Chapter Nine
Tantrism and the Worship of the Dangerous Deities
Introduction
In our discussion of Bhaktapur's pantheon we have emphasized the division of the deities most centrally concerned with the organization of the public city into "ordinary" and "dangerous." These two categories of deities are related to two general modes of religious activity in Bhaktapur and in the Hindu tradition. The mode focusing on the ordinary deities takes special definition in Bhaktapur from its contrast with the worship of the dangerous deities. The worship of the dangerous deities has roots in popular and folk tradition in South Asia but has within it a differentiated aspect that has had a literate development of its own in South Asian high culture. This is "Tantrism," which Bhaktapur differentiates in a traditional South Asian distinction from the "Vedic" practices of the ordinary religion.
Esoteric Tantrism must be distinguished in Bhaktapur on the one hand from the worship of the ordinary deities (which has in itself, as we will note, "Tantric" references) and on the other from the exoteric worship of the dangerous deities by noninitiates. It is Tantrism in itself that will be central to our discussion of the worship of those dangerous deities. For Tantrism not only is the developed mode of relation to the city's dangerous deities in the esoteric practices of the upper social levels of the city but also lies behind much of the public urban symbolism and symbolic enactments centering on those deities which are experienced by all of Bhaktapur's citizens. And it is Tantrism that gives Bhaktapur and
the Newars (as it does neighboring Tibet) much of their special qualities in South Asian religious perspective.
Tantrism As A Religious Mode
There is a substantial literature discussing aspects of the Tantric tradition in Buddhism and Hinduism (see, particularly, the synthesis by Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan [1979]). Tantrism has been characterized as an "historical current" within the larger South Asian tradition, a current that is relatively easy to recognize in its manifestations and notoriously difficult to define. "The extremely varied and complicated nature of Tantrism, one of the main currents in the Indian religious tradition of the last fifteen hundred years, renders the manipulation of a single definition almost impossible. There is, accordingly, a general uncertainty about the exact scope of the word" (ibid., 5). These authors attempt, however, a definition, which will serve as a useful introduction to Bhaktapur's Tantrism (ibid., 6 [emphasis added]):
In our opinion, it is mainly used in two meanings. In a wider sense, Tantrism or Tantric stands for a collection of practices and symbols of a ritualistic, sometimes magical character (e.g., mantra, yantra, cakra, mudra, nyasa . . .). They differ from what is taught in the Veda and its exegetical literature but they are all the same applied as means of reaching spiritual emancipation (mukti ) or the realization of mundane aims, chiefly domination (bhukti ) in various sects of Hinduism and Buddhism. In a more restricted sense, it denotes a system, existing in many variations, of rituals full of symbolism, predominantly—but by no means exclusively—Sakti, promulgated among "schools" . . . and lines of succession . . . by spiritual adepts or gurus . What they teach is subsumed under the term sadhana , i.e. the road to spiritual emancipation or to dominance by means of Kundaliniyoga[*] and other psychosomatic experiences. . . . It is important to remark at this point that the true Tantric sadhana is a purely individual way to release accessible to all people, women as well as men (at least in theory), householders as well as ascetics . At present the practicers (sadhaka ) of the Tantric system are mainly people who live an ordinary life within family and society. But beside this ordinary reality, they try to come into touch with a higher stratum of divine reality by a course of identification with their chosen deity who Is usually the Goddess.
Elsewhere in South Asia the individualistic, anti-Brahmanical, anti-social-structural aspects of Tantrism, although they influenced renouncers of Hindu society (see, for example, fig. 18) and those who tried to manipulate the world through magical power, became for most
Figure 18.
Outside the city. A wandering Indian sadhu doing yoag on a public
porch in a mountain village.
practitioners—for those who "live an ordinary life within family and society," that is, within the Brahmanical order—comfortably bracketed into safe and nondisruptive contexts (ibid., 32):
The Kularnavatantra[*] states that anything which is despised in the world is honorable in the Kula [a particular school of Tantrism] path. On certain occasions, the texts even express a preference for anything which is associated with low social standing or with the breaking of taboos. . . . Of course, this was an important factor in creating for Tantrism its bad repute with the orthodox. But anti-caste statements should never be read outside their ritual context. Returned into ordinary life, no high caste Tantric would think of breaking the social taboos. One might even argue that the predilection for contact with low-caste people, especially women, in a ritual environment served to render the high-caste practicer still more conscious of the violent breakthrough of his ordinary situation which he had to make in order to proceed on the way to spiritual emancipation. Seen in this light, the ritual egalitarianism of Tantrism in practice acted as a caste-confirming and class-confirming force. One can compare the confirmatory and stabilizing role of festivals like Hob or Sabarotsava, during which caste or class relations are temporarily eliminated.
Bhaktapur has gone further in the use and transformation of Tantrism than as an exciting and cathartic antistructural fantasy for upper status men—although that is still one of its important uses. It has transformed the Tantrism of transcendence of Brahmanical order for the purposes of individual salvation and individual power and put it to the use of the civic order, in so doing complexifying that order. Legendary accounts of the capture of Bhaktapur's protective deities, the Nine Durgas (chap. 15), vividly portray this double movement. The stories tell how the demon-like deities who make up the group once lived in a jungle outside of Bhaktapur where they killed and ate the innocent passers-by whom they happened to encounter. Eventually the gods were captured by the spells and wiles of a powerful Tantric practitioner. He took them into the city, put them in a secret room in his house, and, using them for his own private amusement, "played with them" and made them dance for him. But then through the interference of his wife—representing one of the central symbolic mediators from private masculine pleasure to social order—the demon deities escaped his private control and fled the house. The Tantric practitioner was able to recapture them, but by now they had taken measures to prevent his taking them back into his house. Now unable to use them for his own purposes, he, in a compromise, forces them to pledge to protect the public city, to use their power against those external forces of disruption that they originally repre-
sented in themselves. The Tantric expert who presided over this transition (who in some versions is different from the magician who originally captured them) was, significantly, a Rajopadhyaya Brahman. However, once the secret was out, once the dangerous, blood and alcoholic spirit-swilling, order-destroying, and polluting[1] gods were out in the visible public space of the city, special kinds of priests, Acajus (chap. 10) had to replace the Brahman to deal with them in public—although the Brahman's descendants would continue to be engaged with them in more esoteric arenas.
For Bhaktapur's "Newar Brahmans" (chap. 10) and Ksatriya-like[*] Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya groups, Tantrism is not only, as it was for the Tantric master who captured the Nine Durgas in the self-indulgent time before his wife's interference, a source of private fascination but also central to the worship of their partilineal lineage deities. Their exclusive right to Tantric initiation is, in fact, one of the most important markers setting them off from middle-status and low-status groups in the city. This "gentrification" of Tantrism existed in other parts of South Asia. "The study of later Tantric literature seems to reveal an ever tightening grasp of Brahmans and other intellectuals on the movement—or, as one could as well say, an ever greater hold of Tantrism upon the traditional bearers of Indian literary culture" (Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 27). This elite domestication existed and exists in a somewhat uneasy relation with Tantrism's asocial and, in fact, antisocial central thrust, as well as with the low origins and family connections of its central deities.
The problem is clarified by the situation of the dangerous deities in non-Tantric communities. In a consideration of ritual in the Indian village of Konduru in Andhra Pradesh, Paul Hiebert made a distinction between the "high religion" of the village and its "low religion." The "high religion" centers around the benevolent Hindu gods of the "great tradition." Its priests are Brahmans (for the higher castes), the offerings to the gods are vegetarian. The "low religion" centers around "regional Hindu gods and local gods linked to Hinduism" (1971, 133). Hiebert further notes (pp. 135-136):
Chief among these [supernatural beings] are the local and regional goddesses who reside in trees, rocks, streams and whirlwinds and are enshrined in crude rock shelters in the fields, beside the roads, and in the home. Capricious and bloodthirsty, they demand the sacrifice of animals to satisfy their desires; therefore, the Brahmans refuse to serve them. Their priests are Washermen, Potters, and Leatherworkers. . . . All villagers fear their anger
which can bring disease and death to those who neglect them, blight to crops, fires to houses, barrenness to wives, and plague and drought to the village. Even the local Brahmans who deny their existence take no chance and send their offerings by the hand of a family servant to be sacrificed to the goddesses of their fields.
This village arrangement reflects the hierarchical predominance of "Sanskritic" over the other deities in Indian village pantheons that we noted in the last chapter, but it also emphasizes the social peripherality of such "local and regional" deities whose worship and characteristics are those of Bhaktapur's dangerous deities. Even as the status of the dangerous deities—who have been, like the Nine Durgas, captured and taken into the city, albeit in an ambiguous incorporation—has changed in Bhaktapur, so has the social status of their cult and their priests. Yet, the Indian village situation clearly suggests the contradictions and tensions in the apparent urban respectability of these deities in Bhaktapur. The Newar Brahman, the Rajopadhyaya Brahman, has, as we will see below and in chapter 10, important Tantric functions, but these are hidden within private, esoteric arenas of the city's worship. Public Tantric worship is usually done by other priests, the Acajus (which has sometimes led to the erroneous statement in descriptions of the Newars that they are somehow the "Tantric priests" in some sharp opposition to the Brahmans as "Sanskritic priests"). As we will see in chapter 10, the interlocking roles and relations of Brahmans and Acajus in relation to Tantrism and ordinary Hinduism in Bhaktapur are complex. As he is in Hindu communities everywhere the Brahman is a central priestly figure in the "ordinary" Hinduism of Bhaktapur. In relation to the Tantric component of the city religion, however, he has special functions—as guru , giver of mantras , officiant at some Tantric ceremonies for clients, performer of his own private and family Tantric ceremonies, and as priest at the Royal temples of the dangerous deities (particularly Taleju)—which make him, the priestly master of Bhaktapur's urban, civilized Tantrism, a much more complex figure than the ideal Sanskritic Brahman.
Tantrism In Popular Fantasy
People in Bhaktapur without Tantric initiation have various interpretations and fantasies regarding Tantrism. Such fantasies are encouraged by the Tantric strategy of protecting esoteric doctrines through multiple veilings and obfuscations of its doctrinal and symbolic implications (cf. Bharati, 1965, chap. 6). Those veilings and obfuscations are, as we will
discuss below, often associated with some sort of an "advertisement" that there is , in fact, a secret that is being hidden. For the noninitiate, Tantrism means primarily "magic" practices, sometimes referred to as tantra-mantra , that is, to practices that are capable of direct manipulation of supernatural power for worldly ends. Noninitiates, particularly—although not exclusively—lower-status ones, assume that this magic power is used for legitimate, albeit usually private, ends, such as curing disease, chasing off evil spirits, and keeping wandering bulls out of cultivated fields.[2] Occasionally, it is assumed, the power may be used for love magic or for harming an enemy. It is also popularly believed that particularly powerful Tantric experts can (and could more frequently in the past) levitate themselves or objects, travel through the air to distant places, and control and dominate powerful supernatural beings. From the viewpoint of the legitimate practitioner, such direct personal uses of "power" are possible but illegitimate and peripheral to their goals. However, even sophisticated initiates believe that outside the civic esoteric system, out of Brahmanical and civic moral control, there are such figures as sadhus (wandering "renouncers") witches, sorcerers, and healers who use a degree of Tantric power sometimes for good (in a struggle against a contrary harmful supernatural power), sometimes for evil.
Noninitiates often believe that Tantric pujas are associated with major violations of ordinary moral and religious regulations such as the eating of forbidden foods and overt sexual intercourse—including (according to one informant) even the incestuous intercourse between brothers and sisters. In general, however, noninitiates seem to believe that legitimate Tantric practice is, albeit strange, good behavior and in the pursuit of socially acceptable goals. These same people also seem to believe that most Brahmans, at least, do not know much Tantrism, their fantasies about the dharma -violating procedures of Tantrism are directed to the secular upper thars . This interpretation is, in fact, consonant with another essential aspect of Bhaktapur's Tantrism, its alliance with the realm of power of the king in opposition to the realm of moral order of the Brahman, in his role (for Bhaktapur only one of his roles) as a priest of the benign deities.
Upper-Status Tantrism
As we have noted in chapter 5, there is an upper segment of Bhaktapur's macrostatus system whose male members, after completing initiation as full members of their thar (and whose female members under certain
conditions and restrictions), have the right to Tantric initiation. These are the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, all the thars at the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya levels, the Tini, and one Jyapu thar with some priestly functions, the Jyapu Acaju.[3] All of these thars share certain rights and customs in contrast to other, lower, thars . Their male members have the exclusive right to wear the sacred thread, the jona ; they alone have a special kind of lineage deity, the Aga(n) God; they alone have the right to have Tantric gurus (who are Rajopadhyaya Brahmans), initiation, and practice. The worship of the dangerous deities by people of the middle and lower thars is not considered Tantrism by upper-level initiates, nor by members of the lower-level thars themselves.
We will follow this distinction and consider Tantrism per se as the practices of initiates. We will begin with Tantric worship, that is, Tantric puja , in Bhaktapur. We can then consider the uses of that worship. These are of two general kinds for upper-status initiates, worship directed to the phuki's lineage god and practices directed to mukti or "individual salvation." We will then turn to forms that span both esoteric initiate religion and the symbolism and religion of the larger city.
Upper-Status Tantrism: Puja
In part three of Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan's book Hindu Tantrism (1979), a section entitled "Modes of Worship and Meditation," Sanjukta Gupta presents the "fully developed" Tantric puja in detail. The "fully developed" Tantric pujas performed in Bhaktapur by priests and their upper-status clients are minor variations on the sequence Gupta describes and interprets.[4] Descriptions such as Gupta's relieve us to some degree both of our ethnographic responsibility to record Bhaktapur's esoteric practices here and of our conflcting moral responsibility to keep them secret.
Tantric worship has many of the features and sequences of ordinary worship (app. 4), but there are additions, emphases, and occasional reversals, which take their force from their contrasts with those ordinary procedures. Acajus and Brahmans have manuals of instructions, paddhatis , often in the form of palm-leaf manuscripts, which outline the steps of all complex priest-conducted worship sequences used in Bhaktapur. For basic Tantric pujas , such as those held in conjunction with important family or phuki worship to the Tantric lineage deity (see
below), paddhatis include about a dozen major phases. We will follow one of these paddhatis in order to give a rough and superficial paraphrase of an illustrative sequence for our present limited purposes, namely to suggest the Tantric puja's special features.[5]
Prior to the puja there must be worship and offerings to the local areal Ganesa[*] and at the proper mandalic[*]pitha . The participants must purify themselves in preparation for performing puja , as they must for all important worship (chap. 11). The area in which the worship is to be done has also to be purified and marked out in colored powder with diagrams, mandalas[*] and yantras , and the proper utensils and materials for the worship are assembled.
The first preparatory phase of the worship is done by the principal worshiper, the jajaman , and will be done subsequently by the officiating priest. This is called a nyasa , a Sanskrit word that apparently originally included the meaning of "laying aside" and "renunciation" (Macdonell 1974, 148). The nyasa is a mimesis of yogic practices; the sorts of things that yogis do at length to produce altered states of awareness in conjunction with meditation and a quest for "escape" or mukti are done here as ritual gestures. "Nyasa " in Bhaktapur's usage seems to refer to a less specified range of yogic activities than the term does elsewhere (cf. Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 143f.). "Nyasa " varies in the details of the procedure depending on the particular kind of puja in which it is used. It includes various gestures, movements, and hand signs, mudras , and meditative acts, which among other purposes, are said to be for the purpose of establishing the worshipers' bodies as the mandalas[*] , or sacred circles, in which the deity will be realized. It also includes rudimentary breath control procedures (pranayama[*] ), essentially the alternate closing of the right and left nostril during the inhalation and exhalation of air and the holding of the inhaled breath, with the various phases being accompanied and timed by the mental recitation of a mantra . The nyasa prepares the jajaman for the puja .
On the completion of the nyasa the jajaman dedicates the puja , identifying its central deity and its conventional purpose, for example, as part of a marriage, a death memorial ceremony, or as some focal worship of the Aga(n) lineage deity. After the dedication, the sa(n)kalpa , the jajaman touches and makes an offering to a ritual waterpot and to a container of various ritual items that will be used in the later worship and hands them to the priest.
The priest, in a purification and preparation for his part of the ceremony, washes his mouth and performs a nyasa . He now becomes the
central performer in the remainder of the puja , instructing the jajaman when the latter has to participate. The next step is snana , offerings of various kinds made to the primary and attendant deities of the puja . The attendant deities include an oil lamp (representing Ganesa[*] , Siva, and Sakti), "the deity dwelling in one's own heart," and the worshipers' quasi-deified gurus . Offerings to these deities include flowers, vegetarian foods, grain, and light, the same offerings that are given at all pujas . In a departure from ordinary pujas , some aspects of the snana sequence precede the worship of Ganesa[*] within the puja . (He has been worshiped at his neighborhood shrine prior to the puja .) This violation of the usual preliminary worship of Ganesa[*] as the siddhi -giving god is explained locally as showing that the Tantric goddess (the usual focus of the puja in one or another of her forms) "comes before all." The snana is followed by a puja to the officiating priest's own guru , and at this point he performs nyasa for the second time.
The next step begins a sequence in which there is worship by all assembled to, first, the secondary gods and goddesses and, then, to the main goddess through offerings of flowers, grains, colored powder, and the like. This sequence is concluded with an offering by the worshipers to themselves—to the internal representation of the deity in their body. In the course of these offerings uncooked polished rice, known in ritual contexts as kiga :, which is of central importance as an offering in all pujas (app. 4), is presented in a flicking motion to the deity by the left hand rather than with, as would be done in ordinary pujas , the right hand.
After an interlude in which the client performs japa meditation (see below) comes a sequence called "giving bali ." "Bali "—Sanskrit for a food offering—is used in the context of worship of the dangerous deities to designate an animal sacrifice. At this point there is no actual animal sacrifice; that will come later. What is offered now is samhae (a mixture of fish, meat, ginger, and grams; see section entitled "Symbolic Complexes: Sacrifices") and alcoholic spirits, either fermented rice beer, tho(n) or, more commonly, a clear distilled alcoholic spirit, aila (Kathmandu dialect, aela ).[6] These offerings are a further reversal and violation of what would be the proper worship of an ordinary deity.
In the next episode oil-lamp wicks and incense are first worshiped to give them power, sakti , and then lit and presented to the gods by the priest as he rings a bell. The flaming wick and burning incense, used in all pujas , have here special meaning in relation to the Tantric use of the imagery of Sakti and Siva (below).
Now the priest, as the jajaman had previously, performs japa meditation. He covers his left hand, in which he holds flowers and kiga :, with a cloth and counts off a number of mantras , usually 108, which he mutters or says silently to himself. He then offers some of the kiga : and flowers he held during the japa meditation to the goddess. Next he puts some on his own head, as an offering to the internal goddess who dwells within him.
A stotra , a hymn of praise, is now read by the priest from one of the Tantric texts. He rings a bell in the course of this, and then worships the goddess with kiga :, throwing it three times, again from his left hand. As in all pujas , this presentation of kiga : accompanied by sound announces one of the major climaxes of the puja . The climax here is a blood sacrifice. This is usually a goat or a drake in upper-status phuki pujas . On some occasions, however (often for economic reasons), an egg or samhae may be substituted at this step. We will return to the procedures and interpretations of animal sacrifice in a later section.
Now the priest and the jajaman (and the other participants) take and eat some of the fish and meat-containing samhae that had previously been offered to the Goddess—which will now also have some of the sacrificial animal's blood splattered on it—and they also take some of the aila , the alcoholic spirits presented to the god and drink it. This is here not only prasada —the taking back of materials that have been offered to the gods and "contaminated" by the gods, and then by eating them putting oneself in a dependent but inferior hierarchical relation to that god (compare "cipa, " chap. 6)—but something more. The eating of the substances represent, in part, an offering to the participant's body and its internally dwelling Goddess, whose Tantric, nonordinary status, and contrast to the moral entity of the "self" (represented by another internal god, Visnu[*] , who dwells in the "soul" or "heart" [chap. 8]) is repeatedly emphasized.
If the Acaju were performing a Tantric puja for a client at a pitha , he would not himself eat part of the offering, for the pitha is a relatively public setting. In this case some of the offering, samhae , with blood and aila sprinkled on it would be sent to the client households. This mixture would be eaten by members of these upper thars who sponsor pitha pujas , including Brahmans, in the same way as they would eat the blood-spattered prasada in worship within their homes.
Now flowers are taken back from the Goddess as prasada. Daksina[*] , a gift of money, is given by the jajaman to the Acaju , and finally a farewell ceremony to the gods is performed, thus ending the puja .
This basic puja varies somewhat as it is used in different settings and for different purposes. However, variations are within this general pattern. The offering and sharing of meat and drink make this "left-handed, "or Vamacara Tantrism.[7] These are two of the five "forbidden substances," the five makaras , whose use as witnesses of the true Tantric adept's supposed ability to be spiritually impervious to practices and substances that would represent dangerous and profound violations of the moral order for an ordinary person characterize the kaula school or tradition within Tantrism, a school that "is without doubt the most important—and certainly the most characteristic—movement within Tantrism" (Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 45). Bhaktapur's upper-status Tantrism includes (in at least gestural form) these five makaras . The other three forbidden substances or actions (besides meat and alcohol) are fish, "mudra " (probably originally thought of as an aphrodisiac), and sexual intercourse. One of the substances presented to the gods, and tasted during the course of the puja, samhae , contains fish. "Mudra " is identified with some of the grain offered and eaten during the puja .[8] Although there is speculation among noninitiates (which is characteristically not discouraged by initiates) that there is sexual intercourse during Tantric pujas , this does not normatively exist. The sexual act, like whatever sexual reference mudra may have, is a matter of symbolic reference. In many Tantric pujas that are performed for householders or phuki groups, one or more women who have the proper "half-dekha " or "half-initiation." may take part, as they do in ordinary pujas , but most Tantric pujas have only men participants. In all these pujas , the parts of the prayers and stotras that refer to sexual intercourse are read only in Sanskrit and, in contrast to some other Sanskrit passages, are not translated into Newai. References to the performance of sexual intercourse that occur in some of the puja sequences are represented by hand positions (also called mudras ) and are, it is said, not thought of as directed to a particular woman participant. Some initiate informants believe that sexual pujas were performed in the past, but this was privately by husband arid wife "for the purpose of procuring a son." This is in contrast to the fantasies of noninitiates about sex between nonspouses, including men with women of lower social levels, a fantasy that is closer to some reported actual practices of the kaula school, to which Bhaktapur's symbolic Tantric forms and a considerable portion of Tantric practice are related.[9] Whether these sexual practices existed among Newar Tantric initiates in the past and
constituted an acceptable aspect of aristocratic Tantric practice seems unknowable now.[10]
The upper-status Tantric puja represents a struggle and a compromise between proper social behavior as defined in the ordinary civic dharma , the behavior that is necessary for the maintenance of social respectability, ijjat , and, in fact, for the maintenance of social status (for there is, or was, the threat of outcasting for serious violations of the dharma ), and the anti-dharmic , antinomian behavior, which in the context of Tantric ideology and practice, represents the transcendence of that dharma . The transcendence is suggested in the mimesis of Yoga, that attempted escape from the illusion of phenomenal reality. However, it is clearest in the transgressions of what would be fundamental violations of pujas to the moral deities. In Bhaktapur's moral system where reputation, rectitude, and proper behavior is closely monitored in what is for the middle and upper social levels, at least, a rather puritanical system, the violations inherent in the Tantric pujas , even if some of them are, in the case of sexual acts, "symbolic" (or more precisely a much weaker symbolic act than actual Tantric intercourse), are still presumably potentially moving and meaningful to the participants, as the rumors of these acts are to outsiders.
In comparison with Tantric rituals that take place in vegetarian Hindu communities, the eating of fish and meat and the drinking of alcoholic spirits is perhaps less powerful in that Newars do these things in other settings—although the offering of these products of slaughtered animals to gods in the context of the radical inappropriateness of this to the benign moral gods is still a clear antinomial reversal. As "slaughtered animals" suggest, however, the most significant aspect of meat eating is the taking of life, and this is quite overt in the animal sacrifice—which is at the climax of major Tantric pujas —whose blood splatters the prasada and whose flesh will be consumed by household members or the phuki group or some larger group of kin in the ceremonial feasts, bhwae , which follow many major Tantric pujas and are held in connection with auspicious rites of passage and some major calendrical occasions. The sacrifice is ideally done by the jajaman himself on behalf of his family group; he should himself cut the animal's throat. We will return to this central antinomial act, sacrifice, later in this chapter and in connection with urban symbolic enactments centering on Devi in chapter 15. For Bhaktapur, however, the violation of the ordinary dhar-
ma in the worship of the dangerous deities, which most resists becoming routine and trivialized during ritual repetition, is the sacrifice itself.
The participation of Brahmans in some of the most esoteric and "powerful" Tantric puja s is another profound violation of the implications of the city's ordinary religion. Newar Brahmans can eat certain meats, but are never supposed to drink alcohol, which would be a violation of their basic status regulations. In the course of the Tantric puja s in which their participation is essential, the worship of Taleju as the Malla lineage deity and as a central civic deity—which is witnessed by the auxiliary priests of Taleju, and in worship held for and witnessed by high-status clients in the most elaborate Aga(n) House puja s, and in their own phuki Aga(n) God worship, the tasting of alcoholic spirits by the Brahman priest as part of the five makara s is necessary. These spirits are specially prepared and purified, both physically and ritually. They are not called "aila ," "alcoholic spirits," but "Ga(n)ga jala " (app. 4), the purest of the various pure waters used in rituals, and considered in some contexts as amrta[*] or nectar, and in others as Sakti herself. Furthermore, in some Taleju ceremonies and in their own Aga(n) God puja s, Brahmans must perform animal sacrifice. All this involves a genuine risk for the Brahman, not only in the usual Tantric sense that what is clearly a violation and a sin in an ordinary context must somehow become transmuted into a proper religious act but also because their behavior (like all Tantric behavior, but the Brahman has the most to risk) can be used as an attack against the status of participants by those who discount the validity of the Tantric ritual.[11]
Upper-Status Tantrism: Family And Phuki Worship—Worship oF the Lineage Gods, The Aga(n) Gods, And the Digu Gods
We have remarked that the consideration of upper-status Tantrism may be divided into group worship and individually centered worship. Group worship is primarily that of the family—household or phuki —and centers on the lineage deity. The various kinds of internal esoteric worship at Taleju temple are closely related to such family worship, for Taleju is worshiped as the lineage deity of the Malla kings. Tantric worship of the lineage deity is amalgamated with and added to a worship of the lineage deity as the "Digu God" which is shared by all Newars.
We have introduced the basic Tantric group puja in the previous section. Such puja s are required for the rites of passage of family members, and in the course of certain annual events. They may be performed at the mandalic[*]pitha , rarely in the god-house of the Mandalic[*] Goddess, sometimes in a special room of a family's house—the Aga(n) Room, and most commonly in a special house for the phuki 's lineage deity, the Aga(n) House. Although a householder may perform or lead a perfunctory ritual by himself, most important Tantric family rituals are performed under the direction of, and in part by, an Acaju. On very important occasions a (sometimes more than one) Brahman may preside, and the Acaju will assist him. In the case of those upper-status families without initiates, or without an available one, an Acaju must perform the puja alone in the name of the family.
In addition to required Tantric puja s there are optional ones, and in these cases the household may be free to choose between a Tantric and an ordinary puja , the latter usually directed to Visnu[*] . The optional Tantric puja s are performed in relation to some "serious problem." Examples are a major disease of a family member; an outbreak of disease in the city from which the family wishes to be protected; a prolonged inability to have children for which lesser remedies have not worked; a period of bad luck thought to be due to astrological forces; or the wish for success in some major, risky undertaking. Tantric puja s are considered more powerful than puja s to a non-Tantric god. It is said that optional Tantric puja s are more directed toward the granting of a wish, while non-Tantric ones have to do with maintaining relationships with the gods. As a Brahman put it, the ideal attitude in an ordinary puja to the benign gods is, "We are here to serve and honor you. When you are here we have no problems." The distinction is important and emphasizes contrasts in the general meaning and uses of the two kinds of deities, although, in practice, favors are often hoped for from the ordinary gods and conversely one does not overtly confront the Tantric gods with the concrete goal of the Tantric puja , which is rather "kept in the mind."
An optional Tantric puja may have been given at the time of seeking help with a problem. More often a promise or pledge, a baca is given mentally to the Aga(n) God, to the effect that if the wish is granted, a puja will be performed. In these cases, in fact, even if the wish is not granted, a perfunctory puja is often given to the god; people may worry that perhaps the Aga(n) God was angry at them and that was why the favor was not granted, and that if they then neglect the proposed puja ,
they will have even worse luck. Misfortune is sometimes explained by some such neglected promise to a dangerous god, which may have just passed rapidly, even unconsciously, through someone's mind and which might even have resulted in the granting of the desire.
Once a decision to have a puja to solve some problem has been made, there is often (although not always)[12] some choice, as we have noted, as whether to have a Tantric puja , or a Brahman-assisted non-Tantric puja . While a Tantric puja is said to be more powerful than a non-Tantric one, it is also liable to be more elaborate, time consuming, and expensive.[13] Furthermore, the participants, in contrast to the participants who can be gathered in a major Brahman-assisted puja to the ordinary gods, must have the proper initiation. In recent decades non-Tantric puja s have become increasingly common as the upper-level groups have less money (and are less likely to devote it to religious activities), and less time, and are less liable to have received initiation. The Tantric puja , centering as it does on the lineage deity, is essentially a phuki activity. Thus the shift to the non-Tantric puja (a dhala[n] danegu ; app. 4) has the additional characteristic that it is less exclusive and is sometimes attended by non-initiates, friends, and invited neighbors.[14]
Most of the Tantric puja s performed now (as was probably the case in the past) are not optional but required ones. They were dedicated primarily to the Tantric lineage deity, with an associated emphasis on the areal Mandalic[*] Goddess.[15] The Aga(n) God in the Aga(n) House is supposed to be given daily puja s by an initiated family member or an Acaju, and a more elaborate puja once a month (on the fourteenth day or "ca:re " of the dark half of the lunar month; see chap. 12). There is also special worship on the first, eighth, ninth, and tenth days of the autumn Mohani festival (chap. 15) and during the course of the lunar and solar New Year festivals. During all of a phuki 's rites of passage there is special worship by the Acaju and initiated males. Previously many phukis had also dedicated themselves to one or two large annual feasts—often in commemoration of the death of some important phuki ancestor—which must be preceded by elaborate Aga(n) House worship, and need the assistance of one or more Brahmans as well as an Acaju.
We have in the chapters on space and on deities discussed the Digu Gods, the stones placed outside of the city limits, which represent the lineage gods of various phuki groups. These deities are dangerous deities, variously identified, and require offerings of meats and alcohol.
The Digu Gods are, in turn, related to representations of the lineage gods within the city, which are for thar s with Tantric initiation, the "secret gods," the Aga(n) Gods.[16] The Aga(n) Gods, in turn, are closely related to the Mandalic[*] Goddesses who preside over the sector in which the phuki members live or, rarely, in the case of movement of a family within the city, where they had their origin in the city. The relation of the stone lineage deity outside the city and the housed image within reflects the relationship of the Mandalic[*] Goddesses' external pithas and internal god-houses. The Digu God's stone is, as we have noted, sometimes referred to as a pitha , and its form and placement resembles the pitha s of the Mandalic[*] Goddesses. The pairing of the two locations also recalls a characteristic theme in the arrangements, legends, and symbolic enactments of the dangerous deities, that is, the description of a form related to and representative of the dangerous but generative forces surrounding the city and its society, on the one hand and, on the other, the introduction of that form into the city—for the city's protection—under the careful control of powerful Tantric ritual safeguards.[17]
From the point of view of sophisticated upper-status people, both the Digu God outside of the city and the Aga(n) God within it are representatives of the same deity, the lineage god, the Kula (or Kul ) devata . Families below the level of those that have elaborated Tantric secret gods and worship, often have a god image that they keep hidden somewhere in the house and which they often call their "Aga(n) God." That lower-status image is thought of as the family's secret lineage god and is often a yantra worked onto a metal plate, an image of Bhagavati, or a small stone. This image is hidden in cloth wrappings and kept in a safe place in the house, usually, of the leader of the phuki group. This house image is brought in a procession to the family's Digu God location outside the city on the proper day during Dewali, the annual occasion for the worship of the lineage god. Household members in these middle-status and lower-status families are allowed to see and know about the hidden god for the first time for boys after the Kaeta Puja ceremony, during which they are initiated into membership into their thar and for girls after their Ihi or mock-marriage ceremony (see app. 6).
The upper thar s, in fact, have similar portable deities, which they use during the external annual worship of their Digu Gods, but these are different from the main image of their Aga(n) God, the form that is thought of as the Aga(n) God. Ideally, that main Aga(n) God image is kept in a "secret (god-) house" an Aga (n ) che(n) , of its own, often an elaborate four-story structure[18] belonging to the phuki .[19] Sometimes,
the Aga(n) God is kept and worshiped in a special room, the aga (n ) kotha , "secret room," on the cwata floor (chap. 7) of the house of the leader of the phuki . Each household in the phuki group will have a secondary image of the Aga(n) God in their Aga(n) Room, which will serve as the locus of some of the individually centered worship of household members (below). The main image of the Aga(n) God requires daily worship, which is now usually done by an Acaju, who may have several such shrines to attend to each day. It is worshiped by male family members with proper initiation during major Tantric puja s, but in many families in recent years there are no members with the proper initiation, and only the Acaju attends the god in the Aga(n) House.[20]
In spite of the understanding by religious experts that the Digu God and the Aga(n) God are both "the same god," the lineage god, the two foci are, in general, regarded differently and have some important contrasts. The Digu God is often regarded as a specific deity, called "Digu God," and the Aga(n) God is sometimes also thought of as a separate deity, "the Aga(n) God," in its own right. The true identification of these gods is something that is revealed to members of the family during the course of various initiations. men (women have only perfunctory and limited initiations) learn during their initiation the name of their particular lineage god and the mantras appropriate to its worship. All lineage gods for the thar s with rights to Tantric initiation in Bhaktapur are, in fact, most probably forms of the Goddess, and the majority of them the form locally known as "Bhagavati," the goddess in the form of the slayer of the buffalo demon, that is, as Mahisasuramardini. The remainder of the lineage deities are probably the same as the Mandalic[*] Goddess of the area in which the family group is established or from which it moved in the city. Most families, however, not knowing what Aga(n) deities other phuki groups have, are able to think of their own Aga(n) God as uniquely special to their own lineage.
The Digu God is represented in and in a sense is the stone itself. However, there may be several images and representations of a phuki 's Aga(n) God. The central one, the focus of the phuki worship is, like Taleju is supposed to be, a yantra . There may be secondary images kept at the Aga(n) House. They include anthropomorphic figures, often elaborate images, which are the sorts of images usually carried to the Digu God location at the time of the annual Dewali lineage worship there. The image brought to the external shrine at Dewali may not necessarily be kept in the central Aga(n) House, it may be kept in the house of the phuki 's senior leader, or of the particular senior phuki
member whose turn it is to be principally responsible for the Aga(n) God worship. Other secondary images are kept in the Aga(n) Rooms in the houses of the individual phuki households. As we will see later, most individual Tantric worship among these upper-status families takes place not in the Aga(n) House, but in these household Aga(n) Rooms.
An important aspect of the meaning of—and the contrast between—the Aga(n) God and the Digu God is their relation to the lineage groups, which they and their symbolic enactments centrally define. Both define the phuki group, but there is a certain difference in emphasis, the Digu God serving to hold together a larger grouping. The core phuki group consists of those households who during the Dewali period go to the same Digu God shrine at the same time. This ceremony, a procession carrying an image of the Aga(n) God to the Digu God shrine, is an integration of the internal and external representations of the lineage deity. It must take place during the period of some seven weeks, beginning during the waning lunar fortnight of Caulaga in late April (chaps. 12 and 13), finishing seven weeks later prior to the day of Sithi Nakha (chaps. 13 and 15), which signals the ceremonial end of the dry season and the anticipation of the annual rains. The ceremony at the Digu God shrines is called either "Digu God puja " or "Dewali puja ."[21] The core phuki group, those households who go to the same Digu God shrine together, is the phuki group (chap. 6) which is united in the rites of passage of all its members. Particularly salient for members of this group is their sharing of ritual pollution at the birth or death of members, the latter entailing the necessity of prolonged purifying rites. This group shares in ritual feasts and may act (albeit rarely) as a council to discuss problems concerning the group of related families. Its member households tend to live in close proximity to each other, sometimes around a common courtyard. This is also the same group which will have a common Aga(n) House, the house and its god belonging to the phuki groups as a whole. As we noted in chapter 6, these groups must always split when they become too large. What happens now in the case of the Aga(n) House and Digu God is not quite the same.
As the phuki becomes too large and splits, the members of the two newly formed groups still have the same Digu God, but they now go at different times. They have become two ba-phuki s, or "split-phuki s," who, although sharing common male patrilineal ancestors, are now no longer a ritual unit, and do not share the birth and death pollution of the other split-off group. They are no longer, in this sense, one body.
Through repeated splittings there may be a large number of phuki groups that worship the same Digu God at different times. As all these phuki groups worshiping one Digu God are assumed to have a common male ancestry, they are not supposed to intermarry.[22] Thus the Digu God acts as a sign of the group that is subject to exogamy. The different phuki groups represented by the same Digu shrine have, through long periods of time, often become scattered throughout various areas of the city. It is thus believed that the Digu God protects the maximally extended patrilineal group within and throughout the city, and by extension in concert with other Digu God shrines (and in analogy with the protective ring of mandalic[*]pitha s), protects the entire city.
The Aga(n) House, with its central image of the lineage deity, is the center for each upper-status phuki group within the city. When a phuki group splits, ideally a new Aga(n) House will be built and a new representation of the Aga(n) God made, which is ritually "established" or consecrated (pratistha[*] ) in the new house so as to partake of the power and nature of the original deity.[23] While in one sense the Aga(n) Gods which have become duplicated and established in various different Aga(n) Houses are the "same" god, the duplicated deity begins to lose its unifying identity. Once it is in different Aga(n) Houses, there are no longer any ritual enactments tying those houses and the various split-phuki segments together. The different Digu God ceremonies at the same shrine are tied together through the visible identity of the shrine; it is understood that the Digu deity is the same, and the proper mantra s used in its worship are also understood to be the same for each of the split-phuki groups. The Aga(n) Gods disappear from the view of other phuki sections, however, and each comes to be regarded as the protector of a special corporate group in a circumscribed area of space within the city.
Upper-Status Tantrism: Individually Centered Practices and Initiation
The aims of the Tantric tradition for the achievement of mukti , "spiritual emancipation," or bhukti , "domination," as the quotation from Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan (1979) at the beginning of the chapter epitomizes it, are aims to be achieved by individuals, not by groups of Tantric followers, and certainly not by traditional Hindu social units. This is the aspect of Tantrism that is emphasized in popular books directed toward the West and toward modern South Asians. Tantrism,
so conceived, is a practice that is supposed to alter the relation of the individual practitioner of Tantrism to the ordinary social, religious, and logical reality in which he or she lives. Able through Tantric practice to see that reality as maya , illusion, an individual achieves liberation from it.
Thus, as put in a passage typical of such books (L. P. Singh 1967, 2):
In an esoteric sense Tantra means "the spiritual cult by which divine knowledge is unfolded." . . . The mystic definition of Tantra is that It is the spiritual cult which liberates from the bondages of crudeness and ignorance. . . . Tantra is a process . . . which relieves one from the fetters of crudeness. Thus Tantra is an intuitional science which stands for the progressive realization of the divine. It liberates one from the cimmerian darkness and leads unto the divine effulgence. It is a path of salvation. It is a science of the soul. The authoritative definition of Tantra is, that which brings liberation, emancipation from the bondage of Maya.
This particular path to salvation among the several offered by Hinduism, a salvation centered on the nature of the individual, his or her personal and private effort and transcendence of maya , links Tantrism to those South Asian practices such as yoga, meditation, and social renunciation, which are based on temporary or permanent withdrawal from social relationships and modes. Such practices, like bhakti , devotion to a personal god, are antithetical to Hinduism's and Bhaktapur's dominant emphasis on submission to—and salvation by means of—the sacralized forms of social life, a submission phrased as adherence to the dharma . It is the very density of the familial and larger social world regulated by dharma that gives renunciation its special oppositional force and motivation in South Asia. In Bhaktapur the "reality" that is being seen through includes in large part the symbolically constructed mesocosm itself and the self that is to be dissolved is the socially constructed self. The salvation produced by escape from moral reality, the salvation of mukti or moksa[*] , is, on the face of it, quite different from and subversive of the idea of salvation produced by adherence to the moral and religious system of the city.
The technique for achieving mukti and its consequences is, like the goals of Tantric practice, typically described in effulgent terms even in the scholarly literature. Thus Gupta, in a discussion of nyasa and the associated practices of bhutasuddhi in Tantric puja s, describes the sequence in terms that are typical of Tantric commentary (Gupta, Hoens and Goudriaan 1979,136):
Using his yogic technique and his highly developed powers of Imagination and concentration, the Tantric practicer envisages all the ontological realities that go to make up his personality. He then proceeds to envisage within himself the process of cosmic creation . . . in reverse order. . . . He follows every single step, imagining the dissolution of each element into its preceding cause, until in the end he is ultimately dissolved or immersed m his cosmic source. He then envisages his own resurrection, retracing each step of cosmic creation. Only now, having burned away with cosmic fire and blown away with cosmic air all his human imperfections and limitations, he experiences bliss and, permeated with it, remains immersed in the cosmic source. . . . He now has a body made of pure substance . . . identical with that of the deity's and he is free to invite her to descend into it—to invoke the divine ego to descend on to his ego.
What is the relation of such ideal transcending procedures—these techniques for a blissful escape from self, family, and city in Bhaktapur—to the actual individual uses of individual Tantrism there? As we did in the yogic references in familial Tantric puja s, we will find echoes of these antistructural, reality-transcending, and self-altering programs in the goals and forms of individual practice and symbolism, transformed and tamed, as all Bhaktapur's Tantrism is, by a careful fitting into in the civic system.
Individually centered Tantrism is presented to upper-status males in conjuction with a sequence of initiations, dekha (sometimes dikha , both deriving from diksa in Sanskrit), which are conducted by the family's Brahman guru , the same Brahman who is also the family's purohita , or family priest. In the course of each initiation certain information is passed on by the guru to the pupil or initiate (sisya[*] in Sanskrit). There are three significant levels or stages in relation to Tantric knowledge for the upper-status thar s: (1) the initiation to "caste," the Kaeta ("loincloth") Puja (app. 6); (2) the initiation into the worship of the Aga(n) God; and (3), an initiation in preparation for dying, death, and "salvation," the moksa[*] or mukti initiation.
There are many kinds of initiation in Bhaktapur. They all entail the transmission of some esoteric knowledge by the guru , or his equivalent, and a solemn and sacred pledge of secrecy by the initiate. When, for example, a new wife comes to a household, or a new Acaju is employed, they are told the names and some of the mantras of the particular form or forms of the household lineage gods they must deal with, in a ceremony in which they pledge secrecy. Such initiations are sometimes called ba dekha (or "baga dekha ") or "half-initiations" by those familiar
with more advanced Tantric initiations. There are also many special initiations within those thar s that have a craft profession, such as the playing of some particular musical instrument, the making of masks, or the making of metal images. These initiations initiate and make sacred the teaching relation between guru and initiate, introduce the appropriate mantras and procedures of worship to the deity who will give effectiveness to the studies, and may introduce technical instructions or esoteric knowledge.
At all levels and in all thar s, now including the Po(n)s, there is an initiation of boys into their thar , the Kaeta Puja . All thar s have Kaeta Puja ceremonies that are associated with the idea of a radical change of status for a boy, his entry into his thar 's secrets, and his becoming fully morally responsible for following the dharma . The Kaeta Puja is a samskara , one of Bhaktapur's rites of passgage (app. 6) derived mostly from the Hindu tradition. In the upper thar s, the boy receives not only a loin cloth symbolizing his maturity but also the jona or sacred thread. For these upper-status boys this is the first in a potential series of initiations. For boys of other thar s it is the last (with the exception of craft initiation, which is sometimes given in conjunction with the Kaeta Puja ). During the Kaeta Puja boys are told something about their lineage god and are given some mantra s to use in worship. These mantra s, given by the guru (who in lower-status households may be a family member), like the mantra s given in more advanced initiation, are those shared by the larger phuki group and are thought by the phuki members to be their particular and special mantra , although they may, in fact, like the name of the phuki Aga(n) God, be common, not only to other groups that have split off from the lineage, but also to much larger groupings.
The next level of initiation, possible only to the upper thar s, is the one that is usually designated by the unqualified term "dekha ," the initiation to the phuki 's Aga(n) God practices. In previous times almost all men in the upper thar s took this initiation as young adults. Now, except for those Brahmans and Acaju priests who need this and other initiations for their priestly duties, many upper-status men delay taking this initiation until after the active years of their education and professional life—and some may never take it. Once having taken the Aga(n) dekha , one has time-consuming obligations in the ceremonies for worship of the Aga(n) God. In this second dekha the initiate enters into the secret Aga(n) religion of the phuki , is told the name of the god and its proper mantra , and can see it—or in those thar s where noninitiate family
members are able to see the Aga(n) God wrapped and hidden in cloths on some occasions, see it uncovered—for the first time. The initiate is now also told the proper procedures necessary in the worship of the Aga(n) God. He is introduced to japa meditation, where he repeats the same mantra for some given number of times, while counting off the repetitions by means of the beads of a special necklace. The new knowledge and practice is taught to the initiate over several days (depending on the student's quickness and ability) by the family guru , who has now become his guru . In the context of this initiation the phuki 's Aga(n) God is referred to as the student's istadevata , the student's own tutelary god.[24] The initiate is also told something about cakra meditation, the idea that the Goddess can be brought into his body, or resides in his body, and can be moved through a series of internal cakras or centers. The meditative practices he is introduced to are not for his private purposes—for either power or for penetrating illusion in a quest for salvation—but as instruments in the worship of his lineage deity. These introductions to yogic procedures in conjunction with the remainder of the esoteric information he is given moves him into the group of initiates which constitutes his phuki in their focal shared relation to their secret lineage deity.
The third possible initiation is often called Nirban (Sanskrit, Nirvana[*] ) initiation. This is available to men in the upper thar s who had the previous initiations and who would typically take it in their forties or fifties. For Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, the techniques learned at this level of initiation are considered necessary for the really powerful forms of Tantric worship, particularly those associated with the Taleju temple,[25] for conducting Brahman-assisted Aga(n) God worship of upper-status families, and for undertaking the role of guru to members of these families in their middle- and upper-level dekha s. Brahmans, like other upper-status men, also may undergo this stage of initiation for their own "salvation," for mrban , or mukti . Not all practicing Brahmans have this level of dekha ; some will undergo it later in life, while others—those with middle-level clients or temple pujari work—may never have it. Even fewer of the non-Brahman upper-status men now undergo it. Many of them do not even undergo the Aga(n) initiation, which is a necessary prerequisite to this one. However, for those men who are especially interested in continuing Tantric studies—either from interest in Tantrism in itself, or for the specific salvation promised by the initiation—this aristocratic option is available.
During the third-level initiation and studies, the initiate learns more
about his Aga(n) Goddess and her secret connections with the other Tantric deities in the city. He is instructed further in meditation technique, particularly cakra meditation. This is often in a limited form in comparison with the way this kind of meditation is known and used by Tantric practitioners and yogi s elsewhere, but is more elaborate than the initiate's previous meditation. It is considered to be a kind of Kundalini[*] Yoga for the purpose of moving the Goddess into the cakra located in the "heart," for meditation and worship. The instruction at this level requires daily study with a guru during a period of about one month. Following Nirban initiation, the initiate may now also read esoteric books, often in the possession of families, which deal with meditation, with Kundalini[*] Yoga, and with the secret connections and relations of Tantric deities in the city. It is said that the unauthorized reading of such books without initiation leads to insanity or blindness.
What has this to do with mukti , or nirban , that is, with "salvation"? The cosmic fire and cosmic air that the initiate experiences are considerably less freeing and transforming than our introductory quotations promised. He must await his death for their full effect, and even then his self, he hopes, will be only modestly transformed. People in Bhaktapur, like many South Asians, have various elaborate and inconsistent ideas about their fate after death. They believe, in one or another context, that it depends on their moral behavior during life (this life and previous ones), on their ritual activities and general actions at the time of dying, and on the proper ceremonies being performed by their family (particularly by their oldest son) after their death—especially during the first several days. Personal fate after death is also variously conceived. One joins the "fathers," the pitrs[*] . One wanders around somewhere for a period forming a spiritual body, and then goes to be judged by Yama, the King of the Dead, in his kingdom, whereupon one may be reincarnated or one may go to one of several heavens. Whatever mukti or nirban means to the people of Bhaktapur and to the Nirban initiate practicing meditation for "salvation," it does not mean that "highest [stage] . . . when the soul is absorbed in the Paramatman [the supreme soul] as the river is lost in the sea . . . [and where] there is no persistence of personality . . . and there is nothing left to do, or to attain to, or to gain" (Stevenson 1920, 187f.).[26] Whatever the highest theological speculations about the dissolving of the self as salvation, mukti , for those people with whom we have discussed this (and in their understanding of what others believe), this is neither what they believe nor what they want mukti to entail. It seems to mean, rather, the avoidance
of painful new lives, and the chance to remain in some heavenly place, usually the particular heaven of the most unproblematic of the city's moral deities, Visnu-Narayana[*] . This implies, for many, being surrounded by their family and remmbering their present life. The main focus of Nirban studies is the preparation for the time of dying, the maran kal (Sanskrit, marana[*] kala ) the appointed time for "destruction." Tantric discipline leads to a control of mind which can be helpful at the maran kal in two ways. At the time of death, the spirit resists leaving the body easily, the dying person will suffer for a long time. If he uses the proper mantra s and meditates on the god Narayana[*] (never on a Tantric deity), however, the soul leaves the body more easily and the adept has a quicker and less painful death. Tantric education, sadhana , helps in this meditation. The other problematic aspect of dying is that bad thoughts during the maran kal —worries about money, angry or vengeful thoughts, a wish for alcoholic spirits, and the like, will cause a punitive distressing reincarnation. Tantric discipline allows the maintenance of a peaceful mind and thus prevents a bad rebirth, and ideally any rebirth less comfortable than in "Narayana's[*] heaven."
However trivialized these practices and goals may seem from the point of view of Tantrism's highest philosophical ideals, and however woven into larger social practices, the underlying direction is familiar—a detachment from the realities, concerns, and passions of social inter-relatedness, a detachment that will allow the practitioner to avoid, if only at the moment of death, becoming entangled in Bhaktapur's enveloping world.
Techniques learned during the Tantric dekha s are used in the phuki worship we discussed above. These include special mantra s, hand gestures, and meditative practices. An important technique taught in these initiations is the visualization as a clear image—following some canonical description—of the deity to be worshiped and, eventually, the ability to mentally place this image within the body or within a mandala[*] drawn on a purified area on the floor. The ability to perform a puja to a mental image, to be able to dispense with a material external image, is considered to be one of the essential achievements of advanced Tantric practice in Bhaktapur, and one of the factors separating Tantrism from the externally somewhat similar worshiping of the dangerous deities through the sacrificial offerings of noninitiates.
In the remainder of his life after his initiation, the Nirban initiate practices his cakra meditation during daily worship, which usually
takes place in the morning during, roughly, one hour in the Aga(n) Room on the back half of the civata floor of the house. This daily worship is to the Aga(n) God—(whose, most often, subsidiary image is in the Aga(n) Room)—and to the household gods, who will be represented there by secondary images.[27] In the course of his worship through one or another meditative procedure, he is supposed to put himself in the state of concentration and ability to create an image called (both in Bhaktapur and in Tantric theory) dhyana . The imagined image has a specified form, color, number of arms, objects in its hands, significant gestures of some of its hands, a special vehicle, and so forth. Dhyana , here, is not a dissolution of consciousness, but a kind of control or concentration of it.[28] The initiate may also come to the Aga(n) Room for silent meditation when he wishes to. He may now use japa meditation or some form of cakra meditation. Here the meditation in itself, the practice of sadhana in itself, is his goal.
Tantrism and the Public City
We have discussed Tantrism as the esoteric individual and familial practices of upper-status families.[29] Tantrism and the experience of and worship of the dangerous deities by noninitiates are intimately and reciprocally related, influencing each other. In the top-down perspective, Tantrism affects the larger city in many ways. The complex of activities in and centering on the Taleju temple represents the expansion of Taleju as the Malla king's Aga(n) God into the tutelary deity of the king's city. The Tantric puja s performed in Taleju, above all those done at the climax of the autumnal Mohani festival, are, in part, for the "good of the city," as well as for the king himself. There are also other Tantric puja s performed under certain threatening circumstances for the protection of the city as a whole. These are called chema puja , puja s done for "forgiveness" (chema derives from the Sanskrit "Ksama[*] " in its sense as "pardon"), or more adequately, as Manandhar notes, "to restore the worshiper to a proper relationship to deity" (1976, p. 135). Chema pujas have been performed in the past, for example, because of epidemics of smallpox or cholera, prolonged droughts during the rice planting season, fires, and earth tremors with threatening earthquakes. The chema puja is addressed to the dangerous gods as a group. As we have noted, asking "forgiveness" of such gods is often associated with the idea that they may have been inadvertently offended, and therefore an act of redress may possibly placate them. Acajus, Josis, and Brah-
mans take part in these puja s, and offerings of prayer, music, meat, and alcohol are presented to the dangerous gods at their temples and shrines throughout the city. The food offerings are then distributed as prasada among the city's people to restore their relations with the gods and to protect them.[30]
Many of the images of the public city, above all many of the images and actions of the annual cycle,[31] are the outward expression of Tantric forms whose inner meaning is supposedly known only to initiates. The public images, ideas, and practices surrounding the dangerous deities have their own qualities, however, and have some uses that are in marked contrast to Tantrism. Tantrism uses those images in a quest for control and transcendence; the exoteric religion uses them (as does Tantrism) to symbolize aspects of Newar experience, but, in contrast to Tantrism, it uses them entirely for the purposes of social integration and control, not to escape it. We will deal with much of this in later chapters on the annual cycles, but we may here consider two central clusters of ideas in relation to the dangerous deities, ideas that are related to both the esoteric and exoteric aspects of the worship of the dangerous deities. These are the conceptions of the relations of Siva and Sakti, and the ideas about and practices of animal sacrifice.
Symbolic Complexes: Siva/Sakti
In our account of the mythology of the dangerous goddesses we discussed how the goddesses were emitted as a kind of force, sakti , by Siva and by the other male benign divinities. These saktis operated sometimes independently, sometimes coalesced into one supreme Goddess. This supreme Goddess is quite independent of the gods who in some accounts emit her or her component goddesses; in other accounts she is, in fact, prior to them as the ultimate supreme creative deity. The tradition that emphasizes the worship of the Goddess as the supreme deity is Saktism[*] . Both historically and in the way they are made use of in Bhaktapur Saktism[*] and Tantrism are "two intersecting but not coinciding circles" (Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 6). Within Bhaktapur's Tantrism there is an important difference between the images, conceptions, and uses of the Goddess in herself, and the images, conception, and use of "Sakti." Sakti's use both in Bhaktapur's esoteric and exoteric doctrine is based on her relation to Siva—here once again the supreme deity, albeit at a problematic moment in his supremacy—at the
time of her emission from him, and the precursors and consequences of that act.
In Bhaktapur's imagery, Sakti has two implications that are quite different when seen in ordinary common-sense contexts, but which are related in the theory of Siva/Sakti. These conflicting implications and their resolutions generate shifting ways of viewing certain forms and events that contribute greatly to the aesthetics and mystery of Tantric conceptions and symbols. These two implications derive from ideas about sakti as power, on the one hand, and sakti as passive, receptive female sexuality, on the other.
Local characterizations of sakti often begin with nonesoteric statements about the nature and interdependence of form and function. Any living and vital or potentially effective entity has both a containing form and a potential or ongoing function. The function is the object's sakti or "power." The sakti of an eye is seeing; of a bell, ringing.[32] When the object has lost its sakti , it is dead or powerless, it cannot function, and the eye becomes blind. In contrast, a function, sakti , that becomes disconnected from its form becomes diffuse and transformed in some peculiar way, in some cases uncanny, such as the sound of a bell that is not there. Siva/Sakti conceptions are a divinized version of this idea. Siva represents, at one point in a cyclical process, a living entity, a container with contained vitality; that is, he has his sakti within him. He is full of potential power. But in order to exercise power in the world (and not just social influence—we are at the edge of the non-moral arena of the dangerous deities here) he must emit his sakti , who now becomes Sakti, a divinity in herself. This emitted Sakti, often portrayed as a ray or an impersonal force, does actual "work" in the world, work that changes affairs through force, not by means of moral and social influence. Sakti is the power that is one of the goals of Tantric practice. But having emitted the power, Siva is now empty and dead. Siva without Sakti, the saying (based on a play on Sanskrit orthography) goes, is Sava, a corpse. The living Siva is male, but he contains a female principle within him. The dead (or weakened or exhausted) Siva is male, but now the female principle is external to him. He is incomplete. For his own sake and for that of society, it is essential to recapture the Sakti.[33] Now a second step and a partial transformation of the imagery occurs here. Siva, the male principle, and Sakti, the female principle, can become reintegrated through the act of union of sexual intercourse—as well as through other and variously represented
unifications, which never lose their coital implications. For this purpose Siva may be represented as a phallus, a linga[*] , and Sakti as a vagina, a yoni . But the phallus is active; the vagina is a passive receptacle, a container, in something like the way the form is the container for the force that gives it life. There has been a reversal in the signification of Siva and Sakti.
The Sukunda, an elaborately formed combined oil container and oil lamp used in major Hindu Newar rituals, consists of a semispherical container for oil to which is attached an oval or triangularly shaped shallow container, which is the oil lamp itself, and at whose apex a wick is placed. The oil container is the living Siva with his potential force, and both the burning wick and the triangular dish are Sakti, but in different ways. The burning wick is Sakti as energy; the triangular dish is Sakti as the sexual complement to the male, ready to restore his potential power. The oil from the container is put into the lamp dish as an act of union, and now the flame-Sakti can spring forth. Tantrism adds an emphasis on this vaginal and receptive Sakti as a consort in a sexualized act of union that is restitutive and which prepares the now enriched male for a new generation of power to the more general idea of the Sakti as Goddess and as an active and unrestrained (by civic order and morality) force in the world. Bhaktapur's religious, ritual, and festival imagery is replete with references to these ideas. Any pair of objects or events can be related to Siva and Sakti through one or the other of their interrelational meanings. Meat and alcohol presented to the dangerous deities are respectively Siva and Sakti: the flesh representing the embodied form and the alcoholic spirits, the vitalizing principle. A ritually presented grain of unhusked rice has Sakti as its potentially germinating kernel, Siva, as its husk. Dualisms of right and left, double lines (commonly used in marking out mandala[*] s on the ground for Tantric puja s), overlapping pairs (or sets) of triangles, are used to represent the splitting and complementarity of form and function, male and female. Such opposities are symbolically brought together in festival and ritual enactments. The joining and collapsing of these oppositions is shown in visual imagery as a dot or point, a bindu , often placed in the center of the pairs or in a central position in a complex image (such as a dangerous god's face, where it may be placed at the bridge of the nose). The bindu represents unity in contrast to dualism—the beginning of phenomenological diversity—and it represents, among other things, the union of the separated Siva and Sakti into a revitalized and rebalanced albeit now problematically self-contained, Siva.
The oscillating meanings of the polarities of Siva and Sakti and their necessary eternal couplings, condensations, and separations are very powerful symbolic resources for representing personal and social dilemmas. At the personal level these are resonances of vital, self-contained, self-sufficient, omnipotential fullness on the one hand—so well represented in the classical imagery of Siva—versus the divisions that initiate a society and social identity on the other. These personal meanings also echo problems about the sexual other and the sexual act, problems that have special South Asian forms and emphases. On the social level, however, which is our present concern, the complex of Siva/Sakti ideas and practices represents a tension between moral order, the heavenly order of the gods, with its static eternal balance, and the periodic need to mobilize an amoral power, a socially unrestrained force that becomes problematic once its job is done (even while it is doing it) as it is socially unrestrained and dangerous. The question then becomes how to get that power back under control, back into the heavenly quietude again. The Tantric interpretations and enactments of Siva and Sakti represent and mimic all this.
Symbolic Complexes: Sacrifice
The dangerous deities are usually distinguished from the ordinary ones in that their proper worship (as the legend of Taleju, for example, emphasized) requires that they be offered alcoholic spirits and animal flesh, (see, for example, fig. 19) which would be forbidden and sinful as offerings to the ordinary gods. The use of animal sacrifice in contrast to vegetarian offerings to mark a division and contrast among gods and types of ritual did not apparently exist in Vedic religion, where (contrary to what most nonscholarly Newar Hindus seem now to believe) there were both animal and vegetable offerings. "Ultimately," as Madeleine Biardeau put it, "the 'putting to death' of cereals or plants was scarcely less violent than the murder of animal victims" (Biardeau and Malamoud 1976, 139 [our translation]). The Laws of Manu (V, 40 [i.e., section V, verse 40]) includes plants in its attempt to justify the "murder" of various creatures. "Herbs, trees, cattle, birds, and (other) animals that have been destroyed for sacrifices, receive [in rebirth] higher existences" (Bühler 1969, 175). Biardeau points out that the Smrti[*] texts illustrate, however, a particular "embarrassment" in relation to the animal sacrifices, for animals were not to be eaten m non-sacrificial
Figure 19.
Sacrifice of a young male goat to the goddess Bhagavati.
forms. Thus, according to Manu , (parentheses are Bühler's; Bühler 1969, p. 174; Manu V, 31, 32, 33):
"The consumption of meat (is befitting) for sacrifices," that is declared to be a rule made by the gods; but to persist (in using it) on other (occasions) is said to be a proceeding worthy of Rakshasas [malevolent demons].
He who eats meat when he honors the gods and . . . [ancestral spirits], commits no sin, whether he has bought it, or himself has killed (the animal). . . . A twice-born man who knows the law, must not eat meat except in conformity with the law; for if he has eaten it unlawfully, he will, unable to save himself, be eaten after death by his (victims).
Significantly, Brahmans are included among the meat eaters. "A Brahman must never eat animals unhallowed by Mantras; but obedient to the primeval law, he may eat it consecrated with Vedic text." Yet, with all these (and various other) attempts to distinguish sacrifice from murder duly made, the Laws state, "a man who, being duly engaged (to officiate or to dine at a sacred rite), refuses to eat meat, becomes after death an animal during twenty-one existences" (Manu V, 35, 36; Buhler[*] 1969, 174f. [emphasis added]). Sanctions were sometimes needed to force people to participate in the animal sacrifice. These ancient issues have persisted in full force in Bhaktapur.
Biardeau notes that the division between animal and vegetarian sacrifice has in recent millennia become associated with a hierarchy of lower and higher practices, deities, and priests. As we noted in descriptions of other South Asian communities (chap. 8 and above) the vegetarian gods there are higher than the meat eating ones, and their priests, Brahmans, are, in turn, vegetarian and superior to the priests of the flesh-eating gods, whose priests typically belong to lower and nonvegetarian castes (Biardeau and Malamoud 1976, 140). Bhaktapur, of course, has suppressed the hierarchy of the dangerous and benign gods, and hesitates, in fact, to decide which might be higher.[34] The suppression is an uneasy one. Newar Brahmans, as they did in the times reflected in Manu's laws, participate in blood sacrifice and eat sacrificially prepared meat. For them and for all the upper thar s, however, sacrifice and meat eating takes its meaning from the various violations of the ordinary dharma that they represent.
Animal sacrifice or an equivalent meat offering is the proper offering to dangerous gods—which in most cases means a goddess—and is required in upper-status Tantric worship to the Aga(n) God and to other Tantric deities. Sacrificial worship of the dangerous gods is optional for those without Tantric initiation, with one essential exception. Every
household in the city must offer a yearly animal sacrifice or meat offering to Bhagavati during the course of the household ceremonies during the harvest festival, Mohani. Most households, if they can afford to at all, perform sacrifices several times during the course of the year. This is done during important rites of passage, during the ad hoc occasions when a worship of a dangerous deity may seem advisable, and during certain of the annual festivals that are occasions for large, semiritualized family feasts.
The kind of animal sacrificed is optional. An egg is considered a minimal but proper sacrifice to a dangerous deity, and it is offered often by very poor families, using the same terminology for the offering as is applied to other animal sacrifice. The offering of the egg is in fact sometimes called khe(n) syaegu , "killing the egg." A poor family may restrict itself to using a mixture, samhae , which is also used by upper-status families in the course of Tantric puja s in addition to the actual climactic killing of an animal. Samhae is a mixture of black soybeans, ginger, beaten and fried rice, "puffed" or "popped" roasted rice, dried fish, and pieces of water buffalo meat. The dried fish are purchased in shops that also sell grain; the buffalo meat is obtained from the Nae butchers whose thar profession is the ritual killing of water buffaloes. The water buffalo was traditionally the only animal that the butcher killed and sold as the only alternative kind of meat to an animal sacrificed in a family puja . These buffaloes are always killed by the butcher in the course of a perfunctory ritual sacrifice, and this makes the eating of their meat by others the taking of what is gesturally at least a consecrated prasada .
Samhae or eggs may also be used by families at any social and economic level for perfunctory worship of one or another dangerous deity. However, the animal most commonly sacrificed in important household or Aga(n) House puja s by people who can possibly afford one is the male goat. Poorer people may use a rooster on the occasion when a goat would otherwise be sacrificed. Other animals are sacrificed in special occasions and settings. Water buffalo are the focus of sacrifice at the Taleju temple and by the Nine Durgas group, where they symbolize the buffalo demon vanquished by Devi in the Devi Mahatmya . At certain sacrificial ceremonies, pa(n)ca bali , five kinds of animals are sacrificed: water buffaloes, goats, roosters, drakes, and rams. A sixth kind of animal, the pig, is sacrificed in special and limited contexts by the men who incarnate the Nine Durga deities. A castrated male goat, called a khasi , sometimes regarded as a unique type of animal, is consid-
ered the ideal animal for sacrifice to Ganesa[*] . Sacrificial animals are almost always male animals.[35] There are some astrologically caused problems when the sacrifice of a female animal is required upon the advice of a Josi (astrologer), and there are Newar festivals in other communities in which female animals are reportedly sometimes sacrificed, but almost all sacrifice in Bhaktapur is of male animals.
The most generally used term for an animal sacrifice is bali , (from Sanskrit, meaning tax, tribute, offering) and in some contexts, bau , which is said to be a Newari derivation of bali . ("Bali " and "bau " are also used for nonmeat offerings in one restricted context, death ceremonies, where rice offerings to ancestors and to crows and dogs as representatives of Yama are so named. Daily offerings of rice to the deceased ancestors of a household are also called bali offerings.) The sacrificial animal is also sometimes referred to as a baha(n) (from Sanskrit vahana , the—most usually—animal vehicle of a god), and thus a sacrifice may be called a baha(n) puja.
As part of the attempt to distinguish sacrifice from murder ("Slaughtering for sacrifices is not slaughtering" [Manu V, 39]), the animal must indicate his assent to the sacrifice, so that he may (again echoing Manu) "receive a higher existence," and be freed of the bad karma that has caused him to be born as an animal.[36] The sign is the shaking of the animal's head or body in certain ways.[37] During the course of the dedication of the animal to the deity ritually pure water is sprinkled on it, often getting into the ear, which helps ensure the proper movement. Extremely rarely there are animals who are thought not to have assented and they are turned free to wander in the city, and must not be harmed. Throat cutting and death through the resulting exsanguination is considered the specifically Newar way of sacrificing. Rajopadhyaya Brahmans explain that the animal should have life in him to witness the sacrifice he is making as his gift to the deity, and this is not possible in sacrifice through decapitation. Non-Newar Nepalis who perform sacrifices do so by decapitating animals, and this is often referred to as one of the salient contrasts between Newars and others.[38] Fowl are decapitated by the Newars, but in keeping with the way mammals are decapitated, with the cut starting at the throat rather than at the back of the neck. The stream of blood from the severed carotid arteries of the sacrificial animal is sprayed on the image of the deity.
The sacrifice of the animal, most typically a male goat, comes (as we have seen in the description of the Tantric puja ) in the course of a puja sequence, and at one of the major climaxes of the sequence. The animal
itself is worshiped. Colored pigments and flowers are put on its head; people make gestures of respect to it; a special pasu mantra, a "beast" mantra , is said for it. The goat is told by the presiding priest or family worshiper that if it agrees it will be able to go to heaven. Sacred water, uncooked rice, and flowers are thrown on its body and head. People then wait for the sign of assent from the animal. A chicken, duck, or water buffalo (when killed by a butcher) must shake its head; a goat must shake its entire body as a sign of acceptance. A buffalo of special ritual importance (that is, all except those routinely but sacrificially killed to be sold as meat by butchers) must, like the goat, shake its body as a sign of acceptance. Although, as we have noted, the animal almost always eventually gives the assent sign, people must sometimes wait a while for it. Once the sign of assent ms given, the animal may now be killed. After the throat is slit and the blood allowed to spray over the god image "to give drink to the deity," the head of the animal is cut off and placed on a metal plate, a puja bha: , which is placed in front of the deity as a food offering. Flowers and colored pigment are taken from the deity and placed on the puja bha: which will, bearing the head, be brought to the feast that always follows the animal sacrifice. Parts of this head will be distributed to the senior members of the phuki in a formal hierarchical pattern as we will recount below. At the time of the sacrifice the various offerings made to the god image previously, flowers, colored pigment, and food offerings become splattered with blood. Some of them are taken and distributed among the worshipers as prasada , and among these the food offerings taken back as prasada are eaten by the worshipers. In a goat sacrifice the abdomen may be opened and a length of intestine taken out, then knotted at one end and blown into to inflate it. The other end is tied, and the image of the deity is now garlanded with this intestinal balloon.
The body of the animal is now prepared for butchering. Its hair may be singed. This is considered necessary in some contexts, in pitha puja s, for example, but optional in others where instead the skin may be treated with boiling water to facilitate the removal of hair. The animal is now to be butchered, usually at or near the place of its sacrifice in preparation for a feast.
Who does the actual killing? This question illustrates the tension between slaughter as a sin and sacrifice as a religious duty. The two thar s whose traditional responsibilities include the killing of animals for food—(and, traditionally, in the case of untouchable Po(n) also the execution of criminals)—are among the very lowest in Bhaktapur.[39]
Fishing, the traditional source of the dried fish used in the samhae offerings, is one of the duties exclusively assigned to the Po(n)s, the untouchables. The Nae who kill the water buffaloes are also close to the bottom of the status system.
The ideal is for the chief worshiper to kill the sacrificial animal himself. For Aga(n) God puja s in the household or Aga(n) House the acting head of the household or representative of the phuki , whether he is king—or his contemporary Brahman surrogate in Taleju, the king's Aga(n) House—Brahman, or Josi, or any member of the upper thar s, must cut the throat of the sacrificial animals himself. In these cases it is not proper to delegate the sacrificial act to the Acaju, although that is done, as we have noted, in cases where no one in a group has the initiation, or is available to perform the sacrifice. In public settings, however, attended by people beyond the circle of initiates, the Acaju or one of the lowest thar s[40] may do the killing, protecting the highest groups in the public arena from the possible stigma of slaughter. Middle and lower groups also do their own killing in family puja s, although the middle groups may use a member of the Jyapu Acaju, or "farmer Acaju" thar s on important or public occasions.
Sacrifice: The Hierarchical Division of the Head
The deities who receive sacrifice are for the most part those who are the tutelary deities of one or another of Bhaktapur's nested components—phuki, guthi , mandalic[*] segment, city as a whole—and thus the sacrifice represents the members of the unit. The sacrifice, above all those done in the course of Tantric worship, are done in contexts emphasizing the "equality"—which for Bhaktapur means the collapsing of hierarchical distinctions-of the participating group[*] . In the feast that follows phuki sacrifices large family groups are assembled. At the core is the patrilineal phuki group, but hatanata —the out-married daughters and their spouses and children and more distantly related kin—as well as family friends may also be invited. They all share in the sacrificial meal as guests of the phuki or household. However, within this communal egalitarian feast there is an important ceremonial fragment that recalls the male hierarchy of the phuki . This is the orderly distribution of segments of the head of the sacrificial animal.
The distribution of parts of the head is one of the customs that people in Bhaktapur consider to be specifically Newar, or at least specially important to the Newars.[41] The parts of the head of the sacrificed animal are presented just before the fruit course (the arrangement of
courses in such feasts is always conventionally organized in detail), that is, toward the end of the feast. They are given and received in a non-solemn, informal, often joking manner, characteristic of the feast itself.
These hierarchically arranged portions are called siu (in Kathmandu Newari, si ). The particular parts of the head made use of and their hierarchical value varies in various communities and groups. For Bhaktapur, for most upper-level groups at least, the sequence of distribution from highest to lowest is as follows: right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, nose, tongue, right mandible, and left mandible. Toffin gives for the predominantly Jyapu Newar village of Pyangaon the following sequence: right "muzzle," left "muzzle," right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, right mandible, left mandible (1976, pp. 329-338; 1984, p. 104). Manandhar in his dictionary of Kathmandu Newari (1976) gives the sequence: right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, nose (or muzzle), tongue (1976, p. 593). Reportedly, this sequence is not used in Bhaktapur. There are variations in the lowest parts of the status system in Bhaktapur. The Po(n)s, who usually eat pigs during their phuki feasts divide the pig up in the sequence snout, right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, right mandible, left mandible—to which they add the tail, which in contrast to upper-level restriction of siu to males, is given to a woman, the ranking woman in the family.[42] In some circumstances, particularly among lower levels, a chicken or a duck is used for a feast. Thus at the initiation of a member of the Jugi thar s in the learning of the thar 's traditional musical instrument, a chicken is divided. On this occasion the head is given to the guru , the right wing to the student's father, and the left wing to the student. Manandhar (1976, 593) gives the sequential order of distribution for a duck or a chicken as head, right wing, left wing, right leg, and left leg. All these sequences have some tendency to go from top down, or front to back, and always from right to left in the ranking of symmetrical parts. Upper-status Bhaktapur and Pyangaon, at least, divide their mammals into eight parts.
In the middle and upper levels in Bhaktapur the siu is presented in order to the eight highest members of the phuki group that is holding the feast. For upper-level and middle-level thar s, at least, the system of ranking among the phuki as symbolized by the siu division is arranged by age within a generation, rather than only by relative age. In other words, even if a member of an older generation is younger than a male in a descending generation, he has more status in the siu distribution system. If there has been an Acaju assisting the phuki at the sacrifice, he may be presented the fifth-ranked piece, the nose. The recipients of the
siu eat a mouthful of their portion. Sometimes one small piece of any of the portions of siu is taken and presented to a representation of the main deity to whom the sacrifice was presented. The remnants of the siu as well as other residues of the feast are brought, as we have noted, to the chwasa at the twa: crossroads after the feast by one of the household women.
Sacrifice: Human Sacrifice
People in Bhaktapur believe that human sacrifice was performed in Bhaktapur in the past and that it may still take place on certian occasions in remote Newar towns in the Kathmandu Valley. The chronicles contain scattered references to what seem to be actual, as well as rumored human sacrifices, in the past. Mary Slusser reviews some of these reports, remarking that "the late chronicles take . . . [human sacrifice] for granted in the Malla Period, and consider it an accepted Licchavi custom" (1982, vol. 1, p. 337), and adds that "the late chronicles offer several descriptions of human sacrifices that seem too specific and too graphic to be mere fantasy" (ibid., 338). As she sums it up, reflecting with her phrase "almost certainty" the kinds of rumors that persist in Bhaktapur about the distant reaches of the Valley, "Human sacrifice, a feature of blood sacrifice up to the very recent past, is almost certainly no longer practiced in Nepal" (ibid., 1, 217).
In Bhaktapur's civic symbolic enactments the idea of human sacrifice is associated predominantly with the legends and dramatic performances of the Nine Durgas (chap. 15). There are some historical accounts, as we will see in that chapter, indicating that their performances in the past in Bhaktapur once included real human sacrifices. The details of their contemporary performances clearly show that the blood sacrifice of an animal deflects the rage of the Goddess m her most terrifying form from those humans or ineffectual minor deities who have offended her. The idea of the animal sacrifice as surrogate for human sacrifice is overt in still other contexts. In discussion of spirits and dangerous gods it is sometimes said that the dangerous force wants a human death (perhaps manifested in the illness of an individual) and that some substitution, often an animal sacrifice, must be made to save the individual. It is said that an animal sacrifice must be made to a newly constructed house; otherwise it may take a sacrifice itself and someone in the house will die. Similarly, if a truck owned by some Newar family is not given a sacrifice during the Mohani festival, it may cause an accident, again taking the sacrifice for itself. The close relation of ani-
mal sacrifice and threats to humans is experienced by some, at the least, individuals in their late childhood in a deeply felt way. We will return to such personal interpretations and responses in the excursion that follows on the significance of sacrifice in Bhaktapur.
Sacrifice: Aspects of Its Significance in Bhaktapur
Sacrifice in Bhaktapur, as the foregoing sections suggest, has the characteristics that have made one or another variation of sacrifice a powerful and useful social resource, one that "has been found in the earliest known forms of worship and in all parts of the world" (R. Faherty 1974, 128). There is an offering of animals and once, probably, humans to a divine being; that offering is equivocal, as it risks being interpreted as murder; the sacrificial animal is in part a representative of and surrogate for humans, as a human sacrifice would have been a surrogate for other humans; and the life—or death—offered to the gods is in part taken back in a transformed state and shared in a communal meal by the sacrificer and the members of the social group he represents.
It is not our purpose here to attempt to relate these forms to the large literature attempting to explain the social, psychological, and historical functions and "origins" of sacrifice, much of it originating in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century social and psychological theory. We will here emphasize certain aspects of it that are highlighted in Bhaktapur's uses and in the responses and interpretations of some, at least, of its people. These considerations are in anticipation of later discussions of how some of the central symbolic forms and symbolic enactments of the annual festival cycle build on the implications of sacrifice to help bind individuals into the city's symbolically constituted mesocosm.
Blood sacrifice in Bhaktapur might be regarded as an extremely immoral act transformed by a powerful context, a "religious" one of a special kind. The immorality and, therefore, the power represented in transformation is greatly enhanced by the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation, which renders animals in this and other contexts of understanding morally continuous with humans. Not only the killing of animals, which is relegated to the lowest-status thar s, but even the eating of meat from animals unless they are sacrificial offerings is contrary to the ordinary dharma . Against the background of such understanding sacrifice in Bhaktapur is the antinomial act in which all levels of society participate, in distinction to those acts that exclusively characterize upper-
status Tantric puja s. The transformation produced by the context is equivocal; there is a conflict with not only "common sense" but also the tenets of "ordinary religion," a conflict within the realm of faith itself. The possibility of a characterization of sacrifice as murder is always there. Much of the significance of blood sacrifice derives from this. Peripheral people in Bhaktapur's society, adolescents, and members of lower thar s, as well as Nepalese outsiders—including vocal Buddhist reformers—are skeptically aware that the apparent transformation of murder into sacrifice may be only self-serving hypocrisy, motivated in such skeptical interpretations by "superstition" in the quest for a good meal.
The location in Bhaktapur of some, at least, of the skepticism in the minds of older children or younger adolescents is particularly significant. As one informant, a member of a shopkeeper family, put it: "at first when we were young we used to feel afraid." (Why?)[43] "Killing is not good. Killing causes something to happen in your mind." (What?) "It is a kind of cruelty. Someone is doing something cruel to the animal and he may do something cruel to me. Every man is also like an animal. A man can kill with a knife. That's why I used to feel troubled. But afterward I got used to the religion and to all kinds of sacrifice. "He was about twelve years old when he began to "get used to" sacrifice. I [R. L.] then ask him what other feelings he had about sacrifice before that time. "The religious books were about peace and about not killing anything, not harming anything. But they [the adults] break all the customs of religion, or the reality of religion, and they kill the animals, they sacrifice the animals for their own satisfaction only, in order to eat the animal, that is why they sacrifice. I used to say that it is not really for the god, the god never told us to kill anybody. I used to say so at that time."
But then he grew up and he came to realize the "religious truth" about sacrifice. That is he had to make, as Kierkegaard ([1843] 1954) put it, a "leap into faith," a commitment to counterintuitive propositions, to the "absurdities" that mark membership in a "community of faith."[44]
The conflicts of meanings of sacrifice within the ordinary dharmic ethical system with the system of meanings and values of the worship of the dangerous deities means that the issues will be overt and conscious, that alternatives will be visible (i.e., to kill or not to kill), and that a choice is possible. The possibility of rejecting an adherence, on one or another level, to the symbolic forms is essential for the meaning of sac-
rifice, especially when the thing to be chosen or rejected involves a risk. Choice implies that for symbols of social importance (1) adherence must be motivated and (2) the act or state of adherence, being in some sense optional, means something in itself.
The acceptance of the religious interpretation that converts murder into sacrifice is not only a significant commitment to a system of doctrine; it is in part motivated by the powerful personal significance of animal sacrifice. The man we have just quoted has said, "someone is doing something cruel to the animal, and he may do something cruel to me. Every man is also like an animal." This overt association of not only "men" and "animals" but of one's self and the sacrificial animal is common in people's reflections on their thoughts and feelings about sacrifice when they were young. Another informant, a member of a high Chathar thar , said that when he was a child "I had pity for the goat, and I felt some sort of uneasiness which came into my mind. What if I were killed and given as sacrifice in that way, what would happen to me. That was the kind of feeling that came to my mind. If I were, you know, given as a sacrifice, you know, with my head turned up like that and a knife blade being put on my throat [he laughs] what would happen? That was the kind of feeling I had you know, a kind of gooseflesh, you know what that is, I can't express it. I used to have that kind of feeling, but these days I don't." Echoes of early understandings persist, although usually less clearly articulated in other adults. Thus, according to a man from the very low Jugi thar "we love the sacrificial animals like our own sons and daughters, because we brought them up and fed them and gave them drink."
These remarks show empathy for and identification with the animal as sacrificial victim. They also suggest a double psychological movement as individuals mature and fully enter the society, a movement that for boys roughly corresponds to their Kaeta Puja s, their initiation into their respective thars . The "leap into faith," the coming to "understand," the acceptance of the system of marked symbols as having its own legitimate reality, is motivated in part by a solidarity with adults, and hence the community, and that solidarity is aided, urged, by a sort of forced choice between an identification with the community of sacrificers and an identification with its sacrificial victims. One must not only accept the community's "ideology" but must also participate in sacrificial acts, and thus by implication in the whole mesocosmic symbolic system that they represent and protect. People are tempted by all kinds of oppositions to the full moral life of the city—memories of their
own childhood, the life of the lower thar s, and the freedom of the hill people. But these are also dirty, chaotic, animal-like. Sacrifice acts as a kind of continuing rite of passage, which emphasizes commitment to the costly order of household, phuki , and city. As we will see in chapter 15, the ritual performances of the Nine Durgas make the social implications of sacrifice quite clear—the wrath of the Goddess in her most destructive representation as Mahakali is aroused by violations of respect due to her by an inferior, that is, by a violation of the fundamental hierarchical social order. She threatens the hapless violator, and can be appeased only by the substitution of an animal, a cock, whose head she tears off and whose blood she drinks.
After their leading male member kills the animal, the corporate group eats it. This common and much discussed aspect of sacrifice has evoked various explanations—such as shared guilt and the absorption of the substance of the representative "totemic" animal—to explain the solidarity that presumably results from this. The Newar feast is a joyful event, usually associated with drinking as well as meat eating in a further participation in the Goddess's realm. The atmosphere of the feast is joyous and communal, a mild sociable softening of the proprieties of hierarchical order and of ordinary dietary restraints. The communal feast humanizes and socializes further the sorts of procedures which Tantrism performs as esoteric rituals. The act of sacrifice is modulated down into a dinner party. The ritual murder (which in some societies might be in the realm of mysteries, of black magic, of evil, of Satan) is conveniently and typically captured by the city and transformed and given a paradoxical propriety in the realm of the dangerous deities and their worship.
Secrecy and Mystery
Secrecy is a pervasive and fundamental aspect of Bhaktapur's life. Its major symbolic representation is in the worship of the dangerous deities—above all in the Tantric mode with its emphasis on esoteric secrets, swearing of oaths to keep those secrets, and levels of initiation into progressively deeper ones.
Secrecy is clearly associated with the cellular units of Bhaktapur and is, in fact, a condition of their cellularity.[45] What separates their affairs from outsiders is, in large part, the confidentiality of those affairs. In
large part this confidentiality is to protect each unit from the moral scrutiny of larger units, to allow the unit to regulate its own affairs as far as possible. The moral scrutiny of a larger unit is liable to be censorious and carries a serious and consequential risk of the loss of the public prestige, the ijjat , of the unit.
On the religious level the secrecy is focused on the name, form, nature, and proper worship of the unit's tutelary deity, and on the special craft and professional knowledge of a thar . The revealing of any of a group's secrets by one of its members, usually implying a violation of an oath taken during an initiation, would be a very serious breach of an individual's relation to the group and, more generally, of his or her general status as an adequate "person." Secrecy makes the unit equivalent to a mandala[*] , a circle in which some sort of religious potency can be bound, collected, and isolated to some purpose. The boundary, which can be represented in space by a line, can in the life of a group be represented by a boundary of secrecy. In analogy to the mandala[*] , secrecy is similarly associated in the affairs of the units that have it with the concentration, boundedness and possession of some kind of "power" within the unit itself.
Many component units contribute elements to larger ritual or symbolic performances. Mask makers, ritual dancers, potters, image markers, astrologers, Brahmans, Acajus, and so forth may all contribute objects and/or actions. As we have repeatedly emphasized, it is essential that their outputs into the ritual or festival be effective. These outputs are public. However, the way that the mask maker gathers the proper clay, forms the mask in traditional ways, and brings the preliminary stages of siddhi into the mask are secret. It is essential that the cell perform properly, but the details hidden by secrecy are not the concern of the larger group.[46] But the fact of the secrecy in itself, the knowledge that a group has its required initiations and hidden rituals, gives outsiders a conviction and a confidence that proper, effective, and powerful actions are being done within a unit to produce the efficacy of their contribution to the public city. This means that it is essential to know that there are secrets. A completely hidden secret, hidden so well that no one knew that a group had any would not convey this sign of corporate siddhi to outsiders. In Bhaktapur, knowledge by others that a group has secrets, or more precisely has the secrets it is supposed to have, is a sign that it is an effective and necessary component of the larger system .[47]
The secrecy of a group becomes a mystery for those who know there is a secret, but do not know what it is. To turn a secret into a mystery
means that there often have to be ways of signaling, of advertising the presence of secrets. While it is common knowledge that corporate groups have special mantra s, deities, and hidden rites, and that there are parts of temples and houses where no one but the initiate can enter, there are other ways of advertising secrets. One is to warn people to avoid stumbling on them, for they may, it is typically said, be dangerous to an outsider.[48] People know, for example, that the Nine Durgas perform important secret dances in various parts of the city late at night during certain phases of their annual cycle and, knowing where they will dance, avoid these areas. For, it is said, if they are seen, the person who saw them would then have extremely bad luck or might die. We have noted the related idea in Tantrism that if improperly initiated and qualified people try to learn Tantric secrets and procedures, they would become blind or insane or would die.
Thus secrecy has to be advertised in order to be effective in the larger system and, sometimes, to prevent outsiders from stumbling on it. The advertisement sometimes takes flamboyant forms. During Biska:, the solar New Year festival (chap. 13), for example, where an image of a secret dangerous deity is to be brought out of its temple to some other part of the city, there is also a false secret image. While people are watching a procession carrying the portable public image of the deity, a priest will run through the crowd carrying something wrapped in cloths. People will say, with an air of special knowledge, that what is being carried is the "real" and secret image. The bundle that the priest is carrying is, in fact, just a decoy; the "real" image is being carried in true secrecy. This device of a false secret has the virtue of advertising the presence of a secret and at the same time protecting it.
The symbolically constituted dimension of Bhaktapur's life, its mesocosm, is in part structured through bounded information. These areas are the property of various corporate groups, and are organized into the larger hierarchical system of statuses. Secrecy is the means by which these bounded areas are maintained; and the possession of secrets is equivalent to the possession of economic and political force in the "material" realm. To tell the secrets is to destroy them as secrets essential to the special functions of differentiated, interrelated units, and thus is to destroy much of the effective structure of the city.[49]
The system of secrecy has one unintended consequence. It makes loss of traditional knowledge through time, knowledge located in a multitude of bounded groups, very much more likely than the loss of a widely
shared knowledge would be, and at the same time it may prevent an awareness that some aspects of cultural knowledge have, in fact, disappeared. People assume that the esoteric meaning of various symbolic forms is known by "someone" within some one of the city's units. Experts, not knowing the meaning of some form or the details of some ritual technique, will assume that it is known to someone elsewhere. Thus, for example, the nature and meaning of certain faces placed in the headband of some of the masks of the Nine Durgas dancers are thought by Brahmans, mask makers, and the Gatha dancers (see color illustrations) themselves to be known to one of the other of these three concerned groups, but the knowledge is apparently lost.
In Sum
The presence of Tantrism as a legitimate, socially integrated component of Bhaktapur's marked symbolic life, like the legitimate and integrated presence of the dangerous deities, has transformed both Tantrism and Bhaktapur. Esoteric Tantrism and the exoteric religion of the dangerous deities allow for the representation of emotions and ideas that are not represented in—and are often in opposition to—the ordinary moral order of the city. Because of this legitimate and central representation, the ideas and emotions are not totally relegated to such peripheral forms as ghost beliefs, witches and shamans, or to the "imaginary" world of fairy tales and wonder stories, or to private fantasy. All these modes exist in Bhaktapur, although some of them seemed played down in comparison with some other Nepalese groups. (Bhaktapur, for example, uses mostly hill tribe shamans for spirit healers; it treats sadhu renouncers as a "non-Newar" tradition.) The dominant alternative supernatural mode is not only legitimate but also, in some contexts, at the apex of the social system.
Tantrism is intimately connected with the meanings of the dangerous deities who are the objects of its worship, and it shares their implications and uses. Those implications are apparently contradictory to ordinary social order, but they are related to that order in an elaborate, mysterious higher unification. Tantrism and the dangerous deities represent amoral forces and the force that controls such forces, and thus the possibility of using this force to protect the moral system itself; they represent the possibility of escape from the civic system in both its dangers and its attractions and yet, at the same time, a tool for binding the members of a corporate group to the group under the shared protection
and threat of a dangerous deity; they represent danger and chaos, but also fertility and creativity, a realm that can destroy but that is necessary to the life of a community.
Tantric practice and the exoteric worship of the dangerous deities—although some of their symbolic forms may become routine and probably mostly empty of meaning for some or many of its practitioners—are nevertheless able to bring many of these meanings to repeated life, in ways that we have tried to suggest. Tantric practices, albeit somewhat timidly, violate some of the moral laws that are central markers of reputation and status in the public society. Blood sacrifice (less timidly) does this not only in Tantrism but also in the worship of the dangerous deities throughout the city.
Blood sacrifice and Tantrism's other antinomial moves have, among other meanings, a potential epistemological implication for people in Bhaktapur. The violations of the ordinary dharma which must necessarily be done in the worship of the dangerous deities are at the same time violations and not violations. They are "not violations" because they are done in the special transcendent contexts of Tantrism and sacrifice. The city's moral laws are thus valid only in a certain context. This is an important addition to Bhaktapur's large assortment of socially defined paradox-generating contexts, and of different kinds of realities which individuals experience. Tantra, however, in its doctrinal alliance with mysticism, carries the implications of shifting rules and definitions toward the implication that all contexts may be arbitrary and illusory. This is another way—alongside the direct category dissolving possibilities of the experience of meditation—that may lead to a sense of things in which an enlightened or "liberated" individual may come to see through (or, at any rate, peek through) the veil of illusion, maya , in which the moral world and ordinary logic exist.[50] That is, the results of experience will support philosophical doctrine. The purposes of Tantric puja are conceived as either powerful action for the sake of the corporate group involved, which may in some cases be the whole city or, alternatively, personal "escape" as a transcendence of samsara[*] , the ordinary moral world. Power and escape may look to an outsider as different matters, but in the context of Bhaktapur (and Hinduism) they are strongly unified, for they both represent an escape from and a transcendence of the ordinary moral system, the network of pressures, limitations, and relations of ordinary life.
It is this transcendence of the ordinary moral and social world that makes Tantrism significant both for the renouncer (the sadhu or yogi )
and the upper nonpriestly strata[51] (the Ksatriya[*] kings, court officials, and warriors). For this latter group, their power consists, or consisted, precisely in that they have, on proper occasions, to rise above and violate the ordinary dharma in the performance of their necessary protective functions (chap. 10). The alliance of aristocracy, royalty, power, mystic renunciation, and the social legitimacy of Tantrism and the dangerous deities is characteristic of Bhaktapur.