Video: Hindu View of Life: Beneath the Texts: Tantric Views of Person, Community, and the Sacred
A Lecture with Gavin Flood
The early medieval period in north India witnessed significant new developments in religion regarding theology, practice, and social impact. A new revelation of texts calling themselves Tantras emerged, generating new communities of practice and being adopted by polities, especially in Kashmir and Nepal. This lecture presented the theological vision of the Scripture of the Eye, the Netra Tantra, and raise questions about the text’s understanding of person, community, and the sacred, showing the continuities of this “Hindu view of life” with other Brahmanical ways. Digging deeper beneath the text, we find this way of life founded on cultural ontologies as the necessary condition for conceptions of person and community that the text presents.
GAVIN FLOOD, Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), is Senior Research Fellow in Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion, Campion Hall, Oxford University; the Piramal Dean of Academic Affairs at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies; and Professor emeritus, Theology and Religion Faculty, Oxford University. His research interests are Hindu text and tradition (particularly the religion of Shiva in the medieval period), Phenomenology, and Comparative Religion. Among his books are Religion and the Philosophy of Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2014).
