Panchamakara

The five elements are held together by a feature of the language rather than by anything they have in common: their Sanskrit names all begin with the syllable ma. That is the whole basis of the grouping, and it is a mnemonic device of a kind common in Sanskrit technical literature, where a set is fixed by its initial letters so that it can be carried in memory.

What the five denote is disputed inside the tradition itself, and the dispute is not a modern scholarly overlay. Lineages described as left handed within the Shakta traditions describe them as substances and acts used literally within a restricted rite. Right handed lineages, and much of the later commentarial literature, prescribe substitutions, so that named permitted items stand in for the transgressive ones, or read the five as internal yogic operations with no external referent at all.

The atlas records that the disagreement exists and that it is argued out in the commentaries, without adjudicating it. This is initiatory material belonging to specific lineages, not open practice, and the entry describes the frame at the level published scholarship describes it. No rite is set out here, no substances are identified as required, and nothing on this page constitutes an account of how anything is done.

Outside the lineages that hold it, this set has done a great deal of work as a symbol. In colonial period writing about India, and in a good deal of scholarship after it, the five Ms were taken as the essence of tantra and used to characterise a vast and varied body of religious literature by its most transgressive element. Hugh Urban's study of the politics of the field examines how that happened, and how the resulting image served the interests of colonial administrators, Indian reformers and Western enthusiasts in different ways at different times.

The distortion has two parts. The first is proportion: tantric literature is enormous, overwhelmingly concerned with ritual, mantra, cosmology, temple practice and yoga, and the transgressive rites occupy a small and restricted place within it. The second is access: material that lineages guard and transmit under initiation was described from outside by people who had not received it, from texts read without the commentarial and oral apparatus that accompanies them.

Geoffrey Samuel's account of the origins of yoga and tantra places the material in its historical development, and Andre Padoux's work on the Hindu tantras sets out the conceptual world it belongs to. The atlas names the restriction rather than reconstructing what lies behind it, and records this second life of the five Ms as a fact about reception rather than about the practice.

Sources The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian StudiesHugh B. Urban with The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth CenturyGeoffrey Samuel