Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices)

by Julius Lipner

  Mythologically, Lakṣmī arose from the churning of the primeval waters by the gods and demons. The waters were churned to produce the essence of immortality (amṛta); it is no surprise, then, that one of the results of this process was Lakṣmī, who is herself associated with life and fecundity. Since Viṣṇu presides over this process – both Vāsuki, the cosmic serpent, acting as the churning rope, and the cosmic tortoise acting as the pivot for the churning stick, being identified as forms of Viṣṇu – we can understand why Lakṣmī was closely linked with the God (Kinsley 1987: 26–7). In her non-sectarian capacity as the manifestation of the deity's largesse, Lakṣmī is an immensely popular Goddess throughout Hinduism, her image finding a suitable niche in countless Hindu homes in towns and villages, and not least in the domestic and work premises of business people and traders. The new bride is often likened to Lakṣmī in the hope that she will bring health, good luck and prosperity to the household she enters.

  Let us turn now to those contexts in which the Goddess is śakti or Supreme Power in her own right, and what better figure to consider than the Goddess Kālī, the ‘Dark One’ (kālī). In modern times, Kālī has been subjected to much misunderstanding. During British rule in India, she was the Goddess, in particular, that the missionaries loved to hate by their depiction of her as the symbol of Hindu idolatrous degradation and ignorance. In the field of Western literary endeavour where Hindu religion was the backdrop, Kālī often appears as a shadowy, sinister force;it is telling that it was the fearful cult of thuggee with Kālī as its presiding Goddess that John Masters used as a running theme in one of his finely-crafted portrayals of the long-suffering Savage family, viz. The Deceivers. This novel became grist to the Hollywood mill,12 so it came as no surprise that, when the intrepid Indiana Jones, in another context, encountered the Temple of Doom during his escapades in the subcontinent, it was a haggish Kālī and her bloodthirsty votaries that he had to contend with; some of the thrills of this adventure have been recreated for the public at large in the course of a well-known ride in various locations of the Disney experience.

  But these portrayals are simplistic, and misrepresent the Goddess of today. If it is true that the Gods and Goddesses of active Hindu cults are deities-in-transition, emerging from their histories to take on new features and roles as they come to terms with the changing needs of their votaries, this is all the more true, though at times bemusingly so, for Kālī. Traditionally, Kālī was often described as an independent Goddess of fearsome appearance:

  ‘always black or dark, usually naked ... [with] long, dishevelled hair ... adorned with severed arms as a girdle, freshly cut heads as a necklace, children's corpses as earrings, and serpents as bracelets. She has long, sharp fangs, is often depicted as having clawlike hands with long nails, and is often said to have blood smeared on her lips ...’: a Goddess at home on (ritually polluted) battlefields and burning grounds.

  (Kinsley 1987: 116)

  When accompanied by Śiva, commonly regarded as her consort, Kālī is usually in the dominant position, either standing or striding on his upturned recumbent body, or sitting or lying on top of him in the act of sexual intercourse. Kālī’s dark and fearful appearance is explained in the Devī Māhātmya (7.3–22) as a consequence of her emerging from the Goddess Durgā’s angry and darkened countenance when Durgā was confronted on the battlefield by the demons Caṇḍa and Muṇḍa. Kālī emerges from Durgā’s forehead, ‘gaunt with sunken eyes, gaping mouth, and lolling tongue. She roars loudly and leaps into the battle, where she tears demons apart with her hands and crushes them in her jaws. She grasps the two demon generals and in one furious blow decapitates them both with her sword’ (Kinsley 1987: 118). She also destroys the demon Raktabīja (‘Blood-seed’), who has the ability, when cut, to transform every drop of his spilt blood into a replica of himself. Kālī annihilates him by slurping up his blood and consuming the replicas.

  This image of Kālī was to some extent woven into later Tantric texts where, in conjunction with Śiva, she becomes in one form or another the underlying pervasive source and energizing power of all reality, the highest manifestation of the Absolute, and the prime object of ritual practice. In this role, she is not always described as fearsome, no doubt, but as the nemesis of Time, she is an awesome expression of ultimate reality.

  In contrast to the spiritual discipline of the aspirant (bhakta) in traditions of loving devotion (bhakti) to a deity, where it is generally Vedic mantras that are used in ritual and meditation, and where the goal is to achieve communion with the deity through intense, emotional self-surrendering experience(s) of various relational moods as we have seen (e.g. the moods of friendship, parental love, or the yearning of heterosexual lovers), the discipline of Tantra uses its own non-Vedic mantras and elaborate ritual practice in the belief that these are more effective in accomplishing an even higher goal.

  The Tantrics ... saw their own texts as an additional and more specialized revelation ( viśeṣaśstra) which offers a more powerful soteriology to those who are born into this exoteric order. The Tantric rituals of initiation (dikṣā) were held to destroy the rebirth-generating power of the individual's past actions (karma) in the sphere of Veda-determined values, and to consubstantiate him with the deity in a transforming infusion of divine power.

  (Sanderson in S. Sutherland et al. 1988: 660;emphasis added)

  It is largely this Tantricized Kālī that Kinsley focuses on in his various explanations of the Dark Goddess, a Kālī ‘who threatens stability and order’, a Kālī who ‘is ultimately dangerous and tends to get out of control’, a Kālī ‘at home outside the moral order [and seemingly] unbounded by that order’ (1987: 20–2) – in short, a Kālī that flouts established orthodoxy, or at least sits lightly to the dictates of everyday dharma. This Kālī is supposed to help the votary recognize, confront and overcome the anomalies of life and one's deepest fears and anxieties, including the prospect of death itself. There is no doubt that a Kālī who instils awe if not fear appears in various contexts around the subcontinent today. There is even evidence of a tradition of human sacrifice to the Goddess in Tantric and Śākta practice, right up to the nineteenth century, when it was abandoned;and though Hindus by and large would abominate such practice today, from time to time one still reads in the papers of some demented parent or relative sacrificing a child to propitiate the Goddess in one or other of her forms. But in her current role of presiding deity of the Indian state of West Bengal, including Kolkata, its capital city, this image of Kālī would be alien to the urban Bengali mentality. To understand this transformed, latter-day Kālī, we must look to the work of another leading Kālī scholar, Rachel McDermott, which provides an important corrective to the Kinsley emphasis.

  McDermott has argued convincingly that the ordinary urban Bengali votary of Kālī tends to worship a Goddess with Tantric features, it is true, but largely in bhakti mode, where the Goddess has been softened into a maternal figure that belies her traditional gruesome appearance (a thesis that my own anecdotal experience of Kālī-worship in Bengal, with which I have been familiar for many years, bears out).

  McDermott has shown (1996)13 that this transformation of the Goddess, where she gained ‘more benevolent and universal characteristics’, was effected through a trend of Bengali song writing and bhakti-style poetry invoking Kālī, as well as narrative poems or magalkābyas in which the Goddess features, that gained momentum towards the late eighteenth century through the work of such devotees as Ramprasad Sen (ca. 1718–75), and which appreciably softened the character of the Tantric Goddess. This trend was endorsed and strengthened by the devotion to ‘Ma-Kālī’ (‘Mother Kali’) of the nineteenth century Bengali mystic, Sri Ramakrishna (1836–86), who had many influential, Westernized Bengali followers. The ‘Tantric Kālī, or at least a prominent side of her, is still in evidence today in forms of her worship in rural Bengal, and also among those who prefer to revere her explicitly in terms of Tantric ritual, but in everyday urban
Bengali society the fearsome Kālī of Tantra is confined largely to aspects of her traditional iconic representation and perhaps to the animal sacrifice still regularly carried out in her name (even in city temples, e.g. Kalighat in Kolkata), rather than to the actual psychology of her worship. In other words, though the worshipper of the transformed, ‘maternalized’ Kālī may have no option but to physically ‘see’ the traditional image represented iconographically before him/her, s/he tends not to actually ‘perceive’ the gruesome details with the mind's eye, preferring to airbrush them out, as it were, in his or her apperception of the Goddess as loving Mother.

  Further, in this context, the iconographic details are often re-interpreted and minimized: in a popular portrayal installed in innumerable homes, the transformed Kālī is still dark and naked, but her black tresses strategically cover her breasts;she is young and comely, and her now slightly-protruding tongue no longer betokens her traditional bloodlust – it signifies, instead, her embarrassment at inadvertently stepping upon her prostrate Lord; the necklace of heads and the girdle of severed arms now symbolize her power over the demons of the inordinate passions that beset us. Gone are the children's corpses for earrings;her four hands now severally bear the curved scimitar that severs attachments to the world, and the decapitated head of a demon (symbolizing the enemy of the good), and indicate the giving of boons and the allaying of fear to the devotee. There are even more stylized and less graphic depictions of the Goddess freely available in the shops today. If this moderating trend continues, what will the Dark Goddess look like, one may ask, in the stalls selling her pictures around the Kalighat temple in Kolkata in a generation or two?

  During the early nationalist movement in Bengal, however, some Bengali thinkers and/or activists reverted to a more fierce image of Kālī as a symbol of the avenging and liberating Goddess of their Motherland labouring under colonial rule. Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861–1907) invoked such a Kālī – admixing Tantric and bhakti sentiments – in the following essay to stir his Bengali compatriots to a hankering for freedom from foreign domination:

  Tomorrow, Thursday, is Mahālaya.14 Tomorrow the darkness of the new moon will cover heaven and earth. Mother Kālī of the Dance herself will hold Jayā and Bijayā by the hand and dance frenziedly with her witches, sorceresses and she-ghouls.15 Tāl and Betāl will roar out to the rhythm,16 and Śiva the Terrible will sound the destruction of the world on his kettle-drum. Come, let us dance too with the dancing Kālī. Let us watch how Mother's garland of human heads swings to and fro, how Mother's flashing scimitar emits lightning in the gloom.

  Bengali, you love your darling dark Mother, and seek refuge behind the hem of her loincloth. But tomorrow ... you must dance wine-intoxicated with Mother. Look, look! Mother's dark tresses are flying about and every glimmer of light has been blotted out. Earth and sky reel under her thumping feet.

  Bengali! Today abandon your gentle disposition and take on a fierce demeanour. Drunk with beholding the form of your beloved Mother, sound the rhythm of destruction's dance with Tāl and Betāl. Dancing Mother Kali's reddened feet must be worshipped with red flowers. Where will you get red flowers? Mother's feet are red, and red your devoted blood: mix red with red – you are to shed much blood together. The time to shelter behind the hem of Mother's loin-cloth has passed ... Awake, awake! Madden yourselves! Tomorrow is Mahālaya!

  (Lipner 1999: 372–3)

  Let us not forget that it was the image of a destitute Mother-Kālī, seeking vengeance on behalf of a Mother land groaning under oppressive rule, that Bankim Chatterji placed in a subterranean chamber of the forest-monastery of the freedom fighters in his influential novel, Ānandamath, published in 1882. A fierce Mother to meet the demands of stirring, patriotic objectives: this protean Goddess takes on different forms to suit different ends!

  So what is the rationale, we may now ask, behind the popular image-worship current in Hinduism today? We have seen that access to the deity in a concrete form is a, if not the, prime motive. To this we may add – and this derives in no small measure from traditional Tantric practice – the need to visualize the object of worship. In effect, this may be no more than another dimension of the votary's overall objective to seek access to and intimacy with the deity. An image, whether held before the mind's eye, or constructed externally – especially an image imbued with the presence of the deity in some way – can function as a substitute for the spiritual object of worship.

  In Tantra, the practice of visualization has been developed into a fine art. The votary is encouraged to visualize in graphic and colourful detail, over long hours of focused contemplation, every feature of given elaborate descriptions of the cult-deity that resides at his/her designated point in the relational grid or maṇḍala that (theoretically) comprises the votary's experiential domain as Tantric practitioner (on the Tantric maṇḍala as theoretical construct, see White 2000: 9–13). This need for focussed contemplation may well have infiltrated from Pātañjala yogic practice, where meditation (dhyāna) in various forms is a requirement of the discipline. Visualization of this kind – a mental form of image-worship – is meant to lead to a kind of identity or intense communion with its object. We shall return to the practice of visualization in another context in the next chapter.

  When speaking of the sacred and its forms, it would not be out of place to note here that in Tantric and Śākta contexts women are viewed as special aspects or manifestations or even embodiments of the Goddess. This is particularly the case in the context of those ritual acts, necessarily involving the participation of women adepts, that are calculated eventually to achieve what Sanderson has aptly described as ‘consubstantial union’ with the deity (see earlier). C.M. Brown quotes from the brāhmavaivarta Purāṇa (750 C.E.+) to this effect. The Purāṇa makes the point more generally by placing it in the context of the three constituents (viz. the guṇas, sattva, rajas and tamas) of Prakṛti, which, when in conjunction with PuruṣA or ‘Spirit’, become the originative source of all material being. Identified in a special way with the essence of the Goddess, Prakṛti is viewed as the substantial/material cause of the universe, manifesting psychophysically in a special way as women. Thus the Purāṇa can say:

  All women are sprung from Prakṛti,

  the best, the worst, and the intermediate.

  The best are derived from the sattva portion;they are well-mannered and chaste.

  The intermediate are parts of rajas,

  Seeking pleasure and ever intent on their own ends.

  The worst are parts of tamas, of unknown ancestry,

  Bad-mouthed, unchaste, licentious, independent, fond of quarrel.

  Unchaste women on earth and the heavenly nymphs

  Are known as prostitutes, and are parts of tamas.

  (Brown 1974: 185)

  Brown comments:

  Here we see that the three basic types of women are derived from the guṇas of Prakṛti [= Goddess]. It is the rājāsi and especially the tāmāsi women who hinder men from attaining peace in the world and salvation hereafter. The sāttvikī women, on the other hand, help their husbands perform religious rites, free them from sin and karma, and even lead them to liberation.

  (Brown 1974: 186)

  In spite of their alleged special relationship with the Goddess as her ‘representatives’, women do not emerge from this privileged status very well, for as the passage quoted indicates, they function as instruments of male salvation rather than as agents of liberation in their own right. This is all the more so in the practice of Tantric ritual. Let us look a little more closely at the basic form of this ritual, so as to grasp some of its implications.

  Tantric sādhana or discipline speaks of incorporating the so-called 5 ‘M's in its practice. These are matsya (fish), māṃsa (meat), mada (liquor), mudra (grain), and maithuna (copulation). The idea is to assimilate these elements into oneself, as part of a transgressive practice of ritual leading to salvation, ‘transgressive’, that is, of orthodox Vedic dharm
a. ‘Left-handed’ Tantra (the left hand is reserved for ritually polluting acts such as cleaning up after bodily functions) engages directly with rituals involving the 5 Ms. One is not thinking here of orgies of drunkenness or sex;this is not permitted. The relevant rituals use token quantities of the substances mentioned, though in the case of the fifth M, actual ritual copulation is undertaken with a specially selected female. The discipline of ‘right-handed’ Tantra, however, either ignores the 5 Ms or sublimates them into forms of symbolic thought and/or practice. Though women in the left-handed discipline are a necessary part of the ritual, this is not because they are thought of in egalitarian terms socially. The context is quite different;they become a conduit of the male practitioner's objectives to achieve integral union with the object of his ritual worship – usually, the Goddess. One must be careful, then, before lauding the ‘positive’ status of women in Tantric (or Śākta) religion.

  Hindus have a way of seeing the sacred everywhere, and it can be signified by almost anything, whether inanimate, vegetative or animal. We have already considered the liṇga, Śiva's non-realistic phallic symbol, and its complement the yoni, the female organ of generation, in their conjoint form as an object of worship. Stones or rocks that are deemed to bear the shape of the linṇga or yoni often elicit reverence or worship. A famous example occurs in the Lingaraj Mahaprabhu temple in Bhubaneshwar, the capital city of the state of Orissa: