From foods to drinks to drugs, tantric practitioners have long used substances for spiritual, mental, and physical transformation. These substances are used in a controlled and intentional manner, and their effects are considered as a tool for growth and transformation rather than escapism. In this panel, we explore the internal arguments for the use of such substances and the ritual outcomes of their use, including the symbolic nature of consumption, internal justifications for the use of transgressive substances, and development of ingestion across religious traditions. We examine the sometimes exoticized practices found in tantra through detailed and philosophical explorations that seek to de-emphasize the sensational elements of taboo consumption and instead better understand how practitioners themselves justify and understand their use. We investigate the transformative power these substances have on practices through their own conversion into ritual items and examine expanded ideas of religiosity that go beyond everyday temple worship.
The potently psychoactive plant Datura Metel appears across of range of traditions in premodern South Asia preserved in texts. Among those traditions is the form of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna) located in the yogini tantras, the last textual strata of that tradition. In Vajrayāna works the plant is most prominently used in instructions for bringing about vaśīkaraṇa, domination of another. This paper explores the possibility that datura was consumed for its hallucination-inducing potential by considering how the plant was viewed and used in premodern South Asia through an ethnobotanical approach to relevant texts, and also by comparing modern ethnographic studies that detail how the plant continues to be used in traditional settings, especially in Nepal and Himalayan India.
This paper analyzes the consumption of “servings” or “helpings” (Bengali sebā, from Sanskrit sevā “service”) among Bāul Fakirs and Fakiranis who occupy spaces at the social fringes of Bengali Islamic village and urban contexts. The first part of the paper introduces how the idea of sebā in Bangla came to refer to sharing food, drink, a ritual mixture of cannabis known as siddhi, and in esoteric contexts also bodily fluids, and how this connects with “mainstream” cultural ideas of consumption. The second part of the paper analyzes the cosmological background of sebā, including its role with regard to the spiritual teacher (guru or murshid) and the concept of the Light of the Prophet (Nur Muhammad) within the human body. The final part of the paper highlights social stigmas that practitioners face by adhering to certain forms of sebā and also raises ethical questions that surround some modalities of Tantric sebā.
One thread of tantric Buddhist practice is the consumption of the “five meats:” cow, dog, elephant, horse, and human. By eating these meats, a practitioner violated the social and religious norms of their day, embodying an ability to think beyond the dualistic fixations of normal life. The requirement to eat these meats, however, presented a clear tension to tantric practitioners who were also vegetarian. In this paper, I will argue that Tibetan thinkers used two broad arguments to resolve this tension.
In the first, authors insist that the requirement to consume the five meats applies only within specific rituals contexts, not in daily life. The second argument some authors try to resolve this tension is by minimizing the five meats within the ritual itself, either by insisting that the meat in question has been transformed it into divine nectar or that the amounts involved should be minutely small.
This paper explores how the consumption of ritually prepared substances leads to a perfected body by focusing on the alchemical works of Sanskrit South Asia. Here we find the ingestion by mercury of plant, mineral, metal, and gems in its purification process which then leads to consumption by practitioners seeking long life, health, and enlightenment. The presentation will explore the preparation of alchemical medicines by looking at gendered notions of substances, how those notions must conform to the gender of the user, the appetite of mercury itself, and the purification systems in place to allow patients to consume potentially lethal products safely.