VAJRAYANAAND LATER INDIAN BUDDHISM 119were performed utilizing all the arts-music, poetry, theater, the erotic arts,
and dance especially-to bring the faithful into contact with Siva's presence
by creating an intense taste of aesthetic/ sensual/ spiritual bliss.
In this doctrinal and physical setting there developed the most striking
Saivite rite, deva-yoga, a ritual form through which temple dancers, prior to
their performances, would imitate the body, speech, and mind of the gods and
goddesses they were to portray so as to assume their identity and thus receive
direct divine inspiration during the performance. Even today, Indian classical
dancers undergo a simplified version of this rite before performing and are
convinced that the god or goddess actually enters into them as they perform.
In addition to this aboveground form of deva-yoga, however, there were un-
derground forms as well, most notably in the radical Saivite Kapalika (Skull-
Bearer) sect. Initiates in this sect imitated Siva in his most demeaned role, as a
penitent for having cut off one of the heads of the god Brahma, in hopes that
through the devotion they showed by taking on this lowly form they would
be rewarded with the highest yogic powers. They conducted their deva-yoga
rituals in cemeteries, deliberately violating sexual and other taboos, comply-
ing with the principle of transgressive sacrality, or the deliberate inversion of
social norms as a means of harnessing hidden powers in the psyche. Their yoga
culminated with ritual intercourse, in which the male and female initiates
would imitate Siva and his consort in union as a means of taking on their iden-
tities and receiving their powers, which the initiates hoped to use for various
ends. Female initiates, or yoginis, enjoyed an exalted status in this cult inas-
much as they embodied the goddess-usually Kali-who was the ultimate
source of power. Although the Kapilikas were reviled by the mainstream even
within Saivism itself, they developed an underground charisma that exerted a
strong influence on the popular imagination and, in northeastern India during
the seventh century c.E., even began to receive royal support.
The question for Buddhism was how to react to this new movement, inas-
much as its traditional rituals had nothing nearly so viscerally appealing to
offer the public. The Hinayana schools seem, for the most part, to have dis-
tanced themselves from these developments. However, the four classes ofBud-
dhist Tantras, or esoteric ritual texts, dating from the sixth century onward,
show three basic ways in which Saivite practices were absorbed by the
Mahayana: Kriya (Action) and Carya (Performance) Tantras use simple ritual
forms for the purpose of making merit in the classic Mahayana context; Yoga
Tantras teach, for the most part, a nonsexual deva-yoga centered on Sakya-
muni in a cosmic form called Mahavairocana; and Anuttarayoga (Unexcelled
Yoga) Tantras teach a sexual deva-yoga, often using symbols from the Kapilika
sect, centered in wrathful Buddhas derived from wrathful forms of Siva, iden-
tified as a family of Buddhas higher than Sakyamuni and Mahavairocana.
These last two sets of Tantras appear to be primarily the work of lay yoga
practitioners operating outside of traditional Buddhist institutions. However,
beginning in the eighth century, monastic scholars tried to reunite doctrine
and practice by bringing the Yoga Tantras into the mainstream of the Bud-
dhist university curriculum. In the tenth century, they began admitting even
the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras as well, writing elaborate commentaries teaching