Searching for the Body: A Contemporary Perspective on Tibetan Buddhist Tantra

Rae Erin Dachille's Searching for the Body: A Contemporary Perspective on Tibetan Buddhist Tantra goes beyond the standard philosophical, ritual, and textual discussions of authentic or authoritative aspects of body mandala practice. Dachille focuses on a debate between fifteenth-century Tibetan scholars Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo (1382–1456) and Khedrup Gelek Palzang (1385–1438), examining the creative citational practices related to body mandala found in Khedrup's Ocean of Attainment of the Guhyasamaja Generation State and Ngorchen's Destroyer of the Proponent of Evil and Dispelling Evil Views, illuminating the role of body mandala as a method for tantric practitioners to comprehend true reality, as the body provides a context and support for that realization. The complex tensions couched within the rhetorical devices, representational methodologies, and citational strategies deployed by these scholars has much to tell us about the notions of tradition and innovation, rupture and continuity, and reality and fabrication, and Dachille's observations are relevant to contemporary discourses regarding gender, embodiment, and linguistics, while potentially encouraging scholars to delve into the ocean of traditional knowledge in order to enrich contemporary critical discourse.In the early chapters, Dachille presents the larger scope of the debate between Ngorchen and Kendrup, which played a vital role in the construction of identities, traditions, bodies, and histories. The author begins by providing a historical background of the body mandala practices that originated in Buddhist and non-Buddhist tantric texts, such as Guhyasamaja, Hevajra, Jayakhya Samhita, and others. The author then informs us of the foundational consensus on the efficacy of body mandala between Ngorchen and Khedrup in order to illuminate their disagreements on how it should be understood, performed, and achieved.The tension between Ngorchen and Khedrup is rooted in the immediate sociopolitical context of the time and place in which they lived, when religious sectarianism and a doctrinal split emerged in Tibet between the Sakya and Geluk schools; in particular, the Sakya tradition to which Ngorchen belonged was on a shaky ground as they were no longer able to secure their once-flourishing patronage, and this instability disrupted the institutional life in monasteries. Khedrup's Thousand Topics, composed at Gyantse and defining his teacher Tsongkhapa's interpretation of the Madhaymaka philosophical perspective, his subsequent departure from the monastery, and his first body mandala text Ocean of Attainment, all appear linked to the split between Sakyapa and Gelukpa. In the disrupted climate, continuity of the body mandala was central to Sakypa's Path and Fruit tradition, which was the target of the Khedrup's criticism. Khedup's exploration of and frustration with the intersection of fabrication, imagination, and transformation is clearly underlined. Khedrup argues that one moves from conventional reality to ultimate reality by surpassing the biased or fabricated imagination, to which he opposes “a natural enlightened body present in ordinary being” (50). Destroyer of Evil was Ngorchen's response. In it he emphasizes the uninterrupted flow of the transmission of wisdom from India. Ngorchen uses scripture, reasoning, and oral instructions to refute Khedrup's argument that the Hevajra body mandala, a key tradition of the Sakya school, was absent from Indian sources. However, as Dachille warns, we shouldn't reduce the body mandala debate to sectarian differences between the Sakya and Geluk schools in the early fifteenth century.Interestingly, Dachille centers the politics of citation, especially the citational strategies, such as repetition, that Ngorchen and Khedrup employed when attempting to navigate between tradition, innovation, and restriction. In particular, the author notes that Ngorchen lays out his objections to his opponent on three grounds: failure to corelate between the supporting and supported body mandala, where Khedrup grapples with the relationship between deities and retinues; scriptural precedents such as Buton, which Khedrup cites when arguing about the nonexistence of Hevajra body mandala in the Indian tantric system; and the ritual's logic and authenticity. Ngorchen entirely rejects Khedrup's remarks exploiting the subtle difference between “not seeing something and its non-existence” (115) and elicits errors in Khedrup's claims based on Buton's statement. Dachille highlights Khedrup's methodology of “cutting the ground” to create basic outlines, such as his mapping of the Guhyasamaja body mandala by correlating the goddesses of the mandala with winds associated with the five elements, but she could talk more about the “confusion of the order of things” (122) as notable silences in the root texts around crucial details of ritual mechanics.Dachille brilliantly presents citation as a tool to reinforce or recreate lineage ties as well as to recast the limits of authority. The author points out Ngorchen's employment of citational strategies to balance polemical and commentarial methods in defense of the Hevajra mandala, arguing that they challenge the threat waged by his opponent's claim that Hevajra body mandala of the Sakya tradition is fabricated by Tibetans (145). In order to establish the Indian lineage, Ngorchen navigates a cluster of sources, such as oral and written instructions, root and explanatory tantras, and the connections among them. He draws upon three tantras (rgyud gsum), including the Hevajra root tantra, the Samputa Tantra, and the Vajapanjara. These play an important role in “attaining the meaning” of the root tantra (150). Also, in response to Khedrup's leveraging of contradictions among the sources to invalidate the Sakya tradition, Ngorchen cites authoritative texts as well as his opponents’ own writings.Dachille touches upon how Ngorchen and Khedrup use the genre of the explanatory tantra to “manipulate the interpretive process” (173). In particular, Ngorchen applies the Samputa in his defense: first, to validate the body mandala's basis in canonical sources; second, to prioritize the role of the guru's oral instructions for the silences found in the authoritative sources; and finally, playing upon its ambiguity to shake the foundation of his opponent's critique. Like the “perfume of a flower” metaphor found in the text, the body is a container or support for accessing and experiencing the nature of the mind. Likewise, the Sakyapa tantric perspective appreciates “the unique potential of both the explanatory tantra and the body in the meaning-making process” (177).As noted earlier, Ngorchen and Khedrup agree upon the efficacy of body mandala but disagree on how to practice it. Yet we never get details of ritual practice itself, a silence that may reflect the original texts. Still, although the book is largely about their debate, the absence of any discussion of the systematic procedures for practicing the body mandala looms large. Moreover, reducing the debate to citational strategies sometimes causes Dachille to downplay some of the broader historical circumstances, such as their fight over patronage, the role of political allies, the influence of foreign intervention, and the emergence of the Geluk school.Finally, among numerous minor mistranslations, there a few notable errors in the book. Tibetan words such as tshing la skyon are translated as “literal flaw” (119), while don la kyon becomes “flaws in meaning” (121); in both cases, the particle la unnecessarily and incorrectly changes the original grammar. Also, translating chang sa as “drinking place” is quite hilarious because if we translate the term correctly, it means “marriage.” Of course, we drink at marriage ceremonies.Overall, this book is an excellent contribution to the field of Buddhist studies and beyond.