The Granthi of Knowledge: Tantric Insights on Epistemic Limitation

This paper explores the epistemic significance of embodiment through a comparative philosophical lens, integrating insights from Western thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Thomas Nagel with Indian Tantric traditions, particularly Śrī Vidyā and the Lalitā Sahasranāma. It argues that human knowledge is fundamentally limited by the condition of embodiment, and that both critical Western epistemologies and Tantric metaphysics converge on the insight that ultimate truth is inaccessible to discursive reason alone. Tantric concepts like the granthis and māla-s serve as symbolic and practical frameworks for understanding cognitive obstruction and intellectual liberation. The paper calls for a pluralistic epistemology that resists reductive interpretations of non-Western traditions and embraces embodied, ritual, and transformative forms of knowing. By extending knowledge as a relational, performative, and esoteric practice too, the paper advances a decolonial, co-relational approach to philosophy and cognition.