Page 44 - Studio International - December 1968

Tantra art

Philip Rawson

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the first Tantra art concepts by means of which the Indian mind naturally grasped
exhibition in Britain,* which illuminates brilliantly the ends towards reality. In this it is more than religion. For it gives a framework to
which much of the most interesting modern painting is directed, and medicine, logic and social conduct, as well as to liturgy. Broadly
at the same time shows us the work of a school of art hitherto com- speaking it involves three main assumptions, which may disguise
pletely unknown in the West, and full of possibilities. It must be a themselves in various ways, and which are never seen in India as
long time since this last happened. The first indication we had of the being so distinctly separate from each other as I have to make them
existence of such an art was in Ajit Mookerjee's book on 'Tantra Art', here in explaining them :
beautifully designed and published by Ravi Kumar, which has had 1. The universe, like man, has a sexual polarity, male and female;
such a success among the students ofwide-awake art schools in Britain, 2. The goal of all mental and spiritual effort is the focussing of all
Europe and America. a man's faculties into a single, all-embracing point of enlightened
This art is kin to, but different from, the more familiar kinds of vision, when his own spirit becomes identical with the cosmos;
Indian and Tibetan art. It has remained unknown because it was 3. There are special techniques, physical and mental, which can be
made for a special, private purpose. Much of it comes from manu- learned to achieve this, and art is one of the principal technical aids.
scripts which were repositaries of esoteric teaching, meant to be seen Tantra conceives the world of phenomena as the product of a per-
only by accredited students in the temple schools of western India. petual sexual conjunction of the two sexual aspects of the Divine
In this it resembles the alchemical cosmograms made in Europe. For Ground. Creation is not a single act, but a continuous process. The
many of its pictures are visual resumes of traditional Indian ideas on male is the motionless seed of being, without which nothing exists,
cosmology and the phenomenology of experience. But they are not the spermatic infusion of energy without which shape and change
so indelibly tied to text as are the European parallels. The Indians cannot become actual. The female is the active propagator of forms
were prepared to use the symbolism of form and colour in a sheerly and change, giving birth to all creation, and devouring it, measuring
visual manner, because they recognized that words are no more out beginnings and ends. Insofar as she is our phenomenological
adequate to convey remote intuitions than are visual forms. And this mother the female offers us the closest road to vision, for she is the
is why Tantra art seems to have such relevance to contemporary art, material of our bodily existence. And since the cosmos is the offspring
and why it interests students so much. For it attempts to interpret by of driving sexual activity, human sexuality is dignified as a paradigm
means of form not a world of proximate visual appearance, but a of the divine. Properly carried out it can be one of the most important
world of relations in time. of the techniques. But it is never an end in itself. In Tantra art the
The genuinely new doesn't tickle you in the old familiar places. It image for the ultimate conjunction is the interpenetration of triangles,
may—indeed it should—seem strange. As well, even the larger dia- the male pointing up, the female down. The great Shri Yantra is
grams, eighteen inches or so square, are on a modest scale. They are composed of them; and around it are set the opening petals of the
meant to be studied by a solitary person, face to face; they deal with lotus flower which has in all Indian symbolism the double significance
serious matters as directly as possible. There is no purring chic for of the expansion of the universe and the female organ of generation.
the lady-enthusiast. And many of them are in the general mandala- This suggests the reason why Ravi Kumar and the Axiom have
form familiarized by Jung—but with vital differences. Some people excluded from their exhibition the more obvious sexual imagery
may miss the more obvious and familiar types of Tantra art—the which has captivated—even obsessed—the minds of so many Wes-
Yab-Yums of Tibetan Buddhist imagery for example. But Ravi terners. In other places one can see plenty of Tibetan and Nepalese
Kumar and the Axiom have chosen to stress those aspects which are images of deities in sexual intercourse. But these do not contain
the most pure and complete. They have tried to avoid challenging within themselves the whole structure of the ideas which give them
comparisons with the well-known art of Rajput miniature painting— their meaning. They are works of figurative art which need a back-
although the stupendous mandala exhibited from the eighteenth- ground of explanation. They are not their own explanation as the
century Bundi, towers above even the best miniatures from that mandala figures in this exhibition are—most of which expound in one
richly endowed state in the majesty of its conception. way or another the body of the goddess, as the creatively functional
Tantra has been expressed in a great diversity of media. Perhaps partner in the divine couple. These mandalas look almost like clari-
one could best call it a mode of spiritual activity and thought which fied and ultimate Noland, enriched by further symbolism. And since
also uses art to express its conceptions. But Tantra is not a religion. the mandalas all focus on their own centres, they offer a symbolic
There are, in fact, Buddhist, Jain, Hindu and even Moslem forms means of travelling back, in and up through the functional manifes-
of Tantra. It is at the same time both an ancient stratum in the pat- tations of that female body to the nucleus out of and beyond time.
tern of Indian thought, and a kind of intuitive summing-up of the All philosophies worthy of the name, including the philosophy of
science, have to envisage a cosmogony. They have to try and con-
ceive what 'real' means, and how what is real 'came' into existence.