How to honor the dead?

For the late Tony K. Stewart

The passing of Tony Stewart at the beginning of October of this year was a loss to scholarship, and, despite having known him as a friend of friends, a personal loss as well. His most recent work is Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (University of California Press, 2019). His oeuvre included several other important works, and I know from one of his close friends—my friend and colleague Glen Hayes—that he left several projects unfinished at the time of his death. My one anecdote is that he was known as someone who knew fine restaurants in many different cities, and a couple of decades ago or more, after a meeting with other tantric scholars, he took us to a restaurant that had the memorable slogan “Garlic is the ketchup of intellectuals.”

In order to acknowledge Tony’s important contribution to the work that Glen and I did on The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies, as part of my comments at the American Academy of Religion panel on that collection, I read aloud an extended quote from an email he sent us when we were working on it. What he wrote provided a brilliant insight that resolved many of the definitional issues we were struggling with at the time. The following is the full text of my comments, and includes that quote.

The Society for Tantric Studies originated with the idea that there was an identifiable religious phenomenon worth studying that crossed sectarian, linguistic, cultural and disciplinary boundaries. And, that as long as those boundaries were not transgressed, then the study of tantra within those boundaries would be distorted and impoverished.

When Glen and I began talking about doing this volume, this sensibility was very much at the forefront of our thinking, and explicitly informed the structure of the table of contents. Themes that emerged in our conversations as ones relevant to tantric practitioners themselves were also ones that enabled conversation across those boundaries.

The entries themselves are not intended to undertake that conversation. Instead, by juxtaposing entries, the reader of the volume is encouraged to look further into their own topic of inquiry than if they had not encountered it in a context that is not constrained by those disciplinary, or sectarian, or linguistic, or cultural boundaries.

So, I see this volume as having two dimensions. First, as establishing even more soundly and validating even more strongly tantric studies as a field of academic endeavor. And, second, no matter how monumental, it is not the final word on tantra, but is the starting point for future research.

Two particular things are, I think, important contributions of the volume that extend the field of tantric studies in new directions. First, the chapters on Jain tantra support emerging work in this understudied field. Second, the chapters on tantra in Southeast and Maritime Asia also point to research that has only emerged in the last decade and a half into a region long thought to be simply the domain of Theravāda Buddhism.

In order to honor Tony Stewart’s contribution to our project, I would like to read in full the content of the email he sent us that resolved key aspects of our definitional struggles:

Rather than working from a fixed definition, which can have the unintended effect of essentializing tantra, one might be better served to examine what it is that tantra in any specific historical context attempts to accomplish. The a priori determinations of a formal definition impose constraints on the perception of the scholar attempting to interpret the phenomena of tantra as they appear on the ground or in texts, for it leads one to look for preconceived salient features that may well obscure what any particular historical form actually reveals. At times tantra can manifest independently, creating its own autotelic universe. It may also be present parasitically, dependent on some preexisting tradition, but not recognized by it. In other instances it can function in symbiosis to a tradition, offering an embedded alternative path of religious experience within a mainstream doctrine and practice, or even represent the esoteric pinnacle of a tradition— a realm of discipline reserved for the adept practitioner. Because few of these tantric turns will furnish a comprehensive statement of intent, and because tantra often only sparingly reveals its ultimate trajectory, even to the point of adopting strategies of overt secrecy and disinformation, the hermeneutics of this exercise depend on abductive reasoning (see Douven 2021). The scholar must draw out critical features of that particular religious expression from what can be known through text and ritual, and then attempt to fit those elements into a comprehensible image of practice and/ or doctrine that fills lacunae with reasonable prospects. All the while, the scholar knows that the interpretation can never be absolute, but is instead a plausible understanding within a range of possible interpretations. The set of issues particular to any given form of tantra, in turn, dictates the pragmatic interpretive strategy, an approach which most of the essays in this volume have implicitly adopted. However tempting it may be to compare different strategies to develop a composite approach, the result of the comparison will not constitute a definition. On the contrary each example remains unique to its particular historical configuration.

(personal communication, April 22, 2023)—pp. 4–5 of The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies

Important here is the emphasis on starting from specific historical configurations, rather than beginning with an abstracted definitional category. For future study of tantra, the three categories—independent, parasitic and symbiotic—usefully lay out alternative institutional forms of tantra that might otherwise appear only incompatibly placed in the same category.

And always keep in mind—Garlic is the ketchup of intellectuals.

And, just in time for the holidays: below is a scan for “spinach dip” from my aunt Ilse…back from the days of using “instant” ingredients, but hey, it’s got garlic in it!!