The ritual tradition which I am going to discuss – namely the Paraśurāma Kalpasūtra (PKS), a ritual handbook which was probably composed in the 16th century or somewhat earlier in South India, and subsequent elaborations up to the late 19th century – contains everything that contemporary educated Indian and Western readers will expect of Tantra: mantras, yantras, hand gestures (mudrās), yogic body-centers, Kuṇḍalinī Yoga, ritualized alphabet, non-dual śaiva-śākta philosophy, and of course the pañcamakāra, the famous “five Ms”. While the former ritual elements are pretty universal in all forms of Tantra, the pañcamakāra have been specific to Kaula Tantra, the tradition which made use of natural symbols, such as song and dance, wine, meat, sexual fluids and intercourse preferably with women of untouchable castes, to bring about ecstatic god-consciousness and deified existence, and to share in the powers of their godhead śiva-śakti. However, the PKS belongs to the śrīvidyā, the cult of the beautiful goddess Lalitā Tripurasundarī worshiped in her śrīcakra diagram, which is generally not identified with left-hand Kaula Tantra. On the contrary, common expectancies would be more likely to consider a left-hand śrīvidyā a contradiction in terms. The śrīvidyā constitutes the most widespread Tantric tradition in contemporary India. Scholarship has described it as the culmination of a general trend within Tantric history towards domestication, semanticization and internalization. There is wide agreement that the spread of the Tantric cults in Indian religion is largely a history of domestication. Alexis Sanderson attributes to the non-dual Kashmir śaivas, whose heir is the śrīvidyā, a major share in this. Particularly the South Indian śrīvidyā, common among a large community of Smārta Brahmins and the śaṅkarācāryas, was so exhaustively purged of Kaula traits and merged so much with Vedic orthodoxy and the Vedānta that some scholars would not accept calling it Tantra any more. Sanderson acknowledges a Southern śrīvidyā which carried on the older trends of Kaula-Trika merger: “In purely Tantric circles, it was propagated within the theological system of the Pratyabhijñā-based Trika; but, as much as in Kashmir, it came to pervade the wider community of śaiva Brahmins known as Smārtas.” In contrast to Sanderson, however, Douglas R Brooks sees the śrīvidyā as a genuinely South Indian product whose roots lie in the Tamil Siddha and Bhakti traditions. The PKS, however, is concerned with a different Veda-Tantra merger and a śrīvidyā brand wherein we find transfer in the opposite direction. Remarkably, it presents the pañcamakāra as Veda-orthodox and as most vital for embodying the bliss of Brahman and making it a corporeal experience (PKS I.12), i.e. bringing about the emancipatory goal of becoming śiva “in all one’s limbs” and achieving liberation while living (10.50; 10.82). It designates itself as Kaula and as a ‘great Upanishad’ (colophons and 10.83). There is particular emphasis on the mantras’ unfathomable power and the pañcamakāra (I.8l I.12; I.24). Even up to the late 19th century the Brahmin commentators stress the padārthas, i.e. Real liquor, meat and intercourse, and regard the five Ms as most important (mukhya) ritual means. We have to wait for the 20th century to find an ‘evaporation’ of the body, which in other lineages of śrīvidyā has already been happening since the 12th century.
There has been a widespread tendency to view Tantra via the lens of Kaula defined by sexual activities. I do not share this view. Tantra is a vastly complex and many-stranded issue and more of a generic name for many different traditions, some of which predate, and some postdate the Kaula. Most traditions that may be called Tantric did not include sexual contact. Probably the most widespread Tantric custom of both past and present is to view mantras as means of empowerment and self-transformation. This view became widespread far beyond the clan-based Tantric traditions. Speaking of Kaula introduces a blurred perspective, a focus on the deviant and the extraordinary rather than the normal and the ordinary. The first part of this paper seeks to pin down the cluster of reasons why the Kaula gained so much prominence. It is about representation problems and the challenges in dealing with Tantra. I see the PKS as part of the large scale interactive blending and bifurcation processes that I regard as being just typical of Hindu Tantric History as the general trend towards domestication and “gnostification” that has been discerned by many scholars. Regarding the Kaula-Tantra, this trend can be re-formulated as shifting attention from body to mind. The PKS may be characterized as an intermediary. It both confirms and inverts such transformations. It blends together what has often been seen as clearly distinct or even opposing, such as Tantra and Veda, Kaula and Samaya, super-ritualism and gnostification, language and action, exoteric and mental ritual practice, real and virtual body. I consider such kinds of blending (in different variations and degrees) to be typical of Tantra in general. Regarding the PKS my focus will be the Veda-Tantra merger and the continuity of real and virtual body-practices which are characteristic of this source. The technologies of recoding the natural and animating the virtual, and the Kaula program of placing the body in the mind and the mind in the body have been powerful devices for creating extraordinary realities. I believe active imagination to be an important key to Tantra and suggest that it also played a decisive role in interiorizing processes. In a constructive approach, I understand imagination to be a third space that produces something new by connecting conceptual entities and real-world entities, for instance by connecting the concept of immortality and bliss and real-world alcoholic liquor. Likewise, I understand representation as production and creation rather than simple depiction, description or presentation of something.
In 1832, the Maharashtrian Brahmin and Veda-Mīmāmsā scholar Rāmeśvara presented his voluminous commentary on the PKS to the public. This commentary started with a long defense of Tantra against common reproaches that tāntrikas had left the Vedic path, and were greedy, self-indulgent etc. A highly elite Tantric insider speaks as a Vedist in favor of Tantra and does not agree with a widespread opinion in emic and etic discourse that Veda and Tantra exclude each other. It is one of the many examples of the fat that Tantra is a messy field with fuzzy boundaries. Not least, it is a highly contested issue. Its very definition is part of negotiation processes within and between scholarly and popular discourses in past and present times. This pertains to etic as well as emic debates. There is a whole cluster of problematic areas to be considered.
First, the popular image of Tantra as the dangerous, debased or exotic other and the varying “othering” discourses in India and the West. Notably, the common outsider perspective has been vacillating between sex and crime. It is the crime aspect that was most prevalent in India. The indigenous negative cliche of a Tantric being a black magician if not bloodthirsty, orgiastic monster has been extremely powerful and widespread. There is a long history at least since the tenth century from classical literature, plays and hagiographies (e.g. Bhavabhūti, Kṛṣṇamiśra, śaṅkara Digvijayas) to modern Bollywood cinema and popular culture. In contrast, the prevalent image of Tantra in the West is the construct of a hedonistic religion. A search for the word “Tantra” on the world wide web generates thousands of hits almost exclusively concerned with sexuality, offering techniques for better sex etc. This modern Western cliche is basically nothing other than the reversal and positive re-interpretation of negative images brought by missionaries and British administrators for whom Tantra was the peak of a post-Upanishadic degenerate Hinduism judged to be obscene, perverse and debased. The sexual perspective was popularized and amplified by Rajneesh who transformed a religious tradition into a form of sexual psychotherapy. Both representations, the Indian and the Western one, actually contain more self-description than an account of reality.
Second, the history of academic Tantra studies with the construction of Tantra by scholarly representations, starting with Sir John Woodroffe, also known by his pen-name Arthur Avalon, in the 1910s and 1920s. Avalon had the courage not to follow the usual Vedic studies, but to counter the negative colonial Tantra cliche by editing a number of pieces of literature called Tantra, and by showing great sophistication and metaphoric imagination of the Tantras, their deep philosophical content, and their non-dual world-orientation. The problem was that he presented an ahistorical, essentialized and unified Tantra shaped by Brahmanic informants and his selective use of later Tantric works. In the 1960s, Agehananda Bharati confronted Avalon’s Tantra with a new approach: in the spirit of the 1960s free sex and drugs came to the forefront. Whereas Avalon minimized the distinction of so-called right-hand and left-hand Tantra, and restricted sexual ritual to matrimonial intercourse or to the widespread metaphoric and symbolic use and the interior processes of Kuṇḍalinī Yoga, for Bharati, Tantra was primarily defined by the fifth pañcamakāra. He stressed the use of hemp (cannabis) as a disinhibiting factor and interpreted as the “five Ms” as aphrodisiacs and intoxicants. For Avalon, Tantra and Veda were not opponents, whereas Bharati emphasized an anti-Vedic and anti-Brahmanic tendency. Later, David White went a step further. Whereas Avalon discovered a high-class civilized Tantra in colonial times, White postulates a subaltern Tantra in the post-colonial age of deconstruction. He traces the original Kaula and the “core” of Tantra (predating the pañcamakāra ritual) in sexual fluid exchange and violent Yoginī cults among non-elite, subaltern groups (which he regards as including the Kāpalikas). His wild Yoginīs who crave for human blood and sexual fluids are worlds away from avalon’s spiritual sexuality, and even from Bharati’s non-confirmist yogi circles. For a substantial critique of this suggestive thesis, one may look at Shaman Hatley’s doctoral thesis – The Brahmayamalatantra and the early śaiva Cult of the Yoginīs. Another critical point of White’s construction ( Kiss of the Yoginī ) is the thin textual basis on which he builds his argument. Even Geoffrey Samuel, who otherwise follows White, notes the problem that “no direct textual material exists” on what White pins down as early “Kaula-period”. Similarly, there are no original works left by Matsyendra whom White traces as the initiator of the succeeding “Kaula-period”. Both White’s and Samuel’s historical reconstructions make Kaula the defining factor of Tantra, while giving astonishingly little consideration to the āgamas (especially the śaiva Siddhānta Tantras and Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra).
Each of the scholars produced a different Kaula, partly due to different textual sources, different questions and perspectives (philosophy, ritual, different historical and social settings), and partly due to developments in expert knowledge and the history of science, and also dependent on personal predilections and “Zeitgeist” phenomena (e.g. Victorian prudery etc.). There, for instance, no real reason why Bharati interprets Kuṇḍalinī Yoga as a substitute for sex, although it is a vitally integrative part of the ritual he is describing. His ritual shares this and a number of other features with the PKS, while other elements do largely differ. Kaula itself pluralist.
While trying to pave the way to real-world Tantra, each scholar has his/her own share in constructing it. I do not think there is a way out of this, although there may be more adequate or less adequate constructions, and more or less biased interpretations. While writing about Tantra, we are necessarily part of the image-making process, because there is no way out of positioning and selective reading considering the huge number and great variety of sources.
Third, Tantra is more of a hyperonym than a homogenous category. Except for Avalon and Bharati, Tantra did not attract much academic scholarship until recently. The past thirty years, however, have witnessed dramatic developments in the study of Agamic Shaivism and Vaishnava Pancharatra and a growing interest in early heterodox Shaiva cults. The collection and edition of the hitherto largely unknown Shaiva and Vaishnava Agamas gave access to better knowledge of Tantra, but also raised new questions. A number of agamas, for instance, are alternatively called Tantra, but there is no trace of the Panchamakara. We have learned that almost all Shaiva traditions are more or less Tantric, or that South Indian temple culture encompasses many Tantric elements such as visualizations, sacred diagrams and repetitions of monosyllabic mantra formulas – the kind of issues Avalon was talking about. But by acknowledging this, the question of definition, history and origin came to a head, and not only the subject of Tantra, but also the perspectives on it multiplied. Some trace the roots of Tantra, for instance in the Vedic tradition, others in the agama culture or in more heterodox early Shaiva movements more or less removed from the Vedic pale, such as the Kapalika, and an increasing feminization of early Shaivism. Some see Tantra as a phenomenon of an elite Sanskritic culture, others detect folk or even tribal origins, while still others propose a mixture of both. Hindu-Buddhist interactions and transfers were also a matter of dispute, and in particular the relationship between Tantric Shaivism and Tantric Buddhism needs further investigation. Alexis Sanderson noted a general trend of domestication and two major transmutations: a shift from Shaiva ascetic “cremation ground mysticism” to the Tantric householder, and a turn from self-operative ritual (held by the dualist Shaiva-Siddhanta) to an intense concern with meaning and interiority within the circles of non-dualist Kashmir Shaivism championed by Abhinavagupta, which was historically greatly effective even in the Shaiva-Siddhanta. Another shift and mutual transfer can be seen in devotionalizing Tantra and Tantricizing devotion. Tirumular’s Tirumantiram (whose early dating into the 7th century has been disputed), the famous goddess hymn Saundaryalahari (some time after 1000 CE and before the 16th century), and the ecstatic Vaishnava Sahajiya (16th century) are typical examples. Late Puranic sources such as the Devi Bhagavatam are full of devotional Tantra, and even the fiercest of the Tantric Dashamahavidya goddesses receive Bhakti-worship just like any other Puranic deity.
A post-colonial critical approach may be to resist a definition altogether. Similar to Hinduism, Tantraism has been seen as a modern construction, born of a cross-cultural interplay between Eastern and Western imaginations that misrepresent the great plurality of traditions. A sound antidote would be to call each tradition by its own name, instead of labeling it under the common heading of “Tantrism”, to confine oneself to the proper names of the diverse early and later Shaiva traditions, the Vaishnava Pancharatra, the Sahajiya, the manifold Shakta traditions such as Trika, Kaula, Kalikula, Srividya, the Smarta Tantra, and not to forget the non-Hindu lore like the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana, Jain traditions etc. This is a solid solution, but it may not be the best one. Just as in the case of “Hinduism”, the Tantric traditions in question share certain common ritual elements besides differences in negotiating, for instance, the plurality of traditions and their historical transformations on the other, have to be accounted for.
Fourth, Tantra as a “melting pot”. Tantra is a movement that cuts across various traditions and is not confined to a specific religion. It was a predominant religious paradigm or ‘Zeltgeist’ phenomenon from around the middle of the first millennium AD to the 13th century. This necessitates a ‘contact-zone’ perspective which views Tantric history as one of constant interaction, and a highly complex negotiation, blending and recording process within India and Greater India. The PKS is only one late version of osmosis, wherein hybridity of Hindu Tantra is certainly speculative, hypothetical and too simple (leaving out, for instance, Buddhism), but some kind of model will be needed to explain both the plurality and the instances of osmosis which actually exist. My model is based on the written tradition, which is no doubt a serious deficiency, but for historical (re)constructions, it is unfortunately not possible to undertake fieldwork in the oral lore. Some of the early power-based “magic” Tantras are written in defective and very rustic Sanskrit which seems to point to the world of village Shamans or other subaltern groups who had little training in Sanskrit grammar. On the other hand, even the Kapalikas of classical Sanskrit drama, who are invariably pictured as villain, power-seeking human monsters, speak polished Sanskrit, and are presented as an educated elite. We must assume that at all times the contemporary Tantra cut through all social classes, and that written and oral lores existed side by side, including different strands of so-called right and left-hand Tantra. Both forms of Tantra were “deviant” initially. I understand ‘deviant’ pertaining to alternative ritual systems rather than pertaining to social stratification.
As a working definition, I suggest Hindu Tantra to refer to a great number of ritual systems that were derived neither from the Vedic ritual culture nor the Smarta tradition (dharma literature, epics and Puranas). Initially, Tantra and agama were synonymous and referred to soteriological ritual systems of strong sectarian movements that developed new non-Vedic mantras and centered around the universal Lord gods Shiva and Vishnu who had appeared in the Veda as outsider-gods – but whose profiles included world-transcending or panentheistic potential (three strides of Vishnu and Shatarudriya). Eventually the concept of Shakti, the creative power of the god, and personified as his spouse, grew even stronger and more independent, superseding the male. Within India and the expanding region of Greater India, a number of transfers and transformations happened, the most important one being a growing blending of traditions and at the same time an increasing bifurcation of so-called right and left-handers. Some Tantric rites have been judged heterodox by orthodox Brahmins, while the majority of them was wholeheartedly added to the traditional Smarta rites. The early Shaiva sects already included ascetic radicals whose liberation and divine power-seeking mantra practices included antinomian rites, and heterodoxy increased in the general process of globalizing Sanskrit culture in all parts of India. The left-hand Tantrics, many of them belonging to the upper, highly educated stratum of society, were ready to integrate all kinds of folk and tribal customs judged impure by the Smarta mainstream. Some of them developed a real craze for the deviant and impure (such as necrophilia, or menstrual blood, sexual fluids, faeces regarded as particularly strong power-substances), resulting in deliberate inclusion of radical non-conformist behavior and wild females from folk cultures and popular Hinduism. Later Bhairava Agamas (including the Yamala Tantras) and early Kaula appear to be a result of this process, but the Kaula soon transformed itself into the more domesticated Panchamakara ritual and highly interiorized forms of divine female agency. Side by side with growing and transformed heterodoxy, there was increasing inclusion in and fusion with Smarta Hinduism, due to the expanding temple culture, royal sponsorship, and not least the popularity of the non-Vedic mantras as instruments of empowerment and direct communication with superhuman forces. This Tantra-Smarta merger resulted, for instance, in a shift to pragmatic religion and non-clan-based everyday Tantra (e.g. in the development of Tantric digests with mantras for any deity and every situation), and in mutual influence and interaction between Tantric, Puranic and Vedic traditions. Another result was a stronger bifurcation of right and left-hand Tantra because Tantra entered the space of Veda-based Smarta orthodoxy. In fact, the right-hand Tantra (starting with the Agama-based temple worship) merged so much with mainstream culture that it is no longer recognized as Tantra today. The term Tantra was left to designate deviant left-hand Tantra. The connotation was one with low castes, danger, dirty things etc., while clan-based Tantric insiders of all times saw themselves more as a spiritual elite and their rites and revelations as autonomous authority. My major point is that Tantra witnessed a highly interactional history and that various processes of negotiation took place between Tantra and normative Brahmanism which eventually transformed both. Tantra shaped “Hinduism” and was itself reshaped. Most of the early radical so-called left-handers disappeared from the scene, while clan-based left-hand Kaulas among higher classes would heighten their codes of secrecy and be more self-assured and assertive about their Veda-superior authority. I would place Kaula works like the Kularnava Tantra and the PKS within this trend.
Fifth, the identification of Tantra and Kaula (associated with ritualized sexuality, which has been a major factor defining Tantra in Western approaches), rather than Tantra and Agama (terms that are used interchangeably in the Agama lore) or Tantra and mantra practice (which has been a major defining moment in Tantric insider discourses). Mantras have been outstandingly important since the time of early Shaiva and Siddha cultures, particularly in the Mantrapitha and Vidyapitha (distinguished by male and female mantras, i.e. mantra deities). In later Tantra the terms Tantra and Mantrashastra became practically synonyms. The identification of Kaula and Tantra barred our understanding of Tantra as a manifold and polyvalent phenomenon that has to a large extent Shaiva, Agamic and mantric roots and yet plural expressions since ancient times, and most of all a history of many processes of fusion, transformation and bifurcation. The focus on Kaula probably has many different reasons, or more precisely a melange of them. I suppose a not insignificant one was Kaula as the fascinating and exotic “other” par excellence – particularly if narrowed down to sexual issues. Another reason lies in the history of Western studies, which have been largely confined to Kaula or to Srividya as the latest Kaula evolute, whereas Agama studies have emerged only in the last three decades. And finally, the actual history of Tantra in India: if the historical model above is correct, Kaula was one of the few remaining deviant systems that offended Smarta social codes and remained “visible” as Tantra. This would explain Teun Goudriaan’s observation that most literatures bearing the title ‘Tantra’ belong to the Shakta literatures of the Kaula type, and corroborate his proposition that the Kaula movement is the most important and most characteristic within Tantra. A Kaula work of great formative influence was, according to Goudriaan, the Kularnava Tantra, which is also often glossed by Avalon and heavily quoted by the PKS (no less than 27 times). However, the Kularnava (13th century) already belongs to a more domesticated Kaula compared with older Kaula sources (and their wild Yoginis) that probably developed within the Shaiva Vidyapitha (centered on female mantra-deities and the potency of ‘impure’ ritual). The latter leads us to a pre-Kaula left-hand Tantra which is male-dominated and found in the Bhairava Tantras or Bhairava Agamas. These works contain some radical, antinomian practices that apparently intensified when shifting to female dominance in Vidyapitha sources (around ninth century or earlier), such as the Brahmayamala Tantra (one of the rare Bhairava Agamas which did survive). Here we find Kapalika vows that involve things like drinking liquor from skull-caps, making fire sacrifice in the mouths of corpses to revive the dead, offering human flesh, faeces, semen and blood from one’s own body, and also some instances of sexual ritual, because sexual fluids and menstrual blood were among the most precious power-substances for achieving supernatural powers and embodied divinity.
It is typical that the Bhairava Agamas were excluded from the classical Shaiva Agama lore, while their traditional number of sixty-four led to the indigenous tradition of speaking of sixty-four Tantras. It was this radical “left-hand” section of the Shaiva Agamas that played an important role in giving Tantra a bad name in India. Compared with it, Kaula will seem more decent. Instead of ascetic mortuary and exorcist practice in lonely places, the Kaula ritual involves external and internal consorts (intoxication, bliss, kundalini shakti) and is practiced behind closed doors by liberation seeking householders. The cremation gorund shifts to the body and consciousness, and we find increasingly interiorized conceptions of divine agencies, emphasis on ecstatic experience in erotic ritual and yogic conceptions of the presence of the Shaktis – that is there is greater concern with internal yogic nectars than with “impure” liquids like sexual fluids and menstrual discharge. However, exoteric manifestations did not die out, nor was the former ritual devoid of the virtual and visionary (the Brahmayamala even knows the kundalini shakti as inner consort, who would later simply attain much more importance).
As far as I can see, there was only one late, indigenous critique to do with Kaula ritualized sexuality. It is found with the sixteenth century Srividya purist Lakshmidhara who defined mere interior worship as samaya and accused the Kaulas of keeping the kundalini shakti in the lowest body center. It is noteworthy that Lakshmidhara thereby launched not only an explicit Kaula critique, but also a new definition of samaya and in fact a new Samaya school. In the Agamic lore, the term simply refers to general rules for the initiates, i.e. initiatory pledges and post-initiatory stipulations of conduct (achara). In Lakshmidhara, the term samaya attained the normative connotation of proper, orderly and orthodox – everything that in his eyes the Kaula was not. Viewed through the sources I am going to discuss, Lakshmidhara was not only the founder of a new Samaya school that favored particular forms of interior worship, but also created a split between Kaula and Samaya that did not exist before and is conspicuously absent in the PKS. There is a consistency from the Brahmayamala to the Kularnava to the PKS that left-hand body-practice is itself the established norm and proper conduct, if performed according to the school’s own pledges, rules and regulations. Both Lakshmidhara’s redefinition of Samaya and his attack of certain meditational practices of the Kaulas are of particular interest for my discussion. His construction was greatly influential in the Srividya of Southern India where it is combined easily with the moral norms and religious sentiments of the Shankaracharyas and Smarta Brahmins, so that Samaya and right-hand worship became largely synonymous. Samaya-Kaula distinction constitutes the major issue of factionalism among contemporary Srividya practitioners in Tamil Nadu. At the heart of the issue are the panchamakara and their dissociation from the Srividya.
Tantric history reveals that it was not mere Orientalism which led scholars to select the Kaula, but it also shows that left-hand Tantra had many more facets and witnessed more than one transformation. Maybe the most important one was brought about by Abhinavagupta’s discovery of interior sense in body-ritual, which was formative for classical Kaula as well. Remarkably, even Lakshmidhara’s critique started at the level of sacred symbolism and visualizing practice of the yogic body and the kundalini energy-consciousness. In fact, real-world intercourse was not even the primary focus of attack. Kaula practices of interiority have incited controversy, right up to contemporary Samaya-Kaula debates. For my argument of the reality-creating power of imagination this will be of particular interest. It is equally noteworthy that Lakshmidhara’s sole concern with interior ritual was not even followed by the right-hand Srividya, in which there is clear shift of attention from the body to the mind. Most practitioners see themselves as Samayins, but of course they will worship the physical Srichakra diagram and the image of the Goddess.
Sixth, a further fundamental problematic area is the inherent difficulty of studying Tantra. Scholars have to tackle a vast body of anonymous works and traditions. Besides numerous literatures that are called Tantra, or alternatively Agama (like all the Siddhanta Tantras), there are literatures bearing other names, like the Yamalas, and finally, there is a large number of hybrid texts such as certain Puranas like the Devi Bhagavata. Most of these texts are of uncertain date and many practices they speak about have not survived. Many unedited manuscripts await publication. Furthermore, there are translation problems and difficulties in understanding and accessing the texts: early Tantric sources are often written in a hybrid Sanskrit and are cryptic, and later sources use a difficult twilight language and deliberate encodings, stipulate secrecy etc. Scholars who are generally not initiates have to deal with initiatory traditions, i.e. often several increasingly complex initiations that establish the competence to use certain sacred formulas and perform certain rites. Much of it is available only through oral communication, and moreover, the oral lore is much more extensive than the written tradition and often different from it. If commentaries exist that give better access to the secret practices and help decode the mantras etc., they are generally extremely bulky, do not clarify their references etc. All Tantric texts require a lot of training in Tantric terminology. Many are compilations and much knowledge is needed to understand the hidden citations and glosses. The PKS and its commentaries mirror all these difficulties. This is one of the reasons why my paper is exploratory rather than a completed examination of the field.
The Parashurama Kalpasutra unfolds a detailed ritual process in ten chapters, starting with initiation (ch. 1) and followed by the daily ritual sequences of the kula clan’s major (mantra) deities: the lord of obstacles Ganapati (ch. 2), the chief goddess Lalita, the queen of the jewel island (ch. 3-5), her minister Shyama (secretly called Matangi), the goddess of music and dance (ch. 6), her fierce commander-in-chief Varahi (ch. 7), and Para who is qualified as Lalita’s “auspicious heart”, i.e. her “supreme” nature and inner essence (ch. 8). The final chapters are on Tantric fire sacrifice (ch. 9) and an integrated view of the mantra deities (ch. 10). The hybrid character of the PKS can already be inferred from its self-identification: it refers to its legendary author Parashurama as “great Kaula master” (colophons) and calls itself proudly the “great Upanishad” (PKS 10.83). The worship of all the deities comprises extensive mantra practices, visualizations and Kundalini Yoga, and also exoteric worship including wine, meat, and intercourse, except for Para, whose exoteric rites are restricted to alcohol or pieces of meat soaked in alcohol. While Lalita is undoubtedly the chief deity (having three chapters devoted to her), Para seems to be the secret, esoteric core of the whole PKS. Lalita is particularly associated with eroticism and language/alphabet rites (the symbolic idea is that both are world-creating), and Para with the principles of the universe (tattvas), the yogic body centers and the seed-sound of liberation. Para is most related to kundalini yoga, gnostic knowledge and cosmic awareness. Her rites are almost exclusively associated with internal worship. She does not even have a ritual diagram, because the cosmos itself, i.e. the 36 cosmic principles (tattvas) constitute her yantra. In her worship the tattvas are absorbed and purified by visualizing practices in the yogic chakras. The (typically Trika) goddess Para mirrors most the Kashmirian backgrounds of non-dual philosophy. She is associated with Prakasha and Vimarsha, illumination and reflection, i.e. the supreme light and the dynamic consciousness, energetic power and bliss of the supreme I. The PKS clearly presupposes the merger of Kaula, Trika and Krama strands of Tantra with Pratyabhijna philosophy and linguist/sonic metaphysics that are typical of the non-dualist Kashmir Shaivism of Abhinavagupta. We find not only the Trika’s seed-syllable, but also Krama’s seed-syllable. In consonance with Abhinavagupta’s designation of the Trika’s supreme goddess we find the name Parabhattarika in the most crucial place of the Para cycle (PKS 8.21) where threefold immersion is described: the non-conceptual, immersion through conceptual thought, and immersion through meditational and ritual activity.
The PKS is highly ritual-oriented, but clearly presupposes Abhinavagupta’s “gnostic” version of Kashmir Shaivism with which it shares major philosophical tenets and terminology. However, in contrast to Abhinavagupta (early 11th century), who was more interested in wild deities and metaphorically coded Kaula than in the Veda (which in fact was unimportant to him), the PKS is eagerly interested in attaching tiself to the Veda and to Vedantic terminology, combining non-dual Upanishadic language with Kashmir Shaiva and Shakta expressions of non-duality. Instead of the terrifying Bhairava and the dangerous, spooky Yoginis of the Vidyapitha and the early Kaula, there is much more elegant female-dominated pantheon of mantra deities. The PKS is clearly a Srividya text whose center is the beautiful, benign Lalita worshipped in the Srichakra diagram. Only Varahi kept some terrifying and bloodthirsty traits that recall the former Yogini cults. Unlike the rest of the PKS deities, she is worshipped at midnight and receives blood offerings during bali sacrifice (PKS 7.34). Her “very dark” features are expressed in names and mantras that call on Varahi and her attendants to strike and kill, to drink the enemies’ blood and sperm, and bring the practitioner success. Varahi is seen as the “judge” and protector of the school’s samaya (secret teachings, rules and moral codes). Her protective function, autonomy and uninhibited commanding power to punish evildoers, to bind, conceal, and control, and to bestow favors, grace and enlightenment to the initiated peer-group members, are absorbed by the ritual agent after strict mantra practice (cf. PKS 7.1, 7.38 and Rameshvara’s comments). While the objective of the Varahi ritual seems to be more profane than spiritual, the other ritual cycles aim more at spiritual effects than profane ones.
The PKS shares the Veda-Tantra merger and its major goddess Lalita worshipped in the Srichakra with the South Indian Srividya common among Shaiva-Smarta Brahmins and the monastic Shankaracharyas. It is, however, a completely different hybrid. The agents and transmitters have apparently been Brahmins, but not monastics until recently. They were rather cosmopolitan free-thinkers, educated town-dwellers and members of the royal court, particularly the court of Tanjore. The PKS urges a reflected use of the Panchamakara; in order to enjoy them without disturbance one should consider the situation, social conventions, different countries’ customs, and one’s well-being, health and age (PKS 10.56). Alcoholic beverages should be prepared according to the custom of the region (10.62). Caste identities are to be surmounted, and purity codes become irrelevant for those rooted in the Kula family’s own duties that lead to emancipation while living (Jivanmukti) and final liberation when dying (10.70, 10.82). There is an ideology free of castes which has been always typical of Kaula (at least within the ritual context). But the wealth of ritual paraphernalia needed (perfumes, beautiful garments etc.), the preciousness of the materials suggested for the production of the ritual diagrams, the Sanskrit knowledge and the free time presupposed, hint at the well-off higher classes. Even the goddess pantheon and its partially military language seem to reflect a courtly milieu. The chief deity Lalita is the queen of the universe, residing on the jewel island in a palace made of precious stones. The royal Laita is far away from the wild deities and bloodthirsty flying Yoginis whom even the Kaula reformers of Kashmir were crazy about. But she is equally far away from the Lalita of the Shankaracharyas. Her erotic features are more than metaphors. She is the deity whose Shakti worship involves all panchamakara. Regarding sexual intercourse, the only inhibiting rule is that the woman must show signs of agreement. If she signals sexual arousal, she “must” be satisfied; if she signals disinterest, she must be left alone (PKS 10.69). Strict secrecy is stipulated. Most of these ethical codes are more or less directly borrowed from the Kularnava Tantra, with which the PKS also shares a number of other features.
The deliberate Kaula confession stands out when compared with the more common form of South Indian Srividya. The PKS regards its won worldview and ritual practice as the true interpretation of the Veda and ultimately superior to it. In contrast to the Srividya of the Shankaracharyas, which extinguished ritual substances and procedures that were offensive to the system of purity, the PKS may be characterized as a left-hand Srividya, in which the Veda becomes completely overlaid and absorbed by the Tantra. The Panchamakara are declared as conforming to the Vedic system. And this continued and intensified in Umananda’s ritual elaboration Nityotsava (1745) and the learned commentaries of Rameshvara (1832) and Lakshmana Ranade (1889) in the early and late 19th century. All these authors were Maharashtra Brahmins, and at least Umananda had close connections with the Tanjore court where he spent part of his life.
The combination of Lalita and Para, as well as the pair Shyama and Varahi subordinated to Lalita, point to South India as the place of origin, and more specifically to Kanchi, Tamilnadu. The early exchange between South India and Kashmir regarding the Srividya and the Trika goddess Para was variously noted in scholarship, and even today, (right-hand) Srividya is very popular in Tamil Nadu, where Lalita has her seat in Kanchi. The conceptualization of Shyama and Varahi as Lalita’s minister or commander-in-chief is also known to the Lalita Sahasranama that mirrors right-hand and left-hand Srividya conceptions.
But in fact, it is hard to discern with certainty where the PKS actually comes from because of the highly composite nature of the text. The major sources appear to be the Subhagodaya, Kularnava Tantra and may be the Paramananda Tantra which are quoted or glossed extensively, but there are many parallels or even verbatim correspondences with many other earlier and later Tantric sources, such as the Srividyarnava Tantra (very frequent), Gandharva Tantra, Prapanchasara Tantra, Sharada Tilaka, Kali Tantra, Tantraraja Tantra, Shyama Rahasya, Mantramahodadhi etc. The largest number of parallels is apparently found in those sources which are in all likelihood of Southern Indian origin, but altogether the parallels go far beyond South India and the Srividya school. The PKS incorporates and mirrors verses and ideas from Tantras from all parts of India. With some caution, I would call it a late “Kaula summa”. In the sixteenth century (the time when the PKS was most probably composed – first mention is found in Krishnananda’s Tantrasara, 1582), such a summa may have been particularly necessary to preserve Kaula knowledge, due to the criticism of Lakshmidhara, who regarded even Kaula interiorized body practice as “un-Vedic” and “non-spiritual”. In contrast, the PKS shows how Vedic and spiritual Kaula body-practice actually is. It projects a similarly idealized timeless and placeless Kaula like Avalon’s apology for Tantra some centuries later. I will come back to these issues when discussing the Veda-Tantra merger and creative imagination, since the PKS not only differs from Lakshmidhara, but also from Avalon’s presentation of the yogic chakras and kundalini yoga. But my major point is that there was obviously a common stock of Tantric ideas and practices in nearly all parts of India at least since the 16th century, which are assembled in the PKS and cast into a new, highly sophisticated integrated whole. The widespread dissemination of common Tantric ideas and practices and even of individual lineages seems to have a much older history – at least on the conceptual level. Remarkably, the Brahmayamala (probably composed between the 7th and the early 9th centuries) already claims a pan-South Asian genealogy. Cf. Hatley, Brahmayamalatantra, 228, 231-236 – considers this claim not totally implausible. He suspects a rural social milieu in Orissa to be the most probable place of origin. The conceptual framework was apparently a topographic mandala that encompassed central India and the Deccan, the North-Indian heartland, and Orissa and Bengal. Possibly such a topographic mandalic scheme is also the secret superstructure of the four goddesses of the PKS (whose major cults go back to different regions).
So, it remains striking that the PKS mirrors a sort of cosmopolitan, universal Tantra in pre-colonial times, which resembles Avalon’s unified Tantrism that was charged with heavy Orientalism and essentialism. Avalon apparently did not know the PKS, but used partly the same, partly analogous texts for his representation. Avalon’s pretended congruence with the Veda is very much there in the PKS.
I consider the PKS to be of particular interest both for theorizing about Tantra and for considering its historical development. The PKs defines linear developments and reveals that Tantric history remained confusingly complex and opaque even during an epoch when the heyday of Tantra (lasting from the 5th to the 13th century) was actually over. By this time Tantra had largely merged with Hindu mainstream culture, and vernacular Bhakti traditions gained prominence in defning Hindu identities. On the one hand the PKS reveals continuities within the older Tantra strand, while on the other it indeed mirrors transfers and transformations within the Kaula Tantra and Tantric history in general. What stands out the most is its keen interest in the Veda combined with a pronounced Kaula confession and the interface of exterior and interior visionary ritual. The inspiration was probably the Kularnava that identifies the Kaula scriptures and the Veda. The PKS apparently holds the middle ground between the Kashmirian Kaula and the South Indian “vedicization” and “vedantization”. Its “step ahead” towards domestication will become clear when compared with the Kularnava Tantra that itself already continued the Kaula reform that started in Kashmir. When it comes to theorizing about Tantra, the PKS is revealing for its virtuoso blending together of exterior and interior ritual and the real and virtual body.
The PKS was the script for many ritual elaborations, including rather recent ones such as Chidanandanatha’s Srividya Saparya Paddhati (Srichakrarchana Dipika) and Swami Karpatri’s Srividya Ratnakara composed in the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas the Srividya Ratnakara is quiet about the panchamakara and sexual practices, earlier commentators defended the “real thing”. But in fact, this substantial difference is not easy to discern, since the panchamakara and particularly intercourse are communicated in a rather hidden and cryptic way and remain almost invisible to a casual glance, because the verbal material and techniques of imagination are much more dominant.
There can be no doubt, however, that the PKS makes use of the panchamakara, and does so in a highly rule-governed manner. All the sequences of worship have strictly parallel structures that contain some permutations and inversions increasing with each successive chapter. The structural pattern is well known from other Tantric rituals, too. I mention only the rough structural outlines of each deity cycle, part of which will be discussed more elaborately below:
(1) Tantricized sunrise-worship including the visionary showering of the body with the water of immortality flowing from the thousand-petalled lotus on the top of the head (the seat of the Guru’s sandals and the divine pair Kameshvara and Kameshvari, denoting the merger of Paramashiva and Para in one’s consciousness) and japa of the root mantra
(2) Preliminary rites to sanctify the place (worship of door, seat, and lamps, ritual diagram, and mantra) and deify the body (bhutashuddhi and nyasas)
(3) Ordinary water-arghya and special alcoholic-arghya (associated with kamakala symbolism and the A-Ka-Tha triangle)
(4) Worship of the physically and/or mentally created image (exoteric upacharas or mental upacharas in Lalita’s case and chakra/kundalini yoga in Para’s case)
(5) Worship of the ritual diagram (avarana puja of each deity-yantra, except for Para, whose yantra is the cosmos, i.e. the 32 cosmic principles that are mentally absorbed, “melted” and purified in the Muladhara, navel and heart, and “sacrificed” into the supreme light)
(6) Image worship continued (tarpana, upacharas with cooked food) and in Lalita’s case also kamakala meditation and visualization of her “auspicious heart” (Para’s bija mantra)
(7) Concluding rites comprising Shakti-worship, fire sacrifice, and meal
(8) Dismissal rites (withdrawing the deities into the heart; in Shyama’s case special rules of social behavior; in Para’s case no dismissal rites)
Veda and Tantra, respectively “Vedic” and “Tantric” (vaidika and tantrika), have often been cast as opposite ends of the spectrum of Hinduism in etic and emic sources, and there are reasons for this. But the relationship is much more complex and depends on the perspective taken. Within the Tantric traditions the relationship to the Veda ranged from disinterest (probably the most common case), or simple acceptance and even verbal respect although a ritual course of extreme impurity was followed (e.g. in the Brahmayamala), to heavy censure (some later Kaula texts), or the other way round to the claim to be the true original Veda (Pancharatra) or the better revelation, more powerful soteriology and final source of the Veda itself (partly Shaiva Agama). More “confirmist” adaptations see themselves as Veda-congruent and even declare themselves to be “upasana khanda”, the third, esoteric Veda section devoted to meditation (right-hand Srividya). Among Brahmins, for instance in Nepal and South India, combined Vedic and Tantric ritual practice is quite common, while “impure” substances are are treated differently.
The PKS fits more or less into all these categories, except for the first. It shows anything but disinterest. On the contrary, its interest in the Veda is extraordinary and the deliberate merger by recoding the Veda in a Tantric way is one of its most defining features. For instance, in the PKS, all deities except for Varahi who is worshiped at midnight, are associated with the Brahmanic sunrise ritual, the most Vedic one which persists in daily Hindu worship. The Vedic-Brahmanic worship of the sun, the water offerings and the repetition of the Gayatri mantra are blended with Tantric features, such as invoking the Guru and the Goddess in the Brahmarandhra chakra and visualizing a stream of nectarine water of immortality and bliss bathing and cleaning the interior body. We find repetition of the root mantra of the goddess, visualization of the goddess in the rising sun and Tantric Gayatri mantras for Ganesha and Lalita.
This merger is no smooth Veda-Tantra continuum as in the well known South Indian Srividya, although the PKS draws heavily on the Vedic tradition. It is rather a complete transformation of the Veda. Some of the features of Tantricizing Vedic elements are widespread in the Tantric literature, such as adaptations of the Gayatri mantra and the sunrise ritual (sandhya), and particularly of the fire sacrifice (homa). The PKS both includes Vedic mantras (from the Rgveda, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads) and mimics Vedic/Upanishadic imagery. The important Tantric Arghya rite (the alcoholic “special arghya”) makes use of Rgvedic mantras combined with Tantric ones. The Arghya ritual, known in right and left-hand Tantra, is particularly informative about recoding the natural with cosmic symbolism, and performed with perfumed water in the right-hand ritual. It is a fixed element in the Agama culture and the same ritual pattern will be found in many Tantric sources. Some, such as the Shyama Rahasya, include the same mantras from the Rgveda like PKS (representing the five cosmic gods Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Ishana, Sadashiva), whereas others, such as the Subhagodaya (being the oldest Srividya source which informed the PKS), do not include the Vedic mantras. In the PKS there are two arghyas, the ordinary one performed with water and the special one performed with alcohol. Both the vessels filled with liquid are worshiped as representations of the cosmos and its divine source, but the alcoholic arghya involves highly symbolic extra features such as the letter “I” (in the center of the arghya diagram) representative of the goddess’ sexual parts (kamakala), the letters of the alphabet in the order of the a-ka-tha triangle, and a large set of mantras, including the Rgvedic ones and other Vedic imagery. The special arghya is closely related to the worship of the feet/sandals of the Guru and of the divine pair Shiva and Shakti, which have been mentally established on the head of the disciple by the Guru during initiation.
This is most impressive in Lalita’s special arghya, i.e. the “ever wet” goddess Lalita herself who is thereafter “offered into the kundalini” (by sipping a drop of the liquid goddess in the form of alcohol). More important than direct adaptations of the Vedic mantras are, however, the implicit adaptations in the form of rhetoric and Upanishad-like formulas. These are spread throughout the text and found most markedly in the programmatic first chapter, which relates to the rules of initiation.
It is striking that the deliberate Veda-Tantra merger becomes obvious from the first Sutra onwards: “Hence we unfold initiation” (athAto dIkShAM vyAkhyAsyAmaH). This formula imitates verbatim the famous Mimamsa Sutras. However, the Veda is clearly subordinated. Whereas the Veda-orthodox Brahmins regard the Veda as having no beginning and no author, PKS 1.2 postulates that the Veda originated from the supreme godhead Shiva who revealed the Tantric lineages that alone grant liberation. The cosmology and ritual practice is clearly Shaiva Tantric: 36 principles make up the world and there is essential non-duality between the supreme godhead and the individual (PKS 1.3-6). The mantras and panchamakaras are marked out as most important practices for attaining Shivahood. The power of mantras is said to be unfathomable. The major mantras are of course Tantric seed syllables (bijas, generally given in encoded form) or bijas combined with revealingly Tantric goddess names and epithets. But there is also inclusion of Vedic mantras at those critical points where liquor, the first M, plays the chief role in ritual and where the highly erotic, “ever wet” goddess Lalita is visualized. Already in the initiation chapter, the “five Ms”, (i) liquor (madya), (ii) meat (mamsa), (iii) fish (matsya), (iv) roasted and spiced chickpeas, beans or grains (mudra), and (v) sexual intercourse (maithuna), are declared to be in conformity with the Vedic system. They make the bliss of Brahman an embodied experience (PKS 1.12). This postulate differs greatly from the abstract bliss of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta and it differs substantially from the Srividya of the Shankaracharyas, whose highly Vedanticized version is found in the Lalitatrishati Bhashya, a commentary on the three hundred names of Lalita Devi, who is also the chief goddess of the PKS. In the PKS we find a lot of Vedanta, too. Consider PKS 1.28: “There is nothing higher than reaching the Atman”. Such Upanishad-like statements, occurring throughout the text, will always be combined with physical activities and visualizing practices. The final aim is embodied perfection and divine power; or in the words of PKS 10.50 to become Shiva in all one’s limbs, i.e. to attain corporal emancipation while living.
This embodiment is not least guaranteed by the panchamakara, of which alcohol is the major substance. In this aspect and many others the PKS follows the Kularnava Tantra, one of the most important Kaula texts and composed around the 13th century. In fact, the Kularnava was the source of the most daring assertions found in PKS 1.12 and 1.30. Both are almost verbatim quotations. While PKS 1.12 postulates that the bliss of Brahman resides in the body and is made manifest by the panchamakara, the Kularnava (5.80) states that liquor makes the Brahman bliss manifest. PKS 1.30 equates the Veda with a prostitute, while praising its own tradition as higher secret knowledge, just as Kularnava (11.85) did. Both Tantric sources are not really criticisms or opposites of the Veda. They regard prostitutes as highly venerable. There is a rule in the PKS that prostitutes, vessels for alcohol, cremation grounds, elephants in the rut, etc. should be given respect (PKS 10.66), and this rule again comes from the Kularnava (11.57-58). The PKS inherits a number of core ideas from this Tantra, or a common stock of ideas inspired by this Tantra. It shares the centrality of the Para Bija and its interpretation as the merger of the female and male godhead and the underlying unity of the cosmos, the credit given to the Veda while calling it a “prostitute”, the predilection for pleasant wines, the interiorized sacrifice of the Kaula Tantric yogi, Tantric ethics, etc. But in many ways the Kularnava Tantra is more extreme, while the PKS is more inclusive regarding the Vedic tradition.
Calling the Veda a prostitute is an interesting twist. Here “prostitute” apparently means something exterior and publicly available. The Veda is seen as the exterior, outermost layer of the more esoteric Tantric tradition that is regarded as more powerful soteriology than the Veda-determined values. There is great stress on strict secrecy that belongs to the ethical code of Tantric behavior, just as on a positive attitude towards the panchamakara and the requirement to eventually give up caste affiliations. All of this correlates with the Kularnava, but the PKS shows much greater interest in deliberately associating and merging with the Veda. Correspondingly, there is greater secrecy and discretion regarding the panchamakara. They are never mentioned by name, but instead by relational terms (the first, the middle one, etc.) There is much stronger ritual control and Kaula practice becomes almost invisible. Although the PKS borrows extensively from the famous 13th century source by quoting it at least 27 times more or less verbatim, the following daring verses of the Kularnava are conspicuously missing:
“Only by ecstatic delight is the goddess satisfied. By his (alcohol) delirium he (i.e the Tantric hero “satisfies” or “becomes”) (Shiva-)Bhairava, and by his vomiting all the gods. (Kularnava 7.101)
AnandAt.h tR^ipyate devI mUrChayA bhairavaH svayam.h |
vamanAt.h sarvadevAshcha tasmAt.h trividhamarchayet.h ||
Excited by passion, treating other men as their own beloved, the ladies act wantonly. Men also, exhilarated in extreme ecstasy (praudhAntollAsa), behave likewise. Intoxicated men embrace men. Yogis take food from each other’s vessels and, putting the drinking pots on their heads, dance around. Filling wine in their mouths, they make ladies drink it from their lips. Putting pungent things in their mouths they transfer them to the mouth of their beloved. Exhilarated Yogis fall on the ladies, and intoxicated ladies fall upon men. (Kularnava 8.67-74).”
For the Kuarnava, these agents indulging in heavy drinking and sexual liberty are higher yogis, the post-mature heroes, who have lost their normal state of mind and are intoxicated with the wine of god Bhairava. Here we encounter a very powerful example of imagination as a creative ‘machine’ to recode the real and animate the imaginary. Excessive drinking is considered as a form of possession trance. It invariably belongs to the higher mystical grades. The Tantric “hero”, who has reached “post maturity”, is in an exalted state of mind beyond ordinary consciousness. Engrossed in ecstatic god-consciousness, rapture and divine madness he has lost all fear of hell. The PKS mentions these grades but does not describe them (PKS 10.68). The commentators are a bit more explicit. They quote Tantric passages about holy frenzy and explain them with great empathy. They have particularly long glosses on alcohol and how it is produced. They also regard alcohol consumption as necessary for Brahmins. The consumption apparently increases with the stages of maturity and “heroic” post-maturity. Umananda’s Nityotsava allows extra portions of alcohol to be added after the puja when consuming the food and drink as holy “rest of sacrifice”. But Rameshvara censures this custom because it is not prescribed in the PKS. Concerning the notorious “fifth”, sexual intercourse, they are largely in agreement. It is a must like the othe rpanchamakara and substitution is allowed only when the real thing is not available. The PKS is extremely short and cryptic about this part of the ritual, and even the commentators disagree on whether all the cycles involve sexual intercourse or only the cycle of Lalita. In any case, the woman or girl must agree (PKS 10.69). Sexual rites belong to the ritual obligations amongst other ritual duties, i.e. they are not particularly stressed, and alcoholic beverages seem to be at least as important. They have been seen in Kaula cults as self-revelation of the deity. Their consumption meant literally absorbing the essence of the godhead in the body. The intoxication was a state of divine possession and divine bliss. Sexual union apparently had a similar function, the immediate participation in the godhead. It may be an obsession of Western recipients to emphasize so much the sexual elements only, because alcohol is socially accepted and even part of the Christian mass. Sexual rites may be less provocative in the Indian tradition than other transgressions, and there are reasons to suppose that for the Kaula Tantrics themselves, alcoholic liquor may have been a more important and equally exciting means of stimulating bliss in the body and making divine autonomy, creativity and non-dual rapture a sensuous and corporal experience.
Instead of ecstasy and frenzy, in the PKS we find excess control by aesthetic and gnostifying cognitive attracters, cultivated behavior and most of all strict ritual and rule governance. But the difference from the Kularnava is only one of degree (alcohol consumption etc., yes of course, but only in highly rule-governed fashion), or may possibly be explained by increased secrecy (since the Kularnava stresses rule-governance too, while even the PKS 10.68 acknowledges freedom from rules in the higher state of god-immersion). Revolting passages like those of the Kularnava would sound to outsiders like wild drinking parties and libertinist group sex. Even taken as mere literary topoi they must have been particularly shocking and revolting in a society with exceptionally rigid social codes and grids. It is easy to conceive why circles like Shankaracharyas did not approve of Kaula practice. So much physical god-consciousness that the Kaula “hero” is expected to embody would not fit, even as a literary topos, with the propriety codes of celibate monks, nor even meet the taste of the ordinary Smarta and Shaiva householder. But orthodoxy and heterodoxy are always dependent on the perspectives and group interests. The Kularnava presents transgressive behavior as performance of the extraordinary and as sign of high spiritual grades. The otherworldly character of divine experience is physically staged by means of an extreme break with the normal conduct of daily social life. But the scene of transgression is embedded in a graded system of Tantric adepts, and a package of stipulated rules pertaining to initiation, strict secrecy, moral and ritual duties, and not least dispassion, spiritual codings, kundalini yoga and non-dual cosmology. This set of rules, and ultimately the whole cluster, make up the Samayachara, the rule-governed orthodox conduct of the Kaula practitioner. Rule-governance and ethics are substantial. The term ‘samayachara’ is used quite frequently in the Kularnava Tantra and occurs in the PKS in the context of the “mystic” grades (ullasa) (PKS 10.68). The more ancient Bhairava Tantras such as the Brahmayamala Tantra which know extremely antinomian and macabre (mortuary) rites that no longer exist in the Kaula, already used the term samayachara for their initiatory pledges. To break the pledges means becoming “food for the Yoginis” (i.e., becoming their tortured prey and having a dreadful end). Remarkably, bad conduct involves not only taking up the mantras on one’s own and violating the essence of the Tantras, but also being critical of the Vedas!
These discourses are present and refined in the PKS. There are no more flying witches, but in Varahi’s names there still appear all those dreadful things that the Yoginis do with the evildoers. Varahi is the fierce protector of the Samaya. There are no wild drinking parties, but the general structure is retained. In the PKS the same type of package inclusive of ritually and ethically controlled usage of the Panchamakara, Kundalini Yoga and non-dual world orientation is called ‘samayachara’. This is noteworthy because the PKS was probably contemporary with the sixteenth century Lakshmidhara, for whom Samaya is a completely different thing. He rejects Kaula and prescribes a Samaya based on pure interiority and caste. The different processes mirror interesting negotiation processes. Lakshmidhara considers Kaula to be un-Vedic, unworthy and despicable and definitely not applicable to twice-born. He does not only scorn the consumption of wine and physical worship, but positions his Kaula critique within a critique of improper kundalini yoga that does not “rise” from the Muladhara Chakra to the upper body centers. Samaya is to him interior worship of the Srichakra and the Shiva-Shakti union in the Brahmarandhra (thousand petalled lotus) above the head and the only method for the twice-born. In contrast, there is no caste restriction in the PKS. The Varahi cycle involves kundalini yoga in the Muladhara Chakra (PKS 7.6). Even the (merely interior!) Para worship follows a very different procedure than the one proposed by Lakshmidhara. Instead of leading Kundalini up into the highest Chakra, the worship starts with the intensely visualized raining down of “immortality water” from the highest chakra and proceeds concentrating on the body-centers at navel, muladhara and heart. These are the body places where the 36 cosmic principles are absorbed and melted into one like “heated metal” by breath-control, mantra repetition and active imagination. The cosmos becomes Para’s yogic seat and diagram and after she is visualized as cosmic unity and great illumination and reflection (Maha-prakasha-vimarsha-rupini), the cosmos is mentally sacrificed into the supreme goddess form that is supreme non-dual blazing light. The clear vision of light (prakasha) as the true form of the deity is stated to be the highest objective.
Compared with earlier left-hand sources, the PKS may be regarded as a document of increasing domestication and internalization, but compared with Lakshmidhara, it mirrors with older Kaula left-hand ritual. The ritual described in the PKS is first of all a highly rule-governed activity. Unlike in the Kularnava, it is not much a cult of bliss that is propagated. It is primarily ritual absorption, the ecstasy of which lies in the synaesthetics of sensual, verbal and mental performance. But no dubt, the panchamakara are used and play a significant role. Umananda made the implicit Kularnava connection of the PKS explicit by re-organizing the ten chapters into seven, according to the seven mystical grades.
The typical Kaula view of regarding the panchamakaras as major ritual elements alongside the mantras has been faithfully kept by the 19th century commentators. Whereas the PKS defended this view by the remarkable statement that nobody who acknowledged other countries and customs would censure the panchamakara, this liberal standpoint would no longer do in the 19th century when the British firmly established their rule in India and when the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1785) and the first edition of the Rg-Veda (1849-73) were published, while other expressions of Hindu culture were regarded as “debased” and Tantra was greatly despised. The Maharashtrian Brahmin and Veda-Mimamsa scholar Rameshvara obviously sees a new need to argue for Veda and Tantra as continua. As already mentioned, he started his PKS commentary in 1832 with a long defense of Tantra. Rameshvara apparently defines Tantra with reference to Kaula, and defends combined Vedic and Tantric worship against common reproaches that Tantrics have left the Vedic path, they are greedy and self-indulgent and that Tantra is only for women and Shudras. He expressly argues that all the panchamakara substances must be included and substitutes may only be allowed in daily worship if the physical substances are not available, whereas in special rites (naimittika and kamya) they are always needed because they are the most important (mukhya) substances. It is of special interest that Rameshvara does not argue against Lakshmidhara or Srvidya-Samayins but against and with the the Vedist Kumarila Bhatta of the 7th century! Remarkably, he does not only attribute to Kumarila a censure of the Tantra (which was in fact more of a censure of the irrationality of the Puranic creator god and the superhuman knowledge associated with yoga), but also cites Kumarila as confirmation of his PKS interpretation and as proof that Umananda was wrong adding new bija mantras. Just as there can be no change in the mantra material of the Veda, there cannot be any change in the mantra material of the PKS. I think Rameshvara’s markedly Vedist apology of the Tantra was more than a school quarrel. It also had to do with colonial India, i.e. with the new prominence that the Veda gained under the British orientalists and their Brahmin informants. Another point of interest to be underlined is Rameshvara’s emic identification of Kaula and Tantra. His Kaula is of course defined by the whole package of the panchamakara, not only by sexual rites. In contrast to the Kularnava, (and its ecstatic Kaula) and the PKS (and its ritual Kaula), however, Rameshvara strongly emphasizes the need for bhakti and faith. He argues that otherwise it would be hard to keep the senses and the mind under control while consuming meat and alcohol, getting drunk and seeing a beautifully decorated young woman. It is also of interest that he is critical about the custom of adding additional alcohol to the ritual vessel after the puja (which the earlier Nityotsava allows), i.e. at the point in ritual when the panchamakara are actually consumed, and he seems to restrict sexual intercourse to the spouse(s) (sva-yoshit) of the practitioner. This rule is not known in the PKS nor in the Nityotsava (1745) or Lakshmana Ranade’s commentary of 1889. They use the common terms Shakti, Suvasini and Duti, but not Yoshit. None, however, mentions the low caste of the female partner in contrast to the earlier Kularnava. The term ‘duti’ is used in the Buddhist Tantras to denote untouchable or low caste female partners. Lakshmana Ranade distinguishes two forms of physical Shakti worship, one being part of the puja, and the other being the ‘Duti yaga’ which provides the sexual fluids or the “fifth” substance that is needed for Lalita’s offering. The female partners during puja are called ‘Shakti’ (in the goddesses’ kramas) and ‘Suvasini’ (in the Ganapati chalper). The Duti-yaga is also known to Rameshvara, but he seems to reserve this term to a supernatural attendant.
So a slow domestication within a Kaula continuum may be traced and a remarkable closeness of Rameshvara’s Kaula to one of Avalon regarding sexual practice. He defends the Tantra some decades before Avalon in a similar apologetic fashion. I am not sure, however, whether Rameshvara’s restriction to matrimonial intercourse (he also considers imagined intercourse as valid substitution) can be interpreted as puritanical, reactionary or bourgeois. Rather, he is simply pragmatic, considering that he argues that intercourse actually does belong to the daily ritual duties of the Lalita cycle and can only be left out if no woman is available or when she shows signs of disinterest. Since he considers all panchamakaras to be daily duties if they are available, intercourse with one’s own wife is the easiest way to achieve this goal.
It is noteworthy that even the late 19th century commentator Lakshmana Ranade still stresses very much the real-world things. According to him, alcohol is a metonym of Shakti and meat a metonym of Shiva, the satisfaction arising from their union is what is meant by the formula tat tvam asi. He equates the supreme blissful state of sense gratification with the state of deep sleep as described in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad. There it is said that in deep sleep, the father is no longer a father, the Brahmin is no longer a Brahmin, the thief no longer a thief, and the dog-eater no longer a dog-eater. All are immersed in their innate nature of pure existence and bliss. This extreme recoding of the Veda by blending sensuous body-practice and religious imagination is typical of the PKS tradition.
From the PKS-elaboration Nityotsava (1745) up to Lakshmana Ranade’s commentary (1889), we find a PKS tradition insisting on the “real things”. This changed in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1950s Swami Karpatri compiled a new PKS-elaboration, the Srividya Ratnakara. Karpatri’s aim was to bring life to a lost tradition, and indeed his ritual manual follows the PKS closely. However it does not mention left-hand practices. Instead we find enriched verbal material (nyasas and stotras) and approximation to the right hand Srividya of the Shankaracharyas. A casual look, however, will reveal hardly any difference, since the verbal material is already present in the PKS in such abundance that the panchamakara (particularly sexual rites) are almost invisible.