Rethinking the History of the Kāma World in Early India

Ali, Daud

doi:10.1007/s10781-010-9115-7

Cited by 11 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…69 Mipam applies technologies drawn from this world of sensual pleasure to the tantric aims of transforming passion into bliss that catalyses spiritual liberation. That this aim was previously absent from the domain of kāmaśāstra is clear in the opening of Vātsyāyana's Kāmasūtra (1: 1) in which he invokes the "three aims of human life" (trivarga), namely religion (dharma), power (artha) and pleasure (kāma).…”

Section: Sources For Mipam's Kāmaśāstra Treatisementioning

confidence: 99%

The science of sensual pleasure according to a Buddhist monk: Ju Mipam's contribution tokāmaśāstraliterature in Tibet

Jacoby

2017

Bull. Sch. Orient. Afr. stud.

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Of all the myriad aspects of Indian learning to be incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist scholarship, one of the least likely would seem to be the Indian science of sensual pleasure, kāmaśāstra. Even so, we do find traces of Sanskrit kāmaśāstra transposed into Tibetan Buddhist idiom. The most innovative example is the Treatise on Passion ('Dod pa'i bstan bcos) written by Ju Mipam Jamyang Namgyel Gyatso . This article investigates the reasons why the polymath monastic scholar Ju Mipam included kāmaśāstra in his expansive literary output, as well as his sources and influences for doing so. It argues that Mipam's work builds on an intertextuality already apparent in late medieval Sanskrit tantric and kāmaśāstric works, but one that took on new importance in the context of the non-biased outlook (Tib. ris med) that characterized Ju Mipam's nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan milieu. Keywords: Kāmaśāstra, Tibetan Buddhism, Tantra, Ju Mipam Jamyang Namgyel Gyatso ('Ju mi pham 'jam dbyangs rnam rgyal rgya mtsho), Rimé (ris med) Sensual pleasure is centrally important for different reasons in two South Asian knowledge systems: the secular domain of kāmaśāstra, "the science of sensual pleasure", and the religious domain of later Tantric Buddhism. 1 On the one hand, in works dedicated to kāmaśāstra, the pursuit of sensual pleasure for its own sake reigned supreme. Sanskrit-language works such as the third-century Vātsyāyana's Kāmasūtra and later works dating from the early second millennium such as Padmaśrī's Nāgarasarvasva and Kokkoka's Ratirahasya contain a broad array of aesthetic concerns relevant to the Indian urbane, such as cosmetics, perfume, games, poetry, gardening, courtship, domestic affairs and 1 I wish to thank Wendy Doniger for her encouragement and useful feedback about this article from its early stages. The article benefitted from inclusion in a papers session on "Buddhism and sexuality" at the 2014 This alchemical transformation of sensual pleasure into blissful wisdom is not the focus of the rich erotic literature of India, nor did it inspire an indigenous Tibetan tradition of erotic literature. 4 Nevertheless, we do find traces of the Indian science of sensual pleasure transposed from their cosmopolitan courtly origins into Tibetan Buddhist idiom. One of the most interesting examples is the earliest extant Tibetanlanguage kāmaśāstra treatise, which was written by the monastic scholar Ju Mipam Jamyang Namgyel Gyatso ('Ju mi pham 'jam dbyangs rnam rgyal rgya mtsho, . Despite the innovative nature of Mipam's Treatise on Passion: Treasure Pleasing the Whole World ('Dod pa'i bstan bcos 'jig rten kun tu dga' ba'i gter), to date there has not been a single article published that focuses on it and no English translation yet exists. 5 The reason for this is more than scholarly oversight, prudery over its explicit subject matter, or hesitancy regarding the complexity of its Tibetan language. Rather, scholarly dismissal of Mipam's Treatise on Passion can be attributed to the polemics of a later writer who...

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Section: Sources For Mipam's Kāmaśāstra Treatisementioning

confidence: 99%

The science of sensual pleasure according to a Buddhist monk: Ju Mipam's contribution tokāmaśāstraliterature in Tibet

Jacoby

2017

Bull. Sch. Orient. Afr. stud.

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“…In recent years, interdisciplinary scholarship has come to focus on the more ephemeral, sensory aspects of religious and aesthetic experience in medieval and early modern South Asia. Daud Ali, Emma Flatt, and Dipti Khera have drawn attention to the bodily regimes and spaces of pleasure that were central to courtly culture, exploring the political and religious importance of such practices as perfuming the body, the use of fragrant sandalwood pastes, and gathering festively in sites of physical enjoyment (Ali 2004(Ali , 2011Flatt 2019;Khera 2020). Renewed interest in South Asian theories of rasa, which can be translated as aesthetic experience, feeling, or taste has demonstrated the importance of sensory experience and emotions to classical Indian aesthetics (Pollock 2016, p. 42).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

Houghteling

2020

Religions

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This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and mercantile and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.

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The Erotic “World” of theKamasutra

Ali

2019

A Companion to World Literature

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The Kamasutra ( Kāmasūtra ) of Vatsyayana (Vātsyāyana Mallanāga) is a Sanskrit manual on the enjoyment of sexual pleasures. Composed in the first centuries of the Common Era, the treatise focuses on the sexual life of the urbane city dweller or courtier and his relations with different types of women. Despite being the first extant treatise of what came to be a distinct scientific tradition in later times that had deep connections with aesthetics, medicine, and politics, and that can tell us much about aesthetics, gender relations, and the material life of elites in early India, it has most often been glossed by modern European authors, from its first translation at the end of the ninetenth century by “enlightened Victorians,” as either a collection of exotic Oriental sexual habits or a humanist counterpoint to Christian notions of carnality.

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Rethinking the History of the Kāma World in Early India

Cited by 11 publications

References 10 publications

The science of sensual pleasure according to a Buddhist monk: Ju Mipam's contribution tokāmaśāstraliterature in Tibet

The science of sensual pleasure according to a Buddhist monk: Ju Mipam's contribution tokāmaśāstraliterature in Tibet

Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

The Erotic “World” of theKamasutra

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