Madhu’s Tantra Foundation: A Green Garden of Honey for the Scholar- Practitioner of an Enigmatic Vijnan - Neela Bhattacharya Saxena

 

It was a balmy day in Delhi at the end of the year 2022, and I was trying to find the farmhouse that the renowned Tantra scholar and a dear friend Madhu Khanna had invited me to visit.  The road from Gurgaon was nice and smooth, but the Google map was creating trouble.  These days drivers know little about the roads because they depend on those magic machines. Fortunately, a kind young man with a much smarter mind was able to fix the problem, and I was able to reach the beautiful Hari Bhari farm that was as green and wholesome as its name suggests.   

Tantra too in a way is a magic machine, but it is about our interior pathway rather than the one we usually walk or drive through.  It is easy to find the destination if the virtual map is consistent with the territory, but often we confuse the map for the real thing, especially when mere intellectual gymnastics are the preferred method. We have to be ready to take risks and be prepared to be lost on this royal road to our interiority where the colorful, dark, and deep Goddesses reside. Fortunately, finding the library was easier, and it contained the wealth that is waiting to be unearthed:   http://www.tantralibrary.com/

It has been almost two decades since I first met Madhu when I was at the tail end of completing my first book, In the Beginning IS Desire.  Perhaps the beginnings and ends are all about our desires, mostly unconscious. I recall how with such trepidation I joined the panel at the Delhi conference where Madhu was presiding. How was I going to talk about Chinnamasta, a fierce deity beyond understanding, in the presence of a formidable scholar of Tantra! But she had put me at ease, and since then I have been incredibly grateful to her for her guidance and friendship. 

It took me some time to realize that there are no "accidents" in life which is a seamless web of sparkling jewels where we meet people who can tap into our true humanity. Meeting Madhu has been one of those synchronicities emerging out of the womb of the Great Mother. I am the daughter of a Kali worshipper father and was given a terrifying glimpse of the road to that Void energy by my family’s Kali Sadhika Guru, Shiddha Ma. I feel it is her blessings that led me to Madhu and all the joys and trials along the way. I was pleased to see that Madhu’s efforts of a lifetime have yielded fruits as the Foundation library is teeming with rare books, old and new.

It is beautiful, and its every corner has the charm of a small retreat center that is inviting and alluring.  Her deft hands have created the space where wandering minds can find repose and get a firsthand exposure to the most enigmatic and exhilarating Indic spiritual and intellectual path. After all Tantra in its most intriguing and elusive aspects is the way of the “Woman” whose compassionate heart invites both male and female seekers. 

I thought of Madhu’s student Arghya Dipta Kar whom I met later in Kolkata. He received a Ph.D. on Tantra under her guidance and has been blossoming as a Shakta master par excellence. Arghya’s art and scholarship (https://www.facebook.com/diptaarghya/) reveal that the flow of this liberatory knowledge system is continuing uninterrupted.  I was still taking in the aroma of the library when fresh pakoras made with leaves from the farm with coffee arrived. We then sat down to talk about all the work that Khanna and her associates have been engaging in. 

Like any highly specialized knowledge system, an aspect of Tantra too is about our intellect. After all masters of this path spent millennia discovering the secrets of the body, mind, and spirit continuum of our existence. However, Tantra as a mechanism is also about discovering the sublime beauty and aesthetic dimension of our grounded existence on this earth.  Hence the building is full of gorgeous art and yantras that await the expert eyes to decode its enigmatic Vijnana.  The word Vijnana denotes both consciousness and what we know as science, a deliberate and concrete tool. 

         

What is most extraordinary about Tantra is that it puts the dreaded body, especially the female one, at the center of its illuminating methodology which, in a way, is a kind of psycho-archeology.  Digging deeper and deeper into the dark recesses of our embodied existence, Tantric masters have discovered the truth of here and now, the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Nitya Vrindavan of life.  Here, what I call the dancing dualities of our being in various forms sing and dance and speak in myriad voices. They reveal  the light and dark dimensions of a singular consciousness that plays hide and seek with us.

The yantras and mandalas of Tantric/Agamic paths whether they are Shakta/Shaiva, Jaina, Bouddha or Vaishnava, give us concrete instruments to discover that play. Madhu’s famous book Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity gave many of us a key to the mystic door of this enchanting path. Understanding the Vijnan of the mandalas and yantras, we can meditate upon the truth of “the Void of Nirvana and the luminosity of compassion” that my Vajraguru Kulavadhuta Satpurananda speaks of.  Incidentally, it is Madhu’s kind invitation to attend a Bengal Tantra conference that led me to him who initiated a new and difficult journey and anchored my longings for Kali into the clarity of her Shiva aspects. 

Madhu’s nourishing library is also like a labyrinth which can be a maze if we stumble upon it without Ariadne’s thread and can get devoured by the Minotaur of our minds. Books have their own magic secrets, the surface one of mere information and the shimmering hints of something more magnificent.  We have to take the chance of being lost in the maze that represents our own restless and unconscious mind that moves faster than the speed of light but cannot find repose without the grace of the Great Mother. Her insignia can be seen everywhere in the library; the books represent her Saraswati form that can take us from her exoteric white murti to the esoteric blue aspects, if and when our hearts desire the freedom that reveals life itself as a vibrant luminosity. 

Madhu shared many of her exciting projects and showed around her beautiful creation.  She also led me to the crucial references in esoteric texts that I needed for my current project. Since I was visiting India after almost 5 years with many stops to cover, I had to leave the retreat sooner than I liked. I walked out the door of the library into the greenery of the courtyard where a tree was bent with the weight of its fruits. Then in the most exquisite way of a Tantric Yogini, Madhu reached over and plucked a sapient lemon and gave it to me.  I took it as prasad and was happy that my journey which included visits to magnificent Buddhist sites from Kushinagar to Bodhgaya was blessed right in the beginning with Madhu’s fierce sweetness in her green farm.