The purpose of this paper is to explore the points of contacts and echoes, as well as the tensions and differences between contemporary instantiations of spiritual antinomianism (otherwise known as “crazy wisdom”) in the Tibetan and the Russian cultural tradition, focusing on the idiosyncratic figures of Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987) and the Russian punk-rock group Pussy Riot.Footnote 1 While Trungpa revived the tradition of the Tibetan smyon pa in a situation of exile and reinterpreted it for the benefits of a largely Western audience, Pussy Riot radically reconfigured the orthodox archetype of the yurodivy in the context of post-Soviet Russia—a cultural and religious milieu where the boundary between institutional orthodoxy and state power are often blurred, and dissenting political and ecclesial voices are often suppressed.Footnote 2 The paper will argue that for Trungpa and Pussy riot, the practice of spiritual antinomianism serves as lynchpin for the construction and performance of a mode of mystical subjectivity where the very lives of the spiritual practitioner become a locus and paradigm of (cultural, spiritual, but also institutional) resistance to ecclesial and political powers. The biographies of these figures can then become exercises in the deconstruction and subsequent re-assemblage of ethical engagement, while also serving as echo chambers for the expression of broader religious and cultural discontent.

The group Pussy Riot came to international prominence on February 21, 2012, when a number of its adherence staged a “punk moleben” in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, borrowing a melody and refrain from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Bogoroditse Devo, Raduisya (“Oh Virgin Mother of God, rejoice”).Footnote 3 A moleben’ is the Slavic equivalent of a Byzantine paraklesis—a canon addressed to a specific saint or to the Mother of God to obtain the welfare of the living. The Greek and the Slavic tradition differ, but in general, the Russian tradition of the moleben’ follows the structure of the service of Matins for a feast day, which includes a scripture reading.Footnote 4 During their performance, however, the members of the collective begged the Virgin Mary to “become a feminist” and get rid of Vladimir Putin, while also castigating the corruption of the church hierarchy and the close relationship between the Moscow Patriarch and the Russian government. All of this was accompanied by numerous metania—earth-bows—and signs of the cross.

A few weeks later, however, three of Pussy Riot’s leading figures—Nadezhda Andreyevna Tolokonnikova, Maria Vladimirovna Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Stanislavovna Samutsevich—were arrested.Footnote 5 The ensuing trial, which received extraordinary attention by the Russian and international media, culminated in a conviction of “hooliganism” and “religious hatred”; sentenced to 2 years in prison, the three young women were eventually released in December 2013.Footnote 6 While the moleben’ in Christ the Savior cathedral was the stunt that gained the movement international pre-eminence, it was certainly not the only one; previously, Pussy Riot members had released live cockroaches in the Tagansky Courthouse, while in the first months of 2011, the so-called Operation Kiss a Pig (Lobsai musora) saw Pussy Riot members kiss policewomen in Moscow metro station and on the streets of the capital, leading to members of the group being briefly held on charges of sexual battery.Footnote 7 Pussy Riot members also sought to turn the trial into a form of performance art—Tolokonnikova’s decision to defend herself without a lawyer meant that the Russian public could watch her self-defense speeches in court on live TV, and witness the philosophy graduate quote lengthy passages of Plato, Derrida, and Dostoyevsky.Footnote 8

While many have sought to explore the impact of Pussy Riot on contemporary Russian political and cultural discourse, no scholar to date has attempted to explore the deeper cultural resonance between the group’s self-conscious embrace of ritualized mockery and earlier performative models of social, cultural, and religious criticism typical of pre-revolutionary Russia. Throughout the long Russian Middle Ages, but also after the reforms of Peter Great and all the way to the great upheaval of the 1917 revolution, the figure of the “holy fool”—yurodivy—played an important role in the culture and even the self-consciousness of the Russian people (Hunt 2011a, b). Sometimes coming from the peasantry, and sometimes from the merchant class or the aristocracy, the yurodivy lived lives of extreme poverty and self-abnegation, feigning ignorance, and causing scandal by their outrageous behavior, which often involved walking around half-naked and openly reproaching authority figures for their sins. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the yurodivyFootnote 9 were mocked and simultaneously revered by all social classes; their recurrent presence in Russian historical chronicles, hagiographical literature, and figurative art—both sacred and prophane—demonstrates their enduring role as mouthpieces of Russia’s conscience.

How did the paradigm of the yurodivy emerge? According to Priscilla Hunt, the notion of holy foolishness emerged in monastic milieus within the Byzantine cultural area, but would gradually migrate to urban settings in Russia, where it is attested at least from the fifteenth century onwards.Footnote 10Yurodivy embody Christ the outcaste as they live a vagrant life at the margin of cities and villages, assuming a posture of madness so as to be deliberately misunderstood and persecuted. On one hand, this kind of performance castigates ones’ own pride; on the other hand, it also exposes the pride of those who ridicule and mock the yurodivy. People who view themselves as embodying Christian respectability and go on to persecute the holy fools come to play the role of the pharisees in the New Testament parables, ultimately taking part in a scenario that is deliberately uncovering their spiritual hypocrisy and pettiness. The actions of the yurodivy subvert the tension between respectability and outrageousness, effectively bringing spectators to the concealed boundary between spiritual honesty and self-deception. If the spectators of these actions are able to break through the husk of their own spiritual myopia, they come to recognize the presence of Christ (indeed, “the mind of Christ” from 1 Cor. 2.16) in the life and the actions of the holy fool.

The sixteenth century appears to be the heyday of the yurodivy phenomenon. In the year 1570, Blessed Nicholas Salos of Pskov (a local saint or mestochtimi) confronted Tsar Ivan the Terrible when the latter was laying siege to Pskov. After mocking him at his entrance into the city and prophesying the death of his horse, the ascetic offered a piece of raw meat to the Tsar; at the latter’s reply that as a Christian, he could not eat meat during Lent, Nicholas retorted that the Tsar was nonetheless willing to drink human blood. At that point the Tsar interrupted the looting and fled the city, showing that parrhesia could be stronger than a ruler’s sword.Footnote 11 The same Ivan the Terrible, in fact, had already been confronted by another crazy saint, blessed Basil of Moscow, known for shoplifting food and clothes so as to give them to the poor and for going around naked and in chain during the Moscow winters. Basil rebuked the Tsar for failing to follow the divine liturgy at the Assumption Cathedral. The Tsar would eventually be one of the pallbearers at Basil’s funeral in 1552.Footnote 12 A few decades later, Ioann Vlasatii (John the Hairy of Rostov), who was actually of German descent and may never have been formally received into the Orthodox church, was known for wandering around the streets of Rostov and rebuking well-to-do citizens for their hypocrisy and greed—sins that he could detect underneath their façade of devotion thanks to his gift of discernment of spirits. A few decades later, John of Moscow would attend church services naked or carrying heavy chains, and warned Boris Godunov—the first non-Rurikid Tsar of Russia—that God was running out of patience with him and his numerous illegitimate marriages (seven, according to the most reliable records): Bog dolgo zhdet, da bol’no b”et (God waits a long time, but hits harshly). John of Moscow was known for never washing, though after a vision of his own death, he showered himself three times with water so as to ready himself for the tomb.Footnote 13

One may question the speculative pairing of Pussy Riot with the phenomenon of holy foolishness by pointing out that in the worldview of these contemporary performers, truth lacks all theological reference. A useful resource here is another classical work on yurodstvo, D.S. Likachev’s and A.M. Panchenko’s Laughter in Ancient Russia, which in turn references Bakhtin’s work on folk culture in the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Likachev and Panchenko 1984). Bakhtin’s work does not promote any specific political or theological agenda, but offers a socio-cultural analysis of the iconoclastic role played by the carnivalesque in the context of the rigidly hierarchical and ritualized cultures of pre-modern and early modern Europe (Bakhtin 2009). In this perspective, the function of the carnivalesque—which is sometimes institutionalized in the jester or the court buffoon—is to speak truth to power, or to preserve access to an alternative epistemology that serves—so to speak—as the shadow and the foil of authoritative modes of knowledge. “Ordinary” holiness dovetails with conventional notions of beauty, whereas holy foolishness is deliberately inelegant, sometimes cynical, and often colored by an attitude of profound sadness about the human predicament. If yurodstvo has its own aesthetic canon, it is one marked by anguish and deformity, traits that often characterize those at the margins of society who choose to ignore its standards. Tat’iana Goricheva’s pioneering study Orthodoxy and Postmodernism, published in 1991 as the Soviet Union was about to collapse, points out that while many yurodivy from the past would now be diagnosed with some kind of mental illness such as schizophrenia, this is actually what makes them most relevant to Russian society, which often labeled dissidents as mentally ill (Goricheva 1991).Footnote 14

Against the background of these studies, the phenomenon of Pussy Riot appears as a postmodern instantiation of holy foolishness where the absence of a theological anchoring actually makes their message paradoxically more relevant and far-reaching, enabling them to float above the many critical voices within Russia’s political and religious establishment. On one hand, their embodiment of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque and their performance of dissidence do inhabit a political and religious space marked by theological references; on the other hand, as their symbolic imaginary lacks a firm theological footing, their adoption of religious signifiers turns them into cultural markers of an increasingly fluid postmodern identity. Goricheva emphasizes the centrality of “performance” in the shaping and preservation of Russian identity—a performance that manifested in the highly scripted liturgies of the Orthodox church past but also in the grand military parades of the Soviet era.Footnote 15 Pussy Riot’s counter-performance is a theatralization of dissidence not dissimilar from that of the holy fools, who often refused to partake in the religious rituals sanctioned by the official church (Bodin 2011).Footnote 16 The performance of the mock moleben’ in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is a perfect instance of post-metaphysical theater, where markers of piety and devotion are used to underscore the servile nature of religious ritual. In the same way as the holy fools participated in Christ’s kenotic self-emptying and like Christ at the pillar were the object of mockery and contempt, Pussy Riot’s performances deliberately invite mockery and contempt, engaging in a chaotic disruption of the accepted social and religious order.

The grotesque and the “carnivalesque” are also a defining feature of Tibetan Buddhism, which is a tradition that encompasses speculative and meditative lineages as well as ritual practices involving invocation of numerous tantric deities (Ray 2002). While the lineages that developed in the wake of the second transmission of Buddhism to Tibet in the eleventh century, such as the Gelug school, tended to emphasize the speculative and meditative aspects of Buddhism, the return of the dharma to the Land of Snows also witnessed the emergence of a phenomenon that retrieved ancient shamanic practices from the pre-Buddhist Bon religion of Tibet, as well as from the Nyingma school of Buddhism associated with the teaching of the semi-legendary eighth-century master Urgyen (Padmasambhava).Footnote 17 This was the tradition of the smyon-pa—wondering yogins who would engage in deliberately shocking forms of behavior, eating filth, carrying around human remains, or shouting abuse. One such “holy madman” was the eleventh–twelfth-century ascetic Milarepa, who lived in a cave on a diet of nettles, engaged in shocking behaviors, and earlier in life did not hesitate to use his supernatural powers to break havoc among members of his clan who were guilty of robbing his immediate family of their rightful inheritance (DiValerio 2015).Footnote 18 Later on, the Kagyud school of Buddhism, whose best-known representative is the Karmapa, would see a whole wake of radical smyon pa such as the Madman of Tsang (who affected ignorance but actually wrote a life of Milarepa), the Madman of Ű,Footnote 19 and the Drukpa Madman Drukpa Künlé—all of them outspoken critics of religious and political authorities.Footnote 20 The Madman of Ű would wear outfit fashioned with human remains; according to Nyukla Penchen’s hagiography,

Upon his naked body, he was adorned with a crown of long hair, as well as a circlet, earrings, a necklace and bangles made of bone, a sash, and a sacred thread—the Six Bone Ornaments—as well as clumps of ash, drops of blood, and smears of grease from human tissue.Footnote 21

He would then roam the marketplaces reciting mantras, sometimes overturning tables and shouting abuse. Like his Russian counterparts, the Madman of Ű would criticize local abbots and feudal rulers, most of whom, however, were less amenable to conversion than Ivan the Terrible; chronicles report that the poor men would be routinely beaten and left for dead, though each time he would miraculously survive. Finally, the Drukpa Künlé scandalized everyone composing verses that praised those who sold the dharma for monetary compensation or used it for their own advantage. The targets of his critiques were figures from the monastic establishment that charged outrageously for their teachings or ritual services, thereby contradicting the deepest thrust of the Buddha’s teachings.Footnote 22

Who were these smyon pa? The Mahayana’s reconfiguration of the four noble truths ensured a radical rethinking of early Buddhism’s soteriological markers, which strongly emphasized the ontological otherness of the nirvanic state. The claim by the third noble truth that cessation of suffering is a possibility is transfigured into an assertion of the ultimate identity of samsara and nirvāna, where the latter is not a spiritualizing flight from the senses into an attitude of rarefied detachment, but an awakened stance of active engagement of conventional reality for the sake of all sentient beings (Makransky 1997). In this perspective, bodhisattvas seek an active (apratiṣṭita) form of nirvāna, and once they are enlightened, they strive to bring to awakening all beings that are still mired in samsara. While in its ultimate form (dharmakāya) Buddhahood is empty, the Buddha nature assumes a myriad of conventional manifestations in the world of form—some (sambhogakāyah) are glorified Buddhas and bodhisattvas residing in their celestial realm, attended by retinues of dakinis and other supernatural beings, whereas others (more prosaic nirmanakāyah) are part and parcel of the ordinary world we inhabit.Footnote 23

In this perspective, the smyon pa are the ultimate reminder of the inextricable unity of the samsaric and the nirvanic aspect of reality. Their offensive appearance and behavior, which often includes actions considered immoral or indecent, are a performative reenactment of the ongoing validity of the third noble truth in its Mahayāna or Vajrayāna interpretation. Where Gelug monasticism and its emphasis on philosophical reflection would engender a sort of “re-Theravadization” of Tibetan Buddhism, stressing the centrality of meditation and philosophical formation, the smyon pa of the sixteenth century—but even their later epigones—implicitly mocked these monastic pretensions, reminding anyone who had eyes to see that in the world of nirvāna there is no impurity or defilement, but everything is always and already a manifestation of the Buddha’s awakened nature. Smyon pa incorporated into their “performance” elements from pre-Buddhist shamanic practices, but their ultimate purpose was a profoundly Buddhist one—namely, to act as correctives against the all-too-human tendency to reify religious teachings and practices, turning them into self-serving idols rather than using them as tools for universal awakening.

In the nineteenth century, after 200 years of Gelug rule over Tibet, many non-Gelug lineages come together into the Rimed school, largely to ensure the survival of their traditions in view of the Gelug ascendancy (Samuel 1993). The Ris med movement popularized biographies of smyon pa, emphasizing the alleged superiority of their spiritual attainment over those of overeducated, but prideful or stubborn monks; actual examples of smyon pa, however, were few and far between. In the twentieth century, however, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the ensuing Tibetan diaspora led to the reemergence of this tradition in new and unexpected forms. While in Europe and North America Tibetan Buddhism would largely be identified with monastic culture, other figures, such as the teacher and spiritual leader Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987), ensured that other—more subversive—strands of the tradition would reach new audiences in the West.

As we learn from Fabrice Midal’s excellent, if idiosyncratic biography, Chögyam Trungpa was the 11th holder of the Trungpa (Drung pa) tulku lineage in the Kagyud school of Tibetan Buddhism, though he was also deeply familiar with Nyingma teachings and practices—indeed, rather than identifying as a Kagyud or a Nyingma teacher, he would view himself as an adherent of the ris med (nonsectarian) tradition.Footnote 24 Trung pa received his khenpo degree before fleeing his homeland in 1959 for exile in Northern India, a few weeks after the Dalai Lama’s escape. Eventually, Trungpa took up residence in Oxford, England, and established the Samye Ling monastery in Scotland—the first Tibetan monastic center in Europe. After a car accident left him paralyzed on the left side of the body, Trungpa decided to give up his monastic vows, got married, and started to work as a lay teacher. In 1970, he emigrated to the USA, where he would soon gain a huge following among Westerners who were simultaneously attracted by the depth of his wisdom and puzzled by his unconventional lifestyle and teaching methods. Trungpa would often teach while intoxicated, smoked heavily, and was sexually promiscuous, engaging in numerous affairs with disciples from different countries.Footnote 25 Eventually, Trungpa would develop alcohol-induced cirrhosis and pass away in 1987.Footnote 26 Soon enough, former members of the Shambala community would publish memoirs outlining Trungpa’s outrageous behavior, authoritarian streak, and overt nepotism, while other Tibetan lineage holders such as the 16th Karmapa would lavish him with praise. In 2011, asked about her relationship with Trungpa, spiritual writer Pema Chödron would say.

People say to me, how could you follow a teacher like that? Or how could an enlightened person do that? I do not know. I cannot buy a party line where they say it was sacred activity or something like this. Come up with ground to make it okay. I also cannot come up with ground or a fixed idea to make it not okay. You know, I’m left, really left in that I do not know. I do not know.Footnote 27

Trungpa was the ultimate spiritual iconoclast and was not afraid of shocking his audiences. Convinced that many of his disciples were actually practicing Buddhism out of an attachment to one’s own spiritual progress, he insisted that the death of the ego, which in Jungian psychology is called a “psychic death” but can be almost as painful as a physical death, is an absolute pre-requisite to actual awakening. In his own words,

In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it because it forces us to let go of our subjective self-identities. (Trungpa 2010)

For Trungpa, these self-identities are laughably insignificant, as they are a fleeting and conventional flutter on the surface of emptiness. On the other hand, the same identities are one with the totality of the universe, and all identification with specific experiences in the here and now will only prevent us from returning to this oneness. This realization of non-duality allows you to transcend the limitations of materialism and come to rest in full awareness (Trungpa 2002). Trungpa’s shocking behavior was then a deliberate strategy that was strongly rooted in the tantric understanding of the salvific role of our inner cognitive and emotional dynamics, and more deeply in the Mahayana—and Vajrayana—assertion of the unity of samsara and nirvana. More traditional lineages would seek to achieve this goal through speculative reasoning and meditations; Trungpa, however, follows the smyon pa tradition and sets out to shock his followers out of their comfort zone, forcing them to realize the conventionality of all morality and the transitory character of all structured spiritual practice. In this way, his disciples could hope to come and savor the nirvanic taste of their own ordinary existence, in a way that was far more expedient—and in his view, more effective—than years of extensive philosophical training and meditation practice. It is an unfortunate fact that Trungpa did abuse his power, behaving recklessly in his private life and wreaking considerable damage on the lives of many of his disciples; but perhaps, the fact that despite these circumstances, Trungpa’s teachings could serve as a vehicle of the dharma for countless practitioners is itself a reminder of the inextricable unity of samsara and nirvāna.

One obvious way in which Trungpa’s performative strategy differed significantly from Pussy Riot’s is that Trungpa actively sought recognition as a religious leader—even as he effectively reinvented what religious leadership in the Tibetan tradition actually entailed. On one hand, Trungpa’s teachings set out to challenge his students’ self-understanding, as well as their preconceived notion of the way in which “religious practice” was supposed to help them achieve liberation. On the other hand, his deliberate and provocative displays of power—which grew more and more extravagant as time went by, as Trungpa had himself crowned king of Shambala and sought to recreate the trappings of a court—certainly clashed with the assumption that an “authentic” religious leader was supposed to pay no attention to hierarchies and despise formalities and the ostentation of wealth. One might come to the conclusion that Trungpa’s behavior contradicted his teachings, and effectively reinstated the kind of power structures that the Buddhist tradition dismissed as transitory and ephemeral. After all, smyon pa from pre-modern Tibet did not request donations from their followers, nor did they wear an officer’s uniform or parade around their headquarters surrounded by a private army.

A possible solution to this paradox would be to claim that Trungpa’s mode of subversion was purely cognitive—in other words, his only intent was to uncover the web of attachments that keep us entangled in this samsaric world, while he had no interest in subverting outward manifestations of power. This response to Trungpa’s idiosyncratic behavior, however, would fail to consider the extent to which his display of power was itself a form of skillful means, grounded in the dialectical relationship between the emptiness of ultimate reality and the conventional character of the world of forms. On one hand, all forms of political and religious hierarchy lack ontological subsistence; anyone attached to these displays of power merely indicates one’s failure to achieve awakening. On the other hand, when properly used, political and religious power can be at the service of the dharma, and all expressions of deference towards religious leaders are skillful means meant to elicit devotion and bring one closer to enlightenment. Bordering on caricature, Trungpa’s carnivalesque displays of wealth and power ensured that his followers would have to confront the ultimate meaninglessness of these trappings and their utter insignificance compared to Trungpa’s own teachings. In the end, Trungpa’s seemingly voluptuous embrace of religious power uncovered and exposed the utter vacuousness of religious power. The crazy saints of old lambasted the corruption of established religious authority; in the late twentieth-century America, however, a mere critique of the hypocrisy of religious hierarchies would not have had the kind of iconoclastic force with which it was invested in traditional Tibet. For their part, living in a socio-political and religious world where the distinction between conventional and ultimate reality was utterly alien, Pussy Riot could never have turned to an active pursuit of political power without fundamentally betraying their mission. In Tibet—or in the Tibetan diaspora—an empty power could be used skillfully; in Russia, an oppressive power can only be mocked and never wielded by the oppressed.

If we look back at the original sixteenthcentury yurodivy and smyon pa, it is clear that these two groups inhabited vastly different theological and speculative universes. Russian “crazy saints” affirmed a theistic worldview, where the goal of practice was to remind political and ecclesial authorities of the subversive power of the gospel; the objective existence of sinful and virtuous actions was not challenged, but spectators of the yurodivy’s performance were compelled to reassess their understanding of which actions were pleasing to God and which were not. Smyon pa dwelled in a universe held in the embrace of the Buddha nature, witnessing to the fundamental unity of samsaric and nirvanic reality. Wherever practitioners of other strands of the dharma would become too attached to their specific beliefs and practices, and would invest them with an ultimate quality that they did not possess, the smyon pa were quick at mocking their pretensions, reminding them that even repulsive and deranged behaviors could be invested with a soteriological quality. In addition, crazy saints certainly affirmed the ultimacy of individual subjectivity, which their Tibetan counterparts would have rejected as fundamentally untenable.

The lives of Pussy Riot members, which for a period were assiduously chronicled by Russian and international media, as well as the life of Chögyam Trungpa, effectively reinvented the traditions of the yurodivy and the smyon pa for the postmodern era. Stripped of theological and metaphysical layers that are no longer perceived as relevant, their public performances or teachings set out to expose the vacuous pretensions of a political and religious establishment—as in the case of Pussy Riot—or a wealthy Western society unable to offer existential meaning—as in the case of Trungpa. In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, John Caputo reflects on the death of ontology and its lingering effect on theological and philosophical reflection in the West—on one hand, it is no longer possible to engage in speculative reflection as if classical metaphysics were still regarded as normative, and on the other hand, traditional metaphysical categories continue to haunt us, as if we were simultaneously unable to believe in them or let go of them (Caputo 1997). Pussy Riot and Chögyam Trungpa instantiate this post-metaphysical religiosity, where long-standing institutional structures may linger on and yet are incapable of fulfilling their spiritual purpose.

Where does this leave us, weary, post-modern Westerners? The chaos that follows the end of metaphysics leaves us with few signposts towards holiness, or perhaps even towards a life of integrity. Perhaps, it is actually the case that mock molebens in Moscow Cathedral—and drunken dharma talks in Colorado—appeal to contemporary audiences more easily than traditional expressions of religiosity, tied to pre-modern worldviews that are no longer universally shared. Pussy Riot and Chögyam Trungpa can still help us let go of comforting falsehoods and accept those truths that even established religious institutions find too disturbing or unsettling. The truth might be disturbing, but in the words of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova at her trial, speaking the truth remains on an ontologically higher plane than lying.Footnote 28