Tantric cannabis use in India
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Tantric cannabis use in India is the ritual use of cannabis, consecrated under the name vijayā, within Hindu and Buddhist Tantric practice. The plant is documented in the Sanskrit alchemical and Tantric literature from about the 12th century, and in Bengali Śākta ritual in texts codified between roughly the 11th and 18th centuries.[1][2]
In the Sanskrit lexicons and medical compendia vijayā names the plant and its drug substance, alongside bhaṅgā, mātulānī and jayā. The drink used in ritual is one preparation of it.[3][1] The Tantric use is distinguished by the consecration: the sādhaka converts ordinary plant material into a ritual offering by mantra and gesture before consuming it.[4]
The alchemical and Tantric texts use a vocabulary of their own for the plant, preferring names such as trailokyavijayā ("victorious in the three worlds"), trijagajjaitrī and śakrāśana to the ordinary medical bhaṅgā. Meulenbeld treats this as a register distinction, and notes that medical authors begin to adopt the alchemical names only from the 16th century.[3]
The textual record
The evidence for Tantric cannabis use is textual. The material below is arranged by what each layer of the record will support.
Claims from the Vedic corpus
Cannabis is often said to enter Indian religion in the Atharvaveda. The identification is contested and cannot carry the weight usually placed on it. Bhaṅga does not occur in Vedic texts as a name for the plant; at Ṛgveda IX.61,13 it is an epithet of soma. Two Atharvaveda passages are at issue. At VIII.8,3 the word appears in a simile and may designate cannabis, which is how W.D. Whitney translated it, while Dārila's commentary on Kauśikasūtra 16.14 reads it otherwise. At XI.6,15 it heads a group of five plants led by soma and may again mean hemp on Whitney's translation, while Sāyaṇa takes it as śaṇa, sunn hemp.[3][5]
The ambiguity runs through the whole word-group: bhaṅgā and mātulānī are both used elsewhere for śaṇa (Crotalaria juncea), so neither word settles a botanical identification on its own.[3] No Vedic passage uses vijayā.
The alchemical corpus
The longest Sanskrit treatment of the plant is in a Tantric alchemical work. The Ānandakanda, some 6,900 verses on alchemy and yoga, is dated to the 12th or 13th century and devotes a chapter named for the plant, the vijayākalpa, to it at i.15.313–499.[1]
The chapter places cannabis among the substances that coagulated out of the churning of the primal ocean by the gods and demons. It assigns the plant a colour for each world-age and for each of the four varṇa, likens the leaf to Śiva's trident and distinguishes eight types by leaflet count. It holds that the female plants carry the narcotic properties, cause fainting in excess and act to enhance other medicines. It separates the material from male and pollinated female plants, which it calls bhaṅgā, from the product of the unpollinated female plant, which it calls gañjā.[1]
Beyond the botany the chapter is practical: sowing times, rites and prayers for planting and harvest, watering regimes, ten classes of user, preparations from powders and pills through confections to smoking in a chilam, nine successive stages of toxic symptoms and a rejuvenation regime conducted in a purpose-built hut (kuṭī) that echoes the kuṭīprāveśika rejuvenation of the earliest Sanskrit medical literature.[1] Patricia Sauthoff notes that among the synonyms the chapter supplies, gañjā alone is glossed verbally as mādayati, "intoxicates", and that the text otherwise stresses medical, meditative and theological properties rather than intoxication.[2]
The Tantras
Within the Tantras proper the plant appears as a consecrated offering. The Bengali Śākta corpus codified between roughly the 11th and 18th centuries, including the Mahānirvāṇa, Kulārṇava, Niruttara, Tārā and Kāmākhyā Tantras, integrates cannabis into ritual, and the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra carries the description of the consecration used here.[4]
The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra is available in English chiefly through John Woodroffe's 1913 translation, published under the name Arthur Avalon.[4] Its title is Buddhist in derivation and the text takes the form of a dialogue between Śiva and his śakti.[4]
The consecrated substance
Preparation
The Tantric texts do not give recipes, on the assumption that adepts know how to make the drink. Michael Aldrich, whose 1977 account is the English-language description of the rite most often cited in the later literature, reports the simplest form as a small ball of moistened bhang in milk or water, and the ordinary contemporary form as a milk preparation flavoured with almonds, pepper, cardamom and poppy seed.[6]
Consecration
Aldrich's reading of the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra describes a rite beginning before dawn. The sādhaka meditates on his guru at the sahasrāra cakra, then performs a sequence of purifications: ritual bathing with chanting, morning prayers invoking the sacred rivers as channels within his own body, and libations to the sun. He proceeds to the place of worship, which may be a temple, a house or a cremation ground, draws a protective diagram, worships the gods of the entrance beginning with Gaṇeśa and enters left foot first.[6]
The bowl of vijayā is set on an equilateral triangle drawn on the ground. The practitioner recites the consecration mantra and performs a series of mudrā over the bowl, understood to bring the power of the goddess into the cannabis. He raises the bowl to his forehead three times, offers it to the Devī, chants a mantra to Sarasvatī and drinks. The act is understood as a sacrifice of the offering back into the source it came from.[6][4] The consecration mantra itself invokes ambrosia and the favour of Kālikā.[4]
Placement among the pañcamakāra
Cannabis is not one of the pañcamakāra, the five ritual substances of the left-hand rite whose Sanskrit names begin with M: madya (wine), māṃsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudrā (parched grain) and maithuna (sexual union). In many kaula and bhairavī-cakra lineages it functions as a substitute or adjunct to madya.[7][verification needed] David Gordon White reads this substitution as continuous with the older soma-offering pattern reinterpreted in Tantric idiom.[8]
Aldrich credits Agehananda Bharati with the observation that about an hour and a half separates the drinking of the vijayā in the first half of the ceremony from its climax in the second, corresponding to the interval an orally consumed dose takes to reach full effect.[6][9] During that interval the practitioner performs bhūta-śuddhi, a mental cleansing of the bodily elements, and nyāsa, the placing of fingertips and palm on the body to infuse it with divine energy.[6]
Doctrine and categories of practitioner
Tantric practice is divided into left-handed (vāmācāra, literal) and right-handed (symbolic) forms; in the right-handed form substitutes stand in for the five substances, milk for wine among them. Which path a practitioner follows is settled with their guru according to their preparation, under a threefold classification: paśu for the unprepared, vīra for one fit for literal practice and divya for the adept whose whole life is their practice.[6][9]
Both Hindus and Buddhists may be initiated. Caste rules are set aside within the practice, and women practitioners take part and are required in some advanced rites.[6]
Hindu and Buddhist Tantra
The two traditions employ the same substances but assign male and female energy opposite roles. In Hindu Tantra the female śakti is dynamic and paramount and the male passive, an asymmetry expressed iconographically in the depiction of Śiva as śava, a corpse animated only through union with the goddess. In Buddhist Tantra the male takes the active role of compassion and the female embodies wisdom.[10][6]
Bengali Śākta practice
The Mahānirvāṇa Tantra and adjacent texts were codified in a Bengali Śākta milieu, and the regional vocabulary reflects it: the drinkable preparation is ordinarily called siddhi, punning on the yogic sense of the word as attainment, while vijayā and its Bengali form bijoyā attach to the festival occasion.[1]
The cremation-ground strand of the tradition centres on Tārāpīṭha in Birbhum district, a Śākta pīṭha whose adjoining mahāśmaśāna remains a setting for Tantric and Aghorī sādhanā and which continues to host a population of sādhus.[11] The Bāul-Fakir lineages of Birbhum, Murshidabad and Nadia treat cannabis as an adjunct to sādhanā within a devotional rather than a strictly Tantric frame.[11]
The 1970s literature and its influence
Much of the English-language picture of Tantric cannabis use derives from a body of work published in the 1960s and 1970s whose claims have not all survived later philology. The most influential single item is Aldrich's 1977 paper, which supplies the ritual sequence summarised above and remains valuable for it.[6]
Aldrich's wider framing has not held up as well. He identifies vijayā with the amṛta recovered at the churning of the ocean and derives the name from the gods' victory over the demons.[6] The Sanskrit account does not support the identification: in the Ānandakanda, cannabis is one of the substances that coagulated out of the churning rather than the nectar itself.[1] Aldrich also treats the Atharvaveda identification as settled and repeats Grierson's claim that Suśruta prescribes bhaṅga as an antiphlegmatic; Meulenbeld showed that the verse Grierson cited uses bhaṅga as an abbreviation of pattrabhaṅga, a leafy branch, and not as a plant name.[3][12]
The same literature carries a soma-substitution narrative in which cannabis replaced a lost Vedic sacrament as the Aryans moved away from soma's mountain habitat.[13] That narrative was frequently coupled to R. Gordon Wasson's identification of soma with the fly agaric.[14] The soma identification is a long-running and unsettled question in Indology, and no part of the cannabis record depends on its outcome.[citation needed]
Contemporary practice
How far the full rite is still performed is unclear. Aldrich reported that writers in Calcutta told him in 1965 and 1966 that they took part in Tantric ritual, while noting he could not confirm it, and recorded Bharati's view that the traditional ceremonies were by then no longer performed in full.[6] No later survey of the question has been located.[citation needed]
Cannabis remains prominent in Śaiva devotional practice outside any Tantric frame. J.M. Campbell's note for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission recorded bhāṅg poured over the liṅga and consecrated to Kālī in temples across India,[15] and the Commission's own chapter on social and religious customs gathered testimony on festival use at Śivarātri and Holī from across northern India and Bengal.[16] Campbell's note is a document of late-Victorian administrative thinking about Indian religion as much as a record of practice, and its framing is his own.
Terminology
- Vijayā ("the victorious"): the Sanskrit plant name for cannabis used in the Tantric and alchemical literature, and the name under which the substance is consecrated. Not confined to the beverage.[3][1]
- Trailokyavijayā ("victorious in the three worlds"), trijagajjaitrī, śakrāśana: the register of names characteristic of rasaśāstra and Tantric texts.[3]
- Siddhi: the Bengali name for the drinkable preparation, punning on the yogic sense of attainment.[citation needed]
- Bhaṅgā: the ordinary medical name for the plant, and in the Ānandakanda specifically the product of male and pollinated female plants.[1]
- Gañjā: in the Ānandakanda the product of the unpollinated female plant; the only synonym there glossed as intoxicating.[2]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 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.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Sauthoff, Patricia (2024). "Cannabis in Traditional Indian Alchemy". In Maas, Philipp A.; Cerulli, Anthony (eds.). Suhṛdayasaṃhitā: A Compendium of Studies on South Asian Culture, Philosophy and Religion. Dedicated to Dominik Wujastyk. Studia Indologica Universitatis Halensis. Vol. 28. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing. pp. 165–179. doi:10.11588/hasp.1386.c20158. ISBN 978-3-948791-99-5.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Meulenbeld, G.J. (1989). "The search for clues to the chronology of Sanskrit medical texts, as illustrated by the history of bhaṅgā (Cannabis sativa Linn.)". Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik. 15. Reinbek: Dr. Inge Wezler, Verlag für Orientalistische Fachpublikationen: 59–70. ISSN 0341-4191.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Woodroffe, John (1913). The Great Liberation: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra. trans. as Arthur Avalon. London: Luzac.
- ↑ Whitney, W.D.; Lanman, C.R. (1905). Atharva-Veda Saṃhitā. Harvard Oriental Series 7–8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- ↑ 6.00 6.01 6.02 6.03 6.04 6.05 6.06 6.07 6.08 6.09 6.10 Aldrich, Michael R. (1977). "Tantric cannabis use in India". Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. 9 (3): 227–233. doi:10.1080/02791072.1977.10472053.
- ↑ Banerji, Sures Chandra (1992). Tantra in Bengal: A Study in its Origin, Development and Influence (2nd ed.). New Delhi: Manohar. ISBN 978-81-85425-63-4.
- ↑ White, David Gordon (2003). Kiss of the Yoginī: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 83–85. ISBN 978-0-226-89483-6.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Bharati, Agehananda (1965). The Tantric Tradition. London: Rider.
- ↑ Blofeld, John (1970). The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet. New York: E.P. Dutton.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 McDaniel, June (2004). Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press.
- ↑ Grierson, George Abraham (1894). "Note on references to the hemp plant occurring in Sanskrit and Hindi literature". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894. Vol. III. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. Appendix I.
- ↑ Staal, Frits (1975). Exploring Mysticism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- ↑ Wasson, R. Gordon (1968). Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
- ↑ Campbell, J.M. (1894). "Note on the religion of hemp". Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–1894. Vol. III. Simla: Government Central Printing Office. Appendix.
- ↑ Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). "Social and Religious Customs". Report. Vol. I. §§430–446.