The starting point for an inquiry on the relationship between aesthetics and religious experience in pre-modern India cannot but be non-dual Tantric Shaivism of medieval Kashmir, which constitutes the highest achievement of Indian philosophy and religious experience as a whole. Its doctrines and more in general its attitude to life are still able to appeal to us after more than a millennium, as shown by the ever growing interest of contemporary spiritual seekers, not to speak of scholarly research. The most prominent figures were no doubt Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, the latter being much better known also due to his fundamental and long lasting contribution to Indian classical aesthetics.
I am more and more inclined to give prominence to a basic aesthetic flavour as the more or less hidden background of his activity as a whole. This aesthetic flavour goes hand by hand with an aristocratic attitude, the latter being allegedly the very source where the former stems from. Since aesthetic speculation in India always developed side by side with ornate poetry (kavya), leaving largely aside visual arts, the inquiry should include the (aristocratic) world of ornate poetry. The portrait of this very special religious man resembles more and more to that of the Indian ideal gentleman: in both we find an innate gracefulness, elegance, aesthetic resonance, disdain for plebeian efforts, easiness. Abhinava attributes to aesthetic experience, having beauty as its basis, a transformative power in that it is able to create a crack in the wall of everyday life thus opening the way to liberation, creating an `intermediate¿ state in which the object has lost its heaviness, but has not altogether waned. Being at same time in this world and not fully coinciding with it is precisely the ideal proposed to the Shaiva tantric adept. The study of the psychological dimension of the encounter between aesthetics and religious experience is another essential feature of the present research.
To my knowledge, this topic is almost totally new, at least in indological studies. The very few attempts that have made so far were vitiated by lack of philological competence and philosophical elaboration. The texts of non-dual Tantrism (particularly the ones due to Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta and Ksemaraja) are among the most complex and difficult in the entire Sanskrit tradition. The same can be said of the medieval kavya literature. The world of the psychoanalist Bion, the -psychoanalitic mystic- is perhaps the most complex among the post-Kleinian developments of modern psychoanalysis.