Buddhism : Critical Concepts in Religious Studies, Vol. VI

ON THE CONCEPT OF SAHAJA

This passage is of great interest, for it provides an early precedent for the use
of sexual terms to describe a ritual which in fact did not involve overtly sexual
actions. As we have seen, this is precisely what happened with the tantric ritual:
the erotic descriptions of it were interpreted in terms of images expressing an
interiorized ritual - the tantras prolonging in this respect, too, i.e. in the develop-
ment of "interiorization of ritual", an Upanishadic tradition^88 •
Dealing with the tantras, it is, in fact, difficult to say where a ritual, whether
external or interior, is described in sexual terms, and where a sexual act Is
expressed in ritual terms. The problem has been well expressed by Tucci^89 :

... the cosmology, mythology and soteriology of India are dominated

by the presence of sex. The processes of speculative thought are

directed towards the erection of finespun philosophical and mystical

structures which transform the erotic and sexual element into a symbol

of the stages of the divine epiphany or into an object of meditation,

sublimating and purifYing it to such an extent that it is not always easy

to separate the two interpretations and distinguish the real from the alle-

gorical sense ... Tantric thought ... is subjected to the same process of

sublimation and "transference"-not always with complete success.

The texts are in fact steeped in that systematic ambiguity of erotic terminol-

ogy which perhaps no-one has stressed more clearly than Eliade^90 :

Tantric texts are often composed in an "intentional language (sand-

hyiibhiisii), a secret, dark, ambiguous language in which a state of con-

sciousness is expressed by an erotic term and the vocabulary of

mythology or cosmology is charged with Hathayogic or sexual mean-

ings ... The semantic polyvalence of words finally substitute ambiguity

for the usual system of reference in every ordinary language ... ;

through language itself... the yogin must enter the plane on which

semen can be transformed into thought, and vice versa.

The ambiguity which Eliade has so well described follows, as far as the Bud-

dhist tantras are concerned, from the ambiguity of all phenomena, an idea which

derives, ultimately, from the Madhyamika doctrine of the two planes of truth or

of being-the relative (sa171vrti-satya) and the absolute (paramiirtha-satyat^1 •

Thus the bodhicitta, the Thought-of-Enlightenment, may be regarded from the

point of view of either mode of being: as relative it is the physical seed, "white

as white jasmine", as Absolute it is "essentially blissful" (HVT II.iv.30). In

either case it is the same Thought-of-Enlightenment: "The Lord has the form of

sukra" (HVT I.viii.50); "I am the Master with the thirty-two marks, the Lord

with the eighty characteristics^92 ••• and my name is sukra" (HVT II.ii.41).

The importance of this dual, at once concrete and spiritual, nature of the

Thought-of-Enlightenment cannot be too strongly stressed. It is only in the light