Embodied consciousness in tantric yoga and the phenomenology of merleau ponty

RELIGION
and the ARTS

Religion and the Arts 12 (2008) 144–163

www.brill.nl/rart

Embodied Consciousness in Tantric Yoga and the
Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty*
James Morley
Ramapo College of New Jersey

Abstract
Yoga, the ancient inter-religious thread running through all Indian Spirituality, shares a
remarkable congruence with twentieth-century phenomenology. But this conjuncture is not
based on a common aspiration of “transcendence from the world,” as argued by previous
comparisons. Instead, by applying the more advanced Existential Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the more indigenous Tantric stream of yoga, it will be shown that this
congruence occurs in just the opposite direction of immersion into the very “flesh of the
world”—the lived human body as homology of the cosmos. Yoga may offer phenomenology
a much-needed somatic contemplative praxis, as much as phenomenology may offer yoga
the basis for an appropriate theoretical articulation.
Keywords
Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, somatic spirituality, Tantric yoga

I

Introduction

S

hortly after my graduate training in phenomenological psychology, personal circumstances made me a frequent visitor to India. I was not, like

many Western travelers, staying in ashrams or five-star hotels but was actually living amongst middle class Indians to whom I was related by marriage.
During my many extended stays, I was through good fortune introduced to
a renowned authority on yoga and we developed a warm relationship where
I was exposed to yoga practice in the best possible way. As my yoga practice
developed I grew perpetually astonished by the correspondence between yoga
and the existential-phenomenology of my graduate training—a serendipitous

*) I wish to express special thanks to my friend and fellow pilgrim, Richard Kearney, for his
encouragement and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008

DOI: 10.1163/156852908X270980


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discovery upon which this essay will be based. But one of the most remarkable aspects of my accidentally privileged access to ordinary Indian life has
been my visits to rural village settings—the so-called “real” India. here, I
had the opportunity to witness such phenomena as exorcisms, spirit possessions, traditional healing practices, and daily rituals, which added another
dimension to my understanding of the place of yoga in Indian spiritual life.
In other words, I came to see that there is, for lack of a better term, a concrete
“folk yoga” far more primordial and archaic than the Sanskritized or formal
versions of yoga we find in Western bookshops. In due time I came to appreciate this other less literate, more down-to-earth dimension to Indian spiritual practices—equally yogic but with another more somatic focus that is
best described as Tantric. Ahead I shall strive to illustrate how this Tantric
dimension of yoga and the particularly incarnational version of phenomenology expressed by Merleau-Ponty both share a profound commonality
that may be mutually illuminating.

II Yoga and Phenomenology: Towards a Secular Spirituality

Perhaps the original inter-religious movement, the practice of yoga is an
ancient approach to personal spiritual development that eschews dogma,
creed, and institutionalization. Originating in the religious trance technologies of Neolithic culture, Mircea Eliade describes yoga as “a living fossil, a
modality of archaic spirituality that has survived nowhere else.”1 Indeed, in
India we find one of the few civilizations whose religious continuity was
unbroken by foreign conquests as such invaders, and new religious movements alike, were merely absorbed into the massive “spiritual laboratory”
that is pluralistic India. In fact, the Ellora caves bear physical testimony to
this ecumenism. Few places on earth demonstrate such open acceptance of
multiple religious standpoints. For, instead of defacing or carving over each
other’s previous stonework, each generation of artisans at Ellora respectfully left their predecessors’ work untouched. he remarkable sculpture
of Shiva at Ellora is profoundly exemplary of exactly this spirit of “unity
within diversity”—the Indian eco-religious contribution to humankind, and
a worthy ideal for any age where we see the symbols of three religions almost
playfully flowing together (sanga) into a common image. Here the Hindu
deity Shiva is represented in the form of a stick-wielding teacher whose
1)

Eliade 361. his text is an unparalleled masterpiece of yoga scholarship.


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earrings reflect Jainism while his right hand expresses a Buddhist hand
gesture (dharma mudra). Clearly the message is one of respect and reverence to all approaches to spiritual knowledge (fig. 1).2

Figure 1. Shiva Lakulisha Figure (Cave 29), c. 700 CE. Stone carving. Ellora, India. Photograph:
James Morley.

Moreover, throughout the Ellora and Adjanta caves—Buddhist, Hindu, and
Jain—we see figures assuming a common body posture, which should not be
overlooked. Nearly all prominent carved figures maintain the seated meditation
position called the lotus posture or padma-asana, the emblem of yoga practice.

2)

I wish to thank Mary Anderson for her graciously detailed explication of all of these Ellora
and Ajanta cave sculptures, and for referring me to the following two texts: Gupte and Mahajan 216, and Dhavalikar 82–3. he authors do point out that this statue has strongly mixed
influences especially South Indian Chola sources. I was referred to this inter-religious interpretation through local folk tradition and maintain that the Jain ear symbolism reflects a
specific South Indian Jain ritual of piercing the ears of children shortly after birth. Also, one
finds earrings to be ubiquitous to Jain imagery.


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Indeed, one of the remarkable continuities that may have sustained India’s pluralistic spirituality is the practice of yoga, common to all Indian religions.
While thematically permeating nearly all dimensions of Indian art and literature reaching back into the Harappan Indus river culture (4000–3000 BCE),
it was not until Patanjali (150–200 CE) that yoga received a formal written status as a discipline in its own right, distinct perhaps from the other
schools of philosophy and religion of ancient India. In his classical Sanskrit
Yoga Sutras, Patanjali appears to have sifted through the religious systems
of his time and culture (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Samkhya, and even Tantrictribal) to assemble the most effective contemplative techniques available at the
time into one integrated approach. he Yoga Sutras can be viewed as a practice
manual that is theologically agnostic and, in contemporary terms, pluralistic
in a way that offers the paradoxical possibility of a “secular spirituality”—that
is, a point of view which is neutral in matters of religious doctrine (or belief or
non-belief) and serves as more of a practical applied developmental psychology than a metaphysical or religious system.
From this it is no wonder that yoga finds widespread popularity in a

contemporary postmodern culture that is increasingly a planetary “interculture” where entrenched forms of institutionalized religions are viewed
with claustrophobic suspicion by the new cosmopolitan and media-savvy
middle classes. hese same middle classes seek contact with the archaic
dimension denied them by the alienated lifestyles of industrialized civilization. Most importantly, yoga is a system of contemplative practices that
emphasizes the somatic incarnate domain of human experience neglected
by the religious mainstream. So while being the most ancient of all psychological systems, yoga is simultaneously the holistic health paradigm of the
future, a practical yet contemplative health practice.3
Another recourse for the religio-phobic yet psycho-spiritually inquisitive
is a version of contemporary academic philosophy which also maintains a
secular, though admittedly somewhat intellectualized approach to human
knowledge. his is phenomenology. Like yoga, phenomenology affirms the
domain of subjectively lived experience and promotes a meditation method
that maintains neutrality towards belief systems. Yet, one of its distinctions is
that while the Western academic world generally maintains a secular distance

3)

For an excellent survey of contemporary yoga as it has disseminated across Western culture, see de Michelis. For a descriptive account of contemporary yoga culture in yoga ashrams within India itself, see Strauss.


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from religion in favor of the physical sciences, phenomenology maintains
an openness towards the possibility of a hermeneutically (interpretive)
engaged approach to religious experience, i.e. a point of view that allows
one to undergo subjective religious experiences while also maintaining an
autonomous detachment from any particular system of belief.4 It is in this
way that phenomenology affirms a pluralistic openness to multiple subjective standpoints—not just that of the physical sciences.

he comparison, of course, goes deeper, and ahead I shall speak to how,
across culture and history, this remarkable correspondence takes place and
how this association is based on a common movement away from each
other’s respective mainstream orthodoxies towards a unique emphasis on
human embodiment.

III Nirodaha and Epoche—Convergent Meditation Strategies
Previous authors have also commented on the correspondence between yoga
and phenomenology but only on the basis of a point of view that assumes a
shared transcendental idealism. hese readings have rightly stressed Patanjali’s
comprehensive definition of yoga—namely, “the suspension (nirodaha) of the
whirlpools of the mind, such that the true seer may come forth to see the
world as it is”5—as a meeting point between the two traditions. By applying
the meditation method of nirodaha, the yoga practitioner strives to disconnect or “put into abeyance” the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional habits
(samskaras) that distort one’s experience of the objects of world. Correspondingly Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement at
the beginning of the twentieth century, differentiated phenomenology from
4)

While slightly predating the phenomenological movement, William James’s Varieties of
Religious Experiences represents this style of inquiry followed by the scholarship of Rudolf
Otto, Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and, of course, the many recent endeavors of our editor
Richard Kearney.
5)
he translation is my own rendering of Yoga Sutras 1.2 and 1.3: “yogaha chitta vrittri
nirodaha; tada drastuh svarupe vasthanam.” Barbra Stoller-Miller more conventionally
translates these sutras as: “Yoga is the cessation of the turnings of thought; When the thought
ceases, the spirit stands in its true identity as observer of the world” (29). here is a long
1600-year commentary tradition of vigorous debate regarding the grammar of these famously
subtle and enigmatic fragments. he crucial issue here is the word nirodaha often translated
as “ceasing,” “stopping,” or “ending.” Specialists such as Ian Whicher argue at great length

against such translations. He claims that nirodaha is a much more subtle meditation construct in a way that supports my rendering as “suspension.” See Whicher, “Nirodaha.”


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the naturalistic materialism of his time by calling for a “return to the things
themselves”—the world as it gives itself to experience without judgments or
metaphysical presuppositions about the reality character of the objects of the
world. Husserl employed a radical meditation method which he called the
epoche, which is an “‘inhibiting’ or ‘putting out of play’ of all positions taken
toward the already-given objective world.” He also calls this methodological
epoche a “parenthesizing of the Objective world” (Cartesian Meditations 20–1).
his is a refusal to take for granted any assumed beliefs or doubts regarding the
ontological status of any object or world.
So, despite being severed across history and culture with no discernable
intellectual links whatsoever, we find here a remarkable correspondence
between phenomenology and yoga; but because all previous comparative
studies6 have assumed the commonality between yoga and phenomenology
to be a shared transcendental idealism, i.e. both meditations leading towards
a consciousness suspended outside the body and beyond the sensory world,
it is important to note that this idealist model of comparison can only apply
to Husserl’s version of intentionality as expressed in the earlier stages of his
career. For in his later mature philosophy Husserl developed in the direction
of a less cognitive and more corporeal form of intentionality best articulated by
his successor, Merleau-Ponty, as will be discussed below. Because these studies
only appropriate this one, problematical, viewpoint of Husserl’s phenomenology they also, reciprocally, perpetuate an exclusively transcendental or idealist
reading of yoga philosophy. Furthermore, this idealism supports the conventional appropriation of yoga by the more formal orthodox “Sanskritized”
(higher caste) Indian systems of interpretation7 and restricts access to other less

intellectualized “folk” dimensions of yoga practice.
6)

Paranjpe and Hanson; Puligandla; and Sinari. In all of these articles Husserl’s model of a
transcendental ego was compared to the yogic notion of samadhi as a mutual transcendence
from the world. It appears that these authors did not appear to have access to the more
recent translations of Husserl’s later works which I am citing here as evidence of an alternative non-transcendental reading of Husserl’s phenomenological project and yoga. In fact,
samadhi, the developmental goal of yoga, can be interpreted, as does Whicher, as a restoration of the senses, not a departure from them. It is an immersion into a direct experience
of the world unmediated by socialized typifications that is made possible by yoga practice.
Also, for his full text see Whicher, Integrity. I have myself written on this issue in a previous
article. See Morley, “Inspiration and Expiration.”
7)
Few discussions of India can overlook the issue of caste. M.S. Srinivas described a pattern
within Indian culture where communities would strive to raise their caste status by miming
the lifestyles of the higher priestly Brahmin castes. Upward mobility was achieved by abandoning their rustic nature-goddesses’ tribal cults for such mainstream deities as Shiva, Vishnu,


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While the value of these readings cannot but be appreciated, I find it necessary to assert that there is another non-idealist reading of the yoga and
phenomenology convergence. his would be a reading that corresponds
with the more tribal, archaic, or Tantric roots of yoga that has hitherto had a
very limited voice in academic discussions of yoga. In strong contrast, I suggest that it is actually the overcoming of transcendental idealism that distinguishes both yoga and phenomenology from their respective mainstream
traditions and that this is the common basis for not only a mutual exegesis
but also a radically embodied approach to spirituality. Such an approach may
give voice to the marginalized esoteric traditions latent within so many religious traditions and perhaps more clearly elucidate these spiritualities, which,
while marginalized to the academic and theological fringes, have occupied
the very inter-religious heart of so many world religious systems.

IV Merleau-Ponty’s Articulation of an Ontology of Embodiment
Taking up the later Husserl’s discovery8 of the somatic foundation of experience, Merleau-Ponty bolstered this insight with the discoveries of gestalt
psychology to challenge any claim to sense experience divorced from form
or meaning. In the same stroke, his more clearly articulated thesis of the
or Krishna along with priestly vegetarianism, Sanskrit chanting, and conventional temple
practices. his is not unlike how lower middle-class Westerners will alter their church and
political affiliations, or purchase certain consumer products and labels to appear more affluent.
It has become my own observation that this Sanskritization may be a factor in how yoga is
represented to Westerners and Indians alike. When yoga is constructed through higher-caste
culture, this other rustic tribal aspect may get sifted out of play. As tribal and lower-caste culture continues to be downplayed and depreciated across India, I wonder if we need to
recover from the tribals and the agricultural castes what my friend Siddhartha calls an “earth
yoga” that would have a more explicitly ecological and ethical orientation. See Srinivas.
8)
Towards the end of his life Husserl’s thought took certain turns, which did not at all correspond with the stereotypes of his thought endemic to the secondary literature. hese late
texts (only published in German in 1951 and translated into English in 1989) reveal a
philosopher who is keenly concerned with the experiential body as the ultimate point of
contact between consciousness and nature. He states that every object, perceived or imagined, is in some kind of spatio-temporal orientation to the perceiver’s body. Only through
one’s living-body can the experienced world become constituted: “. . . all that is thingly real
in the surrounding world of the ego has its relation to the body.” He goes on to say: “Furthermore, obviously connected with this is the distinction the body acquires as the bearer
of the zero point (null punct) of orientation, the bearer of the here and now, out of which
the pure ego intuits space and the whole world of the senses. hus each thing that appears


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“primacy of the phenomenal world” undoes any idealist endeavor to locate
truth apart from directly lived experience in a manner that was even more

explicit than Husserl’s latter writings. In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology attempts more explicitly to circumvent both the idealist and materialist traditions of the European metaphysical traditions.

has eo ipso an orienting relation to the body, and this refers not only to what actually
appears but to each thing that is supposed [imagined] to be able to appear” (Ideas Pertaining
61). hus, for Husserl, the entire spectrum of possible experiences, perceptual or imaginary,
is rooted to this corporeal “zero point” which is “the bearer of the here and now.” From this
we can see how Husserl’s notion of the transcendental does not entail an isolated disembodied ego extended at a distance above the lived world of perceptual experience—as implied
in the previous comparative studies—but, instead, corporeal experience is itself, for Husserl, the transcendental ground. his spatial zero point of the body coincides with Husserl’s
understanding of a temporal zero point, namely the impenetrable upsurge of the “now”
point that perpetually slips from reflective articulation. All consciousness is, for Husserl,
immersed in the ongoing temporal stream, but unlike the Newtonian constructions of
objective linear time independent of consciousness, Husserl shows us how, given the phenomenological standpoint in lived experience versus the natural attitude of materialist scientism, consciousness is the upsurge of temporality itself. For Husserl the living present,
which is the carnal presence of the body, is a spontaneously self-generated act, it “is the
absolute beginning . . . the primal source, that from which all others are continuously generated. In itself, however, it is not generated; it does not come into existence as that which is
generated but through spontaneous generation. It does not grow up (it has no seed): it is
primal creation” (Internal Time 131). his is the body as the consciousness of nature itself.
Yet when phenomenology reaches this “seedless” primal source or ‘zero point’ it is also at
something of a dead end for reflective discourse and language. his somatic ground, though
discovered by phenomenological reflection, cannot be explored through that very same act of
cognitive reflection. Like the dog chasing its tail, there is perpetual slippage between reflection
and corporeal life. So, despite discovering the importance of corporeality, any attempt to
build on this insight is impeded by the use of conceptual academic terminology to describe
embodied experience, as it resists such articulation. he main point, however, is that this
“primal source” is not necessarily an ideal one which is transcendentally set apart from nature
but is instead one that is grounded in nature via the very flesh of the human body.
As an aside, it is remarkable how Husserl’s metaphor of “seedlessness” (above) is also
similarly employed in the Yoga Sutras (1.25, 3.50) and their commentary tradition. his
“seedless” unconditioned state is referred to in such terms as samadhi, iswara, or purusha in
contrast to the conditioned state of everyday ignorance (avidya) and its corollary of chronic
dissatisfaction (dukha). his “seedlessness” is a point of personal development where one is

no longer influenced by the conditioning mechanisms set in karmic motion by the “seeds”
of past deeds (samskaras) nor is one compelled by desire for the future fruition of the seeds
of ones present actions. Such seeds are “burned” (cleansed) into this unconditioned vantage
point, a freedom (kaivala) that is the ultimate goal of yoga practice.


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hrough a combined appropriation of gestalt psychology’s insight that
the ideal and the material are holistically fused within a figure-ground
cohesion, Heidegger’s existential understanding of “worldedness,” and the
psychoanalytic insight that culture is grounded in somatic affectivity, Merleau-Ponty represents the most forward edge of the phenomenological
movement. To quote him, “he perceived world is the always presupposed
foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. his thesis does
not destroy either rationality or the absolute; it only tries to bring them
down to earth.” Further, he says: “he perceiving mind is an incarnated
mind” (Primacy of Perception 13). his is not only a unity in the Heideggerian sense of Dasein or Being-in-the-World, but it is a bodily being-inthe-world. In his latter works Merleau-Ponty tried to develop an entirely
new ontological nomenclature to convey this insight, which comes closer
than any previous European philosophy to addressing the dilemma of ontological dualism by affirming the primacy of sensory-somatic experience.
First, it is important to review Merleau-Ponty’s use of the word “body.”
he “lived body” or “phenomenal body” is not the same thing as the objective body as constructed by the physical sciences or allopathic medicine.
“[W]e must think of the human body (and not consciousness) as that which
perceives nature which it also inhabits” (hemes 128). he lived body is
sentience itself, it is my personal spatiality, the body to which I am born, fall
ill, desire, nurture children, age, and die. It is my flesh and blood existence,
it is mine as much as it is the common form taken by all humans. his lived
body is the fulcrum or lexicon of all human experience. It is neither subject
nor object, purely mental or purely physical, nor can it be sufficiently comprehended through the traditional philosophical categories of immanence

and transcendence. Like Freud’s unconscious, it can never be fully grasped
through reflection; it can never be caught in the act of living because, similar to nature itself, it is the concrete basis for all such reflection. hen, unlike
the psychodynamic unconscious, it is not just a repository of “representations” or merely a linguistic “defilé of signifiers” but is “feeling itself, since
feeling is not the intellectual possession of ‘what’ is felt, but a dispossession
of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to
think in order that we may recognize it” (130). his “disposition” or “opening” is a pre-rational or pre-categorical modality that founds rationality but
is not reducible to it. Merleau-Ponty criticizes Cartesian constructions of
consciousness as pure nothingness (for-itself ) in dualistic opposition to
non-consciousness or pure being in-itself. Whereas much Western rationalist philosophy views the alterity between such dialectical opposites as an


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unbridgeable chasm or separation, Merleau-Ponty reverses this dualist reasoning by articulating this alterity as itself the corporeal “hinge” between
thing and idea, subject and object, even self and other. hus, the empty gap
between subject and object becomes the living conduit out of which the
two emerge.
To further escape the problems inherent to dualism, idealism and materialism, Merleau-Ponty believed that a new metaphysical terminology was
necessary to sidestep the dilemmas built into the language of “subject” and
“object.” He described our situation as one of entrelacs or the interlacing of
a closely woven fabric.9 Putting aside even the psychological terminology
of “consciousness” and “phenomena,” he endeavored to describe, again,
what lies between the self and the world, the between out of which both are
contingent and derivative. He called this “between” the “chiasm,” “flesh of
the world” or “brute being.” He also describes it as a dehiscence or opening-up that is always the already unfolding quality of existence. his is
a new understanding of the phenomenological concept of intentionality
that was already nascent in Husserl’s late works.

V Turning “East” for Corroboration on the heme of Embodiment
To reiterate, Merleau-Ponty’s thought strives to bypass the tradition of metaphysics that assumes either an absolutely ideal or material world (or a dualism between the two) through the idea of a third term of the “lived body,”
or what he later calls the chiasm or “flesh of the world.” his is to serve as
a new ontology that would take us out of the Western or European tradition of metaphysics.
From here it would seem natural to turn to other non-Western traditions for corroboration on an approach to existence that is positive towards
the phenomenon of embodiment. But this search can disappoint. Despite
its many obvious distinctions from the European style of philosophy and
religion, much mainstream orthodox Indian thought, as a whole, has strong
idealist tendencies.10
9)

I should mention that one of the meanings of tantra is “loom” or “weave,” implying, of
course, the inter-woven tapestry of the cosmos—and the homologous body-cosmos dynamic.
10)
here was much more cultural diffusion between India and the classical Mediterranean
world than most scholarship has previously acknowledged. homas McEvilley’s research,
based on physical archeological evidence, makes a persuasive case for how mainstream
Vedantism and Buddhism were very likely influenced by the idealism of Plato and Aristotle.


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It is even more disappointing to learn how poorly the body fares in this
worldview (including some aspects of mainstream yoga). For example, while
Buddha taught of a middle way between extreme ascetic denial of the senses
or decadent surrender to them, in the end, incarnation is for so many Buddhists and Hindus a misfortune to be overcome or a dream from whence we
should wake. Rarely would conventional Buddhists, or Vedantists, explicitly
affirm incarnate existence. At best, these institutionalized South Asian traditions respected the body as the “vehicle” through which enlightenment may

be achieved, but this is only a benignly neutral affirmation of embodiment
not unlike the mainstream Judeo-Christian affirmation of the body as the
“temple” of the soul—but never synonymous with the soul itself. Having
said this, it is also true that in South Asia there also exists an esoteric yet living tradition that affirms the human body more than any other known religious tradition—Tantric yoga. It is here that Merleau-Ponty’s existential
phenomenology of embodiment, and yoga generally, can find a more appropriate point of mutual corroboration.

VI Jivatma: Towards a Phenomenological Explication of the Tantric
Approach to Yoga
While India may be the world’s “spiritual laboratory,” from the Tantric perspective this laboratory is specifically located within embodied consciousness
(jivatma).11 As it was primarily an oral tradition, specialists on Tantrism12
concur that a clear definition of this movement is extremely difficult to artic-

It is acknowledged that there was a vigorous trade in luxury goods between India and the
post-Alexandrian Hellenic kingdoms and later the Roman Empire. In fact, there were
fusion Greco-Buddhist kingdoms in Bactria (present Pakistan and Afghanistan) that greatly
impacted the rest of India. He also demonstrates, on the other hand, a cultural diffusion
between Tantric Indian yoga and certain Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Orphic-Dionysian
Greek spiritualities—perhaps even influencing medieval Christian mysticism, Jewish Kabbalism, and Islamic Sufism. It seems the wind blew both ways and McEvilley’s work has
profound implications for mutual cross-cultural understanding. See McEvilley, he Shape
of Ancient hought, “he Spinal Serpent,” and “An Archeology of Yoga.”
11)
he Sanskrit word Jiva usually refers to “individual life” or self.” Jivatma or Jiva-mukta could
also be understood “living as individual mortal flesh while also simultaneously a fully realized
immortal being,” i.e., a collapse of the individual-cosmos bifurcation. We have here a concept
very much in keeping with Merleau-Ponty’s project to circumvent dualist nomenclature.
12)
Here I refer to the recent research of White, he Alchemical Body.


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ulate and scholarship in this area is only in its beginning stages. Nor will
space permit a satisfactory definition to be offered here. Yet, in broad strokes,
Tantrism could be understood in historical terms as (1) a mode of experience
rooted in archaic matriarchal shamanism, and (2) an identifiable medieval
movement (starting in the seventh and eighth centuries) involving alchemical/medical strategies for transforming the body to achieve salvation. hough
having declined into esoteric secrecy over the past few centuries, Tantrism
remains today, in often fragmented cultural forms, intermingled with mainstream Jainism, Himalayan Buddhism, various Hindu cults, and Chinese
Taoism. Even contemporary Hatha yoga, as we know it in the health clubs
of today, is rooted in this tradition.
Like phenomenology, Tantrism embraces the sensory world as the true
reality and rejects any metaphysical system that asserts the primacy of
another ideal transcendental realm. In turn, the bodily consciousness takes
on heightened focus. Sir John Woodroffe13 describes the Tantric approach
to the body in this way: “here is nothing in the universe which is not in
the human body.” Further, “Whatever of mind or matter exists in the universe exists in some form or manner in the human body. ‘What is here is
there. What is not here is nowhere’ ” (Woodroffe 50, emphasis mine). Moreover, the human body as the crown of creation is to be explored as a microcosm of the universe. David Gordon White describes “a particular attitude
on the part of the Tantric adept toward the cosmos, whereby he feels integrated within an all-embracing system of micro-macrocosmic correlations”
(Introduction 8). hrough conscious embodiment (jivatma) the forces of
nature cannot just be abstractly studied at an objective distance, but existentially lived, engaged, and immersed into through meditation practice—
the goal of Tantric yoga. In this sense, Tantric yoga is not merely a subjective
psychology, but a radical approach to the study of external nature and the
cosmos.14 his paradigm of the body as a homology of the cosmos, or as a
microcosm of the macrocosm—in Merleau-Pontean terms, the “flesh of the
13)
Sir John Woodroffe was a British high court judge in Imperial Calcutta who was one of
the first Europeans to take up Tantric scholarship and yoga practice. His translations and
commentaries remain important resources.

14)
But this could not be accomplished by academic means alone. Like the psychotherapeutic relationship, a personal long-term individualized relationship with a teacher was found
to be essential to this pedagogical process. See hompson for the visionary chapter “Of
Physics and Tantra Yoga” where he discusses the implications of Tantric meditation practice
as a potential form of scholarly research and pedagogy.


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world”—is a conception of embodiment that is no dualist “temple of the
soul” but a perspective of the human body as the very source of divinity
itself as much as it is a science of nature.
Several cosmological themes stand out as Tantric. here is the emphasis
on the feminine aspect of divinity and nature. Tantric goddesses are not
one-dimensionally maternal, nor delicate angelic consorts, but also beings
of profound sexual-spiritual power. In contradistinction to the West, sexuality itself is associated with feminine activity (prakriti) while masculinity
(purusa) is viewed as not quite passive but neutral in that it is only initiated
into activity by the feminine forces. hroughout rural India we see evidence
of Tantrism in everyday religious icons that invoke the feminine fertility of
the earth—typically symbolized through serpents (nagas). Such imagery
richly proliferates across rural India, as can be demonstrated in the naga devi
figure we see on the external wall of a small seaside shrine just outside the
temple town of Gokarna (fig. 2).

Figure 2. Gokorna Naga Devi, c. 1990–2007. Oil painting. Small Sea Temple, Gokorna,
Karnataka, India. Photograph: James Morley.

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As much as Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology stresses the dehiscence of “lived
body,” Tantra evokes a corresponding notion of the “subtle body” understood
as layered in sheaths or envelopes that, like serpent skins, are shed as embodied
consciousness develops forward into more complex dimensions and forms.
Below we can see a very typical Tantric shrine located deep within a cave
(guha) on a seaside hill outside of Gokarna (fig. 3).15 he Shiva lingam is in the
foreground and the goddess is in the background. To the side lies a coiled
snakeskin offering, a ritual representation of one of Shiva’s animal vehicles—
the serpent. Again, such imagery is ubiquitous across India.

Figure 3. Cave Temple (interior altar). Gokarna, Karnataka, India. Photograph: James Morley.
15)
his is the same cave (guha) referred to by Richard Kearney in the introduction to this
volume. Photo by the author, June 2007.


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One hesitates to discuss Tantric “subtle body” concepts of chakras, kundalini
energy, nadi points, and esoteric ritualized sexuality—so many of which
have been profoundly misunderstood by popular culture in the West. his
is not for prudish reasons but because these matters deserve a more sustained and detailed clarification than can be offered here. But briefly, from
a phenomenological standpoint, one need not conceptualize chakras and
nadi energy channels in literal terms as material natural phenomena but

appreciate them as meditation templates to assist the practitioner in coming to terms with one’s lived body. hese were to be “imaginative” pedagogical tools to be used in conjunction with mandalas, yoga postures
(asanas), breath control (pranayama), and chanting to achieve practical,
contemplative awareness of the spatial internal dimensionality16 of the
lived microcosmic or even mesocosmic body. But, by saying that this “esoteric physiology” is best understood in “imaginary” terms does not diminish its significance. It is through phenomenology’s appreciation of imaginary
experience that such somatic constructs may be liberated from the criteria
of literalism, and be better elucidated and contexualized.17 Here I evoke
Husserl’s famous passage “fiction is the source whence the knowledge of
eternal truths draws its sustenance,” as well as Richard Kearney’s many
works on the centrality of imagination to both religion and philosophy.18
Certainly, more detailed future studies in these matters would be of mutual
benefit to both yoga practitioners and academic phenomenology.
Finally, the very idea of ritualized sexuality simply does not translate very
well into Western representational thought and is especially ripe for misun-

16)

Neurologists use the technical terms of “exteroception” to describe the senses directed to
the external environment (sight, touch, hearing, etc.) while the terms “proprioception” and
“interoception” refer to internal bodily senses. Proprioception refers sensory experience of
muscular, tendon, and joint movements—usually associated with the sense of “balance” or
“spatial coordination” generally. Interoception is the sensation of one’s internal organs such
as the experience of headaches, chest pain, digestion, and breathing. Normally we are only
aware of such internal senses when we fall ill. Yoga practices such as moving postures (asana)
and breath control (pranayama) teach one to live these internal senses with as much attention as we give to the exteroceptive senses. Yogic esoteric physiology may have served as
imaginary templates for the further refinement of these internal somatic senses. Here again,
the theme of the interior cavern (or guha) emerges.
17)
For a treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to imagination, see Morley, “he Texture
of the Real.”
18)

Husserl, Ideas I 184; see Kearney, he Wake of Imagination, and more recently, he God
Who May Be.


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derstanding. Even in rare instances when certain traditional Tantric sects
may have actually employed ritualized sexual conjunction (maithuna), these
acts only occurred after prolonged periods of ritual and liturgy where any
eventual sexual contact was brief, symbolic, and impersonal—not at all synonymous with what is commonly understood as simple “sexual pleasure.”
Typically, this “cosmological sexuality” is relegated to the domain of symbolism. In the Tantric Buddhist temple painting seen in color plate 7,19 for
instance, we find a classic depiction of Tantric creative cosmology. he
female ( prakriti) figure’s head is thrown back with arms flailing in erotic
ecstasy as the Buddha ( purusa) sits in motionless contemplation despite the
activity of his consort. We see halos of color radiating out from their conjunction. One can witness such symbolism at any contemporary Hindu
Vedic wedding ceremony where the groom takes the liturgical form of a
diety such as Shiva, and the bride takes the imaginary form of the cosmic
feminine force (Shakti) both replicating the dynamic cosmic interplay of
existence itself. Still, the centrality of sexuality to Tantric creation spirituality
can’t be overlooked.20 he many goddesses of the Ellora caves could not but
move the onlooker to notice their aesthetic of cosmic sexuality. 21
Merleau-Ponty speaks in almost Tantric terms when he writes that “sexuality is co-extensive with life.” And further: “here is an interfusion of
sexuality and existence, which means that existence permeates sexuality
and vice versa” (Phenomenology of Perception 169).

19)

Photo from Sangacholings Gompa, above the village of Pelling, West Sikkim. Taken by

the author in 1996.
20)
During our visit to the Ellora caves, Richard Kearney asked one of our guides about the
existence of any Tantric imagery. he guide, delighted by this rare request, proceeded to
demonstrate a richly detailed panorama, discretely carved in small detail, depicting a
cacophony of sexual acts performed by the deities. Certainly, these Hindu sections of the
Ellora caves were profoundly influenced by the popular Tantric movements of their time.
21)
Several goddess figures expressed feminine features so pronounced that many previous
onlookers were provoked into literally reaching out to grasp and touch the carvings as can
be seen by the hand-worn breasts in the photograph below. One wonders if this was the
intention of the stone carvers. In any case, as we seek forms of worship beyond the patriarchal representations of mainstream theology, Tantrism may offer a glimpse into alternative
visions of the sacred that are inclusive of both male and female embodied numinousity.
Photo by author, June 2007.


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Figure 4. Yakshi Siddhayika, Jain Mother Goddess (Jain Cave 32), c. 1000–1300 CE. Stone
carving. Ellora, India. Photograph: James Morley.

VII Conclusion
Despite its recognition of the limits of language, phenomenology remains
paradoxically trapped in an abstract representational methodology for pursuing
its goal of articulating corporeal experience. Merleau-Ponty’s attempts at
elucidation (as well as hermeneutics, deconstruction, so on) can only resort
to language and interpretation because, as one writer says, “it is the only
game in town” (Fish 355). Of course, the obvious next step would be a

phenomenological methodology based on body experience apart from language. But how would one systematize such a procedure?
Tantric yoga, like Merleau-Ponty’s existential-phenomenology, is an experiential ontology but, unlike phenomenology, yoga would bypass academic


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discourse in favor of direct psycho-physical meditation practice transmitted
through a personal relationship between a teacher and a student. hough
phenomenology prides itself as “a return to the things themselves,” it could
learn a great deal from the methodology inherent in somatic yoga practice.
hen again, yoga’s focus on direct practice may have led to many misunderstandings of the meaning of yoga such as the reduction of yoga to physical
exercise, or extreme asceticism. he seeming reluctance of traditional yoga
practitioners (especially Tantric) to develop an autonomous systematic academic discourse may be the reason why it so often comes to us as an appendage to larger religious systems.22 An example of this is the tendency on the
part of so many commentators to interpret the otherwise deliberately ambiguous yogic term Ishvara not as “teacher, guide, or ideal” but as “transcendental deity,” thereby fixing Patanjali’s sutras onto their own theological systems.
To suggest that phenomenology is the conceptual system best suited to
yoga is to risk turning yoga into just this sort of appendage or, even worse,
another Orientalism that interprets Indian thought solely in terms of European constructs. Yet, despite this risk, I hope I have demonstrated in this
brief initial sketch the possibilities for such a true mutuality. Phenomenology needs a somatic methodology that can go beyond academic language
and yoga needs a language that will not do violence to the lived somatic
experience of contemplative practice.

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