Jacob P. Dalton offers a history of early tantric Buddhist ritual through the lens of the Tibetan manuscripts discovered near Dunhuang on the ancient Silk Road. He argues that the spread of ritual ...manuals offered Buddhists an extracanonical literary form through which to engage with their tradition in new and locally specific ways.
In the early fifteenth century, two Tibetan monks debated how to
transform the body ritually into a celestial palace inhabited by
buddhas. The discussion between Ngorchen Künga Zangpo and
Khédrupjé ...Gélek Pelzangpo concerned the mechanics of this tantric
ritual practice, known as body mandala, as well as the most
reliable sources to follow in performing it. As representatives of
the Sakya and emerging Geluk traditions respectively, these authors
spoke for communities of Buddhist practitioners vying for patronage
and prestige in an evolving Tibetan scholastic culture. Their
debate witnessed clashes between imagination and deception,
continuity and rupture, and tradition and innovation. Searching
for the Body demonstrates the significance of the body mandala
debate for understandings of Tibetan Buddhism as well as
conversations on representation and embodiment occurring across the
disciplines today. Rae Erin Dachille explores how Ngorchen and
Khédrup used citational practice as a tool for making meaning,
arguing that their texts reveal a deep connection between ritual
mechanics and interpretive practice. She contends that this debate
addresses strikingly contemporary issues surrounding
interpretation, intertextuality, creativity, essentialism, and
naturalness. Buddhist ideas about the construction of meaning and
the body offer new ways of understanding representation, which
Dachille illuminates in an epilogue that considers Glenn Ligon's
engagement with Robert Mapplethorpe's photography. By placing
Buddhist thought in dialogue with contemporary artistic practice
and cultural critique, Searching for the Body offers vital
new perspectives on the transformative potential of representations
in defining and transcending the human.
En este artículo hemos explorado fenomenológicamente la experiencia profundamente humana del despertar al Ser. Hemos explorado explícitamente la fenomenología de la percepción directa del ser y hemos ...elaborado fenomenológicamente la metabolización de la experiencia y el poder de la transmisión del campo de la conciencia, que es el campo del ser. También hemos elaborado las huellas de la experiencia metabolizada que son el campo radiante energético del ser luminoso que continúa vida tras vida y muerte tras muerte.
Abstract This article scrutinizes the history of “esoteric” and “occult” as comparative terms and outlines a concrete methodology for their examination and potential practical application, based on ...the theoretical framework of Global Religious History. My main argument is that “esoteric” and “occult” are today de facto comparative terms that are employed worldwide within and beyond academia. Similar to the case of “religion,” they are not the result of the unilateral diffusion of “Western” knowledge but of globally entangled exchanges that can serve as concrete objects of research. Their synchronic and diachronic historical contextualization forms the basis of the development of substantiated comparative terms and their (experimental) application in different contexts. Departing from scholarship on “Western esotericism,” “esoteric Buddhism,” and “the global occult,” the article outlines a five-step methodology that illustrates the practical use of Global Religious History for religious comparativism based on concrete historical examples.
This Special Issue of Religions brings together a talented group of international scholars who have studied and written on the Hindu tradition. The topic of religious experience is much debated in ...the field of Religious Studies, and here, we present studies of the Hindu religious experience explored from a variety of regions and perspectives. Our intention is to show that the religious experience has long been an important part of Hinduism, and should not be dismissed or considered as irrelevant. As a body of scholarship, these articles refine our understanding of the range and variety of religious experience in Hinduism. In addition to their substantive contributions, the authors also show important new directions in the study of the third-largest religion in the world, with over one billion followers.
Recent research into source materials for haṭhayoga (Birch, Mallinson, Szántó) has revealed that the physical techniques and esoteric anatomy traditionally associated with Śaiva practitioners likely ...found a genesis within Vajrayāna Buddhist communities. The physiology and practices for longevity described in the 11th-or-12th-century Amṛtasiddhi are easily traced in the development of subsequent physical yoga, but prior to the discovery of the text’s Buddhist origin, analogues to a haṭhayoga esoteric anatomy found in Vajrayāna sources have been regarded as coincidental. This paper considers both the possibility that the Amṛtasiddhi, or a tradition related to it, had a lasting impact on practices detailed in subsequent tantric Buddhist texts and that this haṭhayoga source text can aid in interpreting unclear passages in these texts.
The Shambhala Facebook group created a space for individuals to reimagine their religious teachings and practices without the Tibetan Tantric Buddhist student-teacher relationship, which received ...much criticism after Shambhala’s spiritual leader, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, had been accused of sexual abuse by some of his students. This article examines how digital space contributes to Shambhala members’ negotiations of religious authorities through their communications and membership on the Shambhala Facebook group, for example, by establishing meditation groups that incorporate Shambhala teachings but not the student-teacher relationship. The collection of posts and comments on the Shambhala Facebook group show how the communication processes utilized by this online social group are an example of relational authority, or what Heidi A. Campbell describes as “a negotiation of reciprocity and agency between different parties.”
This article addresses Bhaktamar Mantra Healing (BMH), a healing practice based on a popular Jain
stotra
. After a preliminary discussion of Tantra and Tantric elements in Jainism, BMH is introduced ...as the most recent layer in a complex tradition that grew around the
Bhaktāmar Stotra
and conceptualized as a “Tantric reconfiguration”: a relatively recent creative blending of Jain devotional and Tantric elements with some new influences resulting in a systematized, democratized, and (to an extent) commodified brand of spiritual healing available on the spiritual marketplace. It then proceeds to examine BMH’s significant digital media presence to demonstrate how information provided on the effectiveness and mechanics of
mantra
healing reveals a complex interplay of shifting religious, spiritual, and scientific narratives and how functional differences between different digital media forms impact upon the prevalence of these different narratives. Ultimately, the article argues that approaching BMH as a Tantric reconfiguration emerging from an encounter of a Jain practice with consumer culture is helpful to make sense of what sets BMH apart from other uses of Jain
mantra
s and of the importance of the digital space BMH has made for itself.
According to many first-person accounts, consciousness comprises a subject-object structure involving a mental action or attitude starting from the “subjective pole” upon an object of experience. In ...recent years, many paradigms have been developed to manipulate and empirically investigate the object of consciousness. However, well-controlled investigation of subjective aspects of consciousness has been more challenging. One way, subjective aspects of consciousness are proposed to be studied is using meditation states that alter its subject-object structure. Most work to study consciousness in this way has been done using Buddhist meditation traditions and techniques. There is another meditation tradition that has been around for at least as long as early Buddhist traditions (if not longer) with the central goal of developing a fine-grained first-person understanding of consciousness and its constituents by its manipulation through meditation, namely the Tantric tradition of Yoga. However, due to the heavy reliance of Yogic traditions on the ancient Indian Samkhya philosophical system, their insights about consciousness have been more challenging to translate into contemporary research. Where such translation has been attempted, they have lacked accompanying phenomenological description of the procedures undertaken for making the precise subject-object manipulations as postulated. In this paper, I address these issues by first detailing how Tantric Yoga philosophy can be effectively translated as a systematic phenomenological account of consciousness spanning the entirety of the subject-object space divided into four “structures of consciousness” from subject to object. This follows from the work of the 20th century polymath and founder of the Tantric Yoga school of Ananda Marga, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, who expounded on the “cognitivization” of Samkhya philosophy. I then detail stepwise meditation procedures that make theoretical knowledge of these structures of consciousness a practical reality to a Tantric Yoga meditator in the first-person. This is achieved by entering meditative states through stepwise experiential reduction of the structures of consciousness from object to subject, as part of their meditative goal of “self-realization.” I end by briefly discussing the overlap of these putative meditation states with proposed states from other meditation traditions, and how these states could help advance an empirical study of consciousness.
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