IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA, TANTRA AND ĀYURVEDA CONTAIN notable overlaps, because most of the clients who seek out tantric ritualists do so in a search for cures for physical or mental illnesses or for familial or social distress. Although most tantrics know little formal Āyurveda, many, and in some locales most, vaidyas or āyurvedic doctors will admit tantric notions and processes into their thinking and, hence, into their practice. These notions and processes include principles of tantric physiology, including cakras, an extensive closed circuitry of nāḍis or nerve channels, and the potential development of kuṇḍalinī śakti, an upwardly moving energy in the spine that generates ecstatic experience.1 In addition, and perhaps of greater practical value to a minority of vaidyas, is the practice of tantric homa, fire offerings in the name of a diseased client according to tantric practice. This is justified as part of daivavyapāśraya-cikitsa (spiritual treatment), which we examine in Chapter 12. More important, however, for the vast majority of vaidyas is the employment of rasāyaṇas (metallic preparations and compounds) as part of a vast prophylactic pharmacopeia. Most of these are the heritage of Tantra, in both text and practice, which we also examine in Chapter 12. Scholars of Āyurveda, however, must perforce consider this science as distinct from Tantra for several reasons. First, Āyurveda is and always has been primarily an empirical practice, a system (or collage of systems) of diagnosis and treatment for physical and mental illness. Generally, āyurvedic practitioners have striven to maintain the traditions of practice in which they have been educated, which are most often based on the textuality associated with one of the three primary texts of Āyurveda—the Caraka-, Suśruta-, and Aṣṭāṇgahṛdaya-Saṃhitās—but have, nevertheless, adapted their knowledge (and śāstra) over time, in accord with the demands of ever-expanding cultural, textual, and religious boundaries.
Tantra may be said to be one of the two primary religious movements of South Asia in first millennium C.E. India (the other being bhakti). In a generally successful quest for legitimacy, both Āyurveda and Tantra have long ascribed their origins to the Atharvaveda. This ascription is of limited use for the practice of Āyurveda in spite of such assertions in the introductions to certain foundational āyurvedic texts. For example, Susruta states that Āyurveda is a subsidiary limb of the Atharvaveda (AV).2 The basis for this, of course, is the exposition in the AV of healing practices and rhetorical strategies for expressing knowledge of human physiology. This, however, did not amount to Āyurveda in either theory or practice.3
Similarly, Tantra was a movement distinct from practical grounding in the AV or any other vedic text. It arose in the first millennium as a series of esoteric practices, some likely from nonliterate or “folk” cultures.4 These were subsequently systematized and brahmanized over a thousand-year period. However, the distant resonances felt by both āyurvedic and tantric practitioners to the healing and biomagical practices found in the AV and its more specified ritual text, the Kauśikasūtra,5 alone were sufficient to locate both Āyurveda and Tantra within the expanding realm of orthopraxis. This was the case even though for at least a millennium before this time the vast majority of both tantrics and vaidyas knew the AV in name and reputation only, and the Kauśikasūtra not at all. Nevertheless, this rhetorical situating of Āyurveda and Tantra as auxiliary vedic “sciences” was sufficient to valorize them socially and intellectually, to render them significant beyond the boundaries of their own domains of practice.
Perhaps it was not unnatural, then, that at a certain relatively proximate point in time tantric practice was admitted into the precincts of Āyurveda, though not all vaidyas in any region of India ever uniformly applied tantric principles and practices within their medical practice. Even for vaidyas who actively disregarded tantric practice, however, there was a passive recognition that Tantra, intelligently applied, was a legitimate healing modality. To its primary practitioners and architects, however, Tantra was never simply a system of biomagical healing. It was a strategy for healing existential disorder, of which physical disorder was a manifestation. Like Āyurveda, it vigorously employed material of this world in its quest for physical and spiritual perfection.
Possession was one of the many concepts Tantra and Āyurveda shared. The latter dealt almost entirely with “negative” possession by bhūtas, pretas, and other unbidden and inhospitable ethereal creatures, while the former explored both “positive” oracular and initiatory possession even as it admitted the possibility of “negative” possession. Because questions of identity lay at the core of possession, indeed because both disease and ecstatic (or any other) trance states were often believed to have external agents that disrupted the flow of personal identity, tantric practice sometimes progressed into tantric medicine and found a place within Āyurveda. In this way, Āyurveda and Tantra came together sufficiently in the orbit of possession to be considered together. In this section, Chapters 10 and 11 are devoted to discussions of “positive” tantric possession while Chapter 12 comprises accounts of disease-producing possession and its treatment according to both āyurvedic and tantric texts. Chapter 12 also includes my own observations of spirit-healing practice on the ground based on fieldwork undertaken among āyurvedic practitioners and mantravādins in Kerala.
NOTES
1. This subject has received considerable attention in Western-language sources for nearly a century. Most of it is within the popular spiritual media. The only accessible study dedicated exclusively to kuṇḍalinī from a historical, Sanskritic, perspective is Silburn 1988. Much more work on this remains to be done.
2. iha khalv āyurvedaṃ nāmopāṇgam atharvavedasya, Suśruta-saṃhitā sūtrasthānam 1.6.
3. This has been discussed frequently. See, e.g., Wujastyk: “The fact that āyurvedic texts claim to ‘derive from’ the Veda is not evidence for medical history, but rather evidence of a bid by medical authors for social acceptance and religious sanction” (1998:17). As for the connection between Tantra and Āyurveda, a major scholarly study of the recent history of their connections remains to be written.
4. See Davidson 2002 for discussions of the origins of Tantric Buddhism in Indian lower-caste practices.