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David Kinsley writes that the Ten Mahavidyas are
“anti-models,” that is, their roles violate “approved social values, customs,
norms, or paradigms.” He gives as example the socializing model for Hindu
women, goddess Sita, who represents the ideal devoted wife: Sita’s entire raison
d’etre is to serve her husband, Ram. “Her thoughts and actions, wishes and
dreams, all focus on him; her life only has meaning in relation to him.” For
centuries, most Hindu women have imitated Sita’s dependent role. By contrast,
the Mahavidyas are antinomian, being independent from males, or even dominating
and humilating them. “Many of the Mahavidyas seem to mock the pati vrata
ideal and to present and alternative social role that is its exact opposite.”
These feminist goddesses, “if they allow males in their presence at all, demand
to be served by them.”
Kinsley argues that recognizing the “liberating
potential of antimodels”—which he notes is a theme of tantric spirituality, in
general—is one way to appreciate the Mahavidyas:
“There is an insistence in Hinduism that the world as
it appears to us is a show, that there remains hidden from our normal view an
aspect of reality that is different, perhaps shockingly different, from our
ego-centered way of apprehending it. The world is not the way we think it is,
and the soonerwe realize that, the quicker we will make progress in acquiring
spiritual maturity. The Mahavidyas, as antimodels, are awakeners, visions of
the divine that challenge comfortable and comforting fantasies about the way
things are in the world.”
The list of the Ten Mahavidyas is not unvarying, but
the goddesses Kali, Tara, Chinnamasta, Bagalamukhi, Tripura-Sundari and
Dhumavati are almost always included. The number of Mahavidyas also varies. The
book’s title reflects the Ten Mahavidyas, but one shastra lists
eighteen, while another reports the total as seven million.
One origin story about the Mahavidyas tells that
Shiva is with Kali in Satyuga, the first (and most utopian) of the four cycles
of cosmic manifestation. Shiva gets up and declares that he is leaving his
consort. However, wherever he wanders, he encounters a form of Kali. He
abandons his wanderlust and returns home to his spouse. Kinsley points out that
the theme of this myth is that the goddess is everywhere—“it is impossible to
go where the goddess is not…she pervades the entire cosmos in one form or another.”
Indeed, the more radical theme is that the goddess is identical to
the cosmos, itself. The total world is the process of her body and mind.
Elsewhere, Kinsley writes about the right- or
left-handed paths of Tantra. “The left-handed path is restricted to those of a
heroic nature, is described as dangerous, and employs the famous pancha
tattva ritual in which the aspirant partakes of five forbidden things:
meat, fish, wine, a particular type of grain (possibly a drug of some kind)[1]
and illicit sexual intercourse.” The various Tantric texts sometimes specify
which marga should be used to worship particular goddesses. For example,
Kali, Tara and Chinnamasta are (no surprise!) aligned with the left-hand path.
Kinsley says that in actual practice, however, followers of both paths tend to
worship most of the goddesses of the Mahavidyas.
Among several means of approaching the understanding
of the Mahavidyas, Kinsley suggests that they might be seen as representing
progessive stages of spiritual development, as experienced by Tantric
practitioners (akin to the “Ox-herding” woodcuts of C’han Buddhism). In this
view, Kali symbolizes the “unfettered, complete knowledge of self and of
ultimate reality, fully enlightened consciousness that has transcended all
limitations of egocentricity.” Tara stands for a “high or expanded state of
awareness, but a state that has not entirely transcended physical and personal
limitations.” From there, downward, the other goddesses represent gradations of
relatively lesser states of awareness, preoccupied with worldly needs.
The Mahavidyas stand apart from other Hindu
goddesses and from the more typical forms of goddess worship. For example,
unlike other goddesses in Hindu mythology and Sakta traditions, are not linked
to a sacred geography. Many important temples are dedicated to Kali and Tara
independently, but as members of the Mahavidyas, such ties with consecrated
places and with earthly symbols—such as mountains and rivers—are not
emphasized.
In addition, the Mahavidyas are not seen as mother
figures and are not often worshiped for progeny. Nor is their role as consort
to a male deity (usually Shiva) played up. The goddesses are almost always
depicted independently, and if a husband is mentioned at all, he is subordinate
to the goddess.
The Mahavidyas role as maternal presevers of the
universe is weak. In fact, the Mahavidyas tend to be portrayed as fearsome:
They are naked and blood-smeared, wearing garlands of skulls and skirts of
severed arms, living in cremation grounds, and copulating with corpses.
The Mahavidyas are linked with sadhana and siddhis
and mantras. “They are mantras” Kinsley writes, “they exist where their
mantras are uttered, and their most essential form is as mantras.” He says
further, “In this respect, they are tied inextricably to human beings, without
whom they would remain only latent. It is when a sadhaka invokes the
mantra of a goddess that she ‘comes alive.’”
The paragraphs on Kali’s tongue and “tasting the
forbidden” brings to mind the term eka rasa (“one taste”) signifying the
equanimity and equipoise of enlightenment. Kinsley suggests that Kali “invites”[2]
her devotees “to dare taste the world in its most disgusting and forbidding
manifestations in order to detect its underlying unity and sacrality, which is
the Great Goddess herself.”
Kali also expresses ultimate reality, and in this
regard, her eponymous blackness (one of her epithets is Shyama)
“symbolizes her all-embracing, comprehensive nature, because black is the color
in which all other colors merge; black absorbs and dissolves them.” Kinsley
points out that black is also the absence of colors, which signifies the nirguna
nature of ultimate reality. “Either way, Kali’s black color symbolizes her
transcendence of all form.” Here, one is reminded of the Ka’aba of Mecca, the
sacred shrine of cubical black granite, draped in black cloth, which represents
the mystery of Allah at the core of the Islamic world.
I was surprised to learn that Kinsley believes the
Hindu Mahavidya Tara developed from the Buddhist Boddhisatva Tara, and not the
other way around. I am sure that I have read somewhere (in Robert Thurman’s Tibetan Buddhism?) that the Tibetan Buddhist Tara was imported from Hindu Tantra, along with the “national mantra” of
Tibet: Om mani padme hum (Tibetan: Om mani peme hung).
[1] I found
this drug possibility interesting. In 1948, Albert Hoffman, a chemist with
Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland, was studying ergot, a type of mold that
attacks rye crops. It causes those who ingest the grain to go temporarily
crazy, and Hoffman was investigating potential pharmaceutical properties in the
mold. One day, after isolating from the mold a chemical called lysergic acid
diethylamide (LSD), he accidentally absorbed some of the drug through his
fingertips and became the planet’s first acid tripper. He later wrote a book
about his experiences, called “LSD, My Problem Child.” Could it be that the
grain used in the pancha tattva ritual was purposely cultivated with the
ergot mold? (On a related note, an ethnobotanist named Gordon Wasson believed
that soma, “the food of the gods” addressed with great reverence in the
Vedas was the “fly agaric” mushroom (Amarita muscaria), which contains a potent
psychedic. Terrence McKenna disagrees and thinks that soma was more likely the
common psilocybin mushroom, because the nomadic Aryans were cattle herders and
certain Vedic references can be intrepreted as linking soma with cattle
(psilocybin mushrooms sprout in cow dung). Next, I’ll try to tie all this
together with the Australian Aborigines and UFOs from the Pleiades (just
kidding).
[2] I wonder
if “compels” might be a more apt verb.
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