Douglas Osto - An Indian Tantric Tradition and Its Modern Global Revival: Contemporary Nondual Śaivism

This book analyzes the contemporary global revival of Nondual aivism, a thousand-year-old medieval Hindu religious philosophy. Providing a historical overview of the seminal people and groups responsible for the revival, the book compares the traditions medieval Indian origins to modern forms, which are situated within distinctively contemporary religious, economic and technological contexts.

The author bridges the current gap in the literature between insider (emic) and outsider (etic) perspectives by examining modern Nondual aivism from multiple standpoints as both a critical scholar of religion and an empathetic participant-observer. The book explores modern Nondual aivism in relation to recent scholarly debates concerning the legitimacy of New Age consumptive spirituality, the global spiritual marketplace and the contemporary culture of narcissism. It also analyzes the dark side of the revived tradition, and investigates contemporary teachers accused of sexual abuse and illegal financial activities in relation to unique features of Nondual aivisms theosophy and modern scholarship on new religious movements (NRMs) and cults. This book shows that, although Kashmir aivism has been adopted by certain teachers and groups to market their own brand of High Tantra, some contemporary practitioners have remained true to the systems fundamental tenets and teach authentic (albeit modern) forms of Nondual aivism.

This book will be of interest to academics in the fields of religion and Asian philosophies, especially South Asian, tantric, neo-tantric and yoga philosophies, alternative and New Age spiritualities, religion and consumerism, and NRMs and cults.

Douglas Osto is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Massey University, New Zealand. He is the author of Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America (2016), and Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahyna Buddhism: The Gaavyha-stra (Routledge, 2008).

Series Editor: Professor Gavin Flood, University of Stirling

The Routledge Studies in Tantric Traditions series is a major new monograph series which has been established to publish scholarship on South, East and Southeast Asian tantric traditions. The series aims to promote the serious study of both Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions through the publication of anthropological and textual studies and will not be limited to any one method. Indeed, the series would hope to promote the view that anthropological studies can be informed by texts and textual studies informed by anthropology. The series will therefore publish contemporary ethnographies from different regions, philological studies, philosophical studies, and historical studies of different periods which contribute to the academic endeavour to understand the role of tantric texts and their meaning in particular cultural contexts. In this way, the series will hope to establish what the continuities and divergencies are between Buddhist and Hindu tantric traditions and between different regions. The series will be a major contribution to the fields of Indology, Sinology, History of Religions, and Anthropology.

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An Indian Tantric Tradition and Its Modern Global Revival

Contemporary Nondual aivism

Douglas Osto

Contemporary Nondual aivism

Douglas Osto

First published 2020

by Routledge

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2020 Douglas Osto

The right of Douglas Osto to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-0-367-43689-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-00779-1 (ebk)

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To the Great Goddess, Mother of All

I would like to thank Kerry Taylor, Head of the School of Humanities, and Massey University for giving me the financial resources and research leave to conduct the fieldwork necessary for this work. I would also like to thank Dorothea Schaefter, Gavin Flood and Alexandra de Brauw at Routledge, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms and assistance in seeing this book through to final production. Deep gratitude goes to Mark Dyczkowski, Paul Muller-Ortega, Bettina Bumer, John Hughes, Shanna Hughes, Vivek Nath, Prashant Roy, Patricia Obermeier, E. Sundari Johansen Hurwitt and Katherine Bennett, who participated in this study or offered advice and encouragement along the way. Special recognition goes to my family Krystal, Marie, Joanne, Doreen, Alexander, Benjamin, Leonidas, Ayya Lee and Maximillia for blessing my life with their undying love, support and affection.

This book is about the contemporary global revival of a thousand-year-old medieval Hindu religious philosophy often referred to as Kashmir aivism, Kashmiri aivism or Nondual Kashmir aivism. About this tradition, David Peter Lawrence (2017) writes:

What is commonly called Kashmiri Shaivism is actually a group of several monistic and tantric religious traditions that flourished in Kashmir from the latter centuries of the first millennium C.E. through the early centuries of the second. These traditions have survived only in an attenuated form among the Brahmans of Kashmir, but there have recently been efforts to revive them in India and globally.

Some of the more important tantric traditions alluded to above were the Kaula, Krama, Trika and Spanda schools (Lawrence 1999, p. 27). However, often when contemporary people refer to Kashmiri aivism they mean the medieval synthesis of these schools into the recognition (