Rivers to the Sky Transformation, Metaphor, and Worldview in Bengali Tantric Traditions Glen Alexander Hayes One of the most proliic and dynamic regions in South Asia for the development of Tantra has been that of “Greater Bengal” in the northeastern part of the subcontinent – comprising approximately modern West Bengal, parts of Orissa, Bangladesh, and Assam. Located on the fringes of traditional Vedic and Aryan culture and religion, Bengal saw the development of many different and distinctive types of Tantra, from popular villagebased, tribal versions to learned, Sanskritic traditions of temple cities like Viṣṇupur. Bengal saw not only innovations in Buddhist Vajrayāna schools in Nalanda and Tamralipti, but a wide array of Hindu Tantra in diverse Śaiva, Śākta, and Vaiṣṇava forms. In this paper I will address the conference theme of “transformation and transfer” of Tantra by exploring how distinctive Bengali Tantric metaphors and worldviews changed over the centuries: from the Kṣṇa-centered lineages of the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās (ca. 17th-19th centuries) to the British Rāj-inluenced Kartābhajās (18th-19th centuries). Using my own translations of Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā texts and my ieldwork involving the Kartābhajās, as well as the work of Hugh Urban on the Kartābhajās, I will show how Bengali Tantra underwent signiicant transformations from the 17th through 20th centuries – some of this due to the changing historical context and the presence of colonialism and modernity. These transformations in the traditions of those Hindu Tantrics who sought the inal cosmic state of Sahaja – literally, the “together-born” (saha-ja) state – are perfect examples of the interaction of context and text in the history of religions. One useful way to focus our survey is to examine important metaphors used in ritual texts, in songs, and by gurus. For example, while earlier Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā texts speak of an inner riverine yogic channel (the bāṅkānadī) that the adept must yogically “reverse,” later Kartābhajā texts change this classic image from yogic physiology into a passageway for the “merchant” yogin to travel from his “ofice” (kuthi) 114 Glen Alexander Hayes to sell his goods in the “bazaar of the world.” Thus, we ind a Tantric response to colonialism, and an appropriation of colonial and mercantile imagery, especially that of the marketplace (bājār), which supplants the earlier tropes of villages, gardens and ields. However, certain core metaphors and ritual practices are maintained. For the scholar of Tantric Studies, then, Bengal provides us with many excellent examples of transformations and adaptations of Tantric beliefs, practices, and social expressions. The Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās In the irst portion of this essay I would like to examine some key aspects of the yogic physiology (dehatattva) of a major teaching lineage of the 17th-19th century Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, that claiming as their guru one Siddha Mukunda-deva, who lived in the late 16th century (and certainly after the great hagiography of Caitanya, the Caitanya-caritāmta of Kṣṇadāsa Kavirāja was composed, ca. 1575).1 One of the most distinctive things about the post-Caitanya Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās (and they do seem to be primarily a post-Caitanya expression of Tantra) is how they created conceptual and ritual blends between, on the one hand, the devotional Vaiṣṇava bhakti and aesthetic traditions of Caitanya and the Six Gosvāmin Theologians and, on the other, the alchemical tantric traditions of the Nāths, Siddhas, and perhaps earlier Buddhist Tantrics. In other words, the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās embraced, but adapted for Tantric usage, the romantic trysts and ritual practices associated with the love-play of the Dark Lord Kṣṇa and his consort Rādhā. For Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, an underlying goal was to leave behind one’s worldly form (rūpa) and merge with one’s inner identity as the svarūpa (“true form”) of Kṣṇa (for men) and with Rādhā (for women). The lineages descending from Mukunda-deva, for example, expressed innovative ways of transforming these devotional practices of singing, dancing, and aesthetic enjoyment (vaidhi-bhakti) as powerful emotive and erotic enhancements to the higher forms of ulṭāsādhana (“practices of reversal”) using sexual luids that would be used at advanced stages of sādhana. Thus, we ind a creative and fascinating “blend” of Tantra and Bhakti. Although we do not have time in this essay 1 See Edward C. Dimock, Jr. and Tony K. Stewart, Caitanya caritāmta of Kṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, a Translation and Commentary. Trans. and ed. by Tony K. Stewart. Harvard Oriental Series 56. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, 1999). On the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, see Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā Cult of Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Rivers to the Sky 115 to explore the vital roles that emotions have played in Tantric ritual and cosmophysiology, it is worth noting that the modern cognitive science of religion has shown how the presence of any powerful emotion during a ritual activity helps to heighten and enhance that activity.2 The closest that we have to fairly complete presentations of sādhana and dehatattva are found in the several texts attributed to Mukunda-deva or to one of his disciples, including the Amtaratnāvalī of Mukundadāsa (ca. 1650 ce) or the Amtarasāvalī of Mathurā-dāsa (ca. 1750 ce). Mukunda-deva seems to have been one of the primary igures in developing the distinctive Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā blending of Bhakti and Tantra that is found to some degree in other texts. This blending required not only a working knowledge of the sophisticated works of the devotional Caitanya movement – especially those of Kṣṇa-dāsa Kavirāja, Rūpa Gosvāmin and Jīva Gosvāmin – but also an initiate’s knowledge of Nāth and Siddha dehatattva and sādhanas. Throw in the additional “inputs” of alchemy, Sanskrit aesthetics, and the goddess-worship of Śāktism and you can see how complex and transformative these traditions can be. For the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā traditions of Mukunda-deva, sādhana typically starts with the pravarta-āśrama, the “beginner’s stage,” which essentially uses techniques from mainstream Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava rāgānugā bhakti sādhana (Haberman 1988), such as singing and dancing as a milkmaid (gopī) to Kṣṇa (kīrtana), and developing an alternative identity and body (siddha-rūpa; mañjarī-rūpa) as a participant in the divine love-play (līlā) of Kṣṇa and Rādhā. This may also involve the use of mantras, and other “external” (bāhya) ritual forms. This is where the eventual shift and blending of dualistic Bhakti begins, for the Sahajiyās regard the male and female practitioners (nāyaka and nāyikā) not just as humans worshipping the divine Kṣṇa and his consort Rādhā (as orthodox Vaiṣṇavas do), but as in fact embodying in their own physical forms (rūpa) the “true form” or “essence” (svarūpa) of Kṣṇa and Rādhā. This is where the Tantric adaptation of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism is quite clear. At the second stage, that of the “accomplished one” (sādhaka), we ind the use of more “interiorized” (marma) and “secret” (guhya, rahasya) practices, including the antinomian ritual sexual intercourse with the spouse “of another” (parakīyā), generally called rati-sādhana (“practice with a desirable woman”). Here the identity of the man is blended with 2 See for example, a recent discussion of emotions and cognitive science in the National Public Radio series “Radiolab,” at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14/ segments/113310. Also see, for example Daniel Gardner, The Science of Fear (New York: Dutton, 2008). 116 Glen Alexander Hayes Kṣṇa’s, and the woman’s is blended with Rādhā. It is also where we ind a fascinating use of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious aesthetics (a form of rasatheory, using the nuances of “moods” or bhāvas), developed in a most intricate manner by the six Gosvāmins of the Bengal school, blended with essentially Nāth and Siddha sādhanas and dehatattvas. Of note here is the yogic manipulation of sexual luids (see, e.g. White 1996, 2003a), which are reversed (ulṭā) via urethral suction and other techniques and made to low “upwards against the current” (sroter ujāna) of the yogic River into the celestial realms of the “divine body” (deva-deha). In these cases, the sexual luids clearly serve as constituents for the emergent structures of the divine body. This process then leads to the third and uppermost stage, that of the “perfected one” (siddha). The third stage of siddha takes place within the yogic bodies of the practitioners, especially that of the male nāyaka, who absorbs the sexual luids of the female nāyikā into his own body, mixing them with his own, and directing them on into the inner Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā realms. There are many interesting gender and power issues at work here, and many complexities regarding the yogic body.3 And thus again we see distinctive and transformative Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā organizing frames, structures and processes, some relecting the inputs of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Bhakti inluences, some the Nāth and Siddha Tantric inputs. Rather than the well-known, but as David Gordon White (2003b) has shown, hardly uniform Śaiva and Śākta dehatattva of the six cakras, sahasradala, and kuṇḍalinī, the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā model – very much relecting the context of deltaic and riverine Bengal – is instead one with typically four lotus ponds or “tanks” (sarovaras) connected by the “crooked river” (bāṅkānadī), along which low the yogically-reversed male and female sexual luids (rasa and rati). In some texts, this central yogic channel is simply referred to as the “River” (nadī). It is worth noting the similarity to the frequent four-fold structure of earlier Buddhist Tantric dehatattva, and the use of baṅka nāla (“curved duct”) in earlier Nāth and Siddha schools.4 Once yogically “reversed,” the luids become vastu, the basic “stuff” of the cosmos. It is this “material” out of which the divine body, ponds, and river are generated (nirmāṇa). Here it is the vastu, the “cosmic stuff,” which serves as a sort of anchor 3 On similar notions of “male mystical pregnancy” in Taoist traditions, see Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994: 116-123 and 162-163) . 4 David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 261, 485-489. Rivers to the Sky 117 for the structures of the yogic realms. Using this vastu, the practitioners essentially generate the inner yogic body and ponds. Ascent along this River leads up to the Pond of Indestructibility (akṣaya-sarovara) and the attainment of Sahaja – the “together-born,” “innate,” “co-eval” cosmic state of unity in which all dualities – human/ divine, male/female, manifest/unmanifest – collapse. One thus becomes a Sahaja-mānuṣa, an androgynous cosmic being beyond all dualities, even that of of Kṣṇa and Rādhā. Kṣṇa and Rādhā are thus both merged into the ultimate space of the Sahaja-mānuṣa. In order to give the reader a sense of Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā texts, and especially their emphasis upon the centrality of the yogic River (nadī) in sādhana, we will consider some previously-unpublished verses from the Amtarasāvalī (“The Collection of Immortal Rasa”), a text attributed by the great scholar Sukumar Sen to one Mathurā-dāsa, a later disciple in the lineage of Mukunda-deva.5 Although the entire text runs to several hundred couplets, in this passage we see not only the traditional imagery of the “river” (nadī) as a place of pilgrimage, asceticism, and travel, but also its transformation by Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās into the central “yogic channel” through which the sexual luids and consciousness of the adept must travel enroute to Sahaja and the blissful abode called The Place of the Hidden Moon (guptacandrapur). This excerpt also employs allegory to describe the attempt by the worldly consciousness (jīvātmā), called here “Everyman” (Sabā), to sneak along the River in order to “steal” the divine rasa from the inner lotuses. Everyman is accompanied by nine other rasathieves, which later commentaries identify as the four organs (indriya) of action and the ive organs of knowledge. Their “gang” thus totals ten thieves. The Supreme Soul (identiied with Kṣṇa), called the paramātmā and in this passage the “God of Totality” (sarvadevā) , serves as the guardian of the inner realms, and the allegory details how the unqualiied entry into the yogic body by the senses and worldly mind are met with darkness and fear. Only by being initiated by the appropriate gurus can the adept truly advance along the River to the inner Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā regions. Most 5 See Dimock, Place of the Hidden Moon, p. 144 n. 43. Translations of related texts may be found in Glen Alexander Hayes, “The Necklace of Immortality: A Seventeenth-Century Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā Text,” in David Gordon White, ed. Tantra in Practice, Princeton Readings in Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 317-325, and “The Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā Traditions of Medieval Bengal,” in David Gordon White, ed. Religions of India in Practice, Princeton Readings in Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 333-351. The original Bengali verses from which this author has prepared English translations may be found in Manindramohan Basu (Bose), Sahajiẏā sāhitya (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1932), pp. 169-171. 118 Glen Alexander Hayes of the verses are clear enough, although there are some esoteric references to subtle physiology including a “Room” (ghara) and the revival of the physical body (śarīra). From the Amtarasāvalī of Mathurā-dāsa: Now, to return to the story of the ten thieves. Listen, and pay attention, for I’ll give an account of this. While it was still very dark out, they went [along the River] to enter the lotus pond (sarovara). Except that their leader, Everyman (Sabā), was taken prisoner. So the other nine thieves made their own way to a house. Still terriied at losing Everyman, they led the house for the realm of the devas. Day and night they pondered the fate of Everyman. At this time the Supreme Soul (paramātmā/ sarvadevā) arrived to see them. The Great One shouted “Everyman! Everyman!,” calling out again and again. The nine men, wearing modest clothing, went outside to meet Him. “What is your command, oh Lord? What do you want us to do [to ind Everyman]?” The Great One said: “We must go into the lotus pond!” “If that be your command, oh Lord, that is what we shall do! We are not able to refuse your inviolable command.” “Although we are still frightened, we have one more question. But asking this question will relieve us of fear.” The Supreme Soul says: “Why are you still afraid? There should be no more fear!” They say: “We have lost our leader, Everyman!” Rivers to the Sky The Great One says: “Well, where did you lose him?” They said: “It all happened in a lash [along the River], and we were left sitting here.” “Calm yourselves down, and just tell me what happened,” [said the Great One]. “If you become agitated, [even] an artist (kāru) cannot revive the body (śarīra).” “Everyman went with all of you to the forest of water-lotuses (kamala)” “As he was intoxicated by the rasa of the lotuses, he went on [along the River] by himself.” Then, at dawn, Everyman called out to us. “Join with Everyman and let’s go thieving!” For we are just his followers, and he is our leader! Although we all came in order to steal [rasa], we [nine] stayed by the banks of the River (nadī). Yet upon entering the lotus pond, there was [sudden] darkness! When we beheld this great darkness, we were seized with immense fear. Then we arrived at the Room (ghara), wondering about many things. “But you were not here, so we had fear in our minds.” “Therefore we beg for mercy at your feet, oh Great One.” For three days we hid in that Room. The Supreme Soul says: “ He (Everyman) is the greatest of all warrior chiefs!” “He moves ever so quickly, just like the wind.” “Before Whom can even the greatest darkness be destroyed? Due to his fear of Me, he went to another place.” 119 120 Glen Alexander Hayes “Please bring him to my abode; I will soothe him with betal-leaf.” “And I tell you to say to him: ‘Have no fear.’” They say: “Where did he go, and where has he stayed?” How are we going to ind him, they wondered. “If you want to remain healthy, you must speak with him. Failure to return with him means death to you and your families.” In a state of fear, the nine bowed down at His feet. Accepting the command, they went off in search of Everyman. Roaming through each and every country, they could not ind Everyman. In no place could they ind even a trace of Everyman. They searched in so many realms, yet still could not ind him. United in their quest for Everyman, they adopted the guise of ascetics (tapasvī). Since they were unable to return to their homes due to the threat of the Supreme Soul, they retired deep within the forest, following the course of the River. Living alongside the River, the nine men followed the dharma of asceticism (tapasya). They endured many privations among the trees, yet never died. For the River encircles the fourteen realms of the universe, And those who fail to dwell along the banks of the River will receive the wrath of the Lord of Death (Yama). In subsequent portions of this complicated text, Everyman and the nine thieves are reunited, introduced to beautiful Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā maidens (nāyikās) bathing in the River, and eventually learn the advanced sexual sādhanas of the Mukunda-deva lineage. The River has indeed brought them to the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā skies. Rivers to the Sky 121 Thus, as expressed in esoteric texts like this, the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās developed a distinctive form of Tantra and yogic physiology by adapting the popular forms of Caitanya Bhakti devotionalism and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava aesthetics – which had become one of the dominant religious paradigms in 16th-through 18th-century Bengal – and blended them with earlier Tantric physiology and sādhana based upon the kind of exchange of sexual luids that David Gordon White has discussed.6 And, as White points out in Kiss of the Yogini, this use of sexual luids and “hard core” Tantra was not without controversy or opposition from the larger society. Referring to earlier debates over this, White observes: it was sexual practice and in particular the ritualized consumption of sexual luids that gave medieval South Asian Tantra its speciicity – in other words, that differentiated Tantra from all other forms of religious practice of the period. This, the “hard core” of South Asian Tantra, irst appeared as a coherent ritual system – the Kaula – in about the eighth century in central India; and there have been more recent revivals of the original Kaula impetus, in fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Bengal and Nepal in particular. However, throughout most of South Asia, a marginalization of Kaula practice occurred in elite Brahmin circles, from a very early time onward, which sublimated the “hard core” of Kaula practice into a body of ritual and meditative rechniques that did not threaten the purity regulations that have always been the basis for high-caste social constructions of the self.7 While White discusses the eventual reinterpretation and “sanitizing” of “hard core” Kaula practices by the twelfth century, this same dynamic was very much at work during the time of the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, as some practiced the more “hard core” rituals of vastu while others adopted the “safer” practices of the Caitanya movement. Since Bengal was a center of trade, pilgrimage, and travel, it is not surprising that these dynamics of Tantra would occur, or that such diverse forms of both Bhakti and Tantra came together under the guidance of Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā gurus. Yet there would be an important transformation of the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā tradition, under the inluence of the Kartābhajās, literally, “worshippers of the bossman.” This dynamic esoteric group came of age in the time of the British East India Company and has been most thoroughly studied by Hugh Urban. 6 David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 219-123 and infra. 7 White, Kiss of the Yogini, p. 21. 122 Glen Alexander Hayes The Kartābhajās of Colonial Bengal The arrival of the British colonial empire in the 17th century, and the expansion of the East India Company, had profound and lasting consequences upon Bengal, displacing the Muslim rule and initiating any number of socioeconomic and religious changes. Even relatively small esoteric groups like the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, whose outward social appearance might be that of typical Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas, were transformed by these larger forces. One of the results was the fascinating Tantric tradition known as the Kartābhajās, As Hugh Urban has shown in his wonderful study, The Economics of Ecstasy,8 the Kartābhajās were founded by one Āulcāṅd (d. 1779), regarded as an incarnation of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava godman Caitanya (himself regarded by Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas as the dual incarnation of both Kṣṇa and Rādhā). Urban has shown how the Kartābhajās were “perhaps the most important later branch of the Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā tradition.”9 However, while the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās remained largely an underground esoteric group (perhaps to this day, according to Ramakanta Chakravarti10), the Kartābhajās had, “by the mid-nineteenth century, grown into a wealthy, powerful, and quite infamous tradition.”11 The Kartābhajās developed along two basic tracks: some, like the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, remained an underground, esoteric Tantric tradition practicing sexual rituals and other antinomian practices. The majority, however, developed a large following among the poor workers and shopkeepers of Bengal using exoteric traditions with pilgrimages sites, wealthy leadership, and an impressive ownership of revenue and land. Their heyday was in the nineteenth century. Today, Urban observes: Although many pockets of Kartābhajās still survive throughout Calcutta, rural West Bengal, and Bangladesh, and although one can still ind many Kartābhajā subsects such as the Sāhebdhanīs, Bhagabāniyās, Gurusatyas, and Āuls, the current status of the tradition is a rather sad relection of its impressive power and wealth at its height in the nineteenth century. Today, the Kartābhajās are 8 Hugh B. Urban, The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). This ine study is accompanied by a useful collection of translations from the major Kartābhajā texts, the Bhaver Gita “Songs of Ecstasy”): Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). I am indebted to Hugh for his useful insights into the transformations embraced by the Kartābhajās. 9 Urban, Economics of Ecstasy, p. 5. 10 Ramakanta Chakravarti, Vaisnavism in Bengal (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1985) 11 Urban, The Economics of Ecstasy, p. 9. Rivers to the Sky 123 typically remembered only for their large annual festival held in Ghoshpara at the time of Holi, which now survives largely as a kind of carnival event or popular entertainment (as well as the primary source of income for the current family of the Kartā). Ironically, this once profoundly “esoteric” Sahajiyā cult now survives as a relatively innocuous and “exoteric” devotional movement.12 Āulcāṅd and the other 19th-century Kartās composed a number of esoteric verses, known as the Bhāver Gīta (“Songs of Ecstasy”), in which they outlined their own reinterpretation of earlier Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava practices and metaphors. To begin with, they felt that 19th-century Bengal was a time of corruption, and that the “marketplace of love” needed a new incarnation of Kṣṇa and Caitanya to “redistribute” the goods of love and truth to the masses. Rich with colonial and mercantile imagery, the Bhāver Gīta verses argue that the place of practice must henceforth be the “secret market” (gupta hāṭ), no longer the esoteric “villages” (grāma) and “groves” of Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā ritual practice. In other words, although the most advanced Kartābhajās would continue to practice versions of the sexual rituals involving manipulation of luids, their worldview and expressions relected the dominant context of mercantile Bengal, and the core metaphor of the world as “marketplace” takes the place of more rural imagery. And while the earlier Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas had emphasized the need for the “pure love” of prema, the Kartābhajās typically refer to love as a “good” or “rice” to be traded in the marketplace. Furthermore, while the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās typically referred to the ideal social group of the sādhu-saṃgha (“community of sadhus”) or rasika-saṃgha (“community of connoisseurs”), the Kartābhajās called themselves the new “poor company” (gorib kompānī). There are many fascinating aspects of the Kartābhajās that Urban explores in his superb works, but it is their transformation from out of the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās that concerns us today. Another adaptation concerns that of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava and Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā notion of the sacred locale of Vndāvana – central to the Kṣṇa-līlā of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and major Vaiṣṇava texts. For the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, the inner yogic realms also contain the “eternal” (nitya) Vndāvana, a microcosmic sacred space; the Kartābhajās, however, actually located this abode as “new” (nava) Vndāvana and placed it some 20 miles north of Calcutta in the town of Ghoshpara, the residence of the Kartās and their families, site 12 Urban, Economics of Ecstasy, p. 10. 124 Glen Alexander Hayes of major rituals, and place of the sacred Hīmsāgar, a small pond associated with many miracles.13 Much as the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas believed that the six Gosvāmintheologians of the Caitanya movement were incarnations of major milkmaidens (gopīs) from the Kṣṇa-līlā (an idea generally accepted by Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās), the Kartābhajās believed that the 22 disciples of Āulcāṅd were themselves incarnations of the followers of Caitanya (including some, like Kṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, claimed as “secret Sahajiyās” by Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās). But it was Dulālcāṅd, “miraculously born” from the wife of a key disciple, Ramsaran Sarasvati, known as Satī Mā, who is regarded as the true genius of the Kartābhajās, as he organizes the group, amasses great wealth, property, and power, and composes many key Bhāver Gīta verses.14 Whereas the ancient Tantric word Sahaja had been used as far back as the 8th century by Buddhist Tantrics to refer to the “innate,” “spontaneous” state of liberation, and by Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās to refer to the “together-born” androgynous state of the Sahaja-mānuṣa, Dulālcāṅd preferred to gloss it as “easy,” or “natural” and cast it as the easy path for the laboring masses of Calcutta. Urban notes that the older Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā traditions were “especially well suited to this changing social context, and which offered a highly marketable set of spiritual commodities.”15 The Kartābhajās offered a “Religion of Man,” which was essentially a “popularized Tantra,” “a new transformation within the Sahajiyā tradition which invest many older Tantric ideals with broader social implications in the changing context of colonial Bengal.”16 While the older Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā schools were never socially active, the Kartābhajās, drawing support from the growing underclass of the Imperial City of Calcutta, quite intentionally cast themselves as leaders of poor shopkeepers and laborers, calling them out to Ghoshpara for miracles and festive melās – and contributions. In my own ieldwork with Kartābhajās back in 1980, and as supported by Urban’s later research, the dehatattva of the Kartābhajās is similar to the rati-sādhana of the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās in that an “inverse” form of sexual intercourse is claimed, whereby the male, using urethral suction, draws the female sexual luid (rajas) into his penis, and on into his own body. However, they seem not to have used the older Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā 13 In spring of 1980, while conducting ieldwork on the Sahajiyās and the Kartābhajās at Ghoshpara, I was taken to a shrine adjacent to the Hīmsāgar, and told that a mute child had been miraculously cured the previous day. Thanks to a holy woman at the site, she could now speak a few words. 14 Urban, Economics of Ecstasy, pp. 52-59. 15 Ibid., p.60. 16 Ibid., p. 61. Rivers to the Sky 125 riverine imagery of the series of sarovaras or “ponds” within the physical body, relying instead on the better-known system of cakras and kuṇḍalinī. Like the later and modern Bāuls and Bartamān Panthīs,17 the Kartābhajās believe that the sexual luids “move” throughout the body during the month, and that the best time for sādhana are the days of menstrual low. The Bhāver Gīta, using vivid imagery, sees this as: A wondrous Royal Goose, He has plunged into the waters and loats upon them. Swinging and swaying, He dallies in union with his beloved Lady Goose. And I see the dawn of both the wondrous full Moon and Sun together! From time to time He appears upon Her Lotus, in order to adorn her in splendor.18 Concluding Remarks So, what are we to make of these fascinating transformations of Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā traditions that appeared with the arrival of the British Empire and colonial mercantilism in Bengal? We have seen enough to make some basic observations about the durability of core Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā images and metaphors, as well as the role of the historical and mercantile context in reshaping those very metaphors. While most of the older Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā texts connected to the lineage of Mukunda-deva describe the soteriological process as a passage along an interior yogic River (nadī) leading to the inner realms of “lotus ponds” (sarovara) and “villages” (grāma) and upward to the skies of Mount Sumeru and the Pond of Indestructibility, the 19th-century Kartābhajās have changed this process to the journeys of the “merchant of love” on the “seas of desire,” carrying the “goods of love” for sale in the “marketplace of the world.” On the deepest level, the antinomian Tantric rituals kept much of their power and esotericism, but the presence of the British, and the growing power of the new Bengali mercantile elites, the bhadralok, led to what Urban has called a “sanitizing” or “deodorizing” of the most transgressive Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā Tantric 17 An excellent recent study of the Bāuls and their modern-day descendents may be found in Jeanne Openshaw, Seeking Bāuls of Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 18 Bhāver Gīta 413; II .81; in Urban, Economics of Ecstasy, p. 144. 126 Glen Alexander Hayes practices. Or, to use David Gordon White’s terminology, we ind a divergence between the “hard core” and “soft core” aspects of Tantric ritual practice – a process which has been going on for centuries. As a result, the older Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā traditions were forced underground, where, according to some sources, they may still remain today. To be sure (as Jeanne Openshaw demonstrates in Seeking Bāuls of Bengal), the modern Bāul practice of the “four moon” sexual sādhana of semen, uterine blood, feces, and urine has kept this ancient ritual practice of powerful transformative substances alive – despite the “sanitizing” and “popularizing” processes of modern India. As an historian of religions, I see this as yet another vivid example of the interplay between text and context, and how very old “rivers to the sky” may well have become transformed into pathways of new forms of sacred commerce. Bibliography Basu (Bose), Manindramohan. Sahajiyā sāhitya. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1932. 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