2025年1月2日星期四

guzzle. sundown, outré shenanigans. pay his tab by sundown, closing time....espoused a counterintuitive path to salvation. To achieve it — right now, in this life, not after a string of stressful rebirths — you had to undergo a kind of moral shock therapy

Extra special too was a class of wild-and-crazy characters known as mahasiddhas (or “great adepts”). They practiced tantric Buddhism, an offshoot of Vajrayana, which espoused a counterintuitive path to salvation. To achieve it — right now, in this life, not after a string of stressful rebirths — you had to undergo a kind of moral shock therapy, which consisted of doing things you weren’t, socially speaking, supposed to do: spend your time getting high, having sex, and living rough in the streets.

A mahasiddha named Virupa did, and in a large 13th-century thangka we see him showing it off. One day when he was drinking himself sodden in a bar, a server approached and demanded that he pay his tab by sundown, closing time. “No problem,” Virupa said, as he reached skyward, froze the sun in its path and kept guzzling. In the painting we see the miracle in action, and we also see that he’s not alone. Around him, dense as a swarm of tiny insects, float tiny images of fellow adepts engaged in all manner of outré shenanigans.