Conducted by Adam Liddle, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Contemplative Sciences Center and the Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemplative Studies.
JCS: What was the driving question in your article on the substance, Datura?
SG: The reason I’m looking at Datura at all is that I encountered descriptions of it in Buddhist revelatory texts–texts that from the Buddhist perspective, or the perspective of those who take the texts to be valid, were actually spoken by a buddha. In those texts, I found instructions to use Datura to incapacitate people, whether chemically through putting it in their food or their drink or magically by employing it in a sort of hostile ritual. So, the first driving question is just, “What is going on?” because these are Buddhist revelatory texts. Why are they not just allowing for but encouraging incapacitating unsuspecting victims?
The other thing I wanted to explore is related to the fact that there’s now a strong interest in looking at the use of psychedelics in a religious context. In the case of premodern South Asia, recently there have been suggestions that Datura was a favored psychedelic plant consumed by people practicing yoga. I wanted to explore that possibility as well. So, there’s two things happening: The first is to see how Datura is being used. In the texts, it’s being used for a variety of functions. Most common is in magical rites that are used to do something to someone else, whether it’s to harm them, kill them, drive them insane, whatever it may be. The second question is then to see if the plant was ever used in a productive way to bring on some kind of religious experience. Both of those questions were at play.
The thought-world exhibited by these Buddhist tantras is a lot more dynamic than has previously been thought.
JCS: And how does this fit in then with your larger interests or the work that you do?
SG: I’m interested in looking at Buddhist revelatory texts such as tantras and their related commentaries not just as instructions for how to attain liberation or to gain magical powers—or the various things that tantras are often associated with—but also to look at the more mundane aspects of the tantra and how they seem to illustrate a guide for living. So within that there are many, many instructions for utilizing various plants and parts of animals and non-living items, like pieces of wood or metal, in order to achieve certain goals that are not obviously religious but are also not obviously worldly or mundane. And it’s interesting to see how that overlaps with forms of life practices that are not really associated with tantra generally or even specifically with Buddhism. So for example, in that article, I noted that there’s a lot of overlap with Kamashastra texts, which are texts that are themselves guides for living that are always written for a male audience and describe how the ideal man about town should compose himself; what he should wear, what he should consume, what kind of perfumes he should wear, and how he should conduct himself in the company of others. There seems to be what one might call a similar urban and urbane thread that runs through Kamashastra that is also found in the later Buddhist tantras. This suggests to me that the thought-world exhibited by these Buddhist tantras is a lot more dynamic than has previously been thought, not just in scholarship but also traditional tantric Buddhist contexts where these texts are not used for man-about-town mundane purposes but instead for their soteriological aims.
JCS: Are these mundane or even urbane matters transformed by their context since they are spoken by buddhas? Do you think these matters are changed by being included within a sacred environment?
SG: I think that the fact that it’s spoken by a buddha gives it an unshakable gravitas. I’ve asked people today in Nepal who are Buddhists who use these texts today, what’s up with all this stuff, like killing people with Datura? And the answer is pretty consistent that the texts were produced during a period of history where there was a lot of strife and violence and that the hostile magic that you find in them is only to be used for defensive purposes. There’s a lot to unpack there, not least of which is the fact that a tantra is being located in space and time rather than being the timeless preaching of a buddha on a cosmic level. It also indicates that these examples of things that we might not associate with religion provide difficulty for practitioners themselves. And then it shows the breadth of the sacred, which is something we might oversimplify since the sacred is a lot wider than what your everyday person in the 21st century might consider it to be.
JCS: You’ve already touched on this, but what are the core findings of your article? What are some takeaways that you would like to spotlight?
SG: One thing that is important is to draw a distinction, temporally, between sources of information. I mention this is briefly in the article, but examples from the modern period are a lot of the evidence that’s been used in scholarship to assert the ingestion of mind-altering substances by premodern practitioners of yoga. That is to say, “oh, they’re doing it here, so they must have been doing it there.” What I was attempting to do in the article and why I put the parameters of the article specifically around Buddhist magic, as I labeled it, was to have a closed place temporally and geographically. The latter is important because the way that the plant Datura is used very differently by, say, Buddhists in China who frequently would use Datura to incapacitate people for surgery and things like that. So, its usage varies not just across time but also geographically.
Some modern examples that were brought to my attention late in the writing process were all these instances from the nineteenth century of British colonial legal and medical reports of women who were murdering their husbands with Datura. They were using it to poison their husbands, to basically take out a more physically powerful person by putting it in their food. And this is also something that I encountered in premodern Sanskrit sources, where women would use Datura to knock out men. This would be an example where recent evidence does show a consistent usage through to at least a certain point in the past. But then there is the ingestion of Datura now by yogis who view it as something that Shiva does. What’s happening there? Are they taking it as we in North America tend to associate the plant as psychedelic or mind-expanding drug? Or is it more—as I argue in the article—that Datura usually brings on states of intense fear and terror, but the yogis are so advanced in their yoga that they’re totally unaffected by it. And so rather than being a way to expand their mind, it’s really a way to showcase how expanded their mind already is. I argue that this is an example where modern representations of Datura don’t coincide with the premodern usage. I wanted to write about this because there is this steadily growing association that Datura was the psychedelic on the ground, allegedly, in premodern South Asia.
JCS: Right. So, you’re trying to complicate that history, and looking at texts and seeing what’s actually happening on the ground at that time.
SG: And this is not to say that people were not ingesting it in order to have a mind-altering experience. But instead of just assuming that they were, let’s look at the evidence that’s available and see if we can find any suggestion that that’s what was happening. I found three instances where one could argue that the plant was used productively for its mind-altering potential, two in which one would inhale the smoke of Datura. But these are complicated by the fact that the chemicals that make a person have a trip when consuming Datura don’t survive in the temperatures that are necessary to burn and fumigate the plant. So, it’s impossible to have a trip from inhaling Datura smoke. So then, what’s going on still isn’t clear, and unfortunately all we have are these texts at this point.
Rather than being a way to expand their mind, it’s really a way to showcase how expanded their mind already is.
JCS: Sure. That’s all super interesting. What’s next with these kinds of ideas, what questions do you still have? What are some strings that you want to keep pulling?
SG: I’ll give a paper at the AAR with James McHugh in November. He’s written a book on alcohol in South Asia. The panel has a similar theme, which is the consumption of psychedelics in a yoga context. Our paper is going to examine conceptions of intoxication and drunkenness from the same period with which this article is concerned. Now have certain conceptions of intoxication. Beer and wine both bring on drunkenness, which is considered the same state of intoxication. And there’s also not much of an antisocial aspect, generally speaking, to consuming alcohol. Whereas in the context that we’re looking at, both these conceptions are different; there was no ubiquitous intoxicant “alcohol” in premodern South Asia (or anywhere else) and the circumstances under which alcohol drinks were consumed does not align with contemporary American norms. Considering how alcohol is viewed in America today, it’s hard to imagine that a transgressive and spiritual experience could be had through the consumption of alcohol but not through the consumption of something we might label “psychedelic.”
JCS: That’s all really exciting. Thanks so much for giving us this preview into your article.
SG: Thank you so much for having me.
