Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement by Ronald M. Davidson

Author:Ronald M. Davidson [Davidson, Ronald M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Religion/Buddhism/Rituals &#x0026, REL007010, Practice, Religion/Buddhism/History, REL007020
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

The surviving anonymous Sanskrit commentary is exceedingly blunt: the Śabara is Vajradhara himself on the top of Mount Meru, and the five-faced (which can be either a lion or Śiva) cannot begin to approach him.212 Thus the Śabara becomes an icon for the Buddhist esoteric divinity Saṃvara and assumes the position of a metaphor for the myth of Maheśvara’s humiliation and death.

Although Munidatta’s commentary views two Caryāgīti verses (nos. 28 and 50) as the composition of one of the Śabarapādas, there is little evidence for the ascription beyond the content. However, at least three and perhaps more of the Buddhist siddhas are said to have appropriated this name (or similar designations) for themselves; their hagiographies are found in disparate sources. Perhaps the earliest use of this appellation is for the late tenth-/early eleventh-century teacher of the siddha Maitrīpāda, and the Sanskrit Sham Sher manuscript published by both Lévi and Tucci indicates that, after Maitrīpāda’s change of identity into Advayavajra, he studied with a Śabareśvara in the south.213 It is open to question whether this is the personality introduced in Abhayadattaśrī’s Lives of the Eighty-four Siddhas, who is referred to as Śabaripa and for whom no connection to Maitrīpāda is imputed, since neither the latter scholar’s name nor his nom de plume Advayavajra occurs in Abhayadattaśrī’s work. The literature also includes mention of a Śawari who was of the Brahman caste and who taught the early eleventh-century Shangpa Kagyüpa founder, Khyungpo Neljor.214 There is furthermore a late eleventh-century Śabareśvara identified as both the teacher of Phadampa Sangyé Kamalaśīla and the author of an intriguing and difficult poem on the secret nature of the mind.215 In addition to these individuals is a much later Śavaripa acting as the esoteric preceptor for Vibhūticandra, the late twelfth-/mid-thirteenth-century Indian scholar of the Kālacakra.216 The accepted explanation seems to be that Śavaripa is immortal and still wandering the world, a revival of the old “eternal sage” myth found applied in Buddhism to saints as diverse as Mahākāśyapa and Vimalamitra. For our purposes, however, it is instructive to consider that the tantric directives for siddhas to practice in tribal areas no doubt fueled both a fascination with and the appropriation of their identity, all with more than a dash of Rousseauean romanticism of the noble savage thrown in.

The poetry most closely associated with the Śabareśvara/Śavaripa persona tends to play off the behaviors attributed to indigenous groups in the medieval world. As seen above, medieval tribal peoples were depicted drinking, making love, and sleeping frequently. One of the Śavaripas employed these activities as ambivalent tropes for the realization of emptiness.

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