De-constructing the horrific in Sahajāyāna and Kālacakrayāna: Analytical transcreation of the caryās or the bardo songs of siddha Kāṇhapa
Pronoy Chakraborty MVA II, Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M.S.U. Baroda
Introduction
While visually alluding to thangkas, murals and metal-sculptures of the skull-bearer mahāsiddha Kāṇha (Images), the wrathful goddesses and the dakinis part of his esoteric lineage, his female initiates Mekhalā and Kanhkalā (siḍḍdhās in their own right); this paper attempts to trace the connection of visual form in sacred iconography to the vernacular language of the dohās and the caryās, the history of which is mentioned to be “corrupt” by Lama Taranatha (Chattopadhyaya, 1990). Before delving deep into the issue of the horrific, I would like to shed some light on the divergent approaches of Kālacakrayāna
and Sahajāyāna, two distinct trajectories of the last phase of development of Tantrayana in India. While Kālacakrayāna rituals were primarily based on visualization techniques deriving from textual sources in Sanskrit (and later Tibetan translations); Sahajāyāna thrived on oral performativity and can be traced through the living performative traditions of the Sahajiya sects and cults in Bengal with various religious affiliations. The latter also becomes a significant moment of the return of Buddhist discourses to orality and a pronounced emphasis on kāyā-sādhanā.
De-constructing the horrific in visionary performances Visualizing grotesque horror in the chöd meditative ritual of Tantric Buddhism aids the adept to control his vital breath-channels during the last moments
before death, thus enabling one to guide the consciousness in the intermediate stage of bardo. Bardo is believed to be the period of 49 days, seven times seven days a week, before the soul finds a rebirth; a period of liminality when and where Kṛṣṇācārya or Kāṇhu, is mentioned to have achieved the ultimate
bliss of Mahasukha by Lama Taranatha (Templemann, 1989). Incidentally, the hagiographer also mentions the unusual and exceptional reason for the siddha’s death: the irrevocable curse of a ḍākinī named Bāhuri who Kāṇha engaged with in a battle of ritualistic gazes. Kāṇha had also on a previous occasion, failed to recognize an ugly ḍākinī as the initiator, who guru Jālandharipa had urged him to find. Kāṇha’s life-story in the Caturasi-Siḍḍhi-Pravṛtti, Keith Dowman warns, is “one of caution” (Dowman, 1985) which reinstates the severe consequences for disrespecting a woman as evoked by Miranda Shaw who sought to re-position the active historical agency of women in Tantric Buddhist Theory and Praxis (Shaw, 1995).
It is against this backdrop of esoteric ritualistic practice: obscure hagiography and coded scriptures, I seek to foreground trilingual translations of Kāṇhupa’s bardo songs with a dialectical engagement with grotesque and apparently repulsive images of torture and brutality as can be seen in dispersed
chöd initiation ritual cards from Tibet (Images) and offerings to the protectors in the murals at Thiksey monastery, Ladakh (Images). In the translations the original performative caryās in Magadhi Apabhramsa to modern Bengali and subsequently to English, I have tried to maintain the tone, tenor and texture of the original utterance in the twilight aporia of sāndhyo-bhaṣa which defies any fixity in meaning. The 12 songs of Kāṇha from the Newari manuscript of
Caryācaryāviniscaya found by Haraprasad Sastri in the early twentieth century (Sastri, 1916) have attracted a lot of scholarship and attempts of translation into English, which however as result of their dependency on the Tibetan translations based on the 12th century Sanskrit commentaries of Munidatta, have sanctified and theologized the abusive use of vernacular language; except for one song translated by Lee Siegel, titled: Bengal Blackie and the Sacred Slut (a model on which my own translations are loosely based on).
Homi Bhabha’s concept of cultural and lingual hybridity that emerges from the reciprocated speech and gaze between the colonizer and the colonized and renders “the master enslaved and the slave mastered” (Bhabha, 1994) can be quite evidently read in the utterances of Kāṇhu in Magadhi Apabhramsa, which
emerged with the decadence of the strong-hold of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (Pollock, 1998) The hybridity in a strictly lingual sense is attested by Sastri’s statistics and suggests that Kanhu, like the other siddhas who were composers of caryās were literate in Sanskrit: “The Language of the Gods”, yet deliberately chose to sing in a dialect close to the masses in a variaion of Magadhi Abaphramsa similar to old Bengali, borrowing words from the Pali-
Prakrit gamut to talk about deep esoteric concepts of Tantric Buddhism. These performative songs would certainly be accompanied with complex meditative visualization methods. Kāṇha in order to spread his discourses in ‘the language of the masses’ uses tropes belonging to the paradigm of subaltern such as the sparse belongings of the Ḍombi- tānt and cāngaḍi, meaning cotton thread and basket. By embracing the invitation to join in sexual ecstasy from the
skull-bearer mahāsiddha, the Ḍombi is in a position of empowerment and ennoblement to be a part of the theological discourse despite the stamp of her lowly birth
and occupation related to cremation and cemetery. The travels of the heterodox mahasiddhas like Kāṇhupa and Virūpa also led to realization of the pan-Indian Apabhramsa Cosmopolis which in many ways was the primordial stage of multiple modern Indian languages, especially in Eastern India.
The often abusive vernacular caryās were derided to such an extent that even Atiśa had to face serious opposition when he wanted to spread the dohās of mahāsiddha Saraha (Chattpadhyaya, 1960), the content of which was often explicitly critical and satirical about the orthodox Brahmanical as well as the
Buddhist institutions. Realizing the performative orality of the songs (for which rhythm is a seminal tool for memorization), and the essential link of the last phase of Tantric Buddhism in India- Sahajāyāna to the living Sahajiyā cults in Bengal (with Vaiṣnavite, Śākta, Śaivite or even Islamic Marfati Fakiri
affiliations), I would probe here into the living performative traditions for their Buddhist roots. This may be distinct in the case of Parvathy Baul singing a song of mahāsiddha Bhusuku or in the mask-dance of Gambhirā with Tantric Buddhist roots from Malda in the northern Bengal Buddhist belt of
erstwhile Varendrabhūmī. Gambhirā however has an Islamicized and contemporized form and function without traditional ritualistic masks at Rajshahi in Northern Bangladesh, the very site of the Paharpur Tantric Buddhist monastery, where Kanhu was the abbot before becoming a kapalika. Many such tropes and
metaphors with a strong connection to the locale were adapted and appropriated and are still very much in vogue in the living performative traditions of the Sahajiya cults.
The Derridean “Context” becomes seminal for the present study as located in relation to other factors surrounding a text, such as events, discourses and signature, along with the content of the text. The “Context” works to produce meaning or a contextual understanding of the present text almost 1300 years
after the “The Death of the Author”, Kāṇhupa, who no more is a singular source of the semantic context. However, his absence is replaced by the Birth of the Reader– by all the translators since Haraprasad Sastri’s discovery of the manuscript of Caryācaryāviniścaya in Nepal in the early twentieth century–
Sastri himself, Shahidullah, Sinha Ray, Kvaerne and most importantly Lee Siegel whose seemingly problematic interpretation and repeated utterance of the word Slut for conveying the notion of free sexuality effectively tries to recover lost traces; trace which for Derrida “…is not presence but is rather the
simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces and refers beyond itself”. It is in this disoriented shiftiness of the beyond that Bhabha starts his first essay in The Location of Culture by quoting Martin Heidegger: “A boundary is not that at which somethings stops but as the
Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” It is in this liminal space, that the bardo songs resonate with. In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is the central theme of the Bardo Thodol literally meaning ‘Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State’ or popularly known as the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’.
Tīṇi bhuwaṇa mai bāhia hele hāū suteli mahāsuha līle. kaisaṇi hālo ḍombī! tohori bhābhariāli ante kuliṇa jaṇa mājhe kabāli. tāi lo ḍombi! saala biṭaliu kāja ṇa kāraṇa sasahara ṭāliu. keho keho tohore biruā bolaī bidujana loa tore kaṇṭha na melaī. Kāṇhe gāi tu kāma-caṇḍālī ḍombi! ta āgali ṇāhi chiṇālī.
ত্রিভুবন আমি ভ্রমিমি হেলায় শুময়মি আমি িোসুখ লীলায়। হেিন আমি হে হ ামি! হ াে ভাব-েমেয়ামল? অমে েু লীনজন,িামে েপালী। ুইম া হ ামি! সেমল মবোমল োমজ না োেমে শশীমে অবমেমল। হেউ হেউ হ ামে মবরূপ বমল মবদ্যজন হনয় হ ামে বক্ষস্থমল। োহ্ন গায়, ুই োিচন্ডালী হ ামি! হ াে হচময় হনই হেউ মিনামল।
7=text 18 (Raga Gauda)
Three worlds I have plied with great ease; Slept in the sport of supreme bliss. How the heck is your lover? You Slut1! Elite ex-centred; at centre skull-bearer’s rut! You the Slut, have defiled one and all With no rhyme or reason, damned the lunar thrall. Some say you are ugly, without grace The wise keep you locked in eternal embrace. Kanha, the Blackie2, sings– “The lustful untouchable3 you are Slut! There’s none more unchaste than you are!
1 “Slut” – an utterance used in the translation of Lee Siegel’s Bengal Blackie for the first time, takes cue from the notion of free sexuality attested by the word chhinali to portray the character of Dombi, a representative from the lowest rungs of the sectarian society. A sense of availability of free
sexuality hangs around the Dombi for the heretic skull-bearer striving to achieve in his very body in this very birth, the realization of the Innate or Sunya, the “sluttish-ness” or promiscuous nature of the Dombi. As is the case of the slut, a word used in Medieval English for referring to an untidy
slovenly person to an unchaste female who offers free easy sex, chhinali in premodern Bengali (just like magi for any female) was used for the cunningness of women or a feminine character of shrewdness in general, later being attached to the sexual stigmas of normativity.
2 “Blackie” a term common in Caribbean Poetry is also an effective contemporizing term for the dark skinned mahasiddha; for contemporizing and vernacularizing the phrase– “Dark Lord” used by Barbara Stoller Miller in her translation of Jayadeva’s Gita-Govinda, titled Love Songs of the Dark Lord. (Miller, 1977) Miller’s title for the reader, unacquainted to Krishna epidermal schema would have no significance (and could hilariously mean to someone the romantic affair of Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter Series). So, it is within the culture specific context that Blackie should be read and not just with the lens of post-colonial studies and inter-textuality.
3 Kaam-candali is a phrase which with its hyphenation combines together two crucial ideas which may also revalidate the re-iteration of Slut: Kaam (Sexual desire) and Candali (a woman living in the fringes of the society considered untouchable by the Brahmins as well the Buddhist monks, who Kanha ridicules
with the phrase Bamha (Brahmins) nadia (shaven headed monks of the Samgha). The relational politics of caste and free sexuality becomes most apparent in the phrase– “lustful untouchable”. In the subversive praxis of Tantra, Candali however is an honorific epithet rather than a curse; Cunda being one of the prime goddesses to be seen in sculptures and palm leaf manuscripts of the Pala period; as is “kaam” or lust which the Vajrayanist sought not to annihilate but to sublimate. bhaba-nibbaṇe paḍaha-mādalā maṇa-pabaṇa beṇi karaṇḍa kaśālā. jaa jaa dunduhi-sāda uchaliā Kāṇha ḍombi bibāhe caliā. ḍombi bibāhiā āhāriu jāma jau̎ tuke kia āṇuttara dhāma. ahiṇisi suraa-pasaṅge jāa joiṇi-jāle raaṇi pohāa. ḍombiera saṅge jo joi ratta Khaṇaha na chāḍaa sahaja-umatta.
ভব-নিবাণব ে পণেণে মাদলা মি-পবি দুই- করন্ড-ককাশলা। জয়-জয় দুন্ধুনব সদা উেণল কাহ্ন ক ানি নববাণে চণল। ক ানিণক নববাণে আোণর জিম ক ৌতুণক পায় অিুত্তর-ধরম। অেনিনশব সুরা-প্রসণে ায় ক ানিিী-জাণল রজিী কপাোয়। ক ানির সণি ক ত রত্ত কাহ্ন িা োণে, সেণজ উন্মত্ত।
Samsara and Nirvana are resounded by the drum, The mind and the breath are two, like rhythm and strum. The victorious drum announces cries of gut
As Kanha, the Blackie, goes to marry the Slut4!
By marrying the Slut, he consumes birth;
In dowry receives the unexcelled path5.
Days and nights are spent in passionate fervour In the net of the yogini, ends the night of ardour. In company of the Slut who stays engaged, doesn’t vacate– for even a moment; intoxicated with the Innate!
4 The Slut, a very recent trope of subversion invented by trans-cultural, trans-national feminist activist groups by a de-centralized mode of organization through digital networks and platforms like Instagram and Facebook, has been effective with some criticism, interestingly from the coloured Black women,
enraged by a banner held by a white female in one such spectacular event in New York who held a slogan titled “Woman is the Nigger of the World” quoting from a song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (L.Carr, 2013)
5 “Unexcelled Path” translates in rhyme and reason the sense conveyed by the original utterance Anuttara dha(r)ma meaning the Dharma of Un-excelled or Anuttarya Yoga, the highest stage an adept can be initiated in the class of Buddhist Tantras. While Path refers to the Buddhist Middle-Path, a concept of
the historical Sakyamuni Buddha, Gautama; the un-excelled form of yoga or Anuttarya Yoga, is received by Kanha, as dowry or jautuk, a symbol of grace and benevolence from the feminine gender, which plays the dominant role in the dynamics of sexual performativity, best seen in the depiction of viparita-rati
or the female on top of the male in erotic temple sculptures of Khajuraho, Orissa and several other sites and in painted folios of Gita-Govinda, particularly in the Kangra school style by artists of the first generation after Nainsukh.
6 “Innate” does not refer to the binaries of the innate and the acquired forms of knowledge persisting in the Western academic sphere since the Enlightenment. Innate here embodies a sense of spontaneity, of “coemergence” (Kvaerne, 1975), an adjective which another translator has used attempting to
theoretically fortify the concept of Sahaja. However, he runs into the problematic of binaries again trying to argue that Sahaja can be used only as an adjective, which quite clearly is not the case as can be seen in multiple instances. Sahaja the Spontaneous Co-Emergence of the Innate which is nothing but
the Co-emergent entity defies all structural categorization and is the state of Vacuity not in a nihilist manner but with all its completeness which in turn is void in nature. Conclusion
The sandhyo-bhasa songs of Kāṇha celebrates an exclusionary spirit which defies any meaning attested by conventional usage of words such as the Slut which is not an empirical reality but a conceptual social construct, null and void in the Tantric Buddhist discourses. Conversely, the Slut (slutty-ness) is the
momentary particular essential being or svalakshana of the outcaste Dombi which Kanhu’s spirit (ka) aspires to engage with and sublimate for the sake of attaining the ultimate bliss of Mahasukha. The Slut in the codified language is also the central channel of breath or Avadhuti, alternatively the lost traces of the ancient river Sarasavati flowing between Ganga and Yamuna (a metaphor employed by Dombipa and continually used by the Sahajiya performative
traditions). The semantics of Apoha also activates the performative trope of the mask used in Gambhira dance as testified by the Vajrayogini mask (Images). The grotesque as well as the overtly humorous in the masks gets Buddhological sanction as they like all things are empty and transitory in nature, being manifestations of Sunya.
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