The Role of Experience in Representations of the Yoginīmelaka

In the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta offers a unique portrayal of the yoginīmelaka, a collective ritual that goes by many names and involves the ritual invocation of deities, an array of aesthetic elements, and the formation of a “circle” (cakra) of advanced female and male initiates culminating in spontaneous erotic revelry. This paper considers why Abhinavagupta’s description of the rite eschews essential details, and instead portrays the phenomenological unfolding of a charged intersubjective field of experience from the viewpoint of a participant. It will also consider what Abhinavagupta’s experiential account of the ritual might tell us about the kind of knowledge it is intended to generate, in light of parallel depictions of the yoginīmelaka in Vajrayāna and Śākta sources.