A Journey in the World of the Tantras.
White, David Gordon
A Journey in the World of the Tantras. By MARK S. G. DYCZKOWSKI.
Varanasi: INDICA BOOKS, 2004. Pp. 315. Rs. 375.
A collection of six articles and chapters written between 1986 and
2001, the present volume is very much an account of the personal and
scholarly itinerary taken by Mark Dyczkowski, the undisputed master of
Kubjika materials, and arguably the most original and wide-ranging
scholar of Hindu tantra of the present generation, if not of all time. A
semi-permanent resident of Varanasi for the past thirty years,
Dyczkowski is bicultural in a way unrivalled by any living western
scholar of Indian religions, combining the sterling textualist training
in the medieval tantras he received at Oxford under Alexis Sanderson in
the 1970s with a total immersion in the living traditions of Hinduism in
Varanasi in India, and Kathmandu in Nepal.
In many respects, the six studies contained in this volume are a
record of a journey away from a purely textual, philological, and
philosophical approach to Kashmiri Saivism, and toward a more nuanced,
complex, historically and anthropologically rigorous interpretation of
the same. The first three--on the subjects of divine self-awareness in
the writings of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta; abhavavada, the doctrine
of non-being; and the ninth-tenth century Samvitprakasa of Vamanadatta,
an idealist monist Vaisnava work--are purely textualist studies of
Kashmiri Saiva metaphysics. The second three--on the sacred geography of
the Kubjika tantras (complemented by twenty-three pages of maps,
diagrams, and figures), scriptural representations of the goddess
Kubjika as an androgyne, and the cult of Kubjika in the Kathmandu Valley
of Nepal--shade increasingly toward a historical, anthropological, and
sociological synthesis. At the end of the book, Dyczkowski leaves his
readers on the road that he is still traveling, a road whose final goal
is a massive critical edition and study of the Manthanabhairava Tantra,
a seminal text of the so-called pascimamnaya, the "Western (or
Latter-Day) Transmission" that centers on the cult of the goddess
Kubjika. This study, over a decade in the making, will appear in the
course of the coming years.
The articles brought together in this volume may be read on two
levels, those of text and subtext. The text--the articles themselves--is
comprised of closely argued, highly detailed studies of specific
philosophical, metaphysical, theological, and anthropological issues in
Hindu Sakta-Saiva tantra. The subtext, often found in the abundant
footnotes to each article, contains observations of a more general
order, on the nature of Hindu tantra; the relationship between text and
context, map and territory, idealized system and lived experience,
langue and parole. Particularly compelling are Dyczkowski's
insights into the implications of the shift from nomadism to sedentarism
for the emergence of pilgrimage as a religious practice (pp. 18-19); the
interplay of local and translocal power places in medieval South Asian
religious landscapes (pp. 20-21, 97); the relationships between the
idealized world of Sanskrit text, human context, and historical change
(pp. 25-26, 239-40); the circularity of pilgrimage (p. 122, n. 52); the
relationship between internalized sacred geography in the individual and
its projection onto a civic space when kings become tantric initiates
(p. 136); the difference between a skull-bearing vow and a skull-bearing
(Kapalika) sect, the existence of which Dyczkowski doubts (pp. 138-39);
the power of place in archaic South Asian religions, and the
internalization of the same as part of the process of Sanskritization
(pp. 141, 146-47); the differences between tantric Kaulism, with its
multiple secret families of goddesses, and Puranic Saktism, with its
public cult of the goddess Durga (pp. 148; 240, n. 76); parallels and
reversals between tantric initiation into the family of a god or
goddess, with its household, clans, caste distinctions, and the
renouncer's rejection of the same in human society (p. 180, n. 11);
the relationship between public and private, and the outer and inner
pantheons of tantric deities with the graded hierarchies of Newar
society in the Kathmandu Valley (pp. 194-95); the role of Brahmins as
culture brokers in colonial and post-colonial (mis)understandings of
Hinduism (p. 202, n. 13); the "contested hierarchies" of
Kathmandu Valley society, with the tantric blurring of the distinction
between priest and layman, and the disconnect between brahmanic precept
and actual practice in caste relations and the division of priestly
labor (pp. 203-6); the dialectic relationship between "core"
indigenous traditions and high-caste interpretations and appropriations
of the same (pp. 208, 214); the dynamics and implications of shifts from
aniconic to iconic representations of the godhead (pp. 216-18); the
relationship between tantra and the process of Sanskritization (pp.
218-19); methodological insights into the ways in which anthropological
fieldwork can be usefully supplemented by the work of the textual
scholar, referring specifically to the sleuthing of Alexis Sanderson
into tantric liturgies (p. 224, n. 43); the relationship between
Brahmins and ascetics in the formation, propagation, domestication, and
institutionalization of tantra (pp. 95-96; 146; 231, n. 60); and the
human agency in the innovation of new tantric systems, through
permutations on the mantras, iconographies, and metaphysics of earlier
systems (p. 236).
This collection of articles may be criticized on a small number of
points. Background information and certain discussions are repeated from
one chapter to the next, due to the fact that these originally appeared
as stand-alone studies. While he often alludes to the tantric
"yogi" in his articles, Dyczkowski never satisfactorily
defines the term. The text is marred by numerous spelling and
typographical errors that a careful editor should have noted and
corrected. (While Indica Books performs an important service in
producing important Indological works out of its humble publishing house
in Varanasi, Dyczkowski's monumental work deserves a more
established European or North American publisher.)
To date, the scholarly study of Hindu tantra has been carried
forward in a parallel fashion in three different disciplines--classical
textual exegesis, art history, and anthropology--with very little
communication across disciplinary boundaries. It is as if the textual,
art historical, and ethnographic records were documenting three
different traditions. With this collection of studies, and most
particularly the ninety-eight-page final chapter on "The Cult of
the Goddess Kubjika," Dyczkowski effects a masterful synthesis of
all three complementary approaches to a single, millenarian tradition.
The cult of the goddess Kubjika is the most vibrant living Hindu tantric
tradition on the planet, permeating every level of society, polity,
culture, and art in the Kathmandu Valley. In the light of
Dyczkowski's ground-breaking archaeology of this tradition, one
wonders why so much scholarly attention has been devoted, over the past
generation, to the purely archival traditions of the Saivism of Kashmir
or to the strictly brahmanical Srividya tradition of modern-day
Tamilnadu.
DAVID GORDON WHITE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
