Tantra
Subtitle: sex, secrecy politics, and power in the study of religions
By: Hugh B. Urban.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 372
Subjects: Tantrism.; Tantric Buddhism.
Description: "A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life--Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first 'discovery' of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West"--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-366) and index.