2. Throughout, I use “thealogy” to indicate the intellectual religious discourse articulated in the Saundarya Lahar, in order to highlight the goddess and feminist dimensions of what ordinarily could be termed a theological discourse.
3. On the five m’s, see Tigunait, 1998: 45, and Brooks, 1992: 155.
4. As told in a mythic narrative known as the Lalitopkhyna.
5. See also Caldwell’s (2001) discussion of the Saundarya Lahar in light of parallel texts and devotions in Kerala.
6. According to Kmevara Sri, amkara is skilled in poetic composition, knowledgeable of, and skilled in sorting through the various treasured truths to be found in the texts of the tradition; he is perfect in that harmony of being, consciousness, and bliss by which the world is created, preserved, and destroyed, and likewise compassionate for people sunk in the vast and hard-to-cross ocean of sasra; in order to carry out his purposes, he surveys all the tantras, determines what is useful with respect to the four human goals, he delves into rasas by enjoying her beauty and sweet speech, by using aesthetic suggestion as a means of communication, using poetry in a subtle variety of forms. As the fruit of this process, he composes this Saundarya Lahar. Out of his wisdom and compassion he chooses as his topic Devī, showing her bountiful and universally gracious disposition. By verses of praise akara seeks to illumine her essence, which is hidden in scripture, how she is the means to all human goals, tender to those devoted to her, and ever in a dynamic relationship with the highest iva.
7. See Arunmodin on this notion of body: iva’s ninefold manifestation/body as dependent on DevL
8. On all three of the following points, see Brooks, 1992.
9. In the “Flood of Bliss,” the naming is constrained: You are the great pride of the vanquisher of cities 7; Arunā 16; Hara’s queen 19; ivā 25; good woman 26; my lady 34; consort of iva 35.
10. Other names: Arunā 16, 93; pleasure 21; lady 34, 82; Eternal one 33; Samayā 39; Aparnā 56; Cand 89.
11. For explanation and alternatives in the calculations here, see Sastri and Ayyangar, 1992.
12. See the Arumodin on this notion of body: iva’s ninefold manifestation/body as dependent on DevL
13. The succession of the “Flood of Beauty” after the “Flood of Bliss” posed a problem for the tradition as well. The transition from 41 and the seeming climax of the ascent through the cakras and verse 42, meditation on her crown, is not explained in the Saundarya Lahar. The Saubhagya suggests that the “Flood of Beauty” is dedicated to the excellence of Dev’s feet, under which everything in the “Flood of Bliss” has been subordinated. Kāmevara says that while everything has been made clear in the “Flood of Bliss,” amkara offers this meditation to make knowledge of her easier. The Dindimabhyam adds that the meditation in the “Flood of Beauty” “is easy for those people of limited intelligence who seek pleasures and who do not want [the] understanding that meditation [is] on the unlimited light, which is easy only for those people who are looking [favorably] toward the path of liberation . . . “ According to the Padrthacandrik, in the “Flood of Bliss” her true, ineffable form is described, as in Vedānta, whereas in the “Flood of Beauty” her exoteric, visible form is described. None of these claims are supported or denied by the text, which offers no explanation of the move from “Bliss” to “Beauty.”
14. Note how this redramatization differs from the discarded mytholo-gization. Compare also Sarah Caldwell’s comments on parallels in Kerala regarding visualization practice in Pintchman, 2001: 93–114.
15. Laksmīdhara and Kāmevara both appreciate another exaggeration: the bees are described as young elephants, as if they are similarly large and impulsive, or as if young elephants too might yearn for the honey of the sweet sounds. In this way they highlight for us the improbabilities of the verse, the unsettling of the given image, as the eyes and ears and mouth seem to trade roles—all of this governed by Dev’s determination to enjoy Herself.
16. Laksmdhara appeals to exaggeration to describe the play and quarrel of iva and DevL He reads iva’s mind, his jealousy that he has somehow been defeated by a mere tree. Dev is the most faithful of wives; by implication, it is due to his heightened love that iva himself is so very jealous.
17. See Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, 1990: 335, on the standard comparison of the elephant’s frontal globes and the woman’s breasts.
18. Laksmdhara highlights the heightened attention operative here; if her breasts are like elephants’ lobes, it can only be the lobes of Vināyaka (Ganea) that are comparable. Moreover, Ganea is himself making a comparison, which is then held up for the inspection and recognition of the reader. On Laks)mdhara’s reading of verses 72–75, see Clooney, 2005: 174–176.
19. As we saw earlier, the entirety of the Saundarya Lahar ends (in verses 96–100) by a return to a petitionary and poetic, self-conscious, mode. Once language has broken down, in the inner precinct where she dwells, the poet concludes by backing off a bit, reflecting instead on the paucity of human words about Dev.
20. See Clooney, 2001: c. 2.
21. We thus have a purified, simplified notion of female being (perhaps analogous to that purified, simplified notion of maleness attributed to God in the Semitic traditions). It then offers a deconstruction of appearances that arduously travels from known, exoteric details to tantric equivalents powerful in part because (even if they are ultimately to be seen, heard, etc.) they cannot be imagined or visualized in any straightforward sense.
REFERENCES
Anantakrsna Sastri, R., and K. R. Garu. 1957. Saundarya-Lahar of ri akarcrya with Commentaries. Madras: Ganesh and Company.
Brooks, Douglas. 1992. Auspicious Wisdom. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Brown, W. Norman. 1958. The Saundarya Lahar or Flood of Beauty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Caldwell, Sarah. 2001. “Waves of Beauty, Rivers of Blood?: Constructing the Goddess in Kerala.” In Seeking Mahadevi: Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great Goddess, ed. Tracy Pintchman, 93–114. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Clooney, Francis X. 2001. Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries b etween Religions. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2005. D i vi n e Moth e r, Bl es s ed Mot he r: Hindu God d e s s es and t h e Virg i n Mary. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ingalls, Daniel H. H., Jeffrey M. Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan. 1990.
The Dhvanyloka of nandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta. Harvard Oriental series; v. 49. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kuppuswami, A., ed. 1991. The Saundarya Lahar of ri ankara Bhāgavatpadcrya with Ten Sanskrit commentaries. New Delhi: Nag Publishers.
Padoux, Andre. 2002. “What Do We Mean by Tantrism?” I n The Roots of Tantra, ed. Robert L. Brown and Katherine Anne Harper, 17–24. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Pintchman, Tracy. 2001. Seeking MahDev: Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great Goddess. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sastri, Subrahmanya, and T. R. Srinivasa Ayyangar. 1992. Saundarya-Lahar:
The Ocean of Beauty. Madras: Theosophical Publishing House. Suryanarayana, Kalluri. 1999. Saundarya Lahar of akarcrya.
Hyderabad: Sankhyayana Vidya Parishat. Tapasyananda, Swami. 1987. Saundarya-Lahar of akarcrya. Madras:
Sri Ramakrishna Math. Tigunait, Pandit Rajmani. 1998. akti: The Power in Tantra. Honesdale: Himalayan Institute Press.
C H A P T E R 3
Mystery, Wonder, and
Knowledge in the Triadic Figure
of Mahvidy Chinnamast:
A kta Woman’s Reading
Neela Bhattacharya Saxena
INTRODUCTION
About eighty years ago, in a small village called Mallikpur in Sylhet district, now in Bangladesh, a young girl, about five, sat watching an icon (mrti) being made for the purposes of worship in her uncle’s house. The girl watched with wonder and fascination as the gigantic icon took shape: the
image of the goddess, in dark red color and with three blood streams emerging out of her decapitated head, would remain etched in her mind forever The voice recalling the event comes clear and strong over the phone: it is the voice of my mother as I tell her I am working on an essay on Chinnamast. She also tells me about this uncle, her father’s brother, Bharat Chandra Bhattacharya, whose house was just across from her home beyond the pond on the southern end of the land; she remembers the garden of five trees in his house, called a “Panchabati,” where her uncle was later cremated. She talks about their family’s tantric guru, who probably officiated in the worship. She remembers one more icon, that of Dhumvati, being made in her uncle’s house, but Bharat Chandra died before he could sponsor the construction of icons of all ten Mahvidys, the supreme knowledge forms of the divine feminine in the Hindu tradition. Connecting a distant past with the present, my mother also tells me in the same breath how her niece recently brought her the prasd of Chinnamast from another such worship ritual (pj) in her house. Prasd is food offered in worship to, and sanctified by, a deity; it is consumable “grace.”
Among the innumerable images of the Great Goddess that one encounters in Hindu traditions, one of the most intriguing and mysterious is that of Chinnamast. As I visualize the icon to be able to write about her, I connect through my mother’s voice and description with a living tradition of tantric goddesses. The Mahvidys are ten forms of the Great Goddess that are worshipped by Sktas, that is, those who honor the Great Goddess as their primary deity. My essay here, in a volume about reclaiming and revisioning the Feminine in Hinduism, is one small exploration of the vast matrix of what I have described elsewhere as India’s Gynocentric spirituality, the kta tradition that is centered on reverence for the divine feminine.1
My goal in this essay is to offer a Gynocentric interpretation of Chinnamast from a devotional perspective. I assert in this essay that the icon of Chinnamast has great spiritual significance to a akti-worshipping woman like me, starkly revealing the nonduality of life and death where women’s bodies, sexuality, and nurturing potentials can be honored as mysterious sources of ultimate liberation.
For ktas, Ultimate Reality is the Great Goddess, who manifests herself as the active force in the universe. Myriad forms of that energy are simply manifestations of her immense diversity as she permeates everything, sentient and insentient, human and nonhuman. In the kta household where I grew up, we took for granted the supremacy of the Mother God. However, in my present Euro-American environment, the Hindu Mahdev (“Great Goddess”) is largely immaterial. As a transplanted woman whose transcultural experiences have both enriched and challenged my notions about the world, I am particularly aware of the difficulty of “translating” cultural icons, especially feminine ones, due to the deep-rooted assumptions that cloud our perceptions. This is where “dialexis,” the ability to see through contextual communicative choices, is required. I am writing not an academic treatise but a personal theological reflection on this powerful figure, Chinnamast, who comes to me as another form of the Mahâdevï, the subterranean mooring of my psyche. I actively claim the Goddess as the supreme center of my consciousness.
There are two primary sets of sacred Hindu texts, the Purn·as and the Tantras, where one encounters narratives and descriptions of religious practices pertaining to the Hindu Goddess. In my exploration of Chinnamast, I look at both in order to construct my understanding of her importance to kta woman devotees. Since Chinnamast is known as a tantric deity, I must look first at the tantric path in general and the kta one in particular to situate my understanding of her in this larger religious context. In tantra, life, death, and sexuality remain intertwined when seen through a deconditioned mind, while ritual and intellectual efforts are made to transcend the dualities of purity and impurity, spirit and body, masculine and feminine.
THE KTA TANTRIC PATH
Tantra is practiced and interpreted in various ways by different sects and is therefore difficult to define However, David G White’s (2001: 9) working definition goes a long way toward making sense of the vast complex of tantric concepts and practices. He suggests that tantra is:
[a] body of beliefs and practices which, working from the principle that the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy, within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways.
While there are myriad different practices prescribed for an individual practitioner on her or his particular path, they are designed to help one experientially realize a nondual view of the world that asserts that divine creative energy is accessible and useable to the human person, bridging the macrocosm and the microcosm.
I have located the Skta tantric tradition in my work philosophically in what I call a Smkhya-Yoga-Tantra continuum. In this continuum, the Indic tradition posits a primal duality of the feminine principle prakrti (nature; materiality) and the masculine purusa (consciousness) in Smkhya philosophy. Yoga grapples with the import of duality, while the tantric tradition resolves the duality of prakti and purua, human and the divine, in an actualized nonduality where liberation or moka entails a realization that the world is the body of the Goddess, and there is no ultimate distinction between body and spirit. Rita D. Sherma (1998: 107) succinctly elucidates:
Tantrism transforms the Smkhya dualism into a bipolar view of reality, which in its final resolution becomes a consummate nondualism, unlike the Smkhya-based dualistic nondualism of Advaita. Tantra accepts the Smkhya correlation of materiality with the feminine principle, but the latter is elevated in stature to accommodate tantric reverence for the Great Goddess as the genetrix of the universe. Despite the fact that she is the principle of change and materiality, which other [philosophical] schools devalue, she is perceived as the ultimate reality, transcendent as well as immanent, approachable and all-pervasive.
Tantric kta traditions emphasize the supremacy of akti and her eternal interplay with her consort iva, who is also understood in tantric theology as embodying the masculine principle. iva may be understood ultimately to be not different from akti, although the two appear to be different in their divine play. Even in aiva traditions, there is no access to iva without akti. Hence, for example, the renowned tenth-century Kashmir aiva tantric yogi Abhinavgupta was a Kl worshipper and wrote the Krama-stotra in her praise; he states in his Tantrloka that “the autonomous consciousness which is the Absolute is called Kl” (cited in Sanderson, 2006: 64). According to the Tantras, the human woman is the natural seat of akti.
Tantric practices are as diverse as tantric paths, but it is fair to say that tantra tends to engage the body and its hidden revelatory capacity. Some forms of tantra, especially those that are called “left-handed,” include rituals that are symbolically or actually sexual in nature. The esoteric symbols and rituals of tantra cannot be understood when seen via conditioned lenses that have rendered our view of sexuality either as sinful or as merely procreative. As Paul Muller-Ortega (1989: 14) explains, “it is necessary to undergo the process of experiential replication before the symbols speak to us completely.”
My personal experience of kta tantra has been liberating in that its doctrine of the conscious presence of akti in embodied experience allows for the sacralization of physical life. There is no conflict between the sensorial and the spiritual, nor is there a struggle for primacy between the masculine and the feminine. In my view, tantra offers imagery that suggests the possibility of a joyful equality of the sexes by honoring both masculine and feminine alike as essential to spiritual understanding.
MAHVIDY CHINNAMAST:
ICONOGRAPHY, NARRATIVES, TEXTS, YANTRA
ICONOGRAPHY—AN EXPERIENTIAL INTERPRETATION
As one of the ten Mahvidys, Chinnamast is quite well known among tantrikas (practitioners of the path(s) of tantra yoga), but she is not well-known among lay worshippers of the Mahdev. The Mahvidys are themselves form
s of the Great Goddess, who destroys ignorance and dual consciousness with her discriminating sword. According to one list, the ten are known as Kl, Tr, Tripur-sundar (Sodai), Bhuvanevarï, Chinnamast, Bhairav, Dhmvat, Bagalmukh, Mtang, and Kamal (Kinsley, 1997: 14). Some worshippers view them all as various forms of the first Mahvidy, Kl.
There are very few temples dedicated to Chinnamast, but during Durg pj, the most important goddess festival in the Indian state of West Bengal, she, along with the other Mahvidys, shows up on the panels surrounding the central image of the Mahdev in her form as Durg. During Kl pj, all the Mahvidys are worshipped at midnight. While icons are often meant to aid a practitioner’s system of spiritual practice, or sdhana, until he or she can meditate upon the formless, Chinnamast is the only goddess whose icon is to be avoided by householders.2
The icon of Chinnamast, which varies in its details, is one that some viewers find shocking, as it always depicts the goddess decapitating herself. For visual inspiration, I often turn to a picture that can be found on the cover of David Kinsley’s 1997 book, The Ten Mahvidys: Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine. From the painting by Bhatuk Ramprasad on the dark cover of Kinsley’s book, with her decapitated head on one of her four hands, Chinnamast looks directly into the viewer’s eyes as her body sits atop white Rati in viparta-rati (sexual union in which the woman is on top) with her consort, blue K ma. Two nude female figures, one dark and the other light, stand at her two sides. Three blood streams emanate from Chinnamasta’s head: one stream she drinks herself, and the other two nourish her attendants. The jewels on the bodies of all the figures enhance their naked splendor, all encompassed within a halo of brilliant light (figure 3.1).
This is simply one image among many variations now easily available to curious eyes, thanks to the Internet. More traditional images would also have a burning pyre, or cit, upon which rests the embracing couple, sometimes depicted as Rdh and Ka. In many pictures, including a contemporary lithograph to which Kinsley cites, a serpent adorns Chinnamast’s neck (145). Swamy Prajñnnda (1988: 48) cites her meditation mantra, which describes the serpent as her sacred thread. Snakes are common iconographic elements in tantric imagery because of their symbolic connection to the kualin, the powerful latent corporeal energy that is visualized as a coiled serpent asleep at the base of the spine in a subtle center of psycho-physical power called the mldhra cakra. The snake around Chinnamast’s neck in this particular depiction is a clue to the icon’s connection with the yogic practice of awakening the kundalin, which is itself a form of the Goddess.
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