2012 Reprint of 1913 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original
edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Tantra"
is the name scholars give to a style of religious ritual and
meditation that arose in medieval India no later than the fifth
century, and which came to influence all forms of Asian religious
expression to a greater or lesser degree. Strictly speaking, this
usage of the word "tantra" is a scholarly invention, but it is
justifiable on the basis of the fact that the scriptures that
present these practices are generally known as "tantras,"
regardless of which religion they belong to. The historical
significance of the Tantric method lies in the fact that it
impacted every major Asian religion extant in the early medieval
period (c. 500 - 1200 CE): thus Shaivism, Buddhism, Vaishnavism,
and Jainism all developed a well-documented body of Tantric
practices and related doctrines. Its influence spread far outside
of India, into Tibet, Nepal, China, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, and
Indonesia. Today, it is Tibetan Buddhism and various forms of
Hinduism that show the strongest Tantric influence, as well as the
international postural yoga movement and most forms of American
alternative spirituality grouped under the New Age rubric. Defined
primarily as a technique-rich style of spiritual practice, Tantra
has no single coherent doctrine; rather, it developed different
teachings in connection with the different religions that adopted
the Tantric method. These teachings tended to support and validate
the practices of Tantra, which in their classical form are more
oriented to the married householder than the monastic or solitary
renunciant, and thus exhibited what may be called a world-embracing
rather than a world-denying character. Thus Tantra, especially in
its nondual forms, rejected the renunciant values of Patanjalian
yoga, offering instead a vision of the whole of reality as the
self-expression of a single, free and blissful Divine Consciousness
under whatever name, whether iva or Buddha-nature. Since the world
was viewed as real, not illusory, this doctrine was a significant
innovation over and against previous Indian philosophies, which
tended to picture the Divine as absolutely transcendent and/or the
world as illusion. The practical consequence of this view was that
not only could householders aspire to spiritual liberation in the
Tantric system, they were the type of practitioner that most
Tantric manuals had in mind. Furthermore, since Tantra dissolved
the dichotomy of spiritual versus mundane, practitioners could
entail every aspect of their daily lives into their spiritual
growth process, seeking to realize the transcendent in the
immanent. Though the vast majority of scriptural Tantric teachings
are not concerned with sexuality, in the popular imagination the
term tantra and the notion of superlative sex are indelibly linked.
This error probably arose from the fact that some of the more
radical nondual schools taught a form of sexual ritual as a way of
entering into intensified and expanded states of awareness and
dissolving mind-created boundaries.
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