Demystifying Tantra

Tantric Buddhism is often mischaracterized or misunderstood, both in the academy and in the popular imagination. Scholar Richard Payne has dedicated much of the past twenty years to studying tantric teachings and practices—and to dispelling some of the common misconceptions associated with the tradition.

Payne is Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley, and an ordained priest in the Shingon tradition of Japanese esoteric Buddhism. In his new book, Tantra Across the Buddhist Cosmopolis, he examines the evolution of tantric traditions from early medieval India to the present day.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Payne to discuss the difficulties in trying to define tantra, how tantra challenges popular and scholarly notions about the nature of religion, and how he came to ordain as a Shingon priest.

Can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it? Gosh, this goes back at least twenty years, and there were a couple of things that motivated me to pursue the work for that long a period of time. My main area of training has been religious studies, and the more that I’ve studied Buddhism, it’s become increasingly clear that there are aspects that don’t fit well into the structures of religious studies. The ways in which religious studies defines religion and puts boundaries around the field of study all contribute to a kind of distortion of the Buddhist tradition.

I’m reminded of the Grimms’ fairy tale of Cinderella, in which the ugly sisters attempt to fit their feet into the glass slippers by cutting off their toes and their heels, disfiguring themselves in order to force themselves into the slippers. That’s pretty much the way I now think about those categories, and not just in the field of religious studies but in the popular representations of Buddhism as well, where people talk about Buddhism as really philosophy or psychology or a lifestyle. All of those provide constraints around what Buddhism can be and structure the way in which Buddhism is experienced, and all of those are distortions. What I wanted to do was to address the ways in which tantric Buddhism can confront the limitations and push the boundaries of religious studies as a field of inquiry.

The other intellectual issue that I wanted to address was the overarching unity, or coherence, of the tradition of tantric Buddhism. I had studied Tibetan forms, and I had practiced in Japan, and the continuity was something that I wanted to explore and to delineate. I wanted to argue that there is a coherent tradition of tantric Buddhism, and it does have unity not as a single lineage but in terms of common ideas, texts, teachers, and various institutions across Buddhist history. So it was those two issues that largely motivated me to write this book and to maintain the effort for more than two decades.

You argue that tantra is pervasive, invisible, and coherent. So what do you mean by these three terms? These aspects of the tantric tradition have been individually addressed by different scholars in the past, and I wanted to draw them together to provide an understanding that we are looking at something that does have historical continuity, beginning in early medieval India and extending right into the present.

Tantra is pervasive in that tantric Buddhism has been found everywhere across the Buddhist world. There is no region, no part of the Buddhist world that has not had tantric Buddhism present. It has been often overlooked or written out of the history, and that’s what I mean by being invisible. A prime example of that is the understanding of Southeast Asia as Theravada. The regional designation of Southeast Asia as Theravada, Tibet and Central Asia as tantric, and East Asia as Mahayana is often the starting point in many introductions to Buddhism. And that’s OK, but those characterizations have tended to obscure the presence of tantric Buddhism in each of those regions. In many cases, scholars who are trained in a particular tradition can’t see the tantric character of what they’re looking at within that tradition itself.

In the introduction to the book, I talk about a friend of mine who was in charge of a small Zen retreat center. When I visited him, I saw a picture of a lokapala world guardian in the entryway, and to me that was a figure straight out of a tantric mandala. I said to him, “You know, here’s this tantric figure in a Zen retreat.” And for him it was unproblematic. It was just part of the Zen tradition, and each morning he offered incense and recited a chant to it. He didn’t think about its history and its background and how it ended up in the entryway to his Zen retreat center. There are other examples like that, and if you don’t have the background in tantric Buddhism, it’s very hard to see it even when you run right into it.

There is no region, no part of the Buddhist world that has not had tantric Buddhism present.

And how is the tradition coherent? There’s this way in which the tradition holds together. I explored this with a kind of thought experiment, imagining a 12th-century Tibetan tantric practitioner coming to a 20th-century Japanese tantric temple in California. It seems pretty clear that for somebody from the 12th century, the details of the ritual and the details of the way the temple was organized and decorated might have been different, but looking at what was going on, the fire ritual, the recitation of mantra, and even the mantras and deities themselves would’ve been familiar. And so there’s that kind of integrity to the tradition. Even with its incredible variety, there is still a way of hanging together as being recognizably part of the same movement.

One example of coherence you discuss is the practice of severance, or chöd, which you describe as a tantric inflection of charnel ground meditations. can you tell us about severance? Charnel ground practices are one of the continuities from the earliest parts of Buddhism. The vinaya includes instructions for monks on how to make their robes out of cloth from corpses, and some of the earliest meditation practices are on decaying corpses. There are detailed instructions on how to go to a charnel ground and how to visualize the process of a corpse’s decay. Buddhaghosa lays out nine or ten stages of decay, and that very structure of the stages of decay is replicated across much of Asian Buddhism.

In Tibet, this practice takes on the form of severance. It’s employed for specific purposes and in a specific context, and it’s rooted in the Perfection of Wisdom literature. The cutting off, or severance, of attachments is a practice to become aware of impermanence.

One of my teachers, Tarthang Tulku, recounted a story from his own early days as a training monk. One of his teachers was engaged in body severance, visualizing cutting his own body up into pieces and offering them to ghosts and ghouls and demons and goblins, inviting them to eat his body. He used to go to the charnel ground at night and perform this practice. According to Tarthang Tulku, he and some of his friends went out at night and snuck up behind their teacher, and when his teacher got to the point of offering his body to all of these demons whom he had invited, they jumped up behind him and shrieked.

The point that he made is that if you are going to engage in this ritual, you have to take it seriously. This is not a ritual to be undertaken just as something that I’m going to do because it’s a cool practice, but, of course, I don’t really believe that my body is going to be consumed by demons. That is not going to be an effective practice. That is not the yoga. The yoga would be to actually offer one’s own body to these demonic forces and, in doing so, recognize one’s own impermanence.  

Visit tricycle.org/podcast for more.