awareness, experience and activity – whether farming,
weaving, religious ritual or love-making. They reflected
Marx’s profound understanding of knowledge as something
rooted not in material objects but in human sensuous and
bodily activity. Yet through the value given in Indian
culture to immediate bodily knowing were also born not
only the earliest ‘scientific’ treatises or tantras relating to
everyday practical skills, arts and crafts but also bodies of
spiritual knowledge dealing with the highest spiritual-
scientific truths and manuals of the spiritual practices or
yogas needed to attain them.
A ‘true teacher’ or ‘Satguru’ was one capable of
imparting such bodily knowing and its expression through
the powers or ‘Siddhis’ it granted them. All the original,
legendary ‘empowered teachers’ or ‘Siddha-Charyas’ of the
Tantric tradition were not priests but low-caste farmers,
artisans or labourers. Their powers were symbolised by
goddesses or Shaktis (from the Sanskrit root ‘Shak’ –
meaning capacity or power). The ‘male’ principle of
divinity, on the other hand, was identified with pure
awareness (Chit) and symbolised by the god Shiva. That is
why the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism identifies
the Divine Awareness neither with a male or female
principle but with their dynamic and creative unity – with
‘Shiva-Shakti’.