Draft:Sthaneshwar Timalsina



Sthaneshwar Timalsina is a Nepalese philosopher and Indologist. He holds a Ph.D. in Classical Indian Philosophy and Advaita Vedanta from Martin Luther Universität in Halle, Germany and is currently appointed as the Nirmal K. and Augustina Mattoo Endowed Chair of Indic Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Prior to his endowed chair position at Stony Brook, Timalsina was a Professor at San Diego State University and Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Washington University in St. Louis; and Nepal Sanskrit University, Kathmandu. He teaches courses on Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious, philosophical, and literary traditions.

Timalsina has published 5 books and over 80 articles and book chapters throughout his academic career. He is especially recognized for his approach to scholarship which integrates emic perspectives of traditional communities of practice with etic perspectives and methodologies drawn from cognitive science, philosophy, and historiography. Central themes in his work are consciousness studies, image and visualization, imagination, emotion, and the intersecting domains of religion and philosophy. He has encouraged scholarship on these topics, including by editing special issues exploring the interface between cognitive science and tantric studies.

Timalsina has received numerous accolades, including the Exemplar Award for Academic Achievement from the South Asian Studies Association (SASA) in 2020. He has been the recipient of several research grants, including those from the Uberoi Foundation of Religious Studies, Kyoto Research Grant, and Amherst Grant, among others.

Integral to his academic work, which relies on emic perspectives, Timalsina is traditionally trained as a pandit and is a lineage-holder of the Sarvāmnāya Tantra, whose tantric systems he publishes scholarship on and works to preserve by teaching classical shāstras and sādhanās.

Life and career
Timalsina was born in 1966 in Nalang village, Dhading District in Nepal. He received academic and philosophical training at Mahendra Sanskrit University in Kathmandu and completed his master's degree from Sampurnananda Sanskrit University in Varanasi.

Timalsina founded the Department for Tantric Studies in Nepal Sanskrit University in 1991 and taught at Nepal Sanskrit University for several years before joining Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany where he completed his Ph.D. on the history of Advaita Vedanta in 2005, published in 2006 by Shaker Verlag under the title "Seeing and Appearance." While working on his dissertation, Timalsina taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Washington University in St. Louis, before attaining the rank of Professor at San Diego State University and Chaired Professor at Stony Brook in 2023.

Scholarship
Timalsina's scholarship distinguishes him as an academic who is both deeply rooted in the classical philosophies of his native Nepal and who has "fully engaged Western scholarship and methodology." He accordingly describes his approach as one that integrates emic perspectives from within the tradition as well as etic perspectives, particularly from and cognitive science, philosophy, and historiography. Timalsina's integration of emic and etic perspectives, which reflects his dual membership in traditional and academic practice communities, has been described by Jeffrey S. Lidke, who encountered Timalsina during his fieldwork on the Śrī Vidyā tradition in Nepal: "'Timalsina spent the first 20 years of his life excelling in the traditional fields of Sanskritic learning, including grammar, poetry, aesthetics, Vedānta, Mīmāṃsakā, Yoga-Sāṅkhya and other classical darśanas, as well as multiple traditions of Tantric literature, including Trika Kaula and the Sarvāmnāya tradition of Nepal. When I first met Timalsina in 1997 in Nepal he could already claim being head of the Department of Tantric Studies at Valmiki Sanskrit Campus in Kathmandu, Nepal, despite being barely 30 years old. At that time he was widely regarded by his Nepalese colleagues as a foremost authority on Tantra-vidyā and was extensively published in Sanskrit, Nepali and Hindi. He had also by that time already established himself as a foremost informant for such leading Indologists as Walter Slaje and David Gordon White.'"

Contribution to Academic Discourse
Timalsina’s academic work, which comprises over 80 articles and 5 books, involves classical philosophical traditions, Indological research, comparative philosophy, and classical teachings in Sanskrit. He has translated from Vedic literature and Sanskrit philosophical texts of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. His publications initiate a broader dialogue between classical India and the contemporary West, integrating the two through philosophy and cognitive science.

Peer-Reviewed Books
His integrative approach, blending emic and etic perspectives, is illustrated in Timalsina's major peer-reviewed books. Timalsina's (2015) peer-reviewed books "Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach" and "Language of Images: Visualization and Meaning in Tantras" integrate historical text and philological approaches with contemporary discourse on mental imagery, to introduce a cognitive perspective of the meanings embedded in Tantric visual artifacts.

Timalsina stresses the importance of considering the historical and cultural context of Tantra, advocating for an emic hermeneutic approach that respects the tradition's own perspective. This work has garnered scholarly attention, as evidenced by published journal reviews. For instance, Loriliai Biernacki's (2018) review of these works in the International Journal of Hindu Studies, describes how their unique combination of emic and cognitive science perspectives "show a way out of a persistent, particularly Western scholarly, miasma of misinterpretation of Tantric images."

Jeffrey S. Lidke's (2017) review in Religions suggests that "Timalsina succeeds like few others in translating the rich, cultural-specific nuances of Tantric practice in terms that highlight the complex mechanisms by which Tāntrikas rely on a multiplicity of cognitive strategies." By engaging with tantric visual culture through philosophy and cognitive linguistics, these works avoid the reductive approach of archeological and historical studies, which predominated at the time.

Timalsina's peer-reviewed books (2006) "Seeing and Appearance: A History of the Advaita Doctrine of Dṛṣṭisṛṣṭi" and (2008) "Consciousness in Indian Philosophy: The Advaita Doctrine of 'Awareness Only'" have been recognized particularly for their approach situating Advaita doctrines of awareness and non-reductive consciousness in dialogue with other Indian traditions, such as Nyāya and Yogācāra. The latter book has been partially translated into Hungarian.

Journal Articles
Timalsina's scholarly articles similarly reflect his integration of emic traditional perspectives with those of cognitive science, philosophy, and historiography. In one cluster of such works, he examines Indian philosophical ideas on their own emic terms. Examples include examining how change is understood by contrasting thinkers like Gaudapada and Nagarjuna and philosophical systems like Sankhya and Vedanta or the Indian philosophical foundations for theories of pansychism. A second cluster of his work focuses on the hermeneutics of tantric texts, especially on how to interpret them in a cross-cultural context.

A third, and substantial, cluster of his works focuses on bringing Indian philosophies and practices to bear on cognitive science theories. Examples of such work examine how cognitive processes related to imagination are impacted by tantric practices like visualization and meditation and invoked in Hindu myths, how such tantric practices shed light on non-representational linguistic theories, and the embodied cognitive basis of tantric practice, as infused throughout its symbolism, texts and songs, rituals, and meditative experiences. Other work explores the contribution of the aesthetic theory of rasa to contemporary theories of emotion,  particularly as theorized by Abhinavagupta. This cluster positions emic perspectives and cognitive science as equal and complementary forces.

Select Publications
Academic publications by Timalsina are available on Google Scholar, JSTOR, Springer Link. Some representative publications are listed below.

Books

 * Tantric Visual Culture: A Cognitive Approach. London: Routledge. 2015.


 * Language of Images: Visualization and Meaning in Tantras. New York: Peter Lang. 2015. ​
 * Consciousness in Indian Philosophy: The Advaita Doctrine of 'Awareness Only.' London: Routledge, 2008.
 * Seeing and Appearance: A History of the Advaita Doctrine of Dṛṣṭisṛṣṭi. Shaker Verlag, 2006.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

 * Change: Thinking through Sāṅkhya. Religions, 13(6), 549.  Timalsina, S. (2022)


 * Language of Gestures: Mudrā, Mirror, and Meaning in Śākta Philosophy, Language of Gestures: Mudrā, Mirror, and Meaning in Śākta Philosophy. Religions, 12(3), 211


 * A cognitive approach to tantric language Timalsina, S. (2016).
 * Aham, Subjectivity, and the Ego: Re-engaging Abhinavagupta, Journal of Indian Philosophy. August 2020, 48:4, 767-789.
 * “Encountering the Other: Tantra in the Cross-cultural Context,” Journal of Hindu Studies (Oxford Journals). 4:3, 274-289. 2011.
 * Gauḍapāda on Imagination. Journal of Indian Philosophy, 41(6), 591–602.


 * The dialogical manifestation of reality in Āgamas. The Journal of Hindu Studies, 7(1), 6-24. Timalsina, S. (2014).
 * “Metaphors, Rasa, and Dhvani: Suggested Meaning in Tantric Esotericism,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. 19:1-2, 134-62. 2007.
 * “Meditating Mantras: Meaning and Visualization in Tantric Literature,” in Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerard James Larson. Ed. Jacobsen, Knut Axel.  Leiden: Brill, 213-236. 2005.
 * “Meditation and Imagination,” The Cambridge Handbook of Imagination, Abraham, Anna (Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 783-795, 2020.