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This volume results from a symposium held at the University of Toronto in honour of Alexis G.J.S. Sanderson. The symposium was convened in March 2015 in anticipation of his retirement as the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at All Souls College, Oxford University. The event was conceived by Srilata Raman, who worked tirelessly and resourcefully to make it a success. In this she was aided by Shaman Hatley, co-convener of the symposium, and a number of graduate students, especially Kalpesh Bhatt, Tamara Cohen, Larissa Fardelos, Nika Kuchuk, and Eric Steinschneider, to whom we offer our sincere thanks. It was immensely satisfying to have so many of Professor Sanderson's former doctoral students assemble from across the world for the occasion, students whose graduate studies at Oxford spanned more than three decades of Alexis Sanderson's teaching career. The volume is based mainly on papers presented in the symposium, with additional contributions by several of his former pupils who had not been able to present their work at that time (Parul Dave-Mukherji, Csaba Dezső, Csaba Kiss, Ryugen Tanemura, and Anthony Tribe), as well as by Diwakar Acharya, his successor to the Spalding Professorship. We would also like to extend our thanks and recognition to those who enriched the symposium with excellent papers, but who for various reasons could not include these in the present volume:

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This essay examines shifting representations of the asidhārāvrata (lit. “sword's edge observance”) across a range of Sanskrit literary and religious texts. Originally a Brāhmaṇical ascetic discipline, an observance (vrata) by this name is the earliest ritual involving sexual contact documented in the corpus of Śaiva tantras. In its tantric adaptation, an orthodox practice for the cultivation of sensory restraint was transformed into a means for supernatural attainment (siddhi). Diachronic study of the observance in three early Śaiva texts – the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, Mataṅgapārameśvara, and Brahmayāmala – reveals changes in ritual emphases, women's roles, and the nature of engagement in eroticism. Analysis of the asidhārāvrata thus sheds light on the early history of tantric sexual rituals, which by the end of the first millennium had become highly diverse. It is argued that the observance became increasingly obsolete with the rise of Śaiva sexual practices more magical, ecstatic, or gnostic in orientation.