A Journey into Taoist Hell

Following poorly printed maps labelled in broken English and handed out by auto-rickshaw drivers at Thai flea markets is a hazardous undertaking at the best of times. The present author recently set out on a foot march through the suburbs of Trang - a Chinese city in southern Siam - following the instructions on one such map in search of a certain Chinese temple that he was assured was worth the journey. It proved to be a major undertaking.

Trang is not a particularly large city and is very orderly, but when you are not sure just where you are headed then it might as well be a sprawling labyrinth. After a few wrong turns you find yourself thoroughly lost, and since the road signs are all in Thai script there are few useful landmarks to help you on your way. Soon you are wandering aimlessly through industrial estates and semi-rural allotments. Moreover, setting out after lunch is a mistake in the 'Mad dogs and Englishman' category. The humidity starts to soar in the early afternoon. Rain clouds gather but no rain arrives; just an inpenetrable wall of humidity shimmering under the blazing sun. You go on regardless, though, and buy some water off a man on the roadside who, you think - if his hand signals are to be believed -, indicates that yes there is a temple, or something, somewhere on ahead. Eventually you decide that you'll give it five more minutes before turning around, and then - suddenly - as you come around a bend, there it is! Temple gates in the distance! It is a small miracle, and an ordeal, but you've made it!

* * * 

The temple in question is undoubtedly one of the strangest this author has seen in all his travels. It is sacred to the great Chinese war god Guan Yu who is honoured with a full-sized statue, along with his horse, just outside the temple portals. Thus:

The grounds of the temple are very colourful, with numerous small buildings and service structures with the whole space centred on a very tall and prominent dragon pillar, which indeed is the emblem of the temple as marked on the map the author has been following. The temple is known for this tall pillar. Thus:

The temple itself is large and spacious and features a dragon pool below the open aperture in the centre of the ceiling such that the pool and its dragons shine within the gloom of the space. Few other temples make such dramatic use of the light of the oculus. The effect is very pleasing, giving the whole a sort of mystical, luminous ambience. Dragon symbolism - always standard in any Chinese temple - is especially accentuated here, both in the grounds and in the temple, and it is done very well. Thus:

. 

Beyond the temple, through a side door, is an opening onto a quite extensive covered space with tables and chairs for dining. It is a space intended to accommodate a large congregation, especially during the famous Trang vegetarian festival each October during which crowds of Chinese travel from far and wide. It is perhaps relevant to this function, and to vegetarianism specifically, that at the far corner of the dining area is a small temple to the Hindoo deity Shiva. It is remarkable because it is entirely in the Hindoo style. Its whole iconography is Hindoo, an entirely Hindoo gesture within an otherwise completely Chinese temple complex. Thus:

The Shiva temple is the small building in the distance. Its function is directly related to the dining area. It is arranged, evidently, so that diners can easily access it.

None of this, however, prepares the visitor for a further section of the complex back towards the main gates and to the left. There is a small temple to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, and a large statue to the laughing Boodha, Boodai - a great favvourite among the Chinese. But then, without warning, one encounters an outdoor garden scene that features a bridge and life-sized, lurid efigies of poor souls being tortured by a vicious demon. Thus:

Then, in a shelter beyond this - back out into the heat and following the pathway - you come to an extraordinary scene: an extensive, explicit diorama depicting the many tortures of Taoist hell in all their gruesome detail. It is an unexpected and arresting discovery. The author had been told the temple was worth the visit, and the tourist literature made much of the dragon pillar in the courtyard, but no one had mentioned a full-scale rendering of the torture chambers of the Chinese underworld in pornographic naturalism! Thus:

Some dozen explicit tortures are depicted. Here are a few:

Pounding

Bisection

Dismemberment

Bed of Nails

Eaten alive by Dogs

Wok fried

The agents of torture are feirce crazy-eyed chocolate-brown demons, each of them wearing tiger-skin underpants with tiger faces on their behinds. Thus:

Commanding the demons are the various ministers of hell. There are, firstly, the two guides to the Chinese underworld, Ox-Head and Horse-Face, who in this case are standing guard at one end of the display. By tradition these are the first beings the dead soul encounters after crossing the bridge into the Underworld. They carry pitch-forks and deliver the souls to the torture chambers where each soul is punished according to their failings and misdeeds. Here they are:

More menacing, though - and a successfully macabre feature of this particular display - are the two figures called the Heibai Wuchang, the black and white 'Ghosts of Impermanence'. They are watching on as the demons do their work. Here they are:

Images of these two ghouls also feature on the altar at one end of the display. Thus:

The purpose of the diorama, it is clear, is to remind visitors to the temple complex of the terrible purifications that await them in the afterlife as a consequence of their sins in this current life. The scenes are lurid and ghoulish in order to frighten and terrify.

Westerners very often have entirely sanitized views of Taoism - Boodhism too - and have a corresponding bleak and prejudiced view of the occidental traditions, and Catholicism in particular. They are surprised, even shocked, to find that the eastern religions have such graphic and violent depictions of a terrible afterlife. ("I thought terrifying people with tales of hellish torment was the stuff of the medieval Church. Alan Watts never mentioned this!") 

In reality, Taoism - by which we mean popular, practical, religious Chinese Taoism and not the secularized philosophical version, or coffee shop Taoism, known in New Age circles - proposes a complex afterlife featuring purifying tortures prior to reincarnation. Numerous Taoist texts describe the hell-realms and their denizens and the torments thereof in shocking detail. They are a commonplace in Chinese folklore. To a great extent this has been appropriated into Taoism from Boodhist descriptions of the 'Naraka' (realms of punishment) since - contrary to Western misunderstandings - Boodhism too has conceptions of otherworldly punishments every bit as grisly as any ever imagined in Catholicism. 

Indeed, the present author can think of no depictions of the torments of hell in Christian art - not even in Heironymous Bosch or Dante - that are quite as graphic and quite as extreme as these. The diorama at Trang illustrates the perverse depths of the oriental religious imagination. A journey to this temple - the Guan Yu temple on the northern outskirts of Trang - is worth the effort just for this. It is a sobering and confronting reminder of a dimension of oriental religiosity about which many Westerners know nothing. Taoists, like Boodhists, are threatened with terrible punishments if they misbehave. The fact that hell is a temporary phase of the afterlife in the eastern traditions and not an eternal damnation as it is in the West is, in context, small comfort. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Chariots of the Moon

The Moon Chariots of Udupi

The most unique feature of the Hindoo cultus to be found at the sacred town of Udupi on the west coast of the Indian sub-continent are elaborate rites in which cult objects – statues of deities – are placed in massive “chariots” and dragged by devotees around a fixed circuit. The present author was privileged to watch the entire procession from start to finish a few nights ago and has since been pondering the symbolism of the event. 

As always in India there are centuries and even millennia of overlays obscuring the original cultus – Hindooism is especially organic and relinquishes nothing to time – but the essentials of the rites have not changed and can be made out with careful observation and a discerning sense of the symbolic. There are always keys with which even the strangest and most opaque mysteries can be unlocked. Even if those who maintain the rites today have lost sight of their origins, they will usually preserve and guard the essentials – at least in an integral and living tradition such as Hindooism. 

In the case of the rites at Udupi there is a single and somewhat obvious key to what otherwise are peculiar but spectacular events. There are three temples at the site, each of a different age and a different layer of history. It is an ancient site, but it was expanded as recently as the XIIth century when it became one of the foremost centres for the veneration of the avatar Lord Krishna in all the lands of Hindoostan. Each evening – or at least on certain evenings, and certainly at festivals – the image of Lord Krishna, along with an image of Lord Shiva, is removed from its home in the temple and placed in massive four-wheeled wooden constructions which are designated as “chariots”. 

These vehicles are highly decorated, most notably with horse figurines, and function, in fact, as types of temples on wheels. Then they are lit up, blessed and dragged by thick ropes around an elongated pathway. The route is marked by two large guardians, namely men in over-sized costumes with each wielding a sword and a shield, who spin around in circles as they lead the procession. There are starts and stops and fireworks and candles along the way. When the chariots have completed the circumabulation the cult statues are removed and put back into their respective temples in the usual place having gone, it seems, for their nightly jaunt around the track. The photographs on this page illustrate the rites. 

The key? Clearly, the entire event is an enactment of the movement of celestial bodies around the circuit of the heavens. All the details of the rites become explicable in light of this fact. Specifically, one “chariot” – painted gold, as it happens – represents the Sun, and another – balloon-like - represents the Moon. The circuit, which is oriented exactly east-west, represents the ecliptic. The array of torches, fireworks and candles around the pathway represent the background of the stars. The whirling guardians armed with swords and shields represent the nodes that define the limits of the ecliptic. We can be sure of this key since the very name of the town, Udupi, means “Lord of the Stars” and the myths and legends concerning the founding of the site are all cosmological in nature. Moreover, as the present author noted in a previous post, the town is a veritable centre of the astrological sciences; the Hindoo religion takes a particular astrological form here. The entire history of the place has to do with the stars and stellar religion. 

The thing that obscures this key to the symbolism of the Udupi complex is the association of Krishna with the site. Udupi is now known as a centre of devotion to Lord Krishna, and in this sense there is no obvious and direct stellar dimension to that cultus. Indeed, the usual explanation given for the nightly rounds of the chariot is that Krishna was a charioteer, most famously in the Bhagavad Gita. Why is the cult statue of Krishna taken from its temple, placed in a chariot and dragged around its circuit every night? There is a mythological reason: it enacts the scenes of the Gita in which Krishna rides in his chariot. 

But, in fact, this is the most recent layer of symbolism – an overlay on top of the older rites. Before Krishna, the site was sacred to Shiva, and specifically to Shiva as a Moon god. This is plain if one ventures into the sanctuary of the oldest Shiva temple on the site, the Chandramauleshvara Temple. There Shiva is represented, not by the usual lingam, but by an image consisting of a bright round silver face. Chandramauleshvara means, literally, Moon-crowned, or Moon-faced. Shiva, then, was the original passenger in the celestial chariot, the chariot of the Moon. The Krishna cult is a late arrival. Krishna has been added to the temple complex in the XIIth century on the basis of the simple association of chariots. Since this was already a place featuring sacred chariots, the cult of Lord Krishna, the charioteer, found a ready home here. But one needs to look beyond the associations with Krishna to the earlier Shaivite layer of rites in order to understand them correctly. 

Many other strange details of the rites become clear once one applies the key. The whole complex, in fact, its history and its rituals, deserves a thorough study – more thorough and comprehensive than can be offered here. In each of the temples in the complex there are further stellar motifs. The more time one spends there, the more the cosmological character of the cultus becomes clear. 

* * *

As an aside, the structure, purpose and symbolism of the lunar chariots of Udupi invite comparison with the Chariot Trump in the Tarot cards of western esotericism. The resemblance is striking. The present author has long noted that while most occidental literary references to celestial chariots have a solar symbolism - Phaethon's chariot in Greek mythology, for instance - the Chariot Trump of the Tarot is, even in the earliest designs, lunar. The author has had the problem of explaining this lunar chariot symbolism. The problem is resolved in Udupi. Here we have lunar chariots, and they take a form that is strongly reminiscent of the Tarot Trump. 

See the design of the A.E. Waite deck below. Ignoring the pseudo-Egyptian sphinx motif, note the lunar and celestial symbolism throughout. It is exactly this chariot that one encounters in the great temple of Udupi in western India. Most remarkable is the winged (phallic) device in the centre of the card. In the large lunar chariots used in the sacred parades in Udupi, exactly this motif is displayed during the period that the chariot is on the move. Thus, not only is there a general similarity, there is a consonance of details. Note also, if readers care to look closely, how the chariot-riders belt is the celestial ecliptic. The conclusion is inescapable: this Tarot design refers to the very same traditions that are given expression in the rites of Udupi. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Danielou's Shiva & the Primordial Tradition

Often counted as a “soft” Traditionalist after he became a sympathetic reader of some of the works Rene Guenon in the 1940s, the French musician and teacher Alain Danielou spent most of his adult life living in the Asi Ghat area of Shiva’s sacred city, Benares, where he adopted Shaivite religion and lived as a Shaivite Hindoo. The present author has just spent over a month in the same city trying his best to come to terms with Shaivism and towards that end purchased and read a copy of Monseiur Danielou’s Shiva & the Primordial Tradition from the Asi Ghat bookstore hoping that it might shed light upon the key aspects of Shaivism and, as the title promises, its place in the ‘Primordial Tradition’ of integral religions. Regrettably, the book does neither to any depth. It is a strange and disappointing work. Danielou presents Shaivism as a type of Dionysian phallicism and by the ‘Primordial Tradition’ he largely means the doctrine of the Four Yugas. The book does not go much further than that but is padded out with chapters, not always entirely relevant, on diverse topics such as dream interpretation, poetics, music theory and homosexuality. It offers, that is, a view of Shaivism very much through the prism of Danielou’s own personal preoccupations. At its core, though, is his account of Hindooism in a broad sweep, its origins and its history, and this, at least, is worth considering, even if one suspects it is highly stylized and warped in favor of his particular preferences. Certainly, there are very different accounts available; Danielou presents a French convert’s partisan Shaivite version of the roots of the Hindoo faith.

By his account, there are two ancient indigenous traditions in the Indian sub-continent: Tantric Shiva worship, which he presents as an animistic and “shamanic” nature religion, and Jainism, which he presents as an atheistic ethical system. According to Danielou, these two streams represent the authentic genius of India, but they have, he asserts, been distorted and befouled throughout the centuries by overlays of intruding traditions, most notably Vedic religion and then, more recently, Mahometism and British/Western culture. In this sweeping history he presents Buddhism as a mutation of the Jainist stream which was then re-Hindooized in its Mayahana forms and proceeded to colonize the souls and minds of Asia, all the way to Japan. Back in the sub-continent he portrays Vedic religion as an alien, authoritarian creed that secured, he asserts, only a nominal place in the evolving Hindoo mix; in fact, he says, a resurgent Shaivism reconquered India and left Vedism as a fake veneer. Shaivism – and its Samkya cosmology, which includes yoga – is, he insists, the real Hindooism, even when it is dressed up in Vedic forms. Vedic religion invaded, caused its mischief, but was re-Shaivized in subsequent revivals of the underlying indigenous cultus. He is equally dismissive of the manifestations of Vishnu worship, the cults of Krishna and Rama, which take the form of bhakti spirituality, a sentimental and exoteric form of religion which, he says, misrepresents Hindooism in the modern West.

All well and good. It is an intriguing if contentious overview. Its effect is to make ancient Dravidean Shiva culture the original India and the Vedic Aryans hostile intruders. For Danielou, Shaivite Tantra is a means to return to the authentic and autochthonous layers of Hindoo spirituality – and anything that ever went wrong in India was, by his account, imposed by outsiders. This includes traditional Indian aversion to homosexuality, a subject obviously close to his heart because he was himself a homosexual and it was with his partner Raymond Burnier, that he first travelled to Benares and decided to make home there. Although he mentions in passing that Jainism (which, remember, was one of the two ancient, original streams of Hindooism) has a strong taboo against homosexuality, and he also notes that all forms of oral sex are regarded as unclean in India, he says that homopobia is a trait of the “anglicized upper class” and spends a whole chapter setting out Lord Shiva’s homo- and bi- tolerant credentials. One gets the impression, in fact, that this is in large measure a reason for his embrace of the Shaivite creed, just as it is a reason for his undisguised disdain for the Catholicism into which he had been born. It is obviously important – crucial – for Danielou that Shaivism is, in his experience, pro-sexual while Catholicism (and European culture generally) is not.

This general bias goes further. Not only does Danielou characterize Shaivism as Dionysean – a cult of ecstasy – but his homoerotic interests are to be seen in his particular focus upon Shaivism’s phallic nature. The present author spent weeks in Benares being assured by priests and devotees alike that Shaivism is not “phallic worship” and that this is a shameful misconception entertained by sex-obsessed Westerners, and yet upon opening Monsieur Danielou’s account he reads that the Shaivic creed is phallic worship pure and undisguised. “The symbol of Shiva, the Creator of the world, the image worshipped in his temples, is the erect phallus,” he writes. And elsewhere, “The phallus is the emblem, the sign of the person of Shiva, of whom it is the image." This is no doubt true on an immediate level, but Danielou gives no thorough account of the further symbolism of the lingam and the many filters of piety through which the vast majority of resoundingly conservative Hindoos view it. The present author wrote about this in a recent post. Danielou’s Shaivism, certainly, is a long way from what this writer witnessed in the temples of Benares. Although he dresses it up as an esoteric “primordialism” Danielou presents a sexo-yogic version of Shaivism that is much nearer to the doctrines of Rajneesh and the neo-tantric New Agers than anything one is likely to see in the actual religious life of Benares as it is practiced today. One wonders what the decent pious Hindoo families that line up outside the Golden Temple in Benares – the very centre of the Shaivite world – would make of Danielou’s assertion that "It is in the region of the sexual organs that one attains pure knowledge,” or “The godhead can only be perceived through… its linga.”

It is all somewhat twentieth century. One can hear prefigurings of contemporary neo-tantra in such assertions as:

Tantric rites and practices, open to all without any restriction of caste, gender, or nature, are meant to permit anyone to draw closer to the divine through these three passages - on the levels of existence, consciousness, and sensual pleasure.

The book is further marred by quite unnecessary and inflammatory tirades against what Monsieur Danielou calls “monotheism”; there is an entire chapter in which his contempt and lack of feeling for the whole Abrahamic tradition is on display. The idea of the personal god, he writes, is nothing more than the cosmic inflation of human egoism, the poison of egoism writ large. “The notion of a god,” he writes, “a divine personage, is a projection of the notion of individuality, of a being that says "I." Monotheism is merely the deification of the notion of individuality.” He sets this ego-worship against the true religion of phallic worship. “Worshipping the linga means acknowledging the presence of the divine in what is human,” he writes. “It is the opposite of anthropomorphic monotheism that projects human individualism on to the divine world.” Once again, one feels that Monsieur Danielou’s own homoerotic obsessions and his own revolt against his Christian upbringing have been cast as an esotericism that he discovered in mystic India. “Associating the demoniac with the sexual,” he says, “is peculiar to the Christian world.” And therefore “Churches,” he declares, “are conservative and not liberating.” He projects this view back as a conspiracy theory that may have been daring once but which is today drearily commonplace:

The history of the Christian world is sadly filled with witchhunts that have served as a pretext for attacking initiatic organizations.

By “initiatic organizations” he means those that understand and maintain the worship of the sacred phallus. This is the cornerstone of his account of Western spiritual history:

Numerous sects did their utmost to maintain a Dionysian type initiatic tradition in the Christian world but were ferociously persecuted for political reasons, which have nothing to do with truly religious values. Organisms whose aims are purely spiritual are thus persecuted when civil and ecclesiastical authorities seek to establish their total hegemony over souls. The Catholic Church has played this sinister role throughout the ages…

But what of the good elements in Christianity and other religions? He is only able to reconcile himself to certain aspects of other religious traditions by proposing a general thesis that attributes all good things to Shiva worship. “In the final analysis,” he writes, “all initiation is ultimately connected with Shaivism, or with its kindred Dionysian or Sufi forms. Traces of such an origin can be detected in authentic initiatic groups in the Christian, Vedic, Taoist, Buddhist, and Islamic worlds.”

In many places these arguments become nothing less than outlandish. At one point he speaks of a mysterious and unnamed political cohort of “… India persons clothed in the monastic dress, of astonishing intelligence and culture, who, [have]… set up a traditionalist party… against Gandhi, Nehru, and the Indian Congress Party… which, at the right time, will take power and reestablish the traditional order…” Worse than this fantasy, in the chapter on music – an art to which he devoted his life - he argues that the Shaivite esotericism – his “primordial tradition” - is today found in the decadent fervor of discos and rock concerts! He writes:

… in the modern West, music with certain features close to those of ecstatic music is no longer found in places of worship, but in quite different places like discos, where dancers experience the kind of hypnotic isolation that is needed for mystical experience... The gods are much closer in the exaltation of rock concerts than in the faded canticles of the churches… just as vagabond hippies are much closer to the mystical wanderers… than frustrated monks snug in their… monasteries.

Vagabond hippies as the new Traditionalists? By this stage the present author had realized that Shiva & the Primordial Tradition was not going to offer the sort of penetrating and insightful introduction to Shaivite spirituality he had hoped. Rather, this was a tome that instead explained a great deal about the disaffected, resentful, unkempt, lazy, ill-educated and bedraggled feral youths from Germany and France - with their Om tee shirts, dreadlocks and degrees in Queer Studies - who laze about in the cafes of the backstreets of Benares smoking pot, torturing a sitar and taking yoga classes – these, apparently, are Danielou’s cherished inheritors of Shaivite primordiality, by his account the great indigenous treasure of India.

Needless to say this has nothing to do with the ‘primordial tradition’ of Rene Guenon. Nor does it have much to do with the Shaivism one can witness as a living tradition in the temples of Benares and on the ghats of the River Ganges. Alain Danielou and his boyfriend spent forty years living in the sacred city. He taught at the Benares Hindu University, and in the schools established by Rabindranath Tagore, and was decorated by the government of India for his services to music. On the evidence of this work, though, his Shaivism was a very personal avant-gard creation – largely a construction of his own prejudices and demons - the shortcomings of which has been badly exposed by the passage of time. The title promised so much more. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black