The Creation and Revision of the Buddhist Yoginītantra Herukābhidhāna

Prof. Alexis Sanderson (Oxford)

The scripture Herukābhidhāna, also known as the Laghuśaṃvara, Cakraśamvara, or Cakrasaṃvara, was considered to be the core Yoginītantra at the heart of the extensive cycle of revelations structured around the propitiation of various forms of the Heruka known as Śaṃvara or Cakrasaṃvara and the goddess Vajravārāhī or Vajrayoginī. I shall show how this seminal Buddhist Tantra was put together, probably during the ninth century and certainly in eastern India, from diverse scriptural sources, both Śākta-Śaiva and Buddhist Tantric, by a process of montage or bricolage in which there is little trace of sustained authorship on the part of the creator or rather creators of the final product. I shall show that the text has been transmitted in two redactions, the later and longer distinguished by a chapter added at the end, and I shall argue that the purpose of this addition was to add explicitly Buddhist content to a composition that conspicuously lacks it. The opening chapter puts a Buddhist stamp on the redaction in as much as it consists largely of an agglomeration of Buddhist Tantric text-clips from the Sarvabuddhasamāyogaḍākinījālaśaṃvara, the Guhyasamāja, and the Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha, these embedding a small amount of material borrowed from Śākta-Śaiva texts of the kind that are the dominant sources of the rest of the work. But the resulting text was no doubt felt by the producer or producers of the extended redaction to be lacking nonetheless in doctrinal material that could be cited to defend the claim of the Tantra’s followers that it merited the place it had assumed in the canon of the Indian Mahāyāna. For the opening bricolage supports this claim only to the extent that most of its verses would be recognized as occurring in Buddhist Tantras whose credentials were not in doubt by that time. There is nothing in these verses that provides material for a properly Buddhist exegesis; and the rest of the Tantra up to the end of the earlier redaction is even less promising in this regard. The producer or producers of the longer redaction were, I propose, attempting to address this lack. I say producer or producers because there are indications in the redacting of this text within other texts of this cycle that prompt the hypothesis that the extension of the Tantra may have proceeded by stages.

I shall end by considering how such a text could have entered the repertoire of east-Indian Buddhism in the wake of Tantric works of much greater maturity and sophistication from a learned Buddhist point of view. The key, I propose, lies in seeing that the ability of the state-funded east-Indian monasteries to exert the sort of centralized control by the learned that could block textual inroads from innovations in Tantric practice that were inadequately embedded in antecedent Buddhist tradition was dependent on the power of their patrons, the Pāla kings. It was precisely during the period of the emergence of this new corpus that the Pāla empire was at its lowest ebb, its territory at its smallest extent, and its authority at its weakest. This came between the phase of its early greatness, during which the Yogatantras emerged, and its later recovery, which saw the creation of a much more sophisticated Yoginītantra-based system, that of the Kālacakra, and a flowering of learned exegetical activity designed to provide the rough and ready creations of this little ‘dark age’, such as the Herukābhidhāna, the Catuṣpīṭha, and the Hevajra, with commentaries and ancillary Sādhana-texts that would provide the sophisticated Buddhist meaning and polished style that all of them lacked to some extent and the Herukābhidhāna most of all. This was also the period that witnessed a vigorous reassertion of the primacy of monks in the Tantric domain after one during which monastic control over Tantric practice had evidently been relaxed.