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Skull Imagery and Skull Magic
in the
Yoginī
Tantras
David B. Gray
Santa Clara University
I. RelIgIoUS BaCkgRoUnd
The BUddhIST TanTRaS constitute a unique class of Buddhist literature.
While developing from earlier trends in Buddhist thought and practice,
they also constituted a serious challenge to Buddhist identity, largely
due to the fact that many of them contain passages that appear to trans-
gress the tenets of Buddhist morality.
1
Tantric literature also departed,
gradually, from the rhetorical norms of Mahayana Buddhism. While early
tantras maintained the rhetorical style of the Mahayana sutras, later
tantras, and most notably the
Yoginī
tantras, radically departed from this
style.
2
This essay will explore one small facet of the vast array of unusual
elements that can be found in this literature, namely, the image of the
skull, as well as the use of skulls in tantric ritual. like other elements,
this deployment of skulls in the tantras was disquieting to some, evok-
ing as it does the uncanny atmosphere of the charnel ground. Through
this exploration, I will argue that skulls are multifaceted symbols in
tantric literature, simultaneously evoking both death and awakening.
as a result, they were powerful symbols, fruitfully deployed in tantric
literature in a number of interesting ways.
The genre of tantric Buddhist literature in which skulls and as-
sociated charnel imagery is most powerful is the
Yoginī
tantras. These
texts were composed in India beginning in the late seventh century or
early eighth century (with the composition of the
Sarvabuddhasamāyoga-
ḍākiṇījālasamvara-tantra
)
3
and continued to be composed up until the
inal decline of Buddhism in India from the thirteenth through sixteenth
centuries.
4
They are characterized by their focus on ierce deities, particularly
the
yoginīs
and
ḍākiṇīs
, who appear to have originally been understood to
be lesh-eating demonesses who haunted charnel grounds and wilderness
21
 22
Paciic World
areas. As James Sanford wrote, “they were drafted into the Vajrayāna
pantheon and transformed from horrifying old crones lurking in cem-
eteries into beautiful spiritual guides.”
5
despite this transformation, they
retained elements of their dreadful origins and are typically depicted as
garbed with ornaments derived from the charnel ground.
6
as texts that focus on such an awesome class of goddesses, they are
naturally replete with imagery deriving from the fearsome setting of
the charnel ground (
śmaśāna
). Their deities are adorned with charnel
ground regalia, most notably skulls and skull bowls (
kapāla
). The charnel
grounds are also the ideal locale for the performance of many of the
rites described in these texts, such as the notorious Vetalā Sādhana
,
in
which the adept seeks to invoke a spirit to animate a corpse in order to
compel it to bestow magical powers.
These texts, while at least nominally Buddhist, do not seem to derive
from the normative Buddhist setting, that is, the Buddhist monastic
context. according to traditional histories, they derived instead from
the liminal social setting of the
siddhas
, the great tantric saints such as
Lūipa/Matsyendranāth,
7
who were seen as the originators of both the
Buddhist and Śaiva tantric traditions.
8
Indeed, charnel grounds were
long the haunt of Śaiva renunciants. The primal charnel ground deity
is clearly Śiva, whose paradoxical penchant for both asceticism and
sexuality irmly earned him a liminal status in Hindu mythology.
9
he is
iconographically linked to the locale of the charnel ground via his pen-
chant for ashes and bone ornaments, items that are found abundantly
there, as well as the ghoulish company he was fond of keeping. his liminal
status is recorded in several of the
purāṇas,
where we ind passages such
as the following, where his father-in-law Dakṣa, who disapproves of his
dreadful appearance and ferocious companions, curses him:
You are excluded from the rituals and are surrounded by ghosts in the
burning ground; yet you fail to honor me, while all of the gods give me
great honor. good men must scorn all heretics; therefore I curse you
to be outside the sacriice, outside caste; all the Rudras will be beyond
the Vedas, avowing heretic doctrines, Kāpālikas and Kālamukhas.
10
The form of Śiva that most clearly embodies the spirit of the charnel
ground is Bhairava, the ierce and destructive form assumed by Śiva
following his beheading of the deity Brahmā in a well-known episode
of Hindu mythology. As a penance for this crime, Śiva qua Bhairava
 23
Gray: Skull Imagery and Skull Magic in the Yoginī Tantras
wandered the world with the skull of Brahmā afixed to his hand, earn-
ing him the title
kapālin
.
11
Somadeva, in his eleventh-century work, the
Vetālapañca-viṃśatikā,
describes the charnel ground as being a virtual incarnation of Bhairava,
as follows:
It was obscured by a dense and terrible pall of darkness, and its aspect
was rendered awful by the ghastly lames from the burning of the fu-
neral pyres, and it produced horror by the bones, skeletons and skulls
of men that appeared in it. In it were present formidable Bhūtas and
Vetālas, joyfully engaged in their horrible activity, and it was alive
with the loud yells of jackals so that it seemed like a mysterious and
tremendous form of Bhairava.
12
Śiva’s penance as the skull-bearing ascetic Bhairava was assumed as
the “great observance” (
mahāvrata
)
of the Kāpālikas, an infamous Śaiva
sectarian group notorious for their extreme modes of practice involving
violence and sexuality, as david lorenzen has shown.
13
However, the Śaivas were clearly not the only ones in early medieval
India spending time in charnel grounds. The very horror of the
śmaśāna
was believed to make it an ideal site for heroic renunciants, who sought
to completely cut through all attachments to the world. Included among
them were Buddhists.
The association of Buddhists with charnel grounds is evidently
quite ancient. archaeological excavations have shown that Buddhist
monasteries were often built on or near charnel complexes, as gregory
Schopen has shown.
14
Buddhists, in taking the reliquary mound (
stūpa
)
as one of their central cult centers, implicitly rejected brahmanic no-
tions of the impurity deriving from death. The Buddhist association
with sites connected with death was not without social implications, for
in choosing such sites, they deliberately placed themselves in a liminal
position within larger Indian society, a position that implied a rejection
of brahmanic notions of purity and pollution.
Most importantly, the charnel ground was the site for a certain sort
of meditation, the “mediation on impurity” (
aśubhabhāvanā
). Meditat-
ing in charnel grounds for the purpose of contemplating death and
impermanence is an ancient Buddhist practice, which is justiied by the
legend that one of the four sights that inspired Siddhārtha Gautama to
undertake the spiritual journey that would culminate with his achieve-
ment of awakening was the sight of a corpse.
15
 24
Paciic World
Both the
Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna-sutta
16
and the
Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta
17
describe
the nine charnel ground contemplations or “meditation on impurity,”
which involve the contemplation of corpses in their various stages of
disintegration. The practice of this meditation has persisted through
time, as evidenced by the continuing interest in this subject in scholastic
literature, where we ind varying analyses of corpses into nine or ten
types.
18
We also ind treatments of this theme in Mahayana literature,
19
and also contemporary Web sites detailing the stages of the disintegra-
tion of corpses, produced for the sake of meditators who lack access to
charnel grounds.
20
Such meditations were believed to serve as antidotes
for attachment to the body or sensual pleasures.
21
elsewhere in the
Majjhima-nikāya
the Buddha recommends charnel
grounds as meditation sites
22
and describes his austerities as a bodhisat-
tva thus: “I would make my bed in a charnel ground with bones of the
dead for a pillow.”
23
dwelling in charnel grounds had become an ac-
ceptable vocation for Buddhist renunciants by at least the beginning
of the Common era, by which time they were designated as
śmāśānika
(Pāli
sosānika
). The
Vimuttimagga,
a text composed by Upatissa in Pāli in
the irst or second century CE, describes the beneits of this practice as
including an understanding of death and impermanence, overcoming
of fear, and gaining the reverence of supernatural beings.
24
II. SkUll IMageRY In The
YoGInī
TanTRaS
The tantric texts that call upon practitioners to perform rituals, such
as mandala construction in charnel grounds, or to use the substances
derived from charnel grounds in rituals, followed a venerable precedent.
A number of the early tantras, later classiied as
kriyā
tantras in the
Indo-Tibetan classiication scheme,
25
describe practices necessarily set
in charnel grounds.
26
These likely derive from what I have termed “the
cult of the charnel ground.”
27
Texts resulting from this social milieu
are characterized by their focus on the charnel ground (
śmaśāna
) as
the ideal site for practice and call for the practitioner to dress him- or
herself in garb derived from this locale, most notably skulls and bone
ornaments, and to live upon the foodstuffs available there. however,
the charnel ground culture comes to its fruition in Buddhist literature
in the
Yoginī
tantras. Perhaps not coincidently, this is also the genre of
Buddhist literature that received the greatest degree of inluence from
Śaiva traditions.
28
 25
Gray: Skull Imagery and Skull Magic in the Yoginī Tantras
In additional to textual dependence on Śaiva materials, the Buddhist
Yoginī
tantras also drew upon Śaiva iconography.
29
among a number of
iconographic elements borrowed from Śaiva sources is the decorative
use of skulls. In India, the skull is clearly a symbol of death and the fear
of death and is thus considered inauspicious and impure. In both Śaiva
and Buddhist tantric contexts, it is deployed as a sign that the deity bear-
ing this symbol has mastered death and has transcended the mundane
world in which fear of death is nearly universal.
The deity heruka, who is prominent in a number of texts in this genre,
is a clear example of a Buddhist deity modeled upon a Śaiva precursor,
particularly the ierce deities Bhairava or Rudra.
30
he is described as
follows in the
Sarvabuddhasamāyoga-ḍākiṇījālasamvara-tantra
:
greatly glorious Vajraheruka is very terrifying, blazing with ash; his
visage blazes blue for beings, and his mandala of light blazes red. he
is as ierce as the end time of great destruction. Greatly blazing, his
voice blazes, like a charnel ground ire. He has a crown of skulls, ierce
like the end time of great destruction. Possessing the methods such as
anger, he is as terrifying as a charnel ground, with various faces, and
eyebrows arched in anger. With his blazing gaze and dance, he com-
pletely reduces the three worlds to ash, along with Mahādeva, Viṣṇu
(Upendra), the Sun, the Moon, Yama, and Brahmā.
31
It is important to note that that there is a long tradition in tantric Bud-
dhism of associating death with awakening. For early Buddhists, inal
emancipation,
parinirvāṇa,
is not attained until death. In traditions of
tantric yoga, it was widely believed that in death one gained a vision of
the clear light, identiied with the
dharmakāya
or gnosis of awakening,
meaning that death provided an opportunity for awakening that is dif-
icult to achieve in normal states of consciousness.
32
hence such dreadful
images evoking death are also seen as symbols of awakening.
as a result, in tantric Buddhist literature and art, imagery evoking
death, and skull imagery in particular, is quite pervasive, precisely be-
cause it also evokes the awakening toward which the tradition aspires.
Such imagery is particularly associated with the authority igures of the
tradition, the deities,
siddhas
, and gurus or lamas, as these are seen as the
awakened igures capable of bestowing the tradition’s teachings. In the
Cakrasamvara-tantra,
33
for example, the tradition’s chief deity, Heruka,
is described as follows:
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