Some Tantras argue that there are only two castes, male and female; one Purana of a Tantric hue argues that all creatures in the universe are the natural worshipers of Shiva and Parvati, since all males are marked with the sign of the god Shiva (the linga) and join with females, who have what Shiva’s consort has, a yoni.94 In this view, just as our souls (atmans) replicate brahman within us, so our genitals are semiotic images of the divine, images that we all are born with and always carry on us, as others might acquire and carry a cross or a six-pointed star or, closer to the Tantric home, a Shaiva trident.
Some Tantrics refer to their group as one big happy family, a Kula, and the members of their sect as Kaulas.if The Mahanirvana Tantra uses this terminology as it flaunts its inclusion of Pariahs. As usual, Shiva is talking to Parvati:
THE IRRELEVANCE OF CASTE
As the footprints of all living creatures disappear inside the footprint of an elephant, so, all dharmas merge into the Kula dharma. How full of merit are the Kaulas! They are themselves the very forms of places of pilgrimage, who by their mere contact purify aliens, Pariahs, and the vilest people. As all the waters that flow into the Ganges become the Ganges, even so all who join in the Kula practice become Kaulas. As the water that flows into the sea is no longer separated [from the other waters in the sea], even so the people who plunge into the water of the Kula are no longer separated [from the other people in the Kula]. All the two-footed creatures on the surface of the earth, beginning with Brahmins and ending with Pariahs, all become masters in the Kula practice. . . . Any member of the Kula who will not allow into the Kula a Pariah or a foreigner [Yavana, “a Greek”], thinking him low, or a woman, despising her, he, being truly low, goes to the lowest place.95
The text assumes that on the one hand, Pariahs and aliens (mlecchas) are impure, as it boasts that contact with Tantrics will purify them and that most people will not treat them (or women) with respect, but also, on the other hand, that they are not too low to be allowed into the Tantric circle, and if they join the Family, they are to be treated with respect. The primary concern is not to uplift Pariahs but to extol the power of the Tantras: “If they can save Pariahs, imagine what they will do for a Brahmin!” Thus the text offers evidence of people on both sides of the fight for and against caste.
The Tantras, like some of the Puranas, offer several related arguments to justify, on the one hand, the antinomian nature of certain Tantric texts and rituals and, on the other, the inclusion of people that caste Hindus generally exclude—even certain manifestations of the god Shiva himself. Some Puranas say that Shiva himself is a Pariah, lower than a Shudra,96 and in vernacular folktales he is often sexually involved with Pariah women.97 When Shiva appears as the wandering beggar (Bhikshatana-murti), well known from Chola bronzes and stone carvings in temples, he has a bell tied to his leg; as bells were worn by Pariahs in order to warn the upper castes of their approach, the iconography “emphasizes in a way the belief that the god was outside the pale of orthodox Vedism.”98 In this form, as well as in the form of Bhairava, Shiva is often accompanied by a dog, the Pariah of the animal world.
DEAD ANIMALS
The passage with which this chapter begins rejects the “natural” (sahaja) path to Release, denying that “the serpents and cattle and birds and fish” are instinctively pious. Yet animals play an essential part in Tantric ritual; the five substances of the cow are the model inverted by the Five Ms (or Five Fs), two of which are animal substances (fish and flesh). Various animals were to be sacrificed to the goddess, including two of the Vedic pashus (goat and sheep) as well as deer, buffalo, pig, porcupine, hare, lizard, tortoise, and rhinoceros. The animal was to be killed with a sharp blow from a knife; then the officiating priest would place a lamp on the head of the animal and offer the head to the goddess.99
Despite the linguistic overlay of the Vedic Gayatri hymnig that the priest whispers into the right ear of the animal, the sacrifice is not at all Vedic; it uses non-Vedic as well as Vedic sacrificial animals (omitting cattle and horses but including porcupines), with a non-Vedic laxness (almost any animal will do) and a non-Vedic bluntness (calling a spade a spade when they kill the animal). Moreover, where the Vedic ritual went out of its way to suffocate the animal in order to minimize the spilling of blood, here the blood, so central to Tantra, is the main point of the ritual.
When it comes to vegetarianism, the Tantrics, like other Hindus, compromise: They allow the eating of meat sometimes and with a few restrictions, some of which are the same and some different from those of the Brahmin imaginary:
MEAT NOT TO EAT
Anyone who knowingly eats human flesh or the flesh of a cow will be purified if he fasts for a fortnight; this is the prescribed restoration. A man who has eaten the flesh of an animal that has the form of a man, or the flesh of an animal that eats flesh, may purify himself of this evil by a three-day fast. A man who has eaten food cooked by foreigners, Pariahs, men who are like beasts, or enemies of the Kula—he may become pure by fasting for a fortnight. If he should knowingly eat the leftovers of these people, he should fast for a month; if unknowingly, for a fortnight. If he eats food prepared by lower castes, even once, he should fast for three days to purify himself.
But if food prepared by a man who is like a beast, or by a Pariah or a foreigner, is placed within the Tantric circle or in the hand of a Tantric, one can eat it without incurring any evil. Anyone who eats forbidden food to save his life in time of death or famine, in an emergency, or when it is a matter of life and death does not incur evil. No sins of improper eating count when food is eaten on the back of an elephant, on stones or logs so big that they can only be carried by several men, or where there is no one to notice anything reprehensible. One should not kill animals whose flesh is not to be eaten, or diseased animals, not even for the sake of a divinity; anyone who does this commits an evil act. 100
This passage has a fairly high-caste orientation. The flesh of cows is as special as that of humans, and the penance for eating either one is the same as the one for eating food prepared by Pariahs, and not nearly as heavy as the penance for eating their leavings. The usual dharma-shastra rules for emergencies (anything goes) are here extended rather whimsically to eating on elephants or on very large stones (why?) and rather cynically to moments when no one is looking. But the escape clause of permission to eat animals for religious reasons is here ruled out of court. Indeed, if the meat has a different effect for someone who knowingly eats it, but not for the animal that knows it is being killed for a sacrifice, the mental state of the sacrificer must matter more than that of the animal; eating meat is therefore no longer a moral or medicinal problem but a psychological problem.
The rules for not killing are not as complex as the rules for not eating:
ANIMALS NOT TO KILL
A man who knowingly kills a cow should fast for a month and then eat nothing but crumbs for a month; then for a third month he should eat only food that he has begged for. At the end of the penance, he should shave his head and feed members of the Kula, and both distant and close relatives. If he does it unknowingly, he should do half the penance, and he should not shave or cut his nails or wash his clothes until he has completed his vow. If a cow is killed as a result of lack of care, a Brahmin is purified by fasting for eight days, a Kshatriya for six days, a Vaishya for four, and a Shudra for two.
If anyone willingly kills an elephant, camel, buffalo, or horse, he should fast for three days and then he is free of evil. If he kills a deer, ram, goat, or cat, he should fast for a day; for a peacock, parrot, or goose, he should fast as long as there is daylight. If he kills any other animals that have bones, he should eat no flesh for one night. If he kills living creatures that have no bones, he is purified merely by feeling sorry. Kings who, when they are hunting, kill beasts, fish, or birds do not commit evil, for this is the eternal dharma of kings. But one should always avoid injuring creatures except for the sake of the gods; a man who injures creatures according to the sacred
rules is not smeared by evil.101
Here, in contrast with the previous passage, there is a dispensation for killing for the sake of the gods. And kings are forgiven their hunting, for Tantra is always inclined toward kings. The distinction between knowing and unknowing action, willing and (by implication) unwilling action, is crowned by the unusual acknowledgment of remorse, a factor that is implicit but seldom explicit in earlier texts about vegetarianism; here it is enough merely to be sorry for certain animals that you kill.
SHAIVA TEMPLES, TANTRIC TEMPLES
ELEPHANTA AND ELLORA
Right before, during, and particularly after the reign of Harsha, the great phase of Hindu temple building that has been called the iconic or canonic period began, when structural temples began to supersede excavated ones, and each region developed in a different way.102 In Maharashtra, the temple to Shiva on the island of Elephanta off the coast of Bombay testifies to the power and prestige of the worship of Shiva at this time and illustrates several of the dominant myths of Shiva, forming a base that the Tantrics often reversed in building their very different rituals and myths. And the Kailasanatha (or Kailasa) temple of Shiva at Ellora demonstrates in stone what Tantra did in ritual: turns conventional Hindu forms on their head.
These two magnificent stone temples capture on the wing the transition between excavated caves and freestanding rock-cut structural temples, for both of them are simultaneously a cave and a temple. Michelangelo once remarked that the form of the figure that he carved out of a stone was already there, hidden within the stone, and all he had to do was to remove those parts of the stone that were not a part of the figure. The same explanation could be made for these extraordinary temples: The artisans simply (!) cut into the rock and removed all the earth and stone that were not a part of a massive Hindu temple. They seem at first glance to be purely natural caves, and the convex carvings within them are like the so-called self-created (svayambhu) lingas formed of natural rock growths (stalagmites and stalactites) or the temples in Orissa that look, from a distance, like gigantic mushrooms growing there. But then the artistry comes into focus.
Elephanta is almost certainly earlier than Ellora, generally attributed to Krishnaraja I of the Kalachuri dynasty (c. 550-55), who, together with other possible patrons,103 was a devout member of the Shaiva Pashupata sect that was becoming prominent in this region at this time.104 The temples were created by carving out rock in such a way as to leave intact the forms of the rows of columns and crossbeams, the internal spaces and the images. Sculptures depict Shiva and Parvati marrying and, later, playing dice; Shiva bringing the Ganges from heaven to earth by letting it flow through his hair, Shiva dancing, Shiva as the great yogic teacher Lakulisha, Shiva impaling an antigod on his trident, Shiva as the androgyne (Ardhanarishvara); and the linga. One scene represents the myth, told in the Ramayana (7.16) and elsewhere, in which Ravana, objecting to the lovemaking of Shiva and Parvati on Kailasa, lifted up the mountain, whereupon Shiva simply put his foot down hard on the mountain and imprisoned Ravana under it.
As only 150 miles and two hundred years separate the great Shiva temples at Elephanta and Ellora, it is likely that the artisans of Ellora knew about Elephanta; they certainly adopted techniques from Elephanta, such as the use of basalt. More than thirty temples were carved from the hillside at Ellora between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. The Rashtrakutas built the Kailasanatha temple to Shiva in the eighth century CE, taking over a site where there was already a much smaller cave temple. The Kailasa temple took fifteen years to complete. Many of the craftsmen were imported from the kingdoms of the defeated Chalukyas and Pallavas. As a result, the temple tower resembles the “chariots” at Mamallapuram, and the style of the Kailasanatha temple echoes, though on a far grander scale, aspects of the Pallava shore temple at Mamallapuram built during the same period.
The architects of Ellora excavated the great cave right out of the living basalt of the hillside, leaving, on the floor of the courtyard at the base, freestanding, life-size rock-cut elephants and two massive rock-cut columns, as well as the temple itself, whose tower rises to a height of about ninety feet, or, one might say, whose base is cut down to about ninety feet. The result is an inverted or inside-out temple that one has to climb down into in order to enter, a negative temple like a negative number, turning conventional architectural forms upside down. It solves the problem of decorating the outside of a cave. For since worshipers would circumambulate outside the temple (or stupa), people grew to expect temples to have their decorations on the outside. But the early cave temples could be decorated only inside. The solution was to hollow out the hill and then build a temple whose outside was inside the hill. The ornate exterior of the mass isolated by the deep trenches, replete with columns and parapets and moldings, becomes an extended trompe l’oeil, or optical illusion, looking as if it had been built up like other temples. The artisans also hollowed out the inside (leaving the columns to support it), so that one can also wander inside it just like any other temple. But unlike other temples, this one is a combination of a cave and a mountain.
The temple as a whole was conceived as a replica of the Himalayan peak of Mount Kailasa, the home of the god Shiva.105 Most of the individual scenes and figures, exquisitely carved, depict Shiva and Parvati, but there is also a magnificent image of Durga killing the buffalo. The artists even went so far as to carve, under the temple, at the bottom of the whole colossal edifice, the image of Ravana being trapped by Shiva under Mount Kailasa,106 a scene also carved at Elephanta. But the Ellora version has a difference, which echoes the bold negative carving of the temple as a whole: The image of Ravana, connected to the mother rock only at his knees and his many arms, is otherwise completely detached from the background and carved in the round.107 Ravana is thus finally separated from the rest of the monument and left connected to the dark underworld from which the artists had freed the temple, the “mother rock” that gave birth to everything else but held him back. Later Ramayanas, beginning in the Tamil tradition, tell of a shadow Ravana (“Peacock Ravana,” Mayili-Ravana) who lived in a shadow universe under the earth,108 like this Ravana underground at Ellora. We might also see the Kailasa temple as an image of the upside-down world that Trishanku created.
The Kailasanatha Temple at Ellora.
KHAJURAHO AND KONARAK
Two other great temple complexes deserve our consideration here; though both were built somewhat later than the period covered by this chapter, they are best understood in the context of Tantra. The images in the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak are solid evidence of the wide spread of sectarian worship at this time, and some of the Shaiva sects represented there were Tantric.
Khajuraho, the capital of the small kingdom of Bundelkhand that the Chandellas ruled, was a busy cultural center where poets, grammarians, and playwrights rubbed shoulders with affluent Jaina merchants and court officials. 109 Monastic Hindu establishments that arose and grew powerful during this period encouraged the kings to build extravagant temples between 900 and 1150 CE.110 The great complex of twenty-five temples at Khajuraho and the smaller, exquisite temple in the shape of the chariot of the sun at Konarak, as well as other temples in Bhubaneshwar in Orissa (and in Assam and Katmandu), are noted for the carvings of couples in erotic embraces—often called maithuna figures—that decorate their outer walls. Some of the couples are quite demure, gently kissing or fondling each other, but others are in full sexual penetration, “making ingenious love,”111 some in positions that the Kama-sutra warns can only be mastered with practice.
The Temple of the Sun at Konarak, in Orissa, decorated with such figures, was built by the young Narasimhadeva I (1238-58 CE), allegedly to please his mother (a strangely Oedipal gift). It is entirely in the form of a chariot, and the sun is depicted on it in miniature, with his own charioteer driving his seven horses, another instance of the whole replicated within itself. Enormous, three-dimensional animals—kneeling elephants crushing warriors and warhorses overwhelming demons�
�flank the chariot that is the temple, and a frieze depicting both wild and tame elephants, as well as amorous couples, encloses the lower wall. “Colossal stone wheels, each intricately carved, were positioned along its flanks and a team of massive draught horses, also stone-cut, reared seawards, apparently scuffing and snorting under the strain.”112 Though images carved on the temple show the Man-Lion (Narasimha, one of the avatars of Vishnu) worshiping images of Durga and Jagannatha (another form of Vishnu), it is dedicated to the worship of the sun (Surya), a Vedic god who still had the power to inspire the ruling family to construct this monument.
Less explicit (i.e., noncopulating) erotic figures are carved on many other Hindu temples throughout India. (Even Buddhist stupas are often graced by the buxom tree spirits called Yakshis or Yakshinis and the gorgeous courtesan nymphs called Apsarases.) These more muted erotic scenes are a part of the attempt to represent the whole of the material world on the outer walls of temples, both to celebrate the beauty of the world and, perhaps, to gather up all the sensual forces there so that the worshipers can leave them behind as they progress deeper toward the still center of the temple. Such images promise the worshiper the blessings of fertility as well as eroticism. Three levels of eroticism are depicted with very different degrees of prominence: The sexy women are the largest images; the amorous couples are not nearly so large; and the scenes of group sex, stylized and geometrically arranged, are smaller still. The few obscene friezes are very small indeed and placed at difficult-to-spot places, perhaps a private joke on the part of the sculptors who carved the temples.
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