3 - Tantrism “Seen from the East”

Summary

An isolated feature of the incomplete picture of an ancient epoch, full of gaps as it may be, may not convey any meaning to us, but if we find it again at a later epoch just as a part of an organic whole, we can conclude its being a similar part of an organic whole at the ancient epoch, only perhaps in an earlier stage of development.

Hermann Oldenberg (1973, p. 43)

The original form of Hindu spirituality would have been a spirituality of “Spirit Beings”.

David Gordon White (2012, p. 165)

Introduction

This chapter intends to raise the question as to whether the socio-religious movement we now call “Tantrism” may represent a wider Monsoon Asian areal phenomenon, with roots in a past that predates the earliest available textual data. It has been directly inspired by, and it engages with, three thought-provoking essays by anthropologist Robert Dentan on a common religious base in South and Southeast Asia (2002a, 2002b, this volume). As a scholar trained in Sanskrit and Classical Indology focusing on the adoption of Indic religions across Southeast Asia, I intend to take up the challenge cast by Dentan, namely that “speculative reconstruction of Semai theological history… suggests that serious students of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, need to pay attention to the indigenous religions of Peninsular Malaysia” (2002b, p. 207).

I begin the discussion by surveying the historiographical parameters concerning the complex process of cultural and religious transfer between premodern South and Southeast Asia, and the origin of Tantrism. Next, I revisit the idea, advanced by early twentieth-century French scholarship, of a shared cultural matrix in Monsoon Asia, within which framework Dentan's hypothesis may be situated. I then move to review Dentan's main argument that a comparison of similar religious tropes found in the late Vedic tradition and in the oral lore of the Austroasiatic languagespeaking ethnic group of the Semai in Peninsular Malaysia would suggest a common ancestry. By taking into account additional evidence from premodern and modern South Asian, Javano-Balinese, and Malay contexts, I suggest that many of the similarities detected by Dentan extend to the post-Vedic period, i.e. to Tantric Śaivism and Tantric Buddhism in the mediaeval or post-Gupta period (ca. 500–1300 CE).