Tantra

Tantra is a broad current of ritual, yogic and esoteric practice that arose within Hinduism and Buddhism in the middle of the first millennium and reshaped both. The name refers in the first place to a class of scriptures, the Tantras, and the traditions built on them are better described as a distinctive style of practice than as a single doctrine. Characteristic features include the use of mantra (sacred sound), yantra and mandala (sacred diagram), the visualisation and internalisation of deities, the mapping of a subtle physiology of channels and centres within the body, and an initiatory transmission from master to disciple that is essential and non-negotiable. Tantra typically holds that the same energies that bind a person in the world can, rightly harnessed, liberate them, and so it turns toward what orthodox practice shuns rather than away from it.

This is the point at which popular Western usage most badly distorts the subject. In its home traditions tantra is overwhelmingly a matter of ritual, mantra, visualisation and yogic discipline within a demanding ascetic and devotional frame; the sexualised "tantra" marketed in the modern West is a twentieth-century construction only loosely connected to the historical traditions.

Scholars and the traditions themselves distinguish a "right-hand" tantra, whose practice is symbolic and remains within conventional purity rules, from a "left-hand" tantra that ritually employs the very things ordinary religion forbids, in the classic list, meat, wine, and sexual union among them, as a controlled transgression by qualified initiates under strict guidance. Even where such rites exist they are a restricted and guarded minority of tantric practice, hedged with initiation, secrecy and discipline, and much of the tradition treats the transgressive elements as inner and symbolic rather than literal.

Tantra transformed both of its host religions. In Hinduism it deeply shaped the worship of the Goddess and of Shiva and the whole temple and mantra culture that followed. In Buddhism it became the Vajrayana, the tantric vehicle that is the mainstream of Tibetan Buddhism and a major strand of Japanese Shingon, with its deity yoga, mandalas and empowerments. Across both, the constant is that tantra is a path of initiated ritual power, transmitted living from teacher to student, and not reducible to any one of its elements.