Exploring the uses of the term sahaja in Hindu
Tantra: Studying Selected Texts of the Vai–‡ava
SahajiyÈs of Bengal.
Glen Alexander Hayes
F
irst of all, I would like to thank Andrea Loseries for her invitation to contribute this short overview on my own research into the Vai–‡avaSahajiyās to the volume. I was unable to attend the conference itself, and appreciate this opportunity to share some ideas regarding the uses of the term sahaja in an interesting tradition of Hindu Tantra. I will begin with some very brief comments on the earlier appearance of sahaja in Hinduism, and then review my own studies dating back to 1974.
Since many of the other contributors to this volume have discussed the varied uses of sahaja in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, I will only point out some major points in considering its development in Hindu Tantra. While there are many uses of sahaja in Pāla-era Buddhist texts such as the Carāpadas, the period between the 12th century (the decline of the Pāla) and the 16th century, when the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās seem to appear, is a good deal murkier for the historian of religions. Although the term has been associated with the figures of Jayadeva (ca. 1200 CE) and Vidyāpati (ca. 1400 CE), it is more problematic when associated with the several figures known as “Ca‡ÇÏdÈsa” (“Servant of the Goddess Ca‡ÇÏ”). As my mentor at the University of Chicago, Edward C. Dimock (1966) has shown in his foundational work The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the
Vai–‡ava-Sahajiyā Cult of Bengal, there is good evidence that there were
several Hindu mystics using this name.1 One lived before the time of Caitanya,
and composed the renowned ŚrīK‚–‡a-kīrtan (ca. 1450 CE), which does not
really use sahajiyā terminology at all, and a second man (often called
“Dvija-ca‡ÇÏdÈsa” or “Second Ca‡ÇÏdÈsa), who composed short lyrical padas that did make extensive use of sahajiyā terminology—although modified for a
Hindu worldview. Unfortunately, we do not know much about this second
Ca‡ÇÏdÈsa, who helped to propagate the trope of sahaja among the Hindu communities of northeastern India. (His name is even used by later Vai–‡ava
Sahajiyā authors to legitimate their own works.) The term sahaja also finds some uses among the emerging Nāth and Sant communities at the time, especially in regards to yogic and Tantrik notions of the “body” as found in their systems of kāya-sādhanā and dehatattva. But it is only with the
popularity and disappearance of the great Bengali devotional leader K‚–‡a
Caitanya (ca. 1486-1533 CE) that we find a great flourishing of different samprÈ adāyas known to scholars collectively as the “Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās.”
In brief, the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās can be regarded as an interesting merging of the two broad streams of Indian Bhakti and Tantra, beginning as early as the late 16th century and continuing at least into the late 19th century, where the tradition seems to transform into movements such as the Bāuls and the Kartābhajās.2 Whereas the basic goal of the orthodox Bengali or GauÇīya
Vai–‡avas who followed Caitanya-bhakti was to worship and serve the divine couple of Rādhā and K‚–‡a, the quite-transgressive Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās went in the direction of Tantra, where each male practitioner sought to realize himself as K‚–‡a (the inner cosmic male principle) and each female partner herself as Rādhā (the inner cosmic female principle). In studying many Vai–
‡ava Sahajiyā texts, I have found that they tend to cover a spectrum: from those that emphasize the GauÇīya bhakti aspects, and then, on the other end of the spectrum, those that are very Tantrik, employing terminology from the Siddhas and even Nāths.
As noted above, I began my study of the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās in 1974 at The University of Chicago, where, over six years (1974-1979), I took Bengali language classes with Edward Dimock, Clint Seely, and Carol Salomon. (I also studied Sanskrit with J.A.B. van Buitenen.) Ed Dimock and I had an ongoing “reading course” where we sat in his office while I presented my
latest translations of Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā texts. Most of these initial texts were found in two Bengali-language anthologies: Sahajiyā-sāhitya, edited
by Manindramohan Basu3 and Vai–‡ava-grÈhthÊvalī, edited by Satyendranath
Basu (1342 B.S./1936). I also gained access to four major texts belonging to the lineage of the most famous medieval guru, Siddha Mukundadeva (ca. 1600 CE) and his disciple Mukundāsa, through a collection published by Paritosc Dāsa as Caitanyottara prathama carimi sahajiyā pu×thi (1972).
During 1979-1980 I traveled through West Bengal to study existing manuscript editions of Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā texts, all of which eventually led to my doctoral dissertation at Chicago (Hayes 1985), “Shapes for the Soul: A Study of Body Symbolism in the Vai–‡ava-sahajiyā Tradition of Medieval
Bengal.” In this thesis I examined the imageries of embodiment in the Vai–‡ava
Sahajiyā systems of dehatattva and sādhana, primarily from the lineage of
Mukundadeva. While in Bengal I had the opportunity to photograph and hand-copy numerous old pu×thi manuscripts that were preserved at The University of Calcutta, the Bangiya Sahitya Parisad, Visva Bharati University, and in the personal collection of the late Jatindra Mohan Bhattacharjee (see Bhattacharjee 1978).
The Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās were basically a secretive Hindu Tantrik appropriation of the better-known “Caitanya movement” or “Bengali” (Gauīya) Vai–‡avas.4 And although Caitanya lived from 1486-1533 CE, the
orthodox devotional movement he inspired continues to live on, with many devotees still traveling to West Bengal and to the region of Vrāja in western India along the Yamunā River. The main beliefs of Gaudīya Vai–‡avism are to perform devotional ritual practices (bhakti) to the Hindu god K‚–‡a, regarded as the ultimate godhead and supreme being. Many of their stories derive from the Purā‡ic traditions, especially the Bhāgavata Purā‡a,
including the many tales of the erotic exploits of K‚–‡a with the young milk maidens (gopīs, regarded by the orthodox as the human soul). K‚–‡a’s favorite
lover is Rādhā, and the later theological and philosophical developments take this dualistic theological system in quite detailed directions. The basic
3. Bose; 1932.
cosmology is one of layered realities, involving the assumption that the divine love-play (līlā) of K‚–‡a
and Rādhā did not only occur in some mythological “past,” but in fact is constantly taking place in a celestial realm known as “eternal” (nitya) V‚ndāvana. The pure, divine love or prema that flows between K‚–‡a and Rādhā is indeed salvific, as devotees may spend years yogically creating a ‘maiden body” (ma¤jarī-rūpa) so that they, too, may tenderly if vicariously
“participate” in the līlā and prema—ending in salvation as a supporting
character in the eternal realm of K‚–‡a. (For Buddhists, this might be compared to seeking rebirth in Sukhāvatī or a Buddha-k–etra.)
But the Tantrik Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās made significant adaptations to this orthodox devotional system, as we shall see. And they also adapted the earlier Buddhist notions of sahaja, from being a transcendent state of “spontaneous” or “natural” consciousness to that of a divine androgyne, conceived of as
K‚–‡a in union with Rādhā. This ultimate state of achieving sahaja is also called that of achieving the status of the Sahaja-mānu–a. For the Vai–‡ava
Sahajiyā texts, the preferred English translation, while inelegant, is “together-born,” a more literal translation that expresses the merging of male and female–indeed all dualities—into the singular state of the Sahaja-mānu–a.
Whereas the orthodox GauÇīya Vai–‡avas regard K‚–‡a as the supreme divinity and Rādhā as his divine lover, the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās change this to make K‚–‡a the underlying male principle in each man, while Rādhā is the inner female essence of every woman. In other words, the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās developed a very humanistic version of the divine couple, much to the chagrin and outrage of orthodox GauÇīya Vai–‡avas throughout the centuries. As various contributions to this volume have made clear, there were various pre-Caitanya Buddhist traditions in Bengal in which “sahaja” (glossed, e.g. as “Innate”, “Spontaneous”, “Natural”) was a goal (e.g., among the Siddhācāryas such as Saraha). To reiterate: the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās were very likely only a post-Caitanya development. And while the great Shashibhusan Dasgupta, in his Obscure Religious Cults5 argues that there is a continuity of
“spirit” between the Buddhist and Vai–‡ava manifestations of the “sahajiyās,” my own research leads me to question his certainty on this stance. While there is no doubt that the concept of sahaja as an ultimate state of bliss (mahāsukha or ānanda) must have survived the centuries between the Pālas and the Bengal Sultanates and the British, I find very little actual textual evidence of continuity.
Yet, as I will show shortly, the yogic-body system (dehatattva) of the
Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās tended to be one using four vital centers (regarded as “tanks” or sarovaras, not as cakras), not like the more typical six-plus-one model of later Hindu Tantra. This, obviously, does reflect the frequent Buddhist Tantrik model of four vital centers but, apart from sharing the number of centers, there is little other evidence linking the two eras. With the ascendency of Islam during the Bengal Sultanates, and during the rise of trading centers and mercantilism during the European colonial era it seems that transgressive Tantrik traditions and practices waned in Bengal, although they flourished in the Himalayan regions and in the frontier regions of eastern Bengal and in Assam. However, precisely how the adaptation of concepts of sahaja from Buddhist Tantra to Hindu Tantra took place remains unknown to historians (to the best of my knowledge).
Since Caitanya was regarded by his devotees as the dual incarnation of both K‚–‡a and Rādhā in one body (all the better to “taste” the divine love of prema), it seems that the post-Caitanya Hindu Tantriks might find the earlier Buddhist Tantrik concept of sahaja a natural concept to adapt—but we lack full proof here. As secretive Tantriks (possibly living a “double life” as an orthodox GauÇīya) and since they risked expulsion and opprobrium for violations of caste and ritual purity from the conservative Bengali village societies during the 17th through 19th centuries in which they lived, virtually all of their surviving texts are written in an especially opaque style of medieval Bengali. (Edward Dimock estimated that there were over 500 Vai–‡ava
of inflection makes us unsure of precise verb conjugations, the declensions of nouns and adjectives, and other grammatical nuances that are quite refined in other Hindu Tantrik traditions. In a line of eight words, we may have to guess what the direct and indirect object are, and the verb tense might only occasionally be added to help with rhyming and meter. As I realized under the tutelage of Dimock, enough of the material is clear enough to get a general sense of what is going on (usually outlines of rituals and visualizations), but a fair amount is not.
At any rate, during my doctoral dissertation research I traveled throughout West Bengal in 1979 and 1980; in addition to studying the manuscripts, I also conducted fieldwork among the closest direct descendents of the medieval Sahajiyās, known as the Bāuls and Kartābhajās6 It was a
handful of Bāuls whom I interviewed at the Dol Mela festival at Ghoshpara, West Bengal in 1980 who confirmed that some of my translations of very technical dehatattva terms were probably correct (much to their surprise— and to my relief!), and I ended up leaving India with copies of the several texts attributed to the Siddha Mukundadeva (ca. 1600 CE) and his school in multiple manuscript versions, as well as copies of more than a dozen other
Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā manuscripts. Most Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā texts are difficult to translate, let alone understand, for it seems that they were to be clarified (essentially given the missing grammatical inflection) only by the oral commentary by the living gurus. Unfortunately, these gurus seldom wrote down their commentaries (which is, of course, standard and often extensive in most other Hindu Tantrik traditions such as the Śaiva schools of Kashmir). Furthermore, neither Dimock nor I were ever able to locate and interview an apparently authentic Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā guru (directly linked by initiation to the medieval school of Mukundadeva), although the publication of inexpensive Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā anthologies in Calcutta in the 1930s may have created “new” lineages. (The great Bengali scholar Ramakanta Chakravarti confirmed to me, in private conversations, this modern absence of “genuine” Sahajiyās.) But it is clear that groups like the Bāuls and Kartābhajās have carried on selected aspects of the medieval beliefs and practices. The late
Carol Salomon (1995) and Jeanne Openshaw (2002) have done great studies of the Bāuls, and Hugh B. Urban (2001a, 2001b) has done fine work on the Kartābhajās. For my thesis (Hayes 1985), fortunately, I was able to successfully articulate some Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā systems of the yogic body (dehatattva), but much remained (and remains) to be translated. Over the past few decades I have continued to translate selected texts, selections of which have appeared in the Princeton Series on Readings in Religions, including Religions of India in Practice, edited by Donald Lopez7, and both Tantra in Practice8and Yoga
in Practice9, edited by David Gordon White.
For the Lopez anthology I translated four short lyrical poems (pada) and two excerpts from longer technical treatises. All of them present enigmatic glimpses of Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā ritual practices (sādhanā) and subtle-body
physiology (dehatattva). Much of Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā sādhanā entails a
ritualized form of reverse sexual intercourse, usually called rati-sādhana in
the texts. Somewhat like the ul—ā-sādhanā of the Nāth and Siddha traditions, the practice involves the male and female practitioners (called, respectively the “hero” or nāyaka and “heroine” or nāyikā) engaged in ritual coitus wherein
urethral suction is supposed to draw the sexual fluids into the male body. The fluids—semen (rasa) and uterine blood (rati)—are thus yogically “reversed” and become a type of “cosmic substance” (vastu), from which the subtle body is fashioned. The padas which I translated make general references to this process, while a passage from a longer text, the Am‚tarasāvalī (“The Collection of Divine Juice”) attributed to Mukundadāsa, compares the process to the passage of boats moving against the current, along a river with lotus ponds (sarovara), landing-stairs (ghā—), and other
regions (dhāma).
I also included a brief passage from a famous Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā commentary on the renowned hagiography of Caitanya, the Caitanya-caritām‚ta of K‚–‡adāsa Kavirāja.10 Called the Vivarta-vilāsa (“The Erotic
7. Lopez 1995. 8. White 2000. 9. White 2012.
Sport of Transformation”) and composed by Āki¤canadāsa (likely a disciple of Mukundadāsa) around 1700 CE, this text runs to several thousand couplets and basically reinterprets the life and meaning of Caitanya as an expression of Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā reality. Not only does it claim that Caitanya himself was a Sahajiyā, but even the renowned orthodox GauÇīya Vai–‡ava theologians (gosvāmin) were secretly Sahajiyās too. This has been vigorously denied by orthodox GauÇīyas, but illustrates the complicated textual strategies employed by Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās to effectively legitimate their transgressive Tantrik practices. Āki¤canadāsa also compares various aspects of devotion (bhakti) and sādhanā to the sexual organs and fluids, as this brief excerpt shows11:
At first there was a birth due to the bonding between mother and father. But behold how just a little grace from the guru can cause a rebirth. That also involves uterine blood, semen, vagina, and penis. Clear your mind and listen, for I speak the essence of this. The praises for K‚–‡a are like the uterine blood, while the seed syllable [mantra] is like the semen.
The tongue of the master (guru) is like the penis, while the ear of the disciple is like the vagina.
The implication of this vivid passage is that one has two births: the first, physical birth, from one’s parents, and a second “birth,” initiated by the guru, of the inner yogic of the “divine body” (devadeha) which will take the adept up into the celestial regions and higher states of consciousness, closer to “The place of Sahaja” (sahajapur) or “The Place of the Hidden Moon” (guptacandrapur).
Elsewhere in this extensive text, Āki¤canadāsa cites many passages from the Caitanya-caritām‚ta in order to make his argument that Caitanya
and his key followers were “secretly” Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās.12
11. Based on Hayes 1995:350.
12. In the future I would like to have a s
For my contribution to Tantra in Practice13 I decided to focus on just
one major Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā text that focuses on the details of subtle body physiology. Called the Am‚taratnāvalī, or “The Necklace of Immortality,”
this text of several hundred couplets is attributed to Mukundadāsa, himself a disciple of Mukundadeva, and dates to perhaps 1650 CE. Full of rich details concerning practice and cosmophysiology, the text is notable for its clear discussion of the four interior vital centers, conceived of as sarovara (“ponds” or “tanks”) which convey sexual fluids (not as cakras which convey ku‡Çalinī -śakti).
A brief excerpt will illustrate this14:
The Pond of Lust (kāma-sarovara) is reached through the ninth door
of the human body.
This is a subject which has been revealed by all the holy books.
There are four Ponds within the body: the Pond of Lust (kāma), the Pond of Arrogance (mana), the Pond of Divine Love (prema), and the Pond of Immortality (ak–aya).
The four Ponds exist within the human heart.
If you have a physical body, you can reach the other shores of reality.
Of note here is not only a system of four vital centers, which may reflect pre-Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā Buddhist subtle physiology, but also the use of basic GauÇīya Vai–‡ava devotional categories for the ponds. Kāma, or the lower
form of physical love and lust, is to be transformed beyond the second center of ego-awareness (mana) into the purer form of divine love called prema in the third pond. Finally, the fluids are to be raised to the ultimate level of immortality (ak–aya), within which resides the Sahaja-mānu–a, the “together-born” androgynous cosmic being. Many other curious details are found in this excerpt, and readers are free to consult the full version.
For my most-recent translation for the Princeton series15 I chose a
distinctive short Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā text that blends Sahajiyā teachings with Sā£khya-Yoga philosophy and practice. An anonymous text called the
13. White 2000.
Ātmatattva, or “The Metaphysics of the Selves,” this complete translation
presents a very systematic overview of various systems of five things, such as levels of “being” (jīva), selves (ātma), and “seed-syllable” mantras (bīja)—
all of which culminate in the cosmic androgyne of K‚–‡a in union with Rādhā. In contrast to most other Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā texts, there is a clear use of categories and processes from classical Yoga, such as the different “breaths” (prā‡a) and a Sahajiyā reworking of the tattva system of Sā£khya philosophy. Although a short text, it provides us with yet another example of the creative blending of tantra and bhakti that is so very characteristic of Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā texts.
Over the decades, as an historian of religions, I have been interested not only in completing basic translations of Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā texts, but also in discovering what these texts might have meant in the context of the authors and communities who composed them. This meant not only taking into account the riverine and deltaic context of medieval Bengal, and the presences of first Muslim, then European colonial powers, but trying to discern the metaphorical nuances and subtleties of the Bengali language itself. Again, since most of the texts employ an uninflected form of medieval Bengali (and some imprecise Sanskrit passages), it made sense to me to aim for an understanding of the underlying “metaphorical worlds” that were assumed by the texts. This led me to the study of so-called “contemporary” or “conceptual” metaphor theory as developed by George Lakoff (1980), Mark Johnson (1987) and others. I published several essays in this area, and I will refer to two for our purposes today. The first was called “Metaphoric Worlds and Yoga in the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā Tantrik Traditions of Medieval Bengal,” and it appeared in Yoga: The Indian Tradition, edited by Ian Whicher and David Carpenter (2003). In this essay I used metaphor theory to consider how the imagery of sādhanā was based on the much-deeper metaphorical structure of the “path.” As Mark Johnson16 observes, metaphor is a special
type of “embodied imaginative structure” related to interior cognitive processes called “image schemata.” He thus regards metaphor as:
conceived as a pervasive mode of understanding by which we project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another
domain of a different kind. So conceived, metaphor is not merely a linguistic mode of expression; rather, it is one of the chief cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered experiences that we can reason about and make sense of. Through metaphor, we make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organize our more abstract understanding.
Since this is not the place to explore the many intriguing aspects of metaphor theory let me just say that an analysis of the diverse metaphors of paths, flowers, fluids, and embodiment that are found in the texts is a great help in better understanding what the texts might have meant to the practitioners. In brief, the “metaphoric world” of the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās is one based on fluids and flows, not unlike the surrounding realm of Bengal, with its many rivers and ponds. In this we find a world quite different from the more-typical Hindu Tantrik model based upon cakras and the fiery energy of ku‡Çalinī-śakti.
In a second essay using metaphor theory I focused on the issues of the vernacular Bengali language, in contrast to metaphors found in Sanskrit texts. Called “Contemporary Metaphor Theory and Alternative Views of Krishna and Rādhā in Vaishnava Sahajiyā Tantrik Traditions,” the essay was published in Alternative Krishnas: Regional and Vernacular Variations on a Hindu Deity, edited by Guy Beck (2005). This essay allowed me to say more about the GauÇīya Vai–‡ava uses of metaphors, and how they were adapted by
Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās. Here I was again able to show how the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās adapted the deity K‚–‡a as the interior male principle which was the essence of all men, while Rādhā became the essence of all women. Again, we find the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā appropriation of the bhakti tradition and their uses of distinctive Tantrik metaphors.
that go into an image or idea, and explains how the result of Tantrik imagery is what might be called an “emergent structure”—a sense of reality that occurs only in the blended concepts that make up the imagery. I found this ideal for explaining why Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās were so focused on attaining the inner yogic bodies and reaching the higher Sahajiyā realms. My findings were delivered in 2009 at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal, Canada, and then revised and delivered at the meeting of the Society for Tantrik Studies in 2010 in Flagstaff, Arizona. This in turn was published in the Oxford Journal of Hindu Studies (2012;5:193-209), an essay which allowed me to use blending theory to consider the GauÇīya Vai–‡ava and Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā practice of ma¤jarī-sādhanā (“practice as a maiden”)
in which the practitioner seeks to “remember” (smara‡a) their “true identity” (svarūpa) as a character in the eternal K‚–‡a-līlā which transcends the earthly
physical identity (rūpa). Readers are urged to consult the full paper, but suffice
it to say that blending theory has allowed me to make increasingly nuanced and subtle reading of the texts.
In conclusion, I hope that my brief overview of the Hindu Vai–‡ava
Sahajiyā traditions has been of some value to my colleagues who study and practice Buddhist and Bāul traditions. I appreciate the opportunity to share my academic journey with you, and hope that I can join you at some future venue to discuss the many fascinating issues of sahaja.
Selected Bibliography
Basu (Bose), M. M., 1932. Sahajiyā sāhitya. Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
Bhattacharjee, J. M., 1978. Catalogus Catalogorum of Bengali Manuscripts, Volume 1. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1978.
Bose, M., 1986. The Post-Caitanya Sahajia [sic] Cult of Bengal. Reprint ed. Delhi: Gian Publishing House. 39
Chakravarti, R., 1985. Vai–‡avism in Bengal: 1486-1900. Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar. Dasa, P., 1972. Caitanyottara prathama cāri—i sahajiyā pu×thi. Calcutta: Bharati Book
Stall.
Dasa, P., 1978. Sahajiyā o gauÇīya Vai–‡ava dharma. Calcutta: Firma K. L. M. Private
Ltd.
Dasgupta, S., 1969. Obscure Religious Cults. 3rd ed. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay. Dimock, E.C., Jr., 1989. The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the
Dimock, E.C., Jr., Stewart, T. K., (eds. and trans.) 1999. Caitanya Caritām‚ta of K‚–‡adāsa
Kavirāja: A Translation and Commentary. Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 56. Witzel,
M. ed. Cambridge: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University. Haberman, D., 1988. Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Rāgānugā Bhakti Sādhana.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Hayes, G.A., 1985. “Shapes for the Soul: A Study of Body Symbolism in the Vai–‡ ava-sahajiyā Tradition of Medieval Bengal,” Ph.D. dissertation,University of Chicago.
Hayes, G.A., 1995. “The Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā Traditions of Medieval Bengal.” In: Religions
of India in Practice. Lopez, D. S. Jr., ed. Princeton Readings in Religions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 333-351.
Hayes, G.A., 2000. “The Necklace of Immortality: A 17th-Century Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā Text.”
In: Tantra in Practice. White, D. G., ed. Princeton Readings in Religions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 308-325.
Hayes, G.A., 2003. “Metaphoric worlds and yoga in the Vai–‡ava Sahajiyā Tantrik traditions
of medieval Bengal.” In: Yoga: the Indian Tradition. Whicher, I, Carpenter, D., eds. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 162-184.
Hayes, G.A., 2005. “Contemporary Metaphor Theory and Alternative Views of Krishna and Rādhā in Vaishnava Sahajiyā Tantrik Traditions.” In: Alternative Krishnas:
Regional and Vernacular Variations on a Hindu Deity. Beck, G. ed. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 19-32.
Hayes, G.A., 2012. “Eroticism and Cosmic Transformation as Yoga: The Ātmatattva of the
Vai–‡ava Sahajiyās of Bengal.” In: Yoga in Practice. White, D. G., ed. Princeton
Readings in Religions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 223-241. Fauconnier, G., Turner, M. 2002. The Way we Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s
Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Johnson, M., 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kaviraja, G., 1969, 1975. Tantrik sādhana siddhanta. 2 vols. Burdhwan: Bardhaman
Visvavidyalaya.
Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., 1980. Metaphors We Live By Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Openshaw, J., 2002. Seeking Bāuls of Bengal. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Salomon, Carol., 1995. “Bāul Songs,” In: Religions of India in Practice. Lopez, D. S. Jr.,
ed. Princeton Readings in Religions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 187-208.
Stewart, T. K., 2010. The Final Word: The Caitanya-caritām‚ta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Turner, M. http://markturner.org The portal for Mark Turner’s very useful website on the latest in conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory.
Urban, H. B., 2001b. Songs of Ecstasy: Tantrik and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press.
White, D. G., 1996. The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
White, D. G., 2000. Tantra in Practice. Princeton Readings in Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
White, D. G., 2003. Kiss of the Yoginī: “Tantrik Sex” in its South Asian Contexts. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
