Woman and Goddess in Hinduism
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Figure 3.1 “Chinnamasta,” from the cover of Kinsley’s Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine, reprinted with permission.
W hate ver t he va r iat ion, it is t he se ve red head a nd bloo d nou r ish ment that give the icon its name. Elizabeth Benard (1994: 97–98) argues in her landmark book about Chinnamast that “this frozen moment of temporarily decapitating her head indicates [Chinnamast’s] ability to transcend the relative dichotomy of life and death.” The central placement of the goddess’s womb or vulva (yoni) in the heart of the image, along with the stark representation of sexuality as well as death, reinforces the importance of the feminine principle. Dualities such as death and life or spirit and matter merge in Chinnamast in such a way that the vision of a pervasive divine unity becomes immanently real to the one who experiences the goddess. In this liberating image, many kta tantric ideas congregate: the nondual nature of reality, the intricate relationship between life and death, and the central role of the Mahdev or akti in awakening the inner consciousness that shatters the illusions projected by a conditioned mind.
Some interpretations of the iconography suggest that the icon depicts, through the three female figures, the three energy channels (ns) of the subtle body—i, pial, and suumn—through which life energy (prnd) flows. The kualin moves upward when aroused by spiritual practice, ultimately penetrating the adept’s consciousness and leading the adept to experience his or her true, non-dual nature. As kualin awakens in the yogi or yogin, it enters the central channel, the suumn, and begins her path upward, through the seven cakrus, the centers of psycho-physical energy in the body, until she reaches the very top of the skull or the final cakra, the sahasrra, in supreme delight of union with iva (pure consciousness, the true Self) liberating the yogi/yogin from all bondage. Some traditions postulate the existence of cakms beyond the sahasrra that denote further attainments of the yogi. If the prna or life force is stuck between i and pial, here represented by the two attendants, the self remains bound in duality. When the yogi/yogin is able to channel the force into the central n that is suumn, the arduous journey toward the experience of nonduality begins as the now awakened kuttlin power ascends toward the seventh cakra at the top of the head.
NARRATIVES
Narratives about Chinnamast add another enriching dimension to the icon and provide more clues to her meaning. Benard recounts the narrative of the origin of all the Mahvidys in the kta MahbhgavMa Pura. This narrative features Sat, here described as one of many incarnations of the Goddess, who takes form as part of the Goddess’s cosmic play (ll). In the story, Sati’s father Daksa decides not to invite his daughter and her husband iva, whom Daksa dislikes, to a great fire sacrifice (yajñd) that he is holding, but Sat insists on attending. When her husband iva tries to prevent her by invoking his husbandly prerogative, she is enraged and begins to change into a fearsome form, forcing iva to close his eyes. When he opens his eyes, his beautiful wife has vanished; instead, he sees standing before him Kl, naked and in her most formidable form, her roaring laughter filling the universe. Afraid, iva tries to flee, but in all ten directions stand ten fierce forms of the Goddess symbolizing her all-pervasive nature and the futility of trying to escape her. When he asks where his beloved Sat has gone, the Goddess replies that she is standing in front of him. To his edification, Siva learns from a gentler form of the Mahdev that these ten Mahvidys are her forms; she elucidates their names, denoting Chinnamast in the east. The episode ends with all the forms merging into Kl as she proceeds to destroy Daksa’s pride (Benard 1994: 2-3). The narrative indicates the Goddess’s all-pervading nature and independence.
Benard cites a story about Chinnamasta’s origin Here Prvat plays the role of iva’s spouse in another cycle of creation, and she is accompanied by her two female attendants, Jay and Vijay. We hear that Prvat became sexually aroused while bathing in the Mandkini River when the two ask for food from her. There is no male presence here as the immediate cause for such arousal, but it seems spontaneous and without cause. The two attendants implore: “We are overpowered with hunger, O Mother of the Universe! Give us food so we may be satisfied, Oh Merciful One, Bestower of Boons and Fulfiller of Desires.” She then smiles and severs her head with her nails, letting the three blood streams flow into the mouths of her attendants as well as her own (7). This narrative is one of the sources of the iconography of Chinnamast. The usual rendering of Kl as a bloodthirsty goddess who demands blood sacrifice is reconfigured in Chinnamasta’s icon, where the Goddess has decapitated herself to nourish others with her blood. This image of the Goddess nourishing from her own body is analogous to the functions of the maternal, the female, and the Gynocentric.
YANTRA
Along with iconography, narratives, and mantras, we must refer to Chinnamast’s yantra, the geometric form of the deity commonly used by householders for purposes of worship. The abstract iconography of Chinnamast’s yantra emphasizes the centrality of the iconic mark of the yoni, the downward triangle that functions as the symbol of the Great Feminine. Complete ritual worship specifies the making of a special yantra for Chinnamast; the downward triangle resides in the middle of it. Triangles are central to tantric imagination. Madhu Khanna (1979: 32), who calls yantras the tantric symbol of cosmic unity, writes: “The rhythm of creation is crystallized in the primal symbol of cosmic location, the triangle . . . It is the female emblem (yoni-mandala) of the sakti-principle.”
One of the ways of making the yantra of Chinnamast is “to draw three concentric circles in the middle of a triangle and a triangle in the center of these circles” (Benard 1994: 37). According to Khanna (1979: 58-59), Chinnamast “symbolizes the end of existence or the consummation of the ever-burning, ever-devouring life-cycle that precedes and influences resurrection.” Thus, the inverted triangle that is the iconographic yoni of the Great Goddess is the matrix in which the universe is birthed, nourished, dissolved, and recreated. It is not a coincidence that some of Chinnamast’s 108 names include Yonimudr and “Yonigamy (“accessible through the yoni”) (Benard 1994: 59).
TEXTS AND THEOLOGY
In the tradition of dialogue between iva and the Goddess that is common in tantric texts, such as the kta-pramoda and Mahnirvna Tantra, iva relates spiritual truths to the Goddess. Tantric texts known as Nigamas have the Goddess as the speaker and iva as the listener. Benard (1994: 121) refers to the “Chinnamasttantra” section of the Skta-pramoda and translates the thousand names of the goddess recited therein. iva says to the Dev: “Listen, Dev, I shall tell you about Chinna, so pleasing to the mind” (qtd. in ibid.), and before the recitation of Chinnamast’s names, iva explains that one is to worship her for the accomplishment of the four goals of life in Hindu axiology: dharma (virtuous action), artha (prosperity and power), kma (sensory and aesthetic pleasure), and moksa (spiritual liberation). However, she herself is Dharmakarmavirahit, her 552nd name; that is, she is beyond dharma and karma. The same text tells us that her first name is Pracandcandik, “the powerfully fierce one,” and the last name is Sarvnanda-prdayin, “prime giver of all nanda or bliss.”
To me, the names respectively signify that Chinnamast is fierce when the practitioner first faces her, but she becomes gentle as the practitioner progresses in his or her meditation on the deity. A simple practice of acquainting oneself with the thousand names of Chinnamast, which is her theology, may give one an idea of how she is both a particular and a universal deity within the kta universe. For a kta like me, reading them during the festival time of the Dev, Durg púj, is profoundly significant. She is both The One Who Remains in Thought (Citisansth) and The One Who Resides in the Womb/Vulva (Bhagasth); she is both the form of desire (Kmarup) and spiritual emancipation (Kaivaly). In her thousand names, paradox abounds, and all the deities dwell. She gives the joy of sight and she is full of fragrance (cited in ibid., 122-124). In the tantric tradition one must become the deity in order to worship her. My long meditations make Chinna pleasing to my mind; I perceive the identification; I sense her in my body.
TOWARD A GYNOCENTRIC UNDERSTANDING:
ACKNOWLEDGING THE FEMALE EXPERIENCE
To me Chinnamast exists in the imagination of the human and is therefore both real and unreal at the same time, an aspect of Kl whom I have described as “pregnant nothingness” (Saxena 2004: 2). I understand her to be simultaneously both plenum and void; she is existentially real as the fact of life and death, yet she is no-thing. She is not, in my view, a transcendental deity sitting in a heaven beyond; she is instead a symbol for a spiritual state that can be realized expe-rientially within one’s own innermost being. While texts and their interpretations vary, usually those who worship Chinnamast appear to have been men, and those who have interpreted her have been mostly men as well. How does a woman find herself in this picture then? I would suggest that the icon should have a different import for women when compared to men.
Chinnamasta’s image certainly can induce a Not-Self experience for a female religious practitioner like myself. One witnesses the ll or play of the Goddess, internalizes the moment, and continues to participate in the world in a supreme tantric realization that there is nothing to transcend in this phenomenal world of Mahdev’s creative my. Transcendence in this sense means deep realization that stops me from getting too attached to mere pieces of my existence. I at once become an actor and a witness to that great play where the triadic representation of sexuality as the Mahyoni in the yantra (symbolic of the Cosmic Womb/vulva of the Goddess) points toward a Divine Sexuality that is neither gratificatory/consuming nor transcendental-izing, but simply a form of play, ll. Beholding the icon, the self in recognition of what it is not, flows toward the one who is all.
I now look at the late eighteenth-century picture of Chinnamast by Molaram (see Kinsley 1997: 158), which is a more composite and quite different image than many others, with Chinnamasta’s body sitting in intercourse with a strikingly white iva on a burning pyre. The pair is surrounded by the cit, the burning funeral pyre, and the blood flow from Chinnamasta’s cut-off head creates the cycle of life and death. iva is absolute quiescence, that is, the pure, nondual consciousness (cit) that resides deep within the body and can only be accessed by the tantric yoga that the Goddess is performing. “Cit;” (the funeral pyre) is connected to “cit” or consciousness, which is aroused as we awaken from sleep. All the faces in this icon look upward. Mahdev gazes upon the universe as she creates by engaging in sexual unity with iva, or deep consciousness. In figure 3.1, she faces the devotee directly. Benard (1994: 119) is correct when she says, “Chinnamast reveals the tantric technique of liberation without words; her iconography is her code.” But her comment that “in pictorial representations, Chinnamast does not look directly at her devotees” is based on other images (she might not have had access to this picture at the time), and Benard consequently concludes, “By looking at herself, she directs her devotees to look within themselves” (101). The icon on Kinsley’s book appears to look at and speak to me directly; instead of directing the practitioner inward, the eye contact transforms her into the goddess and simultaneously allows for darcm (viewing a deity with a sense of connection and devotion).
The Chinnamast icon can be perceived as a visual yantra; I would suggest that any practitioner who is ready for the awe-inspiring image is meant to visualize, internalize, and recite the icon, yantra, and mantra until in a shaft of light s/he is freed from all bondage. But as a woman, I read it also as a luminous geometry of the universe that is meant to be experienced within the female body. Such symbolic representations point toward an experience unutterable in ordinary parlance. The blood streams are pouring in a focused way out of three ndi, which transmit energy; the suumn carries the force of the kualin itself. That which appears as blood iconographically may also be understood as representative of the life-giving capacity of the female body.
A Gynocentric reading of the image can also point to the female experience of sexuality, diverse though it is. The image may be indicating not only sensual pleasure, but also a deeply inward experience; it is the flow of desire to reach out to the other, mutually encompassing each other into the depths of being. This could be experienced by a woman physically as she freely lets the flow of bodily nourishment, both blood in the womb and milk from the breast to nurture another, her child. David Kinsley (1997: 160-161) offers us an important insight in this regard:
If menstrual blood is the equivalent of male semen for a woman, then the retention of menstrual blood might also result in spiritual awakening and power. When a woman becomes pregnant, menstrual blood ceases to flow, and the result is dramatically evident: a new being is formed inside her. Another dramatic result of retained blood and pregnancy is the creation of milk. It is as if the blood has been transformed into milk. Might not Chinnamast’s image represent the generation of spiritual power in a female, the rising of the kualin, by means of the retention of her sexual fluids and the transformation of them into nourishing fluid?
The flow of breast milk as nourishment can be interpreted as analogous to the flow of compassion, in both Buddhist and Hindu renderings, toward the other. The severed head, thereby, can be seen as deemphasizing the self-involved practices of reaching the ultimate freedom solely for oneself. Rather, the emphasis of Chinnamasta’s image here is on the Goddess’s immanence and, in this particular form, on her role as the preserver and nourisher of all life, even as it acknowledges her death-wielding role. The significance of the head sacrifice as a symbolic “annihilation of the ego” is an interpretation that would be recognizable to many Hindu kta practitioners; but all this does not explain why Chinnamast is drinking her own blood.
Since identity with the deity is one of the important forms of sdhtm in tantric practice, then from the practitioner’s point of view (upon internally merging with the image) there is the clear sense that everything that one needs in terms of “gnostic nourishment” lies within oneself and, properly evoked, can nourish others too. But, the tantric perspective here seems to be that the nature of nourishment and, by corollary that of gnosis (vidy), is feminine, regardless of whether it is undertaken by a male or female practitioner. And, whether the sáhik experiences herself as Dev or as dkin (an enlightened attendant of the Goddess), she consumes that knowledge with an organic-ity that implies a deep intimacy, dissolving the subconscious barriers between the human practitioner and the Divine.
As Mahmay, the Mahdev is also the one who veils, through my, the underlying nonduality of life. The two figures, Dkin and Varnin, are embodied female power in their autonomous existence as extensions of this Mahvidy herself; they are also her disciples. The two attendants are usually depicted as pubescent females, leading me to think that the scene is depicting a female initiation: these young attendants are initiated into the mystery of the Goddess and adult womanhood through their ingestion of her blood, the source of life and gnosis. The hunger the two women attendants speak of in the narrative recounted earlier may be understood not as ordinary hunger, but as spiritual hunger, which can only be satisfied by drinking the essence of the Mahdev herself. In also drinking her own blood, the Goddess points to nonduality between her, her two attendants, and the human yogin meditating upon the icon and internalizing, within her being, the Goddess, as well as to the Goddess’s eternally rejuvenating power inextricably linked with overcomi
ng death.
I see in Chinnamast a Triadic Mother figure that nurtures and enfolds one within herself; her icon points to a Divine Self reaching out to nurture the human self and returning to her fullness, or prnam. The flow of blood out of a severed head opens into the infinite toward all Being waiting for spiritual nourishment. For the worshipper, the icon is not, ultimately, gruesome or shocking; rather, it is a visual representation of the divine feminine as giver and taker of all life and the source of all spiritual wisdom.
CONCLUDING REFLECTION
In writing a constructive essay such as this one, I attempt to reclaim and reinterpret Chinnamast from a female devotee’s perspective. I have found the most inspirational and potentially liberating—in the worldly, feminist sense of the word—imagery of male-female relationships in tantra, a conceptual world that has provided to me an understanding of the relationship between the masculine and feminine that could potentially support gender-egalitarian ideals. I find in Chinnamast a figure that honors in particular women’s bodily and spiritual capacities.
When I recently visited the Kā mā khyā temple in Northeast India, I walked down the deep dark cave of the Chinnamastā shrine, which has no icon but two little c lay snakes. I could sense the e lemental dance of all creation that can be accessed within our own bodies. The shrine was completely deserted when I walked down the steep stairs into the darkened chamber. I had to hold the railing as I trembled entering the womb shrine. There is no icon in the dark chamber, only a flat, uneven, and moist rock, hardly visible. The two little snakes—I wondered if they were made of rock or clay—facing each other in the dim light of an earthen lamp against the wall appeared amazingly alive, again reminding me of the coiled serpent power of the kualin lying dormant within the ephemeral human body. They say if awakened consciously or unconsciously, the kualin could plunge one into the depths of the maddening universe of the Great Goddess with t remendous intensity. The dark shrine of Chinnamast within the Kmkhy temple complex, one of those places where the ancient matricentered paths still survive, reminds me of our wholeness and unity with the Great Goddess in all her complexity and beauty.