How have contemplative traditions throughout time and place utilized the primary elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and space within practices of attention and self-transformation? This panel explores the theorization of the elements as material categories in contemplation, ritual practice, and as technologies of information for ordering kinds of knowledge about human bodies and environments within South Asian and Tibetan contemplative traditions of Yoga and Tantra. Through responses representing geographically and historically diverse contemplative traditions, papers attend to the emergent theme of the elements as relational media that operate between various domains of experience: embodied and environmental; individual and cosmic; private and public; and theoretical and practical domains of contemplation.
Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (SUNY 2020) explores the use of elemental meditations in key texts and ritual practices, including reflections on the author's own training in this discipline and exploration of the five elemental Saiva temples in south India. Resources include the Pṛthivī Sūkta, Yogavāsiṣṭha, and Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā (Hindu), the Dhātu Vibhaṅga, Mahārāhulovāda, and the Visuddhimagga (Buddhist), and the Ācārāṅga Sūtra, Jñānārṇava, and Yogaśāstra (Jaina). This presentation will provide a summary overview of meditations on the five elements as found in all three traditions.
The Kālacakra Tantra states that a physical body is requisite for complete buddhahood, and what constitutes a physical body are the four coarse elements (earth, wind, fire, water), the element of space that is characteristically included in late Indian Buddhist literature, plus the sixth element of gnosis (ye shes). Together, these six elements form the constitutive physiology for a body that, in its fullest expression, is known as the adamantine body endowed with the six elements (khams drug ldan pa rdo rje lus). Corresponding to this sixfold elemental theory, the tantra presents a successive development of a sixfold vajrayoga completion stage process that is incremental, progressive, and adheres to an internal sequential logic. This paper details and analyzes these contemplative processes of dematerializing and rematerializing the physical body into a gnostic body according to the Kālacakra’s metaphysics of the six elements, and its correlative sixfold vajrayoga contemplative practices.
The primary elements of earth, water, fire, and wind are widely known within Buddhist cosmologies and philosophies as units of matter. Less well known are the Buddhist contexts in which the elements function as objects of meditation, as devices for measuring time, and as technologies of information for ordering knowledge about practitioners’ lives and their surrounding material environments. This paper explores these dimensions of elemental thought within foundationally important Great Perfection Seminal Heart (Rdzogs chen snying thig) texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Drawing on key examples of elemental-contemplative thought and practice from the collection known as the Seventeen Great Perfection Tantras (Rdzogs chen rgyud bcu bdun), and their accompanying twelfth-century commentaries, this paper reflects on the role of elements as constitutive and agentive factors in Buddhist theories of meditation, and the ordering of Buddhist contemplative lives.
Newar Buddhism is often viewed in scholarship as being concerned with ritual at the expense of contemplative and/or philosophical practice. This presentation shows that located within the physical ritual space is an intersection of ritual, contemplative, and philosophical thought so deeply interwoven that to attempt to disentangle them in order to make them fit with contemporary categories could only happen at great detriment to the theory behind the practices highlighted. Critical to the conceptual transformation of the practitioner into a being who has fully realized the shared identity of oneself and all external phenomena (dharmadhātu) is the identification with the physical body and environment with the constituent gross elements. These elements form a critical part of the maṇḍala, which is mapped onto the body (private), social space (public) and reality itself (cosmic).
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