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yāvanno!śāśvatocchedo!rāśidvayaṃ!na!vidyate!||!26!||!!
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It!has!a!selfmarisen!nature!that!is!!
Completely!beyond!thought.!|!
All!living!beings!on!earth!perish!!
Due!to!the!net!of!conceptual!thoughts.!||!25!||!!
The!unique!nonmdual!gnosis!!
Is!devoid!of!all!conceptual!imputation.!|!
Since!there!is!no!existence!or!nonmexistence!
The!dualism!of!the!multitude!does!not!exist.!!||!26!||!!
Yoginī Cintā's Vyaktabhāvānugatatattvasiddhi200 also does not engage in the kind of explicit demonological discourse found in other works included in The Seven Siddhi Texts, but it does
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elaborate upon the theme introduced at the conclusion of Lakṣmīṅkarā's Advayasiddhi that beings are killed by their own conceptual thought, for which we might assume the existential condition associated with the demonological paradigm provides at least part of the implicit context. In this sense, Yoginī Cintā's treatment of the thesis that "this entire threefold world is composed of mind" (sarvaṃ traidhātukaṃ cittamayam idam) challenges its reader to
acknowledge that the perception of an internal-external bifurcation of the body is the basis for the belief that there are beings who act independently of one's own mind that can cause one harm.
The work's primary importance for this study of the connection between realization of ultimate reality and its complete embodiment within a demonological paradigm, however, appears in its instructions for the performance of sexual yoga and the consumption of the pill (piṇḍā) that is produced from the mixed sexual and menstrual fluids of the guru (or yogin) and consort. Yoginī Cintā's instructions on preparing and consuming the piṇḍā are
remarkably lucid. Her interpretation of the rite offers some explanation for precisely why consuming the combined sexual fluids and menstrual discharge of a couple who correctly practice the sexual yoga might bring about a direct glimpse of ultimate reality in the initiate and install this realization in the body in embryonic form. She begins by describing the proper performance of sexual yoga in terms of the production of a self-arisen body that manifests after transcending the limitations of the sense faculties associated with the ordinary, corporeal form:
Then, the range one's own perception beyond the sense faculties, born out of the increase of profound sexual bliss of the pleasure awakened by the constantly repeated bliss ritual is born as a mass of bliss that is the essence of saṁsāra.
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That bliss, which is endowed with signs [yet] devoid of the signs of [ordinary] beings, is gnosis, is a self-arisen body, is sublime bliss, is empty of mental fabrication, [and] is the mind that is arisen from ultimate reality of the mental imprints.201
Her use of the metaphor of birth to describe the production of this self-arisen body follows a general theme throughout the work that recognition of the innate (sahaja) constitutes the single factor distinguishing whether or not a given action of body, speech, or mind binds one further to cyclic existence or leads to liberation. In this case there are two potential bodies that might be 'born' as a result of sexual union—
the 'self-arisen body' of bliss that is beyond the range of the senses, or the ordinary corporeal body that remains bound to cyclic existence. The former 'birth,' which results from the correct performance of this yoga, results in both parties attaining a fully embodied realization.
Yoginī Cintā's use of the metaphor of birth also plays an important role in her description of the collection, preparation, and consumption of the sexual fluids produced during this yoga. Her description of the couple in sexual union penetrating the epistemically bound condition of the ordinary body and realizing an unbound, self-arisen body of bliss is followed by the production of another body that is remarkably less abstract and theoretical in its description. After the yogic couple attains a self-arisen body of great bliss (svayambhūrūpaṃ mahāsukhaṃ), the text describes the guru's collection of the products of their union. The passage is a bit long, but it is worth including here in its entirety:
Then the one who burns up the film over the eye of all outwardly directed conceptual imputations that becomes apparent when one enters into [blissful]
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201!Yoginī!Cintā,!"Vyaktabhāvānugatatattvasiddhi,"!170–71.!!
ato’pyatyantābhyāsasukhakriyāvibodhitopabhogagahanasuratasukhasaṃvardhanajanitātīndriyasvaprati pattigocaraḥ!!saṃsārasārasukharāśijāto!’bhūditi!|!
orgasm because the mental activity of [one's] mind-stream is beyond and unimpeded by the rapid fluctuation of mental imprints that are the subtle connection to a cyclic existence that is constructed by oneself like an illusion, etc., the lord of the world who is the nature of bliss, whose nature is pure being, who is endowed with wind, clasps the residual blood that has trickled from the inside of the finest blooming eight-petal lotus from the lower-mouth below the navel of the woman whose menstrual cycle is fully arrived along with the related seminal fluids. After that the lotus appears there like a
blossom closed after it has bloomed. And then the two, the blood and seminal fluid that are the origin and the innate source are mixed like the ocean of milk and formed into a pill, and it acquires the entire heap of collections of
elemental dispositions that are gradually produced and come forth in
succession from excessive rotation of this newly formed embryo etc. And in that [pill] in which the five [elemental dispositions] such as earth and the like are combined, in that [there is] "the feeling that causes one to behold the manifest state," [meaning that one sees that] the body that possesses the five psychophysical aggregates is the nature of [that] feeling. By being in close contact [with that feeling] and exercising restraint regarding the subsequent feeling, one becomes all pervasive, omnipresent.202
The chapter then concludes with a passage, followed by a single verse, in which Yoginī Cintā contrasts the feeling (vedanā) described here with ordinary feeling that leads to the
production of the afflictions and continual rebirth in the round of existence.
This passage is remarkable for a number of reasons. It describes the production of the piṇḍā as the product of a couple whose sexual yoga results in a form of ecstasis as both parties enter into an indistinguishable union and experience a collective body of self-arisen bliss. This seemingly abstract immaterial body is juxtaposed to a rather concrete description of the male partner's collection of the products of this union from the consort's vagina.
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Yoginī Cintā then compares the production of the 'pill' to the Purāṇic cosmogonic act of churning the ocean of milk, a process that is, among other things, linked to the first
appearance of the nectar of immortality (amṛta) over which the devas and asuras are said to be engaged in a constant struggle. The metaphor thus evokes the term amṛta, although it is not actually employed here, one of the most frequently used terms to describe the piṇḍā. The term piṇḍā carries a dual significance. It is first literally a 'pill' that is produced through mixing together the seminal fluids and menstrual discharge of the yogic couple. Such 'pills' constitute one of the most important samaya substances that a yogin or yoginī consumes during initiatory consecration rites and during the self-consecration practice.
Its second connotation, which Yoginī Cintā brings to the forefront here, is as a 'body' or, more precisely, the body of a human embryo in its early stages of development. The process of combining the seminal fluids and menstrual fluid is apparently imagined here, through the cosmogonic metaphor of churning the ocean of milk, as a kind of externalized conception, and the zygote or piṇḍā produced by that process is glossed here with another term for a newly formed embryo (kalala). This imagery is enhanced by Yoginī Cintā's reference to the process of conception in the formation of this newly fertilized embryo as one of 'acquiring the entire heap of collections of elemental dispositions'
(sakalabhūtasañcayopacayam). The most important point Yoginī Cintā makes here is that this piṇḍā contains what she calls "the feeling (vedanā) that causes one to behold the manifest state." Thus a trajectory is established quite clearly in the first chapter of
Vyaktabhāvānugatatattvasiddhi from the arousal of the yogic couple to their attainment of an ecstatic bliss-body followed by the production of an entirely new, material body in the form of a newly formed embryo that, as Yoginī Cintā appears to argue here, is imbued with a
particular 'nature of feeling' that is genealogically linked to the bliss experienced during the yogic couple's embrace. It is the physical substance of the piṇḍā that is in turn capable of transferring their experience onto an initiate or, in cases when it is consumed by the same yogic couple who produced it, of reinforcing or reproducing that experience and establishing its physical presence in the body.
Of course Yoginī Cintā's description of this process should not be assumed as the only explanation for precisely why consuming the piṇḍā can induce a state of realization in newly initiated disciples and renew that realization in more seasoned yogins and yoginīs. But such vivid descriptions of the actual mechanics involved in producing the samaya substances of the higher consecration systems are relatively rare, and this text thus provides some explanation for the practice where so many others remain relatively vague. What is even more unique here is Yoginī Cintā's description of this particular samaya substance in terms of the conception of an actual newly formed embryo. Given the well-known ritual application of this particular substance as something that is consumed during initiation rites, it follows that such rites entail, at least by Yoginī Cintā's analysis of the process, consuming an actual living being of sorts. It is thus not unreasonable to suggest that in the opening chapter of Vyaktabhāvānugatatattvasiddhi, a work that is, after all, allegedly composed by a Yoginī, we have what seems like a re-purposing of the kind of activity with which yoginīs and the broader classes of female spirit beings in their more traditional demonological formulations are commonly associated—namely the consumption of sexual fluids in general and the pathology of miscarriage via consumption of a newly fertilized embryo. In Āyurvedic demonological models for pediatric medicine, such female baby snatchers (bālagrahā) were the assumed culprits behind failed pregnancies and childhood diseases. As Fred Smith notes,
these beings appear to be external to the Sanskritic literary traditions and were at some point incorporated into it.203
This stands as perhaps one of the primary, albeit tenuous, examples of continuity between the rites described in Vyaktabhāvānugatatattvasiddhi and the demonological paradigm. To the degree that this continuity can be granted some legitimacy, it reveals yet another connection between the generation of a fully embodied enlightenment and the existential condition revealed within the demonological paradigm. At the very least, the fact that the initiate or initiated practitioner acquires power from ingesting such substances is in itself indicative of their status as "power substances." 204 In this particular case, that power appears to be derived from the fact that these substances have been transformed, through a kind of extra-utero fertilization process, into a living embryo. Yoginī Cintā's first chapter presents a blending of both the substance and aesthetics of power, grounding the yogic epistemology of her self-arisen body in an actual material substance, before describing the power that consuming that substance has to induce a state of epistemic unboundedness.
The instructions to actually ingest this piṇḍā do not appear in Yoginī Cintā's text, but can be assumed given the context. The verses that immediately follow the production and description of the piṇḍā describe the exercise of restraint (atiniyata) regarding any
subsequent feelings (anuvedanā), indicating that the subject who consumes the piṇḍā must be able to focus exclusively on the 'feeling' with which it is imbued, and which it then elicits in the body of the consumer. The result is yet another kind of yogic magnification in which the subject becomes all pervasive (sarvavyāpi) and omnipresent (sarvagata). This state of
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203!Fred!Smith,!The(Self\Possessed,!481.!!
204!For!a!chronologicalmhistorical!model!of!the!development!of!the!notion!of!blood!and!seminal!fluids!as!
'power!substances'!and!its!eventual!interpretation!within!a!more!aesthetic!paradigm!from!the!early!
Kula/Kaula!to!the!later!Kaśmiri!Trika!Kaula!system,!see!White,!Kiss(of(the(Yogini,!14–15.(
being all pervasive and omnipresent has its correlates in the yogic practices of bodily magnification for which there is evidence presented above from Padmavajra's Guhyasiddhi and in the epistemology of gnostic pervasion in Indrabhūti's Jñānasiddhi.
To summarize, the sequence of instructions in Yoginī Cintā's
Vyaktabhāvānugatatattvasiddhi presents a discourse of embodied enlightenment that proceeds along the following trajectory. First the yogic couple progresses through various states of sexual arousal through a series of interactions involving bodily gestures, glances, and touch and culminating in their bodily embrace. The couple eventually transcends their epistemically bound corporeal bodies only to attain a collective body that is beyond the range of the senses and composed of bliss. The products of this body in turn produce a new body as the seminal and menstrual fluids are mixed together to form a newly formed embryo. This embryonic body is then consumed by body and produces the realization of that some-body's own body as a body that is all pervading and omnipresent. Yoginī Cintā's explanation of the piṇḍā indicates that the act of consuming the samaya substances during initiation and self-consecration is highly invested in the notion of embodied realization, and it offers some explanation as to how that embodied realization might be transferred between a guru and disciple during the consecration ritual or self-administered and reinforced by the yogic couple during the self-consecration practice.
Yoginī Cintā's text contains a final affirmation of a fully embodied realization in its sixth section titled "The Entire Threefold World is Composed of Mind" (sarvam
traidhātukam cittamayam), where the physical processes of cultivating this body are tied into classical Indic aesthetic theory through the notion of the innate (sahaja). The passage reads:
Thus it is said, "Because bodhicitta is naturally pure, whatever bodily movements issue forth from the state of sahaja are all the various types of
mudrā, and whatever verbal expressions there are, they are the various types of mantra, and the vibration that is the appearance of the innate that is incessant, non-abiding, non-compounded, unlimited, that is set in motion by the various types of sentiments, and emotional states, that is eroticism, bravery, disgust, anger, laughter, fear, compassion, wonder, peace, etc., and which is also desire, anger, delusion, madness, pride, envy, and jealousy, etc., whatever arises all has the mental representation of gnosis, has a pure nature that reflects everything." This entire three-fold world is composed of mind.205 Here the text presents a fully developed notion of embodiment that is in accord with its central doctrine of sahaja, and that is reminiscent of the notion of a natural connection established between the various bodily and mental behaviors of a yogin who has attained realization and the natural expression of the awakened state in the world. The list of the nine sentiments (navarasam) that appears here follows the exact same set and ordering of the nine sentiments that are ascribed to the manifestation of the deity Hevajra in Hevajratantra II.v.26.206 The correlation between Yoginī Cintā's proclamation of this transformation of the entire range of mental, physical, and verbal actions and behaviors from their usual, afflicted state to their pure nature shall become clearer in chapter four as the connection between behavior, normative social ethics, and the body's vulnerability to interference from the world of spirit beings is brought into greater focus within the context of the performance of the post-generation stage caryā and vrata.