03818nam 2200649 a 450 991080720990332120200520144314.01-282-35961-41-59734-932-1978661235961397814175255330-520-93689-210.1525/9780520936898(CKB)1000000000007795(EBL)223909(OCoLC)475929268(SSID)ssj0000255536(PQKBManifestationID)11208373(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000255536(PQKBWorkID)10213672(PQKB)11066479(StDuBDS)EDZ0000084774(MiAaPQ)EBC223909(MdBmJHUP)muse30748(DE-B1597)520527(OCoLC)56028449(DE-B1597)9780520936898(EXLCZ)99100000000000779520020913d2003 uy 0engurnn#---|u||utxtccrTantra sex, secrecy politics, and power in the study of religions /Hugh B. Urban1st ed.Berkeley University of California Pressc20031 online resource (390 p.)Description based upon print version of record.0-520-23062-0 0-520-23656-4 Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-366) and index.Front matter --Contents --Illustrations --Preface and Acknowledgments --Abbreviations --Introduction: Diagnosing the "Disease" of Tantra --1. The Golden Age of the Vedas and the Dark Age of Kàlí: Tantrism, Orientalism, and the Bengal Renaissance --2. Sacrificing White Goats to the Goddess: Tantra and Political Violence in Colonial India --3. India's Darkest Heart: Tantra in the Literary Imagination --4. Deodorized Tantra: Sex, Scandal, Secrecy, and Censorship in the Works of John Woodroffe and Swami Vivekananda --5. Religion for the Age of Darkness: Tantra and the History of Religions in the Twentieth Century --6. The Cult of Ecstasy: Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra --Conclusion --Notes --Bibliography --IndexA 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.TantrismTantric BuddhismTantrism.Tantric Buddhism.294.5/514Urban Hugh B0MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910807209903321Tantra3984128UNINA