113bC4l

Riding on the best of buffaloes within the domains of the great forest
tribes, he is ornamented with snakes and carries an iron vajra.
His hair colored ocher with bezoar and tied upwards in just the right way,
with skulls around his head, let him apply ocher to his beard.
He exclaims the mantras hrīh. s.t.rī, etc., brandishing his iron vajra.
This lion’s roar should be done that way because it is the vajra practice
of Yamari.
5
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iddhas and the eligious andscap
And if he has developed the ability, let him enter a city playfully. In an
auspicious dance, he sings “sweet confection” and other kinds of songs.
—Krsnayamari-tantra, XI.9–12 1
t might seem that the “Great Perfected” (mahasiddha) of esoteric Buddhism
collectively defeat the proposal that the Vajrayana is the most feudalized
form of Buddhism. Based on siddha images, it is questionable
whether the Mantrayana is actually constituted by those responding to the increasing
importance of political systems and authority in the period around the
death of Harsa in 647 c.e. The siddhas, one may suppose, were unconcerned
with allegiance of any variety, preferring the untrammeled existence of a psychic
world in which ritual systems, social rules, lineage concerns, scriptural
continuity, and the other paraphernalia of institutional Buddhism were simply
jettisoned for personal liberation. Going naked along their own paths, devoted
solely to their own subjective experiences, the siddhas—in this argument—
represented a purity of religious expression devoid of scholastic hairsplitting or
legalistic wrangling, which was so much the obsession of the great monasteries
of the medieval period. The new variety of saint cannot have been on a continuum
of sacrality with the rigidly observant arhat, the self-sacrificial bodhi-