Gods, Demons, Reality - Deities in Tantric Theory
Recently, I discussed the topic of deities in Buddhism with several people who had questions about the status of divinity in a religion that has been called both polytheistic and atheistic. So I thought I’d do a brief introduction on how the term ‘god’ with a small ‘g’ can be understood within Buddhist theology. Since the discussions in question related to tantric Buddhism in particular, I’ll also focus on the theological explanations understood by Vajrayana Buddhists. These understandings are built upon the foundations of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism so much of it applies to those schools as well. And to begin with, we don’t have to go into any specific regional mythology to describe the status of the thousands of beings worshiped by Buddhists.
I’ll assume that most people have heard somewhere that Buddhism is a religion without a creator God, leading to the atheist label. But even more people have probably seen pictures of massive altars in temples with golden statues of the Buddha and bodhisattvas, who are given offerings and prayed to, which at first glance certainly would look polytheist. And for those more in the know, you would probably recognise in those same temples various local gods exclusive to certain countries, who are also worshiped alongside the central Buddha statues.
These levels of understanding can be tackled one at a time to form a complete picture of how deities are understood in Buddhism regardless of region. First, there are two basic approaches you can take to address the question of how and why Buddhists worship deities: historical and theological.
Historically, many specific Buddhist deities emerged out of a process of assimilation where originally, cults of local gods were subsumed into the broader religious system of Buddhism. This was possible because of the Buddhist concept known as the six realms, which classified beings subject to reincarnation into six types, the highest being the gods. Of course due to originating in India, these gods or devas were earlier Vedic deities like Indra and Brahma. To claim that such beings were inferior to the Buddha who had escaped reincarnation, was certainly one way in which the Buddha distinguished his teachings. Once Buddhism spread across most of Asia, the type of deity subject to reincarnation could include deities like the Jade Emperor from China or certain kami from Japan.
This assimilation process applies to Buddhism just as well as older polytheistic religions like the Egyptian pantheon, evident from the gods of cities who later were said to control more abstract concepts or at least wider reaching natural phenomena. However, Buddhism is unique because it came ready-made with the six realms scheme that could be applied to a much more diverse range of local religions as an extremely potent tool for conversion wherever it went.
Theologically, it gets more interesting. I mentioned that the gods I just described are still understood to be subject to reincarnation, but there are obviously also deities who aren’t, who are enlightened. These deities include the obvious, Buddhas who have escaped reincarnation and bodhisattvas who choose to reincarnate only to help unenlightened beings. But in the case of Vajrayana Buddhism, the lines blur slightly between the worldly deities who are subject to reincarnation and the transcendent deities who aren’t.
One of the reasons the lines blur is historical. Tantric scriptures, are the texts considered canonical exclusively by Vajrayana schools of Buddhism and because they originate from a historically later period in Indian history, they often incorporate deities shared with Hinduism. These deities were reinterpreted in tantric literature as new Buddhist deities with new forms and functions though they kept the same names in many cases. This might seem normal, considering we’ve already established how deities can be incorporated into the Buddhist pantheon by using the six realms scheme. However, it is important to note that in these cases, the tantric deities are no longer worldly, they are transcendent.
Buddhas and Reality
In order to understand the theory behind this distinction, besides the binary of enlightened and unenlightened, we need to take a detour into ontology and Buddhology (used in the same way as Christology). Here is where the Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana schools of thought differ, so I’ll make a note of the differences.
You may have heard that besides the historical Buddha, Buddhists believe there were many Buddhas of the past and there will be Buddhas of the future, because Buddha is a title rather than a proper name. However, where Buddhist schools differ is the status of the people who become Buddhas. For the Theravada, their canon is the most restricted to the earliest scriptures, so they believe all buddhas and arhats (disciples who have achieved enlightenment), are simply individuals, regardless of supernatural abilities, who have attained nirvana.
As Buddhist thought developed and questions began to be asked about what nirvana was and the ontology underlying the Buddhist goal of escaping rebirth, a new concept of Buddhology emerged in the Mahayana, shared with the later Vajrayana. If it helps to understand things from a Christian perspective, you could say Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhists have a docetic view of the Buddha. This means that although we believe that there was a historical Buddha with a fleshly body (aka Sakyamuni, Siddhartha Gautama), this was also an emanation or manifestation of a universal Buddha who has always existed. All past and future buddhas are also all emanations in this way (The Buddhist term for this kind of emanation is nirmanakaya). This universal Buddha is known as the dharmakaya, often translated as Reality Body, because instead of a physical body, the Buddha’s body is said to consist of reality itself, i.e the universe and everything in it.
At first, the implications of this are unsettling, and as a Buddhist practitioner, it may threaten to undercut everything you believe. If the historical Buddha was an emanation, what did it mean for him to struggle for all those years he spent in hermitages, starving himself, begging for alms, and practicing the most rigorous asceticism? Even if these actions educated his followers, could it all have been for show? What are the implications for practitioners and if their effort matters?
Some Buddhist texts and masters have unashamedly said yes, everything the Buddha did while he lived on Earth 2500 years ago was totally for show. They even consider it the quintessential example of the Buddha’s great compassion, to have educated humans in this way. I am not satisfied by that answer, and neither are many Buddhists.
If Buddhists are to posit any meaning to their own practice, then the Buddha’s effort before he became enlightened must have been meaningful. After all, the goal of Buddhism is to become enlightened, defined as attaining nirvana, which is the product of a lifetime of practice and faith. However, nirvana is defined as eternal, always having existed, outside time. How can a temporal being become eternal? Wouldn’t that mean that nirvana has a beginning?
This is where the dharmakaya, the Reality Body, comes in. Because at the most metaphysical level the Buddha’s body is reality itself, it means that every part of reality is part of the Buddha including you and I. This meant that nirvana was not really a separate realm, but a way of being, such that ‘access’ to nirvana and ‘becoming’ nirvana itself were synonymous. So to answer how a conditioned being like a human could become unconditioned like an enlightened Buddha, later sutras gave the answer that nirvana is immanent in every being. The inability to recognise and embody this truth, is what stops people from attaining nirvana and becoming one with the Buddha.
This resolves the issues raised by docetism and the causality of nirvana in one stroke. To the extent that the historical Buddha always had the universal Buddha within him, he was a manifestation of the universal Buddha. This does not invalidate the immense effort required to recognise that fact. Causally, effort was required. But in terms of the result, his ultimate spiritual attainment had always been part of his ontological constitution, eternally, throughout successive rebirths. This is why tantric Buddhism is also called the resultant vehicle, because its goal is to manifest the result of Buddhist practice directly by recognising the Buddha already within.
There is much more that can be said about this principle of immanent divinity and the all-pervasive nature of the dharmakaya, and how that is related to the highest metaphysical teachings of Buddhism such as the concept known as emptiness, but that is for another time.
Transcendent Deities
Now the foundation has been laid to understand the pantheons of transcendent Buddhist deities. We began by trying to distinguish between worldly gods subject to rebirth and transcendent gods whose historical origins would make one think they should be in the worldly category. But based on the theology behind emanations I’ve laid out, now you can see how these transcendent deities are considered enlightened, it is because they are also emanations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas.
Like the historical Buddha and his predecessors, these transcendent deities also known as wisdom protectors as opposed to worldly protectors are discrete entities. Occasionally the lines blur because a single deity can be said to have many forms, in different texts or within the same one. This applies to the wrathful deities common in Vajrayana Buddhism or to the more well known bodhisattvas of the Mahayana.
But one deity can also be the manifestation or emanation of another. Take the case of Mahakala for example, who is said to be a wrathful manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, known as Guanyin from his Chinese form. Historically, they have separate origins because Mahakala was not always present in the same texts as Avalokiteshvara, but in Vajrayana Buddhism, theologically they are one and the same. Mahakala is the wrathful aspect or manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, meaning that any prayer or ritual directed towards Mahakala is made with the implicit knowledge that what lies behind the wrathful form is the bodhisattva of mercy and compassion. So what is Mahakala? Merely a mask for Avalokiteshvara? Just a name and a scary appearance used for particular purposes? Well what was the historical Buddha’s relationship to the universal Buddha, the dharmakaya?
If we go down this rabbit hole, we can ask what is Avalokiteshvara? The bodhisattva of compassion yes, but does that mean as a deity he is the personification of compassion as a concept, or is he a bodhisattva particularly known for his compassion? Is he a symbol or is he a god?
Perhaps we can answer this question with another question. When the ancient Greeks described Phobos and Deimos, fear and dread, accompanying their father Ares into battle, did they believe that was a metaphor or reality? An academic and an ancient Greek would give different answers of course.
So if you wanted to approach things like an academic historian, you could say belief in Avalokiteshvara and other bodhisattvas arose from a need to worship separate deities who embodied separate concepts. If you were a Buddhist arguing from theological grounds you would say Avalokiteshvara is a real being who has taken on multiple lives, andTibetan Buddhists believe that the lineage of reincarnated Dalai Lamas are such reincarnations. And you could add that several deities like Mahakala and all his forms are manifestations of Avalokiteshvara, and therefore they are transcendent because their source is enlightened.
As a brief aside, not all iconographic representations of transcendent deities are to be taken literally either. For example, the famous yab yum posture of certain transcendent deities in Tibetan thangka paintings depict deities having intercourse or coupling. It is not literally believed that in nirvana there are deities occupied with intercourse, it is instead a representation of two virtues intermingling in order to become enlightened, such as wisdom and compassion. However, the deity representing wisdom and the deity representing compassion, (in different tantric systems the the former is male and the latter is female, or vice versa), are believed to exist even if their representation in that particular instance of yab yum is symbolic. This is where certain lines get blurred, between existing deities and mere symbols iconographically represented in the form of deities. Similarly, essential advanced tantric practices known as deity yoga call for the practitioner to visualize themselves as a transcendent deity in order to discover the immanent nature of nirvana within themselves, because they share that with the deity they are visualizing.
This capacity for deities to be symbolic yet actually exist is another feature of Buddhism that, if not entirely unique, is at least emphasized and well understood compared to many other religions. This is in addition to the conscious syncretism made available to Buddhists through use of the six realms classification I mentioned earlier. In Japan, a modified form of Buddhist syncretism was eventually made especially explicit, and termed Honji-suijaku theory, which was based on the idea of Buddhist deities taking the appearance of the native kami. By making syncretism a consciously applied tactic or technique of conversion, Buddhism gave itself an advantage over the vast range of native Asian religions it encountered.
Buddhist Demons
However, there are certain disadvantages to this system as well, which brings me to my next topic, demons. This may seem out of left field for an article discussing Buddhist deities, but reflecting on Buddhist deities and their relationship with syncretism, I couldn’t help but think of the Christian attitude towards syncretism that many of us are more familiar with. In Christianity, syncretism is not a strategy to be deployed but a fact of life to be fought wherever it pops up. Though in the days of early Christianity it was tolerated because the church had less resources to control local folk beliefs, syncretism is certainly nowadays synonymous with divergence from true Christianity. Indeed I have no judgment or prejudice towards this attitude and often view it as correct from a Christian perspective. I view Buddhism and Christianity’s opposed attitudes on the issue of syncretism as a point of genuine difference that stems from deeper ontological claims, and it can be appreciated for what it is.
The reason why I bring up this Christian perspective on syncretism is that it does have something in common with Buddhist syncretism and that is the idea of demons. Gods of the near east were commonly understood to be demons or false gods by Christians and so too for Buddhists, some deities were not so easily incorporated into the scheme of the six realms cosmology.
Buddhists in fact have a whole other classification scheme for supernatural beings inherited from earlier Indian mythology. These beings have a more ambiguous status and don't fit neatly into the six realms categories. These include nagas, yaksas, rakshasas and others, who are believed to inhabit the asura realm just below the realm of the gods, or live in the human realm in places like important lakes and mountains. This is in addition to the beings known as pretas, or hungry ghosts, which more easily absorbed the category of vengeful spirits present in every culture. Of these supernatural beings, some are believed to be powerful enough that they qualify as demons, and this category also included beings who may have once been local gods.
In my last article, I mentioned Rudra, one particular example of this phenomenon since he was a deity with Hindu roots. But in Vajrayana Buddhism in particular there are many, many more. In Tibet for example, the massively important saint Padmasambhava is believed to have subdued local demons of Tibet, and one wonders if these tales may be tales of stopping the worship of local deities, preserved in narrative form. This is possibly a historicised interpretation of the concept of taming demons and local gods.
Nevertheless, if understood literally and in the orthodox way, Padmasambhava through tantric rituals and the magical powers he thereby attained, not only defeated these demons but forced them to convert to Buddhism and become worldly protectors of the faithful, thus bringing the topic back to the worldly gods we discussed earlier. This is what is meant by taming demons in Vajrayana texts. Making them work for Buddhism. What does that mean in a theological sense, what is the work to be done? Well in this case it is soteriology, so to tame a demon can mean that it works for the practitioner in the literal sense of magic with empirical effects, or it can mean that this former demon or local god now works for Buddhism as a whole when invoked for the rituals it was originally associated with.
Buddhism is keenly aware that the difference between a god and a demon can be a matter of perspective, and like all things in Buddhist ontology, the categories are not immutable. In a curious way, the Christian stance towards syncretism parallels this. In the Christian understanding all other gods are false, so that means they were either non-existent or demons. Whereas Christianity revealed local gods as demons, Buddhism opened the possibility for demons to be converted and transformed into local gods. It is important to remember though, that many of these beings are only remembered as demons in the first place because they may represent the deities worshiped by groups opposed to Buddhism, not because they were always believed to be evil.
But like I said, this is not without disadvantages and controversy. Indeed one common Theravada criticism of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism is that it incorporates too many deities and draws attention away from the historical Buddha towards other gods, bodhisattvas or representations of the dharmakaya, the primordial Buddha who has always existed. And Vajrayana Buddhists have taken issue with syncretism as well, as in the 1990s, when the current Dalai Lama was embroiled in controversy over a deity known as Dorje Shugden, whom he decreed was a mere worldly protector and not a transcendent one, and therefore not worthy of veneration or worship in certain official ceremonies by Tibetan monks. This led to protests that framed it as a religious freedom issue, but I am not qualified to go into the intricacies of the controversy, since the Dalai Lama made this pronouncement after his own assessment of Dorje Shugden’s history.
After making all these distinctions and explaining Buddhist theology and how various deities are viewed, I could go on and on about how they interest me as a Buddhist. But what I find most interesting from a broader perspective and for a broader audience is in comparative religious analysis. I mentioned earlier how I appreciate the radically opposed Christian and Buddhist attitudes towards syncretism, because both attitudes are internally consistent and are natural outcomes for their respective religions.
In Closing
I’ve also wondered whether this difference in attitude was one of the many reasons Christianity never succeeded in penetrating East Asia during the centuries when missionaries were most active, (though actually Christianity is growing quite quickly in the 21st century). Not to say that a more syncretistic attitude would have worked for Christianity, since the famous Jesuit Matteo Ricci tried and failed to use that strategy in a limited way by using the Chinese words tian zhu to refer to the Christian God and describing Chinese folk beliefs as merely incomplete understandings of Christianity. My point is rather that, by that point in history the Christian strategy of denying false gods’ existence or calling them demons could not tackle an edifice as large as the already syncretised and systematized pantheon formed by the interaction of Buddhism and local gods. Of course, it’s not like this was unknown at the time, and was surely a source of consternation.
To go off on one final tangent on that point, I’m reminded of the great movie Silence by Martin Scorsese, which depicts two Jesuit priests who were missionaries in Edo Japan, and persecuted by the authorities, along with their followers who were martyred for their faith. One scene that caught my attention was when the idealistic, devout protagonist Rodrigues confronts the more senior priest Ferreira who is jaded after being tortured and having been forced to apostatise by the imperial Japanese authorities. To attempt to convince Rodrigues that the Japanese will never understand Christianity, Ferreira argues that the great Francis Xavier used the term Dainichi to refer to the Christian God, but laments that this word is understood by the Japanese to refer to the sun, and then says that the Japanese cannot conceive of anything beyond the natural world. The viewer is probably supposed to understand this as part of Ferreira's frustration, since earlier in the film a Japanese interlocutor briefly attempted to describe to Rodrigues how the Buddha transcended humanity.
Now I certainly won’t blame the movie’s script nor the novel it was based on for taking liberties with this conversation, since Ferreira was a real person and Xavier did indeed use that term. But the scene immediately stood out as curious to me when I saw the film when it came out. Dainichi is neither the word for the sun as a natural phenomenon, nor the name for the more well known sun goddess Amaterasu, the highest deity in the pre-Buddhist pantheon, and from which the imperial family claims descent. So I wondered what this term Dainichi actually referred to.
Lo and behold this scene is inadvertently a lesson in Buddhist syncretism. Dainichi is the term the Japanese used to refer to Mahavairocana, who in some Mahayana and Vajrayana texts is known as the primordial Buddha, who is identified with the dharmakaya, reality itself. This Buddha is called primordial to refer to his eternal quality, eternal or timeless and unconditioned just like nirvana. This is why sometimes it is misleading when he is occasionally referred to as the first Buddha, because Mahavairocana is not believed to be temporal in that way, he did not go through a process of enlightenment like Buddhas who were originally sentient beings. Before all those Buddhas became enlightened, Mahavairocana was already one with nirvana, waiting for them. In this sense he is the ultimate deity, even though not a theistic creator God.
It is this Buddha Mahavairocana who came to Japan in the first few centuries after Buddhism arrived. Mahavairocana eventually became popular in general and one of the principal deities in the tantric systems of the Tendai and Shingon schools of Buddhism, and the picture I included earlier is of the massive Mahavairocana statue in Todaiji Temple. Eventually, this Buddha understood to be the pinnacle of Buddhist deities came to be identified with Amaterasu through the honji-suijaku theory mentioned earlier and depicted below, with Buddhist deities depicted above their appearances as originally Japanese gods.
This gave Amaterasu, the ancestral deity of the imperial family much greater significance since she had been transformed from a worldly deity kami to a transcendent deity, as much an emanation of the dharmakaya as the historical Buddha. Through this circuitous route of syncretism we can understand how a Jesuit missionary might have thought that the Japanese's highest concept of divinity was a natural phenomenon like the sun, even though the conversation in Silence never happened. Indeed in reality, Francis Xavier did stop using the word Dainichi when he realized it was an improper term to use to refer to the Christian God because it already referred to Mahavairocana Buddha, and thus was even more loaded with non-Christian ideas and associations than Ricci's term tian zhu.
This final anecdote is not to denigrate these missionaries who I consider great men, but from a Buddhist perspective I find it an especially potent example of the advantages and disadvantages of syncretism. Dainichi, Mahavairocana is meant to encompass all of reality, and in that way is the very definition of a deity beyond the natural world, even though as I mentioned earlier, this dharmakaya is understood as immanent, woven into reality despite not being subject to any of the factors that condition mundane existence like impermanence. Syncretism helped both the aristocracy and common members of Japanese society understand this deep meaning, and yet it also allowed the native concepts of kami to reassert themselves, to the point where in theory outsiders might have quite reasonably assumed that the kami of the natural world had taken precedence over the philosophical and metaphysical Buddhist concepts. This is just one example that I think is illustrative of how gods are viewed in Buddhism, and some of the tensions and grounds for religious debate that come with this crucial subject for understanding Buddhism as a religion and practice, not merely a set of scriptures and tenets.