Category: Academic

Lecture List: Michaelmas Term 2024

Lecture List: Michaelmas Term 2024

Lecture List
Michaelmas Term 2024

Sunday 13 October – Saturday 7 December 2024
Library opening hours are Monday to Friday, 9.30-5.30.

Hinduism 1: Sources and Formations

Prof. Gavin Flood FBA
Weeks 1-8, Monday, 2.00-3.00,
Gibson Building

These lectures offer a thematic and historical introduction to the sources and development of Hindu traditions from their early formation to the medieval period. We will explore the formation of Hindu traditions through textual sources, such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā, along with the practices and social institutions that formed classical Hindu traditions. The lectures will include an introduction to Hindu philosophy.

Sanskrit

Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Weeks 1-8, Wednesday, 4.30-5.30, Friday, 10.00-12.00,
OCHS Library 

The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e. Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists.  

Sanskrit Prelims: A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity. 

Pali Prelims: The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials ofPali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya-sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapadaand the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols(1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).  

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1-4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes. 

Readings in Śāktism: The Netratantra

Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Weeks 2, 4, 6, and 8, Tuesday, 3.00-4.00,
OCHS Library

The Netratantra (NT), the ‘Tantra of the Eye’, is an important Śākta-Śaiva text in Kashmir and Nepal, dating from around the early ninth century. The NT occupies a middle ground and claims universality as a sarvasāmānya tantra overriding the distinctions between the orthodox Vedic scriptures, the Śaiva Siddhānta, the Mantramārga, and the Kulamārga as well as divisions outside of Śaivism. The text has absorbed material from different social strata and a variety of Indian traditions in its aim for a universal appeal. Indeed, the NT is strongly influenced by goddess worship and the Kulamārga and represents an important early point of entry and incorporation of the Śākta tradition into Śaivism. Thus, along with Śaivism and the tantric traditions there seems to have developed a distinct tradition, that we might call Śāktism, focused on the Goddess as śakti in her many forms.

We will read and discuss Śākta sections of the NT in transliteration based on the oldest surviving Nepalese manuscript (Amṛteśatantra, NAK MS 1-285, NGMPP Reel No. B 25/4 from 1200 CE) with reference to the KSTS edition and the OCHS Manuscript Database. These reading sessions and seminars are intended for students who have an elementary or intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Śāktism, yoga, and the tantric traditions.

Senior Seminar in Indian Religions

Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier
Weeks 2, 4 and 6, Wednesday, 5.00-6.30,
OCHS Library 

This series of regular seminars brings together scholars and students working on Indic philosophies and religions. It focuses on topics of current research: in each session, two people will present a context they are investigating for 20min, and then open it for discussion on key questions. This term we will have a great list of speakers, all sharing ideas, puzzles, and questions from their work on Indian Philosophy for the group to discuss. All scholars, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join.

All events are in the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) Library, 15 Magdalen Street, OX1 3AE.

Week 2

Dr Marie Helene Gorisse, Birmingham: “On how to distinguish curd and camels: The Jain-Buddhist dispute over the non-one-sidedness of things”

In this talk I will assess whether – with its doctrine of non-one-sidedness (anekāntavāda) – Jain philosophy of language really fails at denoting. This will be the occasion to examine what distinguishes it from Buddhist philosophy of language. I will notably focus on Akalaṅka and on the Buddhist criticism as featured in Śāntarakṣita.

Dr Jessica Frazier, Oxford: Radical Phenomenology in Indian Cultures: Devising a Symposium

Indian thought aims humans at some of the most extreme re-structurings of conscious known to history. Across different traditions, some have advised systematically destroying the structures of the ego, dissolving all reification, totally absorbing in a single object, or re-identifying as the whole of reality.  This discussion asks what phenomenologies exist, and what they add to our understanding of the untapped potentialities of consciousness, with an eye to setting up a Symposium in Spring. All welcome to discuss and get involved!

Week 4

Dr Zishan Khawaja, Manchester: Svabhāva, Pratītya Samutpāda and Nirvāṇa: Is Nāgārjuna Consistent?

This talk thinks about whether there is a consistent philosophy in the work of Nagarjuna, focusing specifically on the apparent tension between a rejection of intrinsic nature, a commitment to dependent-origination, and the description of Nirvana as the cessation of conceptual proliferation.

Dr Szilvia Szanyi, Oxford: Sthiramati on Rebirth and the Notion of the Self

Sthiramati (c. 6th century CE) is one of the most prominent commentators of the Yogācāra tradition, especially on the treatises of Vasubandhu (c. 4th–5th century CE). Despite his crucial role in shaping the identity of the Yogācāra school, Sthiramati’s works and original contributions to addressing key issues in Buddhist philosophy are still often overlooked in scholarship. In the first half of my talk, I will briefly discuss Sthiramati’s interpretation of the various mental afflictions (kleśa) that contribute to the emergence and entrenchment of the mistaken notion of the self in the cognitive architecture of the human mind. In the second half, I will examine Sthiramati’s highly technical account of rebirth, which interestingly combines some earlier and novel considerations to explain the perpetuation of saṃsāric existence.

Week 6

Dr Monima Chadha, Oxford: Vasubandhu’s account of Agency and Responsibility

In Abhidharmakośabhāṣya IX, Vasubandhu denies the ultimate existence of persons and selves because they lack causal efficacy. Who, then, is the agent of (moral) action and the bearer of moral responsibility?

Dr Karen O’Brian-Kopp, KCL: A shared argument between Patañjali, Vasubandhu and Asaṅga on causality and rebirth.

This talk examines cross-traditional dialogue in early South Asia between the Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosopher Patañjali and the Buddhist philosophers Vasubandhu and Asaṅga concerning how ethical causality, or karma, determines rebirth.

Readings in Phenomenology

Prof. Gavin Flood FBA
Weeks 1-8, Monday, 12.00-1.00,
OCHS Library

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we read Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Concept of Mind in Hindu Tantrism

Prof. Gavin Flood FBA
Weeks 4, 6 and 8, Thursday, 2.00-3.00,
OCHS Library 

These lectures present an account of the concept of mind in Hindu Tantra. Through a study of religious and philosophical texts in the post-Gupta period we come to understand how the mind is conceptualized both as that which keeps a person bound to the cycle of reincarnation and as having transformative potential in allowing a person to achieve liberation or salvation. The lectures trace a history of the idea of the mind from the earliest occurrences of the terms for ‘mind’ (manas and citta) in Vedic and Buddhist literature, to tantric traditions of Śiva and the Goddess. The inspiration behind the lectures is Herbert Guenther’s masterful study of the mind in Buddhism published in 1956.

The Concept of Mind in Indian Thinking
Week 4, Thursday 7 November, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

This first lecture will describe the concept of mind in early sources from the Vedas to Buddhism. The category of the ‘mind’ would seem to be quite ancient and appears for the first time in the Ṛg-veda and is arguably a foundational category of pre-philosophical speculation along with speech (vāc) and sacrifice (yajña). It is Buddhism that develops a keen mentalistic vocabulary and influences classical Yoga’s understanding. It is these traditions, the Vedic, the Buddhist, and the Yogic, that I will argue influence and form tantric concepts of mind.

The Mind in Śaiva Scriptures
Week 6, Thursday 21 November, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

This second lecture raises the question about models of mind presented in Śaiva scriptures and how the category of ‘mind’ – as a translation of citta and manas – has a both a negative and positive evaluation, that which keeps us trapped in compulsive responses to world and as that which has the capacity to liberate.

Grounding the Mind
Week 8, Thursday 5 December, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

Having described models of the mind in tantric literature, this lecture will raise the question as to what lies behind these representations? Why do our texts understand mind and consciousness in the ways that they have, such that they can also be overlaid with a distinct dualistic or non-dualistic metaphysics? In this lecture we will probe a deeper cultural and social level that is the precondition for the discourse we have exposed. We need to move to a cultural ontology that is the necessary condition for the languages of awareness to develop. To do this, once more we must revert to our texts: to the proto-philosophical ideas in the scriptural revelation we have described along. We see that concepts of mind are not isolated from the wider cultural and social life within which these reflections arose. There are three elements to this underlying cultural ontology we can identify: sacrifice (yajñā), self (ātman), and boundary variability  (also called ‘body’, śarīra).

Lectures of the J.P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

Spiritual Migration: The first Hindu guru to settle in Europe

Prof. Knut Jacobsen
Week 3, Thursday 31 October, 2.00-3.00,
OCHS Library

One type of Hindu migrants is the spiritual migrants eager to spread the message of Hindu spirituality and Hindu civilization to the rest of the world. The lecture analyses this type of Hindu migrants, the motivations and purposes and in particular looks at the first Hindu guru to settle permanently in Europe, and perhaps in the Western world, who was from Bengal and arrived in Europe in 1911. The lecture looks in particular at his spiritual linage. By relating his teachings to those of his guru, a better understanding of his mission and teaching can be attained.

Plurality of Sāṃkhya traditions

Prof. Knut Jacobsen
Week 5, Thursday 14 November, 2.00-3.00,
OCHS Library

It has been argued that when approaching early Sāṃkhya traditions, one should allow for the greatest possible plurality. In this lecture I argue that it is advisable that this principle be followed when trying to understand Sāṃkhya in all periods of Indian history. Some contemporary approaches to Sāṃkhya tend to essentialize Sāṃkhya and make it ahistorical. While this ahistorical method is inherently problematic in itself, Sāṃkhya is much more than the Sāṃkhyakārikā and Sāṃkhyasūtra tradition. The different Sāṃkhya philosophies and traditions represent a variety of views, and in the lecture, I argue that plurality characterizes the history of Sāṃkhya. The Sāṃkhya teachers did probably represent a wide range of views and seem not only to have repeated a fixed system of doctrines.

 

Knut A. Jacobsen is Professor in the Study of Religions at the University of Bergen, Norway. His main fields of research include Sāṃkhya and Yoga theory and practice, Hindu sacred geography and pilgrimage, transnational Hinduism, religion and public space, and pluralism of religions in South Asia and in the South Asian diasporas. He is the author of four monographs, Prakṛti in Sāṃkhya-Yoga: Material Principle, Religious Experience, Ethical Implications  (Peter Lang, 1999), Kapila: Founder of Sāṃkhya and Avatāra of Viṣṇu (Munshiram Manoharlal, 2008), Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: Salvific Space (Routledge, 2013), and Yoga in Modern Hinduism: Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Sāṃkhyayoga (Routledge, 2018), and is the editor or co-editor of numerous books, the latest of which are the two volumes Handbook of Hinduism in Europe (Brill 2020), Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions (Routledge 2021), Hindu Diasporas (Oxford University Press 2023) and Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India, 2nd ed. (2024). He is the editor in chief of the seven volumes Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Brill 2009-2023).

Lectures of the Shivdasani Visiting Fellow

Who Wants to Live Forever? Gender and the Fear of Death in Bengali Jogi Literature

Dr Joel Bordeaux
Week 1, Thursday 17 October, 2.00-3.00,
OCHS Library

Popular legends centered on the prince Gopicandra can be found in several northern Indian languages. This story builds on the ‘royal renunciate’ motif familiar from Buddhist hagiography but with the twist that the titular protagonist is entirely uninterested in trading his throne and palace for the trials of a religious mendicant and must instead be persuaded to do so by his mother the queen. Alternately farcical and poignant, these stories emerged, alongside much of what we now know as Hatha Yoga, within the broader milieu of the medieval Nath Sampradaya.  

In versions of the story transmitted through Bengali householder Nath/Jogi communities, the dowager queen is an immortal sorceress who exhorts the prince to likewise pursue immortality through ascetic self-cultivation. Her rationale in these texts draws on yogic theories linking [male] mortality to the expenditure of a finite reserve of vital reproductive fluids, but the non-monastic authors of the texts apparently harbor reservations about both the possibility of a woman effectively transmitting such teachings and the very enterprise of celibate asceticism. 

Polyglot Mantras for Pragmatic Ritualists: Sanskrit and its Others in Bengali Spellbooks

Dr Joel Bordeaux
Week 7, Thursday 28 November, 2.00-3.00,
OCHS Library

Inexpensively produced Bengali booklets with titles like Fulfilling the Heart’s Desires Through Mantra —in many senses, the modern descendants of famous tantric digests like the Mantra-mahodadhi and Bṛhat-Tantrasāra— are both ubiquitous and understudied. They typically feature unsourced Bengali and Hindi charms for quotidian ends, presenting these ‘mantras’ alongside their Sanskrit counterparts with minimal ritual instructions. These vernacular mantras especially appear to be tailored more for use by ojhās (village healers/cunning men) and housewives than for traditional elite tantric virtuosi.

Drawing on discussions of so-called śābara mantras in premodern Sanskrit sources, this  presentation surveys possible emic rationales for the ritual efficacy of vernacular mantras before turning to formal and rhetorical analysis from etic perspectives, with particular attention to those sections designated explicitly for women, childcare, and other domestic concerns. Preliminary reading suggest that these are often less normatively ‘Hindu’ and closer in genre to vernacular verbal charms than the mantras presented under less explicitly feminized subheadings.

Joel Bordeaux is a specialist in South Asian religions with a PhD from Columbia University (2015). He has published on East Indian Śākta traditions, early modern Hindu statecraft, Nath Yogi literature from Bengal, and Tibetan Buddhism in Anglophone popular culture. He is a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden  and a member of the research group Body and Embodiment in the Middle Bengali Imaginary based at Jagiellonian University (Kraków). https://linktr.ee/JoelBordeaux

Other Talks and Seminars

In Memoriam: Translating Rabindranath Tagore's Elegiac Poems - Smaran (Remembrance) and Palataka (Fugitive)

Dr Sanjukta Dasgupta
Week 2, Monday 21 October, 2.00-3.00,
OCHS Library

Along with the recurrent themes of love, freedom, mysticism and  transcendentalism that characterize his poetry, the first Nobel laureate of India, poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) has addressed the challenges of death, loss, longing and letting go in his poetry, throughout his long literary career. The sensitive elegiac poems of Smaran and Palataka trace the journey of the aggrieved poet’s eventual liberation from a sense of torment and guilt through introspection and mystical contemplation. In this talk I will focus on my translations into English of two volumes of Tagore’s Bengali elegiac poetry titled Smaran and Palataka, that bemoan the death of his wife Mrinalini in 1902 and  daughter Madhurilata in 1918.  Smaran and Palataka have been translated into English by me for the first time and the book titled In Memoriam: Smaran and Palataka  has been published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in 2022. 

Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor and Former Head, Dept of English and Former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University has been the recipient of several national and international fellowships and awards. She has lectured and taught at various universities in the USA, UK, Europe and Australia. Dasgupta is a poet, short story writer, critic and translator and has 27 published books.

Join our team! Postdoc in Jain Studies

Join our team! Postdoc in Jain Studies

Bhagawan Sumatinath Jain Postdoctoral Study

The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) is pleased to announce that we are accepting applications for the Bhagawan Sumatinath Jain Postdoctoral Study fellowship. Deadline for applications is 18 November 2024.

The role is 0.75 FTE on a fixed-term contract lasting three years with a part-time annual salary of £28,000.

As part of your application, please provide a copy of your current CV, a covering letter (max 1 page), an outline describing your proposed research plan (max 3 pages), and 2 references with email contact information. The ideal candidate will hold a PhD (or be close to completing a PhD) in a relevant field.

Responsibilities of the role:
– Carry out a research project in the field of Jain Studies
– Organise a research symposium (in-person or online)
– Engage and network with leading Jain Studies scholars based in the UK and other European countries
– Publish (or at least submit for publication) two journal articles
– Work on making the PhD thesis ready for publication
– Develop an online course for the OCHS Continuing Education Department

Please note that this is an in-person role and the candidate is expected to be in Oxford during term time.

 
Apply for this position by email to Shawna at secretary@ochs.org.uk
 
About the OCHS 

The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) is the global leader in Hindu Studies. We are committed to the academic study of Hindu cultures and traditions in all periods and parts of the world. As an academic institution, the OCHS is not affiliated with any religious or political group and welcomes staff, students, and visitors of all backgrounds. Our unique scholarly environment opens the way to ground-breaking research in interdisciplinary fields of study.

Teaching Hindu Studies and Indian Languages are core activities at the Centre. We collaborate closely with the University of Oxford; our Fellows tutor, teach and supervise students of the University. Our mission is to contribute to a more holistic global discourse and educate students to become first-class scholars and future leaders in fields including education, philosophy, religion, ecology, literature, and politics.

Building upon the academic status of the Centre we have been able to provide Continuing Education consisting of online courses and weekend schools. We currently have 40 courses available and more than 11,000 enrolments, making Hindu Studies accessible to a global audience. We enjoy meaningful engagement with many levels of society, not least with local Hindu communities, which sets us apart and models a holistic approach. It is within this comprehensive, cultural awareness that we are able to provide chaplaincy services and support Hindu art, literature, and culture.

Lecture List Trinity Term 2024

Lecture List Trinity Term 2024

Trinity Term 2024

I am delighted to share with you the exciting lineup of lectures and conferences scheduled at the OCHS for Trinity Term. This term promises to be enriching with four conferences and the presence of seven distinguished visiting fellows from India, Japan, the USA, Brazil, Canada, and Slovenia.

We are honoured to welcome Dr S. Bhuvaneshwari as the Shivdasani Visiting Fellow and Prof. Glen A. Hayes as the J. P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow. Additionally, I am pleased to announce the inauguration of the Behl Visiting Fellowship, which will be graced by Dr Abhishek Bose. We also extend our warmest welcome to Prof. Kiyokazu Okita, Prof. Mandakranta Bose, Dr Nina Petek, and Dr Ricardo Silvestre. 

Each of our visiting fellows will deliver a lecture during the term, and you can find detailed information in the lecture list below. These lectures will be held in the OCHS Library and are open to the public, offering a wonderful opportunity for intellectual engagement and exchange.

Our conferences this term will explore a diverse array of topics, providing a platform for scholarly discourse and exploration. 

  • The God and Consciousness in Indian Traditions, a three-day conference funded by the John Templeton Foundation. 
  • Boundaries, Liminality, and Heterodoxy in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, a conference which is part of our Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism research programme.
  • The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium is celebrating its 40th anniversary and will take place at Trinity College, Oxford.
  • Text and Ritual in Śākta Traditions, an online conference that is part of the Śākta Traditions research programme. 

The best part? Our conferences are free to attend and open to the public. We will share detailed information about the programme and how to sign up for each event in separate emails.

I look forward to another enriching term and the vibrant academic community here at OCHS.

Yours sincerely,
Tanja
OCHS Development Officer

Bursaries and Scholarships 2024

Bursaries and Scholarships 2024

£15,450 to award to students this year!

We are now accepting applications for our bursaries and scholarships and all our Oxford University students and Visiting students are invited to apply. The deadline is 22 April 2024, before 12 pm.

You should apply by sending a short letter of application to Hari at secretary@ochs.org.uk explaining what you are studying, the reasons for your application, how much you are applying for and include a budget to show us how you plan to use the bursary or scholarship. 

List of bursaries and scholarships: 
Swami Haridas Giri Scholarship: £6,000
The Spalding Memorial Educational Trust: £2,700
The Parvathi Foundation: £1,500
Jiva Goswami Scholarship: £1,050
Tristan Elby: £1,000
Amit Mishra Scholarship: £700
Aku’s Bursary: £500
Professor Charu Chandra Dasgupta Memorial Bursary: £500
Narasimhacharya Bursary: £500
Hansraj and Kanchanben Popat Bursary: £500
The Tagore Centre UK Bursary: £150
Ramalah Alagappan Bursary: £100
Gopal and Elizabeth Krishna Bursary: £100
Wernicke Olesen’s Bursary for Pali and Sanskrit Studies: £100
Professor Makhanlal Roy Chaudhury Book Prize: £50

A warm thank you to all our generous donors who are supporting the next generations of Hindu Studies scholars. 

The Professor Charu Chandra Dasgupta Memorial Bursary

The Professor Charu Chandra Dasgupta Memorial Bursary

New Bursary Endowment:
The Professor Charu Chandra Dasgupta Memorial Bursary

Thanks to a generous endowment from the Nahar Foundation & the Dasgupta Family we are now able to offer a new bursary at the OCHS to support students, faculty, and other individuals involved in the study of ancient Indian languages and history.

The bursary is established in memory of Professor Charu Chandra Dasgupta who was born on September 6, 1908, in the Dinajpur district of present-day Bangladesh, into a respected Vaidya family. His father, Hem Chandra Dasgupta was the first Indian full-time professor and Head of the Geology Department at Presidency College. A renowned and visionary educator, Hem Chandra made pioneering contributions to mass education in Bengal. Professor Charu Chandra Dasgupta followed in the footsteps of his father and, from a very early age, distinguished himself in the study of history. He was awarded the prestigious Premchand Roychand Scholarship and eventually the Mowat gold medal. He earned two doctoral degrees: the first from Calcutta University in 1944 and the second from Cambridge University in 1946. He held various professorships including the Head of Department of Ancient Indian and World History at Sanskrit College in Calcutta and later served as the Principal of Darjeeling Government College in West Bengal.

Professor Dasgupta’s scholarship led to significant advances in the field of ancient Indian fine arts and scripts. He authored four books and more than a hundred scholarly articles in various academic journals. Among these is his seminal work, “The Development of Kharosthi Script,” which is still widely regarded as an indispensable source for the study of the Kharosthi Script. As a prolific scholar, Professor Dasgupta’s research interests were broad and spanned various other disciplines including fine arts, sculpture, architecture, numismatics, history, anthropology and conservation of archives. He was an active member of various scholarly and academic societies including the Asiatic Society and Bangiya Sahitya Parisad. At the time of his death on 23rd June 1962, Professor Dasgupta was less than 54 years of age. But despite his relatively short lifetime, his accomplishments as a scholar remain exemplary.

 

Middle Bengali Imaginary seminar

Middle Bengali Imaginary seminar

Inaugural workshop for the Body and Embodiment in the Middle Bengali Imaginary project

Body and Embodiment in the Middle Bengali Imaginary” is an exciting new research project in the field of Bengali religion and literature co-directed by Dr Robert Czyżykowski (Jagiellonian University) and Dr Lucian Wong (OCHS). This 2-year project, which was recently awarded a € 50,000 grant by Jagiellonian University’s Strategic Program Excellence Initiative, aims to bring a varied team of specialists together to examine how ideas of the body and embodiment take shape in premodern Bengal’s rich and multi-religious corpus of vernacular literature.

The project held its inaugural workshop, funded by the OCHS, on 16-18 January 2023 at the Institute of Religious Studies at Jagiellonian University. Participants presented preliminary papers examining the theme of the body and embodiment in such diverse religious currents as Sufism, Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, Śāktism, regional epic literature, hāṭha-yoga, and tantra.

Over the next 2 years, this working group will continue to develop these papers through monthly virtual meetings, an EASR conference panel, and a second workshop in Krakow in spring 2024. The project will culminate in an Open Access volume of critical essays and translations, which will make some of this fascinating premodern Bengali body-discourse available in the English language for the first time.  

Workshop participants (in the order of presentation):

  • Joel Bordeaux (Leiden University)
  • Keith Cantu (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
  • Rebecca Manring (Indiana University Bloomington)
  • Mriganka Mukhopadhyay (University of Amsterdam)
  • Naba Gopal Roy (Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University)
  • Ayesha Irani (University of Massachusetts)
  • Lucian Wong (Oxford Center for Hindu Studies)
  • Robert Czyżykowski (Jagiellonian University)
  • Ishan Chakrabarti (University of Chicago)

For more info about the project, click here

Netra Tantra Seminar HT23

Netra Tantra Seminar HT23

Netra Tantra seminar

Week 7, Tuesday 28th February, 10.00-15.30
Venue: Campion Hall (10.00-12.45) and Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (14.00-15.30)
Convenor: Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

Timetable and Abstracts

10.00-10.15  

Welcome

Professor Gavin Flood, FBA
Campion Hall

10.15-11.00  

The Netratantra: Its Vision and Themes

Professor Gavin Flood, FBA
Campion Hall

The Netratantra, the ‘Tantra of the Eye’, is an important tantric text in Kashmir and Nepal, dating from around the early ninth century, and widely disseminated during the eleventh and probably tenth centuries. The text takes its name from Śiva as Netranātha or ‘Lord of the Eye’. However, the text is a ‘universal’ (sarvasāmānya-) tantra, which overrides the distinctions between various tantric traditions. The central deity of the Netratantra is Amṛteśvara, whose consort is Lakṣmī/Śrī called Amṛtalakṣmī in ritual manuals based on the text. After an initial chapter in which Amṛteśvara, referred to as Bhairava, responds to the questions of the Goddess by extolling the virtues and powers of Śiva’s eye, the text presents a number of visualisations of a number of deities, catholic in its range, not only from the systems of the Mantramārga but from Vaiṣṇava traditions as well. Furthermore, a strong Śākta influence is evident in the text with its many references to female deities and practices characteristic of the Kulamārga, e.g. chapter 7 on the subtle visualising meditation and chapter 20 on yoginīs.

Professor Gavin Flood FBA (Oxford), Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen (Oxford) and Dr Rajan Khatiwoda (Heidelberg) are currently working on a fully annotated translation of the Netratantra with an introduction in two volumes in the Routledge Studies in Tantric Traditions series. The project to study the text will especially focus on the theme of models of the person or self that the text entails. Based on close philological reading, we hope to account for different understandings of the person implicit in the text.

Gavin Flood is a Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion in the Theology and Religion Faculty and academic director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Gavin read Religious Studies and Social Anthropology at Lancaster University and taught at the universities of Wales (Lampeter) and Stirling before coming to Oxford. He was elected to membership of the British Academy in 2014. His research interests are in medieval Hindu texts (especially from the traditions of Śiva), comparative religion, and phenomenology. He is general series editor of the Oxford History of Hinduism and currently developing closer textual work on the Netratantra.

11.00-11.15  

Tea and Coffee

11.15-12.00

Digital Humanities and Hindu Studies: Building a Śākta Manuscript Database

Dr Ulrik Lyngs, Michael Elison
Campion Hall

New tools from the digital humanities hold considerable promise to augment traditional scholarly analysis in Hindu Studies. Compared to traditional workflows in which scholars manually collate, compare and critically edit manuscripts into edited volumes, computational methods allow many time-consuming tasks to be automated, and new understandings and insights based on the analysis of large volumes of text can be obtained that would previously have been impossible.
In this talk, I present our work-in-progress on an OCHS Manuscript Database using the Netra Tantra as an example. This database will make thousands of manuscripts available, drawn from the OCHS Kathmandu digitisation project, the National Archives of Nepal, the ASA archives, and more. Compared to existing major manuscript databases such as the Cambridge Digital Library, our database will offer a more advanced interface which, for example, allow users to see transliterated and translated texts side-by-side with images of the original manuscripts. Over time, the database will include computational tools that allow easy textual analysis and concordance, and automatic generating of formatted PDFs or Word files with customised content of specific manuscripts.
 
Ulrik Lyngs is a Carlsberg Foundation Oxford Visiting at the University of Oxford’s Human Centred Computing group, and a Junior Research Fellow of Linacre College. He has a highly interdisciplinary background, with a PhD in Computer Science (University of Oxford), an MA in the study of religion and cognitive psychology (Aarhus University), and an MSc in evolutionary anthropology (University of Oxford). His PhD research on attention and self-regulation in human-computer interactions received the Doctoral Prize from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He has previously been a producer at HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival.

12.00-12.30

Readings in the Netratantra: Chapter 7 on Subtle Visualising Meditation (sūkṣmadhyāna)

Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Campion Hall

The lecture will present a reading and discussion of significant passages from the Netratantra’s chapter 7 on subtle visualising meditation. The chapter is significant in that it presents two different anthropologies and systems of visualization, which the Trika commentator Kṣemarāja refers to as the tantric system (tantraprakriyā) and the Kula system (kulaprakriyā). As opposed to the more body-rejecting practices of classical yoga, the Kula system or what may be termed a ‘Śākta anthropology’ of tantric yoga aims at the affirmation and divinization of the body. This Śākta model of the human is first mentioned in the Netratantra’s chapter 7 on subtle visualising meditation (sūkṣmadhyāna). The Netratantra is also the first to mention the Kulamārga and to teach a system of six bodily centers called cakras, which the meditating yogi is supposed to pierce with his inherent power or śakti. This Śākta anthropology is introduced in the first few verses of chapter seven and then elaborated. The text presents an early Śākta appropriation of older yogic models of ‘knots’ (granthis), ‘supports’ (ādhāras) etc. foregrounding the central channel (suṣumnā) and the notion of how the yogi causes the ascent of his inner power as an early form of kuṇḍalinīyoga. Furthermore, the yogi’s inner power (śakti) was also conceived of in terms of sound or inner vibration (nādasūcī, ‘the needle of sound’).

Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen is Research Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a member of the Theology and Religion Faculty where he teaches Sanskrit, Pali and Indian religions. He is the research director and manager for the Śākta Traditions research programme. His book publications include an introduction to Hinduism (2015), translations of the Bhagavadgītā (2009) and the Haṭhapradīpikā (2022) as well as a Danish Sanskrit Grammar and Reader in two volumes (2014). He is the editor of Goddess Traditions in Tantric Hinduism (2016) and has written a number of articles on Śāktism, yoga and meditation in Danish, German and English. He is currently working on several book projects, including an English translation and annotated edition of the Netratantra (based on the oldest available Nepalese manuscript, NAK MS 1-285, NGMPP Reel No. B 25/5 from 1200 CE) in two volumes for the Routledge Tantric Studies series together with Dr Rajan Khatiwoda and Professor Gavin Flood.

12.30-13.00  

Tradition of Manuscript Production: Nepalese Recension of the Netratantra in the National Archives of Nepal

Dr Rajan Khatiwoda
Campion Hall
 
Not only has the Kathmandu Valley preserved an ancient compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā) copied in 878 CE, but also the earliest surviving Śaiva text, Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā copied sometime in the 9th century. Similarly, the National Archives of Nepal houses a well-preserved recension of the Netratantra ‘Tantra of the Eye’, an important text in Kashmir dating from around the early ninth century. Of the four Nepalese Netra-manuscripts, the oldest ‘Mṛtyujidamṛtīśavidhāna’ was copied in 1200 CE. The second oldest ‘Amṛteśvarapūjana’ was commissioned by Abhaya Malla in 1216 CE, most likely to protect his father, King Ari Malla, who was said to be dying. The lecture will attempt to shed light on the manuscript sources (as well as their scribal and palaeographical features) for the study of the Netatrantra.
 
Rajan Khatiwoda currently holds the position of Chief Scientific Documentation Coordinator in the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP) at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HAdW). He is also the Honorary Leader of the Kathmandu Office of the Śākta Traditions Project run under the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) and a Research Fellow at OCHS affiliated with the Śākta Traditions research programme. Khatiwoda studied Classical Indology at Heidelberg University, from where he received his PhD in 2017. His dissertation deals with the formation and enforcement of the Mulukī Ain, Nepal’s first legal code promulgated in 1854. From 2013 to 2016, he was part of the Cluster´s Project A14 “Transcultural Legal Flows in 18th- and 19th-Century South Asia.” Since 2014, Khatiwoda is research associate at the South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, and the Research Unit “Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal,” Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Previously, he worked as a research assistant and cataloguer for the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) and the Nepal Research Centre (NRC) in Kathmandu for nine years (2004–2013).

in Hindu Studies. Compared to traditional workflows in which scholars manually collate, compare and critically edit manuscripts into edited volumes, computational methods allow many time-consuming tasks to be automated, and new understandings and insights based on the analysis of large volumes of text can be obtained that would previously have been impossible.

In this talk, I present our work-in-progress on an OCHS Manuscript Database using the Netra Tantra as an example. This database will make thousands of manuscripts available, drawn from the OCHS Kathmandu digitisation project, the National Archives of Nepal, the ASA archives, and more. Compared to existing major manuscript databases such as the Cambridge Digital Library, our database will offer a more advanced interface which, for example, allow users to see transliterated and translated texts side-by-side with images of the original manuscripts. Over time, the database will include computational tools that allow easy textual analysis and concordance, and automatic generating of formatted PDFs or Word files with customised content of specific manuscripts.

Ulrik Lyngs is a Carlsberg Foundation Oxford Visiting at the University of Oxford’s Human Centred Computing group, and a Junior Research Fellow of Linacre College. He has a highly interdisciplinary background, with a PhD in Computer Science (University of Oxford), an MA in the study of religion and cognitive psychology (Aarhus University), and an MSc in evolutionary anthropology (University of Oxford). His PhD research on attention and self-regulation in human-computer interactions received the Doctoral Prize from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He has previously been a producer at HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival.

13.00-14.30

Lunch (on your own)
Book presentation and reception:

14.45-15.15

Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurārahasya (Routledge Hindu Studies Series)


Dr Silvia Schwarz Linder
OCHS Library

This new book on the Tripurārahasya, a South Indian Sanskrit work which occupies a unique place in the Śākta literature, is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions about the relationships between Tantric and Purāṇic goddesses. The discussion of its philosophical and theological teachings tackles problems related to the relationships between Sākta and Śaiva traditions. The stylistic devices adopted by the author(s) of the work deal uniquely with doctrinal and ritual elements of the Śrīvidyā through the medium of a literary and poetic language. This stylistic peculiarity distinguishes the Tripurārahasya from many other Tantric texts, characterized by a more technical language.

Silvia Schwarz Linder has a PhD in South Asian Studies (University of Vienna). She has lectured in the past at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität in Innsbruck and at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice. She was Research Associate at the Institut für Indologie und Zentralasienwissenschaften of the University of Leipzig, and is currently Research Fellow at the OCHS. Her interests focus on the Tantric religious traditions of the Śrīvidyā and of the Pāñcarātra, specifically on the philosophical and theological doctrines expressed in the relevant South Indian Sanskrit textual traditions. She has also translated into Italian texts from the Sanskrit narrative and devotional literature, for editions aimed at a general readership.

15.15 

Reception
Annual STIMW symposium

Annual STIMW symposium

The 39th Annual Sanskrit Traditions Symposium

Call for papers

The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium is a forum for the discussion of the Sanskrit traditions of South Asia, and the texts and cultures that have risen out of them. It brings together established and rising academics for the focused examination of research pertaining to various aspects of South Asia’s rich Sanskrit religious and intellectual culture. It thereby seeks to sustain and build upon the long history of scholarship in this important area of study.

Please send your paper proposal to rembert@ochs.org.uk and cc secretary@ochs.org.uk.

  • The deadline for proposals is Wednesday 22 February (week 6 of HT).
  • The deadline for the accepted papers is Friday 28 April 2023 (week 1 of TT). 

The 39th Annual Sanskrit Traditions Symposium will take place on Friday 2 June in Week 6 of Trinity Term.
Time TBA

Lecture List Hilary Term 2023

Lecture List Hilary Term 2023

Lecture List
Hilary Term 2023

Sunday 15th January – Saturday 11th March

Hinduism 2: Modern Hinduism

Week 1-8, Friday 4.00-5.00
Faculty of Theology & Religion
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

This paper traces the development of Hinduism from the medieval period through to modernity. The course will examine Hindu scholasticism, devotional and tantric traditions, and modern Hindu thought. The lectures will explore themes of liberation, the soul and the divine, Tantra and meditation, devotional literature and the formation of modern Hindu identity.

Sanskrit and Pali Prelims 2

Week 1-8, Wednesday 4.30-6.00, Friday 10.30-12.00
OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e., Sanskrit Prelims and Pali for Sanskritists.

Sanskrit Prelims: A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity. 

Pali prelims (Pali for sanskritists)

Week 5-8, Tuesday 4.00-5.30, Thursday 4.00-5.30
OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

Pali students will attend the same ‘Sanskrit and Pali’ classes as Sanskrit students in Michaelmas Term and weeks 1-4 of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term, Pali and Sanskrit students will study in separate classes. 

The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Pali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya-sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapada and the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols(1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981).  

Readings in Phenomenology

Weeks 1-8, Monday 12.00-1.00
OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood

Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we will read essays from Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track), in particular ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’ We’ve read Being and Time and then Basic Problems, this takes us into the later work of the philosopher.

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

9 Rooms: Philip Rawson and the exhibiting of tantra

Week 5, Thursday 16th February, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Chris Dorsett

 Both my lectures are about a leading British authority on Indian art, Philip Rawson (1924-1995). The title of my first lecture refers to the nine enclosed spaces in which the celebrated Tantra exhibition he curated in 1971 was laid out at London’s Hayward Gallery. The arrangement confounded an important modernist conviction that any exhibit worth seeing required a clinically minimal mode of display. The Hayward was a minimal ‘white cube’ but, paradoxically, Rawson gathered hundreds of historical Indian items within confined coloured rooms, and heightened the viewer’s sensory engagement with ambient sound and slide projections. The results were widely held to have had greater contemporary resonance than the concurrent exhibition of new Californian art on the Hayward’s upper floor.

The contradiction was not lost on me. As a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art I had gone to see what artists on the west coast of America were doing, but discovered instead, much closer to home, experimental forms of art practice being spectacularly put to work in the service of cultural material usually found in museums. Frustratingly, the Arts Council of Great Britain archive, which holds documents on the commissioning and popular reception of this exhibition, contains no installation photographs; so there is no record of what Tantra actually looked like. As a result, I will set out how the research I am undertaking at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies re-engages with the sensorily-charged enclosures that Rawson derived from the nine emotional states (rasas) described by the tantric sage Abhinavagupta. The impact of Rawson’s tantrism on the London art scene of the early 1970s will be re-appraised, but my real goal is the creation of new practice-based contexts for researching his pioneering exhibition-making. Just over 50 years after Tantra closed I would like to see the show’s curator receive more attention.

9 Bookmarks: Rawson's writing and the influence of Abhinavagupta

Week 7, Thursday 2nd March, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Chris Dorsett

Lecture two is an analysis of Philip Rawson’s textual references to the aesthetic speculations of Abhinavagupta, which not only influenced the layout of the Tantra exhibition, but also provided a theoretical underpinning for the many art books Rawson wrote throughout his career. He was a very creative museum professional who also thought of himself as an art educator and, from this perspective, he saw art schools as laboratories for the advancement of sensory experience and the amplification of what we now call ‘affect’. 

In the Tantra exhibition he had (purposely, I think) addressed the experimental aspirations of Western art students, and those of us who thronged the Hayward Gallery were busy reading his latest publications. In particular, Drawing (1969) and Ceramics (1971) were landmarks in their field, and Indian aesthetics are perceptively at work in both books – both entwine passionate explorations of the ‘language’ of these art forms with the sensible, embodied, and numinous values we associate with Abhinavagupta’s philosophical reflections. Consequently, in this second lecture I discuss some of the most theoretical passages in Rawson’s writing at the time he was curating the Hayward show. 

Over the years, my own copies of Drawing and Ceramics have accumulated impromptu bookmarks made from offcuts of my drawings, and these must figure in the discussion because they are a by-product of my long rumination on Rawson’s educational thinking. A year after the Tantra exhibition closed he joined the staff at the Royal College of Art and became my teacher and mentor. Thus, my account is built upon a great deal of direct knowledge which is, on the one hand, sensitive to the educative significance Rawson attributed to aesthetic encounters, but on the other hand, inflected by an acknowledgement that his books are now placed at some distance from a world that is post-structuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial.

Professor Chris Dorsett is an artist and academic whose career has been built on curatorial partnerships with collection-holding institutions. In the UK he is best known for his pioneering exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum where, having stepped back from his art school commitments in 2018, he is now an Associate Researcher. Dorsett’s many overseas projects include museum ‘interventions’ across the Nordic region and fieldwork residencies in the Amazon and at the walled village of Kat Hing Wai in the New Territories of Hong Kong. These projects were developed during university appointments at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford; Central St. Martin’s School of Art, London; Royal University Institute of Fine Art, Stockholm; Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne; and Edinburgh School of Art. He is on the editorial board of Museum Worlds and has written extensively on the interface between experimental art practices and the museum/heritage sector for publishers such as Routledge and Intellect Books. Most recently, in conjunction with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, he has been researching the museological legacy of the historian of Indian Art, Philip Rawson.

Other Lectures

Metaphysical Thinking in India

Weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, Thursdays, 2.00-3.00
OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood

These lectures will reflect on metaphysical speculation in the history of Indian religions paying particular attention to the ways in which doing, or practice, connects with thinking, or philosophy, and how metaphysical concerns address problems of the relation of self to world, the nature and meaning of sacrifice, the category of the self in relation to person and transcendence, and the nature of language. Although the chronological span of these lectures will be wide, we will nevertheless focus on the early medieval (i.e., the post-Gupta) period for by this time the different schools were established and there is a history of discourse that we can examine. The implicit thesis of the lectures is that action, and in particular ritual action, is the backbone of tradition and that philosophical reflection emerges from the nature of humans as creatures who act. We will not simply present and assess arguments, but rather try to open out or enter into the world in which metaphysical thinking occurs through examining ritual and meditative literature as well as philosophical commentaries and independent works. Examples chosen will mostly be from the religions of Śiva and the Goddess but not exclusively so.

Lecture 1: The Metaphysics of the Act

Week 2, 26th January, 2.00-3.00

Sacrifice is at the foundation of the history of Indian thinking about the nature of the world, God, and human beings. There is a large literature that focusses on ritual action from early Vedic texts to ritual manuals (paddhatis) in the medieval period. This emphasis on action in the Brahmanical imagination led to the development of the school of Vedic exegesis, the Mīmāṃsā, which presents a philosophy of action that the lecture will explore. For the Mīmāṃsā, the most significant feature of human reality is that we act: action is the most distinctive human feature, more important than cognition, because action has consequences in the world. Above all, as human beings we need to be concerned with action as enjoined by scriptural revelation, thus ritual action. The ritual act for the Mīmāṃsā, namely the sacrifice, is performed not to achieve a specific purpose, such as going to heaven at death, but because it is enjoined by scripture. The Mīmāṃsā is thus reflection not so much on ritual per se but on the nature of Vedic anguagee. We should act in conformity to dharma, truth or duty, and the founding text of the philosophical school, Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtra, opens with the statement: ‘Now the inquiry into Dharma’.

Lecture 2: The Existence of God

Week 4, 9th February, 2.00-3.00

Although the Mīmāṃsā reflected on action and language as the essential components of any account of what it is to be human, there were also systems that presented more abstract arguments for the existence of a putative theistic reality, particularly the Nyāya or Logical School and the Śaiva schools. We will describe these arguments and place them in relation to wider cultural concerns about the act and raise the question as to what these arguments sought to achieve and for whom they were written.

Lecture 3: Implicit metaphysics in the Netra-tantra

Week 6, 23rd February, 2.00-3.00

A focus on action and drawing from it a metaphysics or proto-philosophy, is found in the Netra-tantra, originally composed in the seventh or eighth centuries. This text is replete with suggestions for performance in different deity systems, yet retains a conceptual and textual coherence. We will examine the idea of a trans-cosmic reality in the text, how this manifests in and as world, and how different systems of action (ritual and meditation) lead to that reality.

Lecture 4: Explicit metaphysics of Non-Dual Śaivism

Week 8, 9th March, 2.00-3.00

The dualist school of the religion Śiva, the Śaiva Siddhānta, is rooted in ritual action which it regards as salvific. Through certain acts following initiation by the master who embodies Śiva for the duration of the rite, the practitioner can be saved from suffering in the cycle of action. Metaphysics here is on the leash of the ritual act. By contrast the non-dual Śaivas regarded the distinctions of human reality to be based on a misguided cognition that needs to be replaced by the recognition (prayabhijñā) that cognition or gnosis (jñāna) not action, is salvific. This philosophy is supported by the appropriation of the philosophy of language. We will present a description of this system and raise questions about coherence and meaning.

Senior Seminar in Indian Religions

This series of regular seminars brings together scholars and students working on Indic philosophies and religions. It focuses on topics of current research: in each session, two people will present a context they are investigating for 20min, and then open it for discussion on key questions. All researchers, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join.

Solving Metaphysical Mysteries: The archaeology of arguments in Vedantic texts

Week 3, Wednesday 1st February, 3.00-4.00
OCHS Library
Lead by Dr Jessica Frazier

The intellectual history of Indian philosophical schools presents fascinating puzzles of periodisation and mutual influence. But relatively little has been done to excavate the philosophical arguments in Vedantic texts and examine them on their own philosophical merits. In this short seminar discussion, we will dig out arguments for Brahman in a Vedantic text, and untangle their implications

Tantric Meditation and Phenomenology

Week 7, Wednesday 1st March, 3.00-4.00
OCHS Library
Lead by Professor Gavin Flood

This seminar will discuss meditation on ‘the sky of consciousness’ (cidgagana) in Krama texts, identified with the Goddess, and will consider Phenomenology as an approach to understanding this material. If there needs to be an adequation between approach or method and intellectual object, what are the advantages and/or disadvantages of Phenomenology?

Netra Tantra seminar

Week 7, Tuesday 28th February, 10.00-15.30
Venue: Campion Hall (10.00-12.45) and Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (14.00-15.30)
Convenor: Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

Timetable and Abstracts

10.00-10.15   Welcome
Professor Gavin Flood, FBA
Campion Hall

10.15-11.00   The Netratantra: Its Vision and Themes
Professor Gavin Flood, FBA
Campion Hall

The Netratantra, the ‘Tantra of the Eye’, is an important tantric text in Kashmir and Nepal, dating from around the early ninth century, and widely disseminated during the eleventh and probably tenth centuries. The text takes its name from Śiva as Netranātha or ‘Lord of the Eye’. However, the text is a ‘universal’ (sarvasāmānya-) tantra, which overrides the distinctions between various tantric traditions. The central deity of the Netratantra is Amṛteśvara, whose consort is Lakṣmī/Śrī called Amṛtalakṣmī in ritual manuals based on the text. After an initial chapter in which Amṛteśvara, referred to as Bhairava, responds to the questions of the Goddess by extolling the virtues and powers of Śiva’s eye, the text presents a number of visualisations of a number of deities, catholic in its range, not only from the systems of the Mantramārga but from Vaiṣṇava traditions as well. Furthermore, a strong Śākta influence is evident in the text with its many references to female deities and practices characteristic of the Kulamārga, e.g. chapter 7 on the subtle visualising meditation and chapter 20 on yoginīs.

Professor Gavin Flood FBA (Oxford), Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen (Oxford) and Dr Rajan Khatiwoda (Heidelberg) are currently working on a fully annotated translation of the Netratantra with an introduction in two volumes in the Routledge Studies in Tantric Traditions series. The project to study the text will especially focus on the theme of models of the person or self that the text entails. Based on close philological reading, we hope to account for different understandings of the person implicit in the text.

Gavin Flood is a Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion in the Theology and Religion Faculty and academic director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Gavin read Religious Studies and Social Anthropology at Lancaster University and taught at the universities of Wales (Lampeter) and Stirling before coming to Oxford. He was elected to membership of the British Academy in 2014. His research interests are in medieval Hindu texts (especially from the traditions of Śiva), comparative religion, and phenomenology. He is general series editor of the Oxford History of Hinduism and currently developing closer textual work on the Netratantra.

11.00-11.15   Tea and Coffee

11.15-12.00   Digital Humanities and Hindu Studies: Building a Śākta Manuscript Database
Dr Ulrik Lyngs, Michael Elison
Campion Hall

New tools from the digital humanities hold considerable promise to augment traditional scholarly analysis in Hindu Studies. Compared to traditional workflows in which scholars manually collate, compare and critically edit manuscripts into edited volumes, computational methods allow many time-consuming tasks to be automated, and new understandings and insights based on the analysis of large volumes of text can be obtained that would previously have been impossible.
In this talk, I present our work-in-progress on an OCHS Manuscript Database using the Netra Tantra as an example. This database will make thousands of manuscripts available, drawn from the OCHS Kathmandu digitisation project, the National Archives of Nepal, the ASA archives, and more. Compared to existing major manuscript databases such as the Cambridge Digital Library, our database will offer a more advanced interface which, for example, allow users to see transliterated and translated texts side-by-side with images of the original manuscripts. Over time, the database will include computational tools that allow easy textual analysis and concordance, and automatic generating of formatted PDFs or Word files with customised content of specific manuscripts.
 
Ulrik Lyngs is a Carlsberg Foundation Oxford Visiting at the University of Oxford’s Human Centred Computing group, and a Junior Research Fellow of Linacre College. He has a highly interdisciplinary background, with a PhD in Computer Science (University of Oxford), an MA in the study of religion and cognitive psychology (Aarhus University), and an MSc in evolutionary anthropology (University of Oxford). His PhD research on attention and self-regulation in human-computer interactions received the Doctoral Prize from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He has previously been a producer at HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy and music festival.

12.00-12.30   Readings in the Netratantra: Chapter 7 on Subtle Visualising Meditation (sūkṣmadhyāna)
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Campion Hall

The lecture will present a reading and discussion of significant passages from the Netratantra’s chapter 7 on subtle visualising meditation. The chapter is significant in that it presents two different anthropologies and systems of visualization, which the Trika commentator Kṣemarāja refers to as the tantric system (tantraprakriyā) and the Kula system (kulaprakriyā). As opposed to the more body-rejecting practices of classical yoga, the Kula system or what may be termed a ‘Śākta anthropology’ of tantric yoga aims at the affirmation and divinization of the body. This Śākta model of the human is first mentioned in the Netratantra’s chapter 7 on subtle visualising meditation (sūkṣmadhyāna). The Netratantra is also the first to mention the Kulamārga and to teach a system of six bodily centers called cakras, which the meditating yogi is supposed to pierce with his inherent power or śakti. This Śākta anthropology is introduced in the first few verses of chapter seven and then elaborated. The text presents an early Śākta appropriation of older yogic models of ‘knots’ (granthis), ‘supports’ (ādhāras) etc. foregrounding the central channel (suṣumnā) and the notion of how the yogi causes the ascent of his inner power as an early form of kuṇḍalinīyoga. Furthermore, the yogi’s inner power (śakti) was also conceived of in terms of sound or inner vibration (nādasūcī, ‘the needle of sound’).

Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen is Research Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a member of the Theology and Religion Faculty where he teaches Sanskrit, Pali and Indian religions. He is the research director and manager for the Śākta Traditions research programme. His book publications include an introduction to Hinduism (2015), translations of the Bhagavadgītā (2009) and the Haṭhapradīpikā (2022) as well as a Danish Sanskrit Grammar and Reader in two volumes (2014). He is the editor of Goddess Traditions in Tantric Hinduism (2016) and has written a number of articles on Śāktism, yoga and meditation in Danish, German and English. He is currently working on several book projects, including an English translation and annotated edition of the Netratantra (based on the oldest available Nepalese manuscript, NAK MS 1-285, NGMPP Reel No. B 25/5 from 1200 CE) in two volumes for the Routledge Tantric Studies series together with Dr Rajan Khatiwoda and Professor Gavin Flood.

12.30-13.00   Tradition of Manuscript Production: Nepalese Recension of the Netratantra in the National Archives of Nepal
Dr Rajan Khatiwoda
Campion Hall
 
Not only has the Kathmandu Valley preserved an ancient compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā) copied in 878 CE, but also the earliest surviving Śaiva text, Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā copied sometime in the 9th century. Similarly, the National Archives of Nepal houses a well-preserved recension of the Netratantra ‘Tantra of the Eye’, an important text in Kashmir dating from around the early ninth century. Of the four Nepalese Netra-manuscripts, the oldest ‘Mṛtyujidamṛtīśavidhāna’ was copied in 1200 CE. The second oldest ‘Amṛteśvarapūjana’ was commissioned by Abhaya Malla in 1216 CE, most likely to protect his father, King Ari Malla, who was said to be dying. The lecture will attempt to shed light on the manuscript sources (as well as their scribal and palaeographical features) for the study of the Netatrantra.
 
Rajan Khatiwoda currently holds the position of Chief Scientific Documentation Coordinator in the Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP) at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HAdW). He is also the Honorary Leader of the Kathmandu Office of the Śākta Traditions Project run under the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) and a Research Fellow at OCHS affiliated with the Śākta Traditions research programme. Khatiwoda studied Classical Indology at Heidelberg University, from where he received his PhD in 2017. His dissertation deals with the formation and enforcement of the Mulukī Ain, Nepal’s first legal code promulgated in 1854. From 2013 to 2016, he was part of the Cluster´s Project A14 “Transcultural Legal Flows in 18th- and 19th-Century South Asia.” Since 2014, Khatiwoda is research associate at the South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, and the Research Unit “Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal,” Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Previously, he worked as a research assistant and cataloguer for the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) and the Nepal Research Centre (NRC) in Kathmandu for nine years (2004–2013).
 
13.00-14.30   Lunch (on your own)

14.30-15.00   Book presentation and reception:
Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurārahasya (Routledge Hindu Studies Series)
Dr Silvia Schwarz Linder
OCHS Library

This new book on the Tripurārahasya, a South Indian Sanskrit work which occupies a unique place in the Śākta literature, is a study of the Śrīvidyā and Śākta traditions in the context of South Indian intellectual history in the late middle ages. Associated with the religious tradition known as Śrīvidyā and devoted to the cult of the Goddess Tripurā, the text was probably composed between the 13th and the 16th century CE. The analysis of its narrative parts addresses questions about the relationships between Tantric and Purāṇic goddesses. The discussion of its philosophical and theological teachings tackles problems related to the relationships between Sākta and Śaiva traditions. The stylistic devices adopted by the author(s) of the work deal uniquely with doctrinal and ritual elements of the Śrīvidyā through the medium of a literary and poetic language. This stylistic peculiarity distinguishes the Tripurārahasya from many other Tantric texts, characterized by a more technical language.

Silvia Schwarz Linder has a PhD in South Asian Studies (University of Vienna). She has lectured in the past at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität in Innsbruck and at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice. She was Research Associate at the Institut für Indologie und Zentralasienwissenschaften of the University of Leipzig, and is currently Research Fellow at the OCHS. Her interests focus on the Tantric religious traditions of the Śrīvidyā and of the Pāñcarātra, specifically on the philosophical and theological doctrines expressed in the relevant South Indian Sanskrit textual traditions. She has also translated into Italian texts from the Sanskrit narrative and devotional literature, for editions aimed at a general readership.

15.00   Reception