This book is the first major study by an initiate of the complex field of Hindu and Buddhist
tantrism. It is a first
attempt to combine classical scholarship with modern cultural anthropology, and orientalist philology with sociological awareness. The
erotic and sensual symbolism and the care with which
their inner meaning has been guarded have made the objective study extremely difficult. The author analyses from within the literary, linguistic, ideological, philosophical and ritualistic patterns of
tantrism, illustrating them with translated passages from the Indian and Tibetan texts.
He gives special emphasis to mantra, initiation, the male-female polarity symbolism with all its ritualistic corollaries,
and to the history and development of tantrism in India and Tibet. Tantric literature is an independent literature, which utilized relevant philosophical doctrines, but whose origin may not be traced to any system or systems of philosophy; it contains essentially of
methods and practices which have been current in India from a very old time. The subject matter of the tantras may include esoteric
yoga, hymns, rites, rituals, doctrines and even
law, medicine and magic. There are very few concepts which Hindu and Bubbhist tantrism do not share. And—there is really no tantric philosophy apart from Hindu or Buddhist philosophy, or to be more specific, from Vedāntic and Mahāyāna thought.
In the body of tantric literature,
mantras take the largest portion. They
are the chief instruments of tantrism. Mantras is
verifiable not by what it describes but
by its effects. They are often
used as aids and tools for meditation and you may have to repeat them many thousand times on order for them to have the desired effect. You can find many mantras openly listed in many books, BUT,
a syllable or a collection of syllables constituting a mantra IS no mantra UNTIL it is imparted personally by a guru to a disciple. Tantric initiation means mantra initiation. A mantra looses its power if revealed to the non-initiate. The fact that the teaching of tantrism relating to the emancipation from the bonds of pain and birth and death is stressed as the key of tantric teaching by the masters does not imply that other elements are operationally less important. But what then is
the final target of tantric life? It is the same as that of all Hindu and Buddhist religion, namely
the freedom from the misery of attachment. The method of
tantrism is more radical than of any other system, and the immediate aim of the tantric ritual is to achieve enstasy. I use the term ‘enstasy’ instead of ‘ecstasy’. The term applies equally to Christian mysticism and to Sufism, from the comparativist viewpoint. Enstasy, in all these traditions, is a non-discursive, quasi-permanent condition of the individual agent, and
it is highly euphoric. It is
tantamount with supreme insight or wisdom.