Sakta Traditions: History, Doctrine, and Practice

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Project leaders

Project Directors: Gavin Flood, Bjarne Olesen

Project Manager: Bjarne Olesen

Project outline

Research in the Saiva traditions have been quite extensively developed in recent years. Important work has been done on the Skanda Purana, the Pasupatas, the Saiva Siddhanta, the non-dualistic Saiva traditions, and their philosophical articulation in the Pratyabhijna. But less work has been done on what might be called Sakta traditions, those traditions, tantric and non-tantric, focused on an independent Goddess (Devi) or on Siva’s power (sakti). Research has been done on the Kubjika tradition and on Sakta oriented Saiva traditions but a sustained research programme that inquires into the history, doctrine and practices of what might be called ‘Saktism’ is a desideratum.

The aim of this project is therefore to address fundamental questions such as the clarification of the distinction between the Saiva and Sakta traditions, questions about Sakta textual lineages and their inter-relationship, the clarification of doctrines and practices of the different schools, questions about the relationship between the tantric and the puranic Goddess traditions, questions about the relationship between local Goddess traditions (such as the Teyyams in Kerala) and the pan-South Asian traditions, raising questions about the relationship between esoteric practices and the esoteric temple cults, asking what the delimitation of Sakta doctrine is, and what developments there are in contemporary Sakta worship. The conference would therefore have three or four focuses, a text-historical or philological focus (this would be the main one as the texts of the tradition and its text-historical boundaries are hardly established), an anthropological focus on contemporary practice, a doctrinal or theological focus on theological reflection based on the textual material that has been established to date, and an art-historical angle.

The project will be done in collaboration with the Study of Religions Department in the University of Aarhus.

Project outputs

  • An international conference to be held in Oxford.
  • Publication of the papers from the conference as a volume in the Routledge Hindu Studies Series and/or in editions of the Journal of Hindu Studies.