Some Highlighted Passages from Wedemeyer's 'Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism'

I've finally finished reading 'Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism' by Christian Wedemeyer. I started on the book the better part of a year ago, making steady progress until classes resumed. Now with Thanksgiving, I've been able to give it the time it deserved. 

This is the first scholarly work on Tantra I've yet read (also the first scholarly work of history and semiology, so there was a period of adjustment there), and this book is a good antidote to misinformation from other sources. Wedemeyer is especially concerned with errors of history and interpretation of Tantra, and he lays out some very, very large errors in the current literature, some of which I had absorbed second-hand through the writing of David Chapman. I'll be writing up a reflection on these disagreements swiftly. 

Definition and Elaboration of Tantra, and the Setup for his ultimate Thesis

As the term will be used in what follows, Tantric Buddhism comprehends those forms of esoteric Buddhism that are nondualist in their conceptualization of ritual purity and pollution and are, accordingly, antinomian or transgressive in their ritual praxis and scriptural discourses.

(p. 9). 

Within esoteric Buddhism, there are discernible, clear divergences regarding at least two forms of dualism: that between the divine and the practitioner and that between the pure and the impure. Some forms of esoteric Buddhism maintain a doubly dualistic ritual and doctrinal platform in which, on the one hand, substantial attention is paid to the maintenance of ritual purity regarding conduct within and without the rites, and, on the other, the practitioner relates to the divine as petitioner, interlocutor, or invoker, but is never identified with the divine itself. Other forms of esoteric Buddhism break down the dualism between the practitioner and the divine—allowing the practitioner to adopt the identity of a divinity or divinities in ritual/meditative practice—yet nonetheless lay relatively marked stress upon the maintenance of rules of ritual purity. Finally, other forms of esoteric Buddhism—those that form the primary subject matter of this book—are thoroughly nondualistic insofar as they ritually collapse the distinction between the divine and the human and that between the pure and the impure. The sacred scriptures of these latter traditions come to be called the Mahāyoga (“Great Yoga”) or Yoginī (“Female Yoga Practitioner”) Tantras;

(p. 10). 

In this mode of communication, a complete sign in natural language (in this case, the signifier–signified complex of transgression and ritual pollution) functions as a signifier in a higher order cultural discourse. At this higher, performative level, the signified is the attainment of the goal of advanced Tantric practice: non-dual gnosis (advayajñāna).

(p. 12).

... although the rhetorical divergence of dualist (nontransgressive, “institutional”) and nondualist (transgressive, “siddha”) Tantric traditions has been explained by postulating two independent communities, there is no good reason to infer a sociological cleavage based on a rhetorical one. In fact, the available evidence clearly suggests to the contrary that it was precisely the cultural milieu of the conservative monastic institutions from which these radical movements emerged.

 (p. 12).

Wedemeyer dismisses conventional scholarly understandings of Tantra's origins, and criticizes the historiographical obsession with origins

The notion that Tantric Buddhism was created to accommodate degenerate tendencies in the Buddhist monastic community, whose members sought pleasures of the flesh prohibited them by the disciplinary rules of the order, is perhaps the easiest to dismiss. It is, after all, an example of the clumsiest sort of origin tale: a “just so” story. Much like the account of how the elephant got his nose (or the tiger his stripes) or other such folk etiologies, there is no real evidence for this view at all. It is entirely speculative, based upon a series of assumptions about men, their desires, and their behavior. Indeed, insofar as some have sought to found it more solidly upon literary evidence, this is limited to farcical, bawdy representations in Sanskrit satires, such as the Mattavilāsaprahasana, or tendentious allegories, such as the Prabodhacandrodaya.

(p. 23). 

...

Related note:

See R. Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism, 242. This argument is predicated on the evidence of the farce play, the Mattavilāsaprahasana, wherein (as Davidson tells it) a Buddhist monk character laments “that the elders were hiding the real scriptures wherein the Buddha extolled the benefits of drinking wine and making love to nubile women.” Davidson concludes, “if the seventh-century monk could not find the scriptures that he suspected his superiors had kept from him, by the eighth century siddhas had successfully located the holy texts through the act of composition.”

(p. 214). 

Accounts of origins, then, are fundamentally the product of the historian (of religion)’s constructive activity in identifying a most central aspect of the tradition. Dubuisson, in fact, argues that a scholarly focus on the origins of things is fundamentally mythical, not scientific, for “the typical and almost exclusive question posed by myths is that of origins” and “the fascination that the human sciences have for such simple, ‘theological’ explanations [that reduce the infinite diversity of reality to a principle or to a unique, ontologically homogenous cause] probably represents the greatest obstacle that they have to overturn and overcome.”

Analogies can easily be found in the human sciences. Clothing, for instance, is likewise not susceptible to a monocausal account of origins that serves as a totalizing interpretative key to its historical meanings. It very well may have been originally crafted for the purpose of warmth, but if clothing as a human phenomenon is consistently interpreted in light of this it will introduce major distortions. A tremendous amount of the cultural life of societies is devoted to clothing without much, if any, reference to its actual pragmatic value. If a scholar were to define its origins and to attune her cultural interpretations accordingly, she could not in fact be said to understand clothing in any but the most superficial and ahistorical sense. Much the same can be said of the Tantric Buddhist traditions. Were one to find a satisfactory account of its origins—and, as I have endeavored already to show, this has not successfully been accomplished to date—one will certainly “make sense,” but one would still be no closer to understanding Tantric Buddhism. Scholars, consequently, would be best served by getting out of the origins business. 

(pp. 34-35). 

Wedemeyer criticizes the historiographical obsession with fitting facts into predetermined metaphors and narratives of history

Louis Mink, whose marvelous essays on the Historical Understanding were much admired by White, has described a widespread (albeit naive) attitude in historiography that claims (implicitly) that “the historian…finds the story already hidden in what his data are evidence for; he is creative in the invention of research techniques to expose it, not in the art of narrative construction.” Mink, quite rightly, finds this view highly problematical. It is the historian, after all, who imparts identity, meaning, and narrative function to the data at her disposal. The narrative role and, thus, the historical meaning of any historical fact are in themselves indeterminate. Any event may be cast in a variety of narrative contexts and serve a variety of narrative functions, while remaining entirely faithful to the historical record. At the most basic level, events may be cast as either a beginning, a middle, or an end: the three fundamental elements of narrative according to Aristotle. However, while Aristotle seems to have believed that events were naturally and necessarily so structured, such is demonstrably not the case.

...

Yet, in what way do [the events of Indian independence] cohere in a unified narrative? Did these events constitute, for instance, the end of British rule of the subcontinent? Were they instead a median point in larger processes of social and political change taking place in South Asia? Or were they the beginning—the dawning—of a new age and a new order? It is all, I would say, and none, and more than these. To use a Buddhist idiom, these are saṃvṛtisatya, not paramārthasatya: Each is a reality conjured forth by the consensual agreement of a signifying community, not realities that exist in and of themselves.

(p. 39). 

It was precisely [the archetype of decadent Rome's fall] that informed the fashioning of the history of Tantric Buddhism. Given the basic datum so strikingly evident to writers of British India—the absence of a Buddhist presence and, hence, the ostensible disappearance of Indian Buddhism—one needed to account for this fact historically. For many, Tantrism fit the exigencies of narrative quite nicely, providing a familiar and easily-digestible account. The idea most commonly associated with Tantra from the outset (and still widespread today) was sex; and sex, of course, was associated with decadence. Inevitably, this conception of the Tantric traditions suggested to the narrative imagination of the nineteenth century the classical archetype of the decline and fall.

(pp. 47-48).

[T.W. Rhys Davids writes, with Wedemeyer's emphases]:

Gibbon has shown us, in his great masterpiece, how interesting and instructive the story of such a decline and fall can be made. And it is not unreasonable to hope that, when the authorities, especially the Buddhist Sanskrit texts, shall have been made accessible, and the sites shall have been explored, the materials will be available from which some historian of the future will be able to piece together a story, equally interesting and equally instructive, of the decline and fall of Buddhism in India.

In case there had been any doubt about the fundamental, formative influence of precritical, fictive, theoretical models on the construction of Indian Buddhist history, here there can be no question. Rhys Davids indicates in essence that, before scholars have even collected the evidence available from literary and archaeological remains, they can a priori assume a narrative structure along the lines of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s masterwork had allowed a new way of making sense of the fall of a hugely successful enterprise (Rome); some such account was seemingly needed to understand India’s loss of Buddhism as well.

(p. 49).

Wedemeyer switches to criticizing a different narrative theory

In the early twentieth century, with the narrative of decline firmly established in scholarly discourses, a second historical model emerged that told a very different story of the history of Tantric Buddhism. This new rhetoric seems originally to have been the product largely of Indian (chiefly Bengali) scholars but was quickly taken up and amplified by the more Romantically-inclined interpreters of the West. The core idea of this narrative is that the Tantric traditions represent the primordial religion of the Indian subcontinent that was driven underground by the invading Āryans whose patriarchal, Vedic religion established itself on top of this earlier, matriarchal tradition, which was dominated thereafter but never entirely extinguished.

(p. 51). 

[Wedemeyer outlines Jakob Bachofen's Mutterrecht (Mother-power) theory of ancient Mediterranean cultures]

If the reader is beginning once again to experience a sense of déjà vu, she will be perfectly entitled to feel so. It is, after all, transparently obvious that the elaboration of the narrative of Tantric Buddhism as an archaic and primitive religious formation, deriving from a matriarchal culture associated with the earth and the body—a culture that was preclassical and declined due to the victory of a later, classical, patriarchal people—is precisely predicated on this vision of the universal existence of archaic matriarchal cultures elaborated by Bachofen and the many he influenced.

(p. 55). 

[Describing how this latter interpretation grew as a rejection of the former]

In response to this (Enlightenment) conceptual structure, there arose as well a (Romantic) counter-narrative. As often happens in the case of such hegemonic ideologies, however, the counterculture accepted the basic premises of their opponents’ perspective. They did not challenge the temporal and cultural binaries themselves, but merely inverted their valuation—valorizing the ancient and the primitive (though rarely the feminine).

(p. 57). 

Wedemeyer describes and classifies many methods of epistemic legitimation and revelation in Buddhist communities

According to some trends in early Buddhism, prior buddhas—including Gautama after his passing—were in general unavailable for further spiritual assistance. The incredible salvific power attributed to the Buddha—such that the liberation of beings from the endless round of suffering was frequently thought to have been occasioned by his mere presence—was considered (with few exceptions) confined to the short window of his limited sojourn of eighty years in his final incarnation. After his passing, this power was thought to persist in an attenuated fashion in his bodily relics, speech relics (in the form of the teachings of dharma), and (for a few generations at least) those considered liberated saints in his community (saṅgha). All of these, it was thought, would fade in the course of some centuries, leaving the world a spiritual wasteland until the coming of the next buddha, Maitreya. Such enlightened beings, however, were believed to come only when the fluctuating lifespan of humanity was one hundred years: a circumstance that was thought to transpire at most every thousand years. Thus, the Buddhist communities who adopted this perspective considered themselves as living in a world between buddhas, preserving the precious few, remaining fragments of Gautama Buddha’s legacy in text and monument, and seeking to emulate his ideal of moral discipline and mental development for the good of self and other, so as to prepare themselves for the advent of Maitreya in some future life.

(pp. 71-72). 

All the Buddhist communities of which we know allowed for the existence of a number of buddhas other than Gautama. In fact, in the view of many early Buddhist schools (with the notable exception of the Mahāvihāravāsin branch that came to dominate later Theravāda), buddhas were considered “infinite in both space and time”—a view that became normative for the later Mahāyāna movements.

(p. 74).

[In light of the infinity of buddhas], the true dharma (saddharma) is being constantly taught by buddhas in an array of universes. Śākyamuni, in this perspective, is merely a local—and somewhat peripheral—transmitter of this teaching. Further, this true dharma consists of the teachings of the way of the bodhisattvas (bodhisattvayāna), not the mainstream teachings of the way of the śrāvakas (śrāvakayāna). These latter, in contrast, are depicted as the unique teachings of Śākyamuni, the expression of his distinctive pedagogical genius, devised for the limited and unimaginative beings of his especially recalcitrant buddhafield.

(p. 76). 

Related note: 

For example, the stories of the prior buddhas Candrasūryapradīpa (in chapter 1, the “Nidānaparivarta”) or Mahābhijñājñānābhibhū (in chapter 7, the “Pūrvayogaparivarta”), both of whom taught the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka “in a past time, incalculable æons, yet more incalculably long, immeasurably, inconceivably, infinitely, inestimably long, long ago” (atīte ’dhvani asaṃkhyeyaiḥ kalpair asamkhyeyatarair vipulair aprameyair acintyair aparimitair apramāṇais tataḥ pareṇa parataraṃ [or, paratareṇa] yadâsīt; Vaidya, ed., 11 and 104).

(pp. 226-227).

[Wedemeyer gives many examples of accepted scriptures not claimed to have been originally taught by the buddha, rather delivered through other means, such as treasure revelations and face-to-face latter-day revelations by gods and buddhas]

The Samādhi of Face-to-Face Confrontation also speaks of scriptures being sequestered in caves or other secret places to be extracted and revealed to the world in later times by bodhisattvas who have pledged to reincarnate then for that purpose. In particular, it is worth noting that the sūtra describes its text as being placed inside a stūpa after the death of the Buddha, to be guarded by gods and snake-spirits (nāga) until the time arrives for them to be re-revealed by the predestined bodhisattvas.

(p. 77). 

In sum, the constitutive imagination of the Mahāyāna communities was quite different from that reflected in the ideal-typical notion of a Buddhism dependent upon the ephemeral teachings of Śākyamuni. Rather, these groups conceived of the divine power of the buddhas as being omnipresent in space and time, and of the teachings of the dharma as being universally available to those spiritually so attuned.

(p. 78). 

[Wedemeyer describes a narrative of Śākyamuni's enlightenment found in the Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha (STTS: “Compendium of the Reality of All Transcendent Lords”)]

Upon his enlightenment, they escort him to the pinnacle of Mt. Sumeru to a storied palace with an adamant-, gem-, and jewel-encrusted dome, where they seat him on the lion throne of all transcendent lords. That is, he is taken to a place very much like the setting for the revelation of the Mahāvairocana Tantra. In fact, the homology is straightforward: The four transcendent lords other than Vairocana seat themselves in the cardinal directions, forming a maṇḍala around Śākyamuni, who is subsequently referred to as the transcendent lord Vairocana. In this account, the Buddha is not merely presented as a conduit for the ancient and eternal teaching of all the buddhas; rather, he becomes a disciple of all the buddhas who occasion his enlightenment through teaching and initiation. As a consequence of this reframing, Śākyamuni becomes a subordinate, albeit significant, character from a spiritual point of view: Luke Skywalker to the Jedi Council of the cosmic buddhas, as it were.

(p. 82). 

To comprehend properly the function of the historical discourses of Mahā/Vajrayāna Buddhists in context, it is perhaps helpful to think about the Buddha less as a concrete human being, and instead to understand the manner in which “Buddha” served an ongoing epistemic function in Buddhist cultures. For the esoteric Buddhist traditions, clearly, Buddha was not a historical Buddha (and certainly not “the” historical Buddha of some modern scholars and Buddhists), but an epistemic Buddha. Throughout the Buddhist world, the word of the Buddha is considered equivalent to truth and vice versa. Hence, the famous statement that “whatever is well said [i.e., true] was said by the Buddha.”

(p. 97). 

It is essential to understand that this process is by no means limited to mystical religious traditions such as Tantric Buddhism and Śaivism, but was a fundamental feature of Indian cultural discourse in virtually all fields. During the same first-millennium period that witnessed the revelation of the Mahāyāna and Mantrayāna scriptures, similarly consensual understandings deriving from years of social experience across the cultural spectrum were crystallized into major statements of theoretical and practical knowledge. Yet, due to the aforementioned axiom that all that is good and true must have been known of old by divine or semidivine beings, these knowledge systems too were attributed to miraculous revelations.

(p. 98). 

Wedemeyer discusses the problems of interpretation of the semiotically complex Tantric scriptures

After a classical Tantric statement that “you should kill living beings, speak lying words, take what is not given, consort with the women of others” (i.e., break four of the five basic Buddhist moral rules), the [Hevajra] Tantra itself interprets this passage to mean that one “kills living beings” by “developing one-pointed cognition by destroying the life-breath of discursive thought;” that one lies by vowing to save all sentient beings; and so on.

(pp. 109-110). 

[This is, in fact, not too different from rhetoric found in exoteric scriptures, and there are non-dualistic esoteric scriptures where literal interpretations are recommended, as seen below]

For instance, in chapter 8 of the Guhyasamāja Tantra, there is a half-verse which runs, roughly translated, “one should always smear feces, urine, water, and so on, in order to worship the Victors.” Here the literal meaning seems clear as day: It is typical Tantric disgustingness, obviously, claiming that one should offer worship to the buddhas by the slathering of such foul substances as raw sewage. However, although that might seem literal, it is in fact itself already interpretative. What is meant in this passage by “feces and urine” is, in fact, feces and urine. However, unlike many occurrences of these terms in the Tantra, in this context what is meant (as confirmed by the commentaries in a gloss that in no way seems forced) is cow dung and cow urine. Such a smearing of feces, urine, water, and the like, is then (to an Indian eye) quite normal and not foul or disgusting in any way. In orthodox Indian ritual contexts one routinely smears cow dung, urine, and water to purify a ritual site: There is nothing revolting, transgressive, or Tantric about it. As Freud is reputed to have quipped, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…”

(p. 111). 

In order to grasp the semiosis implicit in the consumption of the meats and ambrosias at the climactic moment of the Tantric sādhana, it is essential to understand what these substances signify in the overarching discourse of contemporaneous, mainstream Indian culture. Bhattacharyya’s suggestion that these meats were delicious luxuries much desired by a repressed Buddhist ecclesia could not be further from the mark. I do not believe we are justified in maintaining that they appear in the Tantras merely because they are tasty and the monks were seeking scriptural legitimation for an exotic barbeque.

[rather,]

... contact with the five meats and the five ambrosias so absolutely violates the most central purity strictures in Indian society that reference to them in Tantric Buddhist ritual and scripture could only have constituted a deliberate semiosis.

...

The Tantric literature does not, therefore, as some would have it, reflect the naïve importation of marginal tribal magical techniques that just happened to be repulsive to the cultural mainstream. Rather, the authors of the Tantras were speaking precisely the mainstream cultural language of Indian society and pushing its buttons in such a systematic fashion that it could only have been deliberate.

(pp. 118-120).

...

Related note:

Shiníchi Tsuda (“Original Formation,” 110–111) has also made this point, albeit in a somewhat different context: “it was in fact the expectation of the ‘author’ of [the Guhyasamāja] that this Tantric attitude of assuming intentionally the appearance of extreme obscenity by removing the worldly distinctions of good and evil or purity and defilement would be looked upon with astonishment or abhorrence by the people of the world or the people of commonsense.”

(p. 239). 

What is essential to the signification of the rite are the five meats and five ambrosias as signs, insofar as they function as signifiers in the higher order system. In the natural language out of which that sign is borrowed, the actual signifier is, as de Saussure insists, arbitrary. Thus, I would argue, the question that has troubled modern scholarship—is it “shit” or not?—is beside the point. In fact, much the same seems to have been indicated by authors of the Guhyasamāja Tantra itself—even in its earliest stratum (chapters 1 to 12). In chapter 12, after enumerating a set of five yogic accomplishments that correspond to eating each of the five meats, the text blithely notes that “if all these kinds of meat cannot be obtained, while meditating, one should conceive [of them] as really existent.” The concrete reality of flesh as a denoted signified is extraneous; what matters is its significance within the community of speakers of the Tantric yogin/ī.

(p. 125). 

[If you're looking for a maximally transgressive statement, something so over the top it renders the Tantric scriptures impossible to parody, it is here]

On the other hand, I believe this semiosis can also be clearly and unmistakably discerned in the narratives of Tantric scripture. There are a number of important episodes internal to the Guhyasamāja Tantra itself, which I feel very strongly corroborate the view that these discourses are not meant to be taken as a direct, simple acts of denotative signification, but that—in scripture as well as in ritual—it is the experience of nondual gnosis that is the primary object signified. For instance, in a key passage that appears in GST chapter 5—a passage that has attracted a great deal of attention from modern scholars in that it is one of the most consistently and blatantly Tantric (i.e., transgressive) in the entire text—the Lord Buddha Vajradhara teaches the assembled buddhas and bodhisattvas that “even those who commit great sins such as the inexpiable sins (ānantarya) will be successful in this buddha vehicle, the great ocean of the Universal Vehicle (mahāyāna).” Further, he teaches that those who violate the most basic Buddhist precepts—who take life, lie, steal, and are sex-maniacs—and even, notably, those who eat feces and drink urine, are considered by him to be “fit for the sādhana” (bhavyās te khalu sādhane). In a final flourish, he informs the assembly that those who commit incest with mother, sister, or daughter, will “attain vast success,” while the one who makes love to the Buddha’s own mother will attain buddhahood. At the conclusion of this pithy teaching, the bodhisattvas in attendance are said to have been “amazed and astonished.” Why, they ask, is this bad speech (durbhāṣita) being spoken in the midst of the enlightened assembly? To this query, the buddhas in attendance reply that they should not speak so: That this is the pure teaching of all the buddhas. Upon hearing this reply, the bodhisattvas are so overwhelmed that they actually pass out, whereupon the Lord has to rouse them by the light rays of the meditative samādhi called (notably) the space-like nondual vajra (ākāśasamatādvayavajra).

(p. 127). 

Wedemeyer examines the role of transgression in the Tantric Scriptures

As I think should be clear, the simple notion of a “transgressive sacrality”—“the ritual inversion of social taboos, as a way of laying claim to psychological and physical powers repressed by social convention”—is inadequate to interpret the materials analyzed here. 

(p. 131)

[That is to say, Tantra is not like e.g. Satanism, where inversions are used as a source of rebellion and power. Tantra does not, as we shall see later in the book, seek to destabilize or invert the society around it, but to support it.]

Moreover, it would seem as if the entirety of the prior Buddhist traditions is to be cast aside: These scriptures proscribe basic Buddhist devotional acts, scriptural recitation, ascetic disciplines, and a whole range of nonantinomian esoteric rites, such as fire-offerings, maṇḍala rituals, and mantra recitation.

(p. 133). 

[In other words, part of Tantric practice isn't just performing Tantric rituals, but abstaining from the regular practices of ordinary Buddhism. This leads some to assume that Tantric practice as totally separate from ordinary Buddhist communities, but as Wedemeyer shows later, this is erroneous; Tantric practices were the culmination of more socially acceptable practices by highly experienced buddhist practitioners, lay and monastic alike]

Wedemeyer focuses on the misinterpretation of various terms of art in the Tantras

What, then, is the caryāvrata? In short, in the nondualist Tantric literature of the Buddhist Mahāyoga and Yoginī Tantras, this term and its equivalents come to encapsulate virtually all those features that have come most strongly to be associated with Tantrism (or so-called “Siddha Tantrism”) in the modern mind: Sex, to be sure, but also eerie places (cemeteries, lonely fearsome forests, etc.), eccentric dress, and ecstatic behavior, including the wholesale rejection of the mainstream practices of exoteric Indian religion.

(p. 138). 

[Caryāvrata, and the similar term vratacaryā, is a compound of two terms, both roughly meaning 'religious observance/spiritual undertaking', and in this compound refer to tantric practices. The typical assumption Wedemeyer critiques is to assume that these are the typical, everyday practices of the tantrika, as fire offerings and asceticism are to the non-tantrika, but evidence indicates this is actually the capital-P Practice, the rare and major rituals rather than everyday activity.]

...the undertaking of the caryāvrata is a way of viscerally instantiating and ritually attesting to the attainment of the aim of Buddhist Tantric yogins: a nondual gnosis that sees through (and acts without regard for) the delusive sense that the constructed categories of conceptual thought are real and objective.

(p. 145). 

However, the failure of modern scholars to notice that what seemed to be descriptions of quotidian Tantric practice were in fact references to a very special observance has resulted in widespread misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the tradition. This was not just generic practice, or a practice, but “The Practice” extraordinaire—an occasional, time-delimited practice to be undertaken by elite practitioners. Having identified this distinctive usage, and given the fact that it is pervasive in literature, the contours of scholarly interpretation of esoteric Buddhism (and esoteric Śaivism) will necessarily change rather dramatically.

(p. 168). 

Wedemeyer hones in on his major thesis as to the place of transgressive Tantra in the ecosystem of Indian Buddhist life

There are, in fact, very good reasons to believe that the transgressive (siddha) communities were from the start entirely integrated with the nontransgressive esoteric Buddhist (institutional) communities, growing from and remaining well within the same cultural sphere, addressing similar concerns in their clients with similar ritual arsenals. There are, for instance, numerous indications that when transgressive practitioners did retire to socially marginal locations this move was entirely contrived. That is, these were privileged, educated Buddhist professionals (monks or quasi-monks [dedicated, professional lay religious]) affecting social marginality (and the associated ritual impurity) as an expression of the logic of the preeminent ritual observance of the nondualist traditions, The Practice. Additionally, attention to the divergences in rhetoric between the nontransgressive and transgressive traditions reveals that the latter does not reflect an independent ritual and social milieu, but rather an intimate awareness and tacit acceptance of the traditions of the former. Finally, although rejection of the mores and strictures of mainstream Buddhism and dualistic esotericism may seem on the surface to indicate a radical challenge, cultural criticism has more than adequately established that such inversions as frequently play a conservative, as a radical, social function.

(pp. 172-173). 

Subsequently, Triśaraṇa is said to have “checked out the sites for The Practice, Manobhaṅga and Cittaviśrāma.” That is, after he had become an accomplished Tantric master (siddha) through Nāgārjuna’s guidance, he investigated the conditions at various sacred places wherein he might undertake the caryāvrata. When he had settled on a site, the reader is told, Triśaraṇa then “adopted the guise of a śabara and resided there.” There is no ambiguity here: The boy was raised in mainstream society; he practices Tantric Buddhism, becomes a master in his own right, and he contrives the appearance of a low-status tribal as an element of his transgressive observance of cultivated impurity.

(p. 174). 

...

Such references occur frequently and are certainly more convincing than, for instance, the narrative that appears in *Abhayadatta’s Stories of the Eighty-four Siddhas. In this latter work, heavily relied upon by scholars even though it is almost certainly a Tibetan apocryphon, the siddha Śabara is presented as a tribal hunter (śabara) who is converted by Avalokiteśvara, who reveals to him the sufferings of hell so that he gives up his un-right livelihood and becomes a compassionate, vegetarian bodhisattva. This narrative is scarcely credible: It is precisely the sort of story one would expect to be composed (as such stories quite frequently frequently are) merely on the basis of a figure’s name by authors who had no other information at hand (and needed to fill out a list of eighty-four).

(p. 175). 

The authors of the antinomian traditions were nothing if not Buddhist professionals. The scriptures they revealed are composed (with some few exceptions) in standard Sanskrit, a learned language. Even the “barbaric” Apabhraṃśa that is the linguistic medium for many of the transgressive Tantras was nothing more or less than a “pan-Indic koine”: Like Pali, both were “learned languages and at least as dependent on the textbook as Sanskrit itself.” Even more intriguing perhaps, given what we have seen earlier concerning the contrived marginality of the Tantric ethos, authors would employ Apabhraṃśa precisely “to suggest rural simplicity and joyful vulgarity.” Further, as noted in great detail in chapters 4 and 5, the scriptures of these traditions clearly reveal a specialized knowledge of Buddhist categories of ethics, philosophy, and cosmology such as could only have come from a learned professional.

(pp. 183-184). 

Here one might object: Even if we accept that the Tantric esoterists knew the literature and ritual regimen of nontransgressive esoterism, surely—advocating the transgressive program that they did—the siddha leaders and their communities must have located themselves elsewhere, outside the fold of “institutional” esoterism. How could two such diametrically opposed systems have occupied the same ritual and social space without conflict? There might be some merit in this objection were it not so obviously the case that these inversions served the purpose, not of overturning the standard mainstream and esoteric Buddhist programs, but of reinforcing them.

(p. 188). 

...

As Bruce Lincoln has noted: 

For all that inversion can be an effective instrument of agitation… dominant orders are capable of employing their own symbolic inversions…. To be sure it is a powerful act to turn the world upside down, but a simple 180-degree rotation is not difficult to undo. An order twice inverted is an order restored, perhaps even strengthened as a result of the exercise.

(p. 189).