Siddhartha

When I read Siddhartha it occurred to me that what Hesse was really writing was not, as it is often understood, either Buddhism or Hinduism, but rather Tantra. This is a medieval outgrowth of both Buddhism and Hinduism that suggests that it is important to embrace and understand the world around us instead of rejecting it. I suppose the best example of this Tantric attitude that I can think of comes from the Daoist popular novel Seven Taoist Masters. One figure decides that he is too consumed by lustful thoughts, so he creates a bunch of "fairy gold" out of pebbles and goes to live in a brothel. After doing so for a few years any obsessive interest he may have had in sex has been burnt out of him.

thursday, december 13, 2012

Siddhartha, Tantricism, Environmentalism, Dao

Robert Brown notes that the term tantrism is a construction of western scholarship, not a concept that comes from the religious system itself. Tāntrikas (practitioners of Tantra) never attempted to define Tantra as a whole the way Western scholars have. Rather, the Tantric dimension of each South Asian religion had its own name:
Tantric Shaivism was known to its practitioners as the Mantramārga,
Tantric Buddhism has the indigenous name of the Vajrayana,
Tantric Vaishnavism was known as the Pañcarātra.
The general term "Tantra" may be used to denote all the teachings and practices found in the scriptures called tantras or āgamas, a synonym. It could equally be substituted by the adjective Āgamic.