What tantra is not
Tell someone you write about tantra and you can watch the picture form behind their eyes. It is usually a weekend workshop, a soft-focus couple, a promise about the bedroom. That picture is about seventy years old. The tradition it borrows its name from is closer to fifteen hundred.
A word for a kind of book
A tantra is, first of all, a text. The word comes from a root meaning to stretch or weave, and it was used for a loom and for the warp threads on it. From roughly the middle of the first millennium onward, Indian traditions produced a large body of scriptures that called themselves tantras, and the practices they taught came to share the name.
They were not one religion. There are Shaiva tantras, Shakta tantras centred on the Goddess, Vaishnava and Jain material, and the vast Buddhist tantric canon that travelled to Tibet. What they share is a method rather than a creed.
What the texts actually teach
Read the tantras themselves and most of the pages are taken up with things that would bore a workshop audience:
- Initiation. Practice begins with diksha, a formal transmission from a teacher. Nothing is meant to be taken from a book alone.
- Mantra. Sound treated as the subtle body of a deity, repeated with exact pronunciation and count.
- Diagram. The yantra and the mandala, drawn as a dwelling place for the deity and as a map of the practitioner’s own body and mind.
- Visualisation. Long, precise meditations in which the deity is built up detail by detail, then dissolved.
- Ritual. Worship, offerings, fire ceremonies, the purification of the elements in one’s own body.
The famous transgressive rites existed. They were a small, guarded part of a few lineages, and their point was the overturning of the practitioner’s sense of pure and impure, not pleasure for its own sake.
The body is not the obstacle. It is the instrument, and it has to be tuned.
Why it matters to a painter
What drew me in was not the transgression but the diagrams. Here was a tradition that took images seriously: an image could be inhabited, could be entered, could change the person who made it. Most of what I paint starts there.
That is what this blog is for. Not a sales pitch for a practice, but notes from someone who draws yantras by hand and reads the old commentaries slowly, and who keeps finding that the studio and the meditation seat are the same room.