A Day in the Life of an Aesthetic Tāntrika: From Synaesthetic Garden to Lucid Dreaming and Spaciousness

The essay explores how aesthetics and Tantra intertwine in the worldview of the Hindu Tantric visionary Abhinavagupta (ca. 975–1025 C.E.) and his tradition. It shifts focus from ultimate experience to the life of a liberated being, arguing that Abhinavagupta's blending of aesthetics and Tantra follows from his view of liberation, which reintegrates the body and senses into religious life and affirms the reality of the material world. The author recovers Abhinavagupta's humanness and boundedness as a way to understand liberation, drawing on hymns, rituals, and metaphors from his tradition, and engaging with thinkers like Richard Schechner and James Austin. The essay concludes by reflecting on similarities between the Trika model of Self and lucid dreaming.

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Abstract

This essay addresses the question of the relationship between Aesthetics and Tantra, in the world-view and life-world of Hindu Tantric visionary Abhinavagupta (ca. 975–1025 C.E.) and his tradition. I respond to a classic work on Abhinavagupta’s understanding of aesthetic experience and religious experience by shifting the focus from ultimate experience to the life of a liberated being. I argue that Abhinavagupta’s blending of Aesthetics and Tantra naturally follows from his view of liberation, which re-integrates the body and senses into the religious life, and affirms the reality of the material world in which the liberated being is embedded. I recover the very humanness and boundedness of Abhinavagupta as an additional way of understanding liberation. I draw on hymns of praise, descriptions of ritual, thoughts on hermeneutics of Being, and complex metaphors, from Abhinavagupta’s tradition, and engage with various thinkers, including Performance Theorist Richard Schechner and neurologist James Austin, to flesh out complex metaphors depicting the relationship between consciousness and the world. I conclude by reflecting on similarities between the Trika model of Self, as interpreted by Abhinavagupta’s student Kṣemarāja, and lucid dreaming.