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Forwarded from Logos & Samadhi - Platonic Buddhism

The Temple and the Mandala: The meeting of Hellenic Tantra and Indian Theurgy on the metaphysical currents of the Silk Road: Introduction.

The traditions of late antique theurgy and the tantric lineages of India and Tibet, though separated by continents and centuries, disclose a shared intuition: that philosophy and meditation, to be true, must become rites of transformation. In the walkways of Alexandria and the heights of the Himalayas, sages and initiates intuited that the human soul could not remain a mere spectator of truth. It must become luminous, transfigured, and borne aloft into the presence of the divine. The philosopher must become a theourgos, one who works with the gods and ultimately takes on their form; in the tantric idiom, the yogin must recognize themselves as none other than the deity they invoke. Across these worlds, the same current flows: truth is realized only when embodied in symbol, imagination, and silence.

Theurgy, as Iamblichus articulates in the De Mysteriis, is not mere allegory but a sacred operation wherein divine tokens (sunthemata) and ineffable names (asēma onómata) open the soul to the descent of the gods (Shaw 1995: 33–54). The rituals are no arbitrary gestures; they are threads of cosmic sympathy binding microcosm and macrocosm. Through signs, sounds, and theurgic imagination (phantasia), the soul is irradiated by ellampsis, a divine shining-forth, until it is borne beyond discursive reason into union (henōsis). This is not metaphor but metamorphosis: the very substance of the soul is attuned to the One. The Chaldean Oracles, too, affirm that “the Father snatched himself away, but he left his symbols” — the sunthemata, scattered seeds of divine presence, awaiting recognition.

In the tantric worlds of India and Tibet, a parallel wisdom unfolds. The Mālinīvijayottara Tantra, revered by Abhinavagupta as the highest Śaiva revelation, declares that mantra and mudrā are not conventional signs but pulsations (spanda) of Śiva’s own power, embedded in the nondual Śākta theology of Kashmir. In Vajrayāna Buddhism, the Guhyagarbha Tantra teaches that mandala, mantra, and mudrā are none other than the radiance of primordial awareness itself, articulated within the Mahāyāna framework of the bodhisattva path. The yogin, in deity-yoga, does not imagine a fiction but awakens to a reality already inscribed in the depths of mind. Tsongkhapa in the Great Exposition of Secret Mantra insists that deity-visualization (dmigs pa) and mantra are means by which one’s ordinary aggregates dissolve into the luminous body (sgyu lus), the subtle form of enlightenment. Longchen Rabjam, glossing the same tantra, speaks of all appearances (including the appearance of you, the reader, and this article) as the mandala of spontaneous presence.

Thus we find, in traditions geographically distant yet metaphysically proximate, a science of awakening wherein imagination is transfigured into vision, language into mantra, body into divine vehicle. Iamblichus names this autophania, the self-manifestation of the divine within the soul. Dzogchen calls it rigpa, the primordial awareness that reveals itself without effort. Both point to a luminous epiphany where the finite is irradiated by the infinite.

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