Illness and Immortality: Mantra, Mandala, and Meditation in the Netra Tantra

So we will move now to the next session. So we will put two more, uh, another author like Patricia Souo. Where is Patricia? So Patricia is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. She was previously an assistant lecturer in History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta and a postdoctoral fellow on the European Research Council-funded AYOG project and a teaching fellow at the Nalanda University in Rajar Bear. So her research explores death, medicine, health, anti-aging, sexuality, gender, and ritual in Sanskrit religious and religious medical texts with an emphasis on Tantra and Alchemy, Rasashastra. And she also has more than a decade of experience as a print and digital journalist with a particular focus on arts, politics, and media industry. So Patricia is the author of Tantric Dimensions of Alchemy in the Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies, and of course, she's the author of Illness and Immortality: Mantra, Mandala, and Meditation in the Neta Tantra, which is the book we are going to discuss here today with David Gordon White, who is, I mean, I think he doesn't need an introduction, but he's a distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Associate Research Fellow at the Center of the SUD, the Iman Paris. He is the author of Meats of the Dogman, we have mentioned. Also, he's the author of The Chemical Body, Kiss of the Yogan, Sinister Yogis and Demons are Forever, and all published by the University of Chicago Press. And he's also the author of The Yoga Sutra of Patañjali: A Biography, published in 2014, and editor of Tantra in Practice and Yoga in Practice, all published by Princeton University Press. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and has been the recipient of three full BRIDE fellowships for research in South Asia in 1984, 1993, and 1999. So it's a great pleasure to have both of you here, and the floor is yours. Hello, Patricia, nice to meet you. We've corresponded before but never met in person or anything close to that. Um, I think Patricia is the rising scholar who has the most in common with my own work in the sense that we are both interested in the same topics, and also her approach is similar to mine. Uh, with respect to your book, I'm very much enjoyed reading this, uh, for the first time as an outside reader for the Oxford University Press, and again in preparation for this meeting. I especially appreciate Patricia's eschewing of the solar scriptura approach of the bulk of scholarship on Tantra in favor of her incorporation of material from other data sources rather than limiting herself to the world of the text. She also opens her discussion to the text and the world with particular attention to its human actors, its real-world practitioners, specifically the king and his MTR in medieval South Asia. As such, hers is a sociopolitical analysis of the Neta Tantra. In addition to the iconographic, epigraphical, archaeological, and ethnographic sources, Patricia also engages with both non-tantric Hindu scripture, secular literature, and tantric Buddhist scripture. The book's 10 chapters are well organized, comprising a balanced series of cameo studies of selected portions of the Neta chosen to ground her lucid discussions of the central themes and goals of tantric practice: language, myth, ritual, symbol, identity, initiation, protection, dream interpretation, salvation, and visualization. Often she pivots off her textual selections to engage with their real-world corel medieval Kashmir worship images of Bava, the history of South Asian death-conquering practice, mandala construction, caste relations, patronage, and the social identities of tantric actors, and so forth. Patricia's detailed discussions and analyses of selected passages, particularly those concerning mantric formation and decoding, are superb. While much of the book's content is purely descriptive translation and analysis, I see this as a good thing since it serves a pedagogical purpose explaining through example. Furthermore, the book's descriptive passages are generally balanced by contextualizing discussion which brings the material to life. Many of Patricia's theoretical insights are compelling, and her challenges to the work of other scholars are generally on target. This is one of a very short list of books on Hindu Tantra that work to provide an overview of the subject accessible to non-specialists. Alexis Sanderson's many near book-length studies of Hindu Tantra remain the gold standard, but the great man has never found a way to put his encyclopedic knowledge into a non-specialist user-friendly monograph. Andre Pad's 2010 French language Meso Sando was an excellent introduction. Unfortunately, his 2017 English language adaptation, The Hindu Tantric World: An Overview, is an inferior study. And as I noticed noted on the first page of My Kiss of the Yogan, I'm still very fond of Michelle Strickman's 1996 monograph as a general introduction. However, that book too remains untranslated from the French. Patricia's book falls somewhere between a broad introduction, she of which had been successful to this point, and a successful specialized technical study of the text. And this, I believe, is the sweet spot at which writing on Tantra is best suited to reach as broad an audience as possible in a world in which the general public is bombarded by fake expertise on the internet and social networks. This is important. We as scholars owe it to our discipline to make true scholarship accessible and relevant, and Patricia's book does just that. Now I'm going to segue gradually into the questions that I want to discuss with Patricia concerning the Neta Tantra as a text. We've all been eagerly awaiting Gavin Flood's and B. Verica Olson's critical edition and translation of the entire work. In the meantime, translations of selected chapters are already in circulation. Gavin's addition and translation of chapter 7 is accessible on the ShaktaTraditions.org website. Batima Batina Boer's translation of chapters 17 and 8, about which more shortly, has appeared in the form of a book titled The Yoga of the Neta Tantra: Third Eye and Overcoming Death, 2023. Sanderson has translated the latter portion of chapter 19, which Patricia has also translated in her book, and I've translated the former portion of the same chapter, some of which appears in My Diamonds Are Forever. More recently, I translated chapter 20 for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies, a chapter I want to bring into our discussion since it identifies itself as the treatise on the three yoga or the threefold yoga. So since top yoga is the topic of our meeting this weekend, that's what I want to turn to now and ask you, Patricia, how you approach the topic of yoga in your book. I couldn't help but notice that some of your discussion, which appeared in the manuscript draft that I read several years ago, disappeared from the print edition. So let's focus on that. Your particular focus on yoga practice in the Neta Tantra is on what you call stula yoga. So I'd like to hear what you have to say about that and more specifically why you identify the contents of the Neta's chapters—oh, who's that? That's one of B's minions. Why you identify the contents of the Neta's chapters 6 through 8 as focusing on yoga. So the floor is yours. Well, you know, it's really interesting. When I started working on this text, there wasn't much about it, right? You had, um, Bruner's French language article from the 1970s, uh, you had Sanderson, of course, from 2004, and then as I was working on it, all of these things started popping up that I realized people were working on your work, Patina Balmer's work, uh, Pad's translation, and so all of that kind of shifted how I was thinking about the text. I was originally looking at those three chapters on yoga, six, seven, and eight, and when I realized that seven and eight were already going to be so well covered, I thought to myself, well, I'm a social histori—

previously an assistant lecturer in history Classics and religion at the University of Alberta and a postd doctoral fellow on the European research Council founded a yog project and a teaching fellow at the nalanda University in rajar bear so her research explores death

medicine Health anti-aging sexuality gender and ritual in Sanskrit religious and religion medical text with an emphasis on Tantra and Alchemy rasashastra and she also has more than a decade of experience as a print and digital journalist with a particular focus on

Arts politics and media industry so Patricia is the author of tantric dimensions of alchemy in the Oxford Handbook of tantric studies and of course she's the author of illness and immortality Mantra Mandela and meditation in the Neta Tantra which is

the book we are going to discuss here today with David Gordon white who is I mean I think in doesn't need an introduction but he's a distinguished Emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of California Santa Barbara and Associate research fellow at

the center of the sud the Iman Paris he the author of meats of the Dogman we have mentioned also he's the author of the chemical Body Kiss of the yogan Sinister yogis and demons are forever and all published by the

University of Chicago Chicago press and he's also the author of The Yoga Sut of pangali a biography published in 2014 and editor of tent in practice and yoga in practice all published by Princeton University press he was the recipient of

a John Simon gugenheim Fellowship in 2007 and has been the recipient of three full Bride fellowships for research in South Asia in 1984 1993 and 1999 so it's a great pleasure to have both of you here and the floor is

yours hello Patricia nice to meet you we've corresponded before but never met in person or anything close to that um I think Patricia is the rising scholar who has the most in common with my own work in the sense that we are both interested

in the same topics and also her approach is similar to mine uh with respect to your book I'm very much enjoyed reading this uh for the first time as an outside reader for the Oxford University press and again in

preparation for this meeting I especially appreciate Patricia's estwing of the solar scriptura approach of the bulk of scholarship on Tantra in favor of her incorporation of material from other data sources rather than limiting herself to the world of the text she also opens her

discussion to the text and the world with particular attention to its human actors Its Real World practitioners specifically the king and his MTR in medieval South Asia as such hers is a sociopolitical analysis of the natra Tantra in addition

to the iconographic epigraphical archaeological and ethnographic sources Patricia also engages with both non- tantric Hindu scripture secular literature and tantric Buddhist scripture the book's 10 chapters are well organized comprising a balanced series of Cameo studies of selected portions of

the natra chosen to ground her Lucid discussions of the central themes and goals of tantric practice language myth ritual symbol identity initiation protection dream interpretation salvation and visualization often she pivots off her textual selections to engage with their

real world Corel medieval Kashmir worship images of Bava the history of South Asian death conquering practice Mandela construction cast relations patronage and the social identities of tantric actors and so forth Patricia's detailed discussions and analyses of selected passages

particularly those concerning mantric formation and decoding are superb while much of the book's content is purely descriptive translation and analysis I see this as a good thing since it serves a pedagogical purpose explaining through example furthermore the book's

descriptive passages are generally balanced by contextualizing discussion which brings the material to life many of Patricia's theoretical insights are compelling and her challenges to the work of other Scholars are generally On Target this is one of a very short list

of books on Hindu Tantra that work to provide an overview of the subject accessible to non-sp Specialists Alexis sanderson's many near book length studies of Hindu Tantra Remain the gold standard but the great man has never found a way to put his

encyclopedic knowledge into a non-specialist userfriendly monograph Andre pad's 2010 French language mesos andu was an excellent introduction unfortunately his 2017 English language adaptation the Hindu tantric world and overview is an inferior study and as I noticed noted on

the first page of my kiss of the yogan I'm still very fond of Michelle strickman's 1996 mon as a general introduction however that book too remains untranslated from the French Patricia's book Falls somewhere between a broad introduction she of

which had been successful to this point and a successful A specialized technical study of the text and this I believe is The Sweet Spot at which writing on Tantra is best suited to reach as broad an audience as possible in a world in

which the general public is bombarded by fake expertise on internet and social networks this is important we as Scholars owe it to our discipline to make true scholarship accessible and relevant and Patricia's book does just that now I'm going to segue gradually

into the questions that I want to discuss with Patricia concerning the natur Tantra as a text we've all been eager eagerly awaiting Gavin floods and B verica Olson's critical Edition and translation of the entire work in the meantime

translations of su delect chapters are already in circulation Gavin's introdu editting sorry Gavin's addition and translation of chapter 7 is accessible on the shakat traditions. org website batima batina boer's translation of chapters 17 and 8 about which more

shortly has appeared in the form of a book titled The Yoga of the nature Tantra third eye and overcoming death 2023 Sanderson has translated the latter portion of chapter 19 which Patricia has also translated in her book and I've

translated the former portion of the same chapter some of which appears in my diamonds are forever more recently I translated chapter 20 for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of tantric studies a chapter I want to bring into our discussion since it identifies

itself as the treat us on the three yoga or the threefold yoga so since top yoga is the topic of our meeting this weekend that's what I want to turn to now and ask you Patricia how you approach the topic of yoga in

your book I couldn't help but notice that some of your discussion which appeared in the manuscript draft that I read several years ago disappeared from the print edition so let's focus on that your particular focus on yoga practice

is in the nature Tantra is on what you call stula yoga so I'd like to hear what you have to say about that and more specifically why you identify the context contents oh who's that that's of the Nature's chapters may be

one of B's minions why you identify the contents of the Nature's chapters 6 through eight as focusing on yoga so the floor is yours well you know it's really interesting when I started working on this text there wasn't much about it

right you had um Bruner's French language article from the 1970s uh you had Sanderson of course from 2004 and then as I was working on it all of these things started popping up that I realized people were were

working on your work patina balmer's work uh pad's translation and so all of that kind of shifted how I was thinking about the text I was originally looking at those three chapters on yoga uh six seven and8 and when I realized that seven and eight

already going to be so well covered I thought to myself well I I'm a social historian anyway I'm not a yoga practitioner I'm not that interested in you know the the yoga World um as it you know modern yoga is not really my thing

and I thought you know uh let's look at at what they're actually doing right the the seventh chapter is very philosophical um the eighth chapter on par yoga is very philosophical but this sixth chapter just really focuses on you know sacrifice oblation

manter recitation and meditation and I thought those were the ones where I could like you said get at the people the most right rather than talk about all of this this philosophy that's for this very small group of

practitioners you know what do people what are people hiring these mtrans for what are people asking these yogis to do and so really focused on that and you know as I've talked to yoga teachers a lot of them have said you I'm really

starting to get more into meditation than the postures and I thought great because that's what this book is very much about is these meditations and these practice I mean there's no physical you know postural yoga in this work at all but this idea of you know

the sacrifice and especially that mantric recitation and that meditation being so key uh it really struck me as as a way to really humanize the practice rather than get involved in these deeply philosophical discussions which are great but which are elsewhere um I also

really wanted to look at chapter 20 I was about to start translating it when your work came out and I thought well okay I guess I'll look at something else so it it's just kind of this weird thing

that at the at the time I was working on it there was so much interest in this text that I wanted to really make sure that what I focused on was slightly different than what other people were working on and you know rat son and TM

at soaz always said to me you know look for the women find the women and there's not a lot of women in this book but I looked for the people rather than the deities right I really that just sort of

resonates in the back of my head still you know look for the women look for the people look for the real people who are doing things because I think when we look at these tantric Texs we often yeah

look at them as edit editions and these very deeply philosophical works and we forget that there were very real practitioners doing these things um and in this case doing them for a king um who's not going to do these things on

his own right but there's also this idea that that the practice is continual right this mantr is doing this day and night day in and day out for the king and so you have this continual practice that keeps the world functioning and I

just found that to be really a fascinating idea of of yoga of this constant practice okay thank you and yes certainly that's one of the great strengths of your book is that you're engaging with the practitioner and his

clients in the world but I really want to challenge you about your use of the term yoga in those three chapters I know it's what Betina barmer says in her book she calls chapter six uh corporeal yoga in chapter seven she calls it subtle

yoga chapter eight she calls it Supreme yoga rastogi makes similar uh claim um however thank you thanks to Mark D Kowski who you know has been digitalizing the uh contents of so many T sources online you can do word

searches uh more quickly than just pouring through uh the PDFs of the original Kashmir study series I do a word search of the word yoga in chapters 6 through 8 and it almost never shows up um sukma yoga chapter 7 verse 9 Ashtanga

Yoga chapter 8 verse 9 and Ashtanga Yoga chapter 8 verse 21 however when Shara introduces and concludes each chapter the three chapters he speaking of he doesn't use the word yoga he uses the word Diana now it's true what you

say that or it's true what was said in the last meeting that so much of the yoga Sutra is about Diana or what we call innocence about meditation as opposed to postal yoga but it's more than a quible especially in the light of

chapter 20 of uh the natur Tantra to argue against your assertion that those three chapters are about yoga um I can read what chamaraja says uh Cons with in his intro and his um conclusion to those chapters in his

commentary on nature of chantra 6's final verse he writes with this chapter subtle meditation has been declared and then chapter 71 reads now I will tell you about the excellent Supreme Diana and then it enters into a discussion

of visualization of the six chakras the three objects the five voids and so on and this compound sukma Diana is found throughout chapter 7 chaj introduces chapter 8 with related to subtle meditation sukma danana the God spoke in

consideration of supreme meditation par danana so I I want you to tell me why you call that yoga because the text doesn't call that no that's a really good point um and I talked to Gavin flood about this a

little bit um I think that whoever the author of The N Tantra is is using yoga and Diana kind of um as synonyms for one another um I don't think sh maraja is I think sheam maraja um does that much

less so and and yeah doesn't talk about yoga talks about meditation by the time he's writing I think there's more of a distinction um also I call it yoga because this text is so connected to this fanda Tantra and this fanda Tantra

does use the word yoga quite a bit and actually calls instead of a mantra vid you have a yoga vid um and so in these sections where there's connections between the two um and especially chapter six of the netr Tantra and

chapter seven of the sand Tantra you have a lot of shared ideas um there's obviously an influence of the spand Tantra on the netr Tantra and so because I think they kind of using these terms synonymously um I chose to stick with

the word yoga because I think it's more accessible than di or even meditation um because it's not just meditation it is action right there there are practices involved um so I think it is more than just meditation but I think it's a good

point um that the book doesn't call it yoga um you know very firmly itself it it throws the word in every now and again um but but yeah like I think di is not quite the right the right word in

our context because it's so focused just on meditation and this is talking about you know the chakras the the movement up and down of the breath um and that connection with the deity that uh you know yoking to the deity um I think that

makes it more I think yoga is a more appropriate term than di because of that ultimate goal and of course the the commentary is uh non-dual and the original Tech is dualistic um but that but that that idea

that the end goal is non-death and connection with the Divine uh whether it be immersion in or just connection with um is still you know much more Beyond just meditation it is more of a sort of yoking a connection a a

coalescing so that's why I I chose the word rather than um rather than indana well good enough well enough however if one takes the natra Tantra at its word chapter 20 is the chapter on yoga because it's introduced that way and its

content is the three yogas or the three F yoga and that yoga has nothing to do with what we've been disc discussing which is more sort of a our received notion of yoga because we know what the yoga sutras are and we know what hat

yoga is and so forth so in a way I would there's some kind of anachronism in the in the in the position that chapters 6 through 8 are about yoga they're about yoga as we understand it more today but

the natur Tantra if we take it at its word understood yoga in a very different way and oh absolutely in as much as chap chapter 20 say it introduces Itself by talking about the threefold yoga uh it uses the term yoga declined

or in compounds 18 times in the text itself and countless times in shar's commentary and the chapter is just full of huge verbs and nouns so yoga Yogi yogini yanam pram n VI and shar's introduction says paradi yoga

by means of the yoga of par sukma Etc the ETC being stula which is what you discuss at greatest l in your book but in fact there's like 40 verses in chapter 20 on stula yoga and it really

does unpack it in a much more direct way than does chapter 6 so it's worth noting that and I mean with your well why don't you respond to me and then I mean I can I would like to expand on that because

the content of chapter 20 is so interesting and uh so it's actually a very well structured chapter uh whoever the author of it was it is it's much more well structured than a lot of the rest of the text um which I think you

know is interesting from a philological standpoint you know you know I mean I I'm not one of these edit critical Edition people um but I imagine that one of the first things that one of those folks would say is is this original um I

don't have an answer for that but um but yes it is very it is very different um and but part of the reason I guess I didn't focus on that chapter so much um which of course there are lots of women

there right there's all these yoginis I but they're not the real women absolutely um so I think it's more because it was more of that philosophical rather than practical aspect is part of why you know why I sort of steered away from it um

because I didn't want to get to In The Weeds of the philosophy although you know with the discussion of Mantra we went way into the Weeds on that one um but yeah I think it's a good point to bring up that you know that

this idea of yoga in the 9th century and even the 11th century is so different from what we're talking about with yoga now um and again you know in this vand Tantra we talk he talks he I assume it's

a he who wrote it um talks about constant yoga and meditation and talks about these two things in tandem um so again you know I did work a lot with this fanda Tantra in contrast to this text because it's clear that it it's

connected to it um so perhaps I let that sort of uh trickle into my looking at the NR Tantra maybe a little too much um I still think yoga is a good term for it um but I do think it's vastly

different from the kind of yoga that we think of today it's much more like practice but again practice is kind of problematic because we think about practice we think about bending right and we're not talking about bending we're talking about oblation we're

talking about rituals we're talking about taking medicines and saying mantras to protect those and then giving them to a patient um and I've never really read anything quite like this text which is also part of what was so

intriguing to me about it is that it's super weird it's so odd even within the even within all the odd things of Tantra it's weird and some ways much more practical um but that that image of of of of you know sauta uh encasing a pill

with the Mantra to make it effective is that that's really the thing that like got me hooked on this text was this idea that there's a real practical and yet very philosophical very Supernatural element to all of this and so if you're

going to be healthy it's not just about taking medicines it's about in this case hiring someone to like convince God not to kill you too early or to get rid of your your illness or to give you wealth

or beauty right there's all of those things as well it's not just you know illness is also just sort of like aging Decay um and I think you know in the the modern term we also think of yoga in

those kind of Wellness uh you know Wellness Concepts right oh you do yoga you look younger your body's your body's different it's healthier um so I think that modern influence also sort of crept into my work of just how we think about yoga and

healing um rather than like you know meditation is not people don't really like oh I'm gonna meditate in order to not get gray hair although that there's that in Tantra as well meditating on black lotuses and all kinds of weird things that shaan Hatley

writes about um but but yeah I mean it's it is a very different conception of yoga it's also a different conception of who's doing it right I'm not gonna not gonna go down the street and pay a yoga

practitioner to do yoga on my behalf right so that I'm healthier this is this is something I have to do whereas in this text you do it for somebody else and I'm not really aware of any so direct comment about that and these

other tonas of like hiring somebody I wish they told us how much they got paid but they do tell us a little bit about like he lives in you know in the castle he's got this like corner of the castle

you do kind of get this information that this guy really is hanging around the complex the the court complex um and that's and that's I think what to me was the most interesting is that there is this person whose job is just to like

spiritually keep the world chugging along yeah for sure um Danny Lucy are we moving into the Final Phase of our yeah I was very yeah I was very great to uh listening at this interaction so but yes we have a question right Vicki from Ruth

I think yeah Ruth would you like to ask your question yeah sure thank you that was a really fascinating discussion I'm sorry that I haven't read your book psha and I need to get on it um I found it really

interesting what you were talking about um uh looking for the the actual real people so and and just in your last answer you were starting to go in the direction a little bit more so maybe I could could I invite you to give us more

kind of anecdotes of the people that you did find in the sources and perhaps in comparison to the yogan of say chapter 20 how how you find them different and what what the real people tell us about the context of textual production thank

you for this work yeah so you know in chapter 20 we have all of this stuff about exorcism and getting you know these these yoginis who are attacking the body and how to appease them and but it's the the body

is sort of a you know a byproduct of the of of the the text right there's yugin they're attacking a body and in some other parts you get mentions of you know this cures coughing fever so you start

to get these very real ailments that come in that gives this idea of more of a focus on individuals um and there are some mentions that this is you know this person is employ of the king um there's

not a ton I mean it's not a very easy text to just read in Social context um which is part of way in the book I really try to connect it to um some of the other things that are going on right

is this ponic how is this how is this different and does that what does that tell us about these people in Kashmir um who are they meditating on um there's this great section on the iconography that ends uh you know it starts with

amorta the the god of non-death it goes down through all these different iterations and it ends with the Buddha and then it makes this great comment about how uh basically like oh well the Buddha is for women and I thought well

what does that mean and so I started looking and it turns out that the women of the Court were the ones who were paying for Buddhist temples whereas the men were paying for Hindu temples right so it's it's kind of a slate to Buddhism

but if you look into it uh as like who are these actual people it's not just like ah buddhism's for girls it's like no the women were doing Buddhist practices and the men were doing Hindu practices and that's really interesting

right and that tells us a lot about the world at the time that you do have these interactions and so that caused me to look into some of of the Buddhist texts and the Buddhist rights of um you know

conquering death and seeing that there's a lot of similarities there and so you know for textual production and this is going on at a time when Buddhism and Hinduism aren't different religions really they're kind of more different sects within this very vibrant world

where you have people worshiping different deities on different days of the week different calendrical events um and everybody can kind of worship everybody because depending on whatever text you're looking at uh your God is the ultimate right you can worship

Buddha as a form of amasa he's still albera he just we just think of him as Buddha because it's Buddha's day or because you're a woman right and so it was like those little those little clues that I really tried to chase down to

find out well what's going on in this world and then um you know G Buon has done some amazing work looking at some of the actual physical iconography in the world right and showing that this text didn't just exist as a text somehow

people were taking maybe not straight from this text most likely you know the artists weren't reading the NRA Tantra and then chiseling but the descriptions of the of the Gods in the NR Tantra end up in the world right so we can see that

they had an impact and the most com the most important one is in Catman do where there's this Royal Bath where the Kings would go in and bathe right and when you look at the text it's like bathing is

very important it's the first part of the ritual so again we can see that like this isn't just theoretical it's not and we can never look at these books and say well this is exactly what they were doing but we can kind of Trace like no

they really were doing some of these things um they really did have an impact on the world that still exists which I think is very cool because we get so wrapped up in the like what is the difference between you know connection

and non-connection and all these philosophical things that are so fun to think about but at the end of the day when you're chanting mantras uh you know you're doing something and it's supposed to have a real impact on the world and

so to see that these practices continued all the way from Kashmir into Nepal they did have an impact on the world rather than just being theoretical and the the nepes manuscripts which I haven't had a chance to look at very much um but I know that

they're slightly different than the Kashmir potential which is what I used um so there are some differences right so we can also see that there's some change that goes on and part of the reason well I chose to look at the

Kashmir version for two reasons one um three years of a PhD at soas doesn't give you a lot of time to look at manuscripts and also you know these are texts that were published in the 1920s and 30s right and people were still

reading them um you can still get sort of reprinted copies of them they're online there's tons of mentions of this text right so it is it's not a direct lineage you know it's not the practices they were doing then they're doing now

but there is still sort of a connection to this as a text that people find important and so I wanted to look at that the version that people were using today to disseminate the text great patri I mean actually I have

a lot of questions so perhaps I will ask you like later on and because I was really I mean what you did like looking at people practicing and what they were doing is like okay I I was looking for

this kind of book actually to read so it was very great and and I mean we don't have an I mean I was wondering if it's a kind of you know the author of this text is a maning trying to sell himself to

the king therefore and is in the book present because if there is a manting that as you said is living together with the king or in the presence of the Kingdom but what about other kings I mean they will have their own manins

right and so is the mantr explaining how to protect the king from the other manin because I mean this kind of conflict among manins who's gonna win there is a little bit of that yeah there is you know how to counteract

spells from from a bad person right there is many mentions of sort of uh negative and I think David's probably written about this more and thought about it more than I have but there's definitely mentions of like how to

counteract negative rituals um there's not a a discussion of like this is how you beat that other guy but there are there are things you know like well if you protect all of your cows and you protect all of your people then your

kingdom will be good right you've got to go out and put the Vermilion on the ear on the not the ears the horns of the the cows right and so there is kind there is a an acknowledgment that there are other

people like this out there um and so yeah I guess you just have to say that like well I've read this text so I'm the best one um it's not quite I always think of the Lotus Sutra as like the

most self-advertising text I've ever read because it just tells you all the time if you read the Lotus Sutra then you will be you know you will be liberated continue to read the Lotus Sutra and you're like I am reading the

Lotus Sutra like tell me what to do and it's like just keep reading just keep reading and so it's not like that it's not just but it does say things um I've got a great quote here from it that says

the natur Tantra goes beyond death Conquest to include lifespan strength victory loveliness firmness wisdom a beautiful form and good fortune the highest Kingdom for Kings all of these will arise right so it is kind of telling you like this book is the one

you get you get everything you'll live longer you'll be healthy um if you're tormented by pain that'll go away if you're sick um a barren woman will obtain a son a girl will attract a husband the beneficiary will surely

attain whatever Pleasures he wants right so it is saying you know if if you use this book or you hire the person who can use this book you get it all right the whole world is your oyster well that's something that uh

Helen Bruner drew our attention to 50 years AO goes that the the swanda Tantra is about the um the the permanent and occasional rights the nature is about Kama it's about the voluntary ones that you do for yourself

or for your clients so that that's I think that's one of the reasons why it's so this worldly is that it's it's about those rituals those specific rituals it's the ones that really get you the good stuff in the world yeah yeah and

obviously Ian now that I've moved on to looking more at Alchemy like I'm more I am interested in that what do you do to get a good life what do you do to get health um it was sort of a natural

progression for me to move from the nrot Tantra which is a you know about all these rituals to do this to then look at well then what ingredients do what ingredients are in that pill right that pill that's surrounded by the the Mantra

what's in the pill and sort of so it was a real natural progression to me to try to find out what's in that pill yeah but but so I mean I think in the in the book you stress different ideas of

immortality right even just to have a long life could be discussed or considered as a kind of immortality did I understood well yeah there's a there's a section it's not in the NR Tantra but it's in a book I can't remember the name of it

right now from around the same time that says uh basically to attain immortality is to live life um live the like basically to live life as long as you're supposed to right so you don't die prematurely or to a hundred years and

either of those can be sort of considered immortality so it's not you know I don't yes there are are these ideas of you know yogis who are living up in the hills who've been there for a thousand years but this these aren't the

Chinese kings that are trying to you know eat Mercury to live forever these kings are just trying to live the full oh that's what it is the full extent of one's life right so it's like there's this predetermined amount of time that

you're supposed to live and you have to Stave off dying before that and so that's what this conquering death is about it's it's not really about living forever it's about being youthful and living you know for as long as possible and dying when

one is supposed to die um I wish it got more into the sort of Karma and the more sort of nitty-gritty of that but unfortunately um you know I think that's probably something people had a lot of conversations with conversations about

with each other that didn't quite make it into the texts yeah but I mean this could be very useful because a lot of hat yoga texal sources talk about immortality and if this idea is put in this context and

especially the idea that this textual sources were for Kings let's say patronage and so on it makes much more sense if we're talking about real people you know reading or maybe practicing this and then I was like oh my God it's

it's a it's great thank you Patricia really and there you know thinking about the idea of living forever is you know no matter how good of a yogi you are it's got to get boring right there's and there's no discussion in these texts of

the practicalities of like what do you do when you live forever and that's something that has really struck me for a very long time um Simone wrote a book called all men are mortal and it talks about like this woman who

falls in love with this Immortal man and there are these parts where he's just like yeah I've fallen in love a bunch of times like I can't do it anymore I've seen Wars like he's just so bored with

the world and it's just that book has really stuck with me because it's like yeah it would be really boring to live forever