Searching for the Body, by Rae Erin Dachille (introduction)

Introduction

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hy embrace representations if they are not “true?” From a broad Buddhist perspective, the mind’s tendencies to generate representations in the form of images and concepts present obstacles to accessing the true nature of reality. Representations bombard, deceive, and proliferate beyond control, becoming standards of measure, objects of attachment, and incomplete and imperfect substitutes for reality. And yet the practices of Buddhist tantra suggest that within the poison lies the cure. If the mind’s representational impulses are harnessed through tantric means, they can become powerful tools for liberation and transformation. This book is about a debate between two fifteenth-century scholar monks on one such tantric ritual practice known as body mandala. In mapping the maneuvers of these Buddhist authors as they interpret body mandala, I reveal the relevance of their approaches for contemporary struggles with the paradoxes of representations. In the process, I explore the search for meaning in and through bodies, texts, and images as a defining aspect of what it means to be human.

Body mandala is like the brain surgery of tantric “rites of attainment” (Skt. sādhana), meaning that it is a highly elaborate form of the core ritual act of imagining oneself as a Buddha. This is a practice performed only by the accomplished adept. According to the Vajrayāna tradition of Buddhist tantra, bodies contain hidden potential for meaning that is invisible to the novice. This potential is best described as the vajra body, a network of channels, winds, and drops that only the tantric adept has the skill to recognize and control.1 Through performing the completion stage of sādhana, the tantric adept learns to access and manipulate the elements of the vajra body as tools for achieving enlightenment in this

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present lifetime and body. In body mandala, the adept rearticulates their reality by imagining the parts of the body as deities. Body mandala is therefore an especially powerful tantric tool for realizing meaning and for attaining the ultimate goal of becoming a buddha.

In documenting the quest to understand what is at stake in the body mandala debate, this book reveals a deep connection between ritual mechanics and interpretive practice. Many of the texts these Tibetan authors draw upon in making sense of body mandala are cryptic and contradictory and therefore demand intervention. The incomplete nature of such textual representations of body mandala, the way in which they demand commentary in accessing their meanings, attests to the importance of learned guides within the tantric tradition. The body mandala debate illuminates how two such guides lead readers through the intricacies of tantric text and ritual within a fifteenth-century context in which efficacy, authenticity, and the construction of meaning are intertwined.

Searching for the Body is the first in-depth exploration of body mandala ritual in tandem with transdisciplinary themes of imagination, creativity, embodiment, intertextuality, and representation. My use of the first-person voice throughout the text is one technique for reinforcing my own role in restaging, contextualizing, and translating Tibetan Buddhist texts within the shifting sands of academic and popular discourses.2 In my reading of the debate, I respond to existing scholarship on the encounter using an approach that balances concerns with lineage, ritual, and exegesis. In the process, I uncover aspects of how representations work in perpetual tension between fabrication and naturalness, continuity and rupture, source and repetition. Cultivating attention to the manner in which Tibetan authors navigate and modify the boundaries of interpretation reveals the elegance of their craftsmanship. As I will show, beneath their strategies for establishing continuity lies a complex array of concerns with rupture, creativity, and determining who is qualified to interpret tantric texts.

Nuancing understandings of the body mandala debate with attention to these tensions and concerns, I introduce the figure of the Buddhist exegete as a guide who navigates the paradoxes of representation and cultivates the critical skills needed to make way through their potentialities and pitfalls. These skills empower the reader to face the challenges posed by fifteenth-century tantric texts as well as by the onslaught of representations that characterize life in the twenty-first century. The results promise to enrich future encounters with images, texts, and bodies as supports for accessing a more accurate view of reality and for transforming the boundaries of what it means to be human.

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THE EXEGETE AS GUIDE

Exegete derives from Greek roots meaning “to lead or guide out of.” The English word exegete typically describes someone who interprets texts, oftentimes biblical texts. I adapt the term here to describe Tibetan Buddhists navigating tantric texts and practices to create meaning. The Tibetan equivalent of exegete would be commentator (’grel pa po), one who “clarifies” and “unravels.”3 Within the Tibetan tradition, producing commentaries is among the most valued roles of a Buddhist teacher along with creating and performing rituals and fending off faulty interpretations. As the body mandala debate shows, these commitments are interconnected. To clarify the words of the Buddha and of his esteemed lineage of interpreters is linked with extending this lineage through ritual and defending it against both internal and external threats, real and imagined. Words such as commentator and hermeneut effectively convey the manner in which this book’s protagonists “clarify,” “unravel,” and “interpret.” However, in analyzing the authorial maneuvers of two fifteenth-century Tibetan authors engaged in a debate about body mandala, I choose to use the word exegete to emphasize their role as guides. I show the unique ways in which these authors lead the reader through the complex twists and turns of navigating the paradoxes of representations, in particular their contradictions, their lacunae, and their state of tension with their constructed nature.

Exegetes guide the reader through the process of rearticulating meaning as a way of breaking down and making sense of the world. They train the reader to make connections that have the potential to be transformative. Tantric practitioners use these skills to navigate texts and ritual practices, to access the profound meanings of bodies and texts while working within the boundaries of representations. Representations, in turn, proliferate beyond their original context. They are defined by a dynamic pull between limitation and potential. As I will show, in the hands of the skilled exegete, representations become not just fabrications, illusions, or objects of attachment, but supports for rearticulating meaning.

Understanding how Buddhist authors craft seamless bodies of meaning, the ways in which they imagine, construct, map, and align connections, diversifies the resources available for engaging with contemporary rearticulations of the body as a proxy for what it means to be human. In the wake of the postmodern turn and the movement away from the body as an object of knowledge, this book shows why the search for the body continues to be meaningful.

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REPRESENTATIONS AS “SUPPORTS”

The closest Tibetan equivalent to representation as I am using it here is ten (Wylie equivalent rten, pronounced ten), a term that means “support.” In Tibetan, the term support (rten) defines a collective category for representation inclusive of texts, images, and bodies. The support can refer, for example, to a text as the container of Buddha word, to a painting or statue consecrated to house the presence of buddhahood, and to a disciple as a receptacle of the guru’s teachings.4 Representation in the sense of support is therefore a category that extends across media, defined by the function of providing support for enlightened realization. The English term representation bears connotations of image and likeness and a complex relationship to presence.5 In turn, English terms text and image bear roots that connect texts to being “woven” and images to “imitation.” The roots of the word body remain somewhat unclear, but in its form as “corpus,” it bridges the worlds of bodies and texts. In both Sanskrit and Tibetan languages, the semantic range of “image” and “body” as “support” (rten), “reflection” (gzugs brnyan, Skt. prati-bimba), or “something fashioned or molded” (Skt. deha) expresses their shared terrain.6 While support does not share all of the meanings of representation, support in the Buddhist sense shares the key property of mediation.

Buddhist attitudes toward representations provide reminders of the gap between representation and reality. For example, when an image is consecrated, the ritual includes a kind of disclaimer in the form of verse teaching the truth of interdependent origination. This verse is ritually recited, inscribed, and inserted as a reminder of the constructed and ephemeral nature of all phenomena, including these supports. Moreover, there have been controversies around the nature of the mediation of ordinary and enlightened realities performed by supports. For example, Tibetan thinkers have asked whether representations manifest a divine presence that was previously absent, perform a pedagogical role, or reveal an already present enlightenment.7 While they contain paradoxical elements prompting such existential questions, representations are valued for their potential to serve as tools in achieving freedom from the cycle of suffering. Like bodies, they provide a context and opportunity for regarding the true nature of things. For tantric Buddhists, exegetes provide the skills for using representations to their full potential.

In this book, I use the word representation to describe a diverse array of images, texts, and bodies. These include Tibetan paintings of the protagonists of the body mandala debate, polemical texts on body mandala together with the larger network of texts upon which they draw via citation, and descriptions of the vajra body, as well as mental representations, the fruits of tantric ritual acts of

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imagining. I also use representation to speak beyond the specific context of the body mandala debate to engage with broader Buddhist conceptions of body and mind and of representation and reality, conceptions that play a part in defining what it means to be human. In demonstrating the relevance of the Buddhist exegete’s skills to contemporary twenty-first century debates, I use representation to explore the roles of texts and images in reflecting, limiting, and expanding the experience and potential of embodied individuals. I conclude each chapter with reflections on how to bridge these different senses of representation. I show that while there are significant ways in which these three senses of representation differ, they share key properties such as the ability to mediate between appearances and actualities and to serve as a basis for rearticulating meaning. Toward this end, I also provide two examples of contemporary exegetes, one a trans scholar and activist featured later in this introduction and the other a Black and queer contemporary artist whose work is the focus of the epilogue.

Introducing Two Fifteenth-Century Exegetes In 1426, a Tibetan scholar monk and ritual expert, Ngorchen Künga Zangpo (1382–1456), defended his tradition against claims that struck at the heart of their fiercely guarded body mandala practice. In Destroyer of the Proponents of Evil Through Eliminating Objections to the Hevajra Body Mandala [N1] (abbreviated throughout as Destroyer of the Proponents of Evil) together with a partner text, Dispelling Evil Views of the Hevajra Body Mandala [N2] (abbreviated throughout as Dispelling Evil Views), Ngorchen refuted claims that threatened to destabilize the authority of the Sakya tradition to which he belonged.8 The “proponents of evil,” as they are dubbed in Ngorchen’s title, charged the Sakyapas with transmitting an illegitimate version of body mandala, one that lacked grounding in Indian Buddhist canonical sources. This charge challenged the authenticity of the Sakya “Path and Fruit” (lam ’bras) tradition for which Hevajra body mandala is central.

Who is Ngorchen’s opponent on the topic of body mandala? A few years earlier, Khédrupjé Gélek Pelzangpo (1385–1438), a champion of the emerging Gelukpa/ Gandenpa tradition, wrote an epic compendium on an entirely different tantric ritual system. In that text, Ocean of Attainment of the Guhyasamāja Generation Stage (abbreviated throughout as Ocean of Attainment), Khédrup critiqued the Sakyapa transmission of the Hevajra body mandala, albeit not explicitly by name.9 At that time, the Gelukpa tradition, set in motion by Khédrup’s teacher Tsongkhapa Lozang Drakpa (1357–1419), was beginning to crystallize as a coherent entity

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independent of its roots in other lineages, including of its Sakya roots. This new development provoked anxieties around ruptures within the Buddhist community.

The debate is not about whether body mandala works. Both Ngorchen and Khédrup agree that body mandala is a unique and powerful tool for striving for liberation. Ngorchen, for example, distinguishes body mandala as the “profound shortcut” (myur lam zab mo) for transforming the body into an enlightened form, the ultimate goal of tantric practice.10 For Khédrupjé, body mandala is superior among representations because it is “not newly fabricated” (gsar du ma bcos pa), placing this practice within a spectrum of authenticity determined by degrees of fabrication and naturalness to be discussed further in chapter 1.11 While both authors laud body mandala as a transformative Vajrayāna technology, they disagree on the method of performing it and on which sources to rely upon as guides.

Moreover, Ngorchen and Khédrup are negotiating concerns with the integrity, cohesiveness, and continuity of the communal body.

Portraits of Continuity The Buddhist monastic code prohibits acts that create “schisms in the sangha,” rifts among the monastic community. The pedagogical technique of debate and the literary genre of polemics both contain the possibility for inciting and aggravating contention between contingents of that community. Underlying both debate and polemics as vital practices of Buddhist scholasticism are limitations upon how far one can go in critiquing one’s opponent and in deviating from the views of one’s own teachers. In these texts of the body mandala debate, which I refer to as the first round of a more far-reaching intertextual and intergenerational web of controversy, lineage together with authorial and communal identity all play important roles. In this section I engage two lineage portraits of Ngorchen and Khédrup (figures 0.1 and 0.2). The portraits exemplify how visual and textual representations can be used both to reinforce continuity and to create space for new interpretations. They also reflect the values that Ngorchen and Khédrup upheld and the constraints within which they operated as they interpreted representations of body mandala.

A Portrait of Ngorchen This image of Ngorchen depicts a chronological transmission of authority (figure 0.1). Portraits like this one enumerate and repeat the members of a lineage

F i gu r e 0. 1 Ngorchen Künga Zangpo (1382–1456) with Two Lineages. Tibet, 1430s–1460s.

34 1/16 x 28 3/8 in. (86.5 x 72 cm). Michael Henss Collection, Zurich. Image courtesy of Michael Henss.

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as a means of establishing continuity with the past. Ngorchen appears in the center of the painting surrounded by the lineage gurus of two lines of teachings of which he is a part. On the right is the Sakya Path and Fruit Lineage, the source of the contested form of body mandala; the lineage of the tantric practice of the goddess Nairātmyā is on the left. Both lineages begin with the figure of the tantric buddha Vajradhara, the blue figure depicted above Ngorchen’s head, and proceed through a series of Indian and Tibetan masters, many of them appearing more than once, ending with two images of Ngorchen himself (flanking the treasure vase in the row immediately below the throne). In each, he appears as a receptacle of the teachings and turns in deference to the guru beside him. As the central figure, he performs the gesture of turning the wheel of the dharma, signaling his status as a guru and a conduit of buddhahood qualified to transmit the teachings to his own disciples. Ngorchen therefore appears three times in total in the painting.12 This visual representation therefore embraces repetition as a way of conveying Ngorchen’s authority to receive and perpetuate multiple strands of tantric teachings.

The notion of the support (rten) helps to illustrate how continuity and connection between guru, disciple, and Buddha take shape in the tantric ritual context.

The ritual transmission of knowledge enables a human being such as Ngorchen to become a vessel of buddhahood, one whose contents can be poured forth into a community of disciples. Just as an image is consecrated to house the presence of a deity, so too tantric practitioners undergo initiation rites to prepare themselves to realize their divine identity. This transformation allows the receptacle to become a support for devotion. Ngorchen was initiated into the Path and Fruit tradition by his guru, who introduced him to imagining his own body as a mandala, a celestial palace inhabited by buddhas. By undergoing the phases of ritual empowerment and repeating the practice of transforming the body into a mandala, Ngorchen became qualified to transmit the Hevajra body mandala. The central image of Ngorchen reinforces his buddhalike qualities as an empowered teacher. The portrait as a whole embodies his identity as a “support” for containing and transmitting the wisdom of his predecessors.

As the painting shows, Ngorchen’s predecessors include buddhas, Indian tantric adepts, their Tibetan disciples, as well as the students of those Tibetan teachers. The Sakya tradition is among the Sarma (gsar ma) schools of Tibetan Buddhism that, beginning in the eleventh century, established new communities of practice based around lineage. They legitimated their claims to branch out in this way by reinforcing their connections to Indian teachers and thereby to the land of Buddhism’s birth and to the Buddha himself. The Sakyapas describe the visionary transmission of the Path and Fruit from the goddess Nairātmyā to Virūpa, one of the Indian mahāsiddha, legendary tantric adepts whose antinomian attitudes and behaviors expressed their profound spiritual accomplishments

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(Skt. siddhi). The Path and Fruit teachings were not recorded in writing for generations, until the time of the great Sakya patriarch Sachen Künga Nyingpo (1092–1158) and his sons. The validity of the teachings was therefore subjected to critical scrutiny at several points in Sakyapa history. One way of reading Ngorchen’s defense of the Hevajra body mandala in the early fifteenth century is against the larger backdrop of defenses of the integrity of the lineage, the uninterrupted and unadulterated transmission of the teachings traced back to an enlightened source.

The portrait contextualizes Ngorchen as a continuation of this tradition and thereby authorizes him as a tantric exegete. Through repeating the forms of the gurus of these Sakya lineages, the portrait reinforces their authority as rooted in an unbroken transfer of the essence of the teachings. In the body mandala debate, Ngorchen invokes the words of his predecessors in a similar manner. His citational strategies display how repetition can create continuity and authority, informing a definition of canon that retains the musical sense of a series of overlapping repetitions. His citations display his expertise, and thereby contribute to his prestige, but also play a part in canon formation. Both text and image therefore exhibit the capacity of repetition within Buddhist representations to function as a powerful mechanism for bestowing the authority to interpret tantric texts. As Ngorchen himself will show, the flow of this authority is often multidirectional.

A Portrait of Khédrupjé In another painting, Khédrup, Ngorchen’s interlocutor on body mandala, makes a mandala offering to his own teacher, Tsongkhapa (figure 0.2). This offering expresses the macrocosmic dimensions of mandala as a ritual offering of both self and world that reinforces the bond between guru and disciple. In exchange for this offering, Tsongkhapa invests Khédrup with the authority to revise and interpret the tantric teachings.

Repetition and visionary experience also figure prominently in Khédrup’s portrait, in which he appears three times. In the figure on the left, he is slumped over the ritual altar in despair at his teacher’s absence. His despair is ultimately remedied by Tsongkhapa’s appearance to Khédrup as a vision in the clouds performing the gesture of turning the wheel of the teaching. After his teacher’s death, during his time at Dangchen, Khédrup is alleged by his biographers to have experienced such visions.13 These visions solidified Khédrup’s status as heir to Tsongkhapa’s spiritual legacy, evoking the power of visionary experience in creating continuity and in bridging the gap between ordinary and enlightened

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n the early fifteenth century, two Tibetan monks debated how to transform the body ritually into a celestial palace inhabited by buddhas. The discussion between Ngorchen Künga Zangpo and Khédrupjé Gélek Pelzangpo concerned the mechanics of this tantric ritual practice, known as body mandala, as well as the most reliable sources to follow in performing it. Their debate witnessed clashes between imagination and deception, continuity and rupture, and tradition and innovation. Searching for the Body demonstrates the significance of the body mandala debate for understandings of Tibetan Buddhism as well as conversations on representation and embodiment occurring across the disciplines today. Rae Erin Dachille explores how Ngorchen and Khédrup used citational practice as a tool for making meaning, arguing that their texts reveal a deep connection between ritual mechanics and interpretive practice. She contends that this debate addresses strikingly contemporary issues surrounding interpretation, intertextuality, creativity, essentialism, and naturalness. By placing Buddhist thought in dialogue with contemporary artistic practice and cultural critique, Searching for the Body offers vital new perspectives on the transformative potential of representations in defining and transcending the human.

“Searching for the Body uses a famous fifteenth-century Tibetan debate about a tantric ritual practice called body mandala to explore historical and literary questions that show the relevance of that debate to the broader field of the humanities. Dachille’s knowledge of the Tibetan texts is superb, and her analysis of the body mandala debate is a major contribution to the field.”

José Ignacio Cabezón, author of Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism “Dachille makes exemplary use of exegetical practices drawn from trans, queer, Black, and disability studies to enable a posthumanist, and more-than-human, interpretative stance within Buddhism.

She critically reframes the ways Buddhist authors can understand how reference, citation, and representation work in Buddhist texts and traditions, expanding our understanding of the ever-shifting boundaries between self, others, and world. This is a smart, beautiful, and timely work.”

Susan Stryker, executive editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

R A E E R I N DAC H I L L E is assistant professor of religious studies and East Asian studies and affiliate faculty in social, cultural, and critical theory and gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.

C OV E R D E S I G N :

Elliott S. Cairns

Private collection. Himalayan Art Resources #4227.

Photo by Jeff Watt. Courtesy of Himalayan Art Resources.

C OV E R I M AG E :

9 780231 206082 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-0-231-20608-2

N E W YO R K

C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U