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Towards a Christian Tantra:The Interplay of Christianity and Kashmir Shaivinism
“Christian Tantra”? Anyone with even a fleeting acquaintance with the tantric traditions of India is inclined to retort with John McEnroe: “You can’t be serious!” But John Dupuche is very serious as he sets out to convince us that Christianity would be enriched by learning to assimilate a tradition for which human sexuality is central, and not always in a symbolic sense.
Autobiography, I have always felt, is one of the best media for theology, because it is unavoidably personal and existential – provided the author is transparently honest.Seldom can a Christian autobiography have been so candid and courageous as the first part of Dupuche’s book, which is essential for understanding the more technical scholarship that follows. He gives a gripping account of his travels between countries and cultures and of the changes sweeping the Catholic Church in sixties and seventies Melbourne, though the even more arresting journey is the interior one: the decision to join the Jesuits and then leave them because of his need for a spirituality without duality.
A key guide in Dupuche’s search was Bettina Bäumer, a diminutive Austrian who has become Indian, both Christian and Hindu and deeply immersed in the texts and spirituality Dupuche wanted to study: the tantra of Kashmir Śaivism. Even within that jungle of religions we call Hinduism, tantrism is not easy to discern or understand. It is at the opposite pole from the Vedic tradition of Brahmin orthodoxy (not to mention Buddhism, though a Buddhist tantra also developed). It was referred to as the ‘left-hand path’, for which pleasure was the medium of liberation and sexuality the means of enlightenment. There was something deliberately shocking about this, and the tantra was mostly practised in secret, yet here it is proposed as a complement to Christian spirituality as others propose Zen.This is made plausible not only by Dupuche’s scholarly expertise, but by his rigorous honesty and theological passion. The key to the tantric path, as in so much Indian religion,is the overcoming of dualism, finding a way to the ‘higher’ in and through the ‘lower’ by rehabilitating the body. This involves dimensions of both pleasure and horror, not only the encounter with the body of the consort but the contemplation of the corpse on the charnel field. Śiva’s Śakti or female counterpart is also presented as the terrifying, all-devouring Kula or Kālī. The Self, however, is pure consciousness (caitanyam-ātmā), and the primordial Word is ‘I am’, even to the point of identification with the divine: ‘I am Śiva’, the living liberated one (jīvan-mukti).For the Christian, this implies a double belonging: to a less abstract and spiritualised Christian faith and practice and simultaneously to an esoteric stream within Hinduism which seizes upon bodiliness as spirituality. There is a real danger here of losing one’s grip on both. Dupuche tries to guard against this by confronting Hinduism and Christianity as Myth vs. Reality, whereby “The religions of India help restore Christianity to itself” and 'not-Christ’ helps to understand Christ. “What the tantra surmises, the Gospel announces”.What he adumbrates is no less than a mutual evangelisation issuing in a double fidelity: ‘I am Jesus-Śiva’ and as such the alter Christus, one with Christ in the eucharist but also with Śiva in tantric liberation.
Though the book contains much indological scholarship on which I am not competent to comment, it is much more than merely an exercise in comparative religion or even theology of religions. The treatment is neutral and distanced, yet Dupuche leaves us in no doubt that he has staked everything on this path to liberation after a personal pilgrimage. For him, tantra is grace and its essence is love: it is a non-dual personalism, whose depths can be plumbed not by reason but by intuition and ‘seeing’. In this conception God is consciousness; the Word is consciousness of consciousness; and the Spirit is the power of the Word, which as self-limiting is ‘flesh’. The Trinity is thus a ‘marriage’: “Ultimate reality is essentially a sexual relationship”. All is grace, mediated by suffering and sin as well as by pleasure. In this connection it is worth remembering – and Dupuche goes out of his way to stress this – that Christian tradition can appear to be an equally “scandalous teaching” in the eyes of others, a tradition in which the assembly feeds on the body and blood of the Master and whose central symbol is a gruesome portrayal of torture. In this way the tantra, through the shock of both pleasure and horror, can open our eyes to our own tradition. There is scope here for what I would call ‘collaborative theology’, using theological reasoning from very different premises to address the same or similar problems: the dichotomies of feminine and masculine, soul and body, suffering and joy. At the same time, as Dupuche admits, the tantra seems to have been conceived entirely from a male point of view, to the point of ‘using’ females as the instruments of the male’s liberation, and one would like to know what possible remedy there is for this. Indian theology has been well described as ‘philosophising in the mythical’, but by the same token there is need for a philosophical critique of what the tantra presupposes. As assimilated by Dupuche it inspires a lyrical theology: “If God says ‘I am’, it is because he says ‘I love’”. Yet one would like to know which type of theology of religions is operative here: certainly not ‘exclusivist’, but more likely ‘inclusivist’, as in the documents of Vatican II and the World Council of Churches, in which what is “true and holy in these religions” (Nostra Aetate 2) is acknowledged but finds its fulfilment in Christ. In the context of de facto religious pluralism this assumption needs further examination.
It is no criticism of Dupuche’s extraordinarily stimulating little book, however, to say that it does not resolve these difficult theological issues, which are still outstanding and will be for some time to come. Its value lies in its contribution to what has come to be called ‘comparative theology’, as demonstrated by the American Jesuit Francis Clooney in such books as Hindu God, Christian God. For Dupuche, the encounter with Hinduism mediated by tantra is not kept at arm’s length but is profoundly personal. For a Catholic priest, that is a considerable achievement.
Reviewer: John D’Arcy May, Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin.
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