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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: [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |