Abstract
A celebration and critical evaluation of Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s brilliant book, Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach. In this groundbreaking work, Timalsina utilizes the lens of cognitive studies to shed interpretive light on the Tantric visualization practices that he knows both as a scholar and lifetime practitioner. Timalsina argues that mastery of Tantric practice requires immersion in the culturally relative metonymic and holographic logic framed by the Tantric ritual texts. The conclusion that arises from his analysis is that Tantric “truths” are bound to the linguistic and cultural systems that frame them. In response, I herewith offer a perennialist critique and argument for a more nuanced consideration of the transcendent “truth” or “being” that is the stated aim of Tantric practice.
Highlights
Timalsina argues that mastery of Tantric practice requires immersion in the culturally relative metonymic and holographic logic framed by the Tantric ritual texts
The conclusion that arises from his analysis is that Tantric “truths” are bound to the linguistic and cultural systems that frame them
A lineage bearer of the Sarvāmnāya Tantric tradition, Timalsina has never been satisfied with merely understanding the rich world of his Tantric visual practice from the inner realm of his daily sādhanās
Summary
Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach (Timalsina 2015), professor of Indology at San Diego State University, Sthaneswhar Timalsina, utilizes the lens of cognitive studies to shed interpretive light on the Tantric visualization practices that he knows both as a scholar and lifetime practitioner. A lineage bearer of the Sarvāmnāya Tantric tradition, Timalsina has never been satisfied with merely understanding the rich world of his Tantric visual practice from the inner realm of his daily sādhanās. Rather, his ambition has been to become an insider to western modes of hermeneutical analysis; and, from that angle as a foreigner-gone-hermeneutical-native, turn the outsider’s gaze back into his own esoteric tradition in order to describe the mechanics of his indigenous system via the language of an outsider capable of describing his tradition on its own terms. Through a careful manipulation of strategies of metonymy, metaphorical, mnemonics, holographic logic and the harnessing of aesthetic sentiments Tāntrika skillfully embed their texts with densely layered fields of meaning that they decode via ritual practices that manipulate the human brain’s profound and perhaps distinctively unique ability to construct culturally specific worlds of meaning
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