Tantra

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Tantra ; esoteric traditions of Hinduism as alive as Buddhism that developed in India from a middle of a 1st millennium CE onwards. The term tantra, in the Indian traditions, also means any systematic broadly applicable "text, theory, system, method, instrument, technique or practice". A key feature of these traditions is the use of mantras, and thus they are commonly intended to as Mantramārga "Path of Mantra" in Hinduism or Mantrayāna "Mantra Vehicle" and Guhyamantra "Secret Mantra" in Buddhism.

Starting in the early centuries of the common era, newly revealed Tantras centering on Vishnu, Shiva or Shakti emerged. There are tantric lineages in all main forms of contemporary Hinduism, such as the Shaiva Siddhanta tradition, the Shakta sect of Sri-Vidya, the Kaula, and Kashmir Shaivism.

In Buddhism, the Vajrayana traditions are invited for tantric ideas and practices, which are based on Indian Buddhist Tantras. They add Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism, Japanese Shingon Buddhism and Nepalese Newar Buddhism. Although Southern Esoteric Buddhism does non directly mention the tantras, its practices and ideas parallel them.

Tantric Hindu and Buddhist traditions have also influenced other Eastern religious traditions such as Jainism, the Tibetan Bön tradition, Daoism, and the Japanese Shintō tradition.

Certain modes of non-Vedic worship such as Puja are considered tantric in their theory and rituals. Hindu temple building also broadly conforms to the iconography of tantra. Hindu texts describing these topics are called Tantras, Āgamas or Samhitās. In Buddhism, tantra has influenced the art and iconography of Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism, as well as historic cave temples of India and the art of Southeast Asia.

History

The Keśin hymn of the Rig Veda 10.136 describes the "wild loner" who, states Karel Werner, "carrying within oneself fire and poison, heaven and earth, ranging from enthusiasm and creativity to depression and agony, from the heights of spiritual bliss to the heaviness of earth-bound labor". The Rigveda uses words of admiration for these loners, and whether this is the related to Tantra or not, has been variously interpreted. According to David Lorenzen, it describes munis sages experiencing Tantra-like "ecstatic, altered states of consciousness" and gaining the ability "to fly on the wind". In contrast, Werner suggests that these are early Yoga pioneers and accomplished yogis of the ancient pre-Buddhist Indian tradition, and that this Vedic hymn is speaking of those "lost in thoughts" whose "personalities are not bound to earth, for they undertake the path of the mysterious wind".

The two oldest Upanishadic scriptures of Hinduism, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in segment 4.2 and Chandogya Upanishad in section 8.6, refer to nadis hati in presenting their image on how the Atman Self and the body are connected and interdependent through energy carrying arteries when one is awake or sleeping, but they create not source anything related to Tantric practices. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad describes breath control that became a standard part of Yoga, but Tantric practices do notin it. Likewise, the Taittiriya Upanishad discusses a central channel running through the body and various Vedic texts mention the bodily pranas vital breaths that carry on around in the body and animate it. However, the idea of consciously moving the bodily pranas through yoga is not found in these sources. According to Lorenzen, Vedic ideas related to the body later diversified into the "mystical anatomy" of nadis and chakras found in Tantra. The yogic component of Tantrism appears clearly in Bāṇabhaṭṭa's Harshacharita and Daṇḍin's Dashakumaracharita. In contrast to this theory of Lorenzen, other scholars such as Mircea Eliade consider Yoga and the evolution of Yogic practices to be separate and distinct from the evolution of Tantra and Tantric practices.

According to Geoffrey Samuel, the inner developing of a spiritual energy called tapas becomes a central component of Vedic religion in the Brahmanas and Srauta texts. In these texts, ascetic practices allow a holy man to build up tapas, a bracket of magical inner heat, which allowed them to perform all sorts of magical feats as well as granting visions and divine revelations. Samuel also notes that in the Mahabharata, one of the commonest usage of the term "yoga" transmitted to "a dying warrior transferring himself at death to the sphere of the sun through yoga, a practice that links up with Upanisadic references to the channel to the crown of the head as the pathway by which one can travel through the solar orb to the World of Brahman." This practice of transferring one's consciousness at death is still an important practice in Tibetan Buddhism. Samuel also notes that sexual rituals and a spiritualized sexuality are mentioned in the late Upanishads. According to Samuel, "late Vedic texts treat sexual intercourse as symbolically equivalent to the Vedic sacrifice, and ejaculation of semen as the offering." This theme can be found in the Jaiminiya Brahmana, the Chandogya Upanisad, and the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad. The Brhadaranyaka contains various sexual rituals and practices which are mostly aimed at obtaining a child which are concerned with the loss of male virility and power.

David Gordon White views Yogini cults as foundational to early tantra but disagrees with scholars who maintains that the roots of such cults lie in an "autochthonous non-Vedic source" such as indigenous tribes or the Indus Valley Civilization. Instead, White suggests Vedic Srauta texts mention offerings to goddesses Rākā, Sinīvālī, and Kuhū in a breed similar to a tantric ritual. Frederick Smith – a professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions, considers Tantra to be a reigious movement parallel to the Bhakti movement of the 1st millennium AD. Tantra along with Ayurveda, states Smith, has traditionally been attributed to Atharvaveda, but this attribution is one of respect not of historicity. Ayurveda has primarily been an empirical practice with Vedic roots, but Tantra has been an esoteric, folk movement without grounding that can be traced to anything in Atharvaveda or any other vedic text.