Archives: Lectures

The Śakti of the Caṇḍālī

The 11th century Tantric text, the Yonitantra, evokes a Yantra representing the Yoni in which the central divinity is presented as Caṇḍālī, a woman belonging to what Dumont has labelled “the old prototype of the Untouchable”. Other Tantric texts ascribe the same significance to the Caṇḍāla woman or to women belonging to other low castes, most prominently the Ḍombī, the washer woman. What are the reasons behind this antinomian tribute to the lowest of low-caste women in Tantric texts? An answer to this question can be approached by a study of the representations of these castes in other literary genres. This paper will present an analysis of these literary images and on that basis address their use in Tantric texts.

Mikael Aktor is Associate Professor of History of Religions at Institute of Philosophy, Education and the Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark. He holds a PhD from University of Copenhagen, a part of which was carried out at School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His field of expertise has so far mostly been within the study of Dharmaśāstra, in particular with a focus on caste and Untouchability. Today he is engaged in a research of North Indian Śaiva temple ritual and temple sculpture as part of a general interest in ritual studies and religious aesthetics.

 

Yoginīyoga/Yogin as Yoginī: On the sādhana of female deities in Indian tantric Buddhism of the tenth to twelfth century

Harunaga Isaacson was born in Kuma, Japan, in 1965. He studied philosophy and Indology at the University of Groningen (MA 1990), and was awarded a PhD in Sanskrit by the University of Leiden (1995). From Fall 1995 to Summer 2000 he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. After holding teaching positions at Hamburg University and the University of Pennsylvania, he was appointed Professor of Classical Indology in the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Hamburg University, in April 2006. His main research areas are: tantric traditions in pre-13th century South Asia, especially Vajrayāna Buddhism; classical Sanskrit poetry; classical Indian philosophy; and Purāṇic literature. Prof. Isaacson is a member of the board of Indo-Iranian Journal (since 2003) and the Governing Committee of the INDOLOGY Discussion Forum. He is also presently Director of the Nepal Research Centre and General Director of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (both positions held since April 2006), funded by the Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft.

Four Goddesses and a Liṅga: The So-called Śaktiliṅgas and Similar Sculptures

The paper will discuss types of liṅgas featuring four goddesses facing outward. These include a complex Tantric sculpture from Nepal (17th century) and its possible prototypes, the so-called śakti- or devīlingas found in Bengal, dating from the 9th to 13th centuries. A major problem is the identity of the four goddesses and the significance of these sculptures. The paper will also address the more general phenomenon of feminine liṅgas, namely liṅgas serving as a focus of goddess cult worship.

Gudrun Bühnemann is Professor and Chair of the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, The University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more information, see her webpage, http://lca.wisc.edu/~gbuhnema/

Devī worship as point of departure for a comparative project

In the history of religion especially in the comparative study of religion goddess worship is a very underestimated and under prioritized exploratory field. General books on the history of religion either mentions goddesses in the periphery as the spouse of a god or as seen in a evolutionary scheme, where goddess worship is either placed as part of the archaic state of religion, as a part of a primitive fertility cult or maybe mentioned in relation to small isolated non patriarchal societies. And some scholars even tries to explain the nowadays veneration of goddesses as for example the Virgin Mary in Christianity as weak survivals of these earlier stages.

My paper will try to outline how research on devī-worship in the Hindu tradition is a very important exploratory laboratory to overcome this deficit. It is not only a fact that among the world religions, Hinduism has by far the most vigorous and diverse goddess mythology as well as independent goddess worship, it is also a fact that in Hinduism we find the most elaborated understanding of the Goddess.
Marianne C. Qvortrup Fibiger, Ph.D. and associate professor at the Section of Religious Studies at the Faculty of Arts at Aarhus University. She is especially interested in contemporary Hinduism and has done fieldwork different places in India as well as in Sri Lanka, Kenya, England, Mauritius and Denmark. She is interested in Śāktism from at least three perspectives: 1) As an important part of the Hindu tradition also in Diaspora 2) How or if local goddess worship corresponds with or relate to the textual background. 3) How research on Śāktism could be an important stepping stone in an understanding of Goddess worship as such.

Snakebite Goddesses in the Śākta Traditions: Roots and Incorporations of Tvaritā, Kurukullā, and Bheruṇḍā

Goddesses associated with snakes and healing snakebite are well known to anthropologists of modern Śākta traditions; Manasā in the Northeast and Nāgāttammaṉ in the South come immediately to mind. In Jainism we have Padmāvatī, and in Buddhism various goddesses like Jāṅgulī, Kurukullā, and Mahāmāyūrī specialize in curing snakebite. The origins of many of these goddesses remain obscure, but my research into the largely unedited Śaiva Gāruḍa Tantras suggests that some of them were popularized by this early corpus. In this paper I focus on those snakebite goddesses of the Gāruḍa Tantras who were incorporated into the wider and increasingly influential Śākta traditions of the ninth–twelfth centuries: Bheruṇḍā, Tvaritā, and Kurukullā. What do we know about their early identities and how did incorporation as nityās transform them? The latter two were also incorporated in Jain and Buddhist Tantra respectively, and are still worshipped today. My paper also presents evidence that Purāṇic chapters on these goddesses are directly borrowed from Tantric sources.

Michael Slouber is a Ph.D. candidate in South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. His research interests include Śaivism, Śākta Traditions, and History of Medicine.