Sex Talk and Gender Rites: Women and the Tantric Sex Rite

"If having sex with women could give enlightenment, then all the creatures in the world ought to be enlightened"

--Vasiha in dialogue with the Buddha (C¥nåcåra Tantra 4.23). 1

"Without you o Goddess, there would be no love (prematvam) in the world" (A verse Brahmå and other gods sing to the Goddess Tårå, B®hann¥la Tantra 12.15)

The sage Vasi†ha is well known in the Hindu landscape as a role model of piety. Soft-spoken, calm, with the divine docile cow at his side, VasiΩ†ha embodies the Brahmin ascetic. He stands for the values of orthodox Hinduism.2 Less well-known is his Tantric persona, particularly the persona associated with the region of Kåmåkhyå. In this locale, his piety undergoes a sea change. Rather than the untarnished emblem of pious Brahmin perfection, he presents a hard-headed and fastidious adherence to empty and inhibited rules of purity. His mastery over the senses (C¥nåcåra Tantra (CT) 1.34) results in a fanatical ascetic excess, a denial of the sensual, the body, and all that is associated with the tainted illusory world of desires.

So, in the C¥nåcåra Tantra (CT), the ascetic VasiΩ†ha practices austerities for 10,000 years on the Blue Hill in Kåmåkhyå (CT 1.13f).3 Despite the fervor of his worship, however, the Goddess Tårå, the savior who carries one across the cycle of birth and death, this Goddess to whom he prays just ignores him (CT 1.14). Why is she ignoring

him? His interview with the male creator god Brahmå provides no good answers, but sends him back to asceticism.

Even after still more long but fruitless efforts, she still ignores him. Finally, he gets angry and curses the Goddess. Only then, at this point does she appear to him. However, she does not succumb to his anger and does not grant him a boon. Rather she rebukes him for his harshness (dåruˆamanå˙), politely4 informing him that his method is all wrong, and all his many sensory restraints completely useless (v®thaiva CT 1.41f). Instead she sends him off to the Buddha.5 VasiΩ†ha's methods are all wrong, but he has no clue about what exactly is not right in his method of bull-headed mastery over the body, in his 10,000 years of asceticism. What then, does the Buddha teach him? The Buddha teaches him the sex rite.

Representations of Sex/ Sex as Representation

Vasiنha himself is surprised and initially skeptical about the value of the sex rite. He says, ""If having sex with women could give enlightenment, then all the creatures in the world ought to be enlightened" (CT 4.23). What, we may also wonder along with Vasiنha, could there be in a sex rite that leads to enlightenment? This article focuses on the Tantric sex rite as we find it in one particular group of eight 15th -18th century Tantric texts located in Northeast India.6 With this, I want to counter the current prevalent scholarly notion that sex in Tantra universally functions to construct women as objects for male gains.7

This article is also, however, especially about how we enact identity, and how sex and language--and language about sex-- gets employed in this process. We have to keep in mind that texts which talk about the sex rite are doing just that-- "talking" about

sex. We do not directly document ritual sex practices from the 15th - 18th centuries, but rather we see how sex is represented.

What does it mean to "talk" about sex? For our contemporary world, "talk" of sex is often construed to evoke a degradation of women, such as we find in a general or popular understanding of pornography (as if the speaking of sex, the very act of representing it, somehow inevitably entails an element of the pornographic). What this rite may help us to discover is that "talk" of sex need not necessarily be scripted in only this way. In fact, we see that the script itself, the way one talks about sex, speaks volumes about how identity gets constructed.

I suggest we find a creative reappropriation of sexuality in these 15th -18th century texts, against the grain of a pervasive pornographic degradation and silencing of women which "talk" of sex often engenders. What the sex rite teaches us here, as we find it particularly in the B®hann¥la Tantra (BT),8 is about shifting away from an idea of male mastery over women and over the body. With a prescience that from our position in the 21st century we cannot help but marvel at, these authors appear to recognize the links between an ideology of ascetic mastery (especially mastery over the body) and the denigration of women.

So specifically the sex rite here proposes a shift away from asceticism by means of its special "Kål¥ Practice", a practice which gets rid of all rules except one: treating women with respect. Since I focus on this special "Kål¥ Practice" elsewhere, I do not treat it in depth here,9 except insofar as the sex rite is a key part of the "Kål¥ Practice" in this group of 15th -18th century texts. What the "Kål¥ Practice" encodes prescriptively, in its eschewal of all rules except treating women with respect, we notice, however, is also what the sex

rite encodes through the body's gestures, and what the story of VasiΩ†ha metaphorically enacts through narrative. While the insights and data which support this examination come from a group of eight texts associated with Northeast India in about the 15th -18th centuries, sources which tend to cross reference ideas and verses,10 for the discussion here I draw mostly from the B®hann¥la Tantra (BT), a 15th- 18th century Goddess centered (ßåkta) text, also coming from the Northeast region of India and the C¥nåcåra Tantra (CT), also from the same provenance. These texts have all been published in India (versions of the BT as many as five times since the 1880's), though they have not been translated into English or other European languages. These texts focus on transgressive ritual, "left-handed" rites, involving the use of liquor, ritual performed with corpses in the cremation ground, and especially the sex rite.

One important point to note, however, is that this group of texts differs in a few remarkable ways from earlier Tantric texts which also deal with "left-handed" practices such as the sex rite. So for instance, the BT enjoins that the practitioner bow to the woman he has sex with, something we do not see in earlier "left-handed" Tantras such as the Kulårˆava Tantra (KT) or the Kulac¨∂åmaˆi Tantra (KCT), even though the BT borrows in numerous places from the 10th century KCT. Similarly we find in the BT a particular advocacy of reverence towards women even outside the context of the rite, again, something we do not find in earlier "left-handed" Tantras.11 The differences we find may be read to shift the power women have, acknowledging greater subjectivity and status to women in the version from this group of 15th-18th century texts. Also, I suggest that this-- what we might call "reappropriation"--of the sex rite is deliberate and consciously crafted by these authors through the representation of both

the rite and the women in the rite, and through details these authors add. Especially we should note that through this "talk" of sex, the BT's coding of the sex rite offers another language altogether, encoding its message in the gestures of the otherwise mute body. In this sense we find two kinds of "talk", language which describes and the performative silent speech of the body's gestures.

In what follows we first explore in greater detail the frame myth of Vasiنha learning the sex rite and how this teaching of sex operates to suggest a move away from a model of ascetic male domination, over women and over the body. Following some methodological considerations for how we can use texts, apart from other forms of "evidence," to discuss images of women in Tantra, we then briefly address the representation of the body in Vasiنha's lesson. Following this we examine the representation of the sex rite in the context of a text, that is, as "talk", as a textual description of the rite. In this case the BT, as text, also consciously offers a re presentation of the rite which also functions to enact identity, just as our current discussions about Tantra do. Here we explore the relationship between the text as speech and the sex rite as gesture which gives a "message" enacted on the body. Finally we conclude by addressing how the particular version of the sex rite in the BT, unlike other earlier uses of the Tantric sex rite, contributes to enact identity, in this case, a valorized identity for women. With this we examine the details of the sex rite in the BT, and specifically how it functions to reconfigure the representation of women, to incorporate a recognition of a subjectivity in women.

The Education of Vasiنha

To return to VasiΩ†ha's story, when VasiΩ†ha initially seeks out Brahmå, desperate for answers on his failed worship, Brahmå responds against VasiΩ†ha's expectations. He

refuses to commiserate with him and refuses to act as intermediary for him with the Goddess. Instead, Brahmå praises the greatness of Tårå. He even subordinates his own position as creator to Tårå's, telling VasiΩ†ha that his own creation of the four Vedas, the preeminent holy books of India, came by the grace of the Goddess Tårå (CT 1.18). After VasiΩ†ha recounts his fruitless efforts, Brahmå again urges him to go back to Kåmåkhyå and continue his efforts. VasiΩ†ha, who has anyway conquered his sensual desires (atijitendriya˙ CT 1.34), and newly inspired, decides to give it another try. Unfortunately, VasiΩ†ha fails again and finally curses the Goddess Tårå in his frustration. She, however, also thwarts his expectations. Tårå does not give in to his outburst of temper. She responds to his curse, pointing out his un-sagelike anger, "how is it that you with anger and a such a harsh attitude curse me?" (CT1.41a). She politely informs him, "Your intense effort and the time you have spent are completely useless" (CT 1.42b).

The politeness she displays, using the honorific forms to address him, throughout her rejection especially makes a point here. Even as Tårå rebukes VasiΩ†ha, her politeness in the process highlights her superiority to him. He, purportedly a self controlled sage, loses his cool, becoming emotionally distraught and uncontrolled. With his emotional outburst, he rather acts out a frequent charge leveled towards women, i.e., an "emotional irrationality", while she, the "woman," the one typically culturally coded to be the "emotional irrational" one, on the other hand, maintains a sense of self-control. She is polite and calm, offering a cool, deliberate refusal of his curse. In the end she controls the interaction and ends it, sending him off to the Buddha, who is here an incarnation of the Hindu God ViΩˆu, for proper teaching (CT 1.43). In this sense also, her initial silence ought not to be read as the silence of the woman as subaltern, but rather as

a sign of her power. While her "talk" here eventually clarifies their relative power, the silence behind it is one that suggests her choice rather than his. What strikes one especially in this tale of VasiΩ†ha's education is first, how this Goddess Tårå upsets the normative cycle of events -- typically, austerities must confer results from the gods worshipped. The innumerable uncouth demons who gain powers which they use to harass the Gods are the most salient example of this mostly incontrovertible law of austerity.13 Secondly, we note how she upsets typical representations of the feminine, as well, especially in that she manages to elude both poles of a pervasive bifurcation of woman as either nurturing, a mother-like figure, or a temptress, what Tracy Pintchman describes as an ambiguity which make women either "instruments of salvation" or "temptresses."14 The Goddess Tårå, in contrast, presents an image of a woman which is neither, not nurturing mother, nor a temptress. If anything, we might analogize her to a demanding and meticulous connoisseur of fine food or art who just knows when it's all wrong.15 She matter of factly points out his ignorance, how he "with this practice which is all wrong" (CT 1.43a), needs proper instruction. Her ability to upset typical gendered expectations establishes for her in this case an autonomy and subjective agency; she is emphatically not at the whim of this conquering ascetical Brahmin.

The Buddha's teaching: The "Kål¥ Practice"

When VasiΩ†ha first sees the Buddha, like the good Brahmin that he is (and also like a number of good 19th century orientalists), VasiΩ†ha is appalled by the Tantric Buddha's profligate behavior with women and wine.16 However, after VasiΩ†ha hears a mysterious voice from the sky urging him onward (CT 2.8ff), he decides to take teachings from the Buddha. The Buddha then teaches him the "Kål¥ Practice,"17 the special practice

which we find in a group of (at least) eight 15th-18th century Northeastern Tantric texts, which emphasizes a complete absence of rules except one. We do not find this practice in earlier Tantras such as, for instance, in the KCT or the KT. Here, as we see also in the BT, there are no rules regarding time or place or food, etc., (CT 2.19ff, 2.32f), in stark contrast to typical Tantra, where rules permeate every activity in abundance. However the one rule is that the aspirant should constantly honor women, treating women with esteem (CT 2.23). "He should worship women" (CT 2.23) and especially "he should not ever criticize women or abuse them" (CT 2.24); "he should not ever lie to women", but should, on the contrary, be consistently honest with them (CT 2.24). 18 We find here also, the statement "women are Gods, women are the life breath" (pråˆa CT 2.25).19 Further, in this lesson VasiΩ†ha discovers that "all beings reach salvation by serving women" (CT. 2.44- Adhika påtha, also CT 4.2320), a reversal of the more typical well-known dictum whereby women reach salvation by serving their husbands, or low caste persons reach salvation by serving Brahmins. Specifically this "talk" about how women should be viewed, a talk directed specifically against asceticism, enacts a different status for women. With this esteem for women, the Buddha advocates to VasiΩ†ha a recognition of a subjective autonomy for women, in their bodies, which he advocates should not be physically abused, and in their subjective sense of self, in his advice to speak truthfully to women and not to criticize women.21

Methodological caveats

What does it mean for a 17th century Indian author to suggest in the voice of the Buddha that women maintain a sovereign right over their bodies and that women should be esteemed? Is it a form of a proto-feminism which naturally takes its own contours, one,

perhaps to our view, oddly connected with sex? The articulation of this special "Kål¥ Practice", especially across several texts22 suggests both its possible implementation, and the obverse, a world where this understanding did not figure as normative, hence the need to say it in texts. However, with this, I do not attempt to make claims regarding the historical behavior of actual women or male Tantric practitioners. This is clearly a desideratum, however, recovering the "what really happened" of 17th century Northeast India is a project which from all sides and methodologies is fraught with the inevitable contortions of representation. So, given the dearth of other forms of evidence, these textual sources can stand as representations viewed through a refractory lens. They offer a semblance of one strand of life, an attitude towards women which at least some people in this late medieval period were espousing.

Even with these limitations, nevertheless, what they represent can help us to reconstruct indirectly a picture of women, and especially so since they present such a striking contrast to what we find elsewhere in textual representations of women in Hindu Tantra.23 So, for instance we find clear textual references to female gurus (N¥lasaraswat¥ Tantra 5.70, Guptasådhana Tantra 2.18ff), something, again, not present in earlier Tantras such as the KCT or the KT. Indeed just this opening of a space, particularly one which entails esteem, which recognizes living women as autonomous and venerable, may be read as both causing and representing a shift in attitudes towards women as a group. I will discuss the way in which we may read it as perhaps effecting a shift, below when I address the operation of rituals in general and this rite specifically. However, further than this, I make a different sort of argument than one which hinges upon the reconstruction of this 17th century practice within, what is for us at this

point in the 21st century, a mostly murky social historical context. Rather I suggest that we understand the "Kål¥ Practice" as a form of representation of which the value lies perhaps most in terms of its historical value as a reference to the propagation of discourse. These texts reflect the emergence of a discourse addressing social relations between the genders, and I suggest that its importance lies in the challenge, as discourse, that it presents to normative classifications. Also I use the term "subject" and "subjective" here not so much as a designation of some sort of "real," or existentially autonomous entity--certainly there are considerable philosophical and cultural problems entailed in assigning this notion to a non-modern non-Western context. Nor do I use it to designate a sovereign, intact self which exists prior to any relation to a world outside itself. So, not so much about real or historical subjects, I rather point to a designation that signifies a slippery but rhetorically and grammatically effective and prevalent category. Nor is it possible with this evidence to address the question of women's agency. Here we deal rather with representations of women.

That is, we deal here with representations, imagined constructions, which nevertheless have the power to engender certain types of behaviors, and which here particularly take on positive coding as venerable, powerful persons/beings within a world of social interactions, even without our being able to precisely demarcate the locus or limits of this being as representation. This practice is also emphatically not about homologizing women to Goddesses, and then venerating and serving only the abstract Goddess, and the woman only coincidentally and temporarily as her channel during the few hours while the rite lasts. It is also not about worshipping Goddesses who are stone images, or far away, or

intangible Goddesses (those typically more amenable to pronouncing precisely what the aspirant wishes to hear). Rather, this practice is about venerating ordinary living women. So, in the Tantric sex rite as the CT lays it out, the Goddess is explicitly not invoked for the rite (tatra cåvåhanam nåsti CT 3.16), precisely because this ordinary human woman, in her prosaic everyday state, is already, without any necessary transformations, the deity to be worshipped. She is explicitly here not a temporary channel for the Goddess, but divine in her usual, normal, non-exotic and non-extraordinary self.24 Similarly, in the "Kål¥ Practice" as we find it in the BT and other similar texts from this time period and region, the texts explicitly counter the idea that one could treat a woman as a Goddess during the rite, but that afterwards she reverts again to her ordinary status as second-class citizen. With the "Kål¥ Practice" women are, at least textually, worshipped both during the context of the sex rite, but also outside the confines of the rite. That is, this one rule of behavior towards women is advocated towards all women- women as a class-- not only towards the woman who participates in the rite. What is probably the most important and striking aspect of this practice is that it counters what we find in an earlier Tantric text such as the KCT, by explicitly extending this rule to the treatment of women all the time (BT 6.73f, also NST11.120f, CT 2.23ff).

Bodies and mastery

So to come back to the specifics of the sex rite, what exactly does the Buddha teach Vasiنha? What the Buddha teaches him is not exactly or simply a better technique for mastery, one that here utilizes the female body and the act of sex. Sometimes one gets this image from descriptions of the Tantric sex rite--that what Tantric sex is really about is a technique around employing bodies, especially female bodies, and in this context the use and abuse of female bodies as objects, simply manipulated for male

gains, most often in order to obtain some particular supernatural mastery of the world, the power to fly through the air, for instance. I am not suggesting that these representations of Tantric sex are necessarily or uniformly incorrect; in some cases, as with David White's fine work on a number of earlier Tantras, I would concur.25 Rather, I suggest that we should be hesitant in applying a monolithic and unitary view of the motive for Tantric practice. If we locate specific practices historically, textually and contextually, we find that the practice of the Tantric sex rite reveals a variety of different agendas and motivations. Indeed, as indigenous sources imply by their use of varied nomenclature, searching for unitary motives within a complex history, all aligned under the single vague and slippery rubric "Tantra" may in fact work to muddle key differences.

What, then, does the Buddha teach VasiΩ†ha? VasiΩ†ha's initial attempts are permeated throughout with an ideology of mastery. Continued application will force the Goddess to yield to his prayers, or so he thinks. His adherence to an ascetic purity represents not only a wrong-headed clinging to outward forms, but with this, the CT points to the deeper underlying problem in his attitude, that it clings to a model of domination. For VasiΩ†ha, ascetic practice entails a mechanical application of laws.26 In the same way that he masters and subdues his body and senses (CT 1.34), he also attempts to master, rather than listen to, the Goddess Tårå. VasiΩ†ha's vain attempts at domination result rather in her criticism of his harshness (daruˆa CT 1,39, CT 1.41). In one sense, her neglect of him, ignoring his continued worship, is only simply mirroring back to him that his apparent worship is at its core an attempt to actually "ignore" her, by construing her as object rather than subject, not a subject in relation to him, but an object mechanically forced to confer boons for his long asceticism.

The Buddha teaches him to shift away from a model which promotes a force-laden asceticism to one which involves a recognition of the other, in this case, the "other" as women. If asceticism is a denial of a need for help from another, the goddess Tårå, through the teachings of the Buddha about how to worship her, appears to be deconstructing this model of isolation, especially through a teaching which reincorporates the body rather than denying it. It is the body especially which VasiΩ†ha conquers through his long asceticism, and it is precisely the body which is re-enlivened, and allowed to register a variety of needs, desires and states of pleasure through the sex rite.

The body in many ways stands as quintessential other; the body is often associated with the feminine in precisely this context. To get Vasiنha to recognize rather than deny the body, is to revoke a rule of dominance which subjugates Nature and its representative in the body and by extension women. These three, Nature, the body and woman are connected as secondary members of a pervasive binary pattern (mind/body, man/woman, subject/object, spirit/nature and so on) which we find not only in medieval India, (but also in the West as well) where the secondary member is relegated to a marginal and inferior status, in relation to the first, which, even as it is extruded from the proper domain of subjecthood, nevertheless functions to constitute the idea of a subject, by standing outside and apart from it. The more normative typical coding, where the first member of these binaries is master of the second, is unlearned. What Vasiنha learns from the Buddha is to shift away from an attitude of a rejection and subjugation of the body, the feminine, this secondary element. He, instead, moves towards an attitude of recognition and valorization of this and the material world it connotes. In allowing a slippery incursion into his world of this habitually excluded other,

he experiences a greater displacement of solipsistic egoic identity than any amount of self/(body)-denying austerity could have ever afforded. He shifts from his initial, (what we may call in the Lacanian sense) hysterical world-denying intent on a (Cartesian-like) abstraction of his self as a self which excludes anything which might taint it with the smell of contingency. The Buddha's lesson leads him instead to a recognition of his own embeddedness within a world where one stands alternatively as self and object depending upon one's perspective, where he must efface not the trace of his body through austerity, but the impulse to make that which is other to him, both the Goddess and his body, into mere objects. What is key here is that the enlightenment the Buddha offers presents a shift in paradigms; it is a move away from a notion of attaining a transcendental self. He offers a model that relationally incorporates the body and others as existentially legitimate.

What is more, he shifts his attitude towards women and the body through a practice of sex. For Western ears, where talk of sex is more frequently associated with the pornographic,27 this may initially sound like an odd depiction of the function of sex. I suggest that it may be helpful to work against our Western presumptions regarding "sex" if we stress the second term in the phrase "sex rite" rather than the first. As rite, this depiction of this act involves an implicit and coded discipline; it is not intended to be a simple spontaneous expression of physical desire, but an enactment (reenactment?) of a cosmic order. In this sense the rite serves to construct identities. In the final analysis what he teaches with this special "Kål¥ Practice" is more about an attitude than a technique -- about listening to women, not forcing them to mechanically fulfill his own desires. As we see in teachings of the "Kål¥ Practice" in the BT, "women should not ever be coerced (ha†håd)… not even mentally" (6.343f).

The Text as Representation, as "Talk"

First, I want to suggest that the texts which document the sex rite may also themselves be understood in terms of their re-presentational force.28 After all, what we find here in the description of the sex rite in the BT, or the CT, is not sex, not even a depiction of sex, but a representation of how a particular imagined depiction of sex should occur. Here this representation refers to a distanced deed, which as deed, expressly incorporates language in a performative manner, and blurs the boundaries between the deed, the ritual language accompanying it, and the identity it formulates vis a vis a formal gestural incorporation of the body and its postures. As I suggest below, this use of the body and speech ritually especially acts to rescript identity, but a rescripting of identity also occurs through the textual representations of this rite and its location in a history of gods and their deeds. It would be a mistake to suppose these writers of Tantric texts did not have their own citational strategies for re-enacting new identities, even as they purported merely to simply reveal the already true and existing state of things. Like our own citational speech as academics, the speech of these texts purports to present an actual reality, even, however, as these late medieval authors at times clearly evince an awareness of how their speech reverses normative understanding, and in the process reconstructs new identities and new norms.

So for example we find that the God Íiva explains to ViΩˆu in the BT the rationale for transgressive behavior by citing a list of list of heinous transgressive crimes-- the Moon sleeping with the wife of the planet Jupiter, the sage Paraßuråma killing his own mother, the king Råma killing the demon Råvaˆa, along with others--and revisioning these crimes as part of an secret, unknown but efficacious practice for attaining enlightenment (BT 8.43ff). Now, it's fair to say that normatively, probably few of the

examples cited are elsewhere understood as acts culminating in enlightenment, or even intended to engender it, something which an author familiar with the stories in the first places would also know.

Rather the author(s)29 enact new identities for these gods and their deeds, even as they frame this speech as merely a citational reiteration of "what happened". Apart from this, that certain elements do not seem to fit--i.e., Råma's slaying of the demon Råvaˆa in battle is really nowhere considered a transgressive act--also clues us in to a precise self awareness of an author who recognizes the power of citational speech to reconfigure identity. This example suggests a certain deliberation on the part of this author(s) and suggests we take seriously a deliberate move by the author(s) to offer a syntax of revisioning and reappropriating this "speech" about the sex rite. This reappropriation highlights differences from other, perhaps more normative,30 descriptions of the sex rite, and occurs both on the level of gesture-- for instance where the man should completely and obsequiously bow to the woman-- something we do not find in an earlier version of the sex rite such as that of the 10th century Kulac¨∂åmaˆi Tantra (KCT)-- and on the level of speech which explicitly enjoins shifts in attitudes towards women--i.e., that they should not be lied to, or criticized.

The rite as Performative speech

Apart from the revisioning embedded in the discursive representation of the rite which the text offers, the gestural codes of the rite itself also serve to reappropriate the rite to enact new identity. We should keep in mind, first of all, that ritual speech itself presents the template for illocutionary or performative speech. This is, after all, how Austin originally frames the category, and the examples given by Butler and Langton

originally derive from ritual models. The examples given, the "I do" of the marriage ceremony, for instance, derive ultimately from a ritual context where speaking takes on a heightened power as a result of this ritual context. In discussing the performative speech act, Langton and Butler both focus on the authority of the speaker. What causes the performative speech act to be successful, that is, to not "misfire," in their view, is a vested authority in the speaker. So, when the ball game's umpire yells "fault," this performative act is successful in arresting the game and penalizing certain players, whereas the identical perception and shout of "fault" by a watching bystander is not equally successful. However, I suspect that this neglect of the ritual context in favor of a speaker's authority tends toward a reading which unduly stresses a modern Western idea of the individual and especially the individual as effective actor (paradoxically for Butler, pointing back to an assumption of the sovereign subject31).

On the other hand, if we focus on the rite itself as space where identity is formed, we discover a capacity for shifting identity not contingent upon an idea of a power held and disbursed by the individual (i.e., that coveted appellation of modern identity, here in a position of state-backed authority). The judge may pronounce the sentence but it is only in the context of the ritual space of the court that her sentencing of the defendant has any effect. The very same pronouncement over dinner with her spouse carries no performative effect, even if the content of her declaration to her spouse is identical. Framing the relation between speaker and act in this way, we reach a more diffuse model of power inhering in the act of enunciation itself, (a model, incidentally, closer to the model of power that Foucault suggested, where power is everywhere localized and unpredictable).

Of course these two, the speaker and the performative speech act, are always inextricable, however in the Indian context, traditionally we find important emphasis upon ritual speech in itself as inherently potent when it comes to making things happen in the world. The m¥må≤såist presupposition of the Vedic mantras as in themselves mechanically and extraordinarily effective attests to this power of speech, as does the suggestion that these mantras have no author, but are self-born. Similarly, the use and appropriation of mantras by low-caste persons also work with equal efficiency, despite that as low-caste, these persons are particularly deprived of socially vested authority. (The low-caste poet Kabir might be a good example to highlight this uncanny and unpredictable excess of speech as a tool for resistance against oppressive hierarchical social structures.32)

Especially for our comparatively ritual-deprived contemporary Western world, this, I hope, helps to engender a sense of the relative cultural perspective, to alert us to the ritual's peculiarly efficacious potential for enacting identity both spiritually and socially in this Indian context, and further to a sense that these authors of these Tantras were likely also aware of the rite's efficacy. What I want to stress in the preceding discussion is the power of the medium of a ritual context to rescript social identity. Just as the performative "I do" entails an entirely new social and legal identity for the couple just married, so ritual in general carries an performative force for shifting identity. That is, ritual speech and gesture is especially efficacious in shifting identity and enacting new identities for its performers. The Tantric sex rite in particular can be read especially as an instance of performing identity with an eye to channeling this propensity to enact identity towards preconceived intentions. We may even go so far to say that this sex rite in particular attempts to perfect a science of

enacting identity. That is, with this group of 15th -18th century texts, we focus on a creative reappropriation of sexuality through the sex rite, which I suggest works against the grain of a pervasive pornographic degradation and silencing of women which "talk" of sex often engenders. Specifically we examine how the elements of the rite serve precisely to shift away from conventional attitudes towards women which make them into objects. Instead, the rite inculcates a centrality and subjectivity for women, both in the construction of ritually incorporated gestures and in the ritual speech around women.

How does the rite work?

How does the rite work?

To begin with, it's a ritual performance of sex-- a scripted performance of that which in the West we mostly think should be spontaneous. Further, this scripted performance takes a few dramatic left-turns in comparison with its more usual "spontaneous" performances, specifically in employing this preconceived scripting to recode the relations of hierarchy between the genders.

We should also keep in mind here that as ritual performance, the recoding it enacts takes place on the level of the body. As Elaine Scarry (1985) points out, the use of the body is especially effective as a mechanism for rescripting identities, even as she dwells on a decidedly negative employment of this power, through the damage inflicted upon bodies as a means for unmaking the self-identities of those tortured. If we understand (as Scarry suggests) that the shifts in identity which occur through the body have an especially indelible effect on identity, then the Buddha's response to Vasiنha's question is one that takes into account a need to include the body in any project of enlightenment-- both in that the body itself takes on importance as the representative of materiality (and by extension, women) and in that the effects imprinted on the body have a peculiar staying power.

In another way also, the body as the medium of a powerful emotionally cathecting experience through sex also plays a role in the rescripting of identity. Sex is key because it emphasizes the contingency which is the body, and at the same time affords a space where the solipsistic subject loses itself, even becoming the object of another's pleasure, or situated outside the subjective experience of pleasure which one sees the other experiencing. In this sense, as Joan Copjec notes, the act of sex functions to "shatter the ego's boundaries" (2002: 58), opening a space for a new construction of identity. While sexuality may function to enact a variety of identities, for instance, in torture, in the degradation of identity enacted with rape, in the titillation which accompanies making women into objects in pornography,33 I suggest that the particular formulation of bodies in the grammar of this rite deliberately works to a different end. Functioning obliquely, most palpably outside the medium of words, these texts suggest that the rules of hierarchy encoded in the syntax of bodies might possibly be rewritten. Through a rescripting of the body's gestures--especially as these gestures unfold in an act as self shattering and volatile as sex-- the script is purposely altered away from the ordinary habitual gestural patterns which perform a social hierarchy of gender.34 Instead these rescripted gestures work to enact a recognition of the subjectivity of women. (And just the possibility of this uncommon use of sexuality I hope may help us in the West to rethink the ways which we presume sex functions, especially to rethink an unreflective assumption of sex as invariably merely titillating.)

The rescripting which this text mobilizes as a counter force to a normative hierarchy of genders pivots upon the idea of the body. This habitually inferior member of the mind/body dyad itself becomes the locus for rewriting identity. This may not be so surprising; the political resistance utilized by Bahktin in Stalin's USSR also deployed a 21 profoundly bodily centered conception with his image, for instance, of the laughing distended belly. And one might fruitfully suggest that there exists an affinity, which is not at all accidental, of the body with the very notion of the marginalized other, which would lend itself to exactly a subversive employment in the political economy of power.

The Sex Rite

What exactly is the sex rite? The sex rite is a ritual mostly lacking in Western religious contexts. It involves a ritual performance of sexual intercourse incorporated within a series of ritual actions focused on worshipping women. The reading I suggest here of the sex rite is one which has mostly not been put forward, which goes against the grain of how we have as scholars come to understand the use of sex in Tantra, and perhaps sex in general, and one which appears to be peculiar and specific to this group of 15th-18th century texts. That is, the BT's presentation of the sex rite appears especially to differ from earlier representations such as those we find in the KT or the KCT, especially in a few telling markers-- such as the advocacy of reverence towards women even outside the context of the rite-- which shift the power women have in the rite and outside it.

The sex rite in its representation in the BT is about moving away from a model of male mastery over women and over the body, and it uses the body to do this. This entails a shift in identity, recognizing women's subjectivity and it employs the body's gestures in the process. It promises and presupposes a different kind of world; as we see later on, the revelation of the rite itself is framed in a vision of a world without domination and fighting. The structure of the rite also counters the notion of male ascetic mastery and especially mastery over the body. This has broad implications because mastery of the body is mastery of women, and vice versa, since women are traditionally, historically 22 coded as "the body,"35 so if one eschews mastery over the body, this entails also a shift in attitudes towards women. Especially in the bodily gestures it encodes, the BT's rite proposes a shift in attitudes towards women. Finally, even in the rewards it promises, it moves away from ideas of mastery over nature. Throughout the BT, we keep coming back to the reward the text promises for the rite, and rather than powers over nature and the body—the power to fly, for instance—the text simply promises eloquence, a facility with language.

The basic outlines of the ritual involve a) seeking out the woman, b) worshipping her as one would worship a deity, c) the performance of the sexual act d) discussion of the attainments acquired via the worship of the woman, as well as usually e) a panegyric of women. To give a sense of the striking contrast these 15th-18th century Tantric texts present in the depiction of the rite, we'll note a difference found in a much earlier 10th century Tantric text like the KCT, a text which is especially appropriate for comparison since, like the BT, it also focuses on the transgressive sex rite, also upon the site of Kåmåkhyå, and also since the BT borrows from it at a number of places. For the KCT, the first step outlined above is intricately more elaborate in ways that might be best characterized as akin to a James Bond syndrome. So, in this 10th century text, in seeking out the woman, the male practitioner employs a variety of state-of-the-art gadgets,36 albeit a magical rather than physical technology is at work here, and further his irresistible attraction to women--who cannot restrain their passion for him, even if guarded with chains, miles away, they come to him, full of sexual excitement (KCT 3.6ff)37-- also faithfully parallels the operational male fantasy in a James Bond film. In complete contrast, this sort of depiction does not occur anywhere in the 2,804 verses and 24 chapters of the much later BT, despite that the BT borrows at numerous places from the

KCT. Instead, attracting women is neither a focus, nor otherwise an occasion for a lapse into male fantasy. And, perhaps because the BT advocates the wife as the preferred partner (BT 4.95), the BT essentially begins with, and focuses extensively upon the second step, how one goes about worshipping the woman.

The worship of the woman as deity centers on recognizing her subjectivity and her desires as central in the rite, not his. I suspect that a calculated effect of worshipping the live woman before him as Goddess is that it becomes more difficult for the male practitioner to construct woman as a distant idealized abstraction, more difficult to bifurcate woman into two categories, the denigrated woman he lives with and the distant idealized Goddess on a pedestal. (And, this effect would also no doubt be heightened by the BT's advocacy of the wife as the partner (BT 4.95ff). 38) The rite also shifts the relationship the practitioner has with the living woman before him to one which involves encoding an attitude of reverence. He seeks to please her by offering her the ritual implements offered to Gods, offerings of a seat, water for washing her feet, water as offering (arghyam), water for sipping, offerings of flowers and scents, a light, different fruits, etc. Beyond this the text prescribes also a personal attention to the physical body of the woman: for instance "arranging her hair with a variety of pleasing objects" (6.34). The aesthetic impulse here perhaps plays upon stereotypes of women as bodily/appearance oriented, and at the same time privileges rather than denigrates the representation of woman as physical presence, concerned with the body. This gesture may be read as reinforcing that the body should be his concern as well. On a double level that which is culturally "other," i.e., this more usually socially marginalized figure of woman, is here deified: first as woman, when he worships the woman as deity, and again as body, when he recognizes her body as the instantiation of

deity. Indeed a key element of this feminine discourse is the attention it gives to the embodied present.

Now, one of Foucault's most profound articulations was his reconstruction of subjectivity in terms of desire. Certainly he took his cue from Freud, explicitly in Freud's formulation of the id.39 For our purposes, the construction of subjectivity vis a vis desire is a key element of the Tantric sexual rite. In this case it is her desire that is paramount. "Whatever she desires, he should give her that, by which she will become especially pleased" (6.30b). This seemingly innocent textual prescription contains the seeds of resistance to the frequent suggestion that female desires should be channeled into fulfilling male ends. That is, her desire here is not pre-defined by his needs, but left open to her articulation. In effect, she partakes of that pervasive signifier of subjectivity, her own capacity for desire and pleasure. Prioritizing her desires over his effects a shift in the relations between the sexes. It overthrows that order so visibly exemplified in the ubiquitous rule that the wife should treat her husband as a god (devavat) (Manu Sm®ti 5.154). Visibly, literally, the rite reverses this dictum. Here the woman becomes the god, offered flowers, incense, fed.

For the Lawgiver Manu, of course, a reciprocity in the relations between men and women like this was never intended. The male as the "god on earth" (bh¨deva) expected and was accorded absolute veneration. Even on such a basic level as food-- typically in this culture males have the first right to food and whatever is left over is what women get. Food is a basic support for the body and self, and rescripting this priority of who eats first recognizes an existential right, and consequent subjectivity in the woman-- and we should keep in mind that unlike what we find elsewhere, for instance in the KCT, her deification for the Kål¥ Practice is not a temporary reversal of status, but something the 25 practitioner practices constantly. Again, we need to keep in mind that shift here exists on the level of textual discourse; I do not make claims regarding a historical recognition of women’s subjectivity through this rite, but rather the more modest claim that we find a textual articulation of a shift in the subjectivity accorded to women. The rite, then, purports to reconstruct both male and female identity, and their relations to each other. This man performing the worship of the living woman seated before him engages in a profound rearticulation of cosmology. The fact that the woman in front of him is a living woman is important, since it prevents him from constructing female divinity as an abstract form.

Also we should keep in mind that to worship God in a form which is at a core level, on the level of gendered identity, defined as different from him places him in the position of the marginal. He becomes the "other" of that which, following the German theologian Otto, we could construe as the "wholly other".40 Again what I think is key in the BT, what prevents this gesture from slipping back into a simple temporary reversal such as we find in other examples of liminal rites, the carnival, for instance--and in earlier Tantric texts--is that the "Kål¥ Practice" advocates this shift in attitudes towards women on a constant, permanent basis.41 Further, in another register, this text affords agency to the woman by giving her a say, a choice in her participation. The text urges against overpowering her, even against emotional abuse, and techniques for emotional or mental control. She may be invited but not ever coerced into the ritual. The BT's author(s) tells us: "Blaming, censuring a woman, humiliating, injuring her and attracting her by force [to the ritual] should not be done, not even mentally (BT 6.343b).42 Now, we do not see this in the KCT. Women are, there, objects to be gotten, by whatever means, and mantras just happen to be the most

effective. What does it mean, in contrast, for the BT to articulate this somewhat uncommon view? On the one hand, even to recognize that the woman might have a preference in whether or not to participate has already granted her a modicum of subjectivity. But further than this, stipulating this attention to the means of bringing her to the rite suggests a discursive attempt to shift the status of women, particularly since this includes “fuzzy” forms of manipulation, such as blaming or criticizing her.

"Flat on the Ground Like a Stick"

So far we see he worships her, feeds her, pleases her. In culmination the text prescribes that he should commit a profound gesture of submission. The male practitioner should bow to the woman in front of him in the most obsequious manner, "flat on the ground like a stick" (daˆ∂avat bhuvi) (BT: 6.40). With this explicit physical gesture, he does something a male in this medieval Hindu society typically never does, bowing down to a woman with whom he has sex. Particularly this full prostration is reserved for the guru, or perhaps a powerful temple deity, not usually a woman. Rather, typically the woman bows to the male, and universally the wife bows to the husband. When the reversal occurs, where he bows to the woman, the consequence is a restructuring of the order of things. The BT allows both for bowing to one's own wife as well as women of other castes, both higher and lower who are not his wife (BT 6.21) and also outside the context of the rite (BT 6.73f, also NST11.120f, CT 2.23ff). When the Tantrika bows, he accomplishes what Collins sees as the male allowing himself to be a "supportive self object," that is, to subordinate his own sense of self to her, a feat that Collins does not see happening in Såµkhya (2000: 66).

For a sense of contrast here, and to appreciate the import of this, the male practitioner bowing to a woman in the course of the sex rite does not occur in the much

earlier Kulårˆava Tantra or the KCT. In the KCT, during the sex rite the male practitioner bows to the guru (here a full prostration- daˆ∂avat bhuvi), but not at all to the woman he has sex with (KCT 2.37ff). Further, unlike the Kål¥ Practice, which as we noted earlier does not invoke the Goddess into the woman or women to be worshipped, the KCT explicitly requires that the Goddess be invoked (KCT 3.32), i.e., to "possess" the woman, this in a different context than the sex rite, and only in this "possessed" state does the practitioner bow to her. Immediately after this, the Goddess is ritually made to depart (namask®tyå vis®jyåiva KCT 3.48).43

Normally the Brahmin male, who has the prerogative to function as the guru, this “God walking on earth”, -- normally he is bowed to and he is the subject experiencing the world44. In the context of the transgressive sexual rite it is the woman's desires which become the focus of attention. What is secretly most transgressive in this reversal is a heady philosophical shift: desire transferred to the woman affords a subjectivity to that which should properly be construed as object. This gets iterated elsewhere in the BT when the God Íiva says: "O Goddess I am the body (deha) and you are the conscious spirit within the body (dehin)" (BT 7.86). That is, here the feminine principle, normally associated with matter (prak®ti) becomes the locus of consciousness—subjectivity, while the male principle, usually associated with the conscious subject, here becomes the object.

To flesh this out -- the pervasive classical conception of cosmology for medieval Hindu India encodes gender in an essentialist binary structure.45 The feminine is "Nature," Prak®ti. In this world she is object, absolutely inert dead matter. In contrast, the male is encoded as spirit, PuruΩa, who is consciousness, sentiency. This binary opposition is repeated in various permutations, as a mostly unquestioned structure. The

male is therefore classically the proper subject; the female "Nature" is object, profoundly denigrated as that which lacks real sentiency. To shift the subjectivity of these categories, against the weight of Såµkhya and nearly all of classical India,-- to make the feminine the subject is to enact a rewriting of male and female identity. Now, it is precisely this secret knowledge of the essential subjectivity and consciousness of the feminine which the God Íiva reveals as the secret essence of the sex rite (BT 7.85-87). Apart from other functions of this secret, one element to consider is the impetus for secrecy deriving from an imbedded social insubordination present here, one which calls to mind Butler's notion of recontextualizing labels as a way of resisting hegemonic

structures (1997a:39). We should keep in mind also that the Sanskrit word "spirit" (dehin) affords a host of images-- of an integral self, a soul, an idea of the essence which animates and affords the identity of self-hood. Further, this word (dehin) also suggests the concomitant presence of the inhabited body (deha). Especially key here is the incorporation of the body--even as the typical relegation of women to body is deconstructed by this author’s rescripting of who is body and who is soul. While an image of women as mere vessels precludes the possibility of agency on the part of women, this reversal of creative agency acknowledges an inherent agency to women. Further, this occurs explicitly within the context of recognizing that this female creative power, the Goddess, is everywhere present in the bodies of living, breathing, instantiated females46

Who's on Top?

The rewriting of gender hierarchy is again repeated spatially in the ritual. The BT announces the revelation of a highly potent "secret" (BT: 6.76): the sex act performed where the woman is on top of the man (vipar¥tarati), a specific Tantric practice found also

in earlier Tantras such as the KCT47. The use of the word vipar¥ta "reverse" is revealing. Monier Williams' Sanskrit dictionary, in addition to defining it as "reverse" also glosses the word as "perverse" "wrong" "inauspicious" "contrary to rule" "false", etc. Typically it connotes a sense of transgression, that which opposes normative behavior and hierarchies. The extra merit attached to the inversion of the sexual position in this case probably does not correspond with some supposed increase in physical pleasure for the male practitioner, instead it represents graphically and ritually, in the spaces and contortions of physical bodies, a recoding of hierarchies. Who's "on top" reverberates through to encode the lessons of privilege onto the body.48

Again, to get a sense of the cultural significance of this, we should note that the text of the Kåma S¨tra, which lists such an incredible profusion of postures for making love, does not include this very simple position of "perverse love-making" where the woman is on top and the male penetrates from below. For the text of this infamous ars erotica, the only time that the woman is on "top" is when she is no longer "woman". If the woman is on top, acting out the "perverse love-making" (vipar¥tarati), for the Kåma S¨tra, she acts like a man (puruΩåyita), and she takes some instrument, a rod (sahayya), which she then uses as a phallus to penetrate her partner, who is thus designated as the female (Kåma S¨tra 8.1). The woman on "top" in the Tantric rite, however, is still a woman, and the male is just as male as he was before, only he penetrates from below. What does it mean to place the woman (or man) "on top"? Certainly this "perverse" form and the fact that it is encoded as "perverse" refers more to orthodox discourse about the relations between the genders than it does to what would probably be actual sexual practices. That is, we come back to the notion that this text constructs a discourse which it uses to shift or enact identity. Could one read this "perverse" reversal

as an abrogation of a male impetus to dominate? A mute sign, it could of course be read in a variety of ways.49 Yet, however one reads it, a certain political implication is unavoidable. Putting the woman on top, according this normatively marginalized "other" the superior place suggests a rescripting of women's role, a move away from a dominating gestural posture towards them.

The transgressive sex rite and an ethic against war and fighting

In the 7th chapter of the BT, the Goddess Pårvat¥ asks the God Íiva to tell her the procedure for the transgressive sex practice (7.82). The God agrees, and reveals to her that the secret teaching of the sex rite is a rescripting of feminine identity, one which rejects a denigration of the feminine as unconscious inert matter. Rather, the secret which the sex rite teaches is an understanding of feminine identity as pure spirit, the principle which animates all life (dehin, åtman BT 7.86-87). Here this "talk" especially recodes female identity to incorporate a notion of female subjectivity. Spirit, the marker of self as subjectivity, is accorded to woman.

Following this he appears to think better of his agreement to reveal the practice, since he would not only be revealing this to her, but also to the rest of creation. Presumably she would pass this knowledge on to humans as well as other beings, gods, demons, and the Indian equivalent of fairies, among others. The God's objection to the revelation of this powerful truth is that most of the world's inhabitants-- whether human, divine, or semi-divine, animal or demonic-- are "engaged in bad deeds". Most are very stupid (ja∂atara); "the nature of all these is such that all are mutually fighting in battle" (7.89f). In a manner resembling the hagiographical Buddha's initial hesitation at teaching the dharma to uncomprehending humans, it is the inadequacy of these stupidly competitive beings, constantly fighting amongst themselves, that causes the God to hold

his tongue. The Goddess then cajoles him with a hymn praising his compassion (7.92ff), which causes him to relent. This dramatic device serves to psychologically frame the author's agenda-- the textually necessary revelation of the procedure for the rite. At the same time it insinuates both a cosmology-- that the Goddess in essence occupies the place of the subject; she is pure consciousness, spirit-- and it also offers as well a psychological profile of the Goddess-- as a fount of compassion. With this, the text echoes a pronouncement we find later in the text on what it means to be a Goddess-- she is what causes love (prematvam, i.e., neither lust nor cupidity), to exist in the world (BT 12.15). In this sense the teaching of the sex rite is framed as both a reconfiguration of gender relations, and a shift to a better kind of ethic, a move away from a senseless competitive "mutual fighting." At least in the mind of this 15th- 18th century author(s), the worship of the Goddess, through the use of the sex rite entails a vision of both a recognition of women's subjectivity and a vision of a better world, where warfare is not the norm. To come back to Monier-Williams' early Western representations of Tantra, the disjunction between these two worlds' understanding of women is profound. Monier William's early 20th century assertion that any sort of worship that might be connected with Goddesses or the feminine could only inevitably result in the worst of possible worlds, an inevitable "degenerate" "licentiousness"-- stands in poignant contrast to the BT's author(s) suggestion that this transgressive worship of the Goddess offers hope as a radical ethical counterpoint to a world of senseless violence.

1 This section is lifted from the Kulårˆava Tantra 2.117-119, edited by Tårånåtha Vidyåratna with an introduction by Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), (Madras: Ganesh and Company, 1965; reprint,

Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975). In fact the C¥nåcåra Tantra (CT), in Tantrasa∫graha. Edited by Vrajvallabha Dvived¥, Yogatantragranthamålå Series, vol. 8 Part 5. (Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, 1996), borrows extensively from the Kulårˆava Tantra and reworks it, modifying it and adding some new material. One also notices here that this assumes that women are not in the loop of getting enlightenment through sex, (unless the text assumes that women are also having intercourse with women). The Buddha's response to VasiΩ†ha's question here is elusive; he simply praises the kula path as the highest and as leading to liberation. 2 Recent television series, such as the television series of the epics Råmåyaˆa and the Mahåbhårata aptly enforce this image with a benign and pious VasiΩ†ha as the epitome of brahminical propriety. For a good literary example of the popular representation of VasiΩ†ha as the calm and pure

Brahmin, see R.K. Narayan's Gods, Demons and Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd Edition, 1993), p.64-84. 3 From 10,000 years in CT 1.14, the figure is reduced to 1000 years in his subsequent conversation with Brahmå (CT 1.24). Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition, (London: Ryder & Co., 1965; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1975), p. 69, cites a similar, though somewhat different story as derived from the Brahmayåmala, though without giving an indication of where in the Brahmayåmala one might find this. David White cites an earlier version of this story found in the Rudrayåmala, which differs from the version in the CT, especially in that in the Rudrayåmala version, VasiΩ†ha

comes across sages drinking (menstrual) blood in David White, The Kiss of the Yogin¥, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 76, whereas in the CT, after VasiΩ†ha's story is told, Íiva relates a similar parallel story, but where the God Brahmå comes across the sages, and not drinking blood, but drinking wine (madyapåna CT 5.17). 4 Even as Tårå rebukes VasiΩ†ha, she maintains a polite demeanor, addressing him as "bhavån", a term of respect, and as "best of sages" (CT 1.42). 5 Here an incarnation of the Hindu God ViΩˆu (CT 1.43) 6 The eight texts are: (1)B®hann¥la Tantra (BT), a long text published in 1984 and based in part on an earlier and shorter published version entitled the N¥la Tantra (NT), edited by Madhusudan Kaul (New Delhi: Butala and Co., 1984 reprint of Srinagar: no pub., 1941, likely a volume in the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, but not trackable ). For a list of editions before the volume used here, see Teun Goudriaan and Sanjukta Gupta, History of Indian Literature, Vol. II,2: Hindu Tantric and

Íåkta Literature , (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1981), 88n; this does not include the 1965 version of the N¥la Tantra , edited by Bhadrasheel Sharma, (Prayag: Kalyan Mandir. (2)C¥nåcåra Tantra (CT), in Tantrasa∫graha . Edited by Vrajvallabha Dvived¥, Yogatantragranthamålå Series, vol. 8 Part 5. (Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, 1996), (3) Gandharva Tantra (GT). The version of the GT used here is the volume 3 of the Tantrasa∫graha in the Yogatantragranthamålå series edited by Gopinath Kaviraj with Vrajvallabha Dvived¥ and Ramprasåd Tripath¥ (Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University Press, 1992). (4) Gupta Sådhana Tantra (GST) in Tantrasa∫graha . Edited by Vrajvallabha Dvived¥, Yogatantragranthamålå Series, vol. 8 Part 5. (Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University , 1996). (5) Måyå Tantra (MT) in Tantrasa∫graha . Edited by Vrajvallabha Dvived¥, Yogatantragranthamålå Series, vol. 8 Part 5. (Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University , 1996). (6) N¥lasaraswat¥ Tantra

(NST), edited by Dr. Brahmanand Tripath¥ with Hindi commentary by S.N. Khandelwal, (Varanasi: Chaukhamba Surbharati Prakashan, 1999). (7) Phetkåriˆ¥ Tantra (PhT), in Tantrasa∫graha , 3rd ed. Edited by M.M. Gopinath Kaviraj. In Yogatantragranthamålå Series, vol. 4, Part 2, Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University , 2002. (8) Yoni Tantra (YT), edited with an introduction by J.A. Schoterman, (Delhi: Manohar, 1980).and minimally, the S%arvavijay¥ Tantra (SVT) in Tantrasa∫graha . Edited by Vrajvallabha Dvived¥, Yogatantragranthamålå Series, vol. 8 Part 5. (Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University , 1996). The specific version I focus on for the sex rite derives especially from the BT (7.112ff), with similar versions in PhT (11.18ff), MT (11.5ff), CT (3.13ff), YT (7.10ff), GT (35.54ff), which I also draw upon. Elsewhere (forthcoming) I examine in greater detail this set of texts. For this article in general I focus mostly upon the BT and the CT, using also occasionally the 10th century Kulac¨∂åmaˆ¥ Tantram

(KCT), edited by Gir¥sh Candra Vedåntat¥rtha. In Tantrik Texts , ed. Arthur Avalon, vol. 4, London: Luzac & Co., 1915, reprint, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, n.d. as a point of contrast. 7 White's brilliant detailed analysis is probably one of the best analyses of this, but his is not isolated. Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition, (London: Ryder & Co., 1965; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1975) p. 304ff, also presents this picture as does Davidson's recent study of Buddhist Tantra in Ronald Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism . (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), (2002: 92ff, especially 97). For the power of flight, see White (Kiss, p. 196ff). White, in particular, admirably pays attention to historical shifts and nuances in the use of Tantric sex, contrasting, for instance, the view of the Kulårˆava Tantra and other Kaula texts with Abhinavagupta's school; although his examination of

texts has tended to exclude the group of texts I examine here. So, while in a number of cases, the Kaulajñånanirˆåya, edited with an introduction by P.C. Bagchi, translated by Michael McGee, Tantra Granthamala, no. 12, (Varanasi: Prachya Prakashan, 1986), for instance, even in the Kulac¨∂åmaˆi Tantra, from which the BT borrows considerably, I would concur with this assessment of women's role in Tantra, the point here is that we should not understand this as always the case. Even keeping this in mind, a greater diversity within and between texts needs to be noted. So, for instance, the BT tends on the whole to neglect the use of fluids as a practice, whereas it does figure in the CT and the YT, two other texts used for this study. See footnote 3 above for an example

of a difference in fluid practices between the CT and an earlier text cited by White. Also in a forthcoming study I address in greater detail differences between the earlier texts and texts used in this study. 8 See footnote 6. The BT is one of the longest and most coherent of this group of eight "left-handed" or transgressive Tantras we use here. In a forthcoming work I discuss these eight texts, 9 Forthcoming. 10 See footnote 6 for the texts used in this study. 11 It also differs, coincidentally, from the slightly later and Western influenced Mahånirvåˆa Tantra, with the commentary of Hariharånanda Bharat¥, edited by Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe). Tantrik Texts, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989 [reprint from Madras: 1929]), which also tends towards what I read as a less empowering vision of women, even as the Mahånirvåˆa Tantra incorporates Western

notions of a chivalric protection of women. 12 Since we look through the lens of a text whose authorship cannot be definitively pinned to male or female (though given the cultural context, I would more likely venture the guess of a male author), the question of agency is one place removed, and difficult to address here; so we do not address here the larger question of agency for women in this context. 13 Even when the practitioner is otherwise unworthy and impure of heart, and the deity knows it, she or he is still constrained to offer a boon, albeit frequently with a tricky loophole. Some especially well-known example would include the demons Råvaˆa, Tåraka, Hiranyakaßipu, MahiΩåsura, but also numerous others. 14 Pintchman, Tracy. The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition , (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), p.201. See also

Susan Wadley, "Women and the Hindu Tradition," in Doranne Jacobson and Susan S. Wadley, eds., Women in India: Two Perspectives (Columbia, Missouri: South Asia Books, 1977) p.118f, who articulates this view, connecting it to the married or unmarried state of a woman or Goddess, with the former being auspicious and the latter dangerous as does William Sax, Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 31f. 15 One might suggest she acts more like the finicky guru Marpa who repeatedly rejects Milarepa's architectural efforts than like the terrific and beneficent Goddess we find in the Dev¥ Måhåtmya. 16 The quote I cite from Monier Monier-Williams below is a good example of this 19th century consternation over a perceived impropriety and prurience discovered in Tantric practice. Also see Hugh

Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) for attention 19th European reactions to Tantra. 17 The CT, of course names the special practice as "the Chinese Conduct" or, "the Tibetan Conduct" (c¥nåcåra). For the sake of consistency I keep the English nomenclature of the "Kål¥ Practice" throughout this book, since, as I note in a forthcoming work, that of the three names given to this practice, the name "Kål¥ Practice," while less frequently applied than "the Chinese Conduct" is preferable to this latter because so much of Chinese and Tibetan practice does not in the slightest resemble this particular praxis and it would be confusing and misleading to label this practice with a contemporary national identity. Also, since the essence of the practice revolves around the worship of female

Goddesses, specifically Kål¥ and Tårå, taking this particular name from the texts captures the general impetus of the praxis best. 18 The Sanskrit here is: "tåsåµ prahåranindåñca kau†ilyamapriyantathå sarvathå naiva kartavyam". The quote here also enjoins in general not doing things which women don't like (apriyaµ). 19 Again, I discuss this in detail in a forthcoming work. 20 The Sanskrit word here, niΩevaˆa from the root sev, carries a double connotation of serving, and worshipping and also having sexual intercourse with someone. 21 I discuss in greater detail in a forthcoming work this special "Kål¥ Practice" and how it conjoins with a particular recognition of women's attainments. In the BT see BT 6.73f; also for instance, NST11.120f. 22 See Footnote 20.

I especially appreciate Miranda Shaw's Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), reconfiguration in precisely this direction. And while I think it would be premature to rule out the possibility that some of these texts may have had female authors, given the historical and archival limitations of this project, I do not have sufficient evidence to

substantiate this claim. Elsewhere (forthcoming) I discuss an example of a more typical Tantric representation of women which contrasts the view here. Also I think that Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 80f, problematization of the idea of a subject, as a sovereign agent is a useful distinction, and one that surfaces here mostly in a demarcation of limits as far as what can be accurately gleaned from these textual sources in terms of what agency women actually had. I also am indebted to a comment made by Laurie Patton at a recent AAR, directed to someone else which again iterated the need for distinguishing between an

idea of a subject and agency. 24 Elsewhere (forthcoming) I discuss the ordinary, non-possessed woman as goddess, in contrast to a more typical Tantric ritual worship of a woman as goddess who is possessed by a goddess. 25 In a number of cases, the Kaulajñånanirˆåya for instance, I would concur with this assessment. See footnote 7 above. 26 Curiously VasiΩ†ha's attitude is oddly reminiscent here of much of the way that contemporary science-genetic manipulation of crops for instance, suggest that more and greater scientific manipulation of Nature will force Nature to submit to human will. 27 And even for VasiΩ†ha, as his question to Buddha in the epigraph here indicates. Elsewhere (forthcoming) I

discuss the "pornographic" element ascribed to Tantra by the West. 28If one were to analyze the speech patterns of the BT or the CT in terms of the terms of Austin (which one might read, in fact, as what the M¥må≤såists did for the ≈Rg Veda employing similar, though indigenous, terminology), then the majority of speech would fall under the category of perlocutionary, speech which effects certain actions secondarily. Stories told throughout, like the story of VasiΩ†ha with the Buddha might be conceived as a type of citational speech, describing mythic encounters, which nevertheless, likely held a certain "historicity" for the writers and readers of these texts. 29 A different but structurally similar example of revisioning the gods and their deeds occurs in the YT 4.6ff. I consistently use the plural also because given the way these texts accumulate, it

is likely the text had more than one author. 30 It seems odd to be talking about "normative" versions of this clearly marginalized practice. With this I only mean to suggest that among texts which describe this rite, interpretations like those White gives (2002) seem to fit most frequently and to predominate. 31 See Judith Butler Excitable

Speech: A Politics of the Performative . New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 78 and passim for a fine analysis of Western notions of sovereignty and the subject, even though I suspect it creeps back in at this juncture. 32 Specifically, the apocryphal story of his initiation by the Brahmin Råmånanda highlights how it is the power of the word itself as mantra, which is powerful in effecting change; his lack of social qualification to obtain it has no bearing. See Linda Hess' Bijak of Kabir. (North Point Press, San Francisco 1983). 33 As Rae Langton, "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts." Philosophy and Public Affairs 22, no.4 (Autumn 1993): 293-330, suggests. 34 With this I am

indebted to Butler's formulation of identity as that which is continuously performed in our relations with others on a daily basis in Psychic Life. Where I would add to Butler here is that, in addition, the rite especially seeks to consciously channel this performing of identity. 35 This extends also to the idea of "feminine" Nature (prak®ti) and

"feminine" earth (bh¨dev¥). 36 Of course I'm stretching the translation of yantra here, which elsewhere in Sanskrit has the connotations of a mechanical device, since this copper or hand-drawn plate that the seeker uses in this case is a gadget only in the sense that it is designed for invariable and mechanically manipulable effects. However, in

a more important—functional--way I think it is quite analogous to James Bond's use of gadgets. 37 See also KCT 3.4-3.10, KCT 4.22-4.34, KCT 5.25-5.31. The imagery here is also similar to a James Bond film with her "rolling eyes" and "waist trembling from the weight of her breasts" (KCT 3.7), after which the male practitioner subdues her with his power; an insinuated virility is implied (KCT 3.10). 38 I focus on this element elsewhere (forthcoming). 39 And perhaps, as Judith Butler suggests, in an indirect assimilation of the Hegelian portrayal of the relationship between master and bondsman (Psychic Life, p. 32).

Here one is reminded of Lacan's suggestion that the woman is ultimately the Other, as it begins to coincide with God in Jacques Lacan, Encore: XXth Seminar, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). 41 I address this specifically elsewhere (forthcoming) where I treat the Kål¥ Practice". 42 B®hann¥la Tantra 6.343b-344a "par¥våda˙ paråbh¨tir ha†håd åkarΩaˆaµ striyå˙ || manasåpi na kartavyaµ devi siddhiµ yad¥cchati |" 43 The closest we get to seeing the KCT practitioner bow to women is KCT 3.58, where we don't quite see him bow, but at least that women of all castes are worthy here of being bowed to (namasyå˙). This apparently, however, is a mental operation which he carries out presumably not in front of actual women, but

while taking a bath or rising in the morning. I suspect that even this gesture from the 10th century presents earlier incipient and inchoate beginnings of the more developed tradition we find in the “Kål¥ Practice” by the 15-18th centuries. 44 In the classical, orthodox view he is the subject desiring the world which he must ultimately reject as illusion in a gesture of renunciatory asceticism. 45 Specifically here I refer to the Såµkhya view which underlies nearly all of Indian cosmology. 46 BT 6.301: “Everywhere what takes the form of the feminine, that is the visible manifestation of you, [in] the female of animals, the female of birds and the female of humans, O auspicious lady." 47 See also footnote 49 below. 48 In her insightful and tantalizing article on Íaiva temple ritual Helene Brunner, "The Sexual Aspect of the Li∫ga Cult According to the Saiddhåntika Scriptures." In G. Oberhammer, ed., Studies in Hinduism II: Miscellanea to the Phenomenon of Tantras ,. (Wien: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der

Wissenschaften, 1998), pp. 87-103, reconstructs the original model for the establishment of the aniconic image of the God Íiva in the temple. While the central focus of her article is that the installation of the aniconic image, the li∫ga, (the phallic shaped image of the God Íiva) in the temple is a ritual replication of the sexual act, in the process, without dwelling at great length on it, she points out a feature relevant for our discussion here. She notes that the positioning of the li∫ga which represents the male genital principle and the yoni (the p¥†ha, the part of the image which represents the female genital element in the icon) upsets the normal hierarchy of the genders. The

"sexual act" which the ritual installation of the icon replicates, reverses the normative male-on-top spatial relation between the sexes (Brunner, "Sexual" p. 95f). In a seemingly offhanded, yet conspiratorial gesture, the image in the temple inverts the "missionary position," instead putting the woman on top-- replicating in all those thousands of Íiva temples all over India what our Tantric texts call the highly potent and transgressive form of "perverse love-making" (vipar¥tarati). 49 For instance Edward Dimock, Place of the Hidden Moon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 104, reads the transgression in the Tantric ritual, without addressing this gendered posture reversal, in terms of a liminal state which reestablishes the normative order. This reverse posture occurs not only in this group of 15th-18th century texts. One finds it in a variety of texts dealing with the transgressive sex rite. I suspect that like some of the inchoate turns towards a reverence toward women which we find in an earlier text like the KCT (see endnote 43), it represents an incipient direction which the BT then develops.