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Posts tagged ‘tantra’

  1. Metaphor, Metonymy & tantric interpretations – I

    “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

    In a post last year I made a brief mention of Lakoff & Johnson’s groundbreaking work on embodiment & metaphors in relation to understanding tantric terms. This is a theme I want to expand on in 2011, so for the first post in this series, I’m going to discuss some thoughts I had after reading A.K Ramanujan’s famous essay “Is there an Indian way of thinking”. Continue reading »

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    April 11th 2011

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  2. Kula Bodies – II: Dividuals?

    “…persons – single actors – are not thought in South Asia to be “individual,” that is, indivisible, bounded units, as they are in much of Western social and psychological theory as well as in common sense. Instead, it appears that persons are generally thought by South Asians to be “dividual” or divisible. To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances – essences, residues, or other active influences – that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.” McKim Marriott Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism

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    July 21st 2010

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  3. An Encounter with Tibetan Buddhist Tantrism

    “To Practice Tantra is to Ride the Tiger of Crazy Wisdom,
    to plummet into Wisdom-Fire, and emerge
    Wearing the Body of Visions!”
    Ngakpa Chogyam Rinpoche

    Journey
    Zanskar, Ladakh – site of the twelfth Kalachakra initiation given by the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

    After six months teaching Tibetan kids in the Kulu valley, the children of those who had come to India as refugees, I travelled north, first into Kashmir and then into Ladakh. We’d heard the Dalai Lama was giving Kalachakra, a public ritual, amongst the people there. It was 1988. Continue reading »

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    September 10th 2009

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