04/01/2021 What Is Tantra And Tantric Sex?

Not What You Think It Is

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Tantra Is Not What You

Think It Is
By All That's Interesting
Published July 28, 2016 | Updated May 30, 2018

Ever since tales of Tantric sex reached the West, many

have attempted to understand Tantra -- and have gotten
it very wrong.

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04/01/2021 What Is Tantra And Tantric Sex? Not What You Think It Is

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Manuel Menal/Flickr
Erotic stone carvings adorn the outer walls of the Lakshmana Temple in Khajuraho,
India. The carvings on this temple and others in the Khajuraho Group of Monuments are
widely believed to depict acts of Tantric sex and have become relatively well known, if
also misunderstood, in the West for that very reason.

teach Ayurveda (Indian Holistic Medicine) at The Institute of

I
Holistic Nutrition in Vancouver, something I rst picked up
while living as a Buddhist monk over a decade ago. Ayurveda
is strongly in uenced by Tantric spiritual traditions, and so I
teach a very brief introduction to those traditions as part of
my course.

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04/01/2021 What Is Tantra And Tantric Sex? Not What You Think It Is

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Every time I do, I ask my students, “What is the rst thing you
think of when you hear the word ‘Tantra’?”

It’s rare that a student answers, but the smiles that spread
throughout the room are response enough: Sex.

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What People Think Tantra Is — And What

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04/01/2021 What Is Tantra And Tantric Sex? Not What You Think It Is

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Wikimedia Commons
An illustration depicting sexual intercourse, taken from the Kama Sutra, an ancient
Hindu text. Like Tantra, the Kama Sutra has become widely misunderstood in modern
Western culture, with most focusing only its relatively minimal sexual aspects.
Principally for this reason, Tantra and the Kama Sutra are in fact sometimes confused
and con ated in the Western imagination.

Most people think Tantra is a spiritual approach to sex (or perhaps

a sexy approach to spirituality), or a modality of sexual healing.
The story goes that in ancient India there existed a Tantric culture
which unlike prudish, dualistic Western spirituality, was a sex-
positive, proto-feminist, sensual paradise.

The real story is more complicated. Tantra arose as a reclamation

of practices that had been excluded from or minimized in
Orthodox Vedic Hinduism, the mainstream Yoga traditions, and
heterodox traditions like Buddhism and Jainism. These practices
included ritual innovations, magical spells, violence, mind-altering
substances, and sex.

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Tantras were then a type of esoteric text which arose in di erent

Hindu lineages beginning in the fth century. These texts were
also written by Buddhists and Jains, and thus came to have a
massive in uence throughout India and beyond between the
ninth and 14th centuries.

Wikimedia Commons
Left: A ritual diagram from Nepal circa 1100 depicting several deities who embody the
knowledge of the Yoga Tantras. Right: A late 17th century Tibetan painting that serves
as an overview of several Tantras related to health and medicine.

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The reclamation and spiritual recipe books yielded a worldview

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which supported and explained the practices in them. This pairing
of philosophy and practice is axiomatic in Indian religion and is
sometimes referred to as view and path.

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The view of Tantric texts was generally consistent across Hindu

lineages. It stated that all of reality is an expression of divine
energies. To be born is to ow out from the unmanifest Godhead,
and enlightenment is to ow back.

Because all of reality is ultimately beyond good and evil and

merely an expression of divine energy, the texts state, all of reality
can be used to reach the divine. The enlightened being realizes
this fact.

This realization comes via, at the very least, the use of the body
as a spiritual tool, use of complex physical rituals, chanting of
sacred words, and some degree of transcending dualistic
perceptions of good and bad, sacred and profane.

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The more genteel manifestations of Tantra used ritual, chant,

breathwork, and visualization, but stayed within the limits of
mainstream values (i.e., they were vegetarian, nonviolent, abided
by virtues, observed sexual morality, avoided alcohol and drugs,
did not use sexual rituals, and observed basic purity laws).
Adherents of these ideas became known as the Dakshinamarga,
or “right-hand” Tantric practitioners.

Less genteel were the Vamachara, or “left-hand” practitioners (in

India the right hand is used for eating, and the left hand for wiping
yourself). These were a small minority associated with some of
the wilder sects. The taboo practices they embraced included
meat-eating, hunting, animal and human sacri ce, the use of
alcohol, cannabis and hallucinogens, spirit possession, the
worship of terrifying or violent deities, the extensive use of magic
and spells, and yes, ritual sex.

DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images

Some Indian sadhus (Hindu holy men) still smoke cannabis to this day.

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The “magic and spells” part of the equation led to the widespread
association in the Indian mind between Tantra and black magic.
As renowned scholar of Tantra David Gordon White chronicled in
Sinister Yogis, for centuries in India the tantric master, or “yogi,”
has been perceived as a kind of bogeyman to the extent of being
invoked to scare children lest they be “stolen by the yogi.”

Sexual rituals among the Vamacarins usually included

worshipping a woman as a manifestation of a female deity and
then having sex with her. The point, though, was not to promote
intimacy or better orgasms for anyone, and the humanity of the
women was arguably less than well-respected. In the words of
scholar Serinity Young, Tantra “is not and was never about gender
equality.”

One ritual, in a text known as the Brihat Nila Tantra, still hints at
this lack of equality and respect. It directs that after you worship
the woman’s breasts and vagina by writing mantras (sacred
words) on them and whispering the same into her vagina, you
“pull her toward yourself by her hair” and have intercourse. The
woman is an object of worship and use, treated in a surprisingly
domineering fashion.

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Likewise, other Tantras discuss conferring blessings by placing

your penis in the mouths of women, having group sex with girls
(age 12 to 20), and o ering your sexual consort to your male guru
for his use.

The ideal woman is always described as “young and beautiful”

(which generally meant teenage girls) and was best when a
transgressive choice like a poor outcaste girl or prostitute (both of
which could also be either bought, kidnapped, or seduced without
repercussions). “The preferred female tantric consort is a young
and marginal woman without social power,” writes Young.

Some of the more extreme tantras go beyond this, such as the

Buddhist Guhyasamaja and Cakrasamvara Tantras, which contain
extensive instructions on using magic spells and potions for the
purposes of rape and recommend ritual incest as o ering
spiritual reward.

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The underlying logic is that through engaging in forbidden

practices, one can transcend dualistic thought, tap hidden power
sources, and unite with the divine. Doing so would result in the
widespread Tantric goals of siddhis (magical powers), physical
vitality, and even immortality.

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