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István Keul (ed.): “Yoginī” in South Asia:Interdisciplinary Approaches. (Routledge Studiesin Asian Religion and Philosophy 9.) xvi, 237 pp.London and New York: Routledge, 2013. £85. ISBN978 0 415 62522 7.

Andrea Acri

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 78 / Issue 01 / February 2015, pp212 - 214DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X14001256, Published online: 17 March 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X14001256

How to cite this article:Andrea Acri (2015). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 78, pp212-214 doi:10.1017/S0041977X14001256

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exposition of the concept of religious merit in India, Shimada charts the pattern ofpatronage revealed in the inscriptions from the monument. He demonstrates thatstūpa construction was the product of popular patronage from the wider community(albeit a very select group – the urban elite), and explores the meanings and motiva-tions that lay behind it.

The fifth and final substantive section deconstructs received (textually derived)notions of where Buddhist sites should be located, and relocates the point of inquiryto the first-hand examination of the site of Amarāvatī itself, and its relationship withthe nearby city of Dharanikota. We learn that in being not wholly removed from thecity, but part of its immediate periphery, Amarāvatī provided an important spacewhere key functions of urban life (funerary rituals and exchange) were able totake place. This relationship benefited both the monastic and the urban communi-ties, and was central to the wider changes outlined in the previous chapters.

For the reconstruction of the stūpa alone this book deserves special praise, facili-tating, as it does, many fruitful avenues for future research. It not only makes pos-sible more connected readings of the monument and its sculptures, but alsochallenges a number of established notions in different fields that have used theAmarāvatī stūpa as a benchmark in the gradual piecing together of early Buddhistart and architecture. Through expertly linking disparate strands of existing evidence(archaeological, architectural, sculptural and textual) this work shows just howmuch remains to be said of a site that has long been dismissed as either too ruined,or too well-studied, to say anything new about. Moreover, through its deft handlingof a range of themes (historiography, architectural history, religious change andsocietal transformation), it serves as a valuable model for future approaches to thestudy of religious sites.

This book sets a new standard for the study of early Buddhist sites in India. Itscautious, inclusive and polite approach will find many admirers; and it will be ofinterest and importance to all scholars and students of early historic South Asia.

Jason HawkesThe British Museum

ISTVÁN KEUL (ed.):“Yoginī” in South Asia: Interdisciplinary Approaches.(Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy 9.) xvi, 237 pp.London and New York: Routledge, 2013. £85. ISBN 978 0 415 62522 7.doi:10.1017/S0041977X14001256

This edited book is the outcome of a conference hosted by the Norwegian Universityof Science and Technology in Throndheim in October 2010. It includes seventeencompact essays (twelve conference papers plus five essays by invited contributors),all devoted to the study of the enigmatic and powerful female figures of both pre-modern and modern Indic imaginaire called Yoginī. The essays are subdivided infive groups: (1) “Yoginī”: definitions and categories; (2) History, cosmography,hagiography; (3) Art history; (4) Ethnography; (5) Possession, sexuality, dance.

Known from folklore, texts, temples and archaeological sites from the Indiansubcontinent (and beyond), Yoginīs – and their related cults and imagery – are asso-ciated with a complex constellation of themes and tropes, including orgiastic andantinomian rituals, clan-affiliation, polymorphy and theriomorphism, possession,

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and supernatural power. The polysemic term yoginī (often coterminous with dākinī,mātrkā, yaksinī, etc.) may refer, according to the specific context and milieu, to “aclass of tantric goddesses, a designation for the Great Goddess, intermediary beings/demigoddesses, ghosts, witches, female ascetics, tantric practitioners, women conse-crated to a deity, persons with a special affinity for Indian religion” (Introduction,p. 12) – hence, the difficulty of achieving a satisfactory systematization and tax-onomy of this category of practitioners and/or beings.

The problems of polysemy, polyvalence, versatility, and the advancement of atheoretical model of “religious polysemy” for mapping and structuring this largeand complex field of enquiry are sketched by István Keul in his introduction.Regrettably, only the first and last two-and-a-half pages of this piece fulfil the pre-rogative of a proper introduction; the core of it (nine pages) is based on the editor’sfieldwork conducted in India, mainly in Orissa. As such, it feels somehow discon-nected from the more general tone of the opening and concluding parts of his piece,and perhaps it could have been included in the volume as a separate essay (to be fair,it presents some interesting material in an engaging manner). Further, the introduc-tion describes the individual contributions in a rather sketchy and unsystematicmanner.

A discussion of key theoretical issues connected with the study of Yoginī isfound in the separate essays by Hatley and Hausner in Part 1. Hatley sets thetone of the volume by providing a theoretical basis underpinning the polythetic def-inition of the category of “Yoginī”, and sketching a historiography of past and recentscholarly understandings and definitions of that category (and of Hindu andBuddhist “Tantrism” more generally). Hausner, combining textual and ethnographicscholarship, and making use of the theoretical perspective of gender studies, notes alack of historical information that still prevents us from classifying Yoginīs throughthe ages. Thus, she proposes starting with a symbolic reading of the category,revolving around the definition of Yoginī as embodying “power as a tool, not anend. What that power is meant to effect [. . .] will be historically and culturallylocated” (p. 33).

The remaining fourteen essays combine, in a well-balanced manner, region-focused and disciplinary perspectives. Regions or centres of worship traditionallyassociated with Yoginī-cults through the ages, such as Bengal, Khajuraho,Madhya Pradesh, Varanasi and Orissa, form the primary focus of several essays.The informative and thought-provoking studies by Törzsök, Serbaeva Saraogi andBiernacki are grounded on the textual corpus of medieval Śaiva and ŚāktaTantras, and at the same time tackle such intriguing problems as “possession” orthe role of sexuality in Yoginī-related documents.

The volume successfully takes up the challenge of “capturing diachronic changeand synchronic diversity and variability” (introduction, p. 14) that characterize theYoginī-phenomenon in South Asia. Upholding a variety of disciplinary perspec-tives, it offers a fairly comprehensive, and all-in-all satisfactory, picture of the embo-diments of this phenomenon through the ages and across different geographical,cultural, social and religious contexts. The title “Yoginī” in South Asia, however,is misleading: the volume includes two essays focusing on Tibet (Child) andCambodia (Sharrock) respectively, and sure enough, the Yoginī-phenomenon can-not be considered to be limited to the narrowly constructed, and arguably fictitious(modern) category of “South Asia”. “Yoginī” in the Indic World would have been amore apt title, and one that would have done more justice to both the topic and thewide-ranging, transdisciplinary approach championed by the volume’s editor andcontributors. A case in point is the conspicuous absence of insular South-EastAsia, and Java and Bali in particular, in the volume’s introduction as well as

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among the essays. Yet Java and Bali were an integral part of the Indic cosmopolitanworld, and have yielded a significant – and long-known – amount of Yoginī-relatedIndic material in terms of texts, iconography and archaeology, performance, and rit-ual (think, for example, about the Old Javanese text Calon Aran, the Balinese maskof Rangda and related performances, and the imagery of fierce female beings insome Balinese temples), which certainly could have enriched the discussion.

The contributions generally reflect the state of the art in the field. Many areauthored by leading scholars, whose essays perforce represent condensed versionsof work published in the course of many years of research. This is by no meansa shortcoming, as the contributions do not lack originality. I have to point out, how-ever, that Sharrock’s fine essay on “The Yoginīs of the Bayon” was published pre-viously, with an identical title, in Interpreting Southeast Asia’s Past: Monument,Image and Text (Singapore, 2008); it appears to be a revised, and somewhat shor-tened, version of the author’s previous study, yet an acknowledgement of this fact,let alone an explanation of the relationship between this and the earlier publication,are nowhere to be found in the volume under review.

Fundamental – and perforce bold – questions on the genesis and development ofYoginī cults are not fully addressed in the book. For instance, the possible multidir-ectional historical connections between Yoginīs and “tribal” female practitionersfrom South (and South-East) Asia could have been explored further. Nonetheless,this carefully edited volume, with its rich body of work, is commendable for bring-ing together a wide range of expertise on a vast and complex subject in an accessibleand engaging manner. It definitely has the potential to become a standard referencesource for anyone interested in Yoginī or Indic religions in general.

Andrea AcriThe Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS

CENTRAL AS I A

ANDREW QUINTMAN:The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’sGreat Saint Milarepa.(South Asia across the Disciplines.) xi, 314 pp. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2014. £24. ISBN: 978 0 231 16415 3.doi:10.1017/S0041977X1400127X

One of the best-known masterpieces of Tibetan literature is the fifteenth-century Lifeof Milarepa written by Tsangnyön Heruka: the eleventh-century yogin Milarepahimself one the most famous adepts of Tibetan Buddhism. It is due in part toTsangnyön’s work that Milarepa reached such fame in Tibet and, during the pastcentury, in the West as well. Andrew Quintman, therefore, set himself no smalltask for his 2006 University of Michigan PhD dissertation on “Milarepa’s manylives: anatomy of a Tibetan biographical corpus”, of which The Yogin and theMadman is the revised version. In this eminently readable book, Quintman studiesthe transformations within Milarepa is biographical tradition by thinking of them asa gradual process of embodiment that finally takes life in Tsangnyön’s text.

In the introduction – a must-read for anyone interested in sacred biography orTibet’s religious history – Quintman presents the structures and functions of

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