ABSTRACT
One of the most – or rather the most – secret and baffling tantric ritual is the shava sadhana: the meditation in which the sadhaka engages while seated on a corpse. The tantric texts offer contradictory and confusing descriptions of the shava sadhana, thereby making it difficult to understand the divine connotation of the corpse: whether it is a representation of Shakti or Shiva. The shava sadhana ritual, when seen through the lens of the trope of Devi-as-corpse, makes us rethink the notion of "life" itself. Reorganizing the Energy common to the living beings and dead bodies, the corpse in the shava sadhana radically alters the sadhaka's epistemology of life and death. And hence, a complex co-configuration of Devi, the sadhaka and the corpse is an essential part of the knowledge of life and death, Energy and the Self, that is the result of a successful shava sadhana.
