RITUAL DYNAMICS AND THE SCIENCE OF - Alexis Sanderson

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RITUAL DYNAMICS AND
THE SCIENCE OF RITUAL Volume II
Harrassowitz
Ritual Dynamics Body, Performance,
and the Science of Ritual Agency, and Experience
Including an E-Book-Version in PDF-Format
General Editor
on eD-ROM
AxelMichaels
EditorialBoard Section I
Michael Bergunder,Jorg Gengnagel, Alexandra Heidle, Ritual and Agency
Bernd Schneidmiiller, and Udo Simon Edited by Angelos Chaniotis
Section II
II Ritual, Performance, and Event
Edited by SilkeLeopold and Hendrik Schulze
Section III
The Body and Food in Ritual
Edited by Eric Venbrux,
Thomas Quartier, andJoannaWojtkowiak
Section IV
The VarietiesofRitual Experience
Edited byJan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel
2010 2010
Harrassowitz Verlag· Wiesbaden Harrassowitz Verlag· Wiesbaden
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Table ofContents
Cover:TheyoungLouisXIVintheroleofApollo,intheBallet»RoyaldeIeNuit"
byJean-Baptiste Lully(1653),drawing,after1653.
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Picturecredits::»bpkIRMNIBulloz" Section I:Ritual and Agency
Editedby Angelos Chaniotis
Angelos Chaniotis
Introduction:
DebatingRitualAgency 3
u u u _
Alexis Sanderson
Ritual forOneselfandRitual forOthers 9
u u uu _
Thomas Widlok
What istheValue ofRituals?
Effects ofComplexityinAustralian Rituals andBeyond 21
hu h__
Christian Meyer
PerformingSpirits:
Shifting Agencies inBrazilianUmbanda Rituals 35
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athttp://dnb.d-nb.de.
Section II: Ritual, Performance, and Event
Editedby Silke Leopoldand Hendrik Schulze
Forfurtherinformationaboutourpublishingprogramconsultour
websitehttp://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de
Andrea Taddei
©OttoHarrassowitzGmbH& Co. KG,Wiesbaden 2010
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(Sixth-ThirdCenturies B.C.) 127
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Alexis Sanderson
Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others
During the early medieval period of the Indic world, from the sixth to the thirteenth
centuries, the old ritual order based on the archaic Vedic tradition became progres-
sively complemented and overshadowed by another, developed and propagated by
devotees of the god Śiva. In the first centuries of the Christian era the activities of
these theistic sectarians were mostly restricted to brahmin celibate ascetics; but
around the beginning of our period we find the first evidence that Śaivism had
developed new forms that had moved beyond these narrow confines to propagate
themselves in the broader society, creating in this process a new repertoire of ritu-
als. This new Śaivism is known in Indian sources as the Mantramārga or “Path of
Mantras”, as opposed to the purely ascetic “Atimārga” or ‘Path Outside the World’
of the preceding period. The Indological term Tantric Śaivism may also be used to
refer to it, though I prefer to avoid this expression, because the term Tantric has be-
come contaminated by notions that apply only to certain forms that were mostly
outside the mainstream of the Mantramārga.
By the seventh century, the Mantramārga had emerged into a position of domi-
nance, attracting widespread royal patronage, and from this time onwards exerted a
profound influence on all the other religious systems that had to compete with it for
patronage: Śāktism, Saurism, Vaiṣṇavism, Buddhism, Jainism, and the long estab-
lished Brahmanical substrate. Śāktism and Saurism were largely subsumed by Śai-
vism as it rose to prominence; and Vaiṣṇavism, Buddhism, and Jainism reacted by
developing new ritual systems along Śaiva lines: Pañcarātra, the Buddhist Mantra-
naya, and the Jain Mantravāda. The Brahmanical tradition was also deeply influ-
enced, responding to Śaivism’s success by incorporating, and to some extent ex-
purgating, forms of Śaivism in its ever-growing corpus of scriptural texts.
The Śaiva literature, which we are still in the process of discovering, comprises
in the first instance a huge body of scriptural compositions from the fifth or sixth
century onwards, teaching the procedures for the propitiation of Śiva and, in more
esoteric and transgressive texts, of the god Bhairava and a variety of ferocious god-
desses, worshipped either as Bhairava’s consort or on their own. From the seventh
century onwards, but in much greater abundance from the ninth, there emerged a
learned tradition of commentaries on what were then the principal works of this
scriptural corpus, and this was supplemented by the production of lucid, practical
guides, which set out systematically the procedures of ritual, claiming to be rooted
10 Alexis Sanderson
in this or that scripture, but in reality drawing eclectically on various scriptural
sources, developing their own standardised procedures, and, to a large extent, shift-
ing the emphasis of those texts, as well as homogenising their content.
When I entered this terra incognita in the 1970s, the learned literature of com-
mentary and systematisation was the natural starting point of my investigations,
since, for all its shortcomings, it provided the only avenue of access to what was
then a largely impenetrable mass of discordant scriptural texts and manuals, a mass
which was, in fact, much vaster than I then imagined. Many works which seemed
to have been lost, being known only by name or through citations in the learned
commentaries, and many others besides, were still awaiting recognition in manus-
cript collections, principally in the Kathmandu valley, where the climate has been
much kinder to palm-leaf than in other parts of the subcontinent, allowing the sur-
vival of numerous manuscripts copied in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and
some from the ninth and tenth.
The world of ritual presented in this exegetical literature of commentaries and
ritual manuals, which was my starting point and remained the basis of most discus-
sion of Śaivism until recent years, is one of rituals for personal religious benefit,
performed or commissioned for the purpose of salvation at death, conceived not as
the attainment of some heaven, but the final cessation of rebirth through the attain-
ment of liberation. The great selling-point of this religion was that it promised that
this liberation could be attained effortlessly, by passing through a ceremony of init-
iation in which Śiva himself, or Bhairava, or the Goddess, would destroy the soul’s
bonds, acting through the person of an initiated and consecrated officiant, who en-
acted an elaborate sequence of rites in which the individual was introduced before
the Maṇḍala of his initiation deity, freed of his bonds through the offering of many
oblations into fire, and then united with his deity through a visualisation in which
the officiant drew the candidate’s soul into his own, and then raised it with his own
up the central channel of his vital energy, and out through his cranial aperture to
fuse it with the deity. Thereafter, the initiate was bound to observe a discipline
which entailed the regular performance of a complex and time-consuming ritual of
worship of his initiation deity, at least once a day and ideally thrice, until his death,
combined with the regular study of scripture and the performance of yet more
elaborate rituals on special occasions, both calendrically fixed and incidental. Here,
then, was a religion for which ritual was everything. Ritual performed by an offi-
ciant, while one remained a passive presence, would gain one the goal that other
systems offered only at the cost of intense asceticism and disengagement from the
social world. Thereafter one had only to perform regular rituals of worship until
that goal, so far achieved in advance on a subliminal level, became fully manifest
simply through the natural process of death.
However, since it was initiation itself that guaranteed salvation, the problem of
maintaining commitment to this exacting routine between the time of initiation and
Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 11
death was acute. Theoreticians strove to construct theoretical justifications for what
appeared to be redundant, and I examined these strategies in 1995 in my study
Meaning in Tantric Ritual. The problem was to keep alive a sense that these ob-
ligatory rituals have a higher purpose than those of the brahmanical mainstream,
which offered as justification for adherence to its own ritual obligations the realis-
tic view that they were to be performed simply out of a sense of duty and adhe-
rence to tradition, to avoid the sin of their omission, or, as we might wish to trans-
late this, to maintain one’s credentials as an observant member of one’s caste. The
most intellectually brilliant of the Śaiva theoreticans, the Śākta Śaiva exegetes of
Kashmir in the ninth to eleventh centuries, adopted two strategies to this end. One
was to read meaning into the rituals in such a way that their performance could be
presented as a liturgical contemplation of the reality that would be realised at death,
thereby opening up the possibility that an élite among initiates could, through their
rituals, experience liberation here and now, without waiting for death; and the other
was to support this mystical trend by insisting on the preservation of the transgres-
sive and ecstatic elements of their tradition, such as the consumption of meat and
wine and ritualised sexual intercourse as a means of activating an inner aesthetic of
transcendence of the inhibited norms of brahmanical life, thereby resisting a well-
documented trend to eliminate these elements as these traditions became routi-
nised. But while these strategies make fascinating and, for some, inspiring reading,
they were ultimately doomed to failure. They substituted knowing for doing in the
first strategy, allowing the possibility of liberation in life through knowledge alone,
and in the second by stressing that the purpose of the transgressive elements of ritu-
al observance was to awaken an inner experience they opened the way to the sub-
stitution of non-ritual and non-transgressive means of producing the same effect. In
later centuries the brahmins of Kashmir among whom this Śākta Śaiva tradition
had become dominant, duly abandoned all its rituals, thinking Śaiva but regressing
on the level of rites to the received brahmanical traditions of their caste, reverting
to the brahmanical duality of doing without knowing and knowing without doing.
How, then, one wonders, did Śaiva ritual survive, as it did, outside this commu-
nity, whose literature forms such a conspicuous part of high Śaiva culture? What is
it that set that community apart, and how did Śaiva ritual succeed in exerting such a
tremendous influence in early medieval India, affecting all the other religions,
when the presentation of ritual in this learned literature with its high soteriological
purpose seems to promise a very different trajectory? The purpose of the rest of my
address is to propose answers to these questions.
Ritual for Others
The difficulty arises from the fact that the élite literature which has formed our
natural point of entry into the study of Śaivism provides an entirely inadequate
12 Alexis Sanderson
representation of the historical realities of the religion. It privileges the Śaivism of
a social élite conforming to the brahmanical ideal of personal religious self-culti-
vation, an élite whose social identity was already sufficiently established by its
conformity to the brahmanical stratum of its observance, an élite for whom distinc-
tively Śaiva ritual was a supererogatory adornment, rather than a necessity, and
was therefore always in danger of evaporating in favour of a purely devotional or
gnostic Śaiva identity. What kept Śaivism alive, and enabled it to exert this influ-
ence, was ritual for others, as the professional activity of officiants who operated
outside the narrow confines of self-cultivation. In the élite literature, the officiant is
presented as a spiritual guide acting for the benefit of liberation-seekers. In the
broader reality, revealed both by the Śaiva literature that has been coming to light
in recent times and by the epigraphical record, Śaiva officiants were professional
ritualists who, while insisting on the superior spiritual character of their religion,
succeeded in modifying its core rituals to create a repertoire of ritual services that
made it increasingly attractive to royal patrons. For these officiants, conformity to
the post-initiatory discipline, however difficult it may have been to justify theoreti-
cally, was a professional necessity. It was the visible, and therefore objective, proof
of their qualification to apply modifications and elaborations of these rituals for the
benefit of their clients; and it was equally vital for their disciples, who are best seen
as officiants in waiting. For them, it was gnosis not ritual that was the supereroga-
tory adornment. A reputation for learning and spiritual insight could greatly heigh-
ten the appeal of an officiant to a royal patron, but Gurus who claimed that learning
and insight were sufficient were the enemies of their profession. What mattered to
these Śaivas was verifiable qualification, certificates of ritual entitlement bestowed
by recognised officiants, rather than spiritual charisma based on unverifiable mys-
tical experience, that threatened to undermine their pre-eminence. In extending
their influence by these means, they showed little concern, as we might expect, to
maintain the theoretical coherence of the doctrines of their faith, compromising this
in several ways as they adapted their rituals to strengthen their hold on society.
Accordingly, the traditionalist theoreticians, while no doubt fully aware of these
developments, tend to keep them out of the picture that they present, addressing
themselves to a learned élite that likewise held itself apart from these changes.
They largely conceal from us, therefore, an outstanding example of how inventive
and adaptable the propagators of ritual systems can be in the drive to extend the
power, wealth, and influence of their faith, a creativity that in this case set in mo-
tion waves of competitive innovation in the religions around them that completely
changed the character of Indian religion and thence that of Inner Asia, Southeast
Asia, and the Far East. None is more striking than the astonishing efflorescence of
Tantric Buddhism during this period, which, following the lead of the Śaivas,
developed a system of rituals that eventually died out in India but survives to this
day in Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and Japan. But the Vaiṣṇavas, too, made strenuous
Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 13
efforts in this direction, producing an entirely new ritual system closely modelled
on the Śaiva and enshrined in the scriptures of the Pañcarātra.
In a recently published study, entitled The Śaiva Age, I have set forth the inno-
vations that brought Śaivism to its position of dominance during the early medieval
period, both on the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, and I have offered an hypo-
thesis that seeks to explain this success, namely that it extended and adapted its
ritual repertoire to legitimate, empower, or promote the key elements of the social,
political, and economic process that characterises the early medieval period, while
at the same time taking steps to integrate itself with the brahmanical substrate in
ways that rendered it accessible and acceptable to a far wider constituency, and
therefore all the more appealing to rulers in their role as the guardians of the brah-
manical social order. I shall end by summarising these innovations.
Initiating the Monarch
The first of these key elements is the spread of the monarchical model of govern-
ment through the emergence of numerous new dynasties at subregional, regional,
and supraregional levels. From the seventh century onwards, inscriptions and pre-
scriptive religious texts reveal that Śaiva Brahmin Gurus were holding the position
of royal preceptor (rājaguruḥ) in numerous new kingdoms, both on the Indian sub-
continent and in Southeast Asia, and in this capacity empowering and legitimating
the monarch’s rule by granting him Śaiva initiation (Śivamaṇḍaladīkṣā). It might
be thought that this would have been an unappealing step for any but the most
reclusive and ineffectual of kings, since, as we have seen, after initiation Śaivas
were obliged to adhere to a complex and time-consuming programme of daily and
occasional rituals. However, early in the development of the Mantramārga, the Śai-
vas, no doubt in order to extend their recruitment and hence their influence, admit-
ted a category of initiates who, in consideration of the fact that they were incapable
of taking on these onerous duties, were exonerated from doing so. The king was
considered to qualify for this less arduous route to liberation by reason of his royal
obligations. He was therefore required to adhere only to the obligations of an unini-
tiated devotee of Śiva, which in his case were principally to support the religion
and its institutions, and to sponsor and appear in conspicuous ceremonies in the
civic domain.
Moreover, according to prescriptive sources, the king’s initiation was to be fol-
lowed by a Śaiva modification of the brahmanical royal consecration ceremony. In
this way the monarch was incorporated as a new kind of Śaiva office-holder: while
others were to be consecrated for purely Śaiva functions, the king was to be conse-
crated to take up office as the “head of [the brahmanical social order of] the caste-
classes and religious disciplines” (varṇāśramaguruḥ), the role already assigned to
him by brahmanical prescription.
14 Alexis Sanderson
As the function of the Śaiva consecration is modified in this case, so its form,
though in general Śaiva, incorporates distinctive non-Śaiva elements appropriate to
its mundane and brahmanical aspects, such as the inclusion of the royal banners,
weapons, and armour in the objects of worship.
Just as this brahmanical rite is subsumed within the Śaiva process of initiation
and consecration, so its outcome, the king’s entitlement to rule as guardian of the
brahmanical social order, now entails the additional requirement that he should en-
sure that the authority of brahmanical prescription be subsumed within, and subor-
dinate to, that of the Śaiva scriptures, an injunction supported by the promise that,
by enforcing this hierarchical relationship, he would guarantee the stability of his
rule and kingdom, implying that by neglecting to do so he would bring about their
collapse.
The Śaivas also adapted the theory of their ritual practice to enable them to
claim that those rulers who underwent their initiation ceremony would be empo-
wered in their efforts to maintain their supremacy and extend it through conquest, a
blatant but effective amnesia of the rite’s purely salvific character.
Nor was it only the theory that was adjusted to suit their patrons. The Śaiva
Guru was to close the initiation ceremony by sprinkling the horses, elephants, cha-
riots, and soldiers of the army with the water from the vase of the Weapon-Mantra
(astrakalaśaḥ), one of the two main vases prepared in the course of the ceremony,
“in order to remove all obstacles and to ensure victory in battle”. They also devel-
oped an array of apotropaic, invigorative, and hostile Mantra-rites that could be
performed on demand for the benefit of the realm, to promote the success of royal
patrons, and to frustrate their enemies.
Just as the Guru imbued the king through these ceremonies with the numinous
power of Śivahood in the exercise of his sovereignty, so the Śaiva rites by which
the Guru assumed his office ensured that he, as Śiva’s agent among men, was im-
bued with the numen of royalty. As in the brahmanical consecration of a king, in
which the royal astrologer was to provide him with the royal elephant, horse,
throne, parasol, fly-whisk, sword, bow, and jewels, so at the time of a Guru’s
consecration he received from his predecessor the non-martial symbols of sove-
reignty (rājāṅgāni, rājacihnāni), such as the turban, crown, parasol, fly-whisk, ele-
phant, horse, palanquin, and throne. Furthermore, according to the prescriptions of
the Śaiva scriptures, the residence to be built for the Guru by his royal disciple was
in many respects similar in its layout to the royal palace. It included, for example,
an arsenal for the storage of weapons of war. That Gurus should have needed the
means of warfare may surprise those whose expectations are conditioned by the
prescriptive literature. But on this point, as on many others, the epigraphical record
shows the limitations that that literature imposes. For a twelfth-century inscription
from the Kalacuri kingdom in Central India reveals that the activities of the Rāja-
guru Kīrtiśiva extended beyond the spiritual to those of a successful military com-
Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others 15
mander, who expanded his monarch’s realm and thereby added to his own through
the appropriation of temples in the territories gained.
Kings rewarded their Śaiva Gurus for initiations and other rituals with lavish
gifts, most notably with grants of the revenue from designated lands and the dona-
tion or construction of monasteries (maṭhaḥ); and this largesse enabled these Gurus
to behave like royal patrons themselves, making land-grants to brahmins and
founding temples, new settlements, and further monasteries, thus facilitating the
expansion of their institutions into new areas. In this way there developed a far-
reaching network of interconnected seats of Śaiva learning. Figures at the summit
of this clerical hierarchy therefore exercised a transregional authority whose geo-
graphical extent was greater than that of any contemporary king.
Clearly the Śaiva Rājaguru had become a far grander figure than the king’s
brahmanical chaplain, the Rājapurohita, who was tied to the service of a single
king and was unambiguously his subordinate. Yet, it appears that the Śaivas did not
rest with this, but sought also to encroach on the territory of that lesser office. For
the Netratantra shows the existence of a new class of Śaiva officiants who were to
function in almost all the areas traditionally reserved for that officiant: the perfor-
mance of the king’s recurrent duties to worship the various deities on the days as-
signed to them, to celebrate the major annual royal festivals of the Indrotsava and
Mahānavamī, to protect the royal family through rites to ward off ills, to restore
them to health after illness, to ward off or counter the assaults of dangerous super-
naturals, to empower through lustration (nīrājanam) the king’s elephants, horses,
and weapons of war, and to protect the king with apotropaic rites before he eats,
sleeps, and engages in his regular practice of martial skills. We see here one of
several instances in which the Śaivas used their authority to colonise downwards,
producing modifications of their ritual procedures for this purpose. These adapa-
tions inevitably entailed loss of status for those that implemented them, but we
should understand that this did not affect those of the summit of the clerical
hierarchy, the king-like Rājagurus, but only the humbler clones that extended their
authority into domains that those Gurus would not deign to enter.
The Consecration of Royal Temples
The second element of the early medieval process that I have in mind is the pro-
liferation of land-owning temples. All but the most ephemeral sovereigns during
this period, both in the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, gave material form to
the legitimacy and solidity of their power by building grand temples in which
images of their chosen God were installed, animated, named after the king
(svanāmnā), and endowed with land and officiants to support their cult. The great
majority of these temples enshrined Śiva, in the form of the Liṅga. The Śaivas of
the Mantramārga soon extended their operations into this territory too, providing