David Narayana

David Narayana is a PhD candidate in religious studies at Stanford University, working on South Asian religions and specializing in the history and practice of Śaivism.  Born and raised in Spain, David began his undergraduate study of philosophy at the University of Oviedo (Spain, 2013) and he later received his BA in philosophy, summa cum laude, from the University of Massachusetts Boston (2017), completing two minors in both religious and South Asian studies.  He then earned an MA in religion, with a concentration in Asian religions, from Yale Divinity School (2020).

David is a certified yoga instructor with teaching experience in Spain, India, and the U.S.  He has also worked as a Spanish language teacher, interpreter, and translator.  His interests lie in the fields of Indian and comparative philosophy, Sanskrit and Tamil literature, and yogic and tantric traditions (Hindu and Buddhist).

David’s Fulbright-Nehru project is telling the story of how a famous Hindu deity came to be worshiped in the form of empty space in a medieval South Indian temple.  While the temple town of Chidambaram has been receiving considerable scholarly attention in the last decades, much of it has centered around the figure of Naṭarāja, the dancing Śiva.  However, very little has been said about how Śiva came to be revered as space.  David’s research is attempting to fill this gap by unearthing forgotten and unstudied texts in Sanskrit and Tamil that may provide a history for this belief and practice.