Tantra by Hugh B. Urban :: Tantra

CATEGORIES

	Yoga
	Tantra
	Kashmir Shaivism
	Ayurveda
	Rasayana (Alchemy)
	UNCLASSIFIED

PUBLISHERS

Motilal (MLBD)
Bihar Yoga Trust
Lonavla Yoga Institute
Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute

SPECIAL

Gift certificates

QUICK INFO

KundaliniBooks :: Tantra :: Tantra by Hugh B. Urban

Tantra by Hugh B. Urban

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.

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