Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (7 page)

The origins of Tantricism are shrouded in uncertainty. The name itself is derived from the
Tantras
, literary works expounding various systems of esoteric Buddhism and Hinduism. These treaties deal with almost every aspect of esoteric religio-magical thought; there are
Tantras
dealing with astrology, with the construction of the mystic diagrams known as mandalas, with the preparation of ritualistic ingredients, etc. etc.
¹
In spite of the heterogeneous nature of their contents the form of the
Tantras
usually follows a rigid literary convention. They almost always begin with a conversation between two deities; one asks the other a question, the other refuses to answer, the first again begs to be told the answer to his or her question. Eventually the enquiring deity gets its way and the
Tantra
assumes the form of an answer to the question that has been asked—before this, however, there is usually a good deal of oriental flim-flam, with the god saying that the information he is about to give has never before been divulged, that it is only being given now because of the veneration and admiration with which he regards the questioner, and so on.

Scholars have been, still are, and probably always will be, divided on the question of whether Hindu Tantricism grew out of Buddhist Tantricism or
vice versa
. The older view, now held by only a minority of scholars, was that Buddhism had come into contact with Tantricism or some similar cult and that from a blending of philosophical and theological concepts derived from the former and sexo-yogic techniques derived from the latter had come into existence Vajrayana Buddhism—the oldest school of Tantric Buddhism—which although it was eventually extinguished in its Indian motherland, successfully survived in Tibet. The more modern, and now generally accepted theory is that all Hindu schools using sexual polarity symbolism were originally derived from Buddhism.
²

In any real sense the problem is insoluble. Perhaps, as has been
suggested by Sh. Dasgupta, neither Buddhist nor Hindu Tantricism grew out of the other—although there seems little doubt that the oldest Buddhist
Tantras
are chronologically earlier than the oldest surviving Hindu
Tantras
—but that both grew out of a religious, sexo-yogic cult of ancient India, this cult manifesting as Tantric Buddhism when in contact with Buddhist philosophy, and as Saiva and Shakta Tantricism when associated with the religious speculations of the Saivas and Shaktas.

The philosophy of all schools of Tantricism sees both the universe, the macrocosm, and man himself, the microcosm, as being made up of two opposing aspects—male and female, static and dynamic, negative and positive
³
—and holds that the existence of these opposites in a state of duality is the source of all sorrow, pain, change, and suffering. The object of all religious endeavour should be, so it is believed, liberation from this duality and a return to a state in which the two opposing principles are united in a state of absolute non-duality.

Hindu Tantricism has called the male, that is to say the negative, passive, principle,
Shiva
, and the female, dynamic principle
Shakti
. In the human body (which, as in western occultism, is regarded a microcosm, a universe in miniature) the two principles are regarded as being particularly associated with two of the chakras—the centres of psycho-spiritual force which are of such importance in the esoteric physiology of Yoga.
Shiva
is regarded as dwelling in the Sahasrara chakra, the “thousand-petalled lotus” supposedly situated at the crown of the head, while
Shakti
is associated with the Muladhara chakra which is believed to lie over the perineum and the base of the spine. Liberation from duality can only be achieved, so it is believed by enabling
Shakti
, often symbolised as a coiled serpent, to uncoil herself, to rise up through the psychic centres, and to unite herself with
Shiva
in the thousand-petalled lotus.

The theory of Tantric Buddhism seems to show considerable similarity. The male principle—here seen as the active, phenomenal, aspect
of the polarity—dwells in the head, and only by uniting it with the female principle of voidness, residing in the navel and solar plexus, can non-duality be achieved and liberation attained.

It is not, however, the theory of the various Tantric schools that is important, but their sexo-yogic practice, and in this the various schools show a remarkable resemblance to one another; just as, in the western world, the mystical practices of George Fox, the Quaker, and Madame de Guyon, the Catholic, were almost identical in spite of their theological differences, so the sexo-yogic practices of both Hindu and Buddhist Tantrics are essentially the same,
⁴
in spite of the fact that the former believes in the existence of some sort of “real”, eternal ego, while the latter does not. In the last analysis it is only the nature of the actual psycho-spiritual experiences undergone by Tantric practitioners that are of any real importance, and we are forced to regard these as identical, at least until the unlikely event of a Hindu Tantric being converted to Buddhism (or
vice versa)
and reporting a change in the experiences undergone by him. The
only
fundamental difference between Hinduism and Buddhism is that the first has an ontology, the second has not.

The central core of Tantric religious practice is sexual intercourse—either actual or symbolic. Those who use the rites in which physical copulation takes place are termed followers of the left-hand path, those whose union is only symbolic are referred to as followers of the right-hand path. A good deal of nonsense has been talked about these terms,
“left-hand” and “right-hand”, by western occultists who, following H. P. Blavatsky’s erroneous interpretation of them, have endeavoured to endow them with some moral significance—the transition from “left” to “sinister”, and from thence to “evil” is an easy, and misleading, one for the European to make. In reality the terms have no moral significance whatsoever. They simply express the plain fact that in rites culminating in physical sexuality the woman practitioner sits on the left of the male, while in those in which the copulation is merely symbolic she sits on his right.

The preliminaries to the sexual rites of Hindu Tantricism are very similar to those of more orthodox Hindu worship, but these preliminaries are followed by a type of religious observance that is as shocking to an orthodox Hindu as is the Black Mass to a believing Roman Catholic. “I shall proclaim left-handed practice, the supreme religious observance of Durga”, says one Tantric text, and goes on “following which the adept gains magical powers speedily in this Kali-Yuga. The rosary should be made of human teeth, the goblet of a man’s brain-pan, the seat of the skin of an adept, the bracelet of a woman’s hair. The sacrificial ingredients are to be saturated with wine, one must have sexual intercourse with another’s wife, no matter what her caste may be. Thus is left-handed practice, which bestows all magical powers, described, O benign Goddess.”

At times the
Tantras
are even more outspoken. Thus one of them says that “he who but once offers a hair of his
Shakti
⁵
in the cemetery becomes a great poet, a Lord of the Earth and goes forth mounted on an elephant”. A commentary upon this passage explains “hair” as meaning a pubic hair with its root which after male ejaculation has been soaked in semen. Another recension of the same
Tantra
advocates the physical consumption of semen by the male operator from the vagina of his partner.

The five “sacraments” partaken of by the practitioners of Tantric rites are usually known as the five Ms. They are
matsya
(fish),
mamsa
(meat, often beef, in normal circumstances completely for bidden to Hindus),
madya
(any alcoholic beverage),
mudra
(this word usually means ritual gesture, but in Tantric terminology it refers to kidney beans or any parched grain believed to have aphrodisiac qualities), and
Maithuna
(sexual intercourse). The participants in the rite also take hemp (i.e.
cannabis indica
, which contains more of the essential alkaloid
than
cannabis americana
, the American variety of the same plant from which marijuana is derived) but as a preparation for the ceremony, not as part of it. Probably this is done because, as Agehananda Bharati has suggested, unless under the influence of some hallucinogenic drug pious Hindus would find it quite impossible to break through traditional taboos and partake of the five Ms.
⁶

After the orthodox preliminaries are concluded comes the consumption of the first four Ms (alcohol, meat, fish and the “aphrodisiac” parched grain). While this consumption takes place the practitioners concentrate on the thought that it is not they as ordinary individuals who are eating and drinking the forbidden substances but the Goddess residing in them as the coiled-up Serpent Power. Simultaneously they mentally repeat their personal mantras, for each Tantric practitioner has his own specific mystic word, given to him by his teacher at the time of his first initiation into the cult.

The ritual sexual intercourse begins with the male practitioner drawing a triangular diagram—symbolic of the Goddess and the Serpent Power which is her aspect in the human body—upon his couch. For some time the practitioner worships the Goddess, mentally projecting her image into the triangle he has drawn, and then he calls his female partner. After various ritual purifications he lays her upon the couch and then, visualising himself as the god Shiva and the woman as the wife of Shiva, “offers the father face to the mother face”—i.e. copulates, all the time repeating various traditional mantras (there is a special one for each stage of intercourse, including a special one designed to be recited at the moment of orgasm) and mentally concentrating upon the idea of using the senses as a means of sacrificing to the Goddess.

Such is left-handed Tantric practice—as one
Tantra
says “with alcohol, meat, fish,
mudra
and women, so should the great initiate worship the Mother of the Gods”.

¹
In spite of the low repute in which orthodox Hindus hold the
Tantras
—they generally regard them as being not only heretical but “dirty”—actually erotic passages only make up some six to seven per cent of the total bulk of Tantric texts.

²
For an interesting variant of this latter theory see chapter eight of Agehananda Bharati’s brilliant
Tantric Tradition
.

³
There is an important divergence between the Buddhist and Hindu
Tantras
regarding the nature of the principles. Hindu
Tantras
regard the female as being the active principle, while the Buddhist
Tantras
assign this role to the male. Mysteriously enough, Tibetan Buddhist iconography seems to disregard its own philosophical outlook, for in the famous
yab-yum
icons (which show a god and goddess in sexual intercourse of a yogic nature) the female clearly in energetic motion, sits astride the male, the latter in a position which makes movement impossible.

⁴
On both sides of the Buddhist/Hindu fence claims have been made that members of their own faith do not indulge in sexual practices involving actual physical copulation. Certain Hindu pandits, for example, have claimed that
all
the
Tantras
dealing with physical intercourse are to be interpreted symbolically and that those who think otherwise are immoral, evil and “dirty”. It is a pity that this sort of nonsense has received the support of some western scholars who should have known better; thus Evans-Wentz, who displayed an extremely puritanical attitude towards Tantricism—no doubt a hangover from his early years as a member of the Theosophical Society—so far forgot that moral detachment which is so integral a part of the equipment of Scholarship as to refer to “those hypocrites who follow the left-hand path in Bengal and elsewhere”. Even Lama Anagarika Govinda has claimed that physical sexuality plays no part in Tibetan Tantricism—a statement that, in its literal meaning, is quite simply untrue. Agehananda Bharati has made the ingenious suggestion that by “physical” the Lama meant “consciousness of physical” in which case the statement is probably correct, for there is some evidence to show that the advanced Tantric adept engaged in copulation is more or less unaware of what is happening on the physical plane.

⁵
That is to say, the female partner in ritual sexual intercourse.

⁶
In spite of many statements to the contrary made by present-day puritanically inclined devotees of Transcendental Meditation and other syncretistic religious cults of oriental origin there is no doubt whatsoever that many early Buddhists and Hindus used psychedelic drugs as one of the many means of inducing ecstatic mystical states. It is probable that the
soma
, the divine drink of Vedic literature, was an infusion of the hallucinogenic mushroom
amanita muscaria
. In reality almost the only difference between genuine mystical states and drug-induced ecstasy seems to be that the effects of the latter are only temporary while those of the former are permanent.

There is some resemblance between the theoretical aspects of Tantricism and the ancient Indian Siddha cult. The main emphasis of this latter movement is on a psycho-physical yogic process designed to achieve spiritual development through an intense physical development supposedly leading to a vast extension of the life-span or even actual immortality. The cult, which in somewhat altered form survives at the present day, holds that “death may be either put off
ad libitum
by a special course of re-strengthening and revitalizing the body so as to put it permanently
en rapport
with the world of sense, or be ended definitively by dematerialising and spiritualising the body, according to prescription, so that it disappears in time in a celestial form from the world of sense, and finds its permanent abode in the transcendental glory of God”.
¹
This immortality is to be achieved by “drinking” the “nectar” dripping from the “moon” in the thousand-petalled lotus, the
chakra
, or psycho-spiritual centre, believed to be situated above the head.
²