The Netra Tantra is an important early medieval Śaiva text. We will read and discuss sections of the text based on the two manuscripts in the NGMPP Library and compare these with the published KSTS edition. Apart from reading the text we will discuss its meaning.
Lecture tag: Tantra
Tantric Dimensions of the Rāsa Maṇḍala: The Bhagavata Rāsa Līlā and the Artistic Imagination
The focus of this presentation will be two-fold. First Schweig will bring out tantric dimensions of the Bhāgavata’s Rāsa Līlā: the yantra-like narrative, the feminine power of the Vraja Gopikās over divinity, the līlā of divine love as arranged by the Goddess, etc. Second, Schweig will focus on the symbolism of the Rāsa Maṇḍala by examining key elements of the passage and ways in which its tāntric character influences its artistic renderings. Schweig will argue that the imagery of the Rāsa Mandala functions as a bhakti-yantra. Through līlā-smaraṇam practitioners enter the world of the dance, becoming eternal participants in it. Contemplation and participation become one by virtue of the power of this bhakti–yantra. The centripetal, centrifugal, circumferential and centrifocal dynamics of the Rāsa Mandala circle as they function as powerful inner mechanisms within bhakti, and as expressions in artistic renderings of Rāsa Maṇḍala, will be presented.
Graham M. Schweig is currently Professor of Religion and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Christopher Newport University; he is a regularly invited lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Schweig is the author of Dance of Divine Love: India’s Classic Sacred Love Story(Princeton 2005). His most recent edited publication is A Living Theology of Krishna Bhakti: Essential Teachings of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda (Oxford 2012).
Readings in the Netra Tantra (HT13)
The Netra Tantra is an important early medieval Śaiva text. We will read and discuss sections of the text based on the two manuscripts in the NGMPP Library and compare these with the published KSTS edition. Apart from reading the text we will discuss its meaning.
Readings in Tantric Texts: Session Two (HT11)
We will continue to read the Jayakhya Samhita
Inwardness and Visual Contemplation in Tantric traditions (MT12)
Religion and the Human Person Series
In medieval Hinduism some renouncers and householders seeking a more intense religious experience adopted mystical or spiritual practices that involved the visualization of a deity or group of deities with a view to identification with the imagined image. This lecture will examine visual contemplation with reference to specific texts, showing how this pre-philosophical understanding of inwardness is shared by Śaiva and Pāñcarātra traditions. We see from these reading firstly how imagination can be guide to understanding them and secondly that these texts present us with ritual thinking and point to a layer of culture below a clearly articulated philosophical discourse. Yet this cultural layer is still a symbolic world, more complex than daily transaction, which entails a symbolism of the eradication of individuality and a process that we might call entextualisation.