113bC4l

322 ⁄ siddhas, monks, and communities
gious strictures. Instead of a transitional condition, they are confirmed into a
mystical society from which there is no retreat. Rather than being a temporary
liminal state leading to adulthood, the ganacakra requires a commitment to a
permanent liminal status in which the individual will never be reintegrated
into any village anywhere, even though he must observe his fellow ritualists as
his immutable brothers and sisters in religion. Thus as yet it is unclear whether
any tribal rites actually contributed to the development of the ganacakra or
whether the Buddhist ceremony developed from entirely other local village or
regional Kaula or %aiva rituals.
rules of order
Whatever the source of such erotized rituals, Buddhists formulated their identity
on rules as well as on rites. Particularly in India, communities define themselves
by rules, generally formulated as transgressions in need of ritual atonement.
Chapter 4 looked at one list of rather modest restrictions undertaken by
the early esoteric meditators associated with the mandalas in the Mañju$rimulakalpa.
However, while the lists in the first chapters of this text are representative
of institutional esoterism, they are by no means authoritative. Other lists
of appropriate vows occur, and sometimes different lists are found even within
the same tantra. This should come as no surprise, for Buddhist communities
have tended to divide and to provide self-definition by means of both their rules
and the degree to which these were in fact observed. In the case of monks, certainly,
the real observance is always uncertain, in part because there were the
other systems explicit in the ideology of the three vows: those of the monk, the
bodhisattva, and the vidyadhara. Actually, the sorcerers’ discipline was not required
for community behavior, for the monks were expected to maintain at
least an approximate relationship to monastic decorum and, in some monasteries,
the bodhisattva vows as well. Although the monastic vows were strained by
monks’ participation in esoteric communities, more than adequate evidence
shows that the vows remained an expectation if not a reality. As a result, over
time the perception grew that the discipline of the vidyadhara was, for monks,
supplemental to both the monastic and Mahayanist rules (pratimoksasamvara,
bodhisattvasamvara), since secrecy and appropriate behavior during the secret
rituals were understood as the primary contributions of the new model.
Conversely, dedicated siddha communities, because they were not principally
concerned with monastic behavior, apparently needed specific vidyadhara