The Brahmayamalatantra or Picumata, vol. II: The Religious Observances and Sexual Rituals of the Tantric Practitioner: Chapters 3, 21, and 45. A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. By CSABA Kiss. Collection Indologie, vol. 130, Early Tantra Series, vol. 3. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY/ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT; HAMBURG: ASIEN-AFRIKA-INSTITUT, UNIVERSITAT HAMBURG, 2015. Pp. 373. [euro]32, Rs. 750.

Considered by many to be the "grail" of early Hindu tantric studies, the Brahmaydmalatantra (BraYa), very likely the earliest of the Bhairava Tantras (p. 13), has been largely inaccessible to scholars due to the rarity and near illegibility of the few extant manuscripts of the work. With the present volume, a critical edition and translation of three of the BraYa's one hundred and one chapters (chapters 3, 21, and 45) are now available; these complement Shaman Hatley's edition and translation of chapters 1, 2, 55, 73, and 99, which first appeared in his 2007 PhD dissertation ("The Brahmayamalatantra and Early Saiva Cult of Yoginis," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007) and have long since been available on line. The published version of Hatley's edition and translation of chapters 1 and 2 are forthcoming in a companion (The Brahmayamalatantra or Picumata, vol. 1) to the present volume. The editions and translations of both volumes are based nearly exclusively on Hatley's electronic transcription of a 1052 CE manuscript held in the Nepal National Archives (NAK-3-370) (p. 58). The Old Newari script of this palm-leaf manuscript (Kiss's MS A) is extremely difficult to decipher in and of itself; the Sanskrit, which Kiss qualifies as "extremely non-standard, non-Paninian, or extremely Ais'a" (even if, "it sometimes falls back to perfectly standard Paninian language for fairly long passages" [p. 74]), presents great challenges to translation. Addressing the impact of these irregularities on his edition and translation, Kiss states that his aim "as a kind of experiment, has been to present the text of the BraYa in its extremely Ais'a form" (pp. 73-74). Given his nearly exclusive reliance on MS A, he notes that the importance of a critical apparatus is greatly reduced (p. 75); however the pages he devotes to character and numeral charts, "Ais'a phenomena," and editorial conventions are thorough and concise (pp. 59-90). The same holds for intertextual references: nearly every technical term found in the text is analyzed in the light of usages in other texts from the same canon, and nearly every mantra, verse, and passage cross-referenced wherever possible or applicable. An appendix summarizing the contents of the first twenty-five of the BraYa's 101 chapters is an additional resource.

The three chapters edited and translated by Kiss are devoted to the BraYa's mandala and pantheon (chap. 3); ascetic practices (vratas) aiming at self-purification, followed by pacifying and mingling (melaka) with the yoginis (chap. 21); and the three types of practitioners (sadhakas) (chap. 45). The material is extremely rich, providing the reader with a vivid tableau of the idealized ritual lifeworld of a certain cadre of early tantric practitioners. Demonology, sorcery, elaborate visualizations, "mechanical drawing" techniques for laying out the grids of intricate mandalas, the sacramental and magical use of female sexual emissions, the irruption of the supernatural into the natural, identification with or possession by Bhairava, the combination of extreme ritual scrupulousness with the obsessive consumption of defiling sexual and other bodily secretions--all of these elements characterize the BraYa's generally transgressive practice.

The contents of these chapters leave little doubt that much of the BraYa's ritual program belonged to the realm of the "prescriptive imagination." None but an extremely wealthy and otiose sociopath could possibly have fulfilled, for example, the injunction to offer, in a single sitting, "ten thousand fire-offerings (homa) of cow-flesh mixed with wine, and of jackal- and goat-flesh," as well as the flesh of pigeons, elephants, donkeys, humans, tortoises, camels, dogs, horses, and pigs (BraYa 45.208-11). The same holds for a six-month ritual whose goal was the "supreme vision of one's previous lives" (BraYa 45.596-650), which required equipping an underground chamber with water, food, furniture, and gold and silver flowers for the six month's duration of the ritual, which the practitioner was to enact with eight willing women, stimulating three of them to orgasm each day for 180 days (BraYa 45.608-30). Idem recitations that were to be repeated 500,000 or 900,000 times (BraYa 45.88, 138). In the light of these data, one must wonder whether this text described the practices, real or imagined, of any more than a tiny cadre of religious virtuosi.

The levels of precision and erudition evident in Kiss's work are remarkable, and he is to be congratulated for his achievement. One may nonetheless take issue with his exclusively text-based hermeneutics. Kiss's is, to be sure, a partial critical edition and translation, and so it is appropriate that he should read the BraYa in the context of other works from the Saiva canon, the Bhairava Tantras in particular. But this singular attention to arcana of the world of the text comes at a price, inasmuch as it isolates the BraYa from the wider world of circa seventh- to eighth-century Kashmir, a cosmopolitan crossroad and crucible of Asian religions and civilizations. To begin, the BraYa's demonology draws on Hindu. Buddhist, and Iranian demonological traditions already in circulation across the Kashmir-Gandhara-Bactria cultural area in the first millennium CE. Elsewhere, the BraYa shares a common network of charnel grounds, pithas, ksetras, chandohas, and so forth with coeval Buddhist tantric sources. Hindu and Buddhist sources provide similar word descriptions of those charnel grounds, which are reproduced in rich detail on painted Indo-Tibetan mandalas, and instantiated in the symbolic layout of the medieval city-state of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley. References to these real-world contexts of the visualizations and rituals described in the BraYa would have enhanced Kiss's analysis.

The same is the case with yoga, a term Kiss leaves untranslated throughout his work. By the time of the BraYa, the many yoga traditions that had been in circulation since the end of the last millennium BCE were beginning to coalesce, and one may see the BraYa's uses of the term as a window onto that process. Both the "s'akti-fibre (s'aktitantu) that spans from Siva down to earth" and the associated "fusing of the channels" (nadisandhana) (BraYa 45.108, 114) are clear adaptations of the Chandogya Upanis'ad's (8.6) channels of the heart, which morph into the solar rays by which the deceased was said to rise up to or through the orb of the sun. The BraYa's linking of various charnel grounds with groups of demonesses with names ending in -inl (yoginis, lakinis, sakinis) (BraYa 3.96, 103, 108, 118, etc.) anticipates the Kubjikamata (23.141-46), which situates a set of -inl demonesses on the corners of a hexagonal mandala-cum-sacrificial altar. The demonesses of that mandala become internalized--in the same Kubjikamata, as well as in the Srimatottaratantra, Agni Purana, and Rudrayamala--into the yoginis identified with the six "standard" cakras of tantric yoga. The BraYa's use of the term yogin, which appears once, in the compound yogitvam, is similarly left untranslated: Kiss translates the compound as "yogin-ness" (BraYa 3.5). By the time of the BraYa, the term yogin had a wide array of prescriptive and descriptive referents, ranging from Bhagavad Gita's meditator on Krsna in (or as) the self to one or another of the powerful figures, already described in the Mahabharata, who entered into other people's bodies via ocular rays.

The BraYa (3.201-6) contains a very early, if not the earliest, prescriptive account of the tantric adaptation of these epic yogins' technique. Here, the practitioner enters into a victim's body in order to draw out its elements (blood, fat, marrow, etc.), which it then feeds to the yoges'is, who gratify the practitioner with the power of flight. Although the practitioner here is not referred to as a yogin, the final goal of this practice aligns with the profile of the tantric yogin in later Saiva Tantras: he is a person empowered to pursue the attainment of siddhis. In its description of this technique, the BraYa also introduces a number of other familiar terms from the early yogic lexicon. These include the udana and apdna breaths, as well as avadhuta, a term found in the compound avadhuta-tanu (BraYa 3.202)--literally the "body of [the goddess] Avadhuta," but which Kiss, following Hatley, interprets as "the mantras of Avadhuta" (pp. 177, 204). Avadhuta is, of course, a slight variation on AvadhutI, the Buddhist tantric cognate of the Hindu Kundalini, a term that had not yet appeared in the Hindu tantric canon of the period. This being the case, I would suggest that Avadhuta/Avadhuti was a non-sectarian term belonging to a shared early medieval tantric lexicon.

The same is the case for ucchusma, an important term, given that the BraYa refers to itself as the Ucchusma[tantra] or cites the Ucchusma as an authority in several places. Elsewhere, the fourth of BraYa's "observances of the five," called mahocchusma, entails roaming about at night in the Mahocchusma charnel ground (BraYa 21.90). The Mahocchusmas are also alluded to, either as a class of demonesses or of vidya[-mantra]s (BraYa 21.120). The work also enjoins the worship of a goddess named Mahocchusma (BraYa 45.111). The term appears in both its masculine and feminine forms in other chapters as well (appendix 1: 315, 324, 326). Hatley (2007: 275-81), Peter Bisschop and Arlo Griffiths ("The Practice Involving the Ucchusmas (Atharvavedaparisista 36)," Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 24 [2007], pp. 1-6), and Alexis Sanderson ("Atharvavedins in Tantric Territory: The Angirasakalpa Texts of the Oriya Paippaladins and Their Connection with the Trika and the Kalikula," in eds., The Atharvaveda and Its Paippalada Sakha: Historical and Philological Papers on a Vedic Tradition, ed. Arlo Griffiths and Annette Schmiedchen [Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2007], 196-200) have all generated "genealogies" of the various forms, cults, and texts related to Ucchusma, in the singular, plural, masculine, and feminine. In his discussion, Sanderson notes that "Ucchusma, 'Dessicating [Fire]', was well-established in the early Buddhist Mantranaya as a wrathful subduer of demons" (p. 197). He also suggests (p. 199) that the mantras and general tone of the "Ucchusmakalpa" of the Atharvavedaparisistas are strongly reminiscent of the pre-fourth century CE Buddhist Mahamayurividyarajni. In the light of these data, it is possible that the Ucchusmatantra with which the BraYa identified itself was not, properly speaking, a Saiva Tantra. A recent Ph.D. dissertation by Zhaohua Yang provides a wealth of data and analysis on the Tang-period Chinese Buddhist cult of Ucchusma ("Devouring Impurities: Myth, Ritual and Talisman in the Cult of Ucchusma in Tang China," Ph.D diss., Stanford University, 2013). In discussing the origins of that cult, Yang notes that a chapter of the 653-654 CE Buddhist Dharanisamgraha was devoted to Ucchusma, who also appeared in the *Mahabalocchusmavidydrajasutra, a work translated into Chinese in Kucha before 730 CE. Given the fact that Sanderson ("The Saiva Age," in Genesis and Development of Tantrism, ed. Shingo Einoo [Tokyo: Univ. of Tokyo, 2009], 51) establishes the date of the Bra Ya to the sixth to seventh century on the basis of a mention of the title in a 810 CE manuscript of the Skandapurana-Ambikakhanda, there is no hard evidence for its predating these two Buddhist sources. However, as Yang notes, the highly transgressive content of the *Mahabalocchusmavidyarajasutra reflects an intense engagement with the Saivas in its place of origin, which he situates in Kashmir. Sanderson has forcefully argued that the Buddhist Yogini Tantras were, in the main, derivative of the Saiva Tantras. However, this position likely does not apply for the Kashmir of the seventh to eighth centuries, where a distinctive and eclectic "culture of the charnel ground" was emerging in certain esoteric circles. If, as was the case, the iconographies, mantras, and mandalas of the Saiva and Buddhist Tantric deities and their entourages resembled each other so closely, this was because the actors in this new culture were often the same people. Buddhist tantric practitioners were not "derivative" of Saiva tantric practitioners. They did not live inside their texts, and texts have never had agency. The Brahmaydmala-Picumata[-Ucchusma Tantra] is a window onto a revolution, from a time before the "Leninists" began fighting the "Trotskyists."

DAVID GORDON WHITE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA