Abstract
This essay addresses the question of the relationship between Aesthetics and Tantra, in the world-view and life-world of Hindu Tantric visionary Abhinavagupta (ca. 975–1025 C.E.) and his tradition. I respond to a classic work on Abhinavagupta’s understanding of aesthetic experience and religious experience by shifting the focus from ultimate experience to the life of a liberated being. I argue that Abhinavagupta’s blending of Aesthetics and Tantra naturally follows from his view of liberation, which re-integrates the body and senses into the religious life, and affirms the reality of the material world in which the liberated being is embedded. I recover the very humanness and boundedness of Abhinavagupta as an additional way of understanding liberation. I draw on hymns of praise, descriptions of ritual, thoughts on hermeneutics of Being, and complex metaphors, from Abhinavagupta’s tradition, and engage with various thinkers, including Performance Theorist Richard Schechner and neurologist James Austin, to flesh out complex metaphors depicting the relationship between consciousness and the world. I conclude by reflecting on similarities between the Trika model of Self, as interpreted by Abhinavagupta’s student Kṣemarāja, and lucid dreaming.
Highlights
This essay addresses the question of the relationship between Aesthetics and Tantra, in the world-view and life-world of Hindu Tantric visionary Abhinavagupta and his tradition
Abhinavagupta’s life-world reveals itself only when we tend to the Tantric stance towards life and reality, the emancipated way of carrying oneself through life, a way that liberates one’s body and senses, and frees one to live spontaneously immersed in the world, a stance Abhinavagupta and his tradition describe in different ways, such as bhairavımudrā
Subtle bodies are as present as fleshy ones. Is this a poem about Consciousness? Or is it about matter, and everything that goes along with that, the body and senses, and their immersion in the material world? In the garden and in the wine, we find the Trika Goddesses, and the circles of supporting deities
Summary
We are moving closer to being well-balanced when the standing of our being in relation to the presencing of Being is deeply understood through our embodiment. For Abhinavagupta, precisely in his tantric stance, these ways of being involve integration of the experience of Being with living in the world. Silburn’s and Rastogi’s translations and interpretations have inspired my own Rastogi highlights this verse in his essay (Rastogi 1990) that serves as a preface to Swami Chetanananda’s book and highlights the this-worldly stance of both Chetanananda and the Trika Śaiva tradition, reminding us of the significance and relevance of Abhinavagupta to our complex—and fleshy and messy–contemporary lives. Abhinavagupta’s life-world reveals itself only when we tend to the Tantric stance towards life and reality, the emancipated way of carrying oneself through life, a way that liberates one’s body and senses, and frees one to live spontaneously immersed in the world, a stance Abhinavagupta and his tradition describe in different ways, such as bhairavımudrā. What is significant about the Tantric stance is that nondual experience becomes integrated into life in a radically transformative manner, affecting one’s stance or standing, how one carries oneself in life, or in David Michael Levin’s terms, “how one stands in relation to Being.”
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