Contributed articles on Kashmir Śaivism, Indic philosophy and spiritual life.

Presents Vedamta Dindimah Duly Translated With A Commentary By The Author - An Easy Manual On Advaita And Ascribed By Some To Sankara - Proclaims The Truth Of Vedanta In Clear Terms. 8 Small Chapters - Including Pre-View, Foreword - Introduction - Preface - Erc.

Although the Kaula literature of the Newars did not give rise to a systematic philosophical school like that of their Kashmiri counterparts, I will argue in this article that philosophical thinking can be detected in Newar ritual texts. I do this by translating and analysing the unpublished _Kālīsūtra_, an important hymn found in Newar Uttarāmnāya liturgies whose transmission and composition will also be touched upon. This hymn indicates that the cult of Kālī in Nepal had a distinct ontological stance (...) tending towards a non-dualism which was world-affirming while also seeing consciousness as the ultimate reality. Several key conceptual strands of the _Sūtra_ such as the relationship between transcendence and immanence, reality and cognition and the divine and the body will be elaborated upon. In the process, I will show that the _Kālīsūtra_’s philosophy brings into sharper focus doctrines already present in the canonical Krama and thus displays many affinities with the Pratyabhijñā, a school which shares its cultic backdrop. (shrink)

This paper examines the ritual and philosophical meaning of the term ‘nondual’ (advaya/advaita) in early Śākta Tantras (6th–9th centuries), including some early sources of the anti-ritualist kaula cult. It shows that nondualism denoted only ritual nondualism in the earliest texts, namely, the principle of seeing and using pure and impure substances in ritual without distinction, rejecting the pure-impure dichotomy of orthopraxy. The ontology these tantras presuppose is basically dualist, for they usually see the Lord and the created world as (...) different and regard original impurity (mala) as a removeable material entity, similarly to the classical system of the dualist Śaiva Siddhānta. Nondual ontology evolves gradually, starting with scattered statements about the nature of the god and the phenomenal world, usually in a ritual context. It appears in a form similar to the classical one only in the Krama and related systems, as argued in Sanderson (in: Goudriaan (ed.) Ritual and speculation in early tantrism: studies in honour of André Padoux, 1992). (shrink)