The forgotten Indian women gurus of tantric Buddhism

1,000 years ago, remarkable Indian women fought patriarchy and the caste system, worked miracles and inspired religious change

- Bibek Bhattacharya

When Kali Puja rolls around in Bengal, people come in droves to the pandals to gape at the clay figurines of goddess Kali's frighteningly monstrous, charnel-ground retinue. One figure that holds immense awed fascination is Chinnamasta, the severed-headed goddess, one of the 10 mahavidyas of Hindu Shakta tantra.

This fascination is unsurprising, because Chinnamasta stands naked on a corpse or a couple having sex, brandishing a sword in one hand, and her own severed head in the other, while two lines of spurting blood from her neck splatter into the mouths of her two attendants, women as naked as the goddess, Vairochani and Varnani. The third, central stream of blood lands in the mouth of her severed head.

Chinnamasta seems to have been a popular—if minor—goddess in Bengal and some other parts of India, for a very long time. One might think that this fascination stems from the strong presence of Shakta cults (tantric groups that worship Shakti or feminine power) in these places. The real reason though, is that Chinnamasta is a tantric Buddhist Vajrayana goddess, who was at the centre of a strong cult in India in 9-10 century CE. Back then she was called Chinnamunda Vajravarahi, and her attendants Vajravairochani and Vajravarnani. Some of the great adepts of this cult were women mahasiddhas (the great awakened ones).

THE MASTERS OF TANTRA

The subject of the participation of women in Indian Buddhism is not very well understood by historians. While this is in part a result of a paucity of sources, we do know that Indian Buddhist communities, at various times, supported robust sanghas of nuns. This ebbed and flowed depending on the shifting political tides in South Asia, probably reaching its lowest point when Brahminical caste strictures and patriarchal norms became hegemonic around 1,000 years ago.