Uploaded August 2017 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Geoffrey Samuel (Cardiff University)
Tantric Immortality: the factors of Long Life and the transcendence of Time
Medicine and Yoga in South and Inner Asia: Body Cultivation, Therapeutic Intervention and the Sowa Rigoa Industry.
University of Vienna
1st - 3rd August, 2017
Tantric immortality: the factors of long life and the transcendence of time
As a researcher on Tibetan longevity practices, I have been asked on a variety of occasions whether they work. An answer is by no means straightforward, in part because opinions vary as to what it is they are meant to do. As Barbara Gerke demonstrated in her field research with Tibetans in India, for many lay Tibetans, the practices are indeed directed at the attainment of a long and healthy life. Yet this pragmatic and easily understandable concern is entangled with other matters. Lamas stress that the only proper motivation for such life extension is to enable progress towards Buddhahood. Beyond this ideological commitment, which serves to reconcile the this-worldly aim of the practices with the trans-worldly orientation of the Buddhist tradition, lie more arcane matters. These include the extreme life–spans attributed to holy men in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and the Tantric siddhi of immortality, which may refer to the avoidance of physical death, or to its transcendence into a realm where it no longer exists or makes any sense. There is a history to this complex tangle of ideas, a history which appears to overlap, whatever the precise historical connections, with East Asian traditions of life-cultivation and inner alchemy. In this paper, I attempt to sort out some of this history, and to understand how its modern-day reflections help to create a productive ambiguity within which the apparently impossible can gain enough reality to be taken as a serious goal for Tantric practice.
Geoffrey Samuel (Cardiff University)
Tantric Immortality: the factors of Long Life and the transcendence of Time
Medicine and Yoga in South and Inner Asia: Body Cultivation, Therapeutic Intervention and the Sowa Rigoa Industry.
University of Vienna
1st - 3rd August, 2017
Tantric immortality: the factors of long life and the transcendence of time
As a researcher on Tibetan longevity practices, I have been asked on a variety of occasions whether they work. An answer is by no means straightforward, in part because opinions vary as to what it is they are meant to do. As Barbara Gerke demonstrated in her field research with Tibetans in India, for many lay Tibetans, the practices are indeed directed at the attainment of a long and healthy life. Yet this pragmatic and easily understandable concern is entangled with other matters. Lamas stress that the only proper motivation for such life extension is to enable progress towards Buddhahood. Beyond this ideological commitment, which serves to reconcile the this-worldly aim of the practices with the trans-worldly orientation of the Buddhist tradition, lie more arcane matters. These include the extreme life–spans attributed to holy men in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and the Tantric siddhi of immortality, which may refer to the avoidance of physical death, or to its transcendence into a realm where it no longer exists or makes any sense. There is a history to this complex tangle of ideas, a history which appears to overlap, whatever the precise historical connections, with East Asian traditions of life-cultivation and inner alchemy. In this paper, I attempt to sort out some of this history, and to understand how its modern-day reflections help to create a productive ambiguity within which the apparently impossible can gain enough reality to be taken as a serious goal for Tantric practice.
