John Nemec - The Ubiquitous Siva: Somananda’s Sivadrsti and His Tantric Interlocutors

The Ubiquitous iva

AAR RELIGION IN TRANSLATION

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THE FADING LIGHT OF ADVAITA ACARYA

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THE UBIQUITOUS IVA
Somnandas ivadi and His Tantric Interlocutors
John Nemec

SOMNAN DAS IVADI AND HIS
TANTRIC INTERLOCUTORS

John Nemec

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nemec, John.
The ubiquitous Siva : Somanandas Sivadrsti and his tantric interlocutors / John Nemec.
pages cm. (AAR religions in translation)
In English and Sanskrit (romanized); includes translations from Sanskrit.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-979545-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-19-979546-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-19-979554-3 (ebook) 1. Kashmir SaivismDoctrines. 2. Somananda.
Sivadrsti I. Somananda. Sivadrsti. English. Selections. II. Somananda. Sivadrsti. Sanskrit. Selections. III. Title. IV. Series.
BL1281.1545.N46 2011
294.52dc22 2010043392

135798642

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

The culmination of some eight years of research and writing, the present volume would not have come into being without the support of numerous colleagues, friends, and family. The project began as a Ph.D. dissertation, written while I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania and completed in April 2005; and the first two chapters of the translation and notes found herein appeared in an earlier form in my doctoral thesis. I would like to thank George Cardona, Harunaga Isaacson, and Ludo Rocher, my Ph.D. dissertation advisor, for their guidance both during this phase of the project and beyond. I also owe thanks to four scholars in India with whom I read tantric materials over the years, including Hemendra Nath Chakravarty, Mark Dyczkowski, the late B. N. Pandit, and Debabrata Sen Sharma. Similarly, I thank Jim Benson and Alexis Sanderson for reading grammatical and tantric works with me at Oxford University during the Trinity Term of 2002. Douglas Brooks, Alberta Ferraria, Shaman Hatley, Michael Linderman, and two anonymous reviewers offered constructive criticism of and suggestions for the book manuscript, for which I am grateful. I also thank Louis Dubeau for proofreading the galleys and the Teaching Resource Center at the University of Virginia for supporting this work with a research grant.

A number of friends, family members, and colleagues offered encouragement, advice, or just plain old good conversation along the way, including Jonah Arcade, Marie and Ronnie Banerjee, Reena and Amar Bhaduri, Loriliai Bier-nacki, Tom Carlson, Don Davis, Tim and Jen Dobe, Georges Dreyfus, Nancy Farriss, Surendra Gambhir, Marcy Goldstein, Robert Goodding, Emil Homerin, Mark Juergensmeyer, Raj Krishna Murthy, Gerry Larson, Steven Lindquist, Bill Mahoney, James McHugh, Michael Meister, Mike and Amy Miller, Dominick Mis, Paul Muller-Ortega, Liam Murphy, David Nelson, Andrew Nicholson, Deven Patel, Luis Pillich, Ellen Posman, Rosane Rocher, Bob Roth, Jeff Roth, Tamara Sears, Nicolas Sihle, Fred Smith, Travis Smith, Sean Taffler, Louise Tillin, Sthaneshwar Timalsina, David Vander Meulen, Somdev Vasudeva, my two brothers, Joe and Mike, and my parents. Dominic Goodall shared unpublished materials related to the aiva SiddhNta, for which I am grateful. And Somdev Vasudeva deserves special thanks for helping me to set the manuscript with the latest XeLaTeX software.