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Rama and Sita, conceived as<br />
Vishnu and Laksmi in the Suriya<br />
or sun-disc mandala. Rajasthan,<br />
c. 18th century. Gouache on paper.<br />
42<br />
one. What follows from this hypothesis is that what merely<br />
influences the senses and titilates the eye is no longer creative. To<br />
reduce art, as Coomaraswamy pointed out, and speak of it<br />
'exclusively in terms of sensation is to do violence to the inner<br />
man'. 11 The scope of art is limited if it does not emancipate us from<br />
surface perception.<br />
That emancipation is precisely what tantra art aims at achieving.<br />
Through the vocabulary of art, it teaches us to understand the<br />
world in a way that our experience of it is enriched and deepened.<br />
It frees our mundane reactions so that our dissipated perceptions - a<br />
mass of indistinct spatial configurations - are woven into a<br />
significant idea and, consequently, we do not lose their<br />
psychological impact. Being essentially a product of the thinking<br />
eye, equilibrated by reason, tantra art affirms the Kantian dictum,<br />
if we apply it to the context of art, that 'form without content is<br />
meaningless, content without form is blind'. From this per-