VAJRAYANAAND LATER INDIAN BUDDHISM 129to the eastern side. Ak~obhya, in turn, never appears in his own form, but in-
stead expresses himself in personalities derived from wrathful forms of Siva:
Bhairava, Cakrasambhava, Kalacakra, Heruka, and so on. Furthermore, all the
Buddhas in the maJ:?.qala are depicted in sexual union with their consorts. The
essential message here is that all distinctions, even between Buddhist and non-
Buddhist systems, are ultimately irrelevant.
Thus the language and doctrines of the Tantras are part of the student's
mental training in helping to loosen attachment to dualities and conceptual
precision, in preparation for the coalescing of all concepts in the moment of
great bliss and emptiness at the culmination of the ritual. In short, this is a lan-
guage meant to perform rather than inform, to help loosen the intellectual as-
pect of the knots in the students' internal energy flow. Once the energy flow
is cleared of knots, one undergoes a reversal of the personality (see Section
4.3) and attains union with the Vajra Realm. From this point on, one has little
need for further verbal instruction, as one's every spontaneous thought ex-
presses wisdom; one's every spontaneous act embodies compassion.
One of the most interesting aspects of Unexcelled Yoga, from the point of
view of the psychology of religion, is its use of transgressive sacrality. This
principle was not only a sign of the rite's defiant countercultural status but also
a source of its psychological power. It broke taboos, renounced practices that
the dominant society regarded as pure and good, and in their place exalted
things that society said were impure and bad. It denied distinctions that soci-
ety considered meaningful, made use of a secret code to give new "twilight"
or deliberately ambiguous implications to ordinary statements, and conferred
significance to gestures, words, and actions that society said were meaningless
or even evil. It used cetpceteries, places avoided by society as ritually impure,
for its ritual venues, and drew its power from elements of body, speech, and
mind disavowed by social conventions. In short, the ritual claimed as its own a
psychological and physical territory unclaimed and uncharted by the social
sphere. In doing so, it forced the ritual participants to confront and overcome
the fears that kept uncharted parts of the psyche repressed, with the aim of re-
leasing those repressed forces and harnessing them for power and knowledge
to be used in accomplishing specific ends.
Any rite that unleashes these forces is obviously dangerous. The more re-
pressed the person, the uglier the repressed forces when they are released. This
fact is reflected in the Tantras themselves, which warn that their teachings are
suitable only for those whose compassion and mental control are most stable
and secure. Nevertheless, despite the perils inherent in this practice, the
Tantras managed to attract a determined following in search of the powers
they promised to harness.
As with other religious groups in history that practiced transgressive sacral-
ity-such as the Druids during the Christian Middle Ages in Europe-the
members of the original Tantric circles formed tightly run countersocieties
adopting taboos that were, if anything, even more restrictive than those they
were rebelling against. In particular, the members of these circles held to two
refuges that even transgressive sacrality was not allowed to touch: the guru and