Lecture tag: Tantra

Potential Avenues for Research on Tantric Forms of Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal (Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā)

Research on premodern Tantric groups related to the Caitanya (or Gauḍīya) Vaiṣṇava tradition of Bengal is rather rare and difficult for many reasons, such as limited data and the esoteric language of the texts. In this paper, I propose to critically look at the textual sources with occasional reference to field reports indicating potential areas for fruitful academic exploration in this domain, highlight mutual influence among various Sahajiyā works and their origins. The presentation will be based on the author’s exploration of largely unpublished Middle Bengali sources. I will focus in particular on the Niguḍārthaprakāśāvalī (‘A ray on hidden meanings’), which survives in only three manuscripts, two of which are available in public collections (Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Kolkata, and the Sukumar Sen collection in the National Library in Kolkata). The text stands as a rare example of explicit commentarial effort in the premodern Sahajiyā corpus, one in which earlier texts are recognized as foundational for the tradition – or at least for the Sahajiyā line established by influential Sahajiyā author and guru, Mukundadeva or Mukunda Gosvami). The Niguḍārthaprakāśāvalī is also unique in offering details about the sexual rituals of the Sahajiyā tradition.

Robert Czyżykowski obtained a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Jagiellonian University (2011) and is currently an assistant professor in the Institute for the Study of Religions at Jagiellonian University, Krakow Poland. His work focusses on Hinduism, vernacular Bengali Tantric tradition, and religious experience.

9 Bookmarks: Rawson’s writing and the influence of Abhinavagupta (HT23)

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.

Tantric Meditation and Phenomenology (HT23)

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.

Tantric Meditation and Phenomenology

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?

Book presentation and reception: Goddess Traditions in India: Theological Poems and Philosophical Tales in the Tripurārahasya (Routledge Hindu Studies Series) (HT23)

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.

Tradition of Manuscript Production: Nepalese Recension of the Netratantra in the National Archives of Nepal (HT23)

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).

Readings in the Netratantra: Chapter 7 on Subtle Visualising Meditation (sūkṣmadhyāna) (HT23)

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.

Digital Humanities and Hindu Studies: Building a Śākta Manuscript Database (HT23)

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.

The Netratantra: Its Vision and Themes (HT23)

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.

9 Rooms: Philip Rawson and the exhibiting of tantra (HT23)

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.

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.

Pauṣkarāgama: The Śaivasiddhānta Doctrinal Base in its Later Developments–Two commentators, Umāpati and Jñānaprakāśa of Śālivāṭi, Jaffna

Among the available Saivagamas the Pauskaragama is a very important and interesting in many ways. The eight chapters deal with some of the fundamental doctrines of Saivasiddhanta in a thorough fashion. Its importance is also evident by the existence of two elaborate commentaries of which one is still unpublished. In my lecture I will highlight some of the salient features of this text based on those commentaries.