Ritual

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