This panel brings new textual and historical research in Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, and Buddhist tantric traditions into dialogue with an emerging response to critiques of “religious experience” under the rubric of critical phenomenological approaches to religion. Drawing on source material from Kaula, non-dual Śaiva, Krama, Pāñcarātra, and Tibetan Buddhist systems of practice, we aim to situate tantric studies as a primary archive for empirical data and emic theoretical resources in the critical phenomenological study of religion. Reframing the reception of critiques within religious studies of the term “experience” as an analytic category, critical phenomenology of religion aims not to speak of experience as an ahistorical universal, but rather to situate experiential phenomena as agentively shaping the external world in their concrete historical and sociopolitical contexts. To this end, this panel makes the case that, in historical context, the tantric experiential technologies and the social, intersubjective dynamics of religion are mutually constitutive.
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.
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.
This paper argues that Pāñcarātra texts complicate the notion that the “limited subjectivity” of a practitioner must be experientially expanded through tantric sādhana to the point that it becomes synonymous with the subjectivity of one’s target deity. I argue that texts including the Jayākhya Saṃhitā, Ahirbudhnya Saṃhitā, and Parama Saṃhitā articulate an enduring relationship of service (kaiṅkarya) between devotee and Viṣṇu as superseding other types of ritual concerns, especially the adoption of divine identity. I argue that these texts respectively demonstrate how such relationship is integrated into: (1) ritual practice such as bhūta-śuddhi; (2) cosmology and creation (sṛṣṭi), especially concerning Viṣṇu’s realm Vaikuṇṭha where specific classes of beings including former tantric practitioners reside; and (3) daily contemplative practices that cultivate serviceful affection to Viṣṇu over other ritual aims. I conclude that such examples present dynamic and embodied devotion as the ultimate religious experience that is coterminous from Earth to Vaikuṇṭha.
This paper challenges the assumption that religious experience is necessarily private and individual by examining mid-thirteenth century tantric Buddhist rituals in Tibet. It analyzes how the Tibetan visionary Guru Chöwang (1212–1270) orchestrated large-scale communal rituals centered on relic pills purportedly incorporating the bodily flesh of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara to elicit a range of shared experiences. Focusing on two vignettes from Guru Chöwang’s Maṇi Kabum, the paper argues that producing in crowds the sensations of heightened energy, bodily purging, and vulnerability was central to these ceremonies. Applying the kinship theories of Carsten and Sahlins, it interprets the shared sensations generated by the pills and their associated rituals to foster a sense of kindred belonging thought capable of indexing rebirth in a pure land and addressing social fragmentation, epidemic, military threat, and other collective crises of a “degenerate age.”
| Janet Gyatso | jgyatso@hds.harvard.edu | View |