Specialist in Things Tantric - STS NEWS # 8
File: News#892
STS NEWS # 8 October, 1992
Enough things have happened in the past few months to war rent issuing an STS newsletter. As a consequence, here it is.
Past Perfect: Tantra Occluded, The Third "Annual" STS Conference at Menlo Park.
Tantra Occluded, a very successful meeting co-sponsered by STS and the Institute of Buddhist Studies was held at the Vallombrosa Conference Center in Menlo Park, California from Thursday, May 28 to Sunday, May 31, 1992. The weather was wonderful: a long Californian weekend of clear, mild days and gently-breezed evenings. The location was super too. The Vallombrosa conference center is located on grounds owned and operated by the Catholic church. The facilities were pleasant; the rooms were small-- reminiscent of monk's cells and/or college dorm rooms-- but quite clean and comfortable; the grounds were spacious, well-landscaped and contained the largest ginko tree I have ever seen. The food was excellent. In addition the planning and execution of our program was excellent, a tribute to the long months of serious preparations made by Richard Payne. An open program Saturday evening allowed the non-California participants to explore the further reaches of the Bay area, from San Francisco, to Half-moon Bay, to the college bars of Palo Alto.
The program itself, as can be seen in the outline below, was quite full, as well as being richly diverse. The considerable number of European participants was especially gratifying to those of us North Americans who are generally used to more insular constituencies. If one counts not just the presenters, but all the participants, the geographic range reached from Japan to Italy, with stop-offs in France, Wales, Virginia, and Hawaii along the way. Long lunch breaks also allowed a number of us from rather provincial climes to visit the bookstore scene along the Menlo Park edge of the Stanford University campus.
The degree to which we dis-occluded tantra remains, perhaps, to be seen, but some interesting efforts in that direction were made at the dining hall when STS participants tried to explain what "tantra" meant to members of the two other groups meeting at Vallombrosa that weekend: "Baptists" and "Dreams" according to the plackards on their tables (seating was segregated by conference; we were "Tantra.")
The final program was as follows:
Thursday evening:
Frits Staal, University of California at Berkeley, "Veda and Tantra in Kerala: Reflections and a Proposal"
Friday morning:
Gavin D. Flood, St. David's University College, Wales, "Body and Cosmology in the Jayakhya Samhita and Related Systems"
Rebecca J. Manring, University of Washington, "Advaitacarya's Manjari Sadhana: Tantric Influences on Orthodox Bengali Vaisnavism"
Paul E. Muller-Ortega, Michigan State University, "On the Appropriation of the Hindu Tantra: Reflections on the Tantra in Popular Culture"
Friday afternoon:
Adelheid Harrmann-Pfandt, Philipps University, Marburg, "Dakinis in Indo-Tibetan Tantric Buddhism: Some Results of Recent Research"
Vesna Wallace, University of California, Berkeley, "Karma and Associated Issues in the Second Chapter of the Kalacakratantra"
Joseph Loizzo, Private Psychiatric Practice, "The Poetics of Ecstasy: Intimate Transmission Across Culture Boundaries"
Miranda Shaw, University of Richmond, "Sacred Bodies in Sacred Space: Female Dancers and Tantric Buddhism"
Friday evening:
Andre Padoux, CNRS, Paris, "What Do We Mean by Tantrism?"
Saturday morning:
Elisabeth Benard, University of Hawaii at Manoa, "Heads, Lost and Found"
Patrick A. George, University of Pennsylvania, "Illustrating Occluded Realms: Tantric Geometry and the Approximation of Perfection"
Katherine A. Harper, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, "On the Socio-Historical Context of the Cult of the Saptmatrika
Saturday afternoon:
Mark Tatz, Institute of Buddhist Studies, "The Buddhist Technical Term A-manasikara"
Nathan Cutler, California Institute of Integral Studies, "The Presence of Tantrism in the Preliterate Traditions of Western Tibet"
Fabio Rambelli, University of Venice, "Signs in Recursive Cosmos: On the Esoteric Semiotics of Kogyo Daishi Kakuban (1095- 1143)"
James H. Sanford, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Jewels in the Lotus: Spiritual Gestation in Japanese Buddhism"
Sunday morning:
Mark Unno, Stanford University, "Dreams of Pilgrimage: Myoe Koben as Tantric Figure"
Richard K. Payne, Institute of Buddhist Studies, "Ajikan Meditation and Ritual Syntax."
David Komito, John F. Kennedy University, "Buddhist Tantra in Jungian Context"
Two originally-scheduled presenters were unable to make the meeting: John Stevens of Tohoku Fukushi University who was to have spoken on "Aikido as Tantra" and Todd L. Lewis of the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass. who though unable to attend did arrange to have his paper, "A Modern Guide for Mahayana Buddhist Life-Cycle Rites: The Nepal Jana Jivan Kriya Paddhati," sent to all participants at the conference.
Future Indicative: Plans for Fall 1993, Call for Proposals
In our last Newsletter we indicated that we hoped to make a connection with the American Academy of Religion and to be on their fall 1993 annual meeting program. Subsequent events have modified that plan. The sponsors of the annually held -----India meeting would like to meet jointly with the STS in the fall of 1993. After some considerable discussion over the phone and by mail, we found this proposal to be too valuable to let go. The details of these discussions were slightly complex and need spelling out here.
1. In spite of the rubric,-----, this meeting will welcome panels on tantra in any cultural setting. The organizers of the mmmm want to see how tantrism fits into the scheme of things cross-culturally. For our part we would particularly like to see some papers on tantric aspects of Korean and Chinese religion, as well as further work on Japan and on Tibet, both of which have in fact received fair representation at STS meetings to date. We, would indeed, actively seek at least one panel that widened the venue still further (see more, below).
2. "Stylistically" this meeting will fall in-between the free-standing meetings of the previous three STS conferences and the three-ring circus pattern of most AAR and AAS national meetings. That is, there will be several panels presented at one time and not all participants will want to attend any particular session-- even those on tantrism.
Further the meeting will take place in an urban-university setting rather than the relatively isolated venures of previous STS meetings. This may reduce somewhat the opportunity for (or necessity of) intense after-program discussion sessions.
3. There are two or three topics that we would like to raise specifically as possible concerns for panel presentations.
- Tantra in China and Korea. (Tun-huang and Vietnam might be interesting in this light.)
- Tantric or "tantroid" phenomena beyond the borders of Hinduism and Buddhism. Are there continuites, borrowings, paral lels to tantra in other cultures: eg. Islam, Kaballah, Gnosticism , the English Ranters, Aliester Crowley's Sex Magick, and so on. If these are in some way parallel to Tantra, are we talking diffusion or some kind of Jungian archetypes? These issues get touched on now and then, but usually only in a fairly casual way. Some hard thought in this area might be rewarding. Are there Iranian (Zoroastrian/Manichean) phenomena that fit here?
- Similar in a way to the above would be to take a close look at the shamanic aspects of Tantrism. If there is such a connection is it a parallel or a historical linkage? Which really came first anyway? That is, how old is classical shamanism? Did it get up-cultured into Tantrism or is Northeast Asian shamanism a down-loading of Indo-Iranian themes and practices? Can we tell which, if either?
- Secret encodings. We all know about twilight language. But there is a whole issue of secret transmissions that is pretty open for investigation. In Japan there are esoteric transmission in Zen and Nichiren Buddhism, including some quite tantric koans. How do these work? What does it mean to write down oral transmissions? Are Tendai kirigami esoteric documents? Are all tantric initiatory transmissions (empowerments, kanjo) structured in basically the same fashion?
- It would also be nice to include in the program some performance oriented presentations again.
The above are suggestive. We would like to see any and all proposals-- either several grouped into potential panels or individual topics that we might put in context. If you have an idea you want to work up, please send a preliminary outline of your proposal to Jim Sanford, 101 Saunders Hall, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-3225 by December 15, 1992. Again, both individual and group proposals are most welcome. The actual number of papers/panals presented at the meeting will depend on the number and quality of the proposals received, but we would like the STS presence to be substantial as well as wide ranging. In the case of group panels you may well want to draw in persons not currently on the STS mailing list. This would, of course, be wonderful.
5. At the moment it is still our intention to make a proposal to the American Academy of Religion in hopes of developing a stable and cost-effective venue for STS meetings for at least several years. We would also hope for rather more irregularly scheduled free-standing meetings every fourth or fifth year or so.
Steering Committee Changes
STS has begun rotation of members of the Steering Committee. The current committee now consists of eight persons: Paul Ortega- Muller has agreed to replace Agehananda Bharati (now deceased), and June McDaniel has replaced Joanne Waghorne (resigned). The remaining members are: Kees Bolle, Glen Hayes, Per Kvaerne, Charles rles Orzech, James Preston, and James Sanford. Due to irregular meetings, we have seen less of each other than would be ideal. Therefore we would like to institute the following changes.
- We want to institute three sets of staggered three year terms. This would mean that two people would rotate off of and two others onto the eight person steering committee each year.
- For the first cycle of rotation Bharati and Waghorne have been replaced by Ortega-Muller and McDaniel. The new committee will meet formally at the next AAR meeting in San Francisco in the fall of 1992.
- We would like to split the Secretariat (Newsletter and records) off from the steering committee. For the nonce we would like to keep the Secretariat in the hands of Sanford and Orzech, but in principal it too should be movable (at the direction of the steering committee). Glenn Hayes continues to handle updates and address changes.
Dues Dispensation. The STS coffers are not bursting at the seams, but we will not assess dues for 1992-1993. We will, however, begin collecting regular dues ($10/year) on July 1, 1993.
Registry Update: The STS Registry was last issued in 1989. It has by now become somewhat out of date. At this point we have a number of new names and no few address changes handwritten into our mailing list. Therefore, we want to issue a new edition. For this purpose we include an up-date form that we ask you to fill out and return. Please include any address or phone changes, a listing of recent published works or work in progress, and E-mail and fax numbers.
In addition, we have a number of addresses that are no longer valid for some old members. What follows is a list of these. If any of you can supply current addresses for these folks, we'd like to receive these so we can send them this News letter and get them back on the mailing list.
MEMBERSHIP QUESTIONNAIRE UPDATE
Numerous members have expressed interest in current bibliography from members of STS. Such bibliography, along with address changes could easily be added to the STS NEWSLETTER. We envision such an update once a year with the full registry mailed once every two years.
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In the space below, please insert the name and address of anyone who should get this letter but is not now on our list or who is on the list but with an incorrect address.
Please return to : Prof. Glen A. Hayes, Department of Religion, Bloomfield College, 467 Franklin St., Bloomfield, NJ 07003
