Christopher Wallis

Christopher Wallis, who also teaches under the spiritual name Hareesh, is a contemporary American Sanskritist and scholar-practitioner of Classical Tantra, best known for his book Tantra Illuminated (2013), the first comprehensive and accessible English-language introduction to the nondual Shaiva Tantra of Kashmir.

Initiated by a traditional Indian guru at the age of sixteen and educated at yoga ashrams in India and the West, he went on to complete formal academic training in the field: a B.A. in Religion and Classics from the University of Rochester, an M.A. in South Asian Studies (Sanskrit) from U.C.

Berkeley, an M.Phil. in Classical Indian Religions from Oxford, and a Ph. D. in Sanskrit from U.C. Berkeley. This rare combination of decades of personal practice with rigorous philological scholarship allows him to read the original Sanskrit sources and render their contents in clear modern English.

Wallis works within the lineage of the great Kashmiri synthesizer Abhinavagupta, transmitting the Trika and Pratyabhijna (“Recognition”) teachings to a modern audience through Tantra Illuminated, his translation and commentary The Recognition Sutras (2017), and his myth-busting volumes Near Enemies of the Truth.

His relevance to the mind-power lineage lies in his careful articulation of the recognition doctrine: that liberation is not the attainment of something new but the direct recognition that one’s own awareness already is the single, free, blissful Consciousness that expresses itself as the whole of reality.

Through his teaching platforms Tantra Illuminated and the Mattamayura Institute, his writing at hareesh.org, and his lectures and courses, he has become one of the most influential living voices presenting nondual Tantra as a coherent path of self-recognition rather than as a system of mere techniques.