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Continuing my review of Professor Madhu Khanna’s new edited volume of essays, Studies on Tantra in Bengal and Eastern India (Springer 2022). The first part of the review is here.
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New from professor Madhu Khanna is her edited collection Studies on Tantra in Bengal and Eastern India (Springer 2022). This collection brings together both established and emerging scholars in its focus on tantric influences across a region encompassing the states of Assam, Bihar, Bengal, and Nepal. This is a rich field for exploration, as Madhu Khanna points out in her introduction. The diverse religious currents of the region, ranging from Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism to Tantric Śākta streams coexisted and cross-fertilized each other. The essays in this collection demonstrate the myriad ways in which adaptations and dialogue between religious traditions influenced and shaped Śākta tantra in Bengal.
Professor Khanna was one of the first contemporary scholars to produce a comprehensive examination of Srikula with her Ph.D dissertation – The Concept and Liturgy of the Śricakra Based on Śivānanda’s Trilogy (Oxford University, 1986) – and her publications include Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity (1994), Rta, The Cosmic Order (2004), and Asian Perspectives on the World’s Religions After September 11 edited with Arvind Sharma (2013). She is a former director of the Centre for the Study of Comparative Religion and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, co-creator of the Centre for Indic and Agamic Studies in Asia (CIASA) and a founding member of the Tantra Foundation, New Delhi. A review of the compendium of tantric ritual manuals she edited in 2014, Śāktapramodaḥ of Deva Nandan Singh can be found here.
Continue reading »What does the Śrīcakra mean to me? What part does it play in my own practice? As you might know from reading my Unfoldings newsletter I have been devoting some time to discussing Kenneth Grant’s representation of Tantra. Grant has a great deal to say about the Śrīcakra, and going over Grant’s take on it, plus referring to various tantric scriptures, as well as what scholars have written, prompted this short post. In doing so, I want to get away from scripture or analysis.
Continue reading »In the last two issues of my Unfoldings newsletter, I have been engaging in an in-depth analysis of Kenneth Grant’s representation of Tantric mysteries in his books – using his 1999 book, Beyond the Mauve Zone as the main reference point. In support of this series of essays, I thought it would be helpful for those reading the essays to attempt a general overview of the historical development of the Tripurāsundarī traditions, known nowadays as Śrīvidyā. In this first post, I’m going to focus on the roots of this tradition – the Nityā.
Continue reading »Indian goddess traditions are of enduring and fascinated attention to scholars and esoteric practitioners alike, yet many of them are virtually unknown beyond the boundaries of regional traditions or have been ignored. An attempt to redress this lacuna is this new anthology, edited by Michael Slouber – A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses: Tales of the Feminine Divine from India and Beyond (University of California Press 2020, 374 pages, Illustrated). Featuring primary translations of the narratives pertaining to twelve relatively unstudied Hindu goddesses. In what sense are these goddesses “forgotten” though? It is certainly not that they are insignificant, but that they are rarely given space in surveys of Hindu goddesses, or that their local, regional character has been lost as the goddess has become identified with more popular forms. Moreover, the scriptural sources which are the basis of these goddesses’ stories have, for the most part, received little attention. These range from some of the less well-known Purāṇas, the early Tantras, and contemporary oral lore and performance.
Continue reading »Who, or what, are the Kaula traditions? It’s a question that has bedeviled me ever since I read the teasing footnote references to “Kaula comment” in Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian trilogies back in the early 1980s. In Cults of the Shadow (Frederick Muller, 1975) for example, Grant made several references to the “Kaula Cult of the Vama Marg”, its secret rites and esoteric sexual practices. It seemed to be all very secret, hush-hush, and confusing. Over the years, I’d occasionally find people throwing the term Kaula about in various forums, and would ask them what the “Kaula Cult” actually was. It was hard to get a straight answer, and I often came away with the impression that these folk didn’t really have much of a sense of what the Kaulas actually consisted of, much less be able to point to a particular historical tradition or scripture. Continue reading »
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 »
I’m often asked by correspondents if there’s “one book” that will cover all aspects of tantra for a general reader. Of course there are many books which make the bold claim of being “the only book” a reader will ever need, but if there’s one book that I would unhesistatingly recommend to anyone – indeed that deserves a place on any bookshelf – it would be Christopher Wallis’ Tantra Illuminated (Mattamayūra Press, 2013, 506pp, p/bk). Continue reading »
The one who repeats the fifteen-syllable mantra of Tripurā attains all desires, all enjoyments, conquers all the worlds, causes all words to emerge; achieving identity with Rudra, one breaks through the veil of Viṣṇu and obtains the supreme Brahman.
Tripurātāpinī Upaniṣad
So to verses 32-33 of Anandalahari. These stanzas are held by all commentators to express the secret fifteen/sixteen-syllable mantra of Tripurā-Sundarī. Continue reading »