Introduction

Abstract

Tantrism is often associated purely with soteriology and esoteric practices to gain supernatural power. But Tantrism was also concerned with life cycle rituals, royal consecrations, the installation of images of deities in temples and their worship, and with temple architecture. The papers collected here represent a broad spectrum of the study of tantric traditions and deal with major theological and practical concerns in the Śaiva Siddhānta, non-Saiddhāntika traditions, the Pāñcarātra, Vīraśaivism and the Nātha tradition, focussing on ideas of the image, the temple, and the body. Three papers deal with images; images of deities but also portraits of human beings. On one hand, Silvia Schwarz-Linder views divine images through the lens of Pāñcarātra theology, on the other hand, Marie-Luce Barazer-Billoret and Vincent Lefèvre examine images in the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition in the context of installation ceremonies and in the context of portraiture. Based mainly upon the Pāñcarātra Pādma Saṃhitā (a pre-thirteenth century), Silvia Schwarz-Linder’s study deals with the distinctive use of rūpa and mūrti for categorising the various forms taken by the divine at different levels of the theophanic and cosmogonic process of creation (sṛṣṭi). It shows that rūpa pertains to metaphysics, concerning the being of God rather than his becoming. Thus the term rūpa is used to designate the supreme (para) form of the divine, as well as puruṣa and prakṛti; these two tattvas being deemed as ‘forms’ of paramātman in the cosmogonic emanation process. Moreover, the same term rūpa is applied to the image of God as visualised in meditation, which may be sthūla/sakala, sūkṣma/sakalaniṣkala or para/niṣkala. By contrast, a mūrti may be defined as ‘a concretisation of the divine essence in a particular figure’. In the creation process, the term is applied to the vyūha level and the various mūrtis are said to be born in sequence one from the other but without any hierarchical order resulting from such a process, for all partake of the same supreme substance of the para form of God. But these mūrtis, born from the process of sṛṣṭi, are connected with the material icons (arcā) used in temple worship and which, at the time of installation (pratiṣṭhā), are entered by a particular aspect of God. Mūrtis are also linked with mantras: if there is a mūrtimantra related to each mūrti, it may be said that mantras are phonic mūrtis of the God. To summarise, we can say that rūpa and mūrti refer to the being of God and his becoming respectively. Each are dealt with in different parts of Pādmasaṃhitā. Rūpa is found in jñānapāda and yogapāda, while mūrti is found, on the one hand, in the jñānapāda where it is shown how the sṛṣṭi process makes of God a plurality of divine figures (mūrti), and, on the other, in the kriyāpāda and caryāpāda where the mūrtis are present in the temple.