Notes on Contributors
Diwakar Acharya is the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University, a fellow of All Souls College. Before succeeding Professor Sanderson at Oxford, he was a visiting lecturer and then associate professor of Indological Studies at Kyoto University (2006–2016), before which he held positions at Hamburg University and Nepal Sanskrit University. His research covers a wide range of topics in Indian religious and philosophical traditions, Upaniṣadic studies, epigraphy, the early history of Nepal, ritual, and Sanskrit literature. Recent publications include Early Tantric Vaiṣṇavism. Three Newly Discovered works of the Pañcarātra: The Svāyambhuvapañcarātra, Devāmṛtapañcarātra and Aṣṭādaśavidhāna (Pondicherry, 2015), and a number of articles, such as “ ‘This world, in the beginning, was phenomenally non-existent’: Āruṇi’s Discourse on Cosmogony in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad” (Journal of Indian Philosophy 44.5, 2016). Acharya now also serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Indian Philosophy.
Jason Birch (SOAS University of London) completed a first class honours degree in Sanskrit and Hindi at the University of Sydney under Dr Peter Oldmeadow, and was then awarded a Clarendon scholarship to undertake a DPhil in Oriental Studies at Balliol College, University of Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Sanderson. His dissertation (submitted 2013) focused on the earliest known Rājayoga text called the Amanaska and included a critical edition and annotated translation of this Sanskrit work, along with a monographic introduction which examines the influence of earlier Śaiva tantric traditions on the Amanaska, as well as the significance of the Amanaska in more recent yoga traditions. Birch is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at SOAS University of London on the Haṭha Yoga Project, which has been funded for five years by the ERC. His area of research is the history of physical yoga on the eve of colonialism. He is editing and translating six texts on Haṭha and Rājayoga, and supervising the work of two research assistants at the École française d’ Extrême-Orient, Pondicherry. Birch has taught courses at SOAS and Loyola Marymount University, and given seminars on the history of yoga at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy and Won Kwang University in Iksan, South Korea. He also collaborates with Jacqueline Hargreaves on TheLuminescent.
Peter Bisschop is Professor of Sanskrit and Ancient Cultures of South Asia at Leiden University. In 2004, after finishing his PhD at the University of Groningen under Hans Bakker, co-supervised by Harunaga Isaacson, he was offered the opportunity of spending a year in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. During his spell at Oxford, he met on a weekly basis with Alexis Sanderson in All Souls College to discuss his ongoing work on the Pāśupata tradition. In particular he was able to read with him a draft of his critical edition of chapter 1 of Kauṇḍinya’s Pañcārthabhāṣya, including a previously lost passage of Kauṇḍinya’s commentary on Pāśupatasūtra 1.37–39 on the basis of a newly identified manuscript from Benares. An edition and translation of this passage was published the year after in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, 33. In 2005 he was appointed Lecturer in Sanskrit Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he remained until his move to Leiden in 2010 to take up the chair of Sanskrit. He has published extensively on different aspects of early Śaivism, in particular the Pāśupatas and associated lay traditions, from his monograph Early Śaivism and the Skandapurāṇa: Sects and Centres (2004) to his contributions to the ongoing critical edition of the Skandapurāṇa, as well as a new book entitled Universal Śaivism: The Appeasement of All Gods and Powers in the Śāntyadhyāya of the Śivadharmaśāstra (Brill, 2018). He is also the editor-in-chief, with Jonathan Silk, of the Indo-Iranian Journal, and general editor of the Gonda Indological Studies.
Parul Dave-Mukherji is professor of Visual Studies and Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She holds a DPhil from Oxford University, where she worked with Alexis Sanderson on a critical edition of the Citrasūtra of the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa from 1988–1991. Introduced to the rigour and intricacy of critically editing a text based on manuscripts, her work vindicated Sanderson’s view that the earlier work by Priyabala Shah was far from being a critical edition. In 2001, her critical edition, The Citrasūtra of the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa, was published by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Motilal Banarsidass, New Delhi. The śilpaśāstras and pre-modern Indian aesthetics remain important areas of research, along with modern/contemporary Indian/Asian Art. Dave-Mukherji has held fellowships at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA; South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, Germany; British Academy fellowship, Goldsmiths’ College, London; and Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence. Her recent publications include “Whither Art History in a Globalizing World” (The Art Bulletin 96.2, 2014); Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, co-edited with Ramindar Kaur (Bloomsbury, 2014); and “Who is Afraid of Mimesis? Contesting the Common Sense of Indian Aesthetics through the Theory of ‘Mimesis’ or Anukaraṇa Vāda” (in Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Arindam Chakrabarti; Bloomsbury, 2016). Currently, she is co-editing, with Partha Mitter and Rakhee Balaram, a comprehensive history of modern and contemporary Indian art in a volume entitled 20th Century Indian Art.
Csaba Dezső studied Classical Philology, History and Indology at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. After finishing his masters degrees (Latin Language and Literature and Indology), he went to Oxford in 1998 to study for a PhD under the supervision of Professor Alexis Sanderson. He submitted his doctoral thesis in 2004, a critical edition and annotated translation of Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s Āgamaḍambara, a satirical play about religious sects and their relations with the court in Kashmir around 900 CE. He then returned to Budapest and has been teaching Sanskrit since then at the Department of Indo-European Linguistics, Eötvös Loránd University. He has published, among others, first editions of fragments of Sanskrit plays based on codices unici, as well as a new critical edition and English verse translation of Dāmodaragupta’s Kuṭṭanīmata, “The Bawd’s Counsel,” in collaboration with Dominic Goodall. Recently he has been working on the critical edition of Vallabhadeva’s commentary on the Raghuvaṃśa together with Dominic Goodall, Harunaga Isaacson and Csaba Kiss.
Dominic Goodall began studies in Classics and German at Pembroke College, Oxford, before finishing a BA in Sanskrit with Pali. After two years spent in Hamburg to learn medieval Tamil with S.A. Srinivasan, he returned to Oxford, to Wolfson College, where, under Alexis Sanderson’s guidance, he produced a critical edition of the opening chapters of Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s tenth-century commentary on the Kiraṇatantra, which he submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1995 and published from Pondicherry in 1998. He was attached to the French Institute of Pondicherry as a junior researcher in 1996–1997 before returning to Oxford as Wolfson Junior Research Fellow of Indology from 1998 to 2000. In 2000, he became a member of the École française d’ Extrême-Orient and was appointed Head of its Pondicherry Centre in 2002. For his habilitation, he submitted to Hamburg a first edition of the Parākhyatantra, which was later published from Pondicherry in 2004. Posted in Paris from 2011 to 2015, he gave lectures at the École pratique des hautes études (Religious Sciences Section), at the invitation of Gerdi Gerschheimer, on Cambodian inscriptions in Sanskrit and on Śaivism. Now back in Pondicherry, he continues to pursue his interests in Sanskrit poetry (both Indian and Cambodian) and in the history of the Śaivasiddhānta. With Marion Rastelli, he co-edits the Viennese dictionary of tantric terminology, the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa. In May 2016, he was elected membre correspondent étranger de l’ Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
Jürgen Hanneder studied Indology, Tibetology and Comparative Religion in Munich, Bochum, and Bonn, where he took his MA. His interest in the Śaiva traditions of Kashmir led him to Oxford, where he studied under the supervision of Alexis Sanderson. After completing his PhD in Indology in Marburg, and working as a research assistant in Bonn, he joined the Mokṣopaya Research Group initiated by Walter Slaje in Halle. After some terms as substitute professor in Freiburg he followed his former teacher Michael Hahn to the chair of Indology in Marburg in 2007. The main areas of his research interests are within classical and modern Sanskrit literature, i.e. poetry, religious and philosophical literature, including Indo-Tibetan studies and occasional excursions into neighboring fields, as for instance the names of lotuses (“The Blue Lotus. Oriental Research between Philology, Botany and Poetics?,” ZDMG 152.2 [2002]: 295–308), and a study of Indian crucible steel, which has played an important role for the modern steel industry (Der “Schwertgleiche Raum”. Zur Kulturgeschichte des indischen Stahls; Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005). Current larger projects include August Wilhelm Schlegel als Indologe and The Minor Works of Sahib Kaul.
Shaman Hatley completed an interdisciplinary liberal arts degree at Goddard College (1998), and then studied Indology and Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his doctorate on the Brahmayāmala and Śaiva yoginī cults in 2007 under the direction of Harunaga Isaacson. In 2003 and 2006, he had the opportunity to read the Brahmayāmala with Professor Sanderson while a visiting student at Oxford, a formative scholarly experience that was crucial to his doctoral project. He taught at Concordia University, Montréal, from 2007 to 2015, and is now an associate professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research mainly concerns early Tantric Śaivism, goddess cults, and yoga, and he regularly contributes to the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa. Recent publications include The Brahmayāmalatantra or Picumata, Volume I: Chapters 1–2, 39–40, & 83. Revelation, Ritual, and Material Culture in an Early Śaiva Tantra (Pondicherry, 2018).
Gergely Hidas started a DPhil in Oriental Studies under the supervision of Alexis Sanderson at Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 2002, after earlier studies in Budapest. The revised version of his doctoral thesis, on a principal scripture of Buddhist dhāraṇī literature, Mahāpratisarā-Mahāvidyārājñī, The Great Amulet, Great Queen of Spells, was published in New Delhi in 2012. Between 2007 and 2012 he held research and teaching positions at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and thereafter contributed to the Cambridge Sanskrit Manuscripts Project, an Oxford medieval sources project, and the Vienna Viscom project, and was also was awarded a research grant by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2013–2014 he was appointed as Khyentse Fellow at the Centre for Buddhist Studies, Eötvös Loránd University. Since 2014, he has had a postdoctoral affiliation with the British Museum in the ERC Synergy project “Asia Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State,” where, among other forthcoming publications, he is finalizing a book manuscript entitled Vajratuṇḍasamayakalparāja, a Buddhist Ritual Manual on Agriculture.
Harunaga Isaacson was born in Kuma, Japan, in 1965; he studied philosophy and Indology at the University of Groningen, and was awarded a PhD in Sanskrit in 1995 by the University of Leiden for a thesis on the early Vaiśeṣika school of philosophy (1995). From 1995–2000 he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Sanskrit at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. After holding teaching positions at Hamburg University (2000–2002) and the University of Pennsylvania (2002–2006), he was appointed Professor of Classical Indology at Hamburg University in 2006. He has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and is a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Hamburg. His main areas of study are: tantric traditions in pre-13th-century South Asia, especially Vajrayāna Buddhism; classical Sanskrit belles-lettres (kāvya); classical Indian philosophy; and Purāṇic literature.
Csaba Kiss began his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Alexis Sanderson in 2003. After defending his thesis, a critical edition of selected chapters of the Matsyendrasaṃhitā, he worked at ELTE University, Budapest, as a research assistant. From 2008 to 2010, he was member of the Early Tantra Project, conducting research on the Brahmayāmala, since published as The Brahmayāmalatantra or Picumata, Volume II. The Religious Observances and Sexual Rituals of the Tāntric Practitioner: Chapters 3, 21, and 45 (Pondicherry, 2015). He has since been taking part in a number of research projects: writing entries for the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa, contributing to the edition of Vallabhadeva’s Raghupañcikā led by Dominic Goodall and Harunaga Isaacson, and contributing to research on jātis, as well as to digitization of Gupta-era inscriptions within the ERC Project “Beyond Boundaries.”
James Mallinson met Alexis Sanderson at an open day for prospective undergraduates at the Oriental Institute in Oxford in 1987. As a result of this meeting he changed his choice of course to Sanskrit. As an undergraduate he had Professor Sanderson as his essay tutor. Mallinson was not always the most diligent of students, so was delighted when Professor Sanderson agreed to supervise his doctoral studies at Oxford, which he started in 1995. His doctoral thesis was a critical edition and annotated translation of the Khecarīvidyā, an early text on haṭhayoga. After receiving his doctorate, Mallinson worked as a principal translator for the Clay Sanskrit Library for six years. In 2013 he became Lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical Indian Studies at SOAS, University of London. Since his doctorate he had continued to work on unpublished materials on yoga, often reading his working editions with Professor Sanderson, and in 2015 Mallinson was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for a five-year project on the history of haṭhayoga. Among the members of the project team is Jason Birch, another former doctoral student of Professor Sanderson, and the team have continued to work closely with him. Among Mallinson’s publications is Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017), an anthology of translations of texts on yoga, including several by Professor Sanderson and his former students, together with a detailed analysis of the history of yoga and its practices.
Libbie Mills teaches Sanskrit and Pali at the University of Toronto. She completed her doctorate under Alexis Sanderson’s supervision at Oxford University in 2011. Her principal research interest is in South Asian architectural theory and practice. Her work on the architectural instruction given in the early Śaiva installation manuals (pratiṣṭhātantras) of North India features the first exposition of these texts’ contents. By examining extant buildings in light of texts, her research introduces new tools for dating, which are valuable for these as well as other sources. Her textual study has since expanded to cover domestic and temple building practices up to the modern period, in both South Asia and its diaspora. She is currently engaged in two research projects: “The Nāgara Tradition of Temple Architecture: Continuity, Transformation, Renewal,” funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and “Tamil Temple Towns: Conservation and Contestation,” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Nina Mirnig undertook her studies at the Oriental Institute at Oxford University. She first met Alexis Sanderson during the second year of her undergraduate course when joining an MPhil reading class in 2002. His inspiring teaching and the insights he offered into the fascinating world of Śaiva Tantrism prompted her to do her BA special paper in this field. She continued her post-graduate studies under his supervision on the topic of the socio-religious history and development of Śaiva tantric cremation rites (antyeṣṭi) and post-mortuary ancestor worship (śrāddha). Upon completing her DPhil in 2010, she continued to work on early Śaiva religious history in an NWO-funded project on the composition and spread of the Skandapurāṇa under the direction of Hans Bakker. After a Jan Gonda Fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden and briefly joining an AHRC project on the manuscript collections at the University Library in Cambridge, under the direction of Vincenzo Vergiani, she moved to her current position at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In addition to the early Śaiva tantric traditions, her research now concerns early Śaiva lay traditions, a critical edition of Śivadharmaśāstra 1–5 and 9, and the cultural history of early medieval Nepal, with special focus on the Sanskrit Licchavi inscriptions.
John Nemec is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (2005), an MPhil degree in Indian Religions from Oxford University, an MA in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a BA in Religion and Classics from the University of Rochester. At Oxford, he worked extensively with Alexis Sanderson in the course of completing his MPhil degree and thesis, most notably in the form of weekly private tutorials on Śaiva literature in Sanskrit, which Alexis generously offered every academic term for two full years. Nemec again profited from Alexis’s boundless generosity as a visiting doctoral student, when he once more read Sanskrit with him at All Souls College in the Trinity Term of 2002. His publications include The Ubiquitous Śiva: Somānanda’s Śivadṛṣṭi and His Tantric Interlocutors (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Srilata Raman is Associate Professor of Hinduism at the University of Toronto and works on medieval South Asian/South Indian religion, devotionalism (bhakti), historiography and hagiography, religious movements in early colonial India from the South, as well as modern Tamil literature. Her areas of interest are Tamil and Sanskrit intellectual formations from late medieval to early colonial periods, including the emergence of nineteenth-century socio-religious reform and colonial sainthood. Her publications include Self-Surrender (Prapatti) to God in Śrīvaiṣṇavism. Tamil Cats and Sanskrit Monkeys (Routledge, 2007).
Isabelle Ratié is Professor of Sanskrit Language and Literatures at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris). She defended her doctoral thesis in 2009 at the École pratique des hautes études after reading about two thirds of Abhinavagupta’s Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśīnī in Oxford under Alexis Sanderson’s guidance (2005–2006). She has published several monographs on Śaiva and Buddhist philosophies (Le Soi et l’ Autre. Identité, différence et altérité dans la philosophie de la Pratyabhijñā, Leiden: Brill, 2011, Weller Prize 2012; Une Critique bouddhique du Soi selon la Mīmāṃsā, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2014; and with Vincent Eltschinger, Self, No-Self, and Salvation. Dharmakīrti’s Critique of the Notions of Self and Person, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2013). She has also coedited with Eli Franco the collective volume Around Abhinavagupta. Aspects of the Intellectual History of Kashmir from the Ninth to the Eleventh Century (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2016). She is currently editing and translating recently discovered fragments of Utpaladeva’s lost Vivṛti on the Īśvarapratyabhijñā treatise, and she is working with Vincent Eltschinger, Michael Torsten Much and John Taber on a translation of Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika 1 (the section on apoha).
Bihani Sarkar completed her BA (First Class) in English from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, then undertook an MPhil in Classical Indian Religions and a DPhil in Sanskrit (Oriental Studies) from Wolfson College, Oxford, both under the supervision of Alexis Sanderson. Her doctoral thesis, now the book Heroic Shaktism (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a history of the rise and spread of the cult of Durgā between the 3rd and the 11th centuries CE and its influence on heroic ideology and the rising Indian kingdom. She was a Nachwuchsinitiative Postdoctoral Fellow in Hamburg University from 2012–2014, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University from 2014–2017. She is presently a Teaching Fellow in South Asian Religions at Leeds University and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She is working on her second book, on the subject of grief and lamentation in kāvya.
Péter-Dániel Szántó began his studies at ELTE Budapest, where he received diplomas in Tibetology in 2004 and in Indology in 2006. He first met Alexis Sanderson at his department in 2002, where he held a week-long intensive reading of Abhinavagupta. These sessions were so inspirational that Szántó decided to apply to Oxford, where he was successful in joining in 2006 with the help of Csaba Dezső, thus becoming both the śiṣya and praśiṣya of Sanderson. His doctoral thesis, defended in 2012, was on the Catuṣpīṭha, an early Buddhist Yoginītantra. After being a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and then having a ten-month stipend in Hamburg, Szántó returned to Oxford as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, thus having the enormous pleasure and privilege of spending many splendid dinners with Sanderson. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University in the Open Philology project. Most of Szántó’s publications deal with the literature of esoteric or tantric Buddhism in India, but he has also authored papers on poetics, epigraphy, and material culture. His latest publication, “Mahāsukhavajra’s Padmāvatī Commentary on the Sixth Chapter of the Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇatantra: The Sexual Practices of a Tantric Buddhist Yogī and His Consort” (Journal of Indian Philosophy 46), was co-authored with Samuel Grimes. Szántó is currently working on the editio princeps of the Sarvabuddhasamāyogaḍākinījālaśaṃvara, a project featuring much input and inspiration from the man we celebrate in this volume.
Ryugen Tanemura is an associate professor of Buddhist studies and classical Indology at Taisho University, Tokyo, Japan. After having been educated at the University of Tokyo, he went to Oxford in 1997, where he did his doctoral research on tantric Buddhism under the supervision of Professor Sanderson for five years. He took his DPhil in classical Indology at the University of Oxford (2003). After postdoctoral research at the University of Tokyo and some other institutions, he began his current position in 2014. His main research field is Indian tantric Buddhism, and he has authored many works in this area, including Kuladatta’s Kriyāsaṃgrahapañjikā: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of Selected Sections (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2004) and Kriyāsaṃgraha of Kuladatta, Chapter 7 (Tokyo: Sankibo, 1997). His recent publications include critical editions of Śūnyasamādhivajra’s Mṛtasugatiniyojana, a manual of the Indian Buddhist tantric funeral, and chapters 1 (part), 13 (part), 19, and 22 (pratiṣṭhā section) of the Padminī, a commentary on the Saṃvarodayatantra by Ratnarakṣita (chapters 1 and 13, in collaboration with Kazuo Kano and Kenichi Kuranishi).
Judit Törzsök completed an MA in Indic Studies at ELTE University, Budapest, and then continued her studies at the University of Oxford in 1993, where she was funded by the George Soros Foundation to do research on Abhinavagupta under Professor Sanderson’s supervision. In 1994, having received the Domus Senior Scholarship at Merton College, she started working on the Siddhayogeśvarīmata for her DPhil, supervised by Sanderson. The years spent in Oxford under his guidance determined the course of her research, which has focused on the early history of yoginī cults ever since. After postdoctoral research fellowships at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and at the University of Groningen (supervised by Professor Hans Bakker), she was elected Associate Professor (maître de conférences) in 2001 at the University Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III in France, and professor (directeur d’ études) at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in 2018. She defended her Habilitation in 2011, at the École pratique des hautes études (Religious Studies Section), entitled The Yoginī Cult and Aspects of Śaivism in Classical India, supervised by Professor Lyne Bansat-Boudon. She regularly contributes to the dictionary of Hindu tantric terminology (Tāntrikābhidhānakośa, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna) and participates in the Skandapurāṇa Project (Leiden-Kyoto). In addition to papers on various aspects of Śaivism and the early yoginī cult, she has also published on epigraphy, Tamil Śaiva devotional poetry, and classical Sanskrit literature.
Anthony Tribe is an independent scholar working in the field of Indian tantric Buddhism, and at present a senior fellow of the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He received his doctorate in Indian Buddhism from Oxford in 1995. Subsequently, he taught in the Asian Studies program at the University of Montana, Missoula, USA. In Oxford, his doctoral thesis on Vilāsavajra’s Nāmamantrārthāvalokinī was supervised by Professor Sanderson. He remembers with deep gratitude and much warmth the personal tutoring, encouragement and friendship he received from him during that time. Many afternoons and evenings were spent in Professor Sanderson’s study at his home in Eynsham: learning how to read manuscripts and produce critical editions; exploring Vilāsavajra’s tantric Buddhism; and being fed before catching a late bus back to Oxford. He remembers too the infectiousness of Professor Sanderson’s enthusiasm and commitment, his humour, looking after his house and cat, the clatter of the keyboard on his early, tiny-screened but magical, Apple Macintosh computer, and the kindness of being given the use of it while he was on sabbatical for a term lecturing in Paris. Dr. Tribe is also a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and his publications include Tantric Buddhist Practice in India: Vilāsavajra’s commentary on the Mańjuśrī-nāmasaṃgīti. A critical edition and annotated translation of Chapters 1–5 with introductions, and (as co-author) Buddhist Thought: a complete introduction to the Indian tradition, both published by Routledge. At present he lives in Tucson, Arizona, with two cats and too many books. He tries to keep cool in the summer.
Christopher D. Wallis holds a BA (magna cum laude) in Religion and Classics from the University of Rochester, an MA in South Asian Studies from U.C. Berkeley, an MPhil in Classical Indian Religions from Oxford, and a PhD in South Asian Studies (Sanskrit) from U.C. Berkeley. His doctoral dissertation of 2014 focuses on the role of religious experience in the traditions of Tantric Śaivism, and is entitled “To Enter, to Be Entered, to Merge: The Role of Religious Experience in the Traditions of Tantric Shaivism.” He has studied with Professor Sanderson formally and informally at Oxford, Leipzig, Kyoto, and Portland. He is currently a freelance scholar lecturing internationally and a guest lecturer at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Alex Watson completed his BA in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford), and MA in Hindi, Hinduism and Indian Philosophy (SOAS, University of London), before returning to Oxford to complete an MPhil in Classical Indian Religions. After this, he began his DPhil under Alexis Sanderson’s supervision on the Śaiva thinker, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha II, and his arguments against the Buddhist doctrine of no-self. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Wolfson College, he taught Sanskrit at St James’ School, London, and then held short-term visiting appointments at the University of Vienna and Kyushu University, Japan. He was associated with the EFEO, Pondicherry, for a number of years, and was Preceptor in Sanskrit at Harvard University before taking up his present position as Professor of Indian Philosophy at Ashoka University. He is author of The Self’s Awareness of Itself (2006) and, with Dominic Goodall and Anjaneya Sarma, An Enquiry Into the Nature of Liberation (2013), as well as several articles in the Journal of Indian Philosophy and Philosophy East and West.