CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 88 of 120

Correct — D, Buddhism. Sahajiya begins inside tantric Buddhism. The Sahajayana strand of Vajrayana flourished in Bengal and Odisha from about the eighth century, and its teachers — the mahasiddhas Saraha, Kanha, Savari, Luipada and the rest — put their doctrine into songs and dohas rather than treatises. Those songs survive as the Charyapadas, Buddhist tantric verses in an early Apabhramsha-type speech composed between the eighth and twelfth centuries, which is exactly the period the question names. The teaching turns on sahaja, the innate or spontaneous state, reached through the body and through practice rather than through ritual observance or scholastic learning. A Vaishnava Sahajiya movement grew later in Bengal, in the seventeenth century, adapting the same vocabulary to the love of Radha and Krishna, but the root of the cult in the tenth and eleventh centuries is Buddhist.

• (a)early Bhakti traditions — The Bhakti connection is real but later and derivative — the Vaishnava Sahajiyas of seventeenth-century Bengal borrowed the vocabulary. The cult traced to the tenth and eleventh centuries is not a Bhakti movement.
• (b)a kind of early Sufism — Sufism in eastern India is a later arrival and a separate tradition. The shared emphasis on inward experience makes the option sound plausible, but the Charyapada corpus is Buddhist, not Sufi.
• (c)early Upanishadic philosophy — Wrong by a thousand years and more. The principal Upanishads belong to the first millennium BCE, and Sahajiya is a medieval tantric development.

Sahaja means the innate, the spontaneous, that which is already present. Sahajayana, a strand of Vajrayana Buddhism, taught that liberation is realised in the ordinary embodied state rather than achieved by ritual accumulation, and it rejected image worship and scholastic elaboration. Its literature is song: the Charyapadas, composed by the Siddhacharyas between the eighth and twelfth centuries, are among the earliest specimens of a language ancestral to Bengali, Assamese and Odia, which is why they matter to literary history as much as to religious history.

The dating in the stem is the clue. A cult traced to the tenth and eleventh centuries in eastern India, before the Turkish conquest and before the north Indian Bhakti movement, sits in the world of late Buddhist tantra. Two of the options fail on chronology alone — the Upanishads are far older, and organised Sufism in Bengal is later. The Bhakti option is the one worth arguing with, because Vaishnava Sahajiya is genuinely a thing; the answer to that is that it is the seventeenth-century descendant of a Buddhist parent, not the parent itself.

• Sahajiya originates in Buddhist Vajrayana, in the Sahajayana movement of Bengal and Odisha from about the eighth century.
• Its teachers were mahasiddhas such as Saraha, Kanha, Savari and Luipada, who taught in songs and dohas.
• The Charyapadas are Buddhist tantric songs composed between the eighth and twelfth centuries in an Apabhramsha-type speech.
• Sahaja means the innate or spontaneous state, held to be realisable in the body rather than through ritual and scholarship.
• Vaishnava Sahajiya, which reworked these ideas around Radha and Krishna, became popular in Bengal in the seventeenth century.

• Reading the later Vaishnava Sahajiya back into the tenth century and answering Bhakti.
• Assuming any mystical, anti-ritual movement in medieval India must be Sufi.
• Treating the Charyapadas as purely literary; they are doctrinal songs of a Buddhist school.

As a single-line association item — which religious tradition a named medieval cult belongs to — with the tempting option being the one it later influenced.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Charyapadas, composed between the eighth and twelfth centuries, are associated with which tradition?

  • (a)Jaina asceticism
  • (b)Tantric Buddhism
  • (c)Advaita Vedanta
  • (d)Chishti Sufism

  Answer(b) Tantric Buddhism — they are the songs of the Sahajayana mahasiddhas of Bengal and Odisha.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the Sahajiya tradition, the term 'sahaja' refers to

  • (a)an elaborate fire ritual
  • (b)the innate or spontaneous state realised in the body
  • (c)a monastic code of discipline
  • (d)a system of temple architecture

  Answer(b) the innate or spontaneous state realised in the body — attained without ritual accumulation or scholastic learning.