Invitation to World Religions

The History of Hinduism  131

By the twelfth century, the bhakti movement had transformed once again, becoming an adversary of caste and gender prejudice. In this new transformation, practitioners of bhakti often rejected ritual and temple-based worship, insisting that the body is itself a temple and that God dwells in every individual. Many scholars argue that the bhakti movement had such a far-reaching impact because it was egalitarian, revolutionary, and frequently anti-brahmin. Bhakti poet–saints represented a variety of caste backgrounds. Furthermore, rather than using San- skrit, the language of the Vedas and of priestly authority, the bhakti poets used vernacular languages such as Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, and an early form of Hindi. The bhakti poets asserted that caste and other circumstances of one’s birth did not determine one’s access to God. Rather, it was the quality of one’s surrender to God that mattered. Tantra Bhakti was not the only revolutionary new development to challenge the strictures of gender and caste. Tantra , another new system, emerged alongside it. Making use of symbols, rituals, yogic postures, breathing techniques, mantras, and other spiri- tual practices—sometimes in shocking or forbidden ways—Tantra offered the pos- sibility of sudden liberation from samsara. Likely having arisen among mystics in the northern Indian region of Kashmir and perhaps also in eastern India, by the seventh century Tantra had come to influence not only Hinduism but Buddhism and Jainism as well. Tantra (Sanskrit, “loom”) assumes the interweaving and interconnectedness of all things. These include pure consciousness, which is identified with Brahman or Shiva, and material reality in its most basic state, which is identified with Shakti. Similarly, samsara and moksha are understood not as two different things but as aspects of a single continuum of being. For practitioners of Tantra, the material world is a manifestation of the divine energy associated with pure consciousness. Their spiritual practices are said to give them the ability to manipulate or channel that energy in order to gain liberation. Unlike the ascetics who renounced the mate- rial world and its sensual pleasures, practitioners of Tantra made use of material things and the senses as the means by which to transcend them. For them, moksha could be found in the midst of everyday experience. Tantric practitioners taught that the ritual transgression of social boundaries could create ideal conditions for transcending the egocentric self and achieving in- stantaneous moksha. Recognizing that people’s egos are embedded in caste identity and in taboos regarding purity and pollution, practitioners of Tantra performed rituals in which they identified their bodies as deities, ritually consumed meat, fish, and wine, and engaged in ritual sex with low-caste partners. As Tantra increased in popularity, it also became increasingly secretive. While many were attracted by the promise of achieving liberation in this life, others al- leged that some practitioners exercised seductive magical powers and that others

How does the criticism of special knowledge and power wielded by brahmins compare to criticism of the power of priests and religious authorities in other religions?

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