Reading Yogic Suicide: Puzzling Out the Mālinīvijayottaratantra 17.25-32

Working on a crossword puzzle where the term tantra is clued as Buddhist “treatise”, Donald S. Lopez finds himself stumped even as a Buddhologist.¹ Accustomed to curmudgeonly scholarly handwringing over what tantra is, he finds himself caught off guard by the invocation of this most elementary and obvious of definitions: a text or treatise. Tantra, a term for an entire nexus of practices and overlapping ideas that also simply identifies treatises or texts, is now known to be the path of mantras, the Mantramarga. Characterizing this path is “the use of non-Vedic formulae as mantras, and their being conceptualised as powerful forms of divinity 'embodied' in speech, whose use can produce both soteriological and this-worldly or otherworldly supernatural goals.”²

Because of the scarcity of otherwise available historical and archaeological context, we are often left to divine what tantra was to practitioners through analysis of esoteric scriptures and exegesis from the Śaiva Age, resulting in a picture of tantric practice that can look a lot like ritual hermeneutics.³ Parsing the origin of this conceptual ecology, Jason Schwartz shows that understanding tantric practice as the theory for which the practice is to be parsed out of social history erects a dichotomy that only allegorically overwrites the supposed mystifications of tantric exegetes and practitioners with the no less mystifying hermeneutic structures of contemporary scholars.⁴ Closely reading the Pingalamata and putting tantra and law in the medieval Deccan in dialogue, he argues that tantric knowledge was built upon discrete textual-juridical foundations that erased the distinction between ritual and social contexts. Texts and their interpretation are still essential to our understanding of these practices.

I am interested here in understanding the points of transit that allow us to make any kind of sense out of Tantric texts, that make this apprehension intellectually fruitful. Recent work, foremost among them that of Sthaneshwar Timalsina, has sought to illuminate tantric visualization practices through contemporary cognitive science.⁵ Sympathetic to this approach, I seek to put it in dialogue with debates in the history and philosophy of science as well as philosophy, rhetoric, and poetics. I propose that one way to think about what is at stake here is the nature of a “realization” – for Abhinavagupta, the privileged form is śaktipāta, an interior experience of universal consciousness that serves as initiation.⁶ In the technical terms of contemporary parlance, this is a “dependence relation that is thought to exist between higher-level properties or states and lower-level properties or states”.⁷ Of course, on a colloquial level, to realize something is simply to become aware of something. We get a better sense of what Abhinavagupta is trying to do when we see how he works with the textures of realization.

Into the Mālinīvijayottaratantra

One such realization occurs in the Mālinīvijayottaratantra’s discussion of yogic suicide. A key text upon which the Trika school expounded and grounded its exegesis, the MVUT is the nexus of significant debates on attributions of nonduality to Tantric knowledges. Alexis Sanderson argues that Abhinavagupta’s account of the text as having essentially a nondual orientation is imposed upon the text and emphasizes that, “to determine a Tantra’s metaphysical orientation, it is not enough to consider the implications of the forms of the rituals and meditations it enjoins. What one requires for that purpose are unambiguous statements of doctrine (jnanam, vidya) outside the contexts of ritual (kriya), observance (carya), and meditation (yogah).”⁸ He concludes that there is no evidence to show that this is true with the Mālinīvijayottaratantra – i.e., nowhere is there a statement given that belies dualist or nondualist orientation, which suggests that it is neither like some Kaula texts that explicit claim nondualist orientation, nor a text that feels challenged by nondualism enough that it feels the need to distance itself from its adherents. He hastens to add, however, that it would be quite easy for Abhinavagupta and his school to turn it on its head, since “in principle it would be enough to insert into the corpus a single sentence expressing this view or metaview for the meaning of the whole to be transformed.”⁹ This is exactly what he seems to do when discussing yogic suicide.

Building on the work of Somadeva Vasudeva, I address the short passage from the Mālinīvijayottaratantra on Yoga Suicide, along with Abhinavagupta’s interpretation of this passage, in close detail. Here is the passage I address:

When [the Yogin] considers all or rather [its] experience to be repulsive, he relinquishes his own body and proceeds to the state of no return. To effect this one should perform the aforementioned imposition, whose lustre is equal to the fire [at the end] of time in reverse, [each phoneme] enclosed by two [mantras] skr. k chindi. [Then] after performing the fire-fixation, enkindling all of the vital bonds (marman), one should fill the body with air from the big toe to the top of the head. Then, translocating that [vital energy] one should lead it from the big toe to the cranial aperture. The knower of yoga should [completely] sever all vital bonds with the mantra. (MVUT 17.25–28)¹⁰

One should use the first tooth [ka] (dvijam a ̄dyam) without the soul [sa] (aj ̄ıvakam. ), preceded by the soul [sa] mounted on the first twice- born [tooth, ka] joined to the first [skull] of the chaplet [r.]. Thus is revealed the [mantra called the] Night which is Death, which severs the vital bonds. O Goddess, one who wishes for long life should not enunciate it. After fifty enunciations a headache arises. Perceiving this sign one should proceed with the visualisation of the conqueror of death. Having compressed [the air] there, one should meditate on Drop, Resonance etc. Then, quickly extracting [the air] in that place (tatrastham. ) he should dismiss it once and for all with the [mantra of the] Night which is Death. (MVUT 17.29–32)¹¹

Discussion of yogic suicide raises significant issues for Abhinavagupta, for whom the MVUT served as the highest revelation (as opposed to the Siddhanta texts). In the view of the redactors of the MVUT, this is the “final act in the career of the successful Yogin who has mastered all he set out to achieve”.¹² Yet on a very basic level, this is problematic for Abhinavagupta because it implies that it matters at all whether we, for him Śiva, are living in a body. According to Somadeva Vasudeva, Abhinavagupta is seeking to harmonize two views in his exegesis of this passage: the view that yogic suicide leads to liberation (by abandoning the body), and the view that it is absurd (since Śiva is everywhere and everything). The view that yogic suicide represents a release from the body to find Śiva elsewhere, Vasudeva notes, does not make sense within Abhinavagupta’s nondualist understanding of Śiva. This would have the implication that Śiva does not reside within the body. He joins another text, the Urmikaularnava, in criticizing this view for subjecting Śiva to limitations of space and time but refuses to join it in condemning yogic suicide as a “grave error”, since it does appear in MVUT, which he wants to keep as an exegetical resource. Instead, Abhinavagupta argues that the purpose of yogic suicide is enjoyment, rather than liberation. ¹³ He proposes the view that the teaching of MVUT 17.25 (bold above) is that “the Yogin, who is disgusted with all external pleasures because he is experiencing the far greater pleasure of immersion into pure awareness, may relinquish his physical body and thus eliminate the repulsive experience of external reality. His soul then conjoins with the element of ether and in this way he can continue his blissful experience.”¹⁴ Thus rereading with an esoteric interpretation of the word virupaka as a name for Bhairava, he suggests that the occasion in MVUT 17.25, instead of “When [the Yogin] considers all or rather [its] experience to be repulsive”, actually parses as “Realising that all of one’s individual experience is Śiva”, meaning that (as Jayaratha glosses it) “liberation occurs for him by the elevating pride of the experience in his own self that ‘I am Śiva,” and the abandonment of the body [then takes place] because of this [liberation]." For Abhinava, as Vasudeva shows, “the instruction of one’s own autonomy is the principal liberating initiation,” and he stresses that “both of the two views are correct; which one is accepted depends entirely on the Yogin’s standpoint, on the degree to which dichotomising thoughts are present.”¹⁵

This redirection of interpretation into the internal state of the cognizing practitioner is congruent with Christopher Wallis’s account of the importance of samaveśa (immersion) to Abhinavagupta’s articulation of nondualism, his theology of śaktipāta, and its emphasis on internal experience. This is an “intuitive insight that the true locus of identity is not the body, mind, vital energy, or void, with consciousness as a mere epiphenomenal adjunct of one of these, but rather that Consciousness itself is the Self, and the other levels of identity are projections of it. This is precisely the meaning Abhinava wants and advocates, and he argues that in fact all forms of religious practice and ritual have this liberating insight as their goal.”¹⁶ This theological discourse shifted attention towards internal experience, towards śaktipāta, putting pressure on what I am here calling a “realization”. Very similar questions on how to interpret the ethics, pleasures, and dangers of suicide within texts emerged when Protestant reformers and radicals shifted European religious practice towards the effect of divine grace on internal states and metaphysical questions came to be routed through cognitive realizations.¹⁷ And perhaps due to this legacy, whether reality is dual or nondual (another frame is as “digital” or “analog”) is considered worthy even today among certain circles of an active and perhaps even increasingly lively debate. If we look carefully at what Abhinavagupta is doing, he understands a determination of the purpose of the yogin’s suicide as being dependent on the framework of the nonduality of Śiva and reality. Because he insists (unlike the MVUT’s redactors) ultimate reality is nondual, he is forced to take it upon himself to interpret the yogic suicide as an act of pleasure (and therefore, in his view, irrelevant). He is also careful not to align himself with the view that immersion in Śiva implies “disgust” at the experience of bodily sensation. He believes, instead, that this notion results from dichotomizing thought patterns. By looking for an esoteric reading where the affirmation of the Śivahood of the self is the motivation for an indifference to (rather than disgust at) the body, he shifts our attention away from an internal state of being affected by dualisms (as with the practitioner who, for Abhinavagupta, is affected by dichotomizing thoughts and thus anxious about the state of his or her Śivahood) towards a “realization” – what matters for Abhinavagupta is simply the realization that one is Śiva. Abhinavagupta thus understands his interpretation in making sense of the MVUT’s passage on yogic suicide as ultimately involving a question of how we might reconcile the textures of consciousness with the nature of realization.

But, to return to a basic question, why does Abhinavagupta not simply reject yogic suicide altogether? As Vasudeva points out, Abhinavagupta could easily have argued that yogic suicide is absurd and not recommended (instead of an irrelevant, pleasure-seeking activity), instead of resorting to esoteric readings of the passage at stake to reinforce the claims of nonduality. Sanderson, for what it is worth, argues that the MVUT is more or less indifferent to the question of non-dualism that Abhinavagupta reads into the text.¹⁸ Abhinavagupta’s textual operation in this passage on yogic suicide is thus a marking out of relevance and irrelevance through a reduction of the problem space of textual and human experience into this particular exegetical question. It seems that he is motivated to preserve the authority of the text of the MVUT as an exegetical resource, perhaps in the same vein as Jason Schwartz has argued for the Dharmaśastras, in the interest of preserving the possibility that homologous textual structures can be differentially applied on the basis of different realization relations united under the paradigm of Śivahood as consciousness.¹⁹ In the absence of more available social historical scholarship, it is difficult to be sure. But this is in many ways similar to what it feels like to read contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind (think only of Abhinavagupta’s argument that “’the Supreme Lord’ and ’the contracted individual soul’ are just different names for one Consciousness in two different states or phases”) that underlie the idea of “multiple realization”, which, in order to ground the idea of mind as a fundamental metaphysical paradigm, posits and substantiates a view of mental states as being constituted in diverse physical states.²⁰ Perhaps one could posit that Abhinavagupta’s reading strategies served to provide ground for a kind of pluralistic normativity, just as interpretation in contemporary cognitive science underwrites social ontologies with differential orders of normativity organized by the realization relations behind different metaphysical accounts of consciousness and cognition.²¹ Still, in the absence of more theoretical dialogue between these traditions, this must remain speculation.