Author: Sir John Woodroffe
Publisher: Ganesh & Company
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 318
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8185988129
Description
This book is an attempt to remove many of the cobwebs of ignorance that had come to cluster round the Sakta philosophy and practice. It shows that this cult has a profound philosophy behind it, and that there is nothing irratioinal or obscurantist about the technique of worship it recommends.
Veda fears the man of little knowledge, since injury may be received from him. It is natural, given this difficulty and the mystery which surrounds the subject, that strangers to India should have failed to understand mantra. They need not however, have then jumped to the conclusion that it was meaningless superstition.
This is the familiar argument of the lower mind which says, what I cannot understand can have no sense at all. Mantra is, it is true, meaningless to those who do not know its meaning. But there are others who do, and to them it is not superstition. It is because some English-educated Indians are as uninstructed in the matter as that rather common type of Western to whose mental outlook and opinions they mould their own, that it was possible to find a distinguished member of this class describing Mantra as 'meaningless jabber'.
This book is a Collection of Studies on particular subjects in the Mantra-Sastra, a term which is commonly applied to the Tantra-Sastra. It is practically composed of two parts. After chapter I, which deals with the world, Chapters II-IX treat of the principles of the general doctrine of Sabda.
Contents
CHAPTER
Foreword
Preface
I.Vak or the Word
II.Artha, Pratyaya and Sabda
III.Asabda and Parasabda
IV.Prasabda, Causal Sabda
V.Sakti as Stress
VI.Eternality of Sabda
VII.Sabda as Language
VIII.Natural Name
IX.Vaidika -Sabda
X.The Tattvas
XI.Sakti - Potency to Create
XII.Nada - The First Produced- Movement
XIII.Bindu or Sakti - Ready to Create
XIV.Maya Tattva
XV.The Kancukas
XVI.Hamsa
XVII.Kamakala
XVIII.The Gross Tattvas and their lords
XIX.Causal Saktis of the Pranava
XX.The Kalas
XXI.The Garland of Letters or Varnamala
XXII.Om
XXIII.The Necklace of Kali
XXIV.Dhvani
XXV.Sun, Moon and Fire
XXVI.Bija-Mantra
XXVII.Sadadhvas
XXVIII.Mantra-Sadhana
XXIX.Gayatri-Mantra
XXX.The Gayatri-Mantra as an Exercise of Reasoning
XXXI.Atma-Sadhana