It is therefore better to seek liberation through simple occupations such as farming, fishing, weaving, etc., and through a generally rustic life style. According to the view of the Sahajīyas, the most natural and mundane human activities such as eating, drinking, sexual intercourse, etc., are also the most noble. Eliade regards the Sahaja School as a profound mystical movement that, like tantrism, "is as Buddhist as it is Hindu."[8]

The Great Goddess Śakti

We now begin to see how in Buddhist Tantra, sexuality was openly employed as a means to ultimate identification with godhead. Tantra was a bold and provocative pronouncement, the product of a forward moving social climate. Yet t, let it be stated that even among its less progressive elements, Buddhism has never viewed sex-in-itself as something morally reprehensible. Sex is not avoided out of a prudish sense of guilt or shame. Rather, sex is reproached for its forceful tendency to bind human beings to the blindness of their passions. So, it needs to be affirmed that in the Buddhist Tantras, just as in their Vedic prototypes, sexuality is given a supra-sensual or "metaphysical" interpretation.

Greatly resembling their Vedic forerunners, the Buddhist Tantras devote themselves largely to the exaltation of Devi, The Great Goddess Śakti. The tone of these writings both condones and inspires an open and liberal social consciousness. They embolden their interpreters with the confidence and courage to ignore if necessary all religious conventions concerning in particular the distinctions and taboos regarding ethnicity, class and sexuality.

Vitally important to the Buddhist Tantras is the stark reversal of the male and female roles as presented conventional symbolism. The previous ordering of sexual symbology often recognized the female element as the primary obstacle to the male-yogin's spiritual evolution. In Tantrism in general, however, the feminine component came to be regarded as an indispensable means for the yogin's ultimate realization. And in order to actualize his true divine nature, the yogī implicitly places her above him and yogically embraces her as Parama Śakti, the Immaculate Embodiment of Universal Power.

Here one recognizes Tantra's main vocation, whereby, a yogin enters into cosmic accord in order to homologize his spiritual being with the will-force of Existence. And to accomplish this he performs the "rites of union" with a woman who is viewed as "the personification of Bhagavati (god)."[9] Thus, a characteristic notion found in all Tantras is that primordial energy issues from a god. It then becomes external and objectified, and ends by incarnating itself in a female body or śakti. Metaphysically a śakti is perceived as a "line of force according to which the One, the Absolute, differentiates itself and acts."[10] In a similar vein, Per Kvaerne writes,

One of the most striking features of the Buddhist Tantras is the role played by the female partners of gods, as well as of men... This particular feature has been interpreted as ... a resurgence of a religious universe in which the role of the female creative force, manifested in every woman, comes to the fore. [This] seems to provide a plausible explanation of the emergence of erotic symbolism – and practices! – in Buddhism.[11]

Ritual Nudity & Maithuna

Historically a prevalence of tantric conceptions existed at the Buddha-sect's very beginning. I again refer specifically to the rite of maithuna or "ritual copulation" and to the striking notion that "Buddhahood abides in the female organ (yoni)."[12] This is aptly chronicled in the earliest Buddhist scriptures.[13] In fact, The Buddha himself even speaks of certain ascetics that turn sensuality into a path to nirvāna.[14] "We must bear in mind," wrote Vallée-Poussin, "that several sects allowed ascetics to enjoy 'unguarded' women (i.e., not married, not engaged, etc.)... The episode of the former donkey driver (or bird catcher) Arittha, who though an ascetics, claimed that love was no obstacle to the holy life, [and] that of the ascetic Magandika, who offered the Buddha his daughter Anupama, the 'Incomparable,' should be noted."[15]

Here Eliade attempts to elucidate the basis of this fundamental tantric formulation.

Every naked woman incarnates prakriti [nature]. Hence, she is to be looked upon with the same adoration and the same detachment that one exercises in pondering the unfathomable secret of nature, its limit-less capacity to create. The ritual nudity of the yogini has an intrinsic mystic value: if, in the presence of the naked woman, one does not find in one's inmost being the same terrifying emotion that one feels before the revelation of the cosmic mystery, there is no rite, there is only secular act... The second stage consists in the transformation of the woman-prakriti into an incarnation of the Śakti; the partner in the rite becomes a goddess, as the yogin must incarnate the god. The tantric iconography of divine couples (in Tibetan: yab-yam, "father-mother"), of the innumerable "forms" of Buddha embraced by their Śaktis, constitutes an exemplary model of maithuna....[16]

A sensitive look at the rite of maithuna therefore reveals its deep-rooted yogic culture. Man and woman come together only after a long and arduous period of apprenticeship with a guru. Stereotypically, the male is taken as a yogic practitioner, the female as a "pious woman" (nāyīkā) who is transformed by stages into a goddess. The whole "iconographic dramaturgy" is played out over a period of a year, after which the couple is no longer merely human, but "detached like gods." The sexual act itself is no longer profane but rite, and because there is no emission of semen, the erotic encounter never ends. During the maithuna, then, the couple is transposed to a "transphysiological plane" where they experience not only bliss (mahāsukha), but "contemplate the ultimate reality directly."[17]

According to Eliade, the exemplary model of maithuna is to be found in the innumerable forms of Buddha embraced by their Śaktis or female consorts.[18] He regards the practice as a "substitute for prānāyāma" as it makes respiration rhythmical and aids concentration.[19] He furthermore asserts that if the "mythology of the Tantric cycle" is to be believed, "it was the Buddha himself who succeeded in conquering worldly temptation (māra) by practicing the rite of maithuna.'[20] Asanga in his fifth-century Mahāyāna-sūtralankāra, gracefully suggests that 'in the heavenly tumult of sexual congress, the participants obtain superlative bliss with a Buddha-like perception of melting into each other's divinity.' There are two other Buddhists works of interest in this regard. These are the Prajñopayaviniscayasiddhi (I, 15) by Anangavajra, and his student Indrabhut's Jñānasiddha. Both of these Vajrayānic texts persistently encourage maithuna.[21]

Cakrapūjā, Strīpūjā & Kumaripūjā

In the Mahāyānic Cīnā-cāra-sāra-Tantra, yoga practice in the Chinese fashion (Cīnā-cara) is extolled. The text relates the story of the sage Vashistha, son of Lord Brahmā, who goes in search of the Buddha and finds him engaged in a form of mystical-eroticism resembling the rites of Maithuna and Bhagayaja ("vulva rites"), which certain tantric adepts have historically observed.

He enters the great country of China and sees The Blessed One surrounded by a thousand mistresses in erotic ecstasy. The sage's surprise verges on indignation. "These are practices contrary to the Vedās!" he cries. A voice from space corrects him: "If," says the voice, "thou wouldst gain my favour, it is with these practices in the Chinese fashion that thou wouldst worship me!" He approaches the Buddha and receives from his lips the unexpected lesson: "Women are the gods, women are life, women are adornment. Be ever among women in thought!"[22]

Apart from Maithuna and Bhagayaja, there are three other closely associated tantric rites. But their yogic content is far less apparent. They are therefore widely recognized for the hazards they present, and for their tendency to degenerate into pure debauchery. But one should also keep in mind that the Tantric texts seem never to grow weary of repeating the adage, "By the same acts that cause some men to burn in hell for thousands of years, the yogin gains his eternal salvation."[23]

These three other mystico-erotic rites are cakrapūjā ("circle-worship"), strīpūjā ("woman-worship"), and kūmārīpūjā ("virgin-worship"). They all have affinities with the rites of the Śākta and the Tantric cults where the female nude and the sacred yoni represent the principal objects of worship and meditation.

In cakrapūjā the cakra, or "circle" denotes the fact that the participants of the pūjā, or "worship," are seated in a circle with the women on the left of their male partners. Couples are matched at random. In the centre of the circle is placed a virgin, a yoni, or a mystic diagram (yantra). On another level, the cakra alludes to the energy-centres in the body that are supposed to be awakened.

In strīpūjā, the chosen woman is offered meat and wine, then sprinkled with wine and rendered sacred. The attendants worship her in various ways. Then the deified woman "is seated on an altar with legs spread wide apart to display the sacred symbol, the yoni, which the priest ritually kisses and to which he offers food and libations in sacred vessels called argha, which are shaped like the yoni. After these offerings are consecrated by touching them to the living yoni, they are distributed among the worshippers and eaten."[24]

In kūmāripūjā, the "honoured" virgin is often picked for her beauty, youth and purity, but other times also for her ugliness and ill repute. An important element of Tantric rites is therefore the role played by girls of depraved and debauched character, even prostitutes – the rationale being, "The more depraved and debauched the woman, the more fit she is for the rite."[25]

Digression-Loop: The Sacred Dombi

In a similar sense, the preferred sexual partner has long been the dombī or scavenger woman. Celebrated tantric poets have written verse in honour of her whom by virtue of her veritable social-pariah status is "regarded as the living embodiment of the vulva in its absolute sense, free of all considerations of beauty, birth, social position or pleasure."[26]

But there has also been doubt over the meaning of dombī, which I render here as "scavenger woman." Earlier writers such as Mircea Eliade and Benjamin Walker mistakenly translated dombī as "washerwoman." But dombī means without a doubt a female member of the Dom (or Domb) community. The Doms have long been workers at cremation places, scavengers, or weavers of ropes and baskets. Depending on various regional dialects, they are also called Dombo, Domra and Domba. Dombī is simply the feminine form of Domba. Today most Dom settlements are in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. There is a major settlement on the outskirts of Belgaum. These particular Doms are called Dombari. They traditionally only eat leftovers and rotten food. They tend to work as scavengers and street acrobats. Some of them walk around town whipping themselves with a long thick rope while soliciting money from passers-by. The women go around begging for leftover food from the better-off households. They refuse to eat fresh food, at least the old generation does.[27]

There are also many Doms in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, and in the eastern states of Orissa and West Bengal and other places. Doms are traditionally well known for their musical ability. A medieval history describes the community as a caste that makes its living from music.[28] There are furthermore references to certain ragas entitled Dombakriti, Dombakriya, Dombakrī, Domb and Dombikā, and a deshī or "folk" tāla called Dombuli. Even to this day, the Dom community continues to provide India with skilled musicians.[29]

The Dombī as Dākinī

It has been suggested that dombī is a word of Munda origin, a pre-Vedic aboriginal Indian language. Its presumed root, dom, which is connected with drumming, is linked to damara and damaru, Sanskrit terms for drum. The term dākinī may have also come from this root.[30] A dākinī is a feminine celestial beings who is the personification of transcendental knowledge. In the Buddhist Tantras dākinīs play highly magical and initiatory roles as genies, and the women historically identified with them are particularly linked to the Munda speaking Dombi and Śavara peoples living mainly in the eastern states of Bihar, Orissa and Bengal. This naturally supports the historical idea that many Buddhist Tantras actually originated in these eastern areas and not in Northwest India. It is further worth noting that the term dākinī may have made its earliest appearance in India's deep Dravidian South vis-à-vis the literary Tamil Cilappatikāram.[31]

The Dom & Human Sacrifice

With regard to the Dom community in Orissa, they live as neighbours to the Kondh and play a subordinate role to them, acting as their messengers and procuring their sacrifice. According to the Hodge (2000), the Kondh inhabit the entire highland region of Phulbani, most of the highlands in western Ganjam and much of Koraput and Kalahandi in Orissa. Until the middle of the 19th century human sacrifice was practiced in all this area except the highlands of Ganja where female infanticide was endorsed instead.

As derived from the Kondh's early creation myth, the Goddess Teri believes that "there can be no fertility for their community without human blood falling on the ground." The role of sacrifice seems to imply two things here: 1) that the deity, though considered both impersonal and amorphous, could be made tangible; and 2) that communication was obtainable between the abstract god and its surrounding community.[32] Over time the Goddess Teri cult evolved the idea that human sacrifice was indispensable not only for maintaining the well-being of the surrounding community, but the entire world. This gave rise to the Meriah sacrifices, the victims of which were usually children. Now similar to the bhogis or "enjoyers" (Sritanara, The Khmer Contribution, 2006), the meriah victims were themselves believed to incarnate the divinity. They were strangled and cut into pieces. The pieces were then buried in the fields for the sake of agricultural fertility. Again, it was the occupation of the neighbouring Doms to procure the victims for the Kondh's Theri sacrifice.[33]

Doms – The Original Gypsies

It may now be an opportune time to suggest that dom is the origin of the ethnic designation of the European Roma, or Rom, the people more traditional known as Gypsies. The feminine form of Rom is Romani, which is also the name of their language. According to Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel, the earliest historic record of the Roma describes them "as wandering musicians at the court of a Persian king" while on their way westwards to North Africa and Europe.[34] Many experts on the Roma of Europe and North America share the view that Roma is derived from doma or domara. Domba is apparently a Prakrit word, while dumba and doma are found in Kashmiri Sanskrit texts. Dom is also the root of Domākī, the name of a central Indo-Āryan language spoken in a small enclave in the Northern Areas in Pakistan. The speakers of this language were originally brought from India as servants and musicians.[35]

But indeed over the centuries the Doms of India have been trapped in a vicious cycle of "downward caste mobility" and poverty has consigned them to a life of scavenging, though this is not always the case.[36] In the current Indian context, the Doms are classified as a Scheduled Caste.[37]

The Cult of the Dombi

Now to close the current digression-loop. When earlier writers such as Mircea Eliade and Walker translated dombī as "washerwoman," they presumably mistook dombī for a female dhobi ("laundry person"). The lapse is understandable considering that fact the modern name for a female Dom is dombini. But there is no connection to "washer" here.[38] In any case, a woman from the highly-despised caste of scavengers was a far more superior object of worship in the tantric rites of Bhagayaja and Kūmāripūjā, etc., as her social standing was so much lower than that of an ordinary washerwoman.

But at another vital level the dombī came to represent "the mystery of creation and the mystery of Being."[39] She was nothing less than the immaculate incarnation of The Devi, The Great Goddess Śakti, particularly in her terrible aspect as Kālī, who has always been associated with the primordial goddess and who existed in India long "before the Āryan invaders imposed their ways and manners on the native population" and whose ultimate origin is truly unknown."[40] But in the Hinduized cultures Kālī came to be known as Śiva's Scary Consort. Even to this day the Goddess is adored in the East Indian city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), particularly at the riverside temple Kālīghat from which the city derives its name.[41] She is always seen wearing a garland of dripping skulls. At a temple in the western Indian city of Jaipur, the Goddess was seen with her head twisted right around as if looking backward. Tradition relates that she turned her face in disgust when a goat was offered instead of a human being.[42]

So here in the cult of the sacred dombī we find perhaps the clearest demonstration of the "eccentric sacralities" of the underground current of autochthonous and popular spirituality that was "absorbed at all costs" into mainstream Indian religious strata.[43] Yet still at another very fundamental level, the divinized dombī comes to life through the yogin's highly developed body as she makes her way into his subtle being through the theory of the psychic body and the cakras. She is therefore interiorized and becomes, indeed, the incarnated symbol of the sleeping primordial force within. She is one and the same as kundalinī śakti, which the yogin endeavours to arouse and marshal. In brief, to concentrate his mind on the image of the dombī was an alternate means for the yogin to arouse the inner "mystical heat" called tapas and achieve yoga's much-vaunted alchemical transfiguration.

Accordingly the dombī made her way into the tantric's secret symbolic language or sandhyā bhāshā (lit. "twilight language"). "O Dombi! You are filthy..." one tantric poet wrote. "Some call you ugly, but the wise embrace you.... O Dombī! No woman is more depraved than you!"[44]

Yet due to the rise of numerous inept and ill-intentioned yogic practitioners, the various tantric rites of India eventually deteriorated into a culture of pure debauchery and mystico-erotic vampirism. Such debasing behaviour is largely the cause for the discredited image that Tantra continues to flaunt to this day.