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the victory of esoterism and the imperial metaphor ⁄ 161
tionism, concluding that the esoteric movement diminished the Buddhist
leaders into sycophantic actors imitating the domain of mere politics. Instead,
we might observe the great litterateurs and teachers of North Indian monasteries
trying to sanctify the world as they received and accepted it. This is not
to diminish the importance of patronage issues or the influence of the samanta
culture, but simply to affirm that the mission of Buddhist cloisters was a
consensual effort at sanctifying society, much as the esoteric ritual system
sacralized the political metaphor. These monks tried to take, in another trope
of esoterism, the poison of belligerence and transmute it into the nectar of welfare.
They attempted to transform power and hierarchy into community and
congregation. Swimming in the sea of samanta feudalism, they tried to see it
as an ocean of gnosis and to engage it in the creation of merit for all beings.
At least three factors were important in the sacralized esoteric formulation—
the Buddhist ideology of skillful means, the Indian understanding of metaphor,
and the Mahayanist conception of radical transformation. Esoteric Buddhists
extended these items far past the previous Mahayanist parameters, and
this extension marks some of the difference between the exoteric and esoteric
directions. At the same time, esoteric monks brought the feudal rituals into a
world already governed by monastic rules and bodhisattva vows, so that the
initial development of esoteric precepts was not dramatic or crucial, but instead
a modest supplement to the existing pledges.
When we look at Buddhist notices of skillful means, two things are striking.
First, the appropriation of popular forms was driven by sociological realities.
So, as informed Indian laymen become important in the religious life of
Buddhist India, contravening the earlier exclusive reliance on monks, Buddhist
scriptures are being written to reflect these realities. Thus, at about the
same time as Fa-hsien observed the authority and learning of the lay teachers
Radhasvamin and Mañju$ri in fourth-century Pataliputra, personalities like
them became embodied in the literary personas of Vimalakirti and %rimala. 144
These figures could become learned, and ultimately accepted as Buddhist
teachers, for they were the end-product of the many changes in Indian economic
and political life over the preceding centuries. In this end, they stand in
contrast to previous virtuous laymen, from whom monks would never have
studied the Buddhadharma. However, the process of the Buddhist appropriation
and reformulation of phenomena emerging in the Indian sociopolitical
world appears to take at least some decades, even a century or more.
Second, the doctrines of skillful means are posed as the recovery of what
had always been or the rectification of a straying from the authentic reality. 145
Frequently, this is done with the idea that the authentic reality is eternal, as in