David Gordon White , Kiss of the Yogin: Tantric Sex in Its South Asian Contexts

Kiss of the Yogin: Tantric Sex in Its South Asian Contexts by DavidGordon White
Review by: Hugh B. Urban
History of Religions, Vol. 45, No. 3 (February 2006), pp. 281-285
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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History of Religions 281
that Diouf (the former Senegalese President) had supported a national council of
brotherhoods intended to meet collegially with one another and with government
ofcials (102). Neither the name of this council nor the date of its creation nor
the location of its headquarters is mentioned. There are also several mistakes and
incoherencies: El-Zakzaky, a spearhead of the Islamist movement in Nigeria, is
not a university lecturer as stated on page 43; the Izala movement did not split
as a result of Gumis death; the Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa could
not have been established in 1970 and have thirty-one branches in 1958 (138); es-
timates, based on an interview with a Murid scholar, that members of Muridiyya
outnumber that of Tijaniyya are inaccurate (9798). Additionally, the chronology
of the account is sometimes confusing, with breaks in time that make it difcult
for their targeted audience to have a sense of the history of Islam.
Another epistemological shortcoming is that Pride, Faith, and Fear tends to
present religion as a dependent variable, often explaining religious mobilizations
as resulting from socioeconomic deprivation, an approach that is too simplistic to
do justice to religion as an ontological phenomenon. Likewise, the often-presented
division among African Muslims between traditionalists and Westernized mod-
ernists is not helpful. The reality is much more complex and entails a subtle in-
teraction between tradition and modernity. Many groups labeled traditionalist tend
to be very modern in the use of technology and in organizing the transmission of
knowledge. For example, the authors present the Islamic educational system in
Nigeria as attractive to those who are unable to afford the Western modern
system (48). In reality, Islamic education since the 1950s has slowly been mod-
ernized, with the appearance and subsequent mushrooming of modern Islamic
schools called Islamiyya schools. The organization of these schools is based on
a model of modern Western schools, with several class groups, the use of black-
board and chalk by instructors as opposed to writing tablets, the use of textbooks,
and the use of computers in some cases, and so on.
Although written clearly enough to provide some sense of the diversity and com-
plexity of Islam in Africa, this book suffers from too many shortcomings to be rec-
ommended as a reference for a scholarly audience and ultimately fails to provide
a sturdy bridge between the current scholarly literature and a broader audience.
Ousmane Kane
Columbia University
Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in Its South Asian Contexts. By David Gordon
White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xx+372. $43.00.
The topic of Tantric sex has recently become one of the most titillating and
marketable, yet also grossly distorted and misunderstood, forms of Asian religion
in contemporary America. Not only do we now have pop stars like Sting prac-
ticing Tantric sex and claiming to achieve ve-hour orgasms, but the literature on
Tantra now saturates popular culture in the form of books, videos, and an endless
proliferation of Web sites on the Internet. David Gordon Whites latest book, Kiss
of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in Its South Asian Contexts, is therefore a welcome and
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Book Reviews 282
much-needed critical study of the role of sex in Indian Tantric texts, ritual, and
iconography. Not only does this book force us to rethink the role of sex in Indian
Tantra, but it also forces us to reevaluate the landscape of South Asian religions
as a whole.
White begins in chapter 1 with a bold call for scholars to re-vision the main-
stream of Indian religion itself, which, he believes, has been misrepresented by
the hegemonic voices of the elite traditions. While most past scholarship, both
Indian and Western, has described Indian religion as primarily based on the de-
votional (bhakti) traditions, White argues that Tantra really represents the occulted
face of Indias history, which was, prior to the modern period, more widespread
and pervasive than bhakti or any other popular movement (27). While recognizing
the ambiguous and varied meanings of the category Tantra, White suggests that
its most distinctive feature is its use of ritual acts addressed to a multiplicity of
goddesses, which often involve human sexuality and sexual interactions between
male practitioners and their female counterparts (17). And the quintessential or
hard-core form of this Tantric use of sexuality, in Whites opinion, is the Kaula
tradition, which traces its lineage to the great semihistorical gure Matsyendra-
natha. The form of sexuality here is not, however, very much like the sort of warm-
fuzzy, extended-orgasm love-play of contemporary American pop-Tantra; rather, it
centers around the offering of sexual emissions to terrifying female deities or Yo-
ginis and the oral consumption of sexual uids by Tantric practitioners (7, 11, 17).
In chapter 2, White traces the origins of the Yoginis in South Asia, which have
a long history in gures such as bird, animal, and tree spirits going back to the
Vedas. Chapter 3 then examines the role of bodily uidsparticularly sexual
uidsrst in the South Asian religious imagination generally and then speci-
cally in Tantric literature. In chapter 4in many ways the heart of Whites argu-
menthe explores in detail the complex transactions of sexual uids in Tantric
ritual as represented in Kaula texts and iconography. Here Tantric sex is by no
means a matter of optimal orgasm or nookie nirvana, but rather a transmission
of esoteric knowledge through the transmission of sexual uids from the mouth
(= sexual organ) of the Yogini, which serves to initiate the practitioner into the
Tantric lineage.
Some of the most interesting material appears in chapter 5, where White dis-
cusses the various actors involved in South Asian Tantric practice. In addition to
various gurus, monks, nuns, sorcerers, healers, and lay practitioners, one of the
most important Tantric actors is the king. Indeed, the king is for White the Tantric
actor par excellence, and much of medieval Tantra depended upon royal patronage
from the political center of the Tantric mandala.
In chapter 6, White examines the male consorts of the Yoginis, particularly the
semidivine lineage of the Siddhas, who trace their origins to the legendary founder,
Matsyendranatha. Chapter 7 then explores the imagery of ight in the worship of
the Yoginis, who are often portrayed swooping down from the heavens and carry-
ing their male consorts up into the skies with supernatural power. As White argues
in chapter 7, however, much of the hard-core Tantric practice that centered
around the Yoginis was progressively sublimated, subjected to an internaliza-
tion, an aestheticization and a semanticization in later forms of high Hindu
Tantra (219). In the case of highly intellectual schools like the Kashmir aivites,
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History of Religions 283
the once explicit consumption of sexual uids would be increasingly transformed
into a metaphor for inner meditative practices and abstract philosophical ideals. In
conclusion, White discusses the role of the Yogini today, both in modern India
where she survives largely on the periphery and in the marginal spaces of South
Asian cultureand in the Westwhere she has been appropriated by ersatz en-
trepreneurs of ecstasy to sell a New Age version of Tantric sex to a popular
American audience (272).
Overall, this is a meticulously researched, endlessly provocative, often brilliant
piece of scholarship that offers a rich treasure trove of fascinating new informa-
tion. Despite its obvious importance, however, Whites book does bear some minor,
though noteworthy, weaknesses. The rst of these is his more or less complete
disdain for the contemporary American popular and New Age versions of Tantra,
which are repeatedly dismissed as derivative, dilettante, diminished imitations
of true Tantric practice, more comparable to nger painting than ne art (xiii).
Ironically, this smacks of the same sort of scholarly elitism that led early European
Orientalists to dismiss popular forms of Indian religion as superstitious idolatry.
It is also the same attitude that has, until very recently, prevented modern scholars
from taking contemporary American new religious movements seriously. As prob-
lematic, at times apparently silly, as they may be, the contemporary popular ver-
sions of Tantra also need to be understood and critically studied by historians of
religion.
A second and more troubling problem with the book is Whites rhetorical use of
exaggerations and overstatements, which ultimately weaken rather than strengthen
his argument. There is, I think, a threefold bias running throughout the book:
Whites view of South Asian religion is unduly Tantro-centric, his view of Tantra
is Kaulo-centric, and his view of the Kaula movement is sexo-centric.
By Tantro-centric I mean that White is so determined to revalorize the place of
Tantra in South Asian religion that he often goes to the opposite extreme by over-
stating the case. Thus he argues that Tantra has been the predominant religious
paradigm, for over a millennium, of the great majority of the inhabitants of the
Indian subcontinent. It has been the background against which Indian religious
civilizations evolved (3). This claim is hard to swallow for two reasons. First, as
Andr Padoux and others have argued, the category of Tantra (with a capital T
and singular) is not in fact an indigenous Indian category; rather, like Hinduism
itself, it is largely the construction of Indian elites and European scholars writing
in the nineteenth century, who lumped a vast and extremely heterogeneous body
of texts, rituals, and traditions under the generic category of Tantra.
1
It is true as
White points out (16), that the term tantra can be found in various texts as early
as the fth century BCE (and actually well before that). But historically, the term
has been used with a vast array of different and conicting meanings, and it does
1
Padoux has made this argument in various places, such as A Survey of Tantrism for the
Historian of Religions (review article of Hindu Tantrism by Sanjukta Gupta, Dirk Jan
Hoens, and Teun Goudriaan), History of Religions 20, no. 4 (1981): 34560. See also Hugh B.
Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003), 2343.
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Book Reviews 284
not refer to anything like a singular coherent movement or tradition until the nine-
teenth century. Tantric texts contain virtually no denitions of tantraapart from
general statements like a text that spreads knowledge and savesand even the
great Tantric systematizers like Abhinavagupta offer no clear denitions of the
term (in fact, Abhinavagupta frequently refers to tantra as a path that is inferior
to other more hard-core paths like the kaula and trika). Nor do the Kaula texts
with which White is working describe themselves as part of a movement called
kaula or kula-dharma or kula-marga. As Sir John Woodroffe himself long ago
pointed out, the term tantra most often just means a kind of text, so that it makes
no more sense to speak of Tantra than it does to speak of the Purana or the
Text.
2
Second, the claim that Tantra was the predominant religious paradigm in
South Asia is both an exaggeration and a vast expansion of what Tantra really
means. White seems to want to apply the category broadly to cover virtually all
local or regional deities and popular forms of worship that fall outside the
Vedic paradigm (37); but the result is that the term becomes so vast and ambig-
uous that it really loses its descriptive value.
At the same time, Whites view of Tantra is also markedly Kaulo-centric;
that is to say, it places the particular strand of the Kaula movement at the core of
the many various forms of South Asian Tantra and then proceeds to interpret
most other strands through a Kaula lens. There are, after all, many diverse texts,
traditions, and practices that we now nd it convenient to label as Tantra, in-
cluding the highly philosophical Kashmir aivite tradition, the aiva Siddhantas,
the Vaisnava Pacaratras, the South Indian ri Vidya school, the Bengali Sahajiyas,
and innumerable popular vernacular forms of Tantra, all of which have quite dif-
ferent interpretations of Tantric practice, including sexual practice. For White,
most other Tantric schools, particularly the Kashmir aivite schools of the tenth
through the eleventh centuries, are seen as derivations and transformations of the
original Kaula hard core, which have sublimated, aestheticized, or bowd-
lerized the original sexual rites. Ironically, White has articulated a narrative very
similar to that of the British Orientalists of the nineteenth century, only in reverse.
The early Orientalist narrative described a progressive degeneration from original
pure Vedic Hinduism to modern popular, decadent Tantra; White, conversely,
imagines an original pure, hard-core, and royally patronized form of Tantra that
progressively deteriorates into modern popular Hinduism. Yet the structure of the
narrative is the same: past royal purity and grandeur followed by modern degen-
eration and decay. To this reader, at least, it would seem more accurate to say that
the traditions we now call Tantra include a vast and diverse array of different
practices, philosophies, and interpretations, particularly of the role of sexual rituals;
and these are best seen not as progressive degenerations of some original Kaula
core, but as competing systems that simply came up with divergent interpretations
of sexual rites, among many other things.
Finally, Whites reading of both Tantra and the Kaula tradition is sexo-centric,
in the sense that he denes Tantra primarily in terms of its sexual aspect; for
White, sexual practices are that which give Tantra its specicity, that which dis-
tinguish its rituals from rituals that are not Tantric (17). It is true that White does
2
See Urban, Tantra, 3135.
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History of Religions 285
a wonderful job of explaining what Tantric sex is really about, namely, the offer-
ing and consumption of powerful sexual uidsnot sensual pleasure or prolonged
orgasm. But in so doing, he has overstated the centrality of sexual practices. As
Douglas Brooks and others have argued, there are many, many polythetic ele-
ments that make up the vast and ambiguous body of traditions we now call
Tantra; these include the use of sacred sound and diagrams (mantras and yan-
tras), specic yogic techniques, the use of secrecy, initiation, and so on, among
which the use of sexual rituals is sometimes but not always one element and not
necessarily the most important one. As White himself observes (137), the most
quintessentially Tantric of all temples, such as the sixty-four Yogini temples at
Hirapur and Bheraghat, contain virtually no sexual imagery at all (in contrast to
explicitly eroticized temples like Khajuraho and Konark). Instead, their imagery
centers primarily around blood, sacrice, and terrifying power. This makes the
reader wonder whether sexual rites really are the most distinctive feature of
Tantric practice or whether other characteristics such as violence, power, and
transgression might be better ways of distinguishing Tantraor indeed, whether
there simply is no one hard-core or single distinguishing feature of Tantra. In
sum, perhaps the identication of sexual practices as the distinctive feature of
Tantra only continues the long history of our own hypersexualized view of this
complex tradition. Ironically, White has in a sense reinforced the same distorted
Western interpretation that he so ercely criticizes in New Age versions of
Tantra, by arguing that it really is, in the end, primarily about sex.
But despite these relatively minor weaknesses, this is an important, powerful,
provocative, and in many ways brilliant book that does reorient our understand-
ing of Tantra and South Asian religion. As such, it should be of serious interest
not only to South Asianists, but to scholars of comparative religion, art historians,
and anyone working in sexuality studies.
Hugh B. Urban
Ohio State University
Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas. By Kim
Gutschow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. xixix+333,
20 plates. $29.95.
Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas by Kim
Gutschow is based on anthropological eldwork in Zangskar, a remote Himalayan
region in India, surrounded by some of the highest peaks and passes on earth, with
winter temperatures dropping to minus fty degrees centigrade and, in winter
months, only accessible by foot on frozen rivers. The author lived in Zangskar for
a total of more than three years between 1991 and 2001, even during winters, and
she visited the region annually for fourteen years. Zangskar is situated in the In-
dian state Jammu, and Kashmir and makes up the southern half of Kargil District.
Zangskar, where subsistence is based on farming supplemented by animal hus-
bandry, is one of the most marginal, least populated, and poorest regions in India.
It has a population of only twelve thousand of whom the majority (ca. 95 percent)
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