Skip to navigation | Skip to content
Just as Devī,
Your most beloved, endless pool of bliss,
Is inseperable from you,
So may your devotion alone
Be inseperable from me.
Utpaladeva, Shivastotravali 1.9
Now for some brief notes on verses 28-29 of Anandalahari. Continue reading »
“Enveloping, embracing, and caressing me both inside and out, moving in ripples along my skin, flowing between my fingers, swirling around my arms and thighs, rolling in endless eddies along the roof of my mouth, slipping ceaselessly through throat and trachea to fill the lungs, to feed my blood, my heart, my self. I cannot act, cannot speak, cannot think a single thought without the participation of this fluid element. I am immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea.”
David Abrams, on air, The Spell of the Sensuous
“The tantric practitioner lives within the maṇḍala, lives within the yantra, lives within the vision of divinity such that the symbolic world of the text becomes the lived world of the body. Representation in text, icon and rite coalesce in the experience of the lived body.”
Gavin Flood The Tantric Body
To continue from the previous post in this series I now want to focus on approaching particular tantric body-practices. Continue reading »
“…those who always ponder over this [fivefold act of the Lord], knowing the universe as an unfoldment of the essential nature [of consciousness], become liberated in this very life. This is what the [sacred] tradition maintains. Those who do not ponder like this, seeing all objects of experience as essentially different, remain for ever bound.”
Kṣemarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam
Now for some brief discussion of verses 26-27 of Anandalahari. Continue reading »
“I bow always to she who is the very self
of Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra,
the real form of the three gunas!
I bow always to she who is the form of moon,
sun and fire, her eyes restless with desire!
I bow always to she who is the very self of Brahma,
Vishnu and Siva, bestower of liberation whilst living,
Giver of knowledge and consciousness!”
Matrikabheda Tantra (transl. Mike Magee)
Now to verse 25 of Saundaryalahari. Continue reading »
“To be a knower of Sri Vidya one should be grounded in the Trika; to be a knower of the Trika one should be immersed in the Saiva Siddhanta; to understand Saiva Siddhanta one should be rooted in Samkhya.”
Shudranath
A friend asked me recently if I would provide her with a select bibliography for the SriVidya tradition. Approaching tantric traditions such as SriVidya as an “outsider” can be a daunting challenge, particularly if you don’t have access to practitioner communities or networks. But trying to organise even a basic “reading list” can be equally daunting, if only because SriVidya, as with most other South Asian religious currents, is heavily influenced by other traditions (tantric and otherwise). The epigraph above illustrates this, albeit tersely – that Sri Vidya, in its development, drew on many themes and concepts from the Trika traditions of Kashmir (a.k.a Kashmir Shaivism) and these in turn, require some understanding of the wider Saiva Siddhanta tradition – which was, in turn, heavily influenced by Samkhya philosophy.
This is one of the difficulties of getting to grips with tantra – there has been tendency has been to treat it as something entirely abstracted and seperate from the broader Indian cultural landscape rather than, as contemporary scholarship tends to view it – as the “esoteric wing” of wider Indian traditions (be they Buddhist, Jaina, Śaiva, Śhakta, Viṣṇu, etc.). Tantra also builds on historically earlier traditions (such as Classical Samkhya) but re-interprets them in novel ways.
So here’s a starting point – it is not intended to be comprehensive, and I’ll try and return to it periodically with updates. For the moment, I’m going to focus on scholarly works in English. Continue reading »
“She is thus the beginning and end of the process of divinization, enabling all beings, gods and humans, to become more, even up to a final blissful immersion within Her. To participate in Her bliss, novice practitioners – including attentive readers – must assent to a gradual but ultimately complete deconstruction and enhancement of their own bodies, sensations, pleasures, and relationships. One loses all of this, regains it, and then is able to see Her directly and completely. The key to entering Her world seems to be a combination of reverence, intellect, and intense curiosity, which together make deepening interior vision possible.”
Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary p177
“She the primordial Śakti who excels all and who in Her own nature is eternal, limitless bliss, is the seed of all the moving and motionless things which are to be, and is the pure mirror in which Śiva experiences Himself.”
Kāmakalāvilāsa verse 2
Now for some brief notes on verses 23-24 of Saundaryalahari. Continue reading »
In twining creepers I see your body,
in eyes of startled does your glance,
in the moon the glow and shadow of your cheek,
in the peacocks’ crested plume your hair,
in the flowing waters’ quick ripples
the capricious frown on your brow,
but no single object holds
an image of your likeness.
Kalidasa, Meghadūta
Desire (kāma) is the will to take possession [of the other] (to make the other oneself). Veiling everything with his desire, the desirer can accomplish everything, since everything has as its ultimate principle desire itself.
Abhinavagupta, Mālinīvijayavārttika (1.281)
Now to verses 21-22 of Saundaryalahari. Continue reading »
“Likely, o beloved, [by meditating on Devi] in the form of Kāmakalā emerged in the sprout of madana, with the light-circle of the rising sun, a luminous body with an expanding flame top. She exists while gulping all the beings manifested to enjoy the world.
Existing in I-ness, keeping herself within her own supreme glory, and manifesting successively down to the ground of kāma, which is within the body, manifesting in two forms whilst being alone.”
Nityāṣoḍaśikārṇava, 4.34 – 4.37 (transl. Lidke, 2000)
Now to verse 20 of Saundaryalahari:
Whoever contemplates You in his heart,
O essence of ambrosia,
abundant and radiant like an image carved in moonstone,
will quell the pride of serpents
as if he were the king of birds,
he will cure those afflicted by fever,
with the streaming nectar that showers from his glance.
(transl. Clooney, 2005, p.52)
In this non-dualist tradition, adepts affirm the distinction between subject and object (in this case between human and divine) through darśan in order to dismantle distinctions between human and divine natures. The ritual’s aim is not to affirm a sacred space occupied by the śrīcakra in order to distinguish its “sacrality” from the “profane” ordinary world but to affect a transformation in understanding concerning the everyday world by identifying it as structured through the cakra’s form.
Douglas R. Brooks, The Srividya School of Sakta Tantrism: A Study of the Texts and Contexts of the Living Traditions in South India
“In this way the united Kāma and Kalā are the (three) letters whose own form (Svarūpa) is the three Bindus. It is She who is the Mother manifest as the three Gunas (Triguṇa-svarūpiṇī) and who assumed the form of the triangle.”
Kāmakalāvilāsa, v25
The worship of oneself must be done with elements that are pleasing to the senses.
Yoginīhṛdaya, 3.8a
Let my idle chatter be the muttering of prayer, my every manual movement the execution of ritual gesture, my walking a ceremonial circumambulation, my eating and other acts the rite of sacrifice, my lying down, prostration in worship, my every pleasure enjoyed with dedication of myself, let whatever activity of mine be some form of worship of you.
Saundaryalahari, 27
In the previous post in this series I gave a brief discussion on what could be thought of as a ‘tantric’ perspective on the senses. Now I will move onto describing the “short form” of this practice, which takes the form of a short puja sequence. Continue reading »