Buddhism in India

Transitoriness and Transformations 113

proto-scientific activities in the period of Tantra lacked the

institutional backing that could have led to a full-fledged scientific

development in India as a whole.

At the doctrinal level, there were interesting transformations.

The turn in Mahayana had been, with its emphasis on devotional-

ism, a cosmological proclamation of sunyata, the universal void-

ness or absence of self-subsisting essences and entities. Tantra made

another turn, it identified sunyatawith liberation itself. Nirvana

and sansara, purity and pollution, sin and sinlessness, were all

the same; difference was illusion. Thus, a famous text around the

end of the 7th century declares that sexual practices can aid the

attainment of liberation because the mystic must realise that

the world is originally pure, unoriginated and immaculate (Basham

1958: 199).

Saraha, one of the famous Bengal siddhas, sang of mind as the

origin of all things and of the identity of nirvana and samsara:

‘Everything is Buddha without exception’ (Basham 1958: 200). He

celebrates the body, passion and indulgence, and critiques meditation:

I have visited in my wanderings shrines and other places of pilgrimage,

but I have not seen another shrine blissful like my own body...

Eat and drink, indulge the senses, fill the mandala again and again,

by things like these you’ll gain the world beyond....

‘One fixes the eye, obstructs the thought, restrains the breath.

That is the teaching of our lord and master.’

But when the flow of his breath is quite motionless,

And the Yogin is dead, what then? (Dohakosa 1954: #48, 24, 66)

If meditation and stillness is death, then what? At the very least,

this spirit of celebration shows a re-identification with the world of

samsara, which earlier Buddhists had been enjoined to view with

indifference.

Much of the poetry and writing of Tantra revolves around the

paradoxical identifications of high and low, enlightenment with

bondage, and the actually existing self with the ‘perfect buddha’

(see for instance Hess 1986: 158). These could easily lead to the

denial of any need for morality, or any of the original Buddhist

effort to discipline oneself in the aim of attaining enlightenment. If

in extreme forms the disciple is enjoined to murder, to lie, to steal

and commit adultery, this has implications even if it is immediately

‘explained’ away (ibid.: 141). There is a wide space of ambiguity

society of the earlier period. Tantra is very ancient. It is thought to
have its roots in ancient fertility rites associated with early agriculture,
where the human body was identified with the fecund cosmos and
the union of male and female represented the union of earth and
sky (rains) yielding fertility. Marxists such as Chattopadhyaya
identify it with early materialism. However, why should such
themes survive and even flourish in the later ‘medieval’ periods
of Indian society unless there was something of a stagnation of
production and social forms? Further, there was little that was
‘materialistic’ about the literate philosophies expressed in medieval
Tantra. Vajrayana took off from the idealism of Mahayana Buddhism,
while medieval Hindu Tantra had a philosophy of extreme idealism
influenced by Vedanta (Bhattacharya 1996: 208–10).
Many Tantric practices can be taken as a revolt against caste, a
rejection of the purity–pollution hierarchy which produced
untouchability at the bottom and the supreme purity of Brahmans
at the top. The ‘shock value’ produced by its practices and rituals
may well have been salutary for those socialised into the values of
Brahmanism. Tantric practioners were often low caste or identified
themselves with low castes; the habits of the wandering siddhas
(‘perfected ones’) of having low-caste consorts illustrates this
(though it can also raise questions of gender exploitation). Tantra
can also be seen as a revolt against a focus on monasticism in
Theravada Buddhism. Indeed, the tradition of the wandering
Tantric siddhasin many ways seemed to reflect the ‘homeless’ life
of early Buddhism.
From a gender point of view, Tantra clearly is an effort to redress
the rather puritannical attitude towards sex found in Theravada
Buddhism.
Much of Tantra also preserved some of the scientific thrust of
early Buddhism and materialistic doctrines. The medical tradition
was preserved by Mahayana Buddhism even before Tantra; the
Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang records kings providing medical
care as part of sponsored Buddhist programmes, and it was mainly
through Mahayana that early medical exchanges took place with
China, in which Nagarjuna was a leading figure (see Deshpande
2001). It has been argued that Tantra represented a kind of archaic
science, similar to alchemy, and that many of the esoteric rituals
were in fact chemical formulae. The fact that indigenous medicine
in Tamil Nadu is known as Siddha medicine is striking. However,

112 Buddhism in India