The Body in Buddhist and Hindu Tantra

Religion (1989) 19, 197-210 The Body in Buddhist and Hindu Tantra: Some Notes* Geoffrey Samuel

The Buddhist and Hindu Tantras employ a non-dualist conceptualiza?tion of body and mind based upon the anatomy of the `subtle body' with its `centres' (cakra), `channels' (nddi) and flows of `energy' (prdna) and differing greatly from conventional Western modes of thinking about body and mind . The Buddhist Tantras add the central concept of bodhicitta, which is conceived of as both a motivational state and a pattern of energy-distribution within the `subtle body' . The Tantric terminology forms part of a set of techniques for learning new modes of operating with the human nervous system and thus the body-mind totality . The social and cultural implications of such techniques, and more specifically of the Tantric sexual practices, are examined for both India and Tibet . It is suggested that transformation in `consciousness' and transformations in `society' such as those connected with the Tantras should be see as aspects of a single process, neither reducible to the other . The Tantric lineages preserve centuries of experience in the use of alternate states of consciousness and body-mind techniques within complex literate cultures . As Western interest in such processes grows, the Tantras provide an obvious resource, but if we are to learn from them we need also to consider them in relation to their original social and cultural milieu .

The Tantras are a well-known, if not always well-understood, part of Hindu and Buddhist religious practice . It is also well known that modes of con?ceptualizing the body (more accurately, the body and mind as a totality) are of central importance in the Tantras . In a recent survey of the role of the body in Indian religion, Friedhelm Hardy refers to these `esoteric' traditions as `drawing heavily on ideas and practices typical of folk religion, but developing [their] own metaphysics and physiological models .' The `metaphysics' and the `physiological models', along with their social conse?quences, are my subject here . As Hardy pointed out, we can find in the Tantras a continuum of atti?tudes stretching from an emphasis on the manipulation and control of

• This paper was first presented at `The Body : A Colloquium on Comparative Spirituality', Lancaster University, 8-11 July 1987 . 0048-721X/89/030197 + 15 $03 .00/0

dangerous spiritual entities, the 'magical' side of Tantra if you like, to an emphasis on the classical Buddhist and Hindu goals of Enlightenment or Liberation (bodhi, moksa) . The methods of Tantra can be and are used for either purpose . My own familiarity is primarily with the Buddhist tradition of Tantric practice, the Vajrayana or rDo rje theg pa as the Tibetans call it, but this paper has a comparative dimension, and I shall be talking about both Buddhist and Hindu Tantra .

I shall be considering in particular the role in the Vajrayana of bodhicitta, an important concept in Mahayana Buddhism generally and in the Tibetan traditions more specifically . The primary meaning of this term is usually given as 'altruisitic motivation', or something of the kind . However bodhi?citta is more than what we normally understand by a `motivation' . In fact it is important to be aware in all this discussion that the people we are talking about are using terms from an `indigenous psychology'2 which does not map at all exactly onto Western philosophical or psycho?logical categories . This is true for Hindu and Buddhist concepts before the Tantric period, and is even more so for the new modes of thinking asso?ciated with the Tantras themselves .

Bodhicitta is a kind of citta, in other words it is a state of `mind' in a very wide sense . One might say that it is a state of the total patterning of cognitive, emotional and motivational aspects of consciousness . It is defined as the state in which one desires to achieve Enlightenment (bodhi), not merely to relieve one's own sufferings in samsdra (which would be the classical Hinayana motivation, in the Tibetan perspective), but in order to free all sentient beings in the universe from their sufferings . For the Tibetans bodhicitta is the defining mark of the Mahayana or `Greater Vehicle' . It is the specific characteristic of the bodhisattva, and the necessary precondition for the attainment of the full and complete Enlighten?ment of the Buddha . Bodhicitta already has this central importance in the non-Tantric Indian Mahayana literature . Shantideva's extended praise of bodhicitta and of its transformative properties in the Bodhicar_yavatara is a well-known example :

As a blind man may obtain a jewel in a heap of dust, so somehow, this Thought of Enlightenment [[[bodhicitta]]] has arisen even within me . This elixir has originated for the destruction of death in the world . It is the imperishable treasure which alleviates the world's poverty . It is the uttermost medicine, the abatement of the world's disease . It is a tree of rest for the wearied world journeying on the road of being . When crossing over hard places, it is the universal bridge for all travellers . It is the risen moon of mind (citta), the soothing of the world's hot passion (klesa)

However a further and radical transformation in the concept of bodhicitta becomes evident with the growth of the Vajrayana . Bodhicitta in the Vajrayana is not simply a motivational state, however encompassing, but a quasi?material substance which can be manipulated through the internal processes of Tantric yoga . The `arousing' or `awakening' of bodhicitta, which was already an important component of pre-Tantric Mahayana practice, thus became homologized with the raising and concentrating of this bodhicitta?substance within the practitioner's central `channel' (situated along the spinal column) . As is well known, the sexual union of male and female is used in the Tantras both as a symbolic representation of the enlightened state and in some cases as a form of yogic practice . This provides a third layer to the meaning of bodhicitta, in which its awakening and the subsequent process of attaining Enlightenment can be treated as equivalent (metaphorically or in actuality) to the stages of sexual arousal .

All this is likely to leave Westerners more than a little confused . We are not very used to conceiving of a motivation as an non-material substance that can be moved around within the body . The confusion is worsened when this substance becomes conflated with the very material physiological processes of sexual arousal and orgasm . It is perhaps understandable that many commentators have either focused on the allegedly antinomian and orgiastic aspects of these practices or assumed that the Tantric practices are no more than a pretext for the ancient and popular human activity that they sometimes incorporate . Michael Edwardes, for example, suggests that the famous Indian monastery of Ajanta, dating from around the 2nd to 7th centuries A.D ., was `a sort of leisure-centre for the rich, a country club offering that most attractive of mixes-spirituality and sex' .' The noted Tibetanist David Snellgrove also insists on the orgiastic nature of Indian Tantric Buddhism in his recent survey Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, although he concedes that what the Tibetans later made of these practices `may in some respects be something different' .

I shall have more to say on this subject later on . For the present I shall merely note that the similarity between the psychobiology of sexual and mystical experience is quite well established, so that the idea of using sexuality to represent or stimulate mystical insight is entirely plausible .' It is anybody's guess who came to Ajanta, or why they came, but the whole complex of ideas around bodhicitta deserves the effort to understand it on its own terms . Here, as elsewhere, there is much to be said for the anthro?pological principle that behaviour in another culture that appears bizarre at first sight may well make sense within its own context of thought . As I have said, there are two stages to the complex of ideas, the equation between the movitation of bodhicitta and the internal process of Tantric yoga, and the use of sexuality as a metaphor and as a method to evoke those processes . I start with the first stage . What is actually going on here, and what are the implications of this way of looking at things?

It is interesting that it is only the Buddhists who describe the internal processes of Tantric yoga in terms of bodhicitta . As far as I know there is no real Hindu analogue here . However the processes themselves occur in recognizably similar forms within both Buddhist and Hindu 'hantric practice . We do not know, at any rate at present, whether these practices originated in Hindu or Buddhist circles, to the extent that such a distinction makes any sense at all in the relevant period (around 4th-6th centuries :v .n .) . During these centuries the Buddhists would have been one of a number of 'renouncer movements', to use Hardy's terminology, and the Tantras developed among all of these movements in a way which we are unlikely ever to be able to trace in detail . It is in the nature of esoteric traditions, after all, that their origins tend to be well hidden . There are, however, intriguing possibilities of influences from the similar internal practices of Taoists in China . Some of the early teachers in the Siddha medical tradition in South India were apparently Chinese, and there are persistent hints of Chinese connections in both Indian and Tibetan literature ."

The role of prdna in the Indian traditions is very similar to that which chi had assumed at a slightly earlier date in the Chinese tradition .' Prdna itself, as Peter Connolly has demonstrated, had been a central con?cept in the Vedas, but in that context it was not thought of in terms of energy flows within the body to be manipulated in meditation .' These practices developed along with the Tantras . They seem first to have appeared as a supplement to the so-called 'deity-yoga' practices . Deity?yoga involves the visualization and evocation of one or another Tantric deity, generally leading to the mediator's self-identification with that deity . Such forms of meditation were a natural enough development from practices found in some of the later Buddhist sutras, and they were the basis of Buddhist Tantra as it was transmitted to China, ,Japan and South-East Asia.

However, a sub-group of Indian Buddhist Tantras, the so-called Anuttara?Yoga or Supreme Yoga Tantras, have two stages, of which the deity-yoga is only the first . The second consist of the internal practices I have already mentioned, in which the currents of pra;ia comprising the `subtle body' are manipulated and redirected . The main aim is the concentration of these currents in the central channel or nd_df which runs up the spinal column through a series of locations, the well-known cakra, literally `wheels', from each of which subsidiary ndda or channels radiate .

The Anuttara-Yoga Tantras now form a major part, in fact the most important part, of Tibetan Tantric practice, but they never, as far as we know, came to the Far East, and their practice is confined to Tibetans, Mongolians and Newars, along with their modern converts . These are also the Tantras in which the duality of male and female aspects comes to take a central role, and in which sexual intercourse is used in some cases as a technique of meditation .

Both the subtle-body practices, and the sexual techniques, became im?portant in the Hindu Tantric tradition as well . From the 7th-I Ith centuries the Tantras were handed on by a series of teachers called the Siddhas . Some of the same Siddhas occur in both Buddhist and Hindu Tantric lineages, and there was evidently considerable overlap between the various traditions .' 2 The Tibetans acquired the Tantric lineages from India mainly in the 1 l th and 12th centuries, and have continued to develop them until the present day .

Now meditations on the cakra have become part of the general modern occultist, esoteric, New Age vocabulary . The primary source here is Theo?sophy, and within most of these contemporary groups the cakra (nddi and prana tend to play a rather minor role if they are mentioned at all) are seen as definite physical structures within the body, and are indeed often correlated with specific anatomical structures .

I do not think that we need assume that the use of concepts such as cakra, nadi and prana by the Siddhas or by their subsequent followers in the East implies a similar belief in the physical existence of corresponding structures within the body . The Tibetans at any rate are aware that there are significant discrepancies between the descriptions in different traditions . While the varying descriptions might be, and today occasionally are, explained as appropriate for different meditators, the co-existence of apparently irreconcilable descriptions in and of itself is not seen as a problem . Each description is valid in its own context .' ; Such a view might be expected in a society where the substantiality of the observed world is itself constantly being questioned, but it demonstrates that the physicality of the cakra and nddi is simply not an issue .

I would suggest that if we are to make any real sense of these procedures we are better off moving away from any misplaced concreteness with regard to the cakra and nddi. It is more illuminating to consider these structures, as Alex Comfort suggested some years ago, as a kind of map and guide to the human central nervous system as seen from the inside .' 4 The interesting thing about such a map is that it is dealing with both `body' and 'mind, and that it is not just a holistic description of the 'body-mind', but a guide to operating simultaneously with both `body' and `mind' .

The connection between body and mind is quite explicit within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and at least implicit within the Hindu tradition . The mind rides on the currents of prana ; where the mind goes, prana goes . Here the word I translate as `mind' is once again Sanskrit citta (Tibetan sems), a term that encompasses emotions and motivations as well as cognitive factors . Mind and prana are inseparable, one of the pairs of dualities to be transcended that are so important within Anuttara Yoga Tantra, and which provide its answer to the apparent conflict between wisdom and skill-in?means, voidness and compassion . " ' There are systematic descriptions of what happens to prdlIa and mind, and how they interrelate in ordinary circumstances, in sleep, in dreaming, at the time of death, and at the time of attainment of Enlightenment . 1 '

Now, we don't in our ordinary everyday usage see `mind' as intertwined with `body' in anything like this way . Nor, I think, for all the cultural differences, do modern Indians or modern Tibetans . Nor, I presume, did Indians at the time when the Tantras originated . To do so is a consciously acquired skill, and it cuts across the common-sense, everyday structuring of experience. There is an assumption underlying my discussion of these ideas which I shall now attempt to spell out explicitly . I do not believe that there are in fact any natural, pregiven, ultimately real distinctions between mind and body, subjective and objective, self and other, consciousness and matter .

The distinctions we make doubtless depend to some degree on aspects of human biology, such as the available human sensory modalities, but we learn them individually on the basis of the culture within which we grow up. Short of committing ourselves to a particular set of religious or scientific dogmas, we can have no guarantees that they are true . I think this general approach, which you may find vaguely neo-Kantian or perhaps neo Madhyamaka, can be developed into a reasonably consistent account of human knowledge as a social phenomenon, though I shall not attempt this here .'

What I do want to stress is that it is possible to treat mind and body, psyche and soma if you prefer, not as distinct, if mutually interacting elements, but as a genuine unity which we learn to divide in particular and individual ways . These different ways of dividing up the mind-body unit cannot be separated from the ways in which we deal with our experience .generally, the ways in which we individually learn to make sense of our physical and social environment .

If we adopt this kind of perspective it then becomes possible to ask what the consequences may be for the individual-or the social group--of learn?ing to operate with and to divide up the body-mind in particular ways . In fact it is essential to be able to ask such questions, because it is only in The Body in Buddhist and Hindu Tantra 203 this way that we can treat techniques like those of the Tantras as more than ethnographic curiosities, odd pieces of behaviour with no possibility of being related to our general understanding of the human condition . If we accept that we are in fact talking about techniques for restructuring the self and the emotions, of realigning the relationship between one human being and others, then what the Indian and Tibetan Tantric practitioners are doing becomes something which may have direct consequences for individual and society .

This is actually what the practitioners have been telling us all along . This is not necessarily to say that the consequences of performing the practices are exactly as described in the traditions .

That, however, is an issue that can scarcely be addressed until we allow that the techniques may have real effects on those who practise them . If we now turn to look more closely at the Hindu and Buddhist `subtle body' practices, I think it is clear that these are concerned with an over?coming and rejection of the regulations and social behaviour of conventional society . The explicit aim is, after all, to become a liberated being ; someone beyond the bounds of karmic conditioning, beyond the limits acquired in his or her life so far-in the Hindu or Buddhist conception, in an infinite series of previous lives .

In Hindu society, Tantric practitioners of the kind we are discussing are generally wandering sddhu who have explicitly rejected home, family, and the networks of social obligations of ordinary Hindu life . The 'Fantric tech?niques are designed to bring about an inner renunciation or withdrawal parallel to the outer renunciation their practitioners have already made .

Tantric practice is, in the Indian context, another variety of tapas, of aus?terity, through which magical power is achieved, ultimately the power of' liberation from all of one's previous karmic conditioning . In redirecting ill(- energy-flows from their habitual patterns, practitioners are above all dis?entangling the flows of desire, which have until that point kept them locked within their social context ."

This is true as far as I can tell of Hindu Tantra today, and we can presume that it was equally true of the period in which these practices took shape in the 4th-6th centuries. Certainly, references by Brahmanical writers of the time to the Kapalikas and other wandering Tantric ascetics emphasize the antinomian aspects of these practitioners . They are (eared and made fun of, and regarded as both repulsive and dangerous ."

Agehananda Bharati, that well-known Austrian practitioner of Hindu Tantra, and in more recent years cultural anthropologist of Indian religion, has commented that Tantric practice has no moral implications . If you are selfish, egotistic and exploitative before you undergo Tantric training, you will be the same after you finish, though of course you may now be better

at being selfish, exploitative and whatever, because you are less bound by ordinary social conventions . 20 To the extent that there is a moral dimension to modern Hindu Tantric practice-and with many Hindu Tantric teachers there certainly is such a dimension, despite Bharati's statement-it derives from the Tantric student's submission to his or her guru . The guru, the Tantric teacher, provides the moral orientation to which the student is required to submit . To be a student is to become part of the guru's mission, which may indeed have a genuine social and humanitarian dimension .

BODHICITTA AND THE BUDDHIST TANTRAS

If we can plausibly read this kind of situation back into the early Indian period, and particularly perhaps into the socially and politically chaotic time of the later Siddhas, with the Hindu and Buddhist states of North India gradually collapsing under the effects of the Muslim invasions and of the economic disorders consequent on the loss of long-distance trade routes, the Buddhist Tantric insistence on inserting bodhicitta into the centre of the system makes a great deal of sense . Bodhicitta is, after all, an explicitly ethical and social quantity : it is the desire to save living beings from their sufferings . The role of bodhicitta, and of the related term tathagatagarbha, had also developed in the preceding centuries in ways which make the new Tantric role of bodhicitta seem a natural development .

Tathagatagarbha is usually translated 'Buddha-nature' . It is a central concept in a group of sutras and shastras originating perhaps around the 3rd or 4th centuries, the most important being the Uttaratantra (also known as the Ratnagotravibhaga), a text held to have been revealed by the future Buddha Maitreya to the great Indian Buddhist scholar Asanga . The general idea is that the potentiality for Buddhahood is present in all beings and all phenomena, and that the attainment of Enlightenment is equivalent to the uncovering and revealing of this Buddha-essence within us .

If the potentiality for Buddhahood is within all of us, then bodhicitta is also obviously there to be awakened . The fullest development of this line of thought perhaps appears in a text which is probably of late Indian origin but is known only in Tibetan translation, the Kun byed rgval po'i mdo or `Sutra of the All-Creating King' . The 'All-Creating King' is bodhicitta, seen here quite explicitly as the underlying principle of the entire universe .

Then Bodhicitta, the All-Creating King, proclaimed : `I am the Creator of all phenomena in the past [ . . .] . If I were not pre-existent, phenomena would not have a point from where their existence could start . If I were not pre-existent, there would be no King who creates all phenomena . If I were not pre-existent, no Buddha would ever be . If I were not pre-existent, no Doctrine would ever be . If I were not pre-existent, no entourage would ever be .'

The Kun byed rgyal poi mdo was to become one of the principal texts of the Tibetan school of rDzogs then . In all Tibetan schools, however, bodhicitta has become a vital part of practice . This is especially true in Tantric practice . Tibetan Tantric ritual sequences always commence with both the verses of Refuge and the verses for the arousing of bodhicitta . Bodhicitta vows are an essential preliminary to Tantric practice, and meditations to develop bodhi?citta are of importance in all Tibetan traditions .

At the same time the presence of bodhicitta right at the centre of the most subtle Tantric yogic processes meant that these processes could scarcely be divorced from their Buddhist ethical and moral context and used simply as a source of magical powers, as seems to have happened in India .

In fact things went in quite the opposite direction . I have described elsewhere how lineages of what were in effect hereditary shamanic practi?tioners adopted the Tantric practices and gradually became converted into the central Buddhist functionaries of a quite new and different system, that of the Tibetan lamas, who were to be at once spiritual leaders and magical practitioners for the Tibetan lay population . 23 One could spell all this out in much greater detail through an analysis of ritual texts and of the biographies and writings of the early lamas, but here I shall simply note that this development took place.

It occurred in a specific social, economic and political context, and it is important to see that the linkages here go both ways .

A particular set of ritual procedures may enable a particular social development, but that development has social preconditions as well . The Buddhist Tantras were, after all, present in 12th-century India too, but they were to disappear altogether from the Indian sub-continent, with the exception of a small community in the Nepal valley . What I suggest we need to understand such historical processes is a mode of analysis in which transformations in 'con?sciousness' and transformations in `society' are seen as intimately related to each other-in fact, as aspects of a single process, neither aspect being reducible to the other .

THE SEXUAL PRACTICES OF TANTRA: INDIA AND TIBET

I shall illustrate this point briefly by looking at another aspect of the Hindu and Buddhist Tantric practices : the use of sexual techniques . Here we return to the second stage of the complex of ideas around bodhicitta mentioned in the Introduction . The sexual practices, which are found in both Buddhist and Hindu Tantras, employ the supposed homology between the transformations undergone by the subtle body in sexual intercourse and in the achievement of enlightenment .

In more western terms, one might say that the alternate states of consciousness created through the controlled use of sexuality are used as a way of breaking through conventional views of reality .`` 20 6 G. Samuel These practices exploit a well-developed symbolism within which Enlighten?ment or liberation is represented as the overcoming of complementary aspects of reality . These aspects are visualized as male and female and identified at the level of the human body-mind with the two major channels on either side of the central channel . Thus `male' and `female' here are two modalities that are present in all individuals, whether biologically male or female, although in this particular context they may be seen as polarized between the two partners .

The use of sexuality as a spiritual technique in a tradition that has a strong orientation towards renunciation, celibacy and ascetic practices suggests a deliberately antinomian tinge to these practices . This may well have been true in India, both in the early period and in more recent times . It appears to be much less time in Tibet, and it is this difference on which I want to focus here .

There are, of course, differences today between the philosophical basis of Vajrayana Buddhists of the Tibetan tradition and Hindu Tantrics in India . As Bharati noted, the male-female symbolism in the Buddhist Tantras usually (not always) equates male with the `active' pole of compassion and skill-in-means, whereas the female corresponds to the `passive' pole of wisdom (insight, prajna) and voidness . In the Hindu Tantras the female (sakti, `power') is the active polarity .

These differences are I think relatively insignificant compared to the vast difference in social context between the two societies . Thus in modern India, as Bharati once more has pointed out, the female partner, despite her nominally active role, is essentially a passive instrument used by the male in his own pursuit of psychic power. Her spiritual development is not really what the practice is about . She is an accessory needed by the male partner for his spiritual practice .

In Tibet this is not the case . Male and female partners are each involved in their personal spiritual practice, and it is not unusual for women to become respected spiritual teachers in their own right .

It is surely no coincidence that Tibetan women generally are far more free, much more open to pursue their own lives and purposes, far less prone to be regarded as mere accessories to their fathers, husbands or sons, than women in contemporary India .

An equally striking contrast can be seen in the general social attitude to Tantric practices . In modern India, Tantra has bifurcated into the so-called `right-hand' and `left-hand paths' (daksinamarga, vamamarga) . The right?hand practices are respectable, orthodox, and in fact simply an extension of the standard Indian ritual vocabulary . Fully orthodox Brahmin priests in Kashmir and South India perform right-hand Tantric rituals on a daily basis . The left-hand practices are heterodox, antinomian and unconventional .

The sexual practices fall into this left-hand category, as might be expected in a society as puritanical and sexually restrictive as contemporary India . In general, left-hand practices can be characterized in Indian terms as highly polluting . They are totally incompatible with the life of an orthodox Brahmin priest, though not necessarily with that of a sddhu, who is not bound by the moral restrictions of ordinary life .

Orthodox attitudes to left-hand practices are a complex mixture of fear, disgust and fascination . They are seen as evil, horrifying, and also as poten?tially very powerful . More westernized Indians are likely to reject them as primitive and/or decadent, and certainly as unworthy to be regarded as a genuine spiritual tradition . It is only in very recent years that the interest of some western scholars in these traditions has begun to provoke a partial re?evaluation . In Tibet, the whole complex of attitudes regarding the Tantric sexual practices is quite different, but then, as Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf pointed out many years ago, Tibetan attitudes to sexuality are in any case very much more open and relaxed than those of Hindu caste society .

Not very many Tibetans do these practices, but there is none of the mixture of violent disapproval accompanied by prurient interest that one finds with Indian attitudes to Hindu left-hand practices . Tibetans do not perform the practices because they are difficult and `advanced' practices . The control over prana needed to carry them out properly is believed to take many years to acquire . Also, many Tibetan practitioners are monks (Sanskrit bhiksu) or novices (Iramanera) and have taken vows of celibacy, so performing the practices would involve a breach of their vows . On the whole these practices seem to be confined to hereditary lamas or to other non-celibate yogic practi?tioners . There is no suggestion of the explicitly antinomian and even orgiastic aspect of some modern Indian Tantric circles .

What I have tried to suggest through these examples is that the kind of body practices-better, body-mind practices-involved in the Buddhist and Hindu Tantras do indeed have consequences for society and individual, through the structuring of self, personality, emotion and motivation involved in their continued practice . However the consequences of these spiritual practices cannot simply be `read off' without knowing something about the cultural context within which their practitioners operate . The practices do not take place in a vacuum, but among human beings who are already very much part of a specific social milieu, and the influences between practitioner and society go in both directions . In fact, the dichotomy between individual and society, like the dichotomy between mind and body, is ultimately not viable . The practitioner and the social group are part of a single system .

This, I think, has implications for those who wish to employ these practices in a western context . I believe that the Tantric traditions can be a valuable recource in the transformation which western spirituality is currently under?going . However it is important to realize that these traditions do not simply provide a set of techniques that can be applied in a mechanical manner .

The practices of the Tantras are embedded in a rich and significant cultural context . The elaborate preliminary training and the complex ritual environ?ment of Tibetan Tantric practice, in particular, are not simply arbitrary accretions . These elements are an essential part of how the practices operate, as for that matter is the entire Tibetan social and cultural environment . I think that we need to tread quite carefully if we want to draw upon these practices as resources to use for our own purposes within our own very different social environment .

At the same time there is much in the Tantric lineages that is both fascinating and valuable . The use of direct operations with the body to bypass the conscious mind in order to reshape the human self in its emotional and rational aspects is not confined to the Tantras, but it is here that we have much the fullest elaboration within the world's major religious traditions of such an approach . The only really comparable tradition is that of Taoism, which was possibly historically connected with the Tantras . Within the Jewish, Islamic and Christian religions the general suspicion and rejection of `mystical' procedures has been such as to keep analogous practices in a much more marginal and fragmented situation .

One can certainly find similar techniques in preliterate societies, outside the so-called `great religions', within the so-called 'shamanic' traditions . I have argued elsewhere that Buddhism in Tibet functions in many respects as a 'shamanic' system . 31 However, the Tibetan Tantric tradition, the Vajrayana, has had over a thousand years of evolution in the context of a literate, technologically relatively advanced society, as in a different way has its Hindu equivalent .

If we want to know what is involved in operating with bodily techniques, alternate states of consciousness and the like in a complex literate culture, the Tantric lineages of India and Tibet are obvious places to look . The practitioners of these traditions have been engaged in balancing rational knowledge and intuitive insight, intellect and feeling, for many centuries, in the course of their search for a unity beyond the dichotomies . As the West wakes from `single vision' and `Newton's sleep', 32 we may find their experiences worth bearing in mind .

NOTES

1 Hardy, Friedhelm, `The Role of the Body in the Indian Traditions' . Paper presented at `The Body : A Colloquium on Comparative Spirituality', Lancaster University, July 8-11 1987 .

2 Heelas, Paul and Lock, Andrew (eds), Indigenous Psvchologies . The anthro?pology of the self. London, Academic Press 1981 . 3 III, 27-30 . Translation from Matics, Marion L . Entering the Path of Enlighten?ment, New York, Macmillan 1970, p . 155 . 4 Kvaerne, Per, 'On the Concept of Sahaja in Indian Buddhist Tantric Literature' . Temenos 1 1 (1975), pp . 88-135 .

a Edwardes, Michael, In the Blowing Out of a Flame . The World of Buddha and the World of Man . London, Allen and Unwin 1976, pp . 124-125 . 6 Snellgrove, David, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism . Indian Buddhists and their Tibetan Successors . 2 vols . Boston, Shambhala 1987, p . 277 . 7 Davidson, Julian M . 'The Psychobiology of Sexual Experience', in Davidson, Julian M . and Davidson, Richard J ., The Psychobiology of Consciousness, New York, Plenum Press 1980, pp . 271-332 ; Mandell, Arnold, J . 'Toward a Psycho?biology of Transcendence', op . cit ., pp . 379-463 ; Schuman, Marjorie, 'The Psychophsiological Model of Meditation and Altered States of Consciousness : A Critical' Review', op . cit ., pp . 333-378. 8 Dwight Tkatschow, personal communication ; Bharati, Agehananda, The Tantrh Tradition . London, Rider 1965 : 60 ff on Mahacina ; Guenther, Herbert V . 'Early Forms of Tibetan Buddhism, Crystal Ifirror 3 (1974), pp . 80-92 . 9 E.g . Saso, Michael, 'The Taoist Body and Internal Alchemy', paper for presen?tation at 'The Body : A Colloquium on Comparative Spirtuality', Lancaster University, July 8-11 1987 .

10 Connelly, Peter, 'The Evolution of the Prana Concept in the Veda', paper presented at 'The Body : A Colloquium on Comparative Spirituality', Lancaster University, July 8-11 1987 . 1 I Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism . Cf. also Blacker, Carmen, 'The Place of the Body in Religious Exercise in Japan', paper presented at 'The Body : A Collo?quium on Comparative Spirituality', Lancaster University, July 8-11 1987 . 12 Lorenzen, David, N ., The Kapalikas and Kalamukhas . Two Lost Saivite Sects . New Delhi, Thomson Press 1972 . Australian National University Centre of Oriental Studies . Oriental Monograph Series, 12 ; Robinson, James B . (transl .) Buddha's Lions . The Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas . Berkeley, CA, Dharma 1979 ; Kvaerne, Per, An .anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs . A Study of the Carvagiti . Oslo, Universitetsforlaget 1977 .

13 Cf. Cozort, Daniel, Highest Yoga Tantra . An Introduction to the Esoteric Buddhism of Tibet . Ithaca, NY, Snow Lion 1986 : 1 15 fl ; Dowman, Keith, Sky Dancer . The Secret Life and Songs of the Lady Yeshe Tsogvel . London, Routledge, Megan Paul 1984, p . 247 . 14 Comfort, Alex, I and That . Notes on the Biology of Religion . New York, Crown 1979 . 15 On which cf. Rawlinson, Andrew, 'The Body in Indian Mahayana Buddhism', paper presented at 'The Body : A Colloquium on Comparative Spirituality, Lancaster University, July 8-11 1987 . 16 Tucci, Giuseppe, The Religions of Tibet, London, Routledge, Keg an Paul 1980 ; Beyer, Stephan, The Cult of Tara . Magic and Ritual in Tibet . Berkeley, CA, University of California 1973 ; Lati Rinbochay and Hopkins, Jeffrey, Death . Intermediate State and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism, Valois, NY, Gabriel & Snow Lion 1979 . 17 Cf. Samuel, Geoffrey, Mind Badv and Culture, Cambridge, University Press, in press . 2 1 0 G. Samuel 18 Cf. the similar analysis of the related Taoist practices in Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1987, p . 157 .

19 Lorenzen, The Kapalikas and Kalamukhas.

20 Bharati, Agehananda, The Light at the Center, Santa Barbara, CA, Ross-Erikson 1976 .

21 CC Takasaki, J ., A Study of the Ratnagotravibhaga . Rome; Ruegg, David Seyfort, La theorie du tathagatagarbha et du gotra . Etudes sur la soteriologie et la gnoseo?logie du bouddhisme . Paris, Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient 1969 . 22 Dargyay, Eva K, `The Concept of a "Creator God" in Tantric Buddhism, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (1985), pp . 44-5 . 23 Samuel, Geoffrey, `Early Buddhism in Tibet : Some Anthropological Perspec?tives', in Aziz, Barbara N . and Kapstein, Matthew (eds), Soundings in Tibetan Civilization, New Delhi, Manohar 1985, pp . 383-397 . 24 Cf. Kvaerne, `On the Concept of Sahaja' . 25 Cf. Comfort, Alex, I and That . Notes on the Biology of Religion, New York, Crown 1979 .

26 Bharati, A ., The Tantric Tradition, London, Rider 1965 . 27 Bharati, A ., `Making Sense out of Tantrism and Tantrics', Loka 2 (1976), pp . 52-55 . 28 Allione, Tsultrim, Women of Wisdom, London, Routledge, Kegan Paul 1984 ; Stott, David, `Offering the Body : The Practice of "gCod" in Tibetan Buddhism', paper presented at `The Body: A Colloquium on Comparative Spirituality', Lancaster University, July 8-11 1987 .

29 Cf. Aziz, Barbara N, Tibetan Frontier Families, New Delhi, Vikas 1978 ; Miller, Beatrice D, `Views of Women's Roles in Buddhist Tibet', in A . K . Narain (ed .), Studies in History of Buddhism, New Delhi 1980, pp . 155-166 . The situation in Indian society at an earlier period was apparently less puritanical, and it is not clear when the modern attitudes developed . W . G . Archer suggests that the growth of the Tantras was in part a reaction to the move to a more sexually repressive society . (Comfort, Alex, The Koko Shastra, London, Tandem Books 1966, pp . 21-23) .

30 Fiirer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, Morals and Merit, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1967, referring to the Sherpas and the Hindu Brahmin Chetris of Nepal . 31 Samuel, `Early Buddhism in Tibet' .

32 Blake, William, The Complete Poems, ed by Alicia Ostriker, Penguin 1979, p . 487 (Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802) . GEOFFREY SAMUEL obtained his Ph .D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University in 1975 for research on religion in Tibetan society . He has taught in the U.K., New Zealand and Australia, where lie is currently Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, NMV . He is the translator of Giuseppe Tucci's Religions of Tibet and \Valter Heissig's Religions of Mongolia, and the author of Mind, Body and Culture: Anthropology and the Biological Interface (Cambridge University Press, in press) . Department of Sociology, University o/' Newcastle, New South 11-'ales 2.308, Australia .