Mauss recognises India as the scene of man’s first formal conception of the self as an individual conscious entity. Seeing that this discovery was not followed by the developments which lead in his evolutionist scheme to the perfection of the category of the person in the minds of Europeans, he seeks an explanation for this failure and finds it in the influence of the Sāmkhya dualists, Buddhist impersonalists and Upanishadic monists.
[All three doctrines had this in common, that they denied the truth of statements in
which one represents oneself as the agent of actions. The Sāmkhyas maintained that the actions represented in such apparently unobjectionable statements as “I know”, “I touch” or “I sacrifice” belong not to the self denoted by the first person pronoun but to an unconscious material principle external to the self, with which the “I” falsely identifies itself (see Sāmkhyakārikā 19-20; 64 with Vācaspatimiśra’s commentary; S.A. Srinivasan, Vācaspatimiśras Tattvakaumudī, . . . , Hamburg, 1967, p. 170). For the Upanishadic monists, in place of the Sāmkhyas’ plurality of inactive monads, there was a single super-self (paramātman/Brahma). The world of qualities and change, which for the Sāmkhya dualists existed as a reality external to selves (as the substratum of their false projections), was for these monists nothing but the projections themselves, an apparent transformation produced by ignorance of one’s unchanging, inactive, transindividual identity. The Buddhists maintained the non-existence of any stable entity at any level of consciousness and saw “self” and a fortiori “agent” as fictions which the fluxes of momentary cognitions we call persons superimpose upon themselves]
Since these doctrines belong to the earliest accessible stratum of Indian metaphysics, gaining prominence in the middle of the first millennium b.c., it appears to Mauss that the proper growth of the Indian self was prevented at its birth by views which recognized it only to reject it as a fiction constitutive of an undesirable worldly consciousness.
What is striking in his cursory treatment, is not so much his evolutionism as the inadequacy of his evidence and his lack of sociological and historical perspective. Firstly the relevant intellectual culture of India was much more than these three renunciationist doctrines. They were important; but they were also vigorously opposed. Secondly Mauss presupposes that it is reasonable to approach the category of the person in India through metaphysics alone, overlooking the dimensions of social person-hood which arenas it were; the raw material out of which these metaphysical systems were cooked. In order then to go beyond Mauss’s conclusions we must not only consider a wider range of doctrines. We must also go beneath the surface of philosophical and theological abstractions to the theory and prescription of social roles and, beneath this level, to materials whose aim was not to prescribe the construction of social personhood but to describe it or expose its presuppositions. For if we are to offer a picture of the category of the person in India which is more than a catalogue of unlocated and unrelated theories of the referent of the 'I'-cognition, then we must seek those principles implicit in social life which gave soteriological sense to these idealizations and make comprehensible their coexistence in awareness of each other.
Now these theories must be located and related in as well-determined , a context as possible. It is not sufficient to contextualize them within Indian society in the abstract. These soteriological discourses in representing the raw materials of personhood may draw on prescriptive texts which suppress in a characteristically Sanskritic manner all awareness of their origins in time and space; but we must not be drawn by this ideological feature into presupposing like Mauss that Indian culture was a single homogeneous whole. We must look at the way in which these levels of self-representation, for all their claims to universality, coexisted in a particular community at a particular time. We will not be able to conclude that what we find was the case throughout India at all times; but we will have a basis from which to work towards greater generality. Among various possibilities Kashmir from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries stands out as particularly promising for such an investigation. This period in India is one in which the materials at all levels have achieved great sophistication and mutual consciousness, while Kashmir gives us access through its literature to a uniquely broad perspective on the presuppositions and realities of Indian self-reference. It was the scene of maximum inclusion; for it saw the entry into sophisticated discourse of religious systems which the orthodox consensus considered impure, visionary and magical cults seeking superhuman power. Nowhere else at any time did this fundamental element in Indian society find so articulate a voice, and as it grows in strength we witness the strategies by which certain groups within these radical sects were brought in from the visionary fringe to accommodate areas of orthodox self-representation. This accommodation is of particular interest because the visionary power of the heterodox self is recoded in order to be inscribed within the orthodox social identity and in such a way that it reveals the latter as a lower nature within the one person. Thus we are provided with a unique view of the presuppositions of Indian person-hood: for the tradition sustains its ‘power’ behind the appearance of conformity by means of philosophical arguments and coded rituals which demonstrate to the initiate that all other doctrines of the ‘I’-cognition are no more than the making explicit of the instinctive levels of self-representation which are the parameters of this lower nature. This tradition, by deriving its power from this ability to contain and transcend all others, reveals more than any other the principles underlying their diversity and interaction. We see that the forces of self-representation in the Kashmirian community of this period, manifest in the poles of this duality of the orthodox and the heterodox and in the dialectic of their convergence, were contained within a fundamental structure of values which underlies a far wider range of cultural forms in the kingdoms of medieval India. Its terms are purity and power. At one extreme are those who seek omnipotence and at the other those who seek depersonalized purity. The former are impure in the eyes of the latter and the latter impotent in the eyes of the former. The former seek unlimited power through a visionary art of impurity, while the latter seek to realize through the path of purity an essential unmotivatedness which culminates, in the most uncompromising form of their doctrine, in the liberating realization that they have done and will do nothing, that the power of action is an illusion. The absolute of the impure is absolute Power; that of the pure is inert Being.
[These two poles, of purity and power, were seen as corresponding to the two domains of revealed literature, the Tantric (the domain of power) and the Vedic (the domain of purity). The former covers a wide range of possession-cum-self-divinisation cults sharing a non-Vedic liturgical system but differentiated by deities, public conduct and gnosis. The primary division among them was between Vaisnavas and Saivas. The first, the Tantric cultists of the god Visnu-Nārāyana, did not exercise an influence strong enough to justify their being treated separately here. The Saivas relevant to us are the extreme Tantric (Kāpālika and Kaula) devotees of Bhairava and Kālī (Siva and his consort in the spheres of death, eroticism and impurity) and the “pure” Tantric worshippers of the mild Sadāśiva form of Siva. The Vedic literature, on the other hand, defines the duties and salvific gnosis of the orthodox. However, just as there were Tantrics who aspired to orthodox status (for the Saivas, see text discussion; for the Vaisnavas see the Vedic ritualist’s impotent invective against the well-connected Pāñcarātra arrivistes of ninth-century Kashmir in Jayanta Bhatta’s Agamadambara [“Much Ado about Scripture”], Act 4, pp.75-6), so the religion of those who saw themselves as properly Vedic was deeply impregnated with toned-down versions of Tantric liturgies (see YST, p.14,17—p.19,12 on “safe” Purānic worship of the Tantric deities) and in the field of magic and exorcism, it recognised rites whose distinction from the properly Tantric is not easily perceived (see, e.g., Atharvapariśista [ed. Bolling and von Negelein], XXXI, XXXVI and XL).
The path of purity
The ideal Brahman
The way into this chiasmic structure was necessarily through the path of purity. For those Brahmans who opted for the path of power did so in the consciousness that it could be entered only by transcending the identity-through-purity embodied in the orthodox consensus and embedded in themselves. [It must be emphasised that what follows deals almost exclusively with the self-idealisations of the Brahman caste. Such are the limitations of our sources.]
Brahmanhood in its orthodox form as the basis of the path of purity was of two levels, the physical and the social. The first, conferred by birth from Brahman parents and seen as an inalienable property of the body, is necessary but not sufficient for the second, participation in the society of Brahmans through the study of Vedic revelation, marriage and commensality. This could be achieved, maintained and perfected only by conformity to the corpus of rules derived directly or indirectly from the infallible Veda and embodied in the conduct of the orthodox.
[The Vedic revelation was variously conceived. The ritualists (Mīmāmsakas) held that it was eternal and uncreated, the Naiyāyika epistemologists that it was the creation of an omniscient, world-ordaining God and the monistic Grammarians that it was the self-differentiation of an autonomous Word-Absolute (see Bhartrhari, Vākyapadīya 1.5 with the author’s vrtti). This last doctrine was incorporated by the Tantrics: see Jayākhyasamhitā 1.76-79b (Pāñcarātra); Rāmakantha, Nādakārikā 19—21 (Śaivasiddhānta);]
This functional Brahmanhood entailed a life of exacting ritual and duty, which required the relentless avoidance of the forbidden and contaminant in all aspects of the person’s existence: in his relations with his wife, in his food, drink, sleep and natural functions, in his dress, speech, gestures and demeanour, and in all his contacts, physical, visual and mental, with substances, places and with persons differentiated not only permanently by their castes but also at any time by degrees of purity determined by the same or similar criteria. The Brahman could maintain his privileged position at the summit of the hierarchy of nature only by conformity to his dharma, to the conduct prescribed for him in accordance with his caste and stage of life. The vast catalogue of rules extricating the pure from the impure and enjoining the acts by which he could establish his identity illumined for him a perilously narrow path through a dark chaos of possibilities excluded by absolute and, for the most part, unexplained interdictions. The ideal Brahman was alone with no companion but his balance of merit through conformity. His greatest enemy was the spontaneity of the senses and his highest virtue immunity to emotion in unwavering self-control.
The atheistic autonomism of the ritualists
Dogmatic anthropologies defined for this orthodox subject of injunction, epistemological and ontological frameworks adequate to his person-hood. We will examine the two extremes within these orthodox theories, the Mīmāmsaka and the Vedāntin or Upanishadic. For while there was much Brahmanical theory which cannot be identified with either, these two marked out the fundamental lines of force within which Brahmanical thought operated. The divergence of their categories records a tension within the orthodox which the theories of the extremes sought to minimize. This middle ground, even if it expressed the self-representation of the majority of Brahmans, only emphasises, with its sacrifice of theoretical coherence for the sake of an uneasy peace, the truth-value of the more radical positions.
First, the Mīmāmsaka ritualists, specialists in the interpretation of the Vedic texts as the sole authority for the duties of the twice-born, required the orthodox person to recognize as his a world in which all form is external to consciousness. He was not to view ideas and language as a field of internal construction, an inner depth coming between him and the world in itself. For such a formulation would have undermined his realism, causing him to doubt whether he was in fact in contact with an external world at all. Cognitions, said the Mīmāmsakas, are not formed entities: they are acts, which by their very nature produce in their objects the quality of being known. We therefore know that we know only by inference from this effect, not by introspection. Thus the objective world was to confront the orthodox Brahman pre-arranged, with no contribution from his side, in an eternal taxonomy of universal and values.
If his cognition as pure act was to have no object-form, so that the world it revealed might have absolute objectivity, then it must also surrender any claim to subject-form, so that he, as its agent, might have unquestionable reality. The 'I' of his constant intuition was not to besome noetic pole within cognition. It must point to an independent self, self-existent and enduring as the knower, linked to a manipulate external world by its inherently active nature. The orthodox Brahman was enjoined to know himself therefore as the turbid variable constant of the worldly “now”, always changing on the side of the states which were the reflexes of his actions, but always the same on the side of the fact of his consciousness per se. The intuition of this latter fact was to show that he was an eternal and omnipresent spiritual essence; for he was to see that this intuition contained no notion of spatial or temporal limitation. His contact with the here and now through a mind and senses was to be explained by the theory of motivated action (karma). Such actions generate inescapable retributive potencies which perpetuate such limitation through their fruition into future experiences. This series of causes and effects is beginningless, projecting the agent from contact to contact in life after life and determining the position of these contacts in the hierarchy of nature.
If his self had not been eternal and omnipresent, the Veda, vhich guaranteed his survival beyond death and his relation with ever new spatial contexts for the experience of the fruition of his dharma-bom merit, would have been false. This possibility was however excluded by the ritualists’ ultra-realist epistemology. Cognition, being a formless act, was not such that it could ever fail to be veridical: error and illusion were to be understood not as characteristic of certain cognitions in themselves but as due to deficiencies in the instruments of cognition or the indistinctness of their objects. Thus cognitions being valid in themselves simply by virtue of their occurrence, he could not doubt the validity of the Veda. For did he not cognise the eternal (unauthored) sound-units which were its substance? Were not the injunctions which it comprised unambiguous and did they not inform him of matters inaccessible to the sense-bound faculties of man, for example, that one desiring heaven should sacrifice? How then could their cognition contain that element of doubt that accompanies all cognitions of human utterances; and how, for the same reason, could they ever be contradicted? Thus the Vedic injunctions were to incite him to act in the certain knowledge that the rewards of which they spoke would be enjoyed by him in the life to come, or for the more radical Prābhākaras, simply by virtue of their injunctive form, in the manner of categorical imperatives.
So the Mīmāmsaka defined the orthodox self as active, individual and eternal, but devoid of all creativity. The Brahman was not to see himself as having the capacity to constitute his own values or as able to have cognitions which were not purely the making manifest of that external world which was the sphere of his enjoined actions and the receptacle of the values which these injunctions entailed (purity/impurity, etc.). For were he to have conceded even one case of non-objective perception, of perception perceived, his faith in the veridicality of cognition and therefore in his identity-determining cognition of the Veda would have been undermined. What, he feared, would prevent the implosion of his world into the contemplative intrinsicism of the Buddhists, enemies of the Veda, deniers of the efficacity of sacrifice? For they held that “self” and “object of action” are not external to each other and related by momentary acts of formless cognition, but simply the way cognition reveals itself. For them there were neither selves nor an external world but only constructs of agency and externality within each momentary constituent of a flux of self-cognising cognitions. It is this flux that the worldly man clings to as a stable self, believing that it illumines a world of external facts on which he can act in his own interests.
Securing the category of action from the language-dissolving void to which it was consigned by the Buddhist theory of impersonal flux, the Mīmāmsaka ritualist defined for the orthodox a self that was not only real but also absolutely self-determining. In harmony with his conviction that the Vedic rituals were mechanisms dependent for their results only on the exactitude of their performance and that these results would accrue to him alone as their agent, he held that his present experience and all the perceptible aspects of his identity were the outcome of nothing but his own actions. Just as the gods had no existence for him apart from their names, affecting the outcome of the rite only in as much as their utterance was part of the sacrificial mechanism, so he admitted the existence of no omnipotent and omniscient controller of his destiny, no superhuman entity privy to the balance of merit and demerit which he had accumulated and for which he alone was responsible.
Thus in his self-representation, the most orthodox of Brahmans was the most individual of individuals. For him there were no external powers which moulded his life. His “deity”, his miraculous power of cosmic consistency, was nothing but the law of his action. By this alone each individual “created” his own world within an eternally unchanging set of possibilities. Yet at the same time he exemplified all that was nonindividual: he was the perfect man of the group. This contradiction, that of the “solipsistic conformist”, was his self-representation as ritual agent. The notion of autonomous agency individualised the person, but his determination by a world of revealed duties, his wish to conform to the Brahmanical ideal, depersonalised this individual, purging him of all independent motivations. Thus it was that the orthodox anthropologies idealised two antagonistic values in the person: on the one hand his individuality as the agent of the sacrificial causality which sustained the world of rites and held it outside of him as the receptacle of absolute values, and on the other an impersonality devouring his sense of agency from within so that it progressively permeated the extrinsicist perception of the parameters of action with a sense not of their inwardness but of their unreality.
For all the orthodox soteriologies were the validation of this depersonalisation. There were fundamental differences on the metaphysical plane, as we shall see, but these are unified by a common concern to define the relation between the outer sphere of individual action and this inner impersonality. The Mīmāmsakas devotion to the former precluded their recognising a depersonalisation whose cultivation could dispense at any point with the Brahman’s ritual duties and the irreducible, if merely numerical, individuality which they and an injunctive Veda entailed. In their view the Brahman was to achieve his depersonalisation within the scrupulous execution of his obligatory rites through the renunciation of all personalising motivation. For it was motivated action alone that tied the eternal and omnipresent “I” to its beginningless and potentially endless series of births into the here and now. Therefore, abandoning all attachment to the results of his actions, he would be liberated from life when his karma-stock no longer growing had exhausted itself in a long but finite series of lives passed in unmotivated conformity to dharma. There the perfected Brahman would be, omnipresent without contact or cognition (since these were the result of the forces of actions now spent), a mere ens, forever in an eventless now, coextensive with others but unaware of their presence.
The inactive being of the renunciationists
Facing the Mīmāmsaka ritualists within the orthodox camp were the Vedāntins.
[Rāmakantha (c.a.d.975-1050) distinguished between a Vedanta which sees the world as the real transformation of the Absolute (Parināma-Vedānta) and one which considers it an illusion (Māyāvāda), an apparent transformation projected by ignorance. He admits that the passage on which he is commenting gives the former as representative of the Vedāntins, but expounds instead the latter, pleading that it was the doctrine followed by the foremost interpreters of the Upanishads. This preeminence of illusionism goes back at least to Somānanda (c.a.d.900-950) and probably to the time of the Haravijaya of Ratnākara (c.a.d.830). Sadyojyoti whose emphasis on transformationism in the PMNK suggests his relative antiquity cannot, however, be dated beyond the fact that he was known to Somānanda.
When Vedānta is expounded by its opponents in Kashmirian sources of our period it is the doctrine of Mandanamiśra which is generally in mind. To my knowledge no source betrays familiarity with the doctrines of Śañkara.]
They spoke for the extreme according to which the outer, though the necessary context for the inner’s development, was finally devoured by it altogether, leaving in the place of the depersonalised individual an individuality-obliterating intuition of inherent non-agency.
All plurality, of selves, cognitions and objects, was to be seen as the work of a beginningless ignorance. It was this which veiled the twice-born’s nature, creating the false appearance of an individual agent subject to ritual duties and transmigration. This veil binding his self-representation to the categories of action would dissolve if he constantly reinforced the knowledge of his true nature as proclaimed in the Upanishads, revealing the essential self ‘‘in the beauty of an endless, absolute, self- illumined and innate bliss”, as the non-relational, pure Is-ness which is the substratum of imagined diversity, the prediscursive absolute in the source of all cognitive appearances, timelessly conscious, with no content but its own inert non-dual essence, the only reality.
This realisation, even if it could be cultivated within the life of the householder, could dispense with that life once it reached a critical degree of maturity. Thus the Vedāntins diverged from the ritualists in upholding the institution of renunciation, in which the depersonalised individual would move forth from the domain of his illusory agency into a life of solitary mendicancy and contemplation. The impassivity and self-control which had led him within his life of ritual duty to the intuition of its emptiness, would become outside of it the sum of his dharma. The comparatively dispersed path of agency, by means of which the Brahman sustained his individuality amid the personalising ties of worldly life, was compressed into an adamantine essence, which permeating his consciousness would dissolve these bonds and with them his residual individuality.
The inaction in action of the middle ground
The Brahmanism of the middle ground sought to reconcile these two extremes on the line of conformity to Vedic dharma, the Mīmāmsaka and the Vedāntin. It offered the Brahman householder a monism for the ritual agent which admitted renunciation but tended to confine it to the last quarter of a man’s life (after the payment of the three debts), and at the same time made it an unnecessary option by propagating a doctrine of gnostic liberation within the pursuit of conformity to the householder’s dharma. This compromise excluded both the illusionism of the Vedāntins and the atheistic autonomism of the ritualists. Thus the world of relations in action, individual agency and the rest, was perceived here, not as a mirage inexplicably concealing the inactive impersonality of a prediscursive absolute, but as the real self-differentiation of the One.
The householder Brahman was to reconcile the antithesis of motivation and conformity within his ritual agency by seeing the world of objective values and his own autonomy as respectively absolutised and negated by their subsumption within an all-inclusive Supreme Being. He was enjoined to contemplate the convergence of the parameters of action into an underlying unity in the very process of his Veda-directed activities, cultivating the conviction that it was not he that acted but the self-limiting absolute. This introjection of agency from the ritualists “I” into a non-individual essence of consciousness (a Vedāntic super-self), an “inner controller” accounting for and validating the sense of impelledness within the world of objective values, added to his absolute an element of divine personality. The inclusivist Brahman of this predominantly Vaisnava theistic middle ground was to perfect himself through disinterested conformity to God’s will manifest as his dharma. He was to act not out of desire for the rewards of his ordained actions, but in a withdrawn contemplation of a personal-cum-impersonal absolute as the causative agent of his actions and cognitions.
The path of power
The transcendence of orthodox inhibition and extrinsicism: the Kālī-self
We have seen the Vedic construction of the self from the inside, from the points of view of those who sought to formulate metaphysical anthropologies adequate to the personhood of the orthodox ritual agent within the antitheses of motivation and conformity, of individuality and depersonalised consciousness, of agent and non-agent. Let us consider now this same construction from the inside of the inside, through the vision of the Kashmirian Tantric Brahmans, who objectivating this subjective identity within themselves saw the orthodox metaphysics “from above” as its transmigration-bound and transmigration-binding truth.
These heterodox visionaries derived the extrinsicist doctrines of Brahmanism from an undesirable and transcendable psychological condition, from a state of anxious inhibition tied to the acceptance as objective and concordant of the vast and complex body of prescriptive dichotomies enshrined in the Vedic literature. The conscientiousness essential to the preservation of purity and social esteem was to be expelled from his identity by the Tantric Brahman as impurity itself, the only impurity he was to recognise, a state of ignorant self-bondage through the illusion that purity and impurity, prohibitedness and enjoinedness were objective qualities residing in things, persons and actions.
The consequence of this degrading extrinsicism of values was identified as impotence, blindness to an innate power of consciousness and action considered infinite in its fullest expansion. This inhibition, which preserved the path of purity and barred his entrance into the path of power, was to be obliterated through the experience of a violent, duality-devouring expansion of consciousness beyond the narrow confines of orthodox control into the domain of excluded possibilities, by gratifying with wine, meat and, through caste-free intercourse, with orgasm and its products the bliss-starved circle of goddesses that emanated in consciousness as his faculties of cognition and action. Worshipped in this lawless ecstasy they would converge into his consciousness, illumining his total autonomy, obliterating in the brilliance of a supramundane joy the petty, extrinsicist selfhood sanctified by orthodox society.
The strength of this lower nature is revealed by the Tantric’s account of the process of this implosive liberation. The celebrant of this sensual was to experience in the end a twelve-phased retraction of his power of cognition, from its initial self-dichotomisation in which it represents itself as projecting an object external to itself, through the resorption of this object and its own reversion through deeper and deeper levels to its autonomous and universal source pulsating from beyond time and individuality in the emission and resorption of the relations of agent, act and object of cognition that constitute the universe of experience. Significantly the extrinsicist inhibition, which the adept had tried to annihilate through the observance of his vows and the contemplation of its irrationality, reasserts itself even here, at the deep levels of this final liberating insight. It resists the dissolution of individuality by setting up oscillations in the midst of this implosion between “this new awareness vibrating in essential radiance, free of the contraction of laws, untouched by injunction or prohibition” and a regressive anxiety for some aspect of Brahmanical externalised values. Only when awareness of autonomy had evaporated this inhibition (in stage 4) and its recalcitrant latent traces (in stage 7) would the faculties dissolve into the ego, the ego into the representation of individual agency which sustained it and individuality itself finally implode into the abyss of transindividual consciousness and the infinite power of cosmic projection and resorption in the zero-point at its inexpressible end, the goddess Kālī.
Thus though the description of the twelve phases of retraction was the visionary affirmation of a metaphysics of being, a twelve-phased realisation that the world exists only as its representation in consciousness (the opposite of the Mīmāmsakas’ view), it reveals at the same time that this realisation meant first and foremost victory over the deep urge within the Brahman to establish his identity through a system of values determining him from without. It is as though the world was external to his consciousness only in as much as it was the substratum of these values. Thus for the Tantric devotee of the Kālī-self the cosmos-projecting power and this slavery within himself to Vedic injunction were identical. He represented his consciousness as projecting itself to appear as though other than itself, facing and determined by what it was not and manifesting in the same movement the injunctive and metaphysical systems of the followers of the powerless path of purity as the formalised reflection of this contracted mode of awareness. His idealism in the Tantric domain was the evocation of an omnipotent, all-containing identity immune to this self-imposed tyranny of extrinsicist inhibition.
Power through impurity: the culture of the cremation grounds
It will readily be recognised that the orthodox anthropologies were in themselves a defence against such forces, admitting as they did in the sphere of action no powers external to the individual’s karma-causality. Possession, therefore, was doubly irrational: it obliterated the purity of self-control and contradicted the metaphysics of autonomy and responsibility.
It was precisely because these forces threatened the Hindu’s “impotent purity” that they invited a visionary mysticism of fearless omnipotence, of unfettered super-agency through the controlled assimilation of their lawless power in occult manipulations of impurity. Thus it is that in Kashmir we find about the path of purity, a vigorous polydaemonistic culture of power. The high Tantric soteriology which obliterated the extrinsicism of Brahmanical purity in the privacy of an ecstatic, all-devouring self-revelation of consciousness came out of the traditions of orders of exorcistic visionaries who, knowing the emanative clan-systems and hierarchies of the powers of impurity, freed and protected the uninitiated from their assaults and at the same time cultivated the practice of controlled possession, seeking permeation by the forms of Bhairava and Kali which stood at the centre of and controlled as their emanations the clans of these impurity-embodying and impurity-addicted obsessors of the orthodox identity.
Smeared with the ashes of funeral pyres, wearing ornaments of human bone, the initiate would carry in one hand a cranial begging-bowl and in the other a khatvāñga, a trident-topped staff on which was fixed beneath the prongs a human skull adorned with a banner of blood-stained cloth. Having thus taken on the appearance of the ferocious deities of his cult, he roamed about seeking to call forth these gods and their retinues in apocalyptic visions and thereby to assimilate their superhuman identities and powers. These invocations took place precisely where the uninitiated were in greatest danger of possession: on mountains, in caves, by rivers, in forests, at the feet of isolated trees, in deserted houses, at crossroads, in the jungle temples of the Mother-Goddesses, but above all in the cremation-grounds, the favourite haunts of Bhairava and Kālī and the focus of their macabre and erotic cult. The initiate moved from the domain of male autonomy and responsibility idealised by the Mimāmsakas into a visionary world of permeable consciousness dominated by the female and the theriomorphic. Often transvestite in his rites, he mapped out a world of ecstatic delirium in which the boundaries between actual women and the hordes of their celestial and protean counterparts, between the outer and the inner, was barely perceptible. Intoxicated with wine, itself the embodiment of these powers, he sought through the incantation of mantras and the offering of mingled menstrual blood and semen, the quintessential impurities, to induce these hordes to reveal themselves. Taming them with an offering of his own blood, he received from them the powers he desired. At the same time he was alert to perceive their incarnation in human women and was provided by the tradition with the criteria by which he might recognize their clan-affinities. For a divinatory rite at the time of his initiation had determined his occult link with one of these clans, in order that by the grace of his clan-sisters, who embodied the clan-goddesses and were his spiritual superiors, he might attain by the most direct route liberating possession by the ferocious cosmic deity who was the controller and emanator of all these forces.
The women of this cult, his vehicle to power and the transmitters through sexual intercourse of esoteric gnosis, were the antithesis of the Brahmanical ideal of the docile dependent. Lawless and promiscuous “deities”, feared and revered, they unleashed all the awesome power of impurity, that feminine essence whose recognition and suppression in the daughter, wife and mother was enjoined on the orthodox as essential to the preservation of the social order through caste-purity. Thus that which could not be suppressed in them, the monthly discharge of their inner depravity, contact with which was feared by the orthodox as the destroyer of wisdom, strength and sight, was revered by the devotee of Bhairava and Kālī as the most potent of power-substances, irresistible to the deities he invoked into himself or into his presence.
Power with purity: from super-agent to actor
It was within the scriptural traditions which prescribed this Kāpālika cult of power through impurity that there developed the new idealist vision of internal transcendence in the Kālī-self. In the archaic substratum the adept experienced the presence of the deity and its emanations as something external to his consciousness or as penetrating his consciousness from outside. Now the resulting divinisation was represented as the removal through bliss of cognitive impediments in an implosion which revealed an already latent divine essence, a total surrender of self-contraction which uncovered his identity as Kālī, the unutterable focus of cosmic powers radiating out as the vibrant light of a now enlightened consciousness. The complex schemes of the deity-hierarchies of the circumambient possession cult were partly recoded and partly replaced in new esoteric taxonomies which expressed a vision of the universe (the deity’s cosmic form) as a projection of powers within an unlocated, timeless essence of Consciousness, an autonomous, egoless power. The act of sexual union which produced the quintessences necessary to invocation, became in this inner idealism the vehicle of illumination itself; for it was in orgasm that the deity revealed itself as the transcendental core of the energies of cognition and action, the unity of light and emptiness.
Though the essential core of this visionary idealism continued to be the reaching of the macabre skull-bearers, this internalisation equipped the tradition to colonise the mental life of the Kashmirian householder. Splitting off from the culture of the cremation-grounds, one stream of this tradition reduced itself to its erotic essentials and emerged as the Kaula secret societies, practising collective orgiastic worship, internally casteless but pretending to caste-conformity in their social interactions.
These secret societies were no fringe phenomenon in the Kashmir of our period. The Vaisnava satirist Ksemendra saw them as one of the major social evils of his time and it appears that they had deeply penetrated the court and the patrician intelligentsia.
From the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries we see the emergence from one such Kaula sect, the Trika, of a socially ambitious avant-garde which presented the new idealism to a wider public by clothing it in the philosophically reasoned, anti-Buddhist discourse of high Brahmanism. It argued in its Doctrine of Recognition that all should recognize as their true identity a single, unified and autonomous consciousness which projects itself through innate powers of impulse, cognition and action as all things, experiences and persons. In no other terms, it claimed, can we account for the synthetico-analytic spontaneity of our awareness. By equating the deity with this metaphysical ground it equipped the sect within which it arose with a sect-neutral hermeneutical framework for its upgrading and consolidation. For the abstract powers attributed to this commodious absolute could not only be identified as the real meaning of the constituents of the deity-structure which empowered its own cult. They could also reach out to subsume in exegesis those of rival and, in one case, more prestigious traditions.
In its bid to colonise the souls of Saivas in general, arguably the most numerous religious group in Kashmir, it had to confront the conservative “Saiva Orthodoxy” (Saivasiddhānta) then dominant in the valley. Whatever connections that Tantric system may have had with the heterodox culture of the cremation-grounds, they had no doubt been long concealed and forgotten beneath a systematic epistemology, ontology and injunctive orientation which aligned it, in spite of its theism, with the orthodox world-view of the Mīmāmsakas. Extrinsicist and pluralist, it bound its eternal and pervasive agent-selves to a ritualistic and antivisionary conformity to the social order which assimilated them to their non-Tantric, orthodox contemporaries, deodorising, as it were, their Tantric aspiration to the realisation of an innate omnipotence and omniscience through Siva’s liberating grace. Thus while the devotees of Bhairava and Kālī believed that initiation obliterated one’s former caste, the doctors of the Saivasiddhānta, eager that the initiate should not be deprived of his qualification through caste to fulfil the Brahmanical duties of the path of purity, adhered to the orthodox view that caste was an intrinsic quality of the body which could be destroyed only by death.
This Veda-congruent, soft Tantric theology stood in the tenth century directly between the ascendant Kaulas and the raw material of popular Saivism in Kashmir, the cult of Svacchandabhairava. This cult’s roots were indeed in the culture of the cremation-grounds, as the deity’s name suggests, but its position as the standard Saivism of the Kashmirian householder had modified its heteropraxy, permitting its coexistence with pan-Indian orthodox dharma and its colonisation by the theological exegesis of the Saivasiddhānta.
In the Recognition-texts at the beginning of the tenth century the first Kaula systematic metaphysicians had concealed from the public they addressed their special sectarian background and had referred to the prestigious Kashmirian doctors of the Saivasiddhānta only where they could do so with respect. By the eleventh, however, their order had gathered sufficient strength to displace its once dominant rivals without such self-concealment, propagating a new wave of non-dualist, idealist commentaries on the scriptural literature from which the cult of Svacchandabhairava and its annexes drew their authority. The evidence for the succeeding centuries and the current situation among the Brahmans of Kashmir indicate that this success was permanent.
That the Trika, though a Kaula sect, should have had so great an influence on the majority of the Saiva community needs explanation. Of course, there must have been a certain plausibility in the claim of these nondualists that as worshippers of Bhairava and Kālī they rather than the Saivasiddhāntins were the natural transmitters of the inner soteriology of the public Saivism. For the Saivasiddhāntins’ liturgical tradition was the worship not of the ferocious gods of the Kashmirians but of the mild Sadāśiva. Yet the enduring success of this reassertion of sectarian continuity after the inroads of the Saivasiddhānta was due to the power of the Trika’s view of the person. For out of the visionary traditions of the quest for super-agency on the fringe of Brahmanically ordered society it had forged a perception of the self as an actor concealed within his lower nature as an agent on the path of purity. The power of the heterodox culture of the cremation grounds had been over-coded to emerge as the power of an uncontaminable essence invisible behind the public appearance of conformity to the orthodox life, freely projecting this lower nature in the expression of its autonomy.
The Kaula’s blissful adoration of the outer field of experience as the expansion of the deity immanent in Consciousness was universalised in the concept of liberated social conformity, integrating the antagonistic paths of purity and power. Thus one could be “internally a Kaula, externally a Saiva [a worshipper of Svacchandabhairava in the Kashmirian context] while remaining Vedic in one’s social practice.” The new Śaiva was to see his self as an actor with his individuality as its stage, and his faculties as an audience of aesthetes initiated into the appreciation of the outer world not as a system of external values exacting the extrinsicist impotence of a contentless consciousness but as the expression of the self’s infinite inner autonomy, pervaded by a vibrant beauty.
Having seen the outlines of self-representation in Kashmir in the doctrines of the agent, the non-agent, the superagent and the actor, and their interrelation within the paths of purity and power, we may end by considering the respects in which this picture, though more diverse than that which Mauss offers with his three agency-negating doctrines of renunciation, would still incline him to his conclusion that the Indians had little beyond a promising start to contribute to his sociocentric, evolutionist scheme. He would still look in vain for the notion that individual conscious entities are, ultimately speaking, different from each other in more than a numerical sense. The Mīmāmsaka self, which opposed Mauss’s three doctrines as heresies, though it was a radically autonomous entity, saw as its highest good a totally impersonal cessation of experience as the fruit of unmotivated conformity to duty. Nor was it invested with independent rationality. This faculty, while differentiating the human from the animal, could benefit the Brahman only to the extent that it enabled him to realise his dependence upon revealed injunction, his inability to constitute his own values and determine his own good. As we have seen, the culture of the cremation-grounds recognised the acceptance of the Veda-determined identity through purity as self-limitation through ignorance; but the freedom from it to which it aspired was to be found in depersonalising visions of superhuman power in the delirious zone of exclusion that pressed in upon the ordered world of the social agent. The Kaulas, for their part, identified the world of extrinsicist inhibition with the spontaneous projection of a transcendental self. Their freedom from it was therefore a freedom not of their existence but of a metaphysical,
aesthetic essence. Where the authority of the Veda was rejected altogether we find that it was in the name of a radical scepticism which denied man any knowledge but that given by the contact of his senses with their objects, or, in the Buddhist case, of an impersonalism in which the autonomous social agent was replaced by a flux of momentary cognitions whose capacity for moral responsibility was an unfathomable mystery, at least to outsiders tied to the categories of common sense.
These views are as far removed in their emphasis from the values constitutive of the European personhood which Mauss chooses to place at the summit of evolution as the two social systems which contain them are from each other. One unfamiliar with the diversity of cultures might easily be forgiven his amazement that a civilisation could produce such sophisticated analyses of consciousness and personal identity without wishing to derive the forces which determine moral choice from within the social agent; but to define the Indian views only in terms of what they are not and to attribute this lack to the influence of certain schools of thought, as though but for them Indian personhood might have progressed along more European lines, as Mauss’s evolutionism implies, is unsociological in the extreme.
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