From the middle of the 5th century onwards with the decline of the Gupta empire, Indians began to take more and more interest in the cults of feminine divinities and in the practice of magico-religious rites, which often contained licentious or repulsive features. The new magical Buddhism, like the magical Buddhism, like the magical Hinduism, which arose at about the same time, is often known as Tantrism from the tantras, or scriptures of the sects, describing the spells, formulas and rites which the systems advocated. Tantrism did not appear in organized form until the 7th century.
The Tantras consist of separate treatises which inculcate the cult of the deities, male and female, usually of terrible and hideous forms and often by bloody, obscene or cruel rites. The real principle underlying the whole teachings of the Tantras is that while the lesser and great Yanas (vehicles) prescribe long and tedious ceremonies and a succession of re-births for the attainment of the divine state, this can be more readily and quickly arrived at by the practice of magic and attainment of Siddhi. The worshipper takes a seity as his guide and by certain formulas makes his own body, soul, and mind, the reflection of the body, soul and mind of the deity, and he himself eventually becomes the deity with all his power and thus arrives at the accomplishment of his wishes.
The Suvarnaprabhasa, a Tantric work, which is included amongst the nine Dharmas highly valued in Nepal, calls Buddha by the name Bhagwan and invokes Saraswati and honours Mahadevi. The Mahakala Tantra shows the union between Saivism and Buddhism even more completely.
The Buddhist Tantras exhibit traces of every successive stage in the development of Buddhism. For primitive Buddhism we have the occasional use of Buddha's name and the worship of his image. Anitabha represents the Dhyani Buddha and Avalokiteswara the Bodhisattva. But mixed with these we are shreds and fragments of all from of religious belief indigenous and foreign and scraps form the teachings of every school blended together in a more or less coherent nihilism. The female energies were borrowed from the Saivas en bloc and with them came the necessity for giving female counterparts to the Buddhistic deities and the acceptance of the entire Tantric ritual.
The Buddhists saw that the Pashupatas were gaining ground with the people and that the Saivas has a adopted the Pashupatas and their doctrines as part of their system, and in turn the Buddhists declared these foreign elements of Saivism to be merely forms of their own.
Talking about the development of Vajrayana, guiseppe Tucci says “some of the Vajracharyas kept alive the ancient Buddhist culture…But in general they fell increasingly under the influence of Tantric thought, and thus promoted the diffusion of a peculiarly esoteric and magical cast and the predominance of an empty and ritualistic ceremonial”.
Tucci adds that in the iconography of all these schools both Buddhist and Hindu, the gods are frequently depicted in company with, or coupled with, their own Sakti. The consort or ‘mother' figure of Tantric Buddhism, and thhe Sakti of the Hindu schools exemplify the development of the concept of woman as ‘power, and the omnipresence of the god's inexhaustible creative or liberating force. Tucci went deeper into the mysteries of Vajrayanan saying “The Buddhist Tantras in which this erotic symbolism is most apparent are divided into four groups. The latest, and most esoteric, prescribe ceremonies in the course of which there tare references to sexual union with a female consort. As example of this we may take certain Buddhist Tantras which recommend a diet of human flesh, excrement and urine, menstrual blood and semen.”
At the time of the early Mallas and as the three Malla kingdoms, the increasing acceptance of esoteric Vajrayana Buddhism, with its concepts and practices taken from Saiva tantrism, began to erode the core of Buddhist doctrine. The decay of the old monasteries in Nepal and their transformation into living quarters for whole families must be attributed less to the deteriorating financial position of the monasteries than to the development of the schools of tantric Vajrayana which flourished in the middle Ages.
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