Imagination as Transposition Between Realities : Image Theory in Falola’s Thought and in Hindu Yantra Aesthetics

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

                                                                                            

                                                                                                          

                                                                             

                                                          Imagination as Transposition Between Realities 

                                        Image Theory in Toyin Falola’s Thought  and in Hindu  Yantra Aesthetics

                                                                                Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                         Compcros

                                                                Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                          

                                                       

The image directly above represents central values of Sri Vidya, a school of Hindu Tantra discussed below in terms of its primary  cosmographic symbol, the Sri Yantra, shown here painted on a woman's midsection. Srividya celebrates the harmony of the erotic and the metaphysical, the material and the spiritual,  understanding eros as a demonstration of kama, one of the central forces of existence and a dramatization of the striving for union between the God Shiva and his consort Shakti, these being the two forces that constitute being and becoming. Without Shakti, in repose beyond space and time, Shiva cannot stir, declares the opening stanza of the Soundaryalahari, the Billowing Waves of the Ocean of Beauty, a central text celebrating Tripurasundari, the primary deity of Sri Vidya, who, like all Hindu Goddesses and all women, is perceived as an expression of Shakti. 

Without the energizing of that consciousness that underlies all possibility, existence would not arise, the latencies that may emerge as the cosmos and its permutations  forever  remaining dormant, those lines from the Soundaryalahari suggest of the quiescent Shiva and the dynamic Shakti, an idea further developed by Abhinavagupta in the opening chapter of his Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras, a crowning text of the Hindu Trika Shaivite school, evoking various metaphors in depicting the Shiva/Shakti dynamic, such as "fire and the heat of the flame", "power and the possessor of power".

Abhinavagupta and his Trika Shaivite school, as well as Srividya, are iconic demonstrators of the understanding of the cosmos as unified by a creative force manifest in all activity, including the erotic, making any action a potential doorway to touch the ultimate power from which that pervasive force issues.  This immanent dynamic   is understood as Shakti, and along such lines, she is celebrated as both supremely alluring and cognitively transformative.

She whose buttocks are as hillocks,  declares the Tripurasundari Ashtakam, the hair rising from below her navel towards the space between the succulent mounds on her chest chest like the  tendrils of water of the blue Yamuna reflecting the expanse of the sky, so celebrates the Soundaryalahari.

She, a brief side glance from whom can so energize a decrepit old man, unskilled in the arts of love, that women, inflamed with desire, race after him, their sarees, an Indian female upper body dress,  bursting, the same poem declares, yet, the arrows she caries, representing the pleasures of the senses, constitute weapons  for piercing through those pleasures to a grasp of the ultimate metaphysical ground that enables the cosmos within which those pleasures are encountered as  part of the cosmic play, as is depicted in the Sri Devi Khadgamala.

                                                                                              Abstract

A brief correlation between Indian Hindu theory of the geometric cosmograms known as yantras with  an image theory developed and exemplified by Toyin Falola in relation to  classical African ritual forms, demonstrating  how these different cultural contexts enrich each other in a synthesis suggesting the universal significance of their underlying conjunctions.

Insights from Toyin Falola's  essay “Ritual Archives” from The Toyin Falola Reader and the Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy edited by  Adeshina Afolayan and Toyin Falola.  I have slightly modified the order of the expressions, adding a few one word or phrasal connectives  in order to facilitate the flow of the quotations thereby foregrounding the concentrated force of Falola's formulation, a liberty for which I beg forgiveness:

Objects and images encode the character of the being they represent. They are philosophical expressions, connected with thought and life, representing  mentalities, power, and strength, which may move one  towards the spiritual and religious through the  aesthetic idea living within  the image, enabling what Nietzsche calls an 'army of metaphors', generating a wide range of imaginations and thought systems.

 

[ This process is exemplified ] by seeing  an… image in terms of its projection of  force and strength, of power, epistemic responses and metaphysical perceptions, insights about the body in its physical and non-physical realms, generating  a conglomeration of texts, symbols and performances that allow us to understand  the [ world embodied in that image] through various bodies of philosophies, literatures and histories, combining these disciplines in providing an understanding of the centres of [ their] epistemologies, unifying their ontologies and facilitating their [expression in ]  theories of universal value.

                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                          

                                                                        

                                                    

The Sri Yantra is a Hindu diagram the perfection of its complexly beautiful architectonics described as demonstrating the physical and metaphysical structure of the cosmos and  of the human being and as an abstract form of the Goddess Tripurasundari, the Beauty of the Three Cities of Being and Becoming, the possibilities that constitute existence.

The Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram, a representative ritual of the Sri Vidya school of Hinduism centred in Tripurasundari, consists in the imaginative navigation of the yantra from its circumference to its centre or from its centre to its circumference, thereby imaginatively enacting the withdrawal of the cosmos into its originating core, represented by the bindu, the dot at the centre of the yantra or the emergence of the cosmos from the bindu. 

In its combination of aesthetic force and cosmographic scope unifying the human being and the cosmos, Yantra aesthetics incidentally dramatises, par excellence, Falola’s theory of ritual images and his exemplification of the theory through a meditation on an image of the Yoruba orisa or deity Esu, a theory and meditation that  are, fortuitously,  a  particularly rich interpretation of yantra theory and practice. 

The first paragraph  of the Falola text directly above the image of the yantra is an extract from  the general ideas that constitute the image theory.  The demonstration of the theory through a meditation on a figurine of Esu is evoked  in the second paragraph.

Though Falola's image theory is developed in the context of African ritual forms and exemplified with reference to a representation of a particular African deity,  I see the theory and its demonstration in the Esu meditation as globally relevant and particularly so for schools of thought that unify the cosmos and the human being in diagrammatic form, such as Hindu Tantra, demonstrated by Sri Vidya as presented above,  and Jewish/Western esoteric Kabbalah. 

Also published on Facebook.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Please disregard this post and read the other one one with "edited" at the top. One or two significant mistakes in this one are corrected in that one.

thanks

toyin

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