The Saktas

An Introductory and Comparative Study

Ernest A. Payne

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486149073
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia orientale

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

MANY elements in Indian religion have been neglected, or adversely criticised, simply because they have been distasteful to Western students, and although no real effort has been made to understand them. Rabindranath Tagore, in one of his latest and wisest books, Creative Unity, reminds us that ‘when a stranger from the West travels in the Eastern world he takes the facts that displease him and readily makes use of them for his rigid conclusions, fixed upon the unchallengeable authority of his personal experience. It is like a man who has his own boat for crossing his village stream, but, on being compelled to wade across some strange watercourse, draws angry comparisons, as he goes, from every patch of mud and every pebble which his feet encounter.’ Such an attitude can be charged with all too much truth against many of those who have written of Hinduism.

ktism is one of the phases of Indian religion which has received much condemnation and abuse; it is also one of the phases which has been little studied. Writers have been content to follow one another in expressions of disgust, rather than embark on the difficult task of examining it. In the account of the

ktas given by Hopkins, for example, words like ‘obscenity’, ‘bestiality’, ‘pious profligacy’ frequently occur, and he tells us that ‘a description of the different rites would be to reduplicate an account of indecencies of which the least vile is too esoteric to sketch faithfully.’ Language almost equally violent is to be found in the pages of William Ward, the Abbé Dubois, H. H. Wilson, Monier Williams, Barth, William Crooke and many lesser known writers. Yet throughout India, and particularly in Bengal, there are hundreds of thousands of

ktas, and they are the product of one of the most important and widespread movements within Hinduism, a movement which, however dark some of its expressions may be, has produced some remarkable types of genuine piety, and a considerable literature, and which has in recent times had able apologists.

We are coming increasingly to realise that ‘no error has ever spread widely that was not the exaggeration or perversion of a truth.’ If we would convince men of the inadequacy of their religious conceptions, and the harmful results of their religious practices, we must first seek to understand and appreciate the ways in which they have expressed their experiences, and without hesitating to condemn, where we feel that to be necessary, we must use what truth may be there as a stepping-stone to something higher. However crude, superstitious and repellent

ktism may be on certain of its sides, it must be studied if it is to be combated effectually.

The numerous Tantras form the chief literature of the sect. Until 1913 none of these had appeared in translation in the West, and even in India it was not till about 1900 that the first English version of a Tantra was published. Of late years, however, a Western apologist for

ktism has issued a series of works which have prepared the way for a more scientific study of the movement. Translations of Tantras, works on

kta yoga, and general introductions to different phases of the subject have since 1913 come fast from the pen of a certain Arthur Avalon. Sir John Woodroffe has now acknowledged himself as chie...