A Journey in the World of the Tantras.

• Author: White, David Gordon
• Position: Book review

A Journey in the World of the Tantras. By MARK S. G. DYCZKOWSKI. Varanasi: INDICA BOOKS, 2004. Pp. 315. Rs. 375.

A collection of six articles and chapters written between 1986 and 2001, the present volume is very much an account of the personal and scholarly itinerary taken by Mark Dyczkowski, the undisputed master of Kubjika materials, and arguably the most original and wide-ranging scholar of Hindu tantra of the present generation, if not of all time. A semi-permanent resident of Varanasi for the past thirty years, Dyczkowski is bicultural in a way unrivalled by any living western scholar of Indian religions, combining the sterling textualist training in the medieval tantras he received at Oxford under Alexis Sanderson in the 1970s with a total immersion in the living traditions of Hinduism in Varanasi in India, and Kathmandu in Nepal.

In many respects, the six studies contained in this volume are a record of a journey away from a purely textual, philological, and philosophical approach to Kashmiri Saivism, and toward a more nuanced, complex, historically and anthropologically rigorous interpretation of the same. The first three--on the subjects of divine self-awareness in the writings of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta; abhavavada, the doctrine of non-being; and the ninth-tenth century Samvitprakasa of Vamanadatta, an idealist monist Vaisnava work--are purely textualist studies of Kashmiri Saiva metaphysics. The second three--on the sacred geography of the Kubjika tantras (complemented by twenty-three pages of maps, diagrams, and figures), scriptural representations of the goddess Kubjika as an androgyne, and the cult of Kubjika in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal--shade increasingly toward a historical, anthropological, and sociological synthesis. At the end of the book, Dyczkowski leaves his readers on the road that he is still traveling, a road whose final goal is a massive critical edition and study of the Manthanabhairava Tantra, a seminal text of the so-called pascimamnaya, the "Western (or Latter-Day) Transmission" that centers on the cult of the goddess Kubjika. This study, over a decade in the making, will appear in the course of the coming years.

The articles brought together in this volume may be read on two levels, those of text and subtext. The text--the articles themselves--is comprised of closely argued, highly detailed studies of specific philosophical, metaphysical, theological, and anthropological issues in Hindu Sakta-Saiva...