Ritual transgression in Kaula Trika - A. Sanderson

A. Sanderson and Swami Lakshman Joo

A. Sanderson: In the Tantric Trika, worshippers in these Kaula systems were to fill the principal chalice with liquor in order to ‘purify’ the offering and other factors involved in the act of worship; but they were also to add particles or drops of such substances as the Five Jewels and the Offerings of Heroes (vīra-dravyam). The first are urine, semen, menstrual blood, faeces and phlegm. The rest are these five followed by onion, garlic (both highly pollutant for regenerate members of the three castes with access to the Veda), human flesh, beef, goat’s flesh, fish and fowl.
Purport of Jayaratha to TA 29.17:

"reto harāmbu puṣpaṃ ca kṣāraṃ nālājyakaṃ tathā |
pauruṣaṃ kṣmābhavaṃ chāgaṃ mīnajaṃ śākunīyakam ||
palāṇḍu laśunaṃ caiva dravyadvādaśakaṃ śubham |"

"Male semen, male urine, and menstrual blood, faeces and phlegm; human flesh, beef, goat's flesh, fish, fowl; onion and indeed garlic: these are the beautiful set of twelve ingredients"

Furthermore, while in the Tantric Trika the initiate was to sprinkle the contents of the chalice around and on his person, here he was also to drink from it: in order to gratify the deities within his own body. Tantraloka 29.23:

tena nirbharamātmānaṃ bahiścakrānucakragam |
vipruḍbharūrdhvādharayorantaḥpītyā ca tarpayet ||

Consequently, he should satiate the self with its multitude [of goddesses] in the circle and subcircle, externally by sprinkling drops upwards and downwards, and internally by drinking.

The favoured substrate of worship (pūjādhārah) was a vessel fashioned from a human skull and filled with wine. Moreover, this liquid and surā were not merely substances required by the deities: they were venerated as the deities themselves, as Ānandabhairava(Ānandeśvara) and Ānanda-Bhairavī (Surādevī )

The offerings presented were of the same kind as in the Tantric Trika, but with the notable addition of the body products, the other impurities among the twelve Offerings of Heroes, and the dīpacaru. The last was the usual offering of food (naivedyam, caruh)', but it took the unusual form of a number of lamps (dīpah) shaped out of dough with red wicks fuelled with clarified cow’s butter (goghrtam). They were intended as a substitute for the flesh of a human sacrifice (mahāpaśuh) and were to be eaten by the worshipper at the end of the cult. In the Krama the textual prescriptions for the preparation of these lamps brought the substitute closer to the original: the wicks were to contain camphor, musk, aloe and olibanum mixed with the blood of a man or of an animal substitute and the lamps themselves were to be made from the flour of red rice kneaded with fermented liquor and mixed with ginger and pepper. Both red rice and ginger are substitutes for flesh.

No one was qualified to practice the Kaula traditions unless he had a female partner (dūtī, śaktih).
For example, in Jayaratha comment to TA 29.96:

"kartavyā sarvato dūtirdūtihīno na siddhibhāk |" - "A sexual partner should be used in every case.
He receives no supernatural power if he has no sexualpartner."
 For it was through sexual intercourse with her that he was to obtain the semen and menstrual blood which were the principal impurities to be added to the chalice of wine. Her genitalia were one of the possible substrates of the worship which followed; and copulation with her after ritual worship with meat and wine could take the place of the conventional external cult.

Routinization and domestication may have favoured a man’s choosing his wife for this role. But Abhinavagupta strictly forbids that choice, condemning it as a gross secularization of the tradition. He rules that the initiate’s partner should be his mother, sister, daughter, granddaughter, grandmother, or sister’s daughter; and his commentator Jayaratha explains that a wife is entirely unsuitable because the initiate would be distracted by carnal lust from the state of mind required for the ritual.
Purport of Jayaratha to 29.102:

tat kathamiha asyāḥ  ṣaḍvadhatvameva uktam? satyam, kintu atra laukikavat riraṃsayā na
pravṛttiḥ, api tu vakṣyamāṇadṛśā anavacchinnaparasaṃvitsvarūpāveśasamutkatayetyevaṃparametaduktam |  svapatnyāṃ hi riraṃsāsambhavanāyā api avakāśaḥ syāt
How is it maintained that the [sakti] is classified only in six ways [mother, sister, daughter, granddaughter, grandmother, or sister’s daughter]? That is true! In this [ritual], however, the activity is not undertaken because of a desire for sexual pleasure in a worldly sense. Rather, [the activity is undertaken] - in keeping with a later instruction - because of the intensity of the absorption into the very nature of undivided Supreme Consciousness. For that reason the [activity] is said to be supreme. If one's wife were indeed involved, there would be a danger of focussing on sexual pleasure.


No less abhorrent to the orthodox than incest were relations with women of pollutant castes. Abhinavagupta’s Kaula Trika includes the practice of celebrating the parva days by summoning a group of such untouchable women and worshipping them as the goddesses of the cult. They were to be gratified with liquor, fed and given sacrificial fees (daksinā). Texts of the Krama describe the same rite; but merely as the prelude to an orgy of ritual dancing, copulation and possession by the deities.

The defence of heteropraxy

The attitude of the orthodox to such practices hardly needs to be stated. The Śaiva left itself argued for the validity (prāmānyam) of the scriptural injunctions which instigate these rituals and attempted to justify them by explaining their purpose.

As for their validity, the Śaiva nondualists contended that the transcendence of smārta prohibitions in the Tantric and Kaula rituals  was no different in principle from that which occurred in the most orthodox Vedic practice when a man went beyond smārta observance to undertake the more prestigious and demanding rituals of the archaic śrauta tradition. They pointed out that the śrauta Sautrāmanī ritual, in its pure form at least, included the consumption of rice beer (sura); that animals were immolated in the śrauta Paśubandha and their omenta (vapā) roasted; and that the Śrautin, like the Kaula, was unable to perform his rites without a consort, though admittedly she had to be his wife in the śrauta case. Now no impurity or sin was thought to be incurred in the performance of these śrauta rituals, because it was recognized that they were instigated by specific injunctions which automatically blocked the application of any general rules in the corpus of valid scripture. To object to the Sautrāmanī and Paśubandha rituals because there are general Vedic prohibitions against drinking alcohol and taking life would be as unreasonable as to object to the use of irregular verbs. The grammar lays down general rules to cover most cases and then gives specific rules to cover the exceptions. So does the corpus of ritual injunctions (codanā). If this was true for the śrauta rituals, why should it not apply equally to specific injunctions in the Śaiva case? The answer of the non-Tantric orthodox was that the Tantric scriptures are outside the Veda and therefore invalid. The Śaivas agreed, of course, that their scriptures were no part of the Vedic revelation; but for them revelation (āgamah) was a vaster entity incorporating many levels of injunction, ascending from the most general and exoteric to the most specific and esoteric. The Vedic corpus of śrutih and smrtih was seen as the lowest of these levels, precisely because it was the source of the most general religious authority, while the Śaiva Tantras with their esoteric transcendence of that authority were seen as the highest. The Śaiva rules, therefore, were valid in their sphere; nor could any smārta or śrauta rule prevail over them where there was conflict; and the same principle was applied within the Tantric Śaiva field to conflicts between injunctions on its various levels.

As for justification, it was explained that the purpose of Kaula transcendence  is to enable the worshipper to realize that the purity and impurity which attach to things and persons on the authority of Vedic injunctions are not objective properties of those things or persons (vastudharmah), but purely subjective (pramātrdharmah). This realization is thought to be essential because it is seen that the contrary belief entailed by acquiescence in the brahminical socio-ritual order depends upon and therefore perpetuates the realist illusion that consciousness deals with a world of discrete phenomena outside itself. Indeed it is seen as establishing this state of ignorance in its most extreme form; for it is possible to believe that there is an outside world causing perceptions without believing that it includes the values which are assigned to it by brahminism. The power attributed to the practice of nonduality (advaitācārah) is therefore that it enables the initiate to abandon his state of contraction — or to reaffirm that he has done so — in the realization that even such universally abhorred substances as the Five Jewels can be ingested without contamination, since their real nature, like that of all phenomena, is their identity with his true and uncontaminable self, the autonomous consciousness which manifests them.

The hesitation which prevents the majority from accepting the validity of the Kaula and Tantric revelation becomes identical in this perspective with the contraction which consciousness takes on when it projects itself as bound individuals and their world. By performing Kaula ritual the initiate empowers himself to experience sudden enlightenment (alamgrāsah). His anxiety to conform to the orthodox religion (śañkā) will abruptly dissolve, taking with it all trace of the lower, dualistic experience of reality. Throwing off the unenlightened inhibition (pāśavayantranā) which has contaminated his awareness he will penetrate to the nondual consciousness which is absolute reality and the state of liberation.

Such is the power attributed to this contact with impurity that it is believed that it may take the place of the conventional process of initiation (dīksā) into the Kaula cult. Instead of that ritual the Kaula officiant may simply present the candidate with a skull-cup containing wine and the Jewels or other such substances. If he swallows the contents without hesitation (śañkā) he is considered to have attained direct realization of consciousness in its essential nature uncontaminated by conceptual or ethical dualities (vikalpah). Termed the ‘consumption of the oblation’ (caruprāśanam) this act is listed accordingly among the contexts in which enlightenment may occur without recourse to meditation, ritual or any other means of liberation.

Transgression, then, is translated into transcendence. As the Ānandatantra says (quoted in TA 37.5):

yadārṣe pātahetūktaṃ tadasminvāmaśāsane |
āśusiddhyai yataḥ sarvamārṣaṃ māyodarasthitam || 37-5 ||


The very substances which are said to be the cause of a man’s downfall in the Vedic religion (ārsam) become the means of accelerating his liberation in this System of the Left (vāmaśāsanam)"
 
When Ksemarāja attacks those who substituted water for fermented liquor in the cult of Svacchandabhairava he accuses them of “being in the grip of the demon Caste”. Evidently their concern to have their cult pure in the terms of the non-Tantric orthodox, free of any elements that might be thought to compromise their claim to the brahmin-hood of their birth, had blinded them to the significance of the removal of the caste of their birth (jātyuddhārah) and their entry into the casteless ‘caste’ of Bhairava (bhairavajātih) which were part of the ceremony of their initiation. It would be rash to assume that the castelessness required by the left meant that an initiate could no longer claim membership in the caste of his birth for the purpose of such exoteric social interactions as marriage. But it did require him to identify himself with the deity of his initiation in a such a way that the two levels of his self-image (as invested member of a caste [upanītah] and as initiate [dīksitah]) were truly distinct. That is why the Svacchandatantra promises that anyone who even mentions the former caste of a fellow initiate will be punished after death with torture in the hells. [SvT 4.503-546] Initiates who objected to the offering of fermented liquor refused this internal hierarchy and were therefore indistinguishable from the uninitiated (paśuh).

By insisting that the elements of nonconformity be preserved in the Tantric cults Abhinavagupta and Ksemarāja backed up the effect of their semanticization of ritual. By injecting nondualistic meaning and prescribing nondualistic practice (advaitācārah) they directed the initiate to look to the Kaula Trika and the Krama rather than the Siddhānta for the Saivism of the elite. These Kaula systems certainly were the preserve of the exceptional few. Abhinavagupta reserves them for those officiants and initiates who have already reached the point at which they are firmly established in the spontaneity of nondual awareness, and says that a disciple (śisyah) fit to be initiated into this form of Saivism is one in a hundred thousand. [TA 29.187]:

lakṣaikīyaṃ svaśiṣyaṃ taṃ dīkṣayettādṛśi krame |
rudraśaktyā tu taṃ prokṣya devābhyāśe niveśayet ||

After first of all performing the sacrifice in that manner, he should initiate his own disciple -
one among a hundred thousand who possesses the suitability for such things - into such  procedure.

Aesthetic intensity

Kaula worship has been explained above purely in terms of the value of transcending the ‘psychosis’ of conformity to the exoteric religion. But there is another aspect of this method of transcendence: its sensuality or aesthetic intensity. It is argued that when the objects of the senses are seen as things outside consciousness, to be appropriated and manipulated by the subject, then the senses are no more than the instruments of the state of bondage (bandhah); but when the subject abandons this appetitive style of perception he experiences the objects of his senses within consciousness, as the content of the cognitions that perceive them rather than as their cause. This shift from the appetitive to the aesthetic mode of awareness is seen by Abhinavagupta as the divinization of the senses themselves, or rather as the recognition of their divine nature as projections or avenues of the blissful but egoless consciousness which is the underlying identity of all awareness. Gratified by this reintegration of objectivity — where before they were starved by brahminical restraint and fastidiousness — they liberate consciousness into the realization of its all-containing radiance and transparency. TA 3.262-4:

nijabodhajaṭharahutabhuji bhāvāḥ sarve samarpitā haṭhataḥ / (262.1)
vijahati bhedavibhāgaṃ nijaśaktyā taṃ samindhānāḥ // (262.2)
haṭhapākena bhāvānāṃ rūpe bhinne vilāpite / (263.1)
aśnantyamṛtasādbhūtaṃ viśvaṃ saṃvittidevatāḥ // (263.2)
tāstṛptāḥ svātmanaḥ pūrṇaṃ hṛdayaikāntaśāyinam / (264.1)
cidvyomabhairavaṃ devamabhedenādhiśerate // (264.2)

All the processes [of his cognition, from the emission of the object to its retraction] suddenly and violently (hathatah) throw off their outwardness. They are cast into the visceral fire of self-awareness, causing it to bum more brightly with this fuel of their power. When the otherness of these phenomena has been dissolved by this process of instant ‘digestion’ (hathapākah) [his senses, now revealed as the goddesses of cognition (samvittidevatā [= karaneśvarī])] devour the nectar of this universe transformed, and gratified thereby they fuse in turn with the all-containing radiant Bhairava of the void of pure consciousness (cidvyomabhairavah) who lies in the heart of awareness.

So wine (madyam), meat (māmsah) and sexual intercourse (maithunam) — the three Ms  — are enjoined in Kaula rituals not simply as means of transcending the inhibitions of orthodoxy but also because the first two stimulate the vigour of the worshipper so that he may achieve the greatest possible degree of sensual bliss in the third. The greater the intensity of this bliss the greater the self-realization in one who experiences it aesthetically, centred in consciousness uncontaminated by desire. If he can adjust the mode of his perception in this way, being, as Abhinavagupta says when defining qualification for Kaula initiation, “firmly established in the spontaneity of nondual awareness”, then the complete excitation of his senses becomes the fullest expansion of liberated consciousness.

 Possession

This prescription of intensity is also seen in Abhinavagupta’s treatment of the Kaula ritual of initiation. In the Tantric initiations of basic cults the initiand could be the passive beneficiary of the officiant’s action and awareness; and the left’s presentation of these more broadly based cults was therefore compatible with routinized religion. But in the Kaula case the initiand’s transformation had to be seen. Where he was required to do anything during the ritual he was to act in a trance, impelled not by his own will but by the power of the deity (rudraśaktih) possessing his limbs; and when the officiant united the initiand’s soul with the deity (yojanikā) this state of possession (āveśah) was to manifest itself in ecstasy, convulsions, swooning and the like, the officiant reading these as evidence of how intense a Descent of Power (śaktipātah) was taking place. TA 29.207-8:

anayā śodhyamānasya śiśostīvrādibhedataḥ |
śaktipātāccitivyomaprāṇanāntarbahistanūḥ || 29-207 ||

āviśantī rudraśaktiḥ kramātsūte phalaṃ tvidam |
ānandamudbhavaṃ kampaṃ nidrāṃ ghūrṇiṃ ca dehagām || 29-208 ||

Entering - as a result of a descent of energy classified as intense etc. - into the mind, space,
subtle-breath, internal and external bodies of the student who is being cleansed by her, ║207║
the rudrasakti produces the following respective results: bliss, lightness, trembling, sleep and a
reeling in the body. ║208║

If the normal Kaula procedure did not have the desired effect then there were mantras and visualizations of special power kept in reserve. If an individual were unaffected even when these were used he was to be cast aside as unfit for the Kaula path. From this point of view the Tantric cults exist for the benefit of those who are incapable of progress through the more intense Kaula methods.

Compression

Just as all ritual is seen as the descent of knowledge into the less demanding medium of meaningful action, so within the latter there are thought to be degrees of this descent. The left sees a hierarchy of means of liberation (upāyah), from a pure, non-sequential and nonconceptual intuition through sequential meditation in thought alone to sequential meditation supported by the substrate of ritual action. And it is a corollary of this view that ritual itself is ranked according to the degree of its elaboration: the more prolix the support the lower the status. So Kaula ritual is not only more intense than the Tantric; it must also tend towards brevity and compression. Thus Abhinavagupta tells us that even when the Kaula worship of the deities takes its lowest form, that is to say, when the offerings are presented to the deities upon some inert substrate, there is no need for such preliminaries as ritual ablution (snānam) or the complex impositions of mantras (mantranyāsah) prescribed in the Tantric system. The same principle explains the absence of the sacrifice to the deities in fire (homah) and the fact that the preparation of a mandala for the deities, so important in Tantric initiation, may be omitted. Even greater compression is seen in the higher forms of worship known as the Cult in Internal Sensation (prānayāgah) and the Cult in Awareness [alone] (samvidyāgah). In the first the goddesses are visualized within the internal sensation which underlies the vital breaths, and then gratified with the ‘nectar’ of the ingoing breath (apānah). This he visualizes pouring into him through the orifices of his head and filling his body. In the second the initiate contemplates the goddesses in their real nature as the blissful, uncontracted awareness which is within and behind his individuality and gratifies them by contemplating the entire content of his consciousness dissolving into this Absolute. Abhinavagupta prescribes this highly condensed cult as the norm in the daily worship of those who seek liberation rather than rewards. He requires worship with the female consort only on special occasions.

The pantheon too is subject to compression. Abhinavagupta explains that the order of worship is taught to an initiate in the Kaula Trika in five forms corresponding to the five ascending states of awareness: the waking state, dream, deep sleep, the fourth (tiiryam) and that beyond it (turyātītam). The first is worship of the entire pantheon: Kuleśvara and his consort Kuleśvañ, the three goddesses Parā, Parāparā and Aparā, their Bhairavas, and their retinues of Yoginīs etc. In the second the initiate worships one of the goddesses with her Bhairava and retinue. In the third he worships the core of the pantheon without the retinues: Kuleśvara, Kuleśvari, the three goddesses and their Bhairavas. In the fourth he worships only Kuleśvan, and in the fifth only Kuleśvara.

So worship is presented by the left as moving by degrees from graded sequences in action, through sequence in imagination alone, to a direct perception of reality in which thought will transcend its nature. For when worship in awareness reaches its culmination in non-sequential intuition it has disappeared, or rather we should say with Abhinavagupta that it has become permanent worship, since it is thenceforth co-extensive with experience itself.