Transgressive Sacrality in Hinduism & the World Religions
Dedicated to ELIZABETH to whom I have had so little else to offer�
Sunthar Visuvalingam
"The annulment of the Torah is
its fulfillment"
(Talmud Menahot 99b; the messianic motto adopted by the Sabbatians)
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Transgressive Sacrality in Hinduism and the Indian Traditions
The Symbolic Communication of Transgressive Sacrality: The Clown of the Sanskrit Drama (Vid�shaka)
Psychoanalysis and the Ethical Problem of Transgressive Sacrality
Transgressive Sacrality as the basis of Inter-religious Dialogue
It is important to clearly distinguish the phenomenon of transgressive sacrality in a religious tradition from the well-known opposition between orthodoxy and heresy. A religion is defined by its imposition of a specific system of observances and interdictions, binding on all its adherents and even more so on its spiritual elite. Heresy (or heterodoxy) challenges some of these doctrines, observances and interdictions and seeks to substitute new ones in their place, and in this way a new sectarian orthodoxy is established that can do without, survive and even aim at completely usurping and replacing the mother-religion. Where the original observances and interdictions are violated, this is merely the inevitable consequence of the adoption of new rules and doctrines which seek to wholly invalidate and replace the former, and not because any specific value is placed on the fact of transgression itself. This would be the relation between Buddhism and Brahmanism, Christianity and Judaism, Shiism and Sunnite Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism, to mention only the best-known examples.
‘Transgressive sacrality’ within a religious tradition is something completely different for, though violating the interdictions and observances of the tradition in question, it does not seek to replace the latter. Instead it lays claim to a superior degree and second order of spirituality derived precisely from the violation of socioreligious interdictions whose general validity and binding force is not at all questioned by the transgressor. In fact, transgressive sacrality cannot operate without the existence of such binding and powerful taboos, and often presents itself as an esoteric form of the mother-religion, the latter serving as the exoteric prerequisite and recruiting ground for it. Unlike heterodoxy, which publicly questions and challenges the authority of the mother-religion, the adepts of transgressive sacrality often paradoxically play the role of champions of orthodox religion in the public life of their respective communities. Thus the brahmanicide Bhairava, guilty of the most heinous socioreligious crime in Hindu society and whose mythic model is imitated ritually by transgressive ascetics like the K�p�likas, is simultaneously the policeman-magistrate of the socioreligious order and the guardian of the territorial limits of the sacred city of Varanasi. Where such sacrality finds expression in well-defined initiatic currents, like Tantricism or the P�shupata ‘sect’ in India, one often finds a graded development from the neophyte, observing more rigorous interdictions and a more intense asceticism than that generally prescribed by the public religion, to the adept, who is required to flagrantly violate even the most fundamental taboos of his society. This type of sacrality finds its most spectacular expression in the phenomenon of ‘ritual clowning’ in primitive religions, like that of the Pueblo Koyemshi, where the highest specialists of the sacred publicly violate fundamental taboos before the half-terrified half-amused spectators of the tribe, whose entire religion would seem to be founded on the observance of these very taboos, which the clowns indeed help maintain by their ridiculous negative example.
Transgressive Sacrality in Hinduism and the Indian Traditions
Taking the ritual clown (Vid�shaka) of the Sanskrit drama as the point of departure, I am at present working on "The Semiotics of the Vid�shaka: The Ideology of Transgression in Brahmanical India" (towards a Paris D.Litt. degree), which attempts to reconstruct the unity of the submerged discourse on/of transgression in India by considering all its diverse manifestations. Indian religiosity generally conjures up before our eyes the self-denial of the yogin or Jaina mendicant practicing severe asceticism, the world-renouncing sannysin who competes with the Buddhist monk in his quest of the Absolute Reality of Brahman, the precarious ritual purity of the orthodox brahman shying away from all defilement, the hagiography of the saint (bhakta) intoxicated with the universal love of God, the devout householder on pilgrimage to shrines of various deities, the ethico-rational outlook of ‘Protestant’ Buddhism that has still survived in Sri Lanka, the stubborn and bloody persistence of ‘pre-Aryan’ folk-religion which has been tolerated because of their (reluctant but at least nominal) subordination to ‘classical’ norms, the chaste devotion of a S�t� exaggerated in practices like sat� and/or the stable socio-religious hierarchy where everyone knows his proper place. Yet deeper familiarity with the tradition confronts us with various distinctly religious—and, at first sight, unconnected—phenomena which flagrantly contradict the above tableau and seem to constitute regular eruptions, within the ideal world of the pure, luminous sacred, of an active underground ideology of transgression that finds in the deliberate manipulation of impurity, violence, sensuality and, yes, what we might even be tempted to call ‘evil’, depths of the sacred inaccessible to those reluctant to trespass the bounds of the upper-world. Let us rapidly survey some of the typical phenomena I am in this way obliged to try and comprehend.
There are ascetics like the K�p�likas, P�shupatas, Aghoris, having their Vedic predecessors in figures like the Vr�tya, who indulge in various forms of ritualized anti-social behavior easily spilling into the criminal domain, or who specialize in the manipulation of impurities: for this reason, they tend to be written off as ‘marginal sects’. It is impossible to reduce these currents to popular, licentious, anti-brahmanical movements obliged to assume a pseudo-religious garb. They were all renouncers seeking spiritual liberation through truly penitential and ascetic practices which were inextricably combined with radically transgressive elements to form integral spiritual disciplines. The K�p�lika’s terrible ritual penance corresponds exactly to the punishment prescribed in the brahmanical law-books for brahmanicides. The P�shupata, though obliged to perform lewd obscene gestures in the proximity of women, must however avoid all contact with them; in its classical form it was meant specially for brahmans. Then there are left-hand Tantrics like the Kaulas, many of them brahmans, who live within society as householders and publicly participate in its values, and yet break fundamental taboos like the incest barrier secretly under special ritual conditions. In one play, the Vid�shaka is depicted in open collusion with a Kaula adept called ‘Bliss of Bhairava’ (Bhairav�nanda), who extols the transgressive practices of the Kaula-tantras but is nevertheless venerated by the royal hero. Corresponding to the cult practice, we are confronted in the mythology by transgressive divinities who assume terrifying or sometimes ridiculous aspects.
It is the overbearing fifth-head of the god Brahm�, who represents the values of the pure self-controlled brahman class, that is lopped off by the transgressor-god Bhairava. The tantric depiction of this head subsequently receiving esoteric doctrines from his very decapitator precludes all attempts to interpret the myth as reflecting no more than the clash between orthodox brahmanism and a popular extra-Vedic Bhairava cult, and rather points to a central transgressive dimension hidden in the very heart of brahmanism. For this fifth-head, also the central head, is more often characterized by wholly unbrahmanical traits especially the incestuous desire for his own daughter Sarasvat�, retained from his hallowed Vedic predecessor, Praj�pati, who later came to embody the entire brahmanical sacrifice. The ‘pre-classical’ sacrificer, on being initiated (d�kshita), regressed into the dark embryonic realm of Varuna—another principal Vedic divinity with transgressive notations—to be charged with evil and impurity, with a ‘dangerous sacredness,’ before he emerged therefrom by discharging this evil and impurity onto the officiating brahman priest, who in this way came to represent the initiated condition in himself as it were. In the ritual drama, the couple, constituted by the sacrificer/initiate (or sacrificer/brahman-priest) and defined by a cooperative rivalry, forms a paradoxical biunity which seems to be the very model of the inseparable (sacrificer =) hero / Vid�shaka (= initiated condition, brahman-priest) pair in the secularized drama. The avowed helper of his friend, the hero, the selfless Vid�shaka is seen repeatedly bungling his friend’s designs, often in very suggestive situations, before the drama (-sacrifice) is willy-nilly brought to a successful issue. The initiate is typologically related to other mythico-ritual figures like the brahmac�rin, Vrsh�kapi, Vr�tya, P�shupata, etc., who indulge like him in ritual abuse, obscenities and blabbering nonsense. All these transgressive traits, and more, find condensed expression in the Vid�shaka, whose obscene abuse of the maids may be understood as a displacement of what is finally directed at the heroine herself, who is sure enough presided over by Sarasvat�. Always a brahman, the Vid�shaka is indeed protected by Omk�ra, which is the symbol par excellence of Brahman; he is nevertheless is regularly depicted profaning all the values of classical brahman-hood, so as to earn the mocking label of ‘brahm�n par excellence’ (mah�br�hmana). Yet constant allusions, sometimes teasing, are made to the formidable (magical) powers of the apparently timid and gluttonous Vid�shaka, who revels in making abrupt enigmatic remarks dismissed as puerile jokes. Now the term ‘br�hman’ itself is originally believed to have signified both ‘mana’ and ‘enigma’, and recent anthropological studies have sought to demonstrate that mana as power is unleashed through transgression, and that the key to the enigma is likewise hidden in transgression. The mytheme of decapitation, like that of brahmanicide, indeed signifies transgression: to ‘over-ask’ (ati-prcch)—that is, to ask beyond one’s understanding—in the riddle-contest is to risk the loss of one’s head.
Among the sixty-three Shaiva saints canonized by the official hagiography, we are confronted by twenty-four cases of violent and ‘fanatical’ modes of bhakti. One readily gives away his wife to Shiva disguised as a lecherous brahman, and kills those relatives who try to oppose this ‘meritorious’ act. Another dismembers his beloved only child-in a manner reminiscent of Abraham’s (would-be) sacrifice of Isaac (or Ishmael)—to cook him for his revered host, an otherwise implacable Bhairava-ascetic. A hunter spontaneously worships the sacred linga by desecrating its purity with meat, saliva, dirt and even blood: he is said to be the reincarnation of Arjuna, the ideal Hindu king, who himself attained his magico-religious powers (symbolized by the P�shupata weapon) precisely through the embrace of Shiva appearing as a tribal hunter. (Attempts at) suicide in order avoid injuring other ‘slaves’ of Shiva are depicted with sacrificial notations: ultimately, Shiva’s possession of the debased devotee through love (anpu), at the very height of his paroxysm, reflects the original self-sacrifice of the god himself. The Shaiva social orthodoxy rationalizes the examples of these saints, who are enshrined in all the nuclear Tamil temples, not as an imperfect groping towards true bhakti but, rather, as the ultimate fruition of the constant worship of God through more conventional modes. Despite its unique character as a mode of spirituality, Hindu ‘love of God’ seems to articulate, through its transgressive dimension, the overlapping values both of Vedic sacrifice and of shamanizing possession.
The pious Hindu householder who, with his family, regularly visits the temples and occasionally undertakes an arduous pilgrimage to a distant shrine, could have nothing further from his thoughts than transgression. He may visit the K�la-Bhairava temple of Varanasi on the occasion of the important festival of Bhairav�shtam� to pay obeisance to the protector of the sacred city just as he would worship some other god like Ganesha. Yet this festival finds justification only in the same origin-myth that defines Bhairava as a transgressive—even criminal—divinity, and the temple-walls retain all the symbolism of his bearing Brahm�’s skull and being accompanied by his (black) dog, the most impure of animals. Things are no better if he instead approaches the pot-bellied crooked-trunked Ganesha, whose syllable is Omk�ra and who is brahmanical enough for his worship to be enjoined before all auspicious undertakings. For he was worshipped in certain left-hand sects in a transgressive manner, with meat, wine and sexual orgies, in forms corresponding to those of Bhairava. The symbolism of his iconography is invested with these transgressive significations. In this aspect he has penetrated into the Tibetan and Far-Eastern religions as well. The Vid�shaka too is not averse to meat nor wine and shares his obsession for rounded sweet-meats, which symbolize sexual bliss; in one play this glutton is actually called ‘big-bellied’ (Mahodara) one of the names of Ganesha. He always carries a crooked stick matching Ganesha’s trunk in its phallic signification. His constant assimilation to a ‘brown monkey’ points to yet another model: the Vedic Vrsh�kapi who sought to molest his own ‘mother’ Indr�n�, wife of the royal Indra, with the connivance of the latter. If in despair the pilgrim finally flees for refuge to the benign vegetarian virgin Vaishno Dev�, Bhairava is already waiting for him there, for all the stages of the pilgrimage are modeled on the incidents of Bhairava’s pursuit of the goddess to violate her sexually after he, the senior-most disciple of Gorakhn�th, was refused meat and wine by her. Bhairava’s decapitation by the Goddess, after his passage through the womb cave of this ‘primordial virgin’ (�di-kum�r�), and his subsequent consecration as her foremost devotee, in reality underlies the scenario of Hindu pilgrimage everywhere. The founding myths of the Tamil temples—where the transcendent divinity is otherwise worshipped according to strict rules of purity—are based on the paradigm of a violent and bloody self-sacrifice of the deity to the Mother-Goddess in a marriage that is simultaneously a rebirth from her virgin-womb. Indeed, Bhairava was absolved from his brahmanicide at Varanasi only when he dipped into the Gang� at a particular ‘fish-womb’ (matsyodar�) conjunction when the entire sacred city was enveloped by her maternal waters. This transgressive god of the K�p�likas seems to provide the model for all Hindus who arrive in Banaras in search of final emancipation (moksha).
Every other temple the Hindu visits has Bhairava as the guardian door-keeper. Converting to Jainism does not help much when even the Jainas have adopted him, sometimes under the name of M�nabhadra, as door-keeper. His foremost center of pilgrimage in Rajasthan is the shrine of Nakoda Bhairava within the Jaina temple to P�rshvan�tha. Jainas and Hindus frequent the site more for the sake of this ‘subsidiary’ deity, before whom many enter into a state of trance, than for the veneration of the exemplary Jaina ascetic. Perhaps because of its (self-) image of extreme asceticism and non-violence, the role of tantricism in the Jaina tradition still needs to be adequately addressed. Radical tantricism seems to have developed within the ‘ethico-rational’ Buddhist world-view in tandem with, if not prior to, its explicit formulation through a specifically Hindu idiom. In the sole surviving ‘Hindu’ kingdom of Nepal, it is the Buddhist Vajr�c�ryas who seem to be the true custodians of the secrets of Bhairava. They officiate especially at the royal level of the Newar cult, for example, in the twelve-yearly festival of Pachali Bhairava, who possesses a low-caste Buddhist dancer in order to renew the power of the Hindu king through a ritual exchange of swords. Truly striking is the crucial role of Newar Buddhism in generalizing and consolidating—even without the direct participation of the Hindu brahmans—a socio-religious model that is still modeled on the ‘pre-classical’ Vedic sacrifice. Fleeing to Tibet is not much of a solution when the ‘Yellow-Hat’ Gelugpa orthodoxy has adopted (Vajra-) Bhairava within its esoteric core. The central myth of ‘Red Hat’ doctrine and practice is the liberating murder of the demonized Rudra (-Shiva) by (a Buddhist divinity identified with) Bhairava (Jigs-byed)—but in a scenario that underlines the consubstantiality of the killer and his victim. Not only is this discourse saturated with K�p�lika notations; the paradigm, along with some of its motifs, can be traced to Vedic roots. The point here is that the symbolism of transgression is omnipresent and inescapable in Indian religious culture, even when the fact is denied or absent.
The shamanistic possession and blood-letting that characterizes folk religion has often been contrasted with and opposed to the sober ‘brahmanical’ insistence on purity and non-violence. Its subordination to the latter ‘great tradition’ would be reflected in the manner in which carnivorous local deities — and the relatively impure social groups that worship them — are ranked below the pan-Indian vegetarian deities within the hierarchical order of the Hindu pantheon. What could then be more natural—especially for an anthropologist formed within an ‘egalitarian’ culture—to see in the antinomian traits of some of these ‘criminal gods’ and converted ‘demon-devotees’ the futile expression of deep-rooted resentment, perhaps mixed with a vengeful envy, against the socio-religious domination of the brahmans? In the relentless pursuit of his ‘brahmanicidal’ passion for the virgin �ryam�lai, the daughter of a thousand Vedic brahmans, the untouchable trickster-god, K�ttavar�yan—so popular among Tamil audiences—wreaks mischief by upsetting all hierarchies, before he finally undergoes his inevitable punishment. The problem, however, is that this deviant ‘son’ of Shiva insists on consummating his passion—his predestined ‘marriage’ to the sacrificial stake—even when it is discovered that he is himself a brahman, and hence a suitable match for the coveted bride. It is no doubt easy for the underprivileged to identify with the rebellious hero who is put on a par, even equated, with the "king of the �ryan city" whose order he subverts. Taken together with all the other symbolic notations in the narrative, it is difficult not to conclude that (not only Tamil) folklore has thereby only served all the better as an entertaining medium for conserving and elaborating the transgressive dimension of the brahmanized d�kshita.
The socially inferior Hindu woman is not only educated in all the arts but also granted unlimited erotic satisfaction and liberation within the sacred precincts of the temple-walls which, adorned with ascetic-and-courtesan motifs and soaring to the pinnacles of orgiastic ecstasy, project her heavenward as voluptuous nymphs (apsaras). It is in the same temple that the chaste Hindu wife, bound in matrimonial subservience to her husband, comes to pray and make offerings for the weal of her family. But within the secret tantric rituals the distinction between the courtesan and the familial woman would appear to become blurred. Indeed, one may wonder to what reality the adulterous beauties (abhis�rik�) extolled so effusively by the Sanskrit poets correspond� For the active role of the female partner in the transgressive sexuality of these rituals is explicitly justified by reference to the indispensable, if only passive, presence of the sacrificer’s wife during his performance of Vedic sacrifice. The tantric aspects of the ‘matriarchal’ cult of the Mother-Goddess in her bloodthirsty forms like K�l�, C�mund�, Chinnamast�, etc, are too well-known. The Tamil Goddess Ank�lamman, the focus of a cremation-ground cult which involves the bloody removal of a foetus from a pregnant goat, would appear, at first sight, to be primarily the concern of the untouchable fishermen who are her devotees. Yet, her founding myths relate the violent obstetrics to (the renewal of) kingship within a triangular relationship that equates the profane palace, the pure brahmanical temple (at Tiruvann�malai) and the impurity of death. It is here, in the cremation-ground, where she resides as the termite-mound, itself a womb-symbol, that the skull-bearing Shiva (-Bhairava), finally liberated from his brahmanicide, would have reunited with his consort to form the primordial androgyne. The (royal) sacrificer too was conceived as regressing into the womb of his wife-mother, with whom he formed an indissociable pair (dampat�). The consecration even transformed him (temporarily) into a brahman: it is for this reason that the effigy of the pregnant queen-goddess in the cremation-ground is itself assimilated to (the corpse of) a brahman-woman. It would be easy to demonstrate that the practice of sat� is also derived from the same complex of ideas surrounding the wife of the sacrificer. Whatever the socio-historical origins of these mother-goddesses, they have been harnessed to exteriorize and render explicit—even and especially at the folk-level—the transgressive dimension hidden within the heart of the patriarchal brahmanical tradition.
The Hindu king who, despite his apparent secularization, is in many ways the pivot of the socio-religious order, is described in his primordial mythical prototype of Vena, as having an irredeemable evil and impure dimension that is expelled from him in the form of an untouchable outcast. Transgressive notations are not lacking in the mythology, ritual and representations of kingship as including the office of the royal chaplain. Bhairava himself has inherited the legacy of brahmanicide from Indra, the king of the gods, one of whose characteristic deeds is the slaying of his brahman chaplain ‘Omniform’ (Vishvar�pa). Protected always by Indra, the hero of the Sanskrit drama is often the king, the sacrificer par excellence, and in such cases the Vid�shaka is subtly identified with the royal chaplain (even with his divinization: Brhaspati) who officiates for the king and forms a biunity with him. It is precisely this transgressive dimension that would account for the generally non-sectarian character of Hindu kingship, and the role of the latter as a political catalyst in the socio-cultural integration of diverse caste groups, religious communities and tribal populations that were originally beyond the pale of brahmanical society.
Then there are festivals of transgression like Holi, corresponding to the ‘end-of-the-year’ saturnalia of most archaic societies, carefully delimited in time, during which the entire populace is expected to transgress socio-religious norms and established hierarchies are reversed. Not only is the Vid�shaka sometimes depicted participating with gay abandon in such festivals but, being a brahman with impure low-caste traits, he tends to level out the hierarchy in his own person. The origin of the Sanskrit drama itself has been traced back to such New Year festivals in the archaic Rigvedic cosmogony, when demoniac forces led by Varuna are supposed to overrun the cosmic order: the Vid�shaka himself has been identified with Varuna. This annual renewal of the socio-cosmic hierarchy through the raising and felling of a wooden pole has survived till today in Nepal, where it is identified not only with the royal Indra attached to the Vedic sacrificial stake (y�pa), but also with Bhairava in the form of the phallic linga. Ritualized conflict around the divinized world-pillar is not only allowed but even expected during these ‘holy-days’ as a cathartic safety-valve for human aggression.
Hindu eschatology has even projected this sacrificial leveling of the social hierarchy onto the figure of the ‘barbarian’ (mleccha) Kalki as the final ‘messiah’ (avat�r) who would come from the West. After the Muslim conquest of (north) India from the twelfth century, such archaic festivals were preserved in an Islamicized mold. Already from the fifteenth century, we hear the orthodox clergy regularly protesting against the excesses during the Hindu-Muslim celebration of the ‘marriage’ of Gh�z� Miy�: for not only would caste-distinctions be suspended among the Hindus but the barriers between Hindus and Muslims would also be (temporarily) abrogated. More than facilitating the Islamicization of pre-existing Hindu cults, transgressive sacrality transformed the practice of Islam itself as it flowered on Indian soil. Whereas Muharram elsewhere is celebrated only by Shias as an occasion of mourning for the martyrdom of Husain—with pitched battles against the Sunnis who were held responsible for this horrible injustice—in India it used to be celebrated more like a carnival appropriated by both Sunnis and Hindus. ‘Lawless’ Sufi fakirs collaborated with their Hindu counterparts in lampooning all aspects of Indian religious life including the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Drunkard, who would ‘cite’ verses from the Koran in praise of wine, usury and adultery, was hilariously depicted wearing a brahmanical thread made of (impure) leather. The village idiot is dressed up as a lascivious long-tailed ‘monkey’ (lang�r) to take the prime initiative in violating the norms of sexual segregation, and creating an atmosphere of general promiscuity. Indeed, the specifically Indo-Islamic ‘marriage-in-death’ of the proselytizing martyr Gh�z� Miy�—likewise represented by a pole bearing his decapitated head—may be understood as a transposition of the Muharram scenario so as to incorporate a pre-existing sun-cult analogous to that of (M�rtanda-) Bhairava. In the holy city of Banaras, the eternal Hindu order (san�tana dharma) is represented by (the remaining stump of) a monumental pillar (l�t) standing in the middle of a Muslim prayer-cum-sacrificial site (darg�h). It is here that Bhairava metes out his (metaphysical) ‘punishment’ that confers final emancipation, regardless of caste and creed, to all who die in Banaras. Lower-caste Hindus and Muslims used to celebrate the cosmogonic marriage of this phallic pillar — identified as (the linga of L�t-) Bhairava — with an adjoining maternal well. Everyone believed that it was slowly sinking into the ground, and that the caste-hierarchy would be abolished when its capital was level with the ground. The ‘unprecedented’ Hindu-Muslim riots of 1809 were sparked off — just after the imposition of British colonial rule — when the lower-caste Muslims sought to ‘hasten the end’ by uprooting the pillar and desecrating it through cow-slaughter. What is truly striking about the Hindu memorial of grievances — submitted after a massive retaliation on the entire Muslim population of the city — is that it inscribes the transgressive felling within a pre-existing Vedic sacrificial schema. The immovable world-pillar would have succumbed to its ‘decapitation’ only because it was splashed with the ‘brahmanicidal’ blood of the cow and — so the memorial adds — of its calf. The Muslims would have thrown the massive column into the maternal Gang�: an impossible feat, unless we recall that this is precisely what the Hindus themselves did to the Indra-pole at the end of the royal festival.
If Indian civilization has not given rise to spectacular revolutionary movements this has been largely because disorder and self-negation are essential components at the very heart of its underlying sacrificial order. Among the ritual models of the Vid�shaka is not only the untouchable reviler (apagara) but also the ‘nihilist’ (n�stika) of the (pre-classical) Vedic sacrifice. Like the ‘orthodox’ brahman ritualists, the ‘maligner’ (Vid�shaka) does not hesitate to deny the efficacy of the gods and even their very reality. Indeed, the first appearance of the degenerate brahman clown, who even in the classical Hindu theater is constantly relegated ‘beyond the pale of the Vedas’ (avaidika), is in the (surviving fragments of the) plays of the Buddhist scholar-poet Avaghosha. By providing a symbolic locus not only for the meaningful interiorization of alien elements that threaten the eternal world order (dharma), but also for the exteriorization of a pre-existing Vedic ideology of transgression, the nonsensical clown-transgressor provides us a deep insight into the ambiguous role of Tantricism as a complementary, alternate and even counter-tradition in the immense process of acculturation in the Indian subcontinent that has given rise to what is nowadays conveniently called ‘Hinduism’. It is impossible to give here a satisfactory survey of transgressive phenomena in the Indian traditions and a convincing exposition of their mode of articulation in the Vid�shaka, but at least our readers can no longer be unaware that such phenomena not only exist and are interlinked but also insinuate themselves into every sphere of traditional existence.
The Symbolic Communication of Transgressive Sacrality:
The Clown of the Sanskrit Drama (Vid�shaka)
I have already mentioned how the public display of undisguised transgressive sacrality, where sanctioned in archaic societies, lends the performance a comic aura and tends to transform the transgressor into a ritual clown. The normal reaction to such transgressive behavior generally takes the form of distressing negative emotions like disgust, shame, indignation, fear, etc., precisely the kind of emotions that the adept himself seeks to overcome and surpass while committing ritual transgression privately in closed esoteric circles. But when such public transgression is socially sanctioned, often through direct or indirect valorization of the person of the transgressor, the negative affects and reactions of the spectators are simultaneously neutralized by positive participatory affects, and the combined energies of the mutually opposing emotions are discharged in the form of pleasurable laughter. In my Ph.D. thesis, I have argued for a ‘bisociation-theory’ that discovers the universal cause of laughter precisely in the mutual neutralization of two simultaneous but sharply contrasting, opposing reactions (emotional, cognitive, motor, etc.,) to one and the same stimulus. And such is the exoteric perception of the ritual transgressor that obliges him to assume a comic character. The inherent ambiguity/ambivalence of our laughter at a forbidden theme leaves it wholly unclear whether the driving force behind the laughter is due to one’s participation in the transgression or due to one’s resistance to it or, rather, due to both. The intimate association of transgression and the comic reacts in turn upon the transgressor encouraging him to amplify and diversify his comic effects even independently of his primary function of transgression. Thus an integral element of the P�shupata’s spiritual discipline is to laugh explosively and to provoke others’ laughter through ridiculous behavior. In a traditional culture sharing a depreciative, repressive attitude to profane laughter, the P�shupata’s ‘sacred’ laughter in imitation of the violent laughter of his elect divinity Rudra can only further signify transgression. What matters here is how the clown-transgressor through his comic behavior mediates—even while embodying the conflict—between the two opposing poles of archaic sacrality: the transgressive pole that he enacts both materially and symbolically thus permitting the exoteric public to participate in it—even if only indirectly, partially and unconsciously—and the interdictory pole that contributes towards rendering these transgressions ridiculous, fit only to be shunned by the same public. However paradoxical and teeming with contradictions, a vital mode of communication between the two conflicting dimensions is in this way established and maintained.
When this clown-transgressor later steps out of his ritual context into the secularized stage of the Sanskrit drama, governed by its own aesthetic and ethical norms, his performance has already evolved in at least two complementary directions. Firstly, the material transgressions have been underplayed, disguised, even largely eliminated, and displaced into symbolic substitutes in the form of various stereotyped comic traits pertaining to the appearance, gestures, utterances and interventions of the Vid�shaka, already illustrated above. His deformity, gluttony, contrary speech, obscenity, crooked stick, etc., are all synonyms insofar as they all comically signify transgression through parallel codes like the visual, alimentary, linguistic, sexual and geometric. Secondly, the comic aspect, originally the fall-out of his transgressive role, now acquires an independent status: it undergoes secondary elaboration to serve the purposes of plot-development, dramatic humor, characterization and so forth, while its social-censure function is more systematically and self-consciously exploited. The normative classical Sanskrit drama, even while entertaining all sectors of the society, seeks to reinforce the proper and harmonious pursuit of the four traditional legitimate goals of Indian life: sensual enjoyment, acquisition of wealth, fulfillment of ordained socio-religious duties and spiritual emancipation in ascending hierarchy of values. Though this is normally achieved through the voluntary and total identification of the audience with the exemplary conduct of the hero, Abhinavagupta also prescribes for the comic the additional function of safeguarding socio-religious norms through negative example. By introducing improprieties, in the form of comic incongruities, into the pursuit of the four goals, the dramatist should wean away the laughing audience from imitating such deviant behavior, from becoming themselves objects of ridicule in real life. One frequent form of the farce provokes much merriment by caricaturing — but not really distorting — transgressive ascetics like the K�p�likas, and P�shupatas pursuing final emancipation through ‘improper’ means.
The problem with the ‘negative’ example of the Vid�shaka is that, instead of pursuing any goal whatsoever of his own, he selflessly devotes himself to aiding the hero in achieving his own goals. Though mocked and even manhandled by the inferior characters, he is the only personage who can address the hero (or king) on equal terms, and continues to enjoy the confidence of the latter even after repeated betrayals of trust. One princely hero finds life unbearable without this ‘other half’ of his body. This supreme though indirect valorization of his person, in the midst of symbolic traits and associations that dissolve him into a background of ultimate metaphysical principles like Brahman and the sacrifice, exalted divinities like Varuna, Brahm� and Ganesha, hallowed ritual personages like the royal chaplain (or brahman officiant) and cherished religious symbols like Omk�ra, would underline his being not only ironically but also really ‘the brahman par excellence’ (mah�br�hmana). Abhinavagupta cryptically observes that the Vid�shaka, whose comic function he nowhere denies, manifests the ‘semblance of humor’ (h�sy�bh�sa) which can only hint at the vital function of sacred transgression that his profane comicality vehicles and simultaneously disguises. For the ramifications of the transgressive notations invested in the diverse figures of his background form a veritable symbolic system that would seem to embrace the entire socioreligious life of the community in a web of significations held together, at its secret center, by a transgressive conception and experience of the sacred. The Vid�shaka is an exceptionally striking example of how, by various intricate yet conventionalized techniques, the language of transgressive sacrality is communicated—through the aesthetic appeal of humor even in an apparently secular artistic medium like the Sanskrit drama—to an audience that thereby comes to participate in spite of itself in a symbolic universe whose coherence it does not recognize and whose values it is as yet not prepared to accept. In the laughing Vid�shaka, an exoteric vision wholly enmeshed in the hierarchy of the four goals—which he entertainingly reinforces by his negative example—is nevertheless forced to submit itself to the claims of an esoteric vision that encompasses it and is all the more effective for the reason that it is carefully hidden.
The language of transgressive sacrality finds its ideal expression in the archaic sacred enigma (br�hman), whose structure and mechanism characterizes much of the Vedic hymnology: "The aim was to compose on a given theme, or perhaps according to a given plan, not introducing direct accounts of the lives of the gods so much as veiled allusions, occult correspondences between the sacred and the profane, such as still form the foundation of Indian speculative thought. A large part of Sanskrit literature is esoteric. These correspondences, and the magic power they emanate, are called br�hman: this is the oldest sense of the term. They are not intellectual conceptions but experiences which have been lived through at the culmination of a state of mystic exaltation conceived as revelation. The soma is the catalyst of these latent forces. The designation kavi is given to the poet who can seize and express these correspondences, and to the god who sends him inspiration� . The kavi of the classical period, the learned poet, transposes the old Vedic ambiguities to the aesthetic plane by means of double meanings and multiple senses; the classical vakrokti, ‘tortuous speech’� . This, then, is the origin of Vedic esotericism, which� is linked with the esotericism of later India, as it appears in the Tantras, in learned poetry, in the theories of aesthetics on which this poetry is based, and even in legal tradition. The Indian mind is constantly seeking hidden correspondences between things which belong to entirely distinct conceptual systems" (Renou). The antinomian practices of the ‘epileptic’ P�shupata, who constantly meditated on the ‘terrible’ (raudra) br�hman epitomized by the ‘quivering’ (vipra) sound-syllable Omk�ra, have roots both in the Vedic ritual and in archaic techniques of ecstasy. The brahman Vid�shaka, who through his enigmatic ‘poetic humor’ (k�vya-h�sya) is still the bearer of the ancient br�hman, has at last disclosed—at the very heart of the sacrificial drama—the transgressive experience that unites the Vedic ‘seer’ (rshi) and the tribal shaman.
Abhinavagupta on Ascending and Descending Realization
My own understanding of transgressive sacrality stems from a study of and reflection upon the works of Abhinavaguptcrya whom we already know as India’s greatest theoretician of aesthetics and the dramatic art. He is being increasingly recognized as India’s most totalizing, most representative metaphysician, who was able to synthesize within a single harmonious intellectual framework entire realms of experience, like aesthetics, Tantric ritual and practice, and the world of everyday transactions, necessarily ignored by the world-negating Ved�ntin Shankara. Now Abhinava, the crowning theoretician of the transgressive ideology of the Trika tantrism which developed out of the radical practices enjoined in the textual traditions of the esoteric Kaula and Krama schools, attributes his highest spiritual realization of the supreme all-devouring Bhairava-consciousness to precisely such transgressive praxis. At the same time, he clearly recognized the dichotomy between the esoteric and the exoteric domains, the latter governed by rigorous socioreligious norms from which perspective alone he comments on the Sanskrit drama. Forbidding the uninitiated access to the secret texts of the Bhairava-traditions, he insists on the continuity between the Vedic and Tantric traditions of esotericism exploiting extreme impurity and radical transgression in order to transcend the pure/impure distinction, and attributes the reticence of the Vedic seers (rshi) on this transgressive dimension of their realizations to their concern with preserving the exoteric worldly order founded on norms of purity.
The Trika distinguishes between two modes or, rather, logically successive states of spiritual realization, which I shall respectively translate by borrowing the terms ‘ascending’ (sankoca: ‘retraction’) and ‘descending’ (vik�sa: ‘expansion’) realization. During the ascending realization, Consciousness isolates itself from all objectivity (including body, mind, etc.) until it transcends the latter through a process assimilated to a gradual ‘self-purification’. For it is the contact with such extraneous matter that sullies the pristine purity of Consciousness and imposes all manner of adventitious limitations and human finitude upon it. Practices like yoga or Ved�ntic world-renunciation are equally subsumed under this mode of realization which likewise determines their ‘philosophical’ outlooks, and it is here that the continuity, evident in the P�shupata praxis, between ritual purity and yogic asceticism must be sought. For this withdrawal, with its accompanying observances of chastity, non-violence, fasting, silence, truthfulness and so on, are already prefigured in the system of socioreligious interdictions which reach their maximum intensity in the orthodox model of the classical brahman. But the process attains completion only when Consciousness ‘re-descends’ to assimilate the entire objective world to itself, a ‘universalization’ culminating in the state of Anuttara, impossible to describe in terms of sankoca and vik�sa, understood as constituting the ultimate essence of Bhairava. This claim is typically inserted in the midst of arguments justifying the non-observance of the distinction pure/impure or edible/prohibited (food) and so on. The logic behind this equation becomes clear when we consider the definition of purity: whatever is (experienced as) distinct from Consciousness is impure, whereas whatever is (experienced as) identical with Consciousness is pure. Both terms of the opposition are therefore relevant only with respect to that preliminary, though better known, process of the ascending realization. For the Kaula adept intent on universalizing his Consciousness by re-descending to and assimilating the lowest and most impure aspects of objective manifestation, it is the pure-impure distinction itself that is considered the ultimate impurity to be transcended. It is in attempting the dangerous process of totalization that the adept often commits deliberate transgressions to shatter the rules and limitations that had earlier propped up both his worldly life and spiritual disciplines. It is the impurity represented by Bhairava, the disgust it evokes, that accounts primarily for his ‘terrifying’ character. It is because the universalization of Consciousness necessarily involves the overcoming of this disgust to assimilate the worst impurities in an act that amounts to transgression, that the ultimate Anuttara state itself comes to be represented by Bhairava.
Once it has been sufficiently kindled, Fire, instead of being snuffed out, purifies in the very process of consuming whatever impurities it comes into contact with. Whereas only pure offerings are made in the brahmanical sacrificial fire, the Trika technique of hathap�ka ‘cooking, burning or digesting (the world) by force’ aims at offering the entire objective universe into the blazing gastric Fire of one’s own Bhairava-Consciousness so that it is transformed into undifferentiated ambrosia to relished till satiation. In the Vid�shaka, this totalization is symbolized by his gluttonous, all-devouring appetite, the dramatic transposition of the mythical Fire that in the Puranic cosmogonies destroys the world at the end of each cycle and whose imagery has been borrowed in the above technique. His rounded sweet-meats (modaka) likewise represent the Vedic soma-amrta (ambrosia), which would seem to ultimately refer to the supremely blissful state, often induced by sexual techniques, of Consciousness, which moreover is believed in the Trika to have a rejuvenating influence on the whole psycho-physical system as a side-effect.
Though transgressive sacrality claims privileged access to the fullest expression of the Sacred, it accommodates all the varied even opposing modes of spiritual practice that proliferate in Hindu religious life. But whereas those techniques aiming at an ascending realization and the religio-philosophical currents based on them advocate turning away from the world of ordinary sensory-experience to attain an ultimate reality that is transcendent, the techniques of the descent insist that it is possible to recognize—Abhinava’s metaphysics calls itself ‘recognition’ (Pratyabhij��) —this transcendent reality as simultaneously immanent, even glorifying itself, in the everyday world of sensory-experiences. Not falling a prey to it by recognizing one’s inner transcendence—a capacity which the adept generally achieves only through repeated experiments in inner withdrawal and steady introversion—it is possible to continue living in the world, enjoying it as a manifestation of the Divine. It is not surprising that it is only a metaphysic of the descent, like the Pratyabhij�, that has provided the basis of a successful account of the aesthetic experience, distinguishing it carefully from the bliss of transcendent reality on the one hand and gross sensuous pleasure on the other. By living through ordinary experiences in an extraordinary mode, the adept of the descent has an essentially aesthetic perception of life.
Though this explicit formulation of the soteriological distinction between ascending and descending realization against the background of the Trika metaphysics has found late expression in the history of Hindu traditions, the class of transgressive practices it seeks to account for and justify, along with the abiding symbolic universe they have generated, has been a permanent feature of this tradition right from its Vedic origins. It alone explains the necessity of Dum�zil’s first or priestly function being split between the opposing poles of the pure, luminous Vedic Mitra governing the socioreligious order based on interdictions and the dark, chaotic Vedic Varuna inspiring the transgressions of secret initiatic societies, parallels to which Dum�zil finds in other archaic and primitive societies. Caillois has gone further in demonstrating the universality of this opposition or alternation, within a single religious tradition, between the pure sacrality of order and interdiction and the impure sacrality of chaos and transgression. The dialectic of transgression, its theory, in all archaic and primitive religions has been expounded with lucidity by Bataille: transgression does not contradict the rigorous observance of taboos but presupposes and completes it even while transcending it. The access to the sacred impure which is the basis of transgression is mediated by the sacred pure, which alone is the explicit model of profane society. Unless this dialectic is recaptured in its dynamic movement, which imitates the alternation of the two opposing yet complementary modes of spiritual realization, the curious conjunction of elements of both dimensions of the sacred in a single figure, like the P�shupata or the Vid�shaka, will remain forever insoluble. What distinguishes transgressive sacrality from mere sacrilege is its systematic re-inscription within a symbolic context charged with a transcendent significance.
Psychoanalysis and the Ethical Problem of Transgressive Sacrality
To the avowed moralist the divinities that incorporate the values of transgression can only be the equivalent of the Devil. Indeed such divinities as Bhairava have a marked demoniac character even in the indigenous perception, so much so that a conference has even been held on "Criminal gods and demon devotees" in South Asia. Attempts, whatever be their merits, are however not wanting in the West to see in the Devil himself the representative of an archaic transgressive sacrality dethroned completely by a religious outlook that, having identified itself exclusively with the pure luminous pole of the sacred, slided increasingly into a Christian moralism. It is clear that the specifically moral point of view, so pronounced in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, exaggerated in Protestantism and proclaiming its secular independence in the modern world, is wanting in Hinduism where, as in other archaic societies, it is rather the ritual point of view that holds sway. This does not mean that Hindus are amoral or worse still immoral but simply that even behavior that sometimes impresses us as superlatively ‘moral’ should be viewed from a different angle. Those who wholeheartedly pursue the final goal of spiritual liberation, through that ascetic and renunciatory mode in harmony with the system of socioreligious interdictions, rigorously observe precepts like non-violence, chastity, truthfulness and so on, with an intensity of self-denial that could surprise and disconcert the most stringent moralist. But such ethical conduct is an integral part of, is wholly dependent on, a larger culturally sanctioned design that aims primarily at self-liberation and has no independent or absolute status such as claimed by modern especially areligious morality. If the moral force of even a politician like Gandhi, influenced as it was by the social ethics of Christianity, remains unattainable to our contemporary world-leaders, this is no doubt because it was still deeply rooted in that ancient quest for liberation.
What is important here is that the same precepts, even the fundamental pillars of worldly morality without which no life is possible even in the most secular of societies, may be transgressed by spiritual adepts, including those who had been observing them rigorously and intensely over a long period, in order to achieve the same goal of spiritual liberation but in a different, perhaps more effective and quicker, mode. The elements of ascetic self-denial and of transgression, fused in sects like the P�shupata into a single discipline and contributing to a single goal, defy all analysis in moral terms and are intelligible only from a ritual point of view that equally justifies certain socioreligious norms as well as their ritual violation.
For the moralist to ask whether transgressive sacrality is ethical is to beg a question that cannot arise from the point of view of such sacrality at all. The question to be posed is rather ‘what opposing understandings of Man’s essence do the differing points of view of morality and transgressive sacrality presuppose?" The moral point of view presupposes that man is essentially good or can become good if he tries hard enough or, if it agrees with modern psychoanalysis that man is at heart evil, that he must nevertheless strain to conform unswervingly to the good. Where the last outlook is tempered within a religious tradition of salvation through such principles and doctrines as grace, love, surrender, etc., the redemption is still attained in spite of and from one’s innate evil whose expression and, still less, exploitation can in no way contribute to it. Yet Ren� Girard, for whom Christianity remains closer to the truth than psychoanalysis or the other human sciences, seeks to reinterpret the Christian mystery itself in terms of the primordial violence at the heart of humanity, which the archaic religions were regularly and universally compelled to channel into the mechanisms of the sacrificial scapegoat, often the king himself, in order to prevent human society from reverting to undifferentiated chaos, to protect society from man himself. One of the Vid�shaka’s Vedic models was the deformed human scapegoat upon whom not only the evil of the initiated king but the sins of the community as well were sacrificially discharged, and the clown as the favorite butt of our aggressive tendencies continues to play this scapegoat role in the drama. Has modern humanity really evolved to such a degree that it can now forgo such specifically religious mechanisms and achieve global unity through purely moral precepts, however noble?
The Vid�shaka’s ‘perversity’ is frequently alluded to, and sometimes by himself while ‘innocently’ demonstrating it. The Protestant philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, has appealed to the pessimistic psychoanalytic view of man as innately evil to justify his interpretation of the ‘original sin’ of Christianity inherited by all of Adam’s children, by all of us. But whereas Ricoeur concludes therefrom that any totalizing Absolute Knowledge is impossible because of the very existence of Evil, the transgressive techniques of Tantrism, as elaborated by Abhinava, seek to attain Absolute Knowledge precisely through the exploitation of the very dregs of the ordinary ‘moral’ surface-consciousness, of the dark, chaotic, repressed forces of the subconscious. For, as radically opposed to psychoanalysis, the Trika holds Man’s ultimate nature to be Consciousness itself, but does not confuse it with its smoldering, almost snuffed out, reflection in the ordinary surface-consciousness. The ego, which in the psychoanalytic view differentiates itself from and against the womb-like chaotic instinctual forces of the unconscious, would in the Trika view owe its luminous subjectivity to the borrowed light of this undifferentiated Consciousness. It is this ego, relative island of stability torn between the instinctual demands of the unconscious and the repressive force of socioreligious (or moral) interdictions, that suffers an existential anguish which in Hindu tradition finds expression in the urge to self-liberation. It seems to me that the descending realization may be understood in terms of the ego serving as the transparent instrument of Consciousness in the attempt to illuminate and appropriate the dark depths of the unconscious forces wherein its own energies are ultimately rooted. Even where this ‘regressive’ technique is not induced nor accompanied by deliberate acts of transgression, there is all reason to believe that it is inwardly relived as a mode of transgression. Which explains why the mythical projections of such sacrality lend themselves so readily to the psychoanalytic treatment of symbols, even while ultimately resisting all attempts to simply reduce them to the latter point of view. In order not to lose control, disintegrate and risk its borrowed light being completely overwhelmed and snuffed out by the dark chaotic forces it has unleashed, the ego must have already achieved a degree of unity and transparency to Consciousness, possible only by the cultivation of proximity to the latter. It is the preliminary struggle of the ascending realization, supported and reinforced by the system of socioreligious interdictions governing the pursuit of the life-aims in the outer world of reality, that assures the indispensable unity, transparency and control of the ego in the service of the pure Consciousness. Otherwise madness, often outwardly assumed by the adepts of transgressive sacrality in ritual imitation of their divinity, will be the only fruit of such practices. The supreme conception of the Divine that has devoured and assimilated the demoniac finds its most forceful expression for Abhinavagupta in the figure of the terrifying quasi-demoniac Bhairava, fearful not only because he represents the dark chaotic destructive aspects of the unconscious but also, and probably more so, because he represents the sudden breaking in of the ‘Superconscious’ brought about by the deliberate exploitation of these very dregs of the moral consciousness.
Transgressive Sacrality as the basis of Inter-religious Dialogue
In a sense there has always been inter-religious dialogue even within the Indian traditions, for it is century-long mutual influence in cult-practice and the fierce interaction of clashing theological standpoints that has constantly shaped the intertwined evolution of the numerous currents of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Philosophical debate and mutual borrowings also mark the relations between the various Hindu cults, doctrines and philosophical systems, which have always been anxious to establish their own positions through a systematic critique of those of their opponents. But to what extent can this interaction be justly termed a ‘dialogue’ on the model of modern ecumenism? A proper evaluation of the attitudes to real dialogue within the Indian traditions will certainly contribute to a just appreciation of the Hindu position as a whole.
The first feature that strikes the observer is that each cult, doctrine and philosophical system is convinced of its own superiority over the others—just as is the case with our major world-religions and as already prefigured in the ‘ethnocentrism’ of all archaic and primitive religions—and seeks to establish this superiority in various ways. It may be affirmed by an outright rejection of the opponent’s position (exclusion), or by integrating it with due modifications in perspective at a lower level of one’s own hierarchical outlook, as embodying a lower truth leading up to one’s own supreme truth (inclusion). The latter inclusive method, adopted especially by the Pratyabhij�, enjoys far greater prestige and also permits a certain unequal dialogue. But not even the most syncretizing doctrine has claimed nor could have claimed to impose uniformity and unanimity on homo hierarchicus, whose religious needs, practices, attitudes and milieu is a function of his specific place in a fundamentally unequal caste-society which is itself based on a complex series of exclusions and inclusions. On the contrary, any mixing of doctrines and practices is rigorously condemned as inevitably leading to disillusionment and falling away from both the traditions concerned. Thus Abhinava warns that ‘the Vaishnavas and others, by mixing Shaiva doctrines with their own teaching, are sure to be afflicted with doubt and to stray from both traditions (due to loss of faith in either)." Why? "Because of the transgression of (mutually conflicting) norms, both from the point of view of one’s own tradition and from that of the other, one is bound to create dire obstacles and difficulties for himself and should not proceed in this manner." The result of such groping, self-searching, even ‘free-thinking’ dialogue can only be further inextricable confusion and complete loss of faith, perhaps in all religion. Is this not precisely the predicament of modern man?
But does this mean that traditions other than one’s own are invalid for their respective adherents simply because their practices and beliefs contradict our own? Should we not then attempt to wholly convert them to our views, if necessary by force? Indian traditions have in this respect been marked by a deep de facto tolerance, even when they condemn certain opponents as anathema. It is this attitude of compartmentalization and separation that has permitted the survival in India—as separate castes—of Parsees, Jews, and sects of Christianity and Islam, who were persecuted and even exterminated in their own far more ‘egalitarian’ societies. Hindu ‘ethnocentrism’ is tempered and conterbalanced, in its foremost representative(s), by a resolute relativism that grants validity to every tradition but only for its own adherents. This can best be understood in the light of Abhinava’s definition of the term ‘tradition’ (�gama). Himself raising objections like "which tradition for whom? Teaching mutually contradictory doctrines and practices, how can what is tradition (as a source of authority) for one not be so for another?," Abhinava comes to the conclusion: "All traditions are indeed of the nature of (a set of) injunctions, prohibitions, etc. that take into consideration specific conditions of person, place, time, state, contributory factors, etc." Moreover, "conditioned by (consideration of questions like) what? when? how? and where? all traditions are valid. Even the traditions of the barbarians (mleccha), etc., are to that extent valid, though due to the (inevitable) contact with non-Indian (an-�rya) cultures they are rather ‘semblances’ of tradition"(for those brought up and living within Indian culture; IPVV 3:96). Abhinava does allow for ‘conversion’ when a person, due to the influence of another tradition, comes to be convinced that he had erred before, thus rendering his own henceforth a non-tradition for him. But even in that case, special procedures are necessary to eliminate the traces and after-effects of his earlier convictions and practices, so that they do not interfere with his new-found vocation, rendering it sterile (IPVV 3:97).
Religious traditions make all manner of authoritative but mutually contradictory pronouncements on issues lying beyond the ken of ordinary perception, and invariably appeal to the extraordinary perceptions and revelations of a singular sage or exclusive elite. Inter-religious dialogue, as we understand it, is impregnated with modern humanism that assumes that controversial issues can be settled and mutual understanding brought about through rational discussion that can however appeal to nothing higher than ordinary perception, even if refined into a scientific empiricism. Thus religious tradition(s) and inter-religious dialogue would appear to be founded on mutually incompatible presuppositions. For Abhinava all logic is inconclusive in itself; its use by the various philosophical systems in arguing out their own conception of ultimate reality and the manner of attaining it, is finally only apologetic in character, convincing only to those already pre-inclined to adopt the presuppositions and tenets of that particular tradition. Our faith should be placed only in the authority of tradition which is superior to that of logic, and the tradition in question is precisely that which has established itself in the heart of the individual concerned. If no tradition has been able to lodge itself in his heart, so much the worse for him!
Does this imply an absolute relativism recognizing and encouraging no communication or transition between equally impervious traditions? Surprisingly, Abhinava himself boasts of having learnt at the feet of numerous spiritual masters of diverse Hindu and even heterodox Buddhist and Jaina traditions, and of being all the richer spiritually for it. Not only that, he asserts that the Kaula adept who has realized the highest grades is free to teach Vaishnava doctrines to Vaishnava and Buddhist doctrines to Buddhist disciples! (TA 13.341-346a,322b-3241; IPVV vol.3, p.101). That this is due to something specific in the Kaula (or Trika) mode of spirituality is evident from the fact that even mere access to the Kaula esoteric texts is forbidden to the Vaishnavas and others (TA 13.320-22a,280). The indiscriminate mixing of traditions was condemned only because conflicting rules lead to confusion and chaos both externally and internally. But what harm can it do to the Kaula adept whose primary aim is to rise above all injunctions and who does not hesitate to transgress even the most fundamental prohibitions marking the passage from nature to culture? If a religious tradition is defined by the number and type of injunctions and prohibitions it imposes, a wholly transgressive mode of sacrality would consequently be defined by the absence of all such limitations. This is indeed implied in the oft-repeated declaration that the advancing grades of the descending realization overrule or annul the restrictive teachings based on the grades of the ascending realization (TA 4.249-253). This provides the framework for assigning the various traditions and their corresponding points of view their definite places at the various levels of the initiatic hierarchy culminating in the Kaula and especially Trika stage of realization. Whereas premature exposure to a transgressive sacrality can prove shattering to one whose practice, outlook and understanding is restricted to the narrower confines of a religion of interdictions, the transgressive adept can easily adapt himself to and assume the external appearances and language of any of the more restrictive traditions because he appreciates their necessity, at their own levels, as lesser truths. Suggestions that one should remain a Kaula at heart, an orthodox Shaiva externally, a Vaishnava in the discussion-hall and an adherent of Vedic norms (vaidika) in one’s worldly transactions should therefore not be understood as religious ‘opportunism’ or ‘hypocrisy’ but rather as the practice of ‘Catholicism’ in its truest sense.
It would follow that inter-religious dialogue should be primarily the affair of the adepts of transgressive sacrality in the world’s religions. Their role in the Eastern traditions is uncontested: Buddhism, which began as a ‘heresy’ in India, quickly provided fertile ground, and the impetus, for the development of a radical tantricism that was gradually (re-) incorporated into the Vedic symbolic universe. This universalizing but world-negating religion was already destined, by the circumstances of its birth, to provide a common language of communication between the otherwise ‘ethnically’ oriented religions of Asia like Brahmanism, Bon, Confucianism, Taoism and Shinto. Outside of India, its antinomian potentialities fused with the preexisting religio-cultural traditions of the Far East to give rise to developments like Chan in China, and Zen in Japan. Though originally a Buddhist monk, expelled from the monastery on account of his predilection for wine, women and other pastimes, Ji-Gong, the clown of popular Chinese religion, quickly developed into a trans-sectarian figure. It is difficult to reduce his role to that of ‘popular’ rebellion against the imperial state bureaucracy, when Confucian scholars themselves often wrote the vernacular works of Chinese fiction that have enthroned him beside the Immortals of Taoism. That Chinese spirit-mediums still imitate his outlandish attire to enter into a supposedly clairvoyant trance, only confirms the inherent link between shamanizing possession and transgression. The founding myths legitimizing the imperial house of Japan revolve around the conflict between the sun-goddess Amaterasu and her trickster-like brother Susano-o, who is bent upon disrupting her performance of the heavenly prototypes of the Shinto rituals of enthronement. When he defecates in her sanctuary, skins a pony in reverse and breaks down the paddy-fields, Amaterasu withdraws into a cave thus bringing total darkness upon the whole universe. Yet Susano-o appears to be identified with his sister, who wears a masculine coiffure, when they exchange ritual attributes like the imperial sword during a cooperative and productive contest. Susano-o is born, like the other Japanese deities (kami), from the impurity of death inhering in (the discarded clothes of) their father, Izanagi, after the latter returns from the nether world. Perhaps the most striking confirmation of the transgressive basis of divine kingship is the loudly obscene laughter which alone succeeds in luring the androgynous Amaterasu—that is, the Japanese emperor—from his/her womb-cave. Many of the religious motifs, the symbolic core, of these Asian manifestations of high civilization would seem to be the legacy of a more archaic mode of spirituality best conserved in what is conveniently labeled ‘shamanism’. The determining role of transgressive sacrality in the so-called ‘primitive’ religions of the Americas, Africa and Oceania has already been demonstrated by Makarius through a cross-cultural typology of phenomena like ritual clowning, the trickster in myth, the ambivalence of twinship, the blacksmith’s taboos and divine kingship. By facilitating and accelerating the indigenous acculturation of the ‘�ryan’ tradition, the savage outsider god Dionysos—the Greek Bhairava—had played a determining role in the construction of Greek civilization and of Athenian political, philosophical, aesthetic and religious sensibility.
Since the work of Gershom Scholem on Sabbatai S�vi and the repercussions of his doctrine of ‘redemption through sin,’ no one can afford to neglect its impact not only on subsequent developments in Jewish spirituality but also on the advent of the Jewish Enlightenment (haskalah). Our Jewish interlocutors could perhaps elucidate those features and structures of Judaism that would have tended to minimize and obscure this dimension in the Mosaic tradition till only quite recently. Though parallel phenomena are not lacking in the Christian context, the scarcity of evidence for a systematic praxis, and almost complete absence of a theory, of transgression has permitted Christians to either relegate such phenomena to a pagan prehistory somehow incorporated slowly into Christianity as ‘survivals’ against its will, or seek to explain away such phenomena, and justify them, by minimizing reference to their transgressive dimension. Nevertheless, many of the phenomena unearthed by specialists in European culture, when put together, would tend to indicate that they have been too well integrated into the medieval Catholic order, so well as to warrant the posing of a specifically Christian problematic of transgressive sacrality. In any case, Christianity poses—from the very beginning—the paradox of a world-religion founded precisely on the suspension of the (Mosaic) Law. I leave it to our Muslim brothers to enlighten us about the transgressive implications of the ‘Way of Blame’ (mala’amatiyah) in Sufism, and as to whether there is any place for such modes of sacrality in Islamic esotericism. It has nevertheless played a significant role in bridging the divide between the iconoclastic egalitarianism of Islamic monotheism and the otherwise incompatible socio-religious hierarchy of Hindu polytheism . Far from being a ‘Hinduizing’ aberration, the Indian transformation of Muharram into a carnival appears to be derived from the preexisting Shia understanding of it as the last day of cosmic chaos when not just the hidden Imam but Husain himself—accompanied by Christ—would return to redeem the world. Whereas discreet Sufi violations of the Islamic law may be (merely) tolerated—within the relatively liberal Sunni environment—as excesses in the otherwise genuine pursuit of individual salvation, transgression assumes truly messianic proportions within the ‘heretic’ developments of Shiism. Islam represents itself as the ‘final’ revelation: the Ismailis understood this to mean the final abrogation of not just the preceding religions but of the sharia itself. The Nizari Ismaili missionaries in India hence converted large numbers of Hindus by presenting the first Imam, Ali, as the last avat�ra of Vishnu, while identifying the Prophet as law-giver with Brahm�, and his daughter Fatima with Sarasvat�. Muharram itself is a transposition onto the Muslim calendar of the Jewish ‘Day of Atonement’ (Yom Kippur), which is paradoxically charged with transgressive notations invested especially in the figure of the High Priest, who utters the otherwise ‘unspeakable’ name of God. The moral and ethical point of view, which resists conceding any degree of validity to transgression as a form of sacrality, perhaps makes it impossible for Protestantism in particular to countenance the notion of transgression whose prime figure is, after all, the Devil. Nevertheless, by shifting the responsibility from the Church to the individual, by further interiorizing his relationship to God, the ‘heresy’ of Reform (-ation) has paved the way to modernity: it has made it possible for the individual to be the creator of his own values. Whatever the resulting confusion, it not surprising that it is Protestant Christianity that has been the first to take this initiative of promoting inter-religious dialogue.
Whereas it has been till now fashionable to emphasize, especially in international conferences, those aspects of Hinduism that would place it on a par with the West, the present paper would rather reconcile a permanent, and perhaps even central, dimension of Hinduism with the religions of the Americas, Africa and Oceania. Instead of comparing Hindu bhakti to a personal god with the same in the Abrahamic religions, or Hindu ‘philosophy’ with that of Kant, Hegel and Bradley, or Ved�ntic absolutism with that of the Western mystics like Plotinus or Eckhart, or Hindu asceticism with Buddhist and Christian monasticism, the problem of transgressive sacrality in India will bring it spiritually closer to the archaic and primitive religions, whose true sophistication is only recently being revealed to us by the painstaking researches of anthropologists like L�vi-Strauss. It is by refocusing attention on parallel phenomena in their own religio-cultural histories that the Abrahamic religions may be expected to participate on the same platform. India occupies a privileged situation in an inter-religious forum on transgressive sacrality because, on the one hand, it has seen the same developments of philosophy, bhakti, ethics, aesthetics, science, etc., as the West(ern religions) has undergone and, on the other hand, it has always retained that transgressive dimension which seems so central to the intelligibility of archaic religions but has become obscured in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions. By showing how this transgressive dimension has managed to integrate these later developments in India, the way would at least be partly cleared for reconciling the Abrahamic tradition with the sources of archaic spirituality.
Transgressive Sacrality, Post-Modernism and Messianism
I consider a complete secularization of Israel to be out of the question so long as the faith in God is still a fundamental phenomenon of anything human and cannot be liquidated "ideologically." I consider a dialogue with such secularization about its validity, legitimacy, and limitations as fruitful and decisive. I could not designate the two parties to this dialogue any better than by two Talmudic words which probably constitute the most sublime synopsis of religious Judaism in the past, and possibly in the future as well. I mean the words living throughout 2,000 years of Jewish tradition: "the freedom of the tablets" of the Law and the "broken tablets," which still lie together with the holy tablets in the Ark of the Covenant—that is to say, within the religious dimension of Judaism.
(Concluding lines of Gershom Scholem, "Reflections on Jewish Theology," On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken Books, 1976, p.297).
But why should one now indulge in the public discussion of a tabooed form of sacrality, always confined to closed esoteric circles, and especially with and before fellow men who in no way subscribe to it? By Abhinava’s own logic, should not such dialogue be undertaken only by the adepts of such sacrality and out of the hearing of those who live by religious interdictions alone? But we are moderns, and modernism stands in a peculiarly ambiguous relation to the archaic transgressive sacrality. On the one hand, by questioning the religion of interdictions—for example through Nietzsche, Marx and Freud—it has opened the way for a better appreciation of and even resurgence of transgressive sacrality. On the other hand, the process of secularization has short-circuited the sacralizing dialectic of transgression which necessarily presupposes a rigorous system of specifically religious interdictions. Already shaken by the encounter with other and conflicting religions, the modern man, whose religious faith has been devastated directly or indirectly by the revolutions of the above three secular philosophers, is able to re-appropriate the transgressive core of archaic religion only through the application of specifically modern categories and intellectual disciplines.
Inter-religious dialogue cannot be of any value, or bear any practical fruit, unless the interlocutors are prepared to modify their existing points of view, to admit that much in their own traditions is no longer of any relevance due to changes in general mentality, conditions of modern life, and the spatio-temporal upheavals in the recent history of these traditions. These are precisely the factors that for Abhinavagupta define any tradition. Unless adherents are able to recognize their relative and contingent character, and thereby court the danger of religious confusion and loss of faith, there can only be—instead of borrowing whatever is of value in the other religions—a hardening of attitudes into an uncompromising rigidity. The current phenomenon of fundamentalism has not spared any of the major religions; in many respects it is a specifically modern phenomenon. Against traditionalist claims that Buddhism, or even more ancient Hindu doctrines like the S�nkhya, for that matter, could not be authoritative, because they derive from a single historical figure, Abhinava simply retorts that all traditions are perennial (an�di), because the Buddha is not a specific individual but rather "the intense reflexive awareness (vimarsa) of momentariness, etc., realized through the power of imaginative contemplation (bh�van�)" (IPVV 3:97). This ‘ultra-fundamentalism’ which identifies tradition with the supra-human intentionality of reflexive awareness has the paradoxical result of reducing each religious system to a collective project whose immediate contours are shaped by the historical circumstances of the specific revelation. Moses would thus be the fictive embodiment of the still unaccomplished ideal of world unity under the banner of a universalizing monotheism that bears the mere signature of YHWH. Jesus would have reduced the Temple to the human body in order to temper the dialectic of law and transgression through the ‘final’ sacrifice of love. And Mohammed would now be the final and irresistible resurgence of that egalitarian Sinaitic covenant in the face of socio-economic hierarchies that have lost all religious justification. Abhinavagupta himself, the product and mouthpiece of the ongoing process of acculturation—conveniently labeled ‘Hinduism’ in the Indian subcontinent—would incarnate a most original resolution of the dialectic of interdiction and transgression within an aesthetic sensibility that transcends the opposition between the sacred and the secular.
While ensuring the social cohesion and historical viability of a religious community, the system of prohibitions and injunctions also imprisons its adherents within a reified symbolic universe that is inevitably pitted against those of neighboring communities. ‘Communalism’ may be characterized as a hybrid mentality imposed by the necessity of translating religious values into the discourse of modernity which does not admit any mode of transcendence, a reduction of tradition that exacerbates pre-existing religious conflicts by diverting them into new arenas of competition for primarily secular prerogatives. Inter-religious dialogue would thus imply not only the search for a common language, capable of taming, assimilating and turning to advantage the proliferating forms of modern knowledge. It should at the same time provide the experimental bases for new and multiple modes of community, that draw upon the resources of existing traditions while refusing to be enslaved by their limitations. Communitas, as I understand it, is the crystallization within the subjective consciousness of the appropriate attitudes for holding together a given social formation in its empirical functioning. Though generated, sustained and reinforced by the socio-religious structures encoded into external institutions and prescribed practices, such communitas informs the individual perception and will to the extent of determining an existential outlook that is no longer confined to these objective supports, and thus begins to function even quite independently of them.
Whereas ‘communitas’ for Victor Turner is the idealized ‘liminal’ state of being of human individuals before pragmatic necessities impose the hierarchical structures of a social order upon their otherwise undifferentiated equality, communitas is for me the subjective human bonds that derive from this very imposition of rules and interdictions on the lawless and (even self-) destructive pulsions of an otherwise incompletely individuated psyche (what the psychoanalyst would call a ‘polymorphous pervert’). By mediating conflicts within and between individuals, social structures are still integral to the process of human individuation though it may eventually outgrow their limitations and even come into conflict with them. Communitas, thus defined, need not necessarily be of an egalitarian thrust as in Islam; it could just as well be hierarchical in orientation as in Hinduism. It is unceasingly generated by the dialectical interplay between socio-religious structures, their underlying project or hidden intentionality, and their negation (in and through what Turner calls ‘anti-structure’). If communitas is to be more than a mere cultural ethos, that has outgrown the structures that serve as its vehicle but continues to be shaped by them, if it is to regain its spontaneity by functioning in a wholly autonomous manner from within, it will face a critical moment when the system of prohibitions and injunctions, even the central dogmas, through which this symbolic universe impinged upon the individualized consciousness may have to be suspended and violated in the name of the existential condition they were intended to realize. Though transgression, which can assume highly anti-social even criminal forms, serves various ends—particularly the subjective rediscovery and affirmation of the creative autonomy of a purified consciousness—it also appears to be the most potent catalyst for liberating existential or spontaneous communitas from its increasingly obsolete and constrictive shells.
"Commmunitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or ’holy,’ possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency." Though under normal circumstances the adepts of transgressive sacrality played the role of champions of the orthodox religion in the life of their respective communities, they are also potentially the most effective instruments of change in their own traditions. Transgression relativizes the entire system of norms that constitutes the mother-religion, and thereby places these esoteric currents in a particularly privileged position as potential reformers—whether from within or without—of the existing system when it is no longer capable of responding to the challenges of the times or has to interact with a different and largely incompatible religious system or when it has to face the onslaughts of modernism with its own secular modes of transgression. For example, socio-religious hierarchies are temporarily abolished in the exceptional rituals of transgression, and this attitude is easily generalized to the social order at large in order to renew and transform it, all the more so as such transgressive disorder already finds social sanction in festive saturnalia. Even the inferior social status of women in the patriarchal religious traditions can be thereby radically questioned though a generalization of their equality in the cult of transgression, which can easily accommodate their sexual liberation today. The global society of the future will no longer require the imposition of external norms, but emerge as a natural consequence of an inner transformation of human consciousness which, it seems to me, is the ‘messianic’ project encoded into the symbolic life of all the religious traditions.
Endnotes to Transgressive Sacrality in Hinduism and the World Religions
Additional Endnotes
(to be included amidst earlier notes)
3 Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) had already explored the structural features and ramifications of the brahmanicide motif in her various works: Elizabeth’s (and my own) focus is primarily on demonstrating that it is not so much an attempt ‘solve’ insoluble logical and theological contradictions, but rather a systematic and self-conscious encoding of a transgressive sacrality. As Das (see note ), p.749 n.38, has not failed to recognize, we believe that without a just appreciation of the ‘theology’ underlying the elaboration of the Hindu symbolic universe, Indology, in both its philological and anthropological variants, remains a futile exercise. Cf. Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)
9b The various levels and polysemy—especially of the term ‘mother’ (amba)—are clearly brought into relief in the otherwise brief treatment of the Vkapi hymn in Wendy Doniger, transl., The Rig Veda: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp.257–64.
34 In his address entitled "The Center for the Study of World Religions: Vision and Future" (24 October 1991; see note 62 below), Ronald F. Thiemann, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, pleaded for a semiotic approach as the way out for the current impasse in the dialogue between religious studies, as an academic discipline, and the work of theological reflection proper.
60b For the dialectical tension between the (nomadic) "egalitarian anarchist" and (settled) "expansionist monarchic" ideals, see Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985. It seems to me that this polarization has been a productive one, with each ideal paradoxically contributing towards the realization of its opposite. The apparent contradiction is resolved when the figures of both ‘king’ (David) and ‘prophet’ are recognized as symbolic ciphers for the single human ideal of spiritual-cum-political autonomy. The Licchavi kings, who were renowned in India at the time of the Buddha for their fierce attachment to Vedic ‘republican’ values, later appear at the dawn of Nepali history as a dynasty of benevolent (generally Hindu) monarchs, who were equally committed in their patronage of the Buddhist sangha, which still incorporated the ‘egalitarian’ ideal. Cf. "Between Veda and Tantra" (see note 16), and also my remarks below on ‘hierarchy’ (note 61).
62 Ronald F. Thiemann, "The Future of an Illusion: An Inquiry into the Contrast between Theological and Religious Studies," and "Towards the Integrated Study of Religion: A Case for the University Divinity School," makes a convincing case for greater overtures to religious traditions and modes of life, that have till now been marginalized by the establishment. Both papers were distributed, prior to Dean Thiemann’s address (see note 34), in the context of the recent debates regarding the future direction of the Center for the Study of the World Religions at Harvard. I was particularly struck by the ‘transgressive’ notations accompanying both the implementation of the new vision of the Center and especially the ‘insurrection’ of the existing student community. Perhaps all that remains is to preach what we have begun practice!