Tantra
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Tantra is the name for a body of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain scriptures, the Tantras, and for the systems of ritual, yoga and doctrine taught in them. The word tantra itself means "a system of ritual or essential instruction". Those who followed the Tantras (tāntrika) held them to be a revelation more specialised and more powerful than the Vedic tradition, open only to initiates.[1]: 660 Some Tantric rites prescribe substances that orthodox practice forbade, alcohol and meat among them.[1]: 661 Cannabis appears in Tantric worship under the Sanskrit names vijayā and siddhi, above all in the goddess (Śākta) traditions of eastern India. A reading of one Buddhist Tantra as naming it among plants for long life rests on a single disputed word.[2]: 79[3]: 373–374
Secure references to cannabis in Sanskrit literature begin around AD 1000, and works of Tantric magic and alchemy name it from the 12th or 13th century.[4]: 55, 59, 61–62 One ritual prescription, the consecration of vijayā in the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra, comes from a text that Sergei Pakhomov dates to the second half of the 18th century.[5]
Scriptures and initiates
The Tantras are not one tradition. Alongside the Śaiva Tantras, revealed as the word of Śiva, there were Vaiṣṇava Tantras of the Pāñcarātra, Tantras of the Sun whose texts are now lost, and a smaller Jain production. A Śaiva Tantric may worship the goddess rather than Śiva, and in the goddess-centred, or Śākta, forms of Śaivism she is seen as transcending her place as his consort.[1]: 660 Buddhists added a large Tantric literature to their canon between about 400 and 750 CE. By the end of that period this system, called the Diamond Way (Vajrayāna) or the Way of Mantras, was widely held among Mahāyāna Buddhists to be the most direct path to liberation. The Tibetan canon preserves translations of almost 500 such scriptures and more than 2,000 commentaries.[1]: 661
Initiation (dīkṣā) was held to destroy the force of the initiate's past actions and to fuse him with the deity. Some rites went further than the rules binding public ritual and required meat, alcohol and other impure substances, or sexual intercourse with women of untouchable castes. Alexis Sanderson traces these practices to orders of Śaiva ascetics who used them as magical technique. They passed to married householders, where they survived unaltered only in small circles, and the general tendency in both Hindu and Buddhist Tantra was to keep the structure of the rites while purging the impure elements. Sanderson describes the spread of Tantra through Indian religion as largely a history of this domestication.[1]: 660–662
The Kaula traditions, named for the kula or lineages of the female yoginī deities, kept the transgressive rites and gave them an inward reading: the offerings of meat and alcohol served to intensify experience and to gratify the goddesses of the senses.[1]: 679–680 Substitutes were already in dispute in Kashmir, where the Śaiva exegete Kṣemarāja, a pupil of Abhinavagupta, attacked the practice, current in his day, of offering water in place of alcoholic liquor in the guest-offering to the deity Svacchandabhairava.[1]: 700
Hugh Urban argues that "Tantrism" as a single, clearly defined entity "is largely a product of nineteenth-century Orientalist and colonial discourse".[6]
Wine, its substitutes and cannabis
The Śākta Tantras call the transgressive offerings the five tattva or, from their initial letters, the five Ms (pañcamakāra): wine (madya), meat (māṃsa), fish (matsya), parched grain (mudrā) and sexual union (maithuna).[7]: cxi The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra names them in its fifth chapter and calls the worship of Śakti without them "but the practice of evil magic".[7]: 63 Its eighth chapter relaxes the rule for the Kali age: householders are to offer the "three sweets", milk, sugar and honey, as "the image of wine", and to replace sexual union with meditation on the feet of the goddess and the inward recitation of a mantra (ch. VIII, vv. 171–174).[7]: cxvii, 178
John Woodroffe, who translated the text in 1913 under the name Arthur Avalon, read it as "a protest against the misuse of the tattva".[7]: cxviii In his account a practitioner of the lowest grade, the paśu, takes substitutes (in place of wine, milk, ghee, honey or a rice liquor according to his caste), while in the highest, divya, practice the five names stand for "operations of a purely mental and spiritual character".[7]: cxv, cxix Hugh Urban names Woodroffe, above all, as the 20th-century scholar who defended and rationalised the Tantras and "sanitized" them.[6]
Cannabis is not one of the five. Several writers have nonetheless set it beside wine. Woodroffe cited the Kaulikārcanadīpikā for a set of substitutes, the ādyatattva, in which "wine is hemp (Vijaya)", meat is ginger, fish is citron and the woman is the worshipper's own wife.[8]: 570 He also summarised the Viśvasāra Tantra as directing meditation on the goddess "after taking Vijaya (Hemp)" in the right-hand path.[8]: 143 James McHugh, in Sarbacker's summary, argues that the transgressive status of alcohol (surā or madya) in Tantric worship made surā an umbrella term for intoxicants, cannabis, betel and tobacco among them, all three of which appear as offerings in Tantric worship and fire sacrifice.[2]: 79
In 1894 the Sanskrit scholar Mahesa Chandra Nyayaratna, principal of the Government Sanskrit College in Calcutta, told the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission that the Tārābhaktisudhārṇava made siddhi compulsory before the worship of the goddess for Kṣatriyas, Vaiśyas and Śūdras "if spirituous drink is not available", while exempting Brahmins. He said that taking siddhi was not considered as objectionable as drinking wine, and quoted a Sanskrit verse which he rendered as saying that in the Kali age siddhi should be preferred to wine.[9]: 252–253
Agehananda Bharati, a participant-observer of the Hindu ascetic tradition in Dominik Wujastyk's description, proposed that Tantric adepts used cannabis to overcome their own resistance to rites that deliberately broke social taboos.[4]: 65 Stuart Sarbacker names the drinking of alcohol and the eating of meat as the transgressions in question, and adds that Bharati also took cannabis to act as an aphrodisiac in the rite.[2]: 79 James Fisher repeated Bharati's view in his 1975 survey of cannabis in Nepal, calling the drug "a deinhibiting agent in certain esoteric Tantric rituals".[10]: 250
Cannabis in the Tantric literature
The Yogaratnamālā attributed to Nāgārjuna, a book of Tantric magic with medical material, is dated to the 12th or early 13th century and may come from Gujarat. Among its magical and sexual procedures it recommends the smoke of cannabis (mātulānī) to make enemies believe they are possessed by evil spirits, and Dominik Wujastyk reads the passage as an early sign of the association of cannabis with "the tantric subculture".[4]: 59 The Ānandakanda, some 6,900 verses on Tantric alchemy and yoga of the 12th or 13th century, gives the plant "a long and detailed chapter", the vijayākalpa.[4]: 61–62
In the fifth chapter of the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra the worshipper consecrates vijayā with a mantra that asks for siddhi and for the goddess Kālikā to be brought under his control, offers it three times to the guru and three times to the goddess, and drinks it. Avalon's footnote glosses the word as "the narcotic Bhang (hemp)", called siddhi in Bengali, "which is used in all ceremonies".[7]: 73–74 The text was first printed in 1876 by the Ādi Brahmo Samāj, with the notes of Hariharānanda Bhāratī, whom Avalon describes as the guru of the reformer Ram Mohun Roy.[7]: xii–xiii Sergei Pakhomov dates its composition to the second half of the 18th century, by an author who knew both the Tantric tradition and the Hindu law administered under British rule.[5]
Witnesses before the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893 and 1894 cited further texts. Nyayaratna named the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra, the Bijaya Kalpa and a Kālīpūjā manual drawn from the Rudrayāmala as requiring siddhi before the worship of the goddess, and the Prāṇatoṣiṇī as quoting a text that made its offering to the goddess a duty of the three upper classes.[9]: 252–253 Manmohan Chakravarti, a deputy magistrate in Orissa who searched Sanskrit works with the help of pandits, reported that the Tantras call the drug saṃvidā or vijayā and prescribe two ceremonies, saṃvidā prakaraṇa and vijayā-dhūma-pānam (the smoking of vijayā). His translation of one passage classes the flowers of the plant by the four varṇa and directs that the leaves be fried in ghee, ground with a long list of spices and consecrated with four mantras in a golden vessel. He cited the Muṇḍamālā Tantra alongside the Mahānirvāṇa and put the probable dates of "these Tantras" at the 11th and 12th centuries.[11]: 123–124 The Commission's report concluded that while its witnesses disagreed over whether any shastra made hemp obligatory, "Tantric religious works sanction the use".[12]
Bengal, Orissa and Assam
The Commission's witnesses from Bengal differed over what the Tantras required. Nyayaratna could not say that most of the respectable class of Hindus in Bengal were followers of the "Tantrik religion", "but certainly many of them" were. In his first written answers he called the drinking of siddhi on the Bijaya day of the Durgā Pūjā a social custom for which he had found no weighty religious authority; the Tantric texts he cited came in a further statement he sent in afterwards.[9]: 252–253 A zamindar of Mymensingh thought the Tantrics and the bhairab and bhairabi ascetics "more addicted to wine than ganja or other drugs".[13]: 414 A pleader of Bogra wrote that the moderate use of ganja and bhang "is said to be enjoined in the Hindu Tantras, but it is observed more in the breach".[14]: 454 Chakravarti, writing of Orissa, held that bhang alone was recognised in the Hindu shastras, that he had found ganja smoking in only one Tantra, and that ascetics, Vaiṣṇavas and Tantrics had once chiefly drunk bhang, ganja smoking having come in with tobacco under later Muslim rule.[11]: 122
The Commission's report described the handing round of an infusion of hemp leaves to every guest on Bijoya Dasami, the last day of the Durgā Pūjā, as common in Bengal, a custom that "may almost be said to be universal". It found opinion "almost equally divided" on whether the custom was a social observance or part of the religious ceremonial, and concluded that, whatever its origin, it "may now be said from immemorial usage to be regarded by many people as part of their religious observances".[12]
In Assam a committee on opium and ganja reported in 1913 that ganja smoking was spreading among the Assamese, and that upper-class Assamese thought it a less disreputable habit than opium, partly "on account of its religious associations". The committee put part of the spread in Kamrup down to "up-country or Bengali sanyasis who pass through the district on the way to Kamakhya", the goddess shrine of Kāmākhyā at Gauhati, one of whom "appears to have established a regular cult of ganja smokers" near Nalbari.[15]: 10
Visiting sadhus smoking ganja have been reported at the Ambubachi Mela, the annual gathering at Kāmākhyā. In June 2017 The Sentinel of Guwahati found sadhus there preparing cannabis to smoke, one of whom said that it "helps one to concentrate and meditate".[16] The same month HuffPost India reported that Naga sadhus were being kept out of that year's mela, partly over "drug abuse". The report quoted the chair of the state's anti-drugs council, speaking to the Indian Express in 2015, as saying that ganja smoking was banned under the Assam Ganja and Bhang Prohibition Act and that, since so ancient and famous a temple was involved, the government should find a way to make Kāmākhyā "ganja-free" without hurting sentiments.[17]
Buddhist Tantra, Nepal and Tibet
The Cakrasaṃvara Tantra, a Buddhist Yoginī Tantra that David Gray dates to the mid- to late 8th century, was translated into Tibetan by the late 10th century and is still practised by Newar Buddhists in Nepal and by three of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism.[3]: 3, 11, 21 Its fiftieth chapter gives a recipe for "abundant life" in which the mouth is bound with a list of edible plants, and one of them is śaṇa, which Gray translates as hemp (Cannabis sativa). Both Tibetan translations read tsa na ka at that point, which Gray takes as a transcription of caṇaka, chickpea, and Pandey's 2002 edition of the Sanskrit reads caṇakam.[3]: 373–374 Śaṇa can also mean sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea).[18] Stuart Sarbacker cites the passage for cannabis as an aid to long life in Buddhist Tantra.[2]: 79
Hindu Tantric cults also took root in the Nepal Valley. Practical texts of the Kālī cult, among them a ritual handbook by Vimalaprabodha, an author first named in a Nepalese manuscript dated 1002 CE, have circulated there and circulate still.[1]: 684 In the early 1970s James Fisher found that sadhus, many of them pilgrims from India visiting the Śaiva shrines and temple of Paśupatināth, used it extensively, among other reasons as an aid to meditation, and that for followers of Śiva smoking it was a way of offering it to the god.[10]: 249
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Sanderson, Alexis (1988). "Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions". In Sutherland, Stewart; Houlden, Leslie; Clarke, Peter; Hardy, Friedhelm (eds.). The World's Religions. London: Routledge. pp. 660–704.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Sarbacker, Stuart (10 September 2026). "Psychoactives and psychedelics in yoga: historical contexts and contemporary culture". Journal of Contemplative Studies (1): 73–100. doi:10.57010/exia6450.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Gray, David B. (2007). The Cakrasamvara Tantra (The Discourse of Śrī Heruka): A Study and Annotated Translation. Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences. New York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. ISBN 978-0-9753734-6-0.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Wujastyk, Dominik (2002). "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Herbal Medicine". In Salema, A. (ed.). Ayurveda at the Crossroads of Care and Cure. Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar. pp. 45–73. ISBN 972-98672-5-9.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Pakhomov, S. (2017). "The Notion of Dharma in the Mahanirvana-tantra". Manuscripta Orientalia. 23 (2): 35–40.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Urban, Hugh B. (1999). "The Extreme Orient: The Construction of 'Tantrism' as a Category in the Orientalist Imagination". Religion. 29 (2): 123–146. doi:10.1006/reli.1997.0097.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Avalon, Arthur (1913). Tantra of the Great Liberation (Mahānirvāṇa Tantra). London: Luzac.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Woodroffe, John (1929). Shakti and Shakta: Essays and Addresses on the Shakta Tantrashastra (3rd ed.). Madras: Ganesh & Co. – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Mahamahopadhya Mahesa Chandra Nyayaratna, C.I.E., Brahmin, Principal, Government Sanskrit College, Calcutta". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bengal witness no. 93, pp. 251–253 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Fisher, James F. (1975). "Cannabis in Nepal: an overview". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 247–256. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.247.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Babu Manmohan Chakravarti, Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector, Jajpur, Cuttack, Orissa". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bengal witness no. 52, pp. 121–124 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. I: Report. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. ch. IX, "Social and religious customs", para. 433, pp. 159–160 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Babu Jogendra Kishore Rai Chaudhuri, Zamindar, Ramgopalpur, District Mymensingh". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bengal witness no. 185, pp. 413–414 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Evidence of Syed Riyaz Uddin Quazi, Pleader, Bogra". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Vol. IV: Evidence of Witnesses from Bengal and Assam. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. Bengal witness no. 211, pp. 453–454 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into Certain Aspects of Opium and Ganja Consumption (Report). 18 April 1913 – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.
- ↑ "Kamakhya Dham looks saffron clad". The Sentinel. Guwahati. 20 June 2017.
- ↑ Chatterji, Rohini (12 June 2017). "It Seems The Nudity Of Naga Sadhus Is Making Visitors Uncomfortable At Assam's Legendary Kamakhya Temple". HuffPost India. Archived from the original on 25 September 2019.
- ↑ Monier-Williams, M. (1899). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (new, greatly enlarged and improved ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. s.v. śaṇa, p. 1048 – via Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries.