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The Lalitā Sahasranāma is a text I keep returning to, and last year, a friend gave me a fine edition of this work with the commentary of the sage Bhāskararāya. As I want to get back to my work on the Saundaryalahari this year, I thought a good starting point would be to say something about the Stotra genre in general, along with reflections on some of the themes in Lalitā Sahasranāma. Continue reading »
In the first post in this series I introduced the concept of alaṅkāra – ‘ornamentation’ – an extremely wide-ranging social category which remains tremendously important in Indian culture to this day. Ornamentation is intensely communicative and relational – it is as much about looking good in order to be seen in a particular way as it is about feeling good about oneself. Continue reading »
What comes to mind when an Indian text tells us, for example, that the goddess Tripura is beautiful? To be sure, from the perspective of practice at least, we cannot help but associate such statements with our own culturally-based conceptions of what constitutes beauty. But it helps, I feel, to know something of the social milieu from which these works sprang forth – its ethos, its ideals and aspirations, its cultural mores. What follows is the first in a series of posts in which I will try and explore Indian concepts of beauty, and how they relate to tantra practice and in particular, to the Saundaryalahari. This opening post is very much a general introduction, outlining some of the key concepts. Continue reading »