Woman and Goddess in Hinduism

by Tracy Pintchman

  14. From the official Siddha Yoga website, http://www.siddhayoga.org.

  15. Both my and akti are defined on the Siddha Yoga website glossary at http://www.siddhayoga.org/glossary-siddha-yoga.html#.

  16. On philosophical and mythological renderings of akti, see Pintchman, 2004. On akti and goddesses in Hinduism, see Hawley and Wulff, 1996; Moon and Benard, 2000; and Brown, 1998. On akti and women in Hinduism, see Narayanan, 1999; Pintchman, 2007; Falk, 2005; Leslie, 1991; and Pearson, 1996. This is not by any means an exhaustive list.

  17. See Pechilis, 2004: 219-244.

  18. On the association of women saints with bhakti and women religious teachers with akti, see Narayanan, 1999: 25-77; esp. 65. For a discussion of this and other distinctions across various styles of women’s leadership in Hindu tradition, see Pechilis, 2004: 3-50.

  19. The title “Swami Chidvilasananda” may be translated as “The Bliss of the Play of Pure Consciousness.” The guru’s more popular title, Gurumayi, can translate as “One Who is Immersed in the Guru,” or as “guru-mother”: “The name came from an abhanga, a devotional song by the Maharashtrian poet-saint Tukadhyada which has the refrain ‘Avadali Gurumayi.’ In Marathi, gurumãyi means ‘guru-mother,’ although a closely related Sanskrit word, gurumayi, means ‘one who is filled with the guru’ “ (Durgananda, 1997: 605, n. 247).

  20. Khanna cites McDaniel, 1992: 36.

  21. Other female gurus are understood to have been self-enlightened, e.g., Anandamayi Ma and Ammachi.

  22. See Hallstrom, 1999: 32, 70, 74, 80, and photographs between pages 106 and 107.

  23. For example, St Dev is identified with Laksm; Jayashri Ma is identified with Adya akti Kl; Meera Ma is identified with Adiparaakti; Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati is identified as the daughter of Kl; Karunamayi Ma is identified with Sarasvatï, Bala Tripurasundari, Lalita (Prvatï), and Laksmï; Ammachi is identified with Dev. In addition, Ammachi and Jayashri Ma engage in performances in which they become the Goddess (devbhavd).

  24. See Pechilis, 2004: 219–245.

  25. Discussion is on the Siddha Yoga website, Newsletter archives, http://www.siddhayoga.org/news/volume5/index.html. Hear the guru’s recitation of the message at http://www.siddhayoga.org /siddha-yoga-mes sage -2 0 04.html.

  26. For a discussion of my in Siddha Yoga teachings, in which my is a power manifestation of kualin akti, see Brooks and Bailly, 1997: 445-495; esp. 469-473.

  27. The messages of the previous four years do not bear the explicit association with gender as the message for 2004 (e.g., 2000 Believe in Love; 2003 Trust); see http://www.siddhayoga.org/teachings /message/message-archive.html. The guru’s message for 2008 is: “Search for the knowledge of the Truth and become established in the awareness of the Self” (http://www.siddhayoga.org/teachings/message/2008/).

  28. Siddha Yoga Newsletter, April 2004, at http://www.siddhayoga.org/news/volume7/satsang.html. In a letter dated March 2005, the secretary to the board of trustees of SYDA Foundation informed Siddha Yogis that Shree Muktananda Ashram is open only for long-term retreat participants: “The long-range plan for Shree Muktananda Ashram is to develop the ashram along the lines of Gurudev Siddha Peeth, our mother ashram in India. The goal of this plan is that retreat participants will pursue in-depth Siddha Yoga studies and immerse themselves in following the daily schedule more efficiently and effectively. It will take several years to make the changes necessary to realize this goal. Until then, Shree Muktananda Ashram will continue to function as an ashram solely for long-term retreat participants offering full time guruseva and those participating in specific short-term seva projects that are paramount to achieving this goal. Over the course of this time, letters such as this one will keep you informed of how the plan for Shree Muktananada Ashram is moving forward.” http://www.siddhayoga.org/shree-muktananda -ashram.html, accessed June 2005. A more succinct version of this announcement is now on the website, which dates the decision to 2004 (accessed March 2008).

  29. For an important current and critical discussion of Siddha Yoga as a movement and praxis, see Williamson, 2005.

  30. There is provision for housing a family together, however.

  31. A stream of study influentially forwarded a decade ago in Butler, 1990.

  32. See Barbara A. Holdrege’s (2000: esp. 84–86) comparative analysis of Judaism and Hinduism as “religions of embodiment” in contrast to Protestant-inflected definitions of religion.

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  C H A P T E R 6

  The Kl Practice:

  Revisiting Women’s Roles in Tantra

  Loriliai Biernacki

  Does a woman herself worship the yoni?

  —Prvat’s question to iva, Yoni Tantra

  On the peaks of the holy mountain Mount Kailas, the center of the world, the god iva and his wife Prvat, the Great Goddess in one of her incarnations, discuss the secrets of tantric practice. In the middle of talking about a tantric rite that involves worshipping a woman, the usually diffident and domesticated goddess Prvat asks her husband this curious question about women worshipping. “Should she herself worship the woman or should the male seeker [worship]?” (oni Tantra, v. 5.23). iva replies thus: “The yoni,1 which makes up the whole world—jaganmay—should be worshipped by the male seeker and the linga, the male organ, should be worshipped by her . . . By the mere worship of these two one becomes liberated while in the body” (vv. 5.23-5.25b). Does a woman participate in worship, or is she only the object of worship? If she does worship, what or whom should she worship? Prvat ‘s question here presumes the worship of the yoni, that is, the worship of the female embodied as a womb or vulva, as the normative practice. Her question seems to suggest that women and men, as equal actors in tantric ceremonies, would perform the same normative ceremony of worshipping the yoni. So she asks if a woman participates in the tantric ceremony the same way that a man does, where she would worship a woman. iva replies to the contrary, and the question disappears. The very question, however, signals that something is awry.

  Typically, in Sanskrit tantric textual sources, we find that women are the objects of male worship but not worshippers themselves. Hindu tantric texts generally assume a male perspective, male practitioners, and a male audience. In light of this general relegation of women to a passive role, Prvat asks an odd, even inconceivable, question. Are women, she asks, actors or agents in the tantric context? In the heady tantric quest for magical powers and enlightenment, do women themselves engage in ritual worship? Or are they merely passive objects, simply used by men in a male-dominated conquest for magical powers and otherworldly states?

  Textually, we commonly see women represented in transgres-sive, “left-handed” tantras preeminently as suppliers of potent fluids, menstrual blood, and conduits for male ecstatic (and enstatic) experience. David White (2003), in particular, compellingly argues for the position that women especially were the suppliers of fluids for “left-handed” tantra. Right-handed tantra employs substitutions or visualizations that symbolically represent the concrete transgressive elements used in “left-handed” tantra. In the “right-handed” traditions, which do not employ liquor, meat, or sexual rites, the woman is usually displaced by the metaphor of feminine imagery. She is an inner principle, the goddess within the (male) practitioner. She is an energy or power, kunaalin akti, that rises up in the subtle, or energy body in a linear way corresponding to the spine in the physical body of the practitioner to join in ecstatic unity with iva (the ultimate Self, and pure consciousness of the practitioner) in the sahasrra cakra slightly above the practitioner’s head. One sees the focus on woman as an inner principle in esoteric, inner forms of “right-handed” worship, for instance, in much of the scholarship addressing the corpus of tantric texts written or influenced by the important Kashmir aiva tantra theologian Abhinavagupta2; in this case, as embodied living females, women are absent.

  Prvat’s question, of course, is a charged one, if only because the tantric proclivity for goddesses has been on some fronts understood as a reclamation of feminine power, and the answer to whether the “Goddess is a feminist,” to borrow from the title of an important exploration of this topic, is one that that feminists use today in creating strategies for social change.

  This chapter addresses the theme of women as actors in tantra. I suggest that a particular form of tantric practice, the Kl Practice, presents a textual view of women we do not often see: one that acknowledges women’s capacities for sp
iritual attainment— acknowledging women as practitioners and as gurus3—and recognizes the rights and wishes women may have in the daily business of living life. Working with eight published texts associated with the Kmkhy temple and dating to the fifteenth-eighteenth centuries, this chapter demonstrates the presence of an alternative view of women. This Kl Practice especially proposes a view of women that, I suggest, shifts deeply engrained attitudes toward women to a position that grants women autonomous importance. Prvat’s question signals this shift. Her question jars us into considering the possibility that women may have actively participated in the tantric rites described here in ways that construed them as peers of men, rather than mere objects, and as having the same religious goals as men. In her question, Prvat presumes that since the worship of the yoni leads to enlightenment for the male, the same will hold true for the woman. Her question asks us to reconsider how we have understood women’s roles.

  iva’s response, in any case, clearly affirms her suggestion that women functioned as actors. So, while women, at least in the texts I will examine, do not seem to perform worship exactly as men do, iva, nevertheless, goes on to emphasize the nature of women as active participants. Only when both men and women worship their respective opposite genders does the prized attainment of enlightenment while still alive (jvan mukti) occur.

  In reading Western scholarly literature on tantra, one usually finds employed two salient arguments that mitigate the tendency to construe tantric traditions as either affording or recognizing the agency of women. The first often runs like this: yes, tantrics venerated the goddess, but this veneration did not actually carry over into veneration of actual living women. In other words, the veneration of a goddess recognizes her capacity to affect events in a practitioner’s life; one venerates a goddess precisely because she has the power to make things happen and one seeks to win her favor so that she will choose to use her power to fulfill the desires of the practitioner. While this attitude assumes a sense of power and concomitant agency for the goddess from the standpoint of the believer, this sense of agency typically does not transfer to ordinary women. Neither does it typically transfer to the living woman who temporarily houses this goddess in a state of trance. She may be an incarnate goddess, but unlike the disembodied goddess, the ordinary woman is simply the object of veneration, not a subject or agent capable of choosing a particular course of action.