#tendai

The sculpted main image of Eleven-Faced Thousand-Armed Kannon Bodhisattva (十一面千手観音菩薩) dating to the early Kamakura period (1185-1333) at Jōfukuji Temple (浄福寺) in Kōka, Shiga Prefecture, only displayed to the general public once every thirty-three years

TODAY!

by Marlon West (Bluesky: @marlonweststl.bsky.social, Spotify: marlonwest) Happy January Music Monday and MLK Day here at Good Black News! It’s your friend and selector, your sonic chauffeur, your groove conductor, Marlon, back again. I’m delighted to offer up this first of likely, 12 GBN collections of the year. This is an “afroclectic” collection of tracks released in 2024. It is more than…

There's a heuristic coming along that feels close to something I've been wanting to find for a long time. It all comes down to hongaku (original enlightenment) on the one hand, and Tantric and theurgic non-dualism on the other hand, and from there I think I have a way of making some interesting connections possible.

When I read Hellenic Tantra during the last week or so I noticed that Gregory Shaw tries repeatedy to establish a connection between the concept of the theurgist and the jivanmukta at least on the grounds that both meant that the individual practitioner would become divinised while embodied and alive (though only fully joining the gods after death). Well, it turns out there's a Japanese Buddhist concept that's at least somewhat similar to the premise of the Tantric jivanmukta and Neoplatonist theurgy, or at least the way Shaw presents them. The Japanese term "sokushin jōbutsu" means to "become a Buddha in this body", and it seems to have originated in Shingon Buddhism.

"Sokushin jōbutsu" refers to the Shingon doctrine that buddha-nature could be realised in your own present lifetime, in your present body, in your present appearance (maybe now even). This idea is often attributed to Kukai, the founder of Shingon himself, who may have adapted it from Chinese esoteric Buddhism. Different versions of the concept were proposed by Saicho, another Shingon scholar, who accepted a partial realisation of buddhahood, and Annen, a Tendai scholar, who viewed it as the full attainment of buddahood in this life.

For Kukai this involved the practice of mudras, mantra recitation, mental concentration, and visualisations, which were supposed to lead to unification or mutual identity with the Buddha Mahavairocana. If this sounds like how Gregory Shaw talked about Tantra, well...

Maybe it's to do with the fact that Shingon has its roots in Tantric Buddhist traditions, or Kukai's own background in that tradition studying the tantras, or that at a certain point the Japanese concept of Mikkyo (esoteric Buddhism) generally denoted a kind of Tantric Buddhism. That Tantric Buddhism was also very obviously, to some extent, inspired by Hindu Tantra, with its inclusion of Hindu gods and often centrally centering the gods of Shaiva Hinduism. This seems to have been especially true for medieval Tendai given the role of deities like Mahakala and Kojin.

The doctrine of "sokushin jōbutsu" also seems to have involved collapsing any difference between physical and "ultimate" reality, the human body and the "dharma body", and positioning the body (and matter) itself as the site of realisation and a symbol of the entire universe. This form of nondualism probably did align with Tantric Hinduism to some extent. In fact, as Faure notes, Hindu Tantra itself developed from the Vedic tradition and inherited an originally Vedic conception of the human body as a microcosm of the universe.

It is on this basis that Tantra proposed the mutual identity of the human and the universe, and so Faure interprets Tantric Buddhism as having returned to the Vedic micro-macrocosmic vision. The Shingon doctrine of buddhahood involving Mahavairocana seems to match this vision. Faure also interprets this as a departure from earlier and more ascetic forms of Buddhism. In fact, he suggests that, in India, Tantric Buddhism assimilated the gods of Hinduism so successfully that it ended up losing distinctions from Hinduism, and folding back into Hinduism.

This obviously did not happen with Japanese or Chinese esoteric Buddhism. But, in Japan, Tantra can still be seen at the root of Mikkyo, and, as Nobumi Iyanaga observed, Shaiva Hindu deities played a special role in medieval esoteric Buddhism.

Both Tendai and Shingon are accepted as developments of Tantric Buddhism, in the sense that esoteric Buddhist derived from the larger Tantric tradition, and in that sense it seems the concept of hongaku seems was just part of Japanese Tantric Buddhism.

Although the formal concept of original/innate enlightenment did not originate (at least in these terms) in Tantric Hinduism, it seems to have definitely been part of the Tantric Buddhist milieu in Japan. And if you think about it, that makes sense given the logic of hongaku. Tendai hongaku establishes a collapse of the boundaries between ignorance or passion and enlightement or dharmarata, and therefore the distinction between the demons and the buddhas/gods, but it also logically connects to Mikkyo notions of matter as a symbol of the universe or the Buddha-mind. In that sense, it's hard to not connect hongaku to Tantric philosophy and its nondualist logic. And from there you can access the larger significance of the demon gods in Tantric terms. I'd even argue you have all you need for a kind of "Tantric synthesis".

And what's more, you can get to a sense of that kind of cosmic vision in the way Shaw describes theurgy or for that matter its goetic origins and correspondence as elaborated by Kent, and then there's extent to which can actually apply them to each other. After all, in pagan Neoplatonism, the body of the theurgist, while embodied and alive, is to be figured as a synthema for the divine or the creative activity of the Platonic Demiurge or Helios, and in a way you can kind of parallel that with what sokushin jōbutsu entails.

What comes next, of course, is the erotic significance. In Japan, Tantric esotericism that at least allegedly involved outright sexual rituals was called sadō mikkyō, which basically meant heterodox esoteric Buddhism, or "left-handed esotericism", as in the Left Hand Path. That the Left Hand Path should be directly defined by eroticism or sexual ritual is not surprising: it logically follows from the way the terminology was applied in Hinduism. But, in Japan, it also allowed some esoteric Buddhist schools to single out their rivals as heretics. It probably also dovetails nicely with efforts of some schools to define themselves as "pure" schools, focused only on Buddhahood, as opposed to "mixed" schools, allegedly only focused on worldly goals: a line functionally identical to Iamblichus' on theurgy versus goetia.

April 2023: Tokyo, Japan Dancers perform during the Shirasagi-no Mai, or White Heron Dance, at the Sensoji Temple