In keeping with the basic nondualist orientation of Tantrism, the adepts of this movement introduced a battery of means that hitherto had been excluded from the spiritual repertoire of mainstream Hindu metaphysics, notably Goddess worship and ritual sexuality. The tântrikas, or practitioners of Tantra, rejected the purist attitude of the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy and instead sought to ground the spiritual quest in bodily reality. It was the introduction of sexuality that understandably caused the greatest opposition in conventional Hindu and Buddhist circles; the Tantric practitioners were accused of indulging in hedonism under the mantle of spirituality. In some cases, accusations of debauchery were no doubt justified, but such cases were the exception rather than the rule. Today Tantra is held in low esteem in India, and left-hand Tantric gatherings (involving sexual rites) are actively suppressed by the Indian government.
Had it not been for Sir John Woodroffe (alias Arthur Avalon), a British judge of the Calcutta High Court who studied the Tantras with native Bengali scholars, we might still share that general prejudice. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Woodroffe boldly disregarded the hostile attitude toward Tantra. In a number of pioneering studies he paved the way for a better understanding and appreciation of this many- faceted movement. In many respects, his writings are still unsurpassed, as is their tolerance.
The so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has, among other things, put Tantra on the map of our contemporary Western culture. Yet Tantra remains widely misunderstood and is often confused by Western neo-Tantrics with the Hindu erotic arts (kâma-shâstra). Its sexual practices, which are enacted literally only in the left-hand schools but are understood symbolically by the right-hand tântrikas, are merely one aspect of Tantra-Yoga.
It is true that today we are perhaps not as easily shocked by the more controversial features of Tantra, yet the Tantric masters, especially those teaching in the crazy-wisdom mode, can still manage to test even our more enlightened attitudes. They are spiritual radicals, and notwithstanding our sexual revolution, I believe that most people are still carrying in their heads a rather idealized image of how a spiritual teacher is supposed to behave. We still tend to think of sexuality and spirituality as incompatible, and hence we may be greatly offended by gurus who are sexually active.
“One day
while with my sister-in-law,
I thought of Shyama, and emotion filled my heart.
I stood transfixed, and my body trembled uncontrollably.
—Candîdâs
For instance, how would we relate to the fourteenth- century Bengali adept Candîdâs if he were alive today? He managed to outrage his contemporaries because he, a brahmin, fell in love with a young girl, Râmî, who he had seen washing clothes at the river bank. Their eyes met, and Candîdâs became enchanted by her to the point of neglecting his priestly duties. He was rebuked, and when he continued to openly dedicate love songs to her he was deprived of his offices at the local temple and was “excommunicated.” (Since Hinduism has no organized church, however, excommunication is, strictly speaking, not possible.)
Candîdâs’s brother finally negotiated an official hearing, during which the adept was given the opportunity to publicly renounce his obsession and be forgiven for his folly. When the maiden heard about this, she went to the hearing. On seeing her, Candîdâs completely forgot the promises he had made to his family and adoringly approached Râmî with folded hands. What Candîdâs’s judges and revilers failed to see was that for him that young girl had become an embodiment of the Divine Mother. His love was for the Goddess in human form. It was an emotion of worship triggered by a beautiful maiden.
The liberalism of the Tantric masters, which has often been confused with hedonism, is of course not unique in the history of religion. Erotic love has been a part of the ritual dimension of many traditions outside India—notably Chinese Taoism—where it has likewise led to occasional excesses and frequent accusations of debauchery. Orgiastic excesses were more likely where ritual practice became separated from lofty metaphysics and associated with magical intentions. A good example of this is found in recent history in the homespun occultism of Aleister Crowley, who encouraged his followers to engage in homosexual activity, premarital and extramarital intercourse, and even bestiality.
Goddess Worship
The Tantric adepts reclaimed for the spiritual process all those aspects of existence that the mainline traditions excluded by way of renunciation—sexuality, the body, and the physical universe at large. In Jungian terms, we can see this as a concerted attempt at reinstating anima, the feminine psychic principle.5 That this interpretation is correct is borne out by the fact that the unifying element of all schools of Tantra is precisely the attention they pay to the feminine principle, called shakti (“power”) in Hinduism and depicted in iconography by such Goddesses as Kâlî, Durgâ, Pârvatî, Sîtâ, Râdhâ, and hundreds of other deities.
Often the feminine principle is simply referred to as devî (“shining one”)—the Goddess.6 The Goddess is, above all, the Mother of the universe, the spouse of the divine Male, whether he is invoked as Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Krishna, or simply Mahâdeva (“Great God”).
According to some schools, the Goddess manifests in ten forms. These are known as the “Great Wisdoms” (mahâ-vidyâ), which represent an interesting parallel to the Greek gnostic notion of sophia. They are as follows:
Kâlî—who is the primary form of the Goddess. She is portrayed as dark and unpredictable. She works through the agency of time (kâla), which destroys all beings and things. Yet for her devotees she is a loving mother who unfailingly protects and cares for them.
Târâ—who is the saving aspect of the Goddess. Her function is to safely conduct the devotee across the ocean of conditioned existence to the “other shore.” Yet, like Kâlî, Târâ is frequently depicted as a terrifying deity who dances on a corpse and holds a severed head in one of her four hands— a reminder that divine grace demands self- sacrifice.
Tripurâ Sundarî—who represents the essential beauty of the Goddess. She is called Tripurâ (“Triple City”) because she rules over the three states of consciousness— waking, dreaming, and sleeping.
Bhuvaneshvarî—who, as the name indicates, is the ruler (îshvarî) of the world (bhuvana). If Kâlî stands for infinite time, Bhuvaneshvarî represents infinite space and infinite creativity.
Bhairavî—who is the fierce, awe-inspiring aspect of the Goddess, demanding the devotee’s transformation. She is commonly depicted as a wild woman with bare breasts smeared with blood. Yet her wrath is of the divine variety and is always constructive. Her liberating power is indicated by the fact that two of her hands are in the gesture of bestowing knowledge, while her other two hands are in the gesture of granting protection.
Chinnamastâ—who is the mind-shattering aspect of the Goddess. She is portrayed with her own head (masta) completely severed (chinna) from the body. This gruesome image is a powerful message to her devotees to go beyond the mind and experience Reality directly.
Dhûmâvatî—who is that aspect of the Goddess that acts as a divine smoke screen in the form of old age and death, hence her name “Smoky.” Only the ardent devotee is able to see beyond the fear of mortality to the Goddess’s promise of immortality.
Bagalâmukhî—who, though ravishingly beautiful, carries a cudgel with which she smashes her devotee’s misconceptions and delusions.
Mâtangî—who in her role as a patron of the arts, especially music, guides her devotee to the uncaused primordial sound.
Kamalâtmikâ7—who is the Goddess in the fullness of her graceful aspect. She is depicted as seated on a lotus (kamala), symbol of purity.
All ten forms of the Goddess, whether gentle or terrifying, are worshiped as the universal Mother. In the nanda-Laharî (“Wave of Bliss”), a poem ascribed to Shankara, we find this verse, which is characteristic of the Tantric approach:
He who contemplates You, O Mother, together with Vashinî and
the other [attendant female deities] who are lustrous like the moon gem, he becomes a maker of great poems with lovely metaphors, of speech [inspired] by Savitrî, and of words that are as sweet as the fragrance of the lotus mouth of that Goddess. (17)
Devî is not only the creatrix and sustainer, whose beauty is beyond imagination; she also is the terrible Force that blots out the universe when the appointed time has come. In the human body-mind, Devî is individuated as the “coiled power” (kundalinî-shakti) whose awakening is the very basis of Tantra-Yoga. We will hear more about this shortly.
But Shakti, or Devî, is nothing without the masculine pole of existence. Shiva and his eternal spouse are commonly portrayed in ecstatic embrace—what the Tibetans call yab-yum, meaning “Mother-Father.” They belong together. On the transcendental plane, they are forever enjoying each other in blissful union. Their transcendental marriage is the archetype for the empirical correlation between body and mind, consciousness and matter, and male and female. “Shiva without Shakti,” states a well-known Tantric dictum, “is dead.” That is to say, Shiva remains uncreative.
But the same holds true of Shakti on her own, as is emphasized in the Buddhist Tantras, which invest the masculine rather than the feminine principle with dynamism. In Hindu Tantra, Shiva represents the primordial Condition in its unqualified aspect, as pure Consciousness or Light. Shakti represents that same Reality in its dynamic motion, its perennial “holomovement,” to use David Bohm’s phrase.
Shakti is the Life Force par excellence, the driving force behind all change and evolution. She is the universal Energy of Consciousness. Thus, Tantric metaphysics conceives of existence as a bipolar process. Creation is simply the effect of the preeminence of the feminine or Shakti pole, whereas transcendence is associated with the predominance of the masculine or Shiva pole.
The Tantric Antiritualist School
Tantra is a comprehensive enough movement to contain its own antithesis. Thus, the pronounced ritualism characteristic of most Tantric schools is, for example, overcome and even criticized in the schools of the Buddhist Sahajayâna, the “Vehicle of Spontaneity.” The adepts of this current take the doctrine of the identity between the conditional world and the ultimate Reality as literally as possible. They prescribe neither a path nor a goal, because from the viewpoint of spontaneity (sahaja) we are never truly separated from Reality. Our birth, the whole adventure of our life, and also our death occur against the eternal backdrop of Reality. We are like fish who do not know that they are swimming in water and are continuously sustained by it.
The term sahaja means literally “born (ja) together (saha),” which refers to the fact that the empirical reality and the transcendental Reality are coessential. The word has come to connote “spontaneity,” the natural approach to existence prior to interfering thought constructs about Reality. The sahaja-yogin lives from the point of view of enlightenment, of Reality. When we breathe, it is the Divine that breathes as us. When we think, it is the Divine that thinks as us. When we love and hate, it is the Divine that loves and hates as us. Yet we are forever in search of a “higher” Reality, and this very quest merely reinforces our illusion of being separated from that Reality. The adepts of the Sahaja tradition, therefore, refused to put forward any program of liberation. As the ninth-century adept Lohipâda says in one of His songs (dohâ):
Of what consequence are all the processes of meditation? In spite of them you have to die in weal and woe. Take leave of all the elaborate practices of yogic control (bandha) and false hope for the deceptive supernatural gifts, and accept the side of voidness to be your own.8
Or as Sârahapâda, a great Buddhist master of the eighth century C.E., declares in his “Royal Song”:
There’s nothing to be negated, nothing to be
Affirmed or grasped; for It can never be conceived.
By the fragmentations of the intellect are the deluded
Fettered; undivided and pure remains spontaneity.9
The songs of the adept Kânhapâda, who lived in the twelfth century C.E., contain very similar pronouncements. He admonished practitioners to follow the example of the Tantric female consorts who sell their looms and woven baskets to join the Tantric circles. Looms and baskets have been interpreted allegorically as standing for thought constructs and superstitious ideas respectively. The follower of the path of spontaneity must give up the mental habit of experiencing Reality from within the cage of his or her particular “mind-set.” This includes the renunciation of magical or wishful thinking, which was as ripe among tântrikas as it was and is among most other spiritual traditions.
If the practice-oriented (ritualistic) schools of Tantra were a reaction to the abstractionism of Advaita Vedânta, the Sahajayâna approach can perhaps be regarded as a critique of the extreme ritualism of mainstream Tantra. But the sâhajîyas, or sahaja-yogins, criticized scholarship as vigorously as they censured religious formalism. With unsurpassed single-mindedness they lived and preached the truth of nondualism.
Strictly speaking, their no-path cannot be characterized as psychotechnology. Rather, Sahajayâna understands itself as the negation of all techne (Sanskrit: upâya), or “skillful means.” It is unquestionably the epitome of the Tantric movement. The principle of sahaja, or spontaneity, however, is inherent in all Tantric teachings. After all, the purpose of even the most humble rite is to help the practitioner transcend all the artificial divisions made by the unenlightened mind and to restore the integrity between transcendence and immanence, between bliss and pleasure.
The Tantric Literature
In addition to the numerous Tantras, which form the bedrock of the Tantric corpus, there is a vast number of other works comprising both commentaries and original compositions. The latter consist of monographs (prakarana), guides (paddhati), digests (nibandha, nirnaya), dictionaries (niganthu), hymns (stotra), and magical works (kavâca). When viewed broadly, the Tantric tradition also includes aphoristic compositions such as Vasugupta’s Shiva-Sûtra and Upanishadic texts such as the Tripurâ-Upanishad (written Tripuropanishad). Tantric scriptures may bear the title Tantra, gama, Yâmala, Rahasya, Samhitâ, Arnava, Shikhâ, Purâna, and so forth.
One of the most significant Tantric works is the erudite Kashmiri adept Abhinava Gupta’s monumental Tantra-loka (written Tantrâloka), of which only an Italian rendering is available thus far. Although the author groups this opus with the commentarial literature, it is really an original accomplishment that exceeds the traditional criteria for a commentary. Also, according to his disciple Kshemarâja, Abhinava Gupta composed the Tantra-loka in a state of meditation, which brings it into proximity to the revealed literature. In this work, which comprises nearly six thousand stanzas, we can find references to and quotes from many other Tantric scriptures (nearly two hundred are mentioned by name).10
Abhinava Gupta (which appears to be his spiritual rather than his birth name) was born in the mid-tenth century C.E. He created a spate of writings on the Trika school, of which more than forty are known by name. Besides the Tantra-loka, the most notable are the Tantra-Sâra and the Parâ-Trimshika-Vivarana.
He was renowned not only for his erudition, but also for his spiritual accomplishments and miraculous powers. He attained Self-realization through the grace of his teacher Shambhu Nâtha, who initiated him into the secrets of the Kaula school and its literature, but he received teachings in many different subjects and from many other teachers, and he established a thriving school, of which the late Swami Lakshmanjoo was the twentieth century’s greatest representative.
The Tantric teachings of Kashmir have become better known in the West through the scholars who have studied with Swami Lakshmanjoo, especially his disciple Jaideva Singh, the translator of several vitally important works.11
The Kashmiri tradition has its counterpart in South India in the widespread Shrî- Vidyâ tradition, whose spiritual treasures also are slowly being brought to light through the diligent labors of scholars like Douglas Renfrew Brooks.12 As
Brooks notes, the Shrî-Vidyâ tradition is among the few branches of Hindu Tantra where we not only have the texts but also living practitioners who are able to expound their esoteric teachings.13 The most respected text of the Shrî-Vidyâ tradition is the Vâmaka-Îshvara-Tantra (written Vâmakeshvara-tantra), which has been translated into English.14 Another work available in English is the Tripurâ-Upanishad (written Tripuropanishad). Two untranslated but very influential scriptures are the Tantra-Râja-Tantra and the Jnâna-Arnava-Tantra (written Jnânârnavatantra). The sixteenth-century Shrî-Vidyâ- Arnava- Tantra must also be mentioned as an authoritative text. Of the later treatises that have been rendered into English, the Kâma- Kâlâ-Vilasa must be singled out.15
A third stream of Tantric teachings, called Kaula or Kaulism, is also increasingly being opened up for Western students, especially through the publications by Mark S. G. Dyczkowski and Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega.16 Kaulism is one of the oldest branches of Tantra, which achieved fame (or, from a different perspective, notoriety) for its “Five M’s” ritual. Some, perhaps even many, Kaula schools understood this ritual metaphorically rather than literally. However, over the centuries critics have always exclusively focused on the left-hand (literalist) variety, as opposed to the conventional (samâya) orientation of Tantra, which emphasizes the purely symbolic enactment of the “Five M’s” (panca-makâra) to be discussed shortly.
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