Critical Phenomenology and the Field of Tantric Studies

The goal of this paper is to set the stage for a conversation that brings tantric studies into dialogue with emerging theoretical research on religious experience in social context. But how should scholars of tantric studies speak about the category “experience,” given the vexed reception of the term religious studies scholarship in recent years? In light of these critiques, this first paper begins by disambiguating the aims of the panel, raising questions for further interdisciplinary research. Outlining key examples of how the category “experience” has been conceptualized in premodern tantric traditions, the paper explores how tantric studies can offer emic vocabulary relevant to understanding the social, political, and embodied impact of experience across cultures. In particular, the paper explores tantric theorizations of the relationship between language and experience, and the role of “training” in regularizing experiential phenomena in social context.