RT Article
T1 Modern Transformations of sādhanā as Art, Study, and Awareness: Religious Experience and Hindu Tantric Practice
JF Religions
VO 10
IS 4
SP 1
OP 16
A1 Ruff, Jeffrey C.
LA English
PB MDPI
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1671406141
AB "My first raising of the kuṇḍalinī was hearing Ma [her teacher] speak about art." The experience of the awakening of sakti within practitioners in contemporary cultures occurs both in traditional religious settings and within novel circumstances. Traditional situations include direct transmission from a guru (saktipāta), self-awakening through the practice of kuṇḍalinī-yoga or haṭhayoga, and direct acts of grace (anugraha) from the goddess or god. There are also novel expressions in hybrid religious-cultural experiences wherein artists, dancers, and musicians describe their arts explicitly in terms of faith/devotion (sraddhā, bhakti, etc.) and practice (sādhanā). They also describe direct experience of grace from the goddess or describe their ostensibly secular teachers as gurus. In contemporary experience, art becomes sādhanā and sādhanā becomes art. Creativity and artistic expression work as modern transformations of traditional religious experience. This development, while moving away from traditional ritual and practice, does have recognizable grounding within many tantric traditions, especially among the high tantra of the Kashmiri Saiva exegetes.
K1 Tantric Studies
K1 arts &
K1 Creativity
K1 Kuṇḍalinī
K1 Modern Hinduism
K1 Religions
K1 Religious Experience
K1 Tantric sādhanā
K1 Yoga
K1 Srī Vidyā
K1 sākta tantra
K1 sakti
DO 10.3390/rel10040259