The Eighty-four Mahasiddhas and the Path of Tantra

The evolution of Tantra into the dominant spiritual power in Indian life coincided with the growth of a terrible, destructive menace on India's north-west frontier. At the beginning of the eighth century, when Arab power was supreme from Morocco to Sindh, in India the numerous inheritors of imperial Gupta glory were engaged in internecine conflicts, and Indian culture was in a state of decay. The old dispensation was vitiated, society taking refuge in inflexible caste rules and regulations; and as form and procedure governed social life, so ritual dominated religion and scholasticism the academics. There was no vital, united society to meet the threat of the fanatical Islamic armies who wreaked burning, pillage and massacre, and who were a new kind of enemy, compelling Islam or the sword. As a stream of Buddhist refugees brought tales of the destruction of Buddhist Central Asia to India, Tantra was increasing its influence, particularly in Oddiyana, the front-line state, and also in eastern India, where a new power, the Buddhist Pala Dynasty, was emerging. Was it coincidence that India took refuge in Tantra with its uncompromising non-dualist metaphysics, its school of spontaneous liberation, and its fierce flesh-eating, blood-drinking deities, during a period of incipient doom? Is it a further coincidence that, after rejecting Tantra for centuries, the West finds it increasingly acceptable as the notion of mankind's extinction become credible?
   
Nearly four centuries passed between AD 711, when Sindh (S. Pakistan) was conquered, and the end of the twelfth century when the Buddha's Tree of Enlightenment was finally desecrated by Turkish soldiers. Some critics maintain that the final blossoming of pure Hindu civilization between the eighth and twelfth century was the most magnificent achievement of India's cultural history. During that period Tibet embraced Buddhist Tantra and the main part of the Buddhist tantric canon was translated into the Tibetan language, thus saving it from incineration in the great Indian libraries. Java was colonized and the great stupa at Borobodur was built. Although most of the artistic achievement at home was destroyed by the Muslims, the scripture of the Pala Empire (Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Assam), the ruins of the great academics built by the Pala Emperors, and the temples of Khajuraho, bear witness to the genius of tantric art. "Tantra" describes the ethos of Indian culture of this time; the men who embodied that ethos and the aims and ideals of the culture, the generators and directors of the creative energy that converted the people and transformed society, the guides and exemplars on the path of Tantra, these men were called siddhas. The eighty-four siddhas, whose lives and practices are described in these legends, were the siddhas who practiced the Buddhist Tantra, as opposed to the Tantra of devotees of Siva (saivas) or the Tantra of the worshippers of the Great Mother (saktas).
   
The number eighty-four is a "whole" or "perfect" number. Thus the eighty-four siddhas can be seen as archetypes representing the thousands of exemplars and adepts of the tantric way. The siddhas were remarkable for the diversity of their family backgrounds and the dissimilarity of their social roles. They were found in every reach of the social structure: kings and ministers, priests and yogins, poets and musicians, craftsmen and farmers, housewives and whores. However, the greatest names amongst the eighty- four - Tilopa, Naropa, Saraha, Luipa, Ghantapa, Dombipa, etc., - were sadhu siddhas, mendicant yogins living with the people on a grass-roots level of society, teaching more by psychic vibration, posture and attitude - mantra, mudra and tantra3 - than by sermonizing. Some of these siddhas were iconoclasts, dissenters and anti-establishment rebels fulfilling the necessary function of destroying the rigidity of old and intractable customs and habits, so that spontaneity and new vitality could flourish. Obsessive caste rules and regulations in society, and religious ritual as an end in itself, were undermined by the siddhas' exemplary free-living. The irrelevance of scholastic hairsplitting in an academic language, together with a host of social and religious evils, were exposed in the poets' wonderful mystical songs written in the vernacular tongues, They taught existential involvement rather than metaphysical speculation, and they taught the ideal of living in the world but not of it rather than ascetic self mutilation or monastic renunciation, The siddhas are characterized by a lack of external uniformity and formal discipline.

    Under the generous patronage of the Pala Emperors in the eastern Indian empire, where the majority of the siddhas lived, the revolution became the establishment. The great academies of Vikramasila and Somapuri were built, and the ancient monastic establishment at Nalanda was extensively enlarged. The militancy of the siddha-poets decrying empty ritualism, charlatanism, specious philosophizing, scholasticism, hypocrisy and the caste system is less apparent during Naropa's period in the eleventh century. The attitudes and precepts of Tantra became more socially acceptable after generations of siddhas in positions of temporal power had influenced people and events on many levels. From the beginning, Tantra's flexibility permitted initiates like Lilapa to retain their secular status, wealth and pleasure, and this principle of tolerance and inclusiveness was a significant factor in the appeal of the doctrine; as the millennium approached the increasing hedonism could be used as a path to spiritual liberation. However, the ideal of spiritual anarchism, the attitude that precluded attachment to religious forms, prevailed, and in its esoteric, yogic form, Tantra remained the preserve of initiates into the lineage, and no institutionalism compromised their spirit of existential freedom.
   
Tantra took centuries to come out if its closet. Its history up to the era of the siddhas can only be conjecture, but it appears that originally, in the guise of fertility cults, it belonged to the pre-Aryan, tribal worshippers of the Mother Goddess, and later, also, to the low castes and out-castes of Hindu society. A corpus of sympathetic and imitative magic for a variety of mundane purposes such as healing became part of the various tantric cults. Then over the centuries, as they became "sanskritized" and more sophisticated, these cults assimilated brahmanical deities, their rituals and the principles of mantra. Later still, Upanishadic philosophy, Patanjali's Yoga-sutras and principles of mahayana Buddhist philosophy were assimilated, and a crucial transformation was accomplished - a body of ritual magic became a soteriological system with liberation from human suffering as its aim. Whether the Kapalikas, or a similar sect of primitive saiva Tantra, or heretical Buddhist monks, formed the first lineage of Tantra as we know it, is not known, but in the fourth or fifth century, a need arose for order and consistency in the system, and this could only be achieved by committing to palm leaf manuscript what until then had been purely oral transmission. The Manjusrimulakalpa contained a body of mahayana lore and also the basic father-tantra mandala of the Five Dhyani Buddhas; but the Guhyasamaja-tantra is considered to be the first of the root-tantras describing yoga techniques as well as the mandalas, mantras and rites associated with the propitiation of a particular deity and his retinue, in this case Guhyasamaja. This tantra was probably compiled in the sixth or seventh century, not reaching its final form until Indrabhuti "revealed" it in the eighth century. The eighth and ninth centuries saw the revelation of most of the major tantras, particularly the mother-tantras, incorporating many elements from the sakta, Goddess-worshipping cults.

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