Mahanirvana Tantra

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In the introduction to his 1913 translation, the man writing as Arthur Avalon set down a small confession of failure. He had found a complete manuscript of the text in the hands of a pandit in Nepal, and the pandit would let him copy it only on the condition that certain mantras be left out — for, the man explained, virtue was no precondition for their power, and to print them might arm the ill-disposed. Avalon could not in conscience publish a mutilated text, and so the world received only the first part of the Mahanirvana Tantra. The scene is characteristic of the whole encounter: a British judge, a Bengali scripture, a withheld remainder, and a translation that would shape the Western imagination of Tantra far out of proportion to the place the text held at home.

The Mahanirvana Tantra — the Tantra of the Great Liberation — is a Shakta scripture, a comparatively late member of the tantric literature, cast as a revelation spoken on the snows of Mount Kailasa. It is short by the standards of its genre, fourteen chapters, called ullasas or “outpourings,” of something over two and a half thousand verses in the portion that survives in print. And it carries, woven into its ritual instruction, a body of social and legal teaching — on caste, on marriage, on the protection of widows — so unlike anything else in the tantras that scholars have spent a century asking when, where, and at whose prompting it was written.

Kali standing upon Shiva, a press chromolithograph after Raja Ravi Varma (circa 1910). In the Mahanirvana Tantra the Goddess who questions Shiva is Adya Kali, the primordial, the one Brahman under the form of the Mother. — Ravi Varma Press, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A scripture spoken on the snows

The tantras present themselves not as composed but as revealed, and the Mahanirvana honors the convention exactly. Its scene is laid in the Himalaya, the “Abode of Snow,” at the paradise of Shiva on Mount Kailasa, where the air is sweet with mandara flowers and thronged with spirits. There the great god dwells, and there — as in the tantric genre generally, which takes the form of dialogues between the Devata and his power — the teaching unfolds as conversation. The questioner is the Goddess. The respondent is Shiva in his form as Sadashiva, the eternally benign, who answers each question in turn and so lets his doctrine be drawn out of him.

Who the Goddess is matters here, because the text makes a deliberate choice. She is named Adya, the Primordial, identified with Kali — not Kali the terror of the cremation ground alone, but Adya Kali as the first and final reality, the Brahman itself conceived under the aspect of the Mother. The frame thus declares the text’s central teaching before any ritual is described: the one without a second, the absolute of the Upanishads, is to be worshipped here as She. The introduction Avalon supplied makes the further point that Kailasa need not be sought in Tibet, for Shiva dwells wherever his worshippers, versed in the doctrine of the kula, abide; his mystic mountain is the thousand-petaled lotus at the crown of the subtle body of every living being, the sahasrara called Shivasthana, the place of Shiva, to which all may repair who have learned the way.

That double location — a cosmic mountain and a point within the body — is the signature of the tantric worldview, and the Mahanirvana inhabits it without strain. Yet the text’s own preface insists, repeatedly, on the present age. The discipline it sets out is for the Kali Yuga, the dark final age of the world, in which (Shiva says) men are short-lived, feeble, dependent for their being on the food they eat, and unequal to the long austerities of earlier ages. For such men the kula doctrine is given, as a medicine fitted to a sickness. The Vedic path of sacrifice and the slow ascent of knowledge are not abolished but declared insufficient to the times; the tantra offers a swifter and more accommodating road, and justifies itself precisely by the weakness of those it serves.

The discipline for a dark age

The core of the teaching is sadhana — disciplined spiritual practice — directed to the realization of Brahman as the Mother. The instruments are the ones the whole tradition shares. There is the mantra, the sound-form of the deity, without which worship has no handle; there is diksha, initiation, the rite by which a mantra is conferred and the disciple set on the path; and standing over all of it, indispensable, is the guru, the teacher in whom the lineage lives. The Mahanirvana is emphatic on this last point: the secret of the kula is not to be had from a book — a position the text dramatizes even as Avalon translates it, since his Nepalese pandit had said as much in refusing to publish the operative mantras. Knowledge that the mind inclines to this doctrine at all, the text adds, is the fruit of merit gathered across former births.

What sets the kula path apart, and what made it scandalous, is the panchatattva — the “five elements,” more luridly known to outsiders as the panchamakara or “five M’s,” from the Sanskrit initials of wine (madya), meat (mamsa), fish (matsya), parched grain (mudra), and union (maithuna). These are substances and acts that orthodox observance forbids; the tantric ritual takes them up deliberately, as offerings, on the principle that what binds the unawakened may, rightly consecrated and rightly understood, become a vehicle of liberation. The architecture is one of transgression sacralized — the forbidden thing made sacrament by knowledge and by the presence of the divine in all things.

A Kalighat painting of Kali, Calcutta, nineteenth century — the devotional image of the Goddess in the very milieu where the Mahanirvana Tantra was printed and read. — Cleveland Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0, public domain)

What the Mahanirvana does with these elements is its most distinctive move, and it is the reason the text earned both its reformist admirers and its tantric critics. It hedges the panchatattva about with restriction. It regulates and sublimates them: where other tantras might take the five literally, this one tilts toward substitution and inner meaning, permits surrogates for the forbidden substances, ties their use to consecration and to the discipline of the householder, and surrounds the whole with cautions against abuse. The Goddess herself voices the worry, telling Shiva that she fears even what he has ordained for the good of men may, through them, turn to evil. The text’s answer is to bind the practice tight. To the reform-minded among nineteenth-century Hindus this was the tantra at its most respectable; to some practitioners, as Avalon was told, the same provisions looked like an unnecessary timidity, a loss of nerve before the very power the tradition existed to wield.

Set within this frame is the figure the Mahanirvana most consistently addresses: not the wandering ascetic but the sadhaka who is also a householder, a man with a wife, a station, and social duties, pursuing liberation without abandoning the world. It is to him that the text’s strangest feature is addressed — its legislation. Alongside its ritual it lays down rules of conduct that read like a code: provisions touching caste, the conduct of marriage, the disposition of property, the duties owed to dependents, and, most remarked of all, the protection of women and the care of widows. Where the broader tantric and Shakta corpus is concerned with cosmology, deity, and ritual, the Mahanirvana turns aside to govern a household and a society. No other tantra carries so much of the dharmashastra, the law-book, inside it. This is the seam along which the modern dating question would be opened.

The road to liberation

For all its concern with ritual and law, the avowed end of the Mahanirvana is the one its title names: the great liberation, mahanirvana, moksha understood as release into Brahman. The text holds, in a register it shares with the Vedanta, that in the purified heart knowledge of Brahman arises, and that for one in whom such knowledge has risen the distinctions of duty and prohibition fall away. But — and Avalon underlined this against readers who took the Mahanirvana for a covert Protestantism — that knowledge is not won by discussion or by prayer. It is won by sadhana, the disciplined worship that is the body of the book. The high non-dual statements are the goal, not the method; the householder reaches them through the long apprenticeship of mantra, initiation, and the regulated kula rite, not by leaping over it.

So the text holds two things together that a tidier scripture might keep apart. It is, on one face, a manual of worship aimed at the realization of the absolute as the Mother, complete with the apparatus of mantra and the architecture of the kula. On the other face it is a charter for living in the world — for the man who must marry, raise children, hold property, and die, and who is told that none of this need bar him from the great release. The bridge between the two faces is the doctrine of the dark age: because the times are weak, the path must be a householder’s path, and because it is a householder’s path, it must legislate the household. The structure is internally consistent, whatever its origin, and it accounts for the text’s long appeal to readers who wanted a Tantra they could live by without ceasing to be respectable.

The making of a representative tantra

Then there is the matter of when this scripture was written, and the answer the field returns is uncomfortable for a revealed text: late, and probably in living memory of the British. The Mahanirvana leaves few of the tracks that let a Sanskrit work be dated, but the consensus of scholarship places its composition — or at the least its decisive reworking into the form now read — in eighteenth-century Bengal, with some pushing it into the early nineteenth. The contested points are sharper than the broad date. The earliest printed edition, issued by the Adi-Brahma-Samaja in 1876, carried the commentary of Hariharananda Bharati, who was remembered as the spiritual teacher of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the great Bengali reformer; one of the three manuscripts consulted for that edition came from Roy’s own library. The text’s liberal cast — its hostility to sati, its concern for widows and for women’s rights in property, its softening of caste — made it a natural scripture for Roy’s reforming circle, and it circulated among his followers as an inspiration.

This proximity to a reform movement that was itself entangled with colonial rule provoked the most striking modern claim about the text. In 1968 the legal historian J. Duncan M. Derrett published an essay with a title that says everything — “A juridical fabrication of early British India: the Mahanirvana-Tantra” — arguing that the work’s law-like chapters were composed, or heavily shaped, in response to the needs and suggestions of the early British administration, a Sanskrit scripture made to order for a colonial moment. The suspicion has a more lurid folk version, which names William Carey, Hariharananda Bharati, and Ram Mohan Roy as a trio who between 1796 and 1797 manufactured the text outright. The academy has not accepted the strong forgery thesis. Derrett’s own colleagues judged the most aggressive forms of it improbable, and Hugh Urban, surveying the question in his 2003 study of Tantra, concluded that the true author and date will most likely never be known. What survives the deflation is the durable core: this is a late text, reformist in temper, produced in or near the colonial encounter, and untypical of the tradition it claims to crown. That falls squarely into the register of the contested — a dating the field debates, an authorship it cannot fix, a “juridical fabrication” thesis it weighs and largely declines.

The north face of Mount Kailasa in Tibet, the mountain on which the Mahanirvana Tantra sets its revelation, where Shiva is said to dwell and to instruct the Goddess. — Ondřej Žváček, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Into this already-complicated picture stepped the man who would make the Mahanirvana famous. Sir John George Woodroffe (1865–1936) was a barrister and judge of the Calcutta High Court, son of the Advocate-General of Bengal, who rose to be Chief Justice — and who, in his off-hours and under the pen-name Arthur Avalon, became the most influential Western expositor of Hindu Tantra of his age. His translation of the Mahanirvana, with its long introduction, appeared in 1913 as the first complete English rendering of any tantra published in Europe; it can be read in full as the hosted Tantra of the Great Liberation, with the companion volume of Hymns to the Goddess issued the same year. Modern scholarship, above all Kathleen Taylor’s 2001 study, has shown that “Arthur Avalon” was not one man but a collaboration, and that the Bengali Shakta scholar Atal Bihari Ghose supplied much of the Sanskrit learning Woodroffe’s name carried; the agency long credited to the British judge belongs in substantial part to his Indian colleagues. That, too, sits in the contested register — a pseudonym now read as a partnership, a body of work being slowly re-attributed.

The irony of the reception is the deepest part of the story. Woodroffe chose the Mahanirvana to lead his great series in part because it was esteemed and accessible and, by tantric standards, tame; he wanted to rescue Tantra from the European reflex that filed it under “black magic.” He largely succeeded, and the cost of his success was a distortion that took decades to correct. For two generations of Western readers the Mahanirvana simply was Tantra — the text through which the field was entered, the lens through which the rest was viewed. But the text was the exception, not the rule: late where most tantras are old, reformist and sanitized where the tradition is transgressive, weighted with household law where its cousins are weighted with ritual and cosmos. The scripture that schooled the West in Tantra was the least representative one available, and the picture it left behind was correspondingly skewed. Later scholarship — Urban on the colonial reshaping of the category, Taylor on the collaboration behind the pseudonym, the philologists who reconstructed the older Shaiva-Shakta corpus the Mahanirvana postdates — has spent a century unteaching what the Mahanirvana taught. The “great liberation” of its title liberated, among other things, an entire Western idea of Tantra from the facts, and the work of putting the facts back is not yet finished.

→ In the library: Mahanirvana Tantra (The Great Liberation), tr. Arthur Avalon, 1913 · Hymns to the Goddess, tr. Arthur Avalon, 1913

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