Through the optics of imagination

ABSTRACT This article investigates Bustān al-sālikīn (Garden of wayfarers), a compendium of Malay Sufi-tantric treatises compiled in Aceh between the 16th and 19th century. The object of this study is Bustān al-sālikīn’s section on the ‘science of the imagination’, which deals with practices intended for the internal invisible world of subtle entities. In the first half of the article, the doctrine of the imagination, its background and mechanisms of its action are studied in both the Sufi and the tantric aspects, and an example of the internal visualisation of the inside of the gross body and the subtle body by means of the imagination is provided. The second half of the article examines how, through the imagination, the male and female practitioners in sexual congress contemplate their joint meditative ascent, symbolised by the upward movement of their generative fluids. Having entered together the system of channels (nāḍī) in the subtle body of the male practitioner (vajrolīmudrā), the pair of fluids ascends along his medial channel, integrating on the way to finally achieve union with the Truth Most High in ‘the palace of the tryst’ between the eyebrows.