So far, we’ve seen how the concept of chakras and their symbols has evolved throughout history, from the popularisation of Hinduism to the rise of Shakti and Bhakti.
In the process, Buddhism, unable to withstand the offensive of the Hindu powers, was forced to transform itself into esoteric Buddhism, and Gautama Buddha eventually lost his place as the main deity to Dainichi Nyorai (Mahavairochana) and other deities.
Esoteric Buddhism has also developed various mandalas with beautiful chakra designs. However, in the composition of Dainichi Nyorai at its centre and the multiple Bodhisattvas and Tathagatas surrounding him, Sakyamuni Buddha has no presence.
Dainichi Nyorai, a pantheistic Dharma-Kaya Buddha who is considered to be one with the macrocosm itself, is also called Hensyou (illuminate all around) because he shines all around with his light. “Dainich” literary means “Great Sun”. As its name suggests, Dainichi Nyorai is the deification of the sun, and its ideology is strikingly similar to that of Vishnu, who originates from the sun’s illumination which permeates everything in the world. Perhaps Dainichi Nyorai was a Buddhist counterpart to Vaishnavism.
With the appearance of Dainichi Nyorai, Buddhism in India embarked on the final chapter leading to its extinction.
In fact, there is an interesting relationship between the rise of Tantric Shakti and the decline of Buddhism.
From the 6th century AD onwards, many Hindu temples were built in India by various dynasties, not a few of which were donated by queens.
The picture below shows the Mallikarjuna Temple in Pattadakal, Karnataka, which also is a World Heritage Site. The inscription record said that some of the temples in the complex, including this one, were built by queens of the Chalukya dynasty.
Many of these temples are decorated with statues of voluptuous women with their breasts exposed, where gods such as Vishnu and Shiva are depicted with their consorts in an intimate manner, and kings also accompany there with their arms around the waists and breasts of half-naked queens. These temples were filled with a secular celebration of eroticism that would be hard to imagine in a Buddhist temple in Japan.
In the folklore surrounding the building of temples during this period, there are repeated stories of queens converting their husbands (kings) and brothers from Buddhism and Jainism to Hinduism. This is evidence that royal women had no small say at the time, and it also shows that they were averse to asceticism.
Did the dissolute and pleasure-seeking lifestyle of the upper classes also provide a certain degree of women’s liberation?
The World Heritage-listed cave temples at Ellora in Maharashtra, in the central Deccan, were built by the Rashtrakuta dynasty, which flourished between the 8th and 10th centuries. Their extraordinary structures carved directly out of a huge rocky hill in the Deccan, leave every visitor in awe.
At the same time, it is a unique religious site where, unusually for India, Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples have co-existed peacefully with each other.
The Kailasa temple, with Shiva as the main deity, is particularly famous for the unprecedented feat of carving the entire temple architecture directly out of the rock, whereas Buddhist cave temples are merely lateral cave holes dug into the rocky hillside.
There, too, Shiva is always close to Parvati and Vishnu to Lakshmi, and the temple appears to be a love nest where the male and female deities are in communion with each other. Symbolising this, Shiva Linga (phallic), which is enshrined in the sanctum sanctorum as the deity, is always represented in union with Yoni (female genitalia), and the shrine chamber is symbolically called Garbha Griha, or ‘womb’.
In Buddhist caves, on the other hand, the Buddha, the founder and deity, always sits alone in the depths of the dark cave. To his left and right are bodhisattvas and other figures, as if to cover his isolation, but he never interacts with the world or others, and is always surrounded by solitary serenity.
It was an image completely opposite to the dramatic nature of Hindu mythology, with Shiva and Vishnu cuddling with their consorts, Rama risking his life to save his beloved Sita, and Krishna having affairs with many cowherd women and living with several beloved wives.
His way of life, abandoning home, wife and sexuality to devote himself entirely to meditation, could in no way intersect with the feminine principle. Although he was born from a woman’s womb, his path of practice fundamentally denies and rejects femininity. There would indeed be a state of being that can only be reached at the end of such a path, but…
But, socially awakened women said NO to such kind of Buddhism. I think this was one of the main reasons why Buddhism died out in India. This is more or less the case with Jainism, which follows a similar ordained system and philosophy.
Buddha, alone in the depths of a dark cave, and Hindu deities in communion with divine consorts in the sunlit Kailasatha temple. It was a beautiful illustration symbolizing the history of the tantric shakti, based on female sexual power, which rose as if to challenge the religions of renunciation and swept them across India.
The most striking example of this is the temple complex at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, built by the Chandela dynasty, which flourished from the 10th to the 13th century. There are images of Mithuna: scenes of men and women’s sexual intercourse, reminiscent of the Kama Sutra, carved all over the outer walls of the temples, giving the impression that a harem has been fossilized and fixed in the place.
The purpose of life for Hindus is said to be Dharma (fulfilment of caste-based religious duties), Artha (pursuit of profit in business) and Kama (sexual enjoyment), and belief in the tantric Devi Shakti may have created its prominent kama inclination.
Historically, in most religions that originated in northern India, only men could attain divine wisdom or godhood, whether through ritual practice, penance or meditation. The paradigm of “only spiritually superior men could know God and the truth of the world” shows that there was definitely male chauvinism. Tantra may well have been the powerful counter-attack of Indian women against this.
A man who is not a god is forced to wrinkle his forehead and practice in search of the God who must be somewhere else. However, a woman who has the Devine power itself within her as sexual Shakti or birthing power does not need to seek God elsewhere outside and practice! Therefore by having intercourse with a woman who has the Devine within her as shakti, by becoming one with that shakti, men are more quickly united with the Supreme and saved.
It was literally a fatal blow to Buddhism, which is dedicated to ordained principles of renunciation.
Cornered, Buddhism eventually adopted the forbidden Tantric philosophy, part of which was transformed into the Left-hand Path. In the process of esotericisation, Buddhism, which had ousted the Buddha from his position as the principal deity of worship and abandoned even the most important precepts in practice, had completely lost its appearance as ‘the teachings of the Gautama Buddha’.
Having thus lost its distinctiveness from Hinduism, Buddhism soon lost even its raison d’etre in India.
It is fair to say that by the time Tantric thought reached its zenith at Khajuraho, Buddhism was already on the brink of extinction. It was precisely at this time that Muslim invasion forces swept into northern India and thoroughly destroyed the Vikramasila monastery in eastern India, the last bastion of esoteric Buddhism, and Buddhism virtually died out on Indian soil.
Come to think of it, for Hindus, the three purposes of life and the belief in God based on shakti and bhakti were all things that Buddha denied and dismissed as the root of suffering. It is fair to say that Hindu values were precisely the very current of anti-Buddhism.
The figure of the Buddha, who denied dependence on God, cut off the temptations of bewitching beauties, repelled demons and being liberated, meditating alone in a dark cave wearing only his robe, may have been doomed to inevitable extinction in the Indian world.
At the same time, however, the decline and fall of Buddhism in India also sowed the seeds for the rise of Buddhism overseas. It is very likely that the great master Bodhidharma, seeing the huge wave of Hinduisation approaching and foreseeing the future of Buddhism in India, travelled to China in an attempt to transmit the Dharma Lamp to China. Around the same time, a Tamil Buddhist monk called Buddhaghosa travelled to Sri Lanka and wrote a scripture called Vishuddhi Magga: The Path of Purification.
The teachings of the Bodhi Dharma became the origin of Zen Buddhism in East Asia, including Japan, and the Vishuddhi Magga is still widely read in the Theravada Buddhist world as an encyclopaedic scripture for ordained practice. The Dharma Lamp of Vikramasila Monastery was passed on to Tibetan Buddhism, where it has flourished in modern times within the teachings of the Dalai Lama.
Having practised Zen meditation in Japan and Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and Sri Lanka, it was a poignant story that was not someone else’s matter to me. As I continued to follow the chakra philosophy of India, I felt that I was being shown a fundamental human drama that transcended time and space, asking what religion is and what it means to live.
I then visited Dharamshala in northern India, where the Tibetan government-in-exile is based. This town is a sacred site of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism, where the Dalai Lama resides in exile from China, and is unique in that Tantric Buddhism, which originated in India, has been re-imported.
There I was surprised to discover an overflowing chakra image in a Buddhist painting called a thangka.
The ‘Kala Chakra’, which means the wheel of time. The ‘Bhava Chakra (Wheel of Life)’ represents the six realms of Samsara, etc. Most of the mandalas drawn there were based on the Chakra (wheel) design.
There were even motifs of the thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, whose figure resembles the afterimage of a fast-spinning wheel, and a six-pointed star chakra, where the male and female principles merge. They have been passed down through the millennia as excellent meditation objects representing esoteric thought.
When I saw the ‘Yab-Yum’, a male-female union deity unique to Tibetan Buddhism, I was deeply shocked. This form, which is impossible in the original Buddhism of Syakyamuni, is represented by a man and a woman having sexual intercourse while seated in the lotus position, and is said to represent the Buddha’s state of great joy, which is a fusion of the wisdom of emptiness (female) and compassion (male).
In the lotus position, with both legs deeply crossed, the sitting posture is stable, forming a triangle with both knees at the base and the tailbone at the apex. This is the reason why it is said to be the most complete sitting posture, and if you look at the two figures of the two deities facing each other in the lotus position from above, you will see that the two opposite triangles formed by the lower bodies overlap to form a perfect six-pointed hexagram.
It was a yantra (mandala) drawn three-dimensionally by the human bodies.
The world of Tibetan thangka. It is a living testimony to the transmission of chakra thought and Devi Shakti from the Indian world far beyond the high peaks of the Himalayas to the Tibetan plateau.
At the same time, it was a dead end, the final form of Gautama Buddha’s teachings, which had been transformed again and again.
~to be continued~
INDIA~The Land of Holy Chakra 