JHS - Latest Issue (OUP)

The Truth, the Way, the Life: Christian Commentary on the Three Holy Mantras of the Srivaisnava Hindus. By Francis X. Clooney.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

The Art of Loving Krishna: Ornamentation and Devotion. By Cynthia Packert.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

The Womb of Tantra: Goddesses, Tribals, and Kings in Assam

This article examines two central but controversial themes in the early development of Tantra in South Asia: the relationship between Tantra and kingship and the role of non-Hindu, indigenous traditions in Tantric practice. As its primary focus, the article will examine the relationship between goddess-worship, kingship, and tribal religions in Assam, which has long been regarded by both Sanskrit texts and Western scholars as the symbolic and/ or literal heartland of Tantra. Using Sanskrit texts from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries as well as vernacular histories and archeological evidence, the article will discuss the complex negotiations between Hindu brahmans and the non-Hindu tribal kings who adopted the worship of Kamakhya, Kali, and other Sakta Tantric goddesses. Assamese Tantra, I suggest, represents a complex negotiation between Sanskritic brahmanic traditions and local indigenous rituals, which we see most clearly in the offering of animal and human sacrifice.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

Encountering the Other: Tantra in the Cross-cultural Context

This article focuses on the cultural appropriation of Tantra in India and the West. The term ‘Tantra’ evokes one sentiment in contemporary India, the birthplace of Tantra, and a widely divergent meaning in the West. In these contrasting understandings of Tantra as the black magic or as sex, the sacred of some has been turned into an object for appropriation and commodification for others. This shift relies on identifying Tantra as the ‘other’, in relation to what the mainstream culture defines itself as the ‘self’. Due to secretive nature of Tantric tradition since the classical times, Tantra has never found its own voice, and with the mainstream culture claiming the power over truth, marginal voices repressed within the rubric of Tantra have never been heard. The emergence of religious consumerism has assisted in peeling off this secretive Tantric body, bringing the heart of sacred practices from India to the consumers in the West.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

Siva's Demon Devotee: Karaikkal Ammaiyar. By Elaine Craddock.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

The Resounding Field of Visualised Self-Awareness: The Generation of Synesthetic Consciousness in the Sri Yantra Rituals of Nityasodasikarnava Tantra

In this article, I utilise current scholarship on synesthetic experience as a lens for evaluating the multi-layered cognitive and artistic processes by which Sri Vidya practitioners construct, visualise, and embody the primary symbol of their clan, the Sri Vidya diagram. This diagram is simultaneously a multi-hued visual image and a resounding symphonic field of luminous, reverberating graphemes. By constructing externally and visualising internally a sound field that is not just heard but perceived, the sadhaka generates an embodied poly-sensualised consciousness that is the ritualised means for achieving the aim of his Sakta practice: the recognition of one's self as non-distinct from that supreme goddess, Mahatripurasundari, she whose self-emanation as the resounding, luminous Sri Yantra, is itself the emergent cosmos.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

The Secret Garland: Antal's Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli. Translated with Introduction and Commentary by Archana Venkatesan.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

Tantric Studies: Issues, Methods, and Scholarly Collaborations

This introduction will briefly consider some of the major themes and issues that have been central to Tantric Studies, as the formation of the Society for Tantric Studies (STS) has very much been a response to addressing these issues. It will then provide an overview of the development of the STS since 1984, and conclude with some comments on the four essays in this volume.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

New Homelands Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa. By Paul Younger.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]

Towards a Tantric Nondualist Ethics through Abhinavagupta's Notion of Rasa{dagger}

In a famous pronouncement on the defects of India’s monistic traditions, the German scholar Paul Hacker declared that advaita, or nondualist, traditions could never achieve the ethical pre-eminence of Christianity since in the ultimate analysis, in a world where all is ultimately the ‘absolute one’, there is no room for the ethical engagement inspired by the Other. This article explores what I suggest is a highly nuanced and compelling understanding of the ethical relationship between a self and the other within the context of a nondualist Indian thinker. Specifically, I propose that the writing of the tenth century Tantric philosopher, Abhinavagupta, on aesthetics, offers a way into understanding how a nondualist philosophy might address the ethical complexity of human interrelations. I suggest that the link he makes between the emotional and subjective experience of art to a process of universalisation is especially compelling as the basis for ethical relations towards others.

view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - current issue]