Dear reader,

Welcome to the second part of my series on who were the Indian Buddhists in history. You can read the first part here.

The 10^th-13^th centuries in Kashmir was an important time for Buddhism. Kashmir at this time likely included the Valley, as well as parts of the upper Indus watershed, the western parts of modern Zanskar, as well as the historical area of Gandhara and Taxila, and the Swat valley and modern Gilgit-Baltistan. An entirely Himalayan region, this area was culturally one, but not necessarily so politically.

The Utpala and Lohar dynasties ruled over this period, but they had to share power with many other local monarchies, which, at various points in time, were either feudatories, or competitors. As many historians had pointed out, this was largely a time of political destabilisation, and also a fair degree of institutional violence and corruption.

Kashmir remained extremely wealthy though, largely due to lucrative trade with north India to the south, but equally importantly with Central Asia to the north, and Tibet and China to the northeast. And Kashmir’s sustained cultural sophistication retained a charm that states all around it sought to emulate.

By all accounts, this was also an unsure time for Kashmir’s sizable Buddhist communities. While the glory days of state support under the Karkota dynasty was in the past, the communities were sizable, powerful and wealthy enough to continue to support large and important monasteries and temples, not to mention workshops of trained artisans.

Buddhism and trade routes

The reason for this sustained high isn’t difficult to understand, since Buddhism remained the religion of choice for merchants, professionals and artisans (members of guilds called sreni or goshthikas)—those who stood to lose in the varna hierarchies of Brahmanical Hinduism.

As the scholar Ronald M. Davidson writes in his book Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (2002):

As Buddhists altered the perceptions of the importance of trade, they were themselves affected in the process; monks embedded the images of merchants and guildsmen in their own diction. We find, for example, a trade-influenced ordination lineage inscribed along a Gilgit caravan path, with the monks Satyasreshthi and Dharmasreshthi—Guildmaster of Truth and Guildmaster of the Dharma—engraving their names in rock…Caravan leaders eventually become the model for bodhisattvas in the Dasabhumika Sutra—a bodhisattva has to be as dedicated towards the goal as the caravan master—and the caravan master becomes an apt metaphor for the Buddha himself in panegyrics over time from Matriceta to Shantideva.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are no records of ordinary Buddhist Kashmiris that have been preserved in the historical record. What we now know of Kashmiri Buddhism and Buddhists is indirectly, in the impact on intellectual and cultural lives of Kashmir’s neighbours (including Tibetans), and over the general efflorescence of late Mahayana and Vajrayana in India and elsewhere. So what we have left of Kashmiri Buddhism from this period are vivid echoes in the art of others’—in Ladakh, Spiti and Zanskar.

Given the important connection between traders and Buddhism, it is no wonder that the iconic art of Kashmiri Buddhists can be seen today on the important Indus Valley trade route. This ancient route connected the main Central Asian Silk Route via the Swat river valley and Gilgit to the Kashmir Valley to the South and the Indus valley and Tibet to the east. Both these routes lay through predominantly Buddhist areas, and monumental rock sculptures are found all along the route. On the eastern route, the main sculptures are in Drass, Apati, Kartse in the Suru Valley of Zanskar, and the biggest—Mulbekh.

The Mulbekh Maitreya

The Mulbekh rock-cut sculpture of the four-armed Bodhisattva Maitreya, the future Buddha. This is how the art historian Rob Linrothe describes the sculpture:

His hair is arranged in a symmetrical ‘butterfly jata’ on either side of the high chignon bearing a Kashmiri-style stupa with a small, rounded anda (dome) above a stepped terrace with staircase, and a ten- or eleven-level chhatravali (stack of umbrella-like disks) above the outward slanting supports of the harmika (platform with railing above the dome). The hair is pulled back in strands, but two spiral curls adorn the high layer of hair at the centre.

He wears a slender upavita (consecrated thread), with a naga-pushpa flower rising from his upper left hand to above his right shoulder. He holds a kundika (water jar) in his lower left hand, while his lower right hand forms the dana (gift-giving) mudra. The upper right hand holds an akshamala (string of prayer beads).

About 25 feet high, the stupendous sculpture is framed by smaller figures of donors around its ankles. They are dressed identically, “with belted robes ending mid-shin over boots”. Under the robes, the figures wear tunics, and the overall style of dressing is in keeping with the Kashmiri style of the period. Linrothe surmises that the Maitrya sculpture is from the 10^th-11^th centuries CE, and was sculpted by Kashmiri Buddhist artisans for local merchants or princes.

Regarding the identity of the artists, there are too many tiny details…which can be related with the visual vocabulary of unquestionably Kashmiri sculpture…the bodily proportions, the transparency of the garment, the elegance of the garment fold, the style of jewellery, the piled up hair and the corkscrew plaits, the particular treatment of the naga-pushpa flower, the length of the vanamala, can all be paired with excavated objects of those collected from the Kashmiri sites for which they were made…the Mulbek Maitreya is Kashmiri.

It is well known that Kashmiri artists travelled far along the Silk Route and its subsidiary branches, to take up commissions from Buddhist societies influenced by Mahayana Buddhism from India. Along with the Bengal-Bihar style of art, the Kashmiri style was in demand in these areas, since Asian societies looked to India as the land from which new advances in both Buddhism and Buddhist art arose. As a result, the handiwork of those nameless Kashmiri Buddhists can be found all over the place, from Gandhara to Tibet.

I’ll stop here for now dear reader. In the next part of this series, we will visit the Alchi monastery in Ladakh, and view the masterpieces of Kashmiri mural painting, including a fantastic depiction of life in the Kashmir Valley in the 11^th century.

Thank you all for reading, and see you all again next week.

Select Bibliography

Jean Naudou Buddhists of Kashmir

Ronald M. Davidson Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement

Rob Linrothe Origins of the Kashmiri Style in the Western Himalayas: Sculpture of the 7th-11th Centuries

Dear reader,

When considering the vast swathe of India’s historical remains—be they monuments, statues, paintings, texts or any other media—I often wonder how our perception of this history is shaped by the fact that there is hardly ever any mention of the social context of the artefact.

What do I mean by social context? Well, it’s things like who were the communities of ordinary people who took part in the process? Who were the patrons? Who were the artists and artisans? What purpose did these objects and buildings serve for Indians living at the time? Who were these people?

India’s historical and archaeological remains have very little to say on this; wherever there are epigraphic or paleographic markings, it is mostly to do with kings and other courtly elites. There is often mention of religious elites, like Buddhist monks or Brahmins, but taken together, all such mentions favour just the topmost sliver of South Asian societies, hardly ever lay communities like householders.

Names etched in stone

However, this doesn’t mean that representations of ordinary people are entirely absent from the record. For example, at the vast rock cut monastic complex of Kanheri inside the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, there are several epigraphic mentions of donations from members of the larger Buddhist communities. Cave 7 of the complex records the donation of a water cistern for the use of monks by a Sulasadatta from Chaul in Raigad, who is the son of a goldsmith. One can assume that Sulasadatta himself was a goldsmith as well.

A stupa next to Cave 3 holds the funerary remains of a monk called Dhammapala, and it was erected in his memory by a woman called Sivapalitanika and her husband Dhamanaka, a goldsmith. A large chaitya in Cave 3 was donated by two brothers Gajasena and Gajamita, along with their wives.

Kanheri, or as it was known at the time, Sri Krishnagiri Mahavihara (the black mountain monastery), was in active use for at least a thousand years, between the 2^nd and 12 centuries CE, so it witnessed the flourishing of three different phases of Buddhism—Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana. At every point over this long period of time, there were lay Buddhist practitioners (upasakas) who made donations in order to attain religious merit for themselves and their families.

Thus, Cave 21, which was built around the 6^th century CE, records the donation of a water cistern by Apapapenu, a trader from Kalyan, along with his wife Juvarinika and his mother Dharmadevi. Cave 22 was donated by a Buddhist nun. An enigmatic inscription in Cave 99 records the donation of benches for monks to sit and look out at the sea by a Mitabhuti, an official whose job, as the inscription says, was sagara-paloganam, “to observe the sea”.

People came from far and wide to Kanheri: A Gomin Avighnakara travelled all the way from Gauda (Bengal) in the 9th century to make a permanent endowment for the monks of the “Sri Krishnagiri mahavihara”, as an inscription records in Cave 11. Cave 90 bears inscriptions in Pahlavi that records the names of Persian visitors to the caves in the 11th century.

Kanheri is just one of several such sites from across the country that bears such epigraphic records, and these represent a broad cross-section of Buddhist Indians—mostly craftsmen, merchants and various kinds of professionals.

This is in keeping of the Buddhist political and social ideal of the ‘Open Society’, as formulated by archaeologist and historian Giovanni Verardi in his 2011 book Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India. This was a non-hierarchical caste-less society based on trade, urban settlements and professional classes and artisans, “less dependent on agricultural sources and thus less bound to strict rules of (Brahminical) varna and jati.”

The international world of Ajanta

While painting was a major part of public and private methods of storytelling and religious instruction, not much survives in India from the early medieval era. Whatever does is Buddhist.

The most famous of these survivals is undoubtedly the wall murals of the Ajanta caves in Maharashtra. Created with state support from the Vakataka kingdom, especially the king Harisena, the paintings at Ajanta primarily concern scenes from the Jatakas, tales of the Buddha’s past lives. In most of these scenes, gorgeously depicted at a massive scale, the focus is on courtly scenes befitting a royal commission. As I’ve written in a long story about the Ajanta caves, through these Jataka scenes, we get a snapshot into the opulent courtly life of the Vakatakas, at the time one of the most powerful states in Asia, if not the world.

However, you also get a sense of the internationalist milieu of the time, since a large portion of the Vakatakas’ wealth and prestige came from their trading relations with the Mediterranean and Central Asian regions. The latter was, by the 5^th century, almost entirely Buddhist, and looking to India’s prestigious Buddhist communities with their urban cultures for guidance. Thus, in a mural depiction of the Mahajanaka Jataka in cave 1, you can find people of Central Asian origin depicted as listening to the Bodhisattva. In another scene, showing the abhisheka or ritual anointment of a new king, there are east African attendants.

Indian Buddhist establishments throughout the historical period were renowned for their mural paintings, in monasteries and temples, but none have survived. In fact, there’s a gap of about 600-700 years between the murals of Ajanta and those of Alchi in Ladakh, the latter being constructed between the 11^th-13^th centuries CE.

That will be the story of next week’s post, where we will look at depictions of current Buddhism from 10^th-11^th century Kashmir and 10^th-13^th century Bengal.

On the wonders of Kanheri, read my detailed article here.

On the hidden stories of Ajanta’s murals, read my detailed article here.

Thank you all for reading, and see you all again next week.

Dear reader,

It’s Diwali on Monday, but to us Bengalis what’s more important is the fact that it is Kali Puja. Pretty much as soon as the main festival in the region—Durga Puja—ends, the wait begins for the festival of the Dark Goddess to roll around. After all these years, I take Kali Puja pretty much for granted, but come to think of it, it’s quite amazing that while the rest of the country is celebrating light, Bengalis are celebrating the dark.

What does this have to do with Buddhism? Actually, quite a lot. Before Kali cast her spell, there was another major Bengali goddess who ruled in the region, in her calm, benevolent form as Tara, and in her fierce form as Ugra Tara (this form also had many other names). And she was a Buddhist goddess. She was so popular that that when her Buddhist identity gradually disappeared in eastern India from around the 14^th century, she was almost immediately turned into a Hindu deity.

Today, Tara is mostly worshipped as a form of Kali—one of the Dasa Mahavidya of the Shakta Tantras. Except in Bengal (and to some extent in Odisha and Assam), where Tara continues to remain her own self, retaining her Buddhist true-self against all the odds, and despite centuries of attempts to cover her in Brahminical Hindu robes.

The Mahayana Tara is of course famous worldwide, venerated both as a Bodhisattva, and in some contexts, as a fully-fledged Buddha in her own right. Since the most visible form of this Tara is seen in the context of Tibetan Buddhism, most people in India have the appropriation story the wrong way round. But if you were to go to her most famous temple in Tarapith in the Bankura district in West Bengal, you will find that the main mantras of Tara worship remain the Buddhist ones, including the famous heart (hridaya or core) mantra: Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha!

I’ve been writing on the Buddhist deities of India for quite some time now. And every time I’ve written something, it has been a process of discovery for me. What never ceases to amaze me is the many different ways that Buddhist deities and cultural ghost traces continue to show up to this day.

Also Read The Secret Society: The forgotten story of Tantric Buddhism in India

Sometimes this happens is in bizarre ways, like the time in Tripura many years ago when I saw a large black stone image of Avalokiteshwara being venerated as Kali in a private temple. Close to a Buddhist archaeological site, this statue had been moved many decades ago, a garish red tongue been painted on its face, and the Bodhisattva of compassion had been turned into the Goddess.

Or, on a more poignant note, how standalone Buddha statues across Bihar are venerated by villagers as “Bhairo”.

Or the fact that Bengalis have Buddhist monastic surnames like Mitra or Ghosh, and keep naming their children Pragya, Karuna, Paramita, Dipankar, Sambuddha, Bodhisattva or Manjushri.

And how the greatest Tara temple in India lies in a very spiritually charged part of Bengal, redolent with tantric practices and the unique philosophy of the Bauls—who incidentally sing songs of spiritual liberation that are identical to those sung by Buddhist siddhas in a proto-Bengali language in the same region a thousand years ago.

Coming back to Kali and Tara, the process of Hindu appropriation of a Buddhist goddess was clearly established by art historian Benoytosh Bhattacharyya nearly a century ago in his pioneering works Indian Buddhist Iconography and Introduction to Buddhist Esoterism.

Later scholarship expanded and deepened this field of research like the German scholar Gudrun Bühnemann’s brilliant study, The Goddess Mahachina-krama Tara (Ugra Tara) in Buddhist and Hindu Tantrism. Through painstaking textual study of 10^th-11^th century Buddhist sadhana compendia and 14^th-16^th century Hindu tantra digests, Bühnemann shows how a tradition can be swallowed whole.

More recently, the question of Tara in the Hindu context has been further examined by scholar Joel Bordeaux through extensive fieldwork in his 2024 study, From Bauddha Desa to Sakta Pitha: Re/Locating the Hindu Goddess Tara. What is particularly interesting about this work is a demonstration of how Tara worship at Tarapith has gradually changed over the centuries from a very tantric, unconventional and Buddhist-flavoured ritual to a more strictly Brahminical one designed to cut out all kinds of ‘impurities’.

Also Read What is Tantric Buddhist dance? A lost Indian tradition lives on in Nepal

One of the few places in South Asia where one can experience the cult of Ugra Tara in its original Buddhist form is at the Vajrayogini Temple in Sankhu in the Kathmandu Valley. Here Ugra Tara is conflated with another great Vajrayana goddess Vajrayogini. Two years ago, when I visited the temple, I was struck by the brilliance of the art at display there.

The sanctum’s door and torana is decorated with some masterful gilt-copper repoussé work, but what immediately draws the eye is a depiction of the devi and her attendants in exquisite cast copper. The central figure is of the eight-armed Ugra Tara, standing in the warrior (pratyalidha) stance, holding a sword, a lotus, an arrow, a bow, a vajra, an elephant goad, a hooked knife and a skull bowl.

On either side are her four-armed emanations, and together, the three are flanked by two attendant yoginis with a tiger and lion (Baghini and Singhini) head respectively. The five cosmic Buddhas—the Pancha Tathagata—and Vajrasattva are arrayed above the deities. Just below the torana, on the lintel above the door, is a smaller depiction of Ugra Tara with four arms, in pratyalidha, standing on a corpse or a vetala (evil spirit).

Inside the sanctum, her image is large but swaddled in voluminous red fabric, with a finely worked crown on her head. Her face is red, two eyes serenely half-closed in meditative trance, while her third eye is open. On her two sides are smaller images of her attendants Baghini and Singhini, similarly clad. I ask the Bajracharya pujari about the devi’s form under the clothes. “She is the red Ugra Tara, and she has four arms,” he says, pointing to the small image of Ugra Tara on the lintel. “That is her,” he says.

There’s a Bengal connection here as well: The nearby monastery Gum Baha (baha is Newari for vihar, or monastery) has another, larger Ugra Tara statue that is venerated. This image is reputed to have been brought here sometime in the 14^th-15^th centuries from Bengal, in order to preserve the flickering flame of Buddhism.

Like any other Bengali, I love Kali Puja, and the unconventional, powerful spirituality of Kali. But when I visit the pandals, I like to imagine that even as we venerate her, we are also venerating her Buddhist shadow self.

On the Kali-Tara connection, you can read my detailed article here.

A few months ago, I wrote about Vajrayogini, and her cult in India. You can read it here.

This turned out to be fairly long post! Hope you enjoyed it, dear reader, and see you next week.

The most famous of these is the Hemis Tsechu—the Hemis Festival—which is held every summer at the Hemis monastery in Ladakh. This is both a conventional summer festival, but also a celebration of the life and legends of Guru Padmasambhava, the great 8^th century Indian tantric monk who helped initiate the first spread of Buddhism into Tibet.

Although the festival takes place every year, there is a special performance once every 12 years. I was there when the last one happened, in 2016. This is my story of the sheer scale and splendour of that day’s festivities.

If you’d like to read my in-depth post on the Hemis Festival, you can find it here.

Last week, I wrote about ritual Buddhist dances within the larger Mahayana-Vajrayana tradition. I’d started that article by mentioning that in many Himalayan Buddhist cultures (by which I mean mainly Tibetan Buddhist cultures), such dances are still performed during important annual occasions.

The most famous of these is the Hemis Tsechu—the Hemis Festival—which is held every summer at the Hemis monastery in Ladakh. This is both a conventional summer festival (Hemis is not the only Ladakhi monastery to host a festival, merely the best known), but also a celebration of the life and legends of Guru Padmasambhava, the great 8^th century Indian tantric monk who helped initiate the first spread of Buddhism into Tibet.

The Hemis Monastery

One of the earliest schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Nyingma, takes its inspiration directly from Padmasambhava’s teachings, and the tantric Mahayana-Vajrayana synthesis is the supreme form of Buddhism practiced by this school and its subsequent branches, like the order of the Kagyus.

The Hemis Gompa (Tibetan for vihara, or monastery) is the main institution of the powerful Drukpa order of Bhutan and Ladakh, itself a branch of the Kagyus. Founded in the mid-17^th century, Hemis is today the biggest and most influential monastery in the Indus Valley, home to over a 1,000 monks, and has more than 200 branch monasteries across the Himalaya.

For generations, the heads of the Hemis Monastery served as the principal spiritual preceptor of the Namgyal dynasty of Ladakh, a tradition that began with the monk Taktsang Repa, who became the guru of king Sengge Namgyal in the 1620s. The annual Hemis festival was established in the 1730s by a member of the dynasty, Mipham Dorje, who became a monk and is today popularly known as the Gyalsey Rinpoche.

While the festival is held every summer, a special performance takes place every 12 years during the Tibetan year of the Monkey. According to the Tibetan calendar, Padmasambhava is believed to have been born on the 10^th day of Non (the fifth month of the Lunar calendar, Jyeshta in Sanskrit) of the Monkey year which comes around once every 12 years.

To mark this occasion, a special silk thangka (Tibetan for the Sanskrit pata or painting on cloth) of the great Guru—the painting is gigantic, about three storeys high—is displayed, and monks perform a famous masked dance (Chams in Tibetan) celebrating the life and deeds of Padmasambhava.

I visited Hemis for the last such occasion in 2016, and the sheer scale and splendour of the day’s festivities was a sight to behold. People had come in their thousands—from Ladakhis to tourists to high ranking Indian army commanders—and the giant courtyard of the monastery was buzzing with lines of people seeking blessings and Drukpa monks in maroon robes and berets managing proceedings.

The dramatic overhanging crags of the cliffside sheltering Hemis shone in the early morning sun, and the Padmasambhava thangka looked positively three-dimensional in its brightly-painted finery. The entire place was reverberating with deep blasts of two long Tibetan trumpets called dugchen, and the mantra recitation of monks, amplified through speakers set around the courtyard.

Whispers of a shared past

The dance performance itself didn’t start till about 11am, which gave pilgrims enough time for an hour-long hike to a hermitage set deep in the mountains above the monastery. Called the Gotsang, this is a large natural cave that has over the centuries become a favoured place for solitary meditation, or sadhana, for monks from the Hemis monastery. A monk I spoke to said people have been to known to spend up to a few years doing charjya (Sanskrit for “The Practice”—tantric rites and rituals of empowerment).

I joined other pilgrims going up to Gotsang, and once there, I saw many of these practitioners, dressed in black and with long hair and beards—visual markers that during the practice, their monastic identity is superseded by that of sadhakas. Pilgrims are especially eager to get their blessings, as if to receive a fraction of the spiritual power they have been amassing during their retreats.

In this, as well as the tradition of having a meditation retreat near a monastery but also reasonably far enough, one can easily draw a line from the now lost tradition of Mahayana-Vajrayana as it was practiced by monks, ritual specialists, tantric priests and normal householders in the Indian heartland.

You just need to visit the archaeological site of any major Buddhist monastic centre in India—like Kanheri in Mumbai, for example—to see evidence of clearly defined spaces for Mahayana monks and Vajrayana practitioners. The fact that people slipped seamlessly between the two spaces depending on their current spiritual modes (Mahayana monks or Vajrayana ritualist) is also well attested. In Hemis, it’s a thrill to see this ancient practice as a living tradition.

Holding space

A couple of hours later, I was back at the monastery, making my way through the crowds in the courtyard, trying to get a good vantage point. The start of the Chams performance was heralded with the clash of huge cymbals called bukjal and the beating of drums, conches and gyalings.

A procession of monks came down from the prayer hall and walked slowly round a flagstaff in the centre of the monastery courtyard, led by two musicians in high curving hats, playing gyalings. This was followed by two figures in yellow mask and robes, called hatuk. By their behaviour, it seemed that their job was to control the surging crowds of Ladakhis, Indian and foreign tourists from spilling into the performance space in as jovial a way as possible, joking and gesticulating at various members of the audience to stand back.

Then emerged the first of the dancers, thirteen monks clad in distinctive black hats with wide rims and full tantric regalia—all flowing capes and heavily embroidered robes. Wearing neckerchiefs with skull insignia, and accompanied by thundering clashes of cymbals and droning low chants from musician monks sitting in a balcony overlooking the courtyard, the 13 dancers proceeded to slowly make their way around the flagstaff, while displaying distinct gestures (mudra) and stances (abhinaya) with every move.

This dance, called the Muchmasu Guchod (Seemavadya Nritya in Sanskrit) or the Dance of Binding the Four Quarters, sets the limits of the sacred performance space, dispelling evil spirits and purifying the sacred area. Tibetan traditions claim this to be identical to the black-hatted tantric dance performed by Padmasambhava himself at the site of Tibet’s first monastery, Samye Gompa, in the 8^th century. Nor is this difficult to imagine. As we have seen in my previous post on Tantric Buddhist dances, such performances are common amongst Newar Buddhists as well, and before them, Indian Buddhists.

The space having been secured, in what the tantric Buddhists call an ‘aura of light’, a monk ran around the courtyard carrying a pot of burning embers to seal the purity of the space.

Then came a group of 16 young monks in gilded copper masks. These were the compassionate Dakinis, divine women and possessors of all tantric knowledge (literally ‘those who fly through the sky’), led by their queen, the great tantric deity Vajravarahi.

Holding small hand drums and the ceremonial bell symbolising both the feminine principle of Pragya or ultimate knowledge and Sunyata or emptiness, the monks danced in slow, mesmeric motions round the flagstaff, ringing their bells and sounding the small drums in an intricate rhythm. What I was witnessing was the dynamic creation of the mandala of Vajravarahi—a sacred ritual space animated by dancers enacting the roles of the various deities of the goddess’s mandala, purifying and binding the space as divine, safe from any harm, and therefore sacred. The monks on the balcony chanted Padmasambhava’s mantra in deep, reverberating tones, while cymbals crashed in sheets of white noise: “Om Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum!”

Now that the requisite space had been created and sacralised, the main dance drama of venerating the eight manifestations of Padmasambhava could begin. But that’s a story for another time.

Select Bibliography:

The Tantric Dance of Dharma: The Masked Dances at the Hemis Festival of Ladakh by Madhu Khanna.

Monk, Householder and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and its Hierarchy of Ritual by David N. Gellner.

Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions by Christian Wedemeyer.

In the Himalayan regions, there exist many kinds of popular Buddhist dance forms, usually performed during festivals or harvests. Some of these, like the one at the Hemis Monastery in Ladakh or the ‘Lama Dances’ of Sikkim are known the world over. Specifically, they are forms of tantric dances, performative manifestations of the highly ritualised Vajrayana Buddhism.

Many lesser known forms of Tantric Buddhist dances exist, including those performed by the Newar Buddhists of the Kathmandu valley. Their’s is a unique culture: the Newars are the sole remaining Buddhists who follow the Sanskritic Indic Mahayana-Vajrayana tradition of Bihar, Bengal and Kashmir.

It is a sophisticated and mature cultural tradition complete with an artistically complex system of Vajrayanic modes of worship whereby tantric Vajracharya priests officiate over community rituals as well as devotional and life-cycle ceremonies.

As is evident with Tibetan Buddhism, the Vajrayana lays great emphasis on the creativeness of religious ritual, incorporating vividly visual sadhanas or meditational techniques, as well as the use of theatrical gestures and the ritual art creation of mandalas and thangkas (’paubha’ in Newari; ‘pata’ in Sanskrit). This mastery of religious art ties in perfectly with the Newars’ continued excellence in the plastic, decorative and performative arts, with master craftsmen producing stunning works of sculpture and painting for at least a thousand years now.

Historically, professional artists, many of whom also double up as religious specialists, have assiduously maintained a corpus of sketchbooks, filled with line-drawings of models, annotated instructions, as well as their religious and spiritual interpretations.

Many of these centuries-old notebooks have been collected and published, and recently I came across some stunning sketches of tantric Buddhist dances from the 18th century, in the scholar Gudrun Bühnemann’s book Buddhist Iconography and Ritual in Paintings and Line Drawings from Nepal.

These sketches were made on palm-leaf manuscripts, and they portray the Parikramavidhi, the ritual dance around a site to purify it before the construction of a mandala. Highly influential in Nepal (as well as in Tibetan Buddhism), the Parikramavidhi was a detailed ritual manual written by a Newari Vajrayana monk named Kuladatta sometime in the 13th century, as a part of his book, the Kriyasamgraha-panjika, in which he outlines the rituals required to consencrate a vihara (monastery). The manual was in turn based on a older texts like the famous Mayajalatantra and the renowned Bengali tantric monk Abhayakaragupta’s ritual compendium, Vajravali, written in the early 12th century CE.

Making full use of forms from the Indian classical dance tradition of the Natyashastras, the sketchbook visually shows the various mudras (gestures), abhinayas (stances) which are to be performed with prescribed mantras, by the officiating monks/priests. Dressed in full ritual regalia, they are to assume the roles of various tantric deities, Bodhisattvas and directional guardians in order to purify the space.

Works of art like this manuscript, helps us get a deeper sense of the vibrant cultural and artistic lives of a people. So the next time you visit Patan, and see the wonderful Newari viharas like the Hiranyavarna Mahavihara (popularly known as the Golden Temple), know that prior to the building of that monastery or the various three-dimentional mandalas in its courtyard, many hundred years ago, Buddhist tantric adepts had probably performed a beautiful dance like this, to consecrate the site. The performance must have been as arresting a sight as the Cham dance of Hemis.

Here are some folios from this beautiful manuscript depicting line drawings of the dance postures.

In this panel, we see eight of forty-two stances or abhinayas to be performed by the principal master (Mulacharya) of the ritual. These are:

9. Vajraghantabhinaya in the Kurmapada stance facing east (of the mandala), evoking the Buddha Vajrasattva.

10. Vajrotkarsanabhinaya in the Vaisakhapada stance facing south, evoking the Buddha Akshobhya.

11. Vajravilasabhinaya in the Vaisakhapada stance facing west, evoking the deity Vajrakarman.

12. Garvadvayabhinaya in the Ekapada stance facing north, evoking the deity Krodhalasya.

13. Bhramarijalabhinaya in the Ekapada stance facing the centre, evoking the Buddha Vairochana.

14. Simhapadabhinaya in the Alidhapada stance facing the centre, evoking the deity Yamantaka.

15. Simhavijrambhitapadabhinaya in the Alidhapada stance facing the centre, evoking the deity Takkiraja.

16. Vajrasphotabhinaya in the Samapada stance facing the centre, evoking the deity Vajrasphota.

Each of these stances are adapted from the Natyashastra, where they are specified as standing postures for male performers.

Here’s another panel showing one abhinaya performed by an assisting adept, and seven abhinayas that evoke seven goddesses of ritual puja offerings, performed by the Mulacharya, while sitting in the yogic lotus posture, or padmasana.

65. Abhayabhinaya performed by the officiating adept in the north of the mandala.

66. Vajralasyabhinaya, evoking the goddess of beauty, Vajralasya.

67. Vajramalabhinaya, evoking the goddess of the garland, Vajramala.

68. Vajragitabhinaya, evoking the goddess of song, Vajragita.

69. Vajranrityabhinaya, evoking the goddess of dance, Vajranritya.

70. Vajradhupabhinaya, evoking the goddess of incense, Vajradhupa.

71. Vajrapuspabhinaya, evoking the goddess of flowers, Vajrapuspa.

72. Vajradipabhinaya, evoking the goddess of the lamp, Vajradipa.

Many such examples of the beautiful artistic traditions of the Newars exist. It’s a pity these aren’t better known.

Finally, these dance forms remain a vital part of Newar cultural life, as can be seen in this recent video of the dancer Raj Sakya performing the tantric text Manjusri-Nama-Samgiti in a Buddhist courtyard in Patan.

When we hear the words Tantric Buddhism or Vajrayana, most of us think of Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps even particular forms of Buddhism in China and Japan. But we don’t connect it to India, where it originate. I’m writing a book on the forgotten history of Vajrayana in India. While working on the book, I have also been writing small essays on the subject. This one analyses a cloth painting from 11th century Nepal and what that tells us about.

I dispelled the three worlds by means of amorous play
And I fell asleep in the sport of sexual union
How lovely, o Dombi, is your coquetry
The twice-born is outside, the kapalika is inside your hut
By you, o Dombi, the whole world has been disturbed
And for no reason, the Moon has been agitated
Some are there who speak ill of you
But those who are discerning do not remove you from
their throat
Kanha sings of the amorous Chandali
There is no greater harlot than you, o Dombi

***

This song, written sometime around the 10th century CE by the Buddhist siddhacharya Kanha or Krishnapada, is from the earliest collection of folk-songs in what was then the proto-Bengali language. Called the Charyagiti or ‘Songs of Realisation’, these songs were performed by a new kind of Buddhist adept, the tantric siddhas or ‘the perfected ones’ who weren’t monks. Followers of the esoteric ritual doctrines of the Vajrayana (the Way of the Thunderbolt), the siddha community of men and women rejected conventional society, and even the popular Mahayana Buddhism, for a life of intense yogic practice and ritualised sexual union.

Roughly speaking, the 8th to the 13th centuries CE were a great time for Buddhism in eastern India (and in some other regions like Kashmir). Under the patronage of the powerful Pala monarchy of Bengal and Bihar, the monastic universities of Nalanda and Vajrasana (Bodh Gaya) were flourishing, and new viharas like Vikramashila in Bihar and Somapura in Bengal (now Bangladesh) brought in fresher perspectives on popular Buddhism, especially the tantric way of Vajrayana.

In terms of folk culture, what the Vajrayana ushered in was revolutionary. Over a period of about 500 years, the arts boomed. From stone sculptures and metal casting to miniature paintings, mural paintings as well as large canvases on cloth, the effects were seismic, and international. As art historians Susan L. Huntington and John C. Huntington depict in their book Leaves From a Bodhi Tree: The Art of Pala India and Its International Legacy, under the Palas, the Buddhist heartland of Magadha in Bihar became a melting pot of Asian and Southeast Asian cultures, with monks and lay worshippers coming to worship, and carrying away with them examples of this burgeoning religious art, which would go on to influence their own countries.

This period was brought to an abrupt and tragic end, as the viharas first fell victim of the religious iconoclasm of invading Afghan armies and thereafter, without the institutional support of the monasteries, Buddhism was entirely eclipsed by a resurgent Hinduism.

However, while a unique religious and artistic way of life perished in the country of its birth, it continued to thrive elsewhere, most notably in Tibet and in Nepal. It is in this context that I came across an 11th century painting on cloth, from the Kathmandu Valley, in the online archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This gorgeous painting of the Chakrasamvara Mandala is called a paubha by the Newar people of the Kathmandu Valley. Master craftsmen and artists for over a millennia, the Newars have always been part of the same cultural continuum as norther and eastern India. As traders who traversed the lucrative routes from the Gangetic plain to the Tibetan plateau and China, their role in transmitting Indian artistic styles—especially Buddhist art traditions—to Tibet is second to none. The famous Tibetan cloth painting style called the thangka, is basically the paubha by another name.

Paubha itself is the Newar word for the eastern Indian pata, and the painting of the tantric deity Chakrasamvara in an erotic embrace with the goddess Vajravarahi, is one of the earliest surviving examples of a style that, in the 11th century, was thriving in contemporaneous Indian culture, especially in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.

The patachitra or painting on cloth, had been popular in India since at least the time of king Harsha Vardhana of 7th century Kannauj. Bana Bhatta, the author of Harshacharita, speaks of cloth banners being carried in processions, or being used by itinerant storytellers, as a visual guide to their tales. Indeed, the 8th century Buddhist tantric text, the Manjushrimulakalpa, even describes the process by which a pata of the Bodhisattva Manjushri should be made. Evidently then, this was a major form of painting style in India.

In fact, it still is, as the thriving cultural practice of patachitra production, especially in Bengal and Odisha, shows us. The end use of such painted scrolls too remains the same—a visual guide to telling a story. The only aspect of this that no longer exists in India is the Buddhist context of this praxis. In India, one could say that the Buddhist paintings of the Pala era were the high cultural incursion of a folk form that has since returned to its roots.

In fact, the trends were already there. A beautiful 12th century painting of the Buddhist goddess Shyama Tara (Green Tara) dispensing boons is actually a miniature watercolour illustration on a palm-leaf manuscript of the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita, an important Mahayana sutra. This manuscript was executed in Bengal as a royal commission of a Queen Vihunadevi. More so than any large-scale painting, this miniature, with its rural setting, its depiction of dense foliage, the group of ecstatic devotees and benevolent, larger-than-life Tara—probably modelled after the commissioning queen—belongs more to a folk medium.

What is remarkable, however, in this miniature’s relationship to the Nepali paubha, is not the deity, but the worshippers. In the Tara painting, these people aren’t monks, but seem to be a group of tantric adepts, led by a white-haired guru. Their ecstatic poses, ranging from the dancing figure in the bottom left corner to the supplicating figures closest to the deity, give a sense of utter immersion and profound bliss.

The Buddhist technical term for supreme pleasure is mahasukha or the ‘Great Bliss’, which is, in tantric terms, the same as nirvana. In this extreme yogic state, the adept is cut off from the ties of samsara, and perceives the world hidden behind the false
dualities of human sense perceptions. It is just such an adept who can lay claim to being called a siddha, and in turn continue the siddha lineage by becoming the Guru to his or her own disciples. The Vajrayana was primarily propelled by this community, some of whom were monks, while many others weren’t. When we look at the painting of the Chakrasamvara mandala, what catches the eye is the depiction of the siddha community in the background, those who are simultaneously visualizing and worshipping Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi through their tantric practice in cremation grounds.

And these aren’t just any cremation grounds, but the eight great Indian charnel grounds (maha-smasana) that are both actual spaces and internalised fields of meditation—Chandogra, Gahvara, Jwalakula, Subhisana, Attattahasa, Lakshmivana, Ghorandhakara and Kilakilarava—with their own sacred trees (vriksh), protectors (dikpatih), serpents (naga) and clouds (megha). This cremation ground iconography, as well as the reference to the kapalika in the song quoted at the beginning, serves to highlight the cultural realm and technical terms that tantric Buddhism shared with its great rival—tantric Shaivism.

Indeed, the myth of the tantric Buddha Chakrasamvara is predicated on his defeat of Maheshwara in a straight battle on Mount Kailash and the latter’s eventual conversion to Buddhism. You can see this in the painting too: Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi can be seen trampling on Shiva and his consort, Kalaratri.

But let us return to the scenes depicted in the periphery of the mandala. In fact, the cremation ground scene can’t really be referred to as a ‘background’ in the conventional sense. The figures and the locales underpin the entire mandala, as it is this community of divine creatures, siddhas, yogis and yoginis are the ones that are creatively giving form to the deities through their activities. In later Tibetan traditions, depictions of deities, mandalas and cremation ground communities became more rigidly stylised, as can be seen in the 15th century Tibetan thangka of the exact same scene, preserved in The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in California.

From texts such as the 9th century Hevajra Tantra, which is dedicated to the tantric deity Hevajra and his consort Nairatma and the slightly later Samvarodaya Tantra dedicated to the deities in the painting under discussion, we read about ganachakras or the ‘secret communion’ of like-minded yogis and yoginis in liminal spaces away from mainstream society. In these gatherings, adepts would seek out other members of the ‘secret society’ by means of choma or secret signs. Thereafter, under the leadership of the Guru, the men and women would perform ritual dances, eat ritual feasts of ‘impure’ substances like meat and alchohol, and engage in ritual sex, to the accompaniment of Charya songs and music. All of these activities would be celebratory and help the adepts to try and reach the state of the Great Bliss.

When we look at the 11th century painting, we see this is exactly what is being depicted—men and women dancing, having sex, talking, engaging in ritual meditation with skull arches and corpses and feasting, all the while surrounded by the pyres, human remains, jackals and skulls of the charnel ground, an ‘impure’ space, and thus perfect for such congregations.

The fact that the historical Krishnapada, with whose song we opened, was a prolific writer of tantric texts and commentaries, a notable pandita, and a prime disseminator of both the Hevajra Tantra and the Chakrasamvara Tantra as well as the cult of Vajrayogini/ Vajravarahi, goes to show the eclectic nature of this community. Some of them were also monks, but most were lay householders who studied the tantras with lineage Gurus, tantric priests (Vajracharya) and with monks in the viharas. To find echoes of that time, we need only visit a modern tantric sacred site like Tarapeeth in West Bengal or Kamakhya in Assam. Both sites are renowned for their powerful tantric female deities (the Tara of Tarapeeth, though under a Hindu guise, has the same core mantra as the older Buddhist Tara), and also for their adjacent cremation grounds, where even today you will find yogis and yoginis residing as members of a liminal community of tantric seekers.

In the popular Newari Buddhist imagination, the Kathmandu Valley is but a gigantic mandala presided over by Chakrasamvara. In the monasteries of Patan, one of the three main cities of the Valley, you will still find painters making similar paubhas, reciting Sanskrit tantras and sutras, and undergoing secret tantric initiations with their partners. Indeed, at the bottom right of the 11th century painting, you can see a depiction of the Newari couple who commissioned the painting of this paubha, so that they could, together, gain the paradise of Chakrasamvara. Although, we will never know who these people were, they live with us still, a guhya-samaja immortalised in art.

Select Bibliography

Per Kvarne Buddhist Tantric Songs: A Study of the Caryagiti

Rob Linrothe Ruthless Compassion: Wrathful Deities in Early Indo-Tibetan Esoteric Buddhist Art

Elizabeth English Vajrayogini: Her Visualizations, Rituals, And Forms

David Barton Gray The Chakrasamvara Tantra

David Snellgrove Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Indian Buddhists & Their Tibetan Successors

Ronald M Davidson Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement

Christian K Wedemeyer Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions

Nihar Ranjan Ray Bangali’r Itihash (A History of the Bengali People)

Nupur Chaudhuri and Rajat Kanti Ray Eros and History: Sahajiya Secrets and the Tantric Culture of Love

David Templeton Taranatha’s Life of Krishnacharya/Kanha

David N Gellner Monk, Householder and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and its Hierarchy of Ritual