Indo-European Mythology and Religion
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these Indian rituals in Tibet and the Orient. The primal
deity in the homa is indeed the god of fire, Agni. The
Tantric Shaiva Siddhānta sacrificial ritual envisages a
symbolic birth of the deity into the ritual enclosure. As
Richard Payne has pointed out,
344 In John Woodroffe, op.cit. , ‘Note to Ch.IV’.
345 Ibid.
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This involves the full range of sexual imagery, that
is, impregnation, gestation, and birth, as well as the
other rituals of childhood: Two deities (identified as
Brahmā and Sarasvati) are installed in the hearth altar,
and burning coals identified as Śiva’s semen are then
poured in while the practitioner visualizes the act of
impregnation. By these ritual actions, Agni is born as
the ritual fire in the hearth-altar.346
The identification of the forms of Agni, or Agni
Vaishvānara, with the three sacrificial fires used in the
Kālachakra Tantric rituals of Vajrayāna Buddhism—just as
they are in the Vedic—has been noted by Vesna Wal ace:
The first is the southern fire (dakshinagni), identified
with lightning that resides in a bow-shaped firepit
in the heart cakra. The second is the domestic fire
(garhyapatya), which is identified with the sun that
dwel s in a circular firepit within the throat cakra; the
third is the consecrated fire taken from the perpetual
domestic fire (ahavaniya), or the flesh-consuming fire
(kravyada), which is located in a quadrangular firepit
within the navel cakra. Above these three fires, at the
edge of darkness, where neither the light of lightning,
the sun, the moon, or the planets shine, there is an
additional fire, the fire of gnosis (jnanagni). This
fourth fire is of the nature of joy (ananda) located in
the secret and forehead cakras, and it has been there
since beginningless time.347
346 See R. Payne, ‘Homa: Tantric Fire Ritual’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, p.7.
347 Vesna Wal ace, ‘Homa Rituals in the Indian Kālacakra Tradition’, in R.K. Payne and M. Witzel (ed.), Homa Variations: Ritual Change across the Longue Durée. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p.260.
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We see that the sacrificial fires are simultaneously
identified with the thermal energies located within the
chakras of the human body. The internal homa of the
Tantric Tibetans is even more il ustrative of the movement
of Agni or termal energy within the chakras of the human
body in such a way that the practitioner transforms his
sexual energy into a source of enlightenment. For example,
in the Tibetan yoga of the subtle body (linga sharīra),
inner heat (gtum-mo) is generated in the navel (or in
the junction of the central channel with the ro-ma and
rkyang-ma below the navel) and blazes up through the
central channel. As a result of the bodhicitta, the white
drop located at the head’s center, melts and meets
with the red drop, the gtum-mo fire. The practice
culminates in the realization of supreme nondual
enlightened wisdom.348
In Tantric worship, the virtual creation of Agni in the
fire-altar and the worship of Agni through oblations
and entreaties are accompanied by the divinisation of
the priest. This aspect of Tantric worship will be observed
also in the adjunct to the homa, the pūja, where the
sādhaka is divinised before he can venerate the deity
manifest in temple idols. The fire that is created in the fire-
altar is in fact created by the priest from within his own
heart. This is evident especial y in the Kālachakra Tantra
rituals studied by Vesna Wal ace.349 Grether too has noted
that
Vedic priests may identify parts of their bodies with
a variety of gods, but “there is no unified nor even
consistent parallel of worshipper and god” … Tantric
rites, on the other hand, tend to focus on a direct
348 See Y. Bentor, op.cit., p.597.
349 See V. Wal ace, op.cit.
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correlation between a singular divine being—who
becomes present in the fire—and the worshipper.350
Thus we may agree with Bentor that ‘Tantric rituals,
external rituals included, are in fact ritualized meditations’.351
Indeed, the entire office of the brahman priest in the Vedic
ritual stresses the internal significance of the external fire-
rituals:
The role of the brahman priest in vedic rituals also
points to the importance of the mental aspect in
outer vedic sacrifices. While the other priests, such
as the adhvaryu and hotr, perform the ritual actions
and recite, the brahman follows the ritual mental y.
Whenever an error in the performance occurs he
corrects it not by ritual actions, but through his mental
powers.352
Heesterman’s conjecture that yogic asceticism was an
“internalisation” of the Vedic sacrifices is thus clearly
inaccurate in its suggestion of the priority of sacrifice.353 The fire-rituals of the brāhmans may more likely have been an
externalisation of the thermal disciplines of yoga since
the Rgveda (X,154,2) itself mentions [yogic] tapas as that by which “one attains the light of the sun”.
As regards the use of mantras in these various rituals,
Grether points out that the recitation of Vedic mantras
merely narrates the defeat of evil while the tantric mantras,
on the other hand, actual y effect the destruction. Another
indication that the Vedic fire-rituals were not prior to
350 See H. Grether, op.cit. , p.21.
351 See Y. Bentor, op.cit., p.605.
352 Ibid. , p.605.
353 See J.C. Heesterman, Broken world: An Essay on Ancient Indian Ritual, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.186.
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yogic practices among the earliest Indo-Europeans is
that the implements used in the latter often have a sexual
significance, as when the ladle symbolises a penis and the
hearth a vagina. This significance is derived from Tantric
symbolism, as Wheelock reminds us:
[In the Tantric ritual] not only the worshipper is
made identical to the central deity … but all of the
components of the ritual as wel .354
Wheelock also notes that, in the system of correspondences
between the external objects of the ritual and their cosmic
referents, the Vedic practice is not so comprehensive as
the Tantric:
the transformations of objects in the Vedic ritual arena
does not generate a precisely ordered mandala that
replicates the divine powers in a one-to-one fashion.
Rather, one finds a more variegated and constantly
changing amalgam of divine resonances.355
Whereas
The Tantric ritual in an even more systematic fashion
transforms a mundane setting into a precisely and
minutely conceived replica of a sacred cosmos. The
&
nbsp; purification and cosmicisation of ritual components
covers everything from the individual worshipper
(sadhaka), whose body becomes an image of the deity
in both transcendent and manifest form, to the altar
on which the offerings are made, which is changed
into a mandala housing the entire retinue of divine
beings, the manifold body of the supreme deity.
354 See Wade T. Wheelock, ‘The Mantra in Vedic and Tantric Ritual’, in H.P. Alper (ed.), Understanding Mantras, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989, p.108.
355 Ibid., p.105.
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***
The imprecision in the correspondences noted above is
further highlighted by a comparison of the Tantric ‘pūja’,
which is, apart from ‘homa’, the other common form of
Tantric worship, with the Vedic fire-ritual. As Wheelock
states:
One noteworthy difference from the Tantric ritual is
that the Vedic priest … identifies parts of his body with
parts of a variety of different gods. There is no unified
nor even consistent parallel of worshipper and god.356
In the ‘pūja’, on the other hand, there proceeds a process
of divinisation of the worshipper that follows a series of
steps that steadily recall the macrocosmic dimensions of
the human microcosm. These steps have been well studied
by Wheelock,357 whom I shall cite here. The first step is
‘bhūtashuddhi’:
Bhutashuddhi, as the name implies (purification
of the elements) involves visualising the refining of
the worshipper’s own body by a process inwardly
re-enacting the destruction of the cosmos and the
reabsorption of the basic elements into primal,
undifferentiated matter … With some variation in
different texts, the worshipper proceeds to visualise
the cosmic fire being extinguished with earth and the
resulting ashes final y being washed away with wáter,
completing the process of purification.
Bhūtashuddhi is followed by the recreation of the
worshipper’s body, now as an image of the cosmos. This
is accomplished through the process of ‘nyāsa’ (placing):
356 Ibid.
357 Wheelock,
op.cit., p.102ff.
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Like bhutashuddhi, nyāsa involves the use of
nonsentence mantras but with an accompanying
physical act, touching various parts of the body. The
mantras, in effect, are applied to the body manual y.
Two basic types of mantras are used. First, the letters
of the Sanskrit alphabet are placed in order on
different parts of the body (matrka-nyasa) providing
the worshipper’s body with the fifty basic elements of
the Tantric cosmogony.
Next, a series of essential y reverential mantras are offered
to the parts of the body (anga-nyāsa) to consecrate them
as implicitly identical to those of the supreme deity. The
mantras of the anga-nyasa then transmute the purified
body of the worshipper into the ful y manifest form of the
supreme deity.
The entire Tantric ritual is thus viewed ‘as god offering
worship to god’.
In the idol-worship section of Tantra, the liturgy
begins with an invocation of the deity and moves to
providing the deity with a detailed manifest form.358 This
begins with the establishment of the life breaths in the
image (yantra, statue) that the invoked deity has just
entered. This is the rite of ‘prāna pratishtha’. However, as
Wheelock points out:
the deity is not descending from the distant heaven of
the Vedic cosmology but is drawn out from the very
heart of the worshipper and asked to become manifest
in some concrete object in the ritual. For example,
Siva is invoked into the temple’s lingam.
358 For a further account of the divinisation of idols in the Tantric tradition, see A. Jacob, Brahman: A Study of the Solar Rituals of the Indo-Europeans, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2012, Ch.XV.
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In the deity’s acquisition of a manifest form, the worship
of the limbs of the divine body is conducted using a set
of mantras employed in the Tantric worshipper’s rite of
nyāsa. As with the rite of nyāsa, the point of these mantras
is to identify parts of the mandala with parts of the deity’s
body. This focus on the physical aspect of the deity is
different from the Vedic ritual, as Wheelock points out:
that an important part of the homage expressed in the
Tantric puja concerns the physical traits of the deity.
This is certainly not the case in the Vedic ritual, where
one mentions the deeds and functions of the god with
almost no mention of his physical appearance.
Further, the fact that the idol-worship prescribed as part
of Tantric worship corresponds closely to the original
yogic meditation is made clear in the description of such
worship in the Mandalabrāhmana Upanishad II:
Not being troubled by any thoughts (of the world)
then constitutes the hyāna. The abandoning of all
karmas constitutes
āvāhana
(invocation of god).
Being firm in the unshaken (spiritual) wisdom
constitutes āsana (posture). Being in the state of
unmanī constitutes the
pāya
(offering of water
for washing the feet of god). Preserving the state
of amanaska (when manas is offered as sacrifice)
constitutes the arghya (offering of water as oblation
general y). Being in state of eternal brightness
and shoreless nectar constitutes
snāna
(bathing).
The contemplation of Āṭmā as present in all
constitutes (the application to the idol of) sandal.
The remaining in the real state of the ḍṛk (spiritual
eye) is (the worshipping with) akshaa;(non-broken
rice). The attaining of Chiṭ (consciousness) is
(the worshipping with) flower. The real state of agni
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(fire) of Chiṭ is the hūpa (burning of incense). The
state of the sun of Chiṭ is the īpa (light waved before
the image). The union of oneself with the nectar of
full moon is the naivēya (offering of food, etc.). The
immobility in that state (of the ego being one with all)
is praakshia (going round the image). The conception
of ‘I am He’ is namaskāra (prostration). The silence
(then) is the sui (praise). The all-contentment (or
serenity then) is the visarjana (giving leave to god or
finishing worship). (This is the worship of Āṭmā by all
Raja-yogins). He who knows this knows al .
Another index of the original quality of Tantric ritual
is the importance of mantras in it. Every god is indeed
represented by a ‘bīja’ or seminal mantra which embodies
the essence of the god. Thus the syl able ‘ram’ betokens
Agni, ‘dam’ Vishnu, ‘horum’ Shiva, etc. A connected series
; of bīja mantras in the form of a mūla, or root, mantra of
the deity is used in the climactic rite of ‘japa’ at the end
of the pūja in such a way that the multiple repetitions of
the mūla-mantra serve as a means of producing a concrete
sonic manifestation of the deity. As Wheelock points out:
In the Tantric ritual] the deity becomes manifest as
the world first by taking on Sonic form, the concrete
objects or referents (artha) of those primordial words
following afterward in the course of cosmic evolution.
By contrast,
the orthodox formulation of the Vedic tradition,
the Purva-Mimamsa, virtual y ignores mantras. Its
key task is to determine a valid means (pramana)
for ascertaining dharma … Only the set of explicit
injunctions to action (vidhi) found in the brahmana
section of sruti are to be counted as relevant to
defining dharma.
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***
We see therefore that Tantric worship is much more
detailed in its divinisation of the worshipper than the
Vedic. Tantric Āgama indeed considers the universe
as a whole whose every single part bears an influence
on the others. Thus a system of sympathetic magic was
developed out of it in which the final aim of the spiritual
adept (sādhaka) is to transform, within his consciousness,
his own person as well as cult-objects and rites into that
which these phenomena essential y are. And the ultimate
aim of Tantra, called ‘siddhi’ or spiritual perfection, is a
practical realisation of the Upanishadic equation of the
individual ātman with Brahman (“tat tvam asi”/that art
thou).
Thus it is not surprising that, although drawing on
the Vedic tradition, Āgama claims to supersede it. As
Flood points out, “The mainstream tantric texts of the
Pancharatra and Shaiva Siddhanta maintain a close
proximity to the vedic tradition and prescribe a whole way
of life that incorporates vedic rites of passage [samskaras]
… along with the supererogatory tantric rites of their
tradition”.359 Kul uka Bhatta, the celebrated commentator
on Manu, for instance, says that Shruti is of two kinds,
Vaidik and Tantrik, while the Niruttara Tantra also cal s
Tantra the Fifth Veda.
We have noted that the Vedic fire-rituals do not exhibit
the correspondences between the elements of the external