Tantra on the feeling you were told to get rid of

Something has just been said to you, and your chest is tight and your face is hot, and the first thing you do is try to be less angry.

Notice what that assumes: that what you are feeling is a fault in the machine, and that the work is to clear it before anything real can happen. Most of what gets called spiritual practice in English agrees with you. Calm down, let go, get above it.

There is a large family of Indian traditions that looked at that assumption and refused it.

In one sentence

Tantra is not one thing and does not speak with one voice, so it has no single answer. What its traditions share is a question the others do not ask: what if intense experience is not the obstacle to the path, but the material it is made of?

The problem it tries to solve

The problem is not that you feel too much. It is what the available solutions cost.

If the way out of suffering is to want less, then everything that makes a life recognisable becomes suspect: appetite, attachment, the body, the people you love. The ascetic answer is coherent and it works for some people, and it asks you to leave. Renounce, withdraw, thin yourself out until there is less to be disturbed.

These traditions are where the opposite suspicion got a doctrine: that the price is too high and the diagnosis too quick. The formula scholars use for what they attempt is placing desire, in every sense of the word, in the service of liberation, rather than sacrificing this world to obtain it.

How it sees the mind

The mind is not treated as a separate compartment with feelings in it. Across these traditions the body, breath, energy and awareness are one continuous thing, described in vocabularies the West has since borrowed and used for other purposes. It is worth knowing which parts of that vocabulary are shared and which are not, because the famous ones are the exceptions.

Mantra is shared: sound treated as effective rather than expressive, doing something rather than meaning something. The Buddhist branch is named after it.

The mapped interior is not shared, and arrived late. The wheels that reached English as chakras are a case in point. The earliest surviving tantra describes two channels and no wheels at all. The number of centres runs from five to sixteen and beyond depending on which text you open, and the familiar six only become standard around the twelfth century. The energy that rises through them is called kuṇḍalinī on the Hindu side and by other names entirely on the Buddhist one.

Two claims do run across the material, and they are what matters for the question this library asks.

One: a strong state carries force, and force can be used. Anger, desire and fear are not noise to be filtered out. They are concentrated attention, and attention is what practice runs on.

Two, and only in some schools: there is nothing that is not divine, including this. Where that holds, the feeling you were about to apologise for is not outside the sacred, and treating it as contamination is itself the error. Other schools hold that matter and consciousness are entirely separate, and would not say this at all.

The central move

Use it. Do not fix it, do not flee it, do not wait for it to pass.

Where another tradition would ask you to loosen your grip on a strong state, the tantric move is to take it as fuel: the intensity that was going into the reaction gets turned toward the practice, with the feeling still present and still strong.

What that looks like in the texts is more concrete than it sounds, and the deity practice is the clearest case. A practitioner in a rage does not wait for the rage to subside before beginning. The rite gives that state a form to take: a deity who is himself wrathful, visualised in detail, with the mantra that belongs to him. The heat is not talked down and it is not indulged. It is put through a shape that already exists, and the practitioner takes on that shape rather than being run by the state. The claim is that this only works because the energy is genuinely there: a mild feeling would not carry the practice. That is the reason the difficult states, and not the peaceful ones, are the ones this tradition is interested in.

This is why the tradition is dangerous to summarise. Read at speed, "use it" becomes "indulge it", which is the reading the West arrived at and stayed with. In the texts the move is the opposite of licence: it is precisely because the material is powerful that it is hedged with initiation, a teacher, secrecy, and long preparation. One scholar's summary of the initiate is that he was less an anti-ritualist than a super-ritualist, taking on more exacting duties than the ones he already had, not fewer.

A case where the move is hard

Here is where the tradition stops the reader who wants to try it, and it stops them on purpose.

Most of what is described here was transmitted through initiation by a teacher who had received it, and the most demanding parts were explicitly not to be practised, or even read, without that. Modern scholarship can tell you what the texts say; the tradition's own position is that knowing what they say is not the same as being permitted to do it.

The gate was also a possession, and this is the part the admiring version leaves out. In the places where these lineages survive, who may be initiated into what has been one of the ways families keep their standing. The secrecy did that work as well as the other.

So what this piece can do is explain the shape of a tradition, and what it cannot do is hand you its practice. That is unusual here. Stoic exercises are in a book you can buy. Zazen has a posture someone can show you. ACT is a protocol with a manual. This one has a gate.

And there is a second difficulty, and this one is where the move genuinely fails rather than where it is withheld. "Use the intensity" assumes intensity you can work with. When what is present is not a strong feeling but the flat, absent state that follows something bad, there is nothing to turn toward anything, and this is not the tradition that speaks to it.

What you actually practice

Not a technique you add to your morning. In its own setting, a coherent programme with a teacher in it, and these are its recurring parts.

Mantra. The syllables of a particular deity, repeated, often counted, often for years.

Visualisation and identification with a deity. Extended, precise, and structurally the strangest thing here: the practitioner is not asking the deity for something but taking on its form.

The body as instrument. Breath, posture, the mapped interior. The body is not the part of you that gets in the way of practice; it is the place practice happens.

Ritual. Offerings, hand gestures, diagrams drawn to be entered rather than looked at, and in some lineages the deliberately impure substances that outsiders later fixed on.

What these are for depends on which school you ask, and the schools argue about it. In the non-dual Śaiva schools, the ones that hold everything to be Śiva, the practice recognises something already true: you are not becoming divine through it, you are being brought to notice what was never otherwise. The Śaiva Siddhānta, the larger and more institutional branch, says the opposite and says it against them: what stands between you and liberation is a substance, knowing about it does not remove it, and only the ritual does.

What people often misunderstand

Tantra does not mean sex, but the honest version of that sentence is longer. The word names a genre of texts and the traditions that use them, Hindu and Buddhist and Jain, spanning many centuries and much of South, Southeast and East Asia: ritual, mantra, deity practice, yoga, medicine, temple building, statecraft. How much of that material is about sexual practice is one of the field's live arguments, and it is not a small one. David Gordon White writes that most tantric scriptures discuss it at length, and treats the sexual rite as the tradition's defining core. André Padoux devotes a chapter to arguing the other way, that it belongs to certain rites and is not the main thing. What is not argued by anyone is that what is sold in the West under the name is a modern product with a Sanskrit label.

The transgressive practices are real, and they did not stay that way. The literature includes rites that deliberately break caste and purity rules, using exactly the substances and contacts the surrounding society treated as polluting. Scholars distinguish streams that took these literally from streams that read them symbolically, and a third position holds that the choice is the wrong question, because the earliest form was neither: it was about substances and what they were thought to do. What is not in dispute is what happened next. Once these rites reached householders they survived unrevised only in narrow circles, and the general trend was to keep the structure and drop the impurity.

It is not a religion, and it is not one system. There is Buddhist tantra and Hindu tantra, and inside the Hindu material there are schools that disagree with each other about the deepest things, including whether practice reveals what is already there or produces something new. A sentence beginning "Tantra teaches that" is usually a sentence about one school.

It is not the opposite of ethics. The freedom described in the texts is the endpoint of a long formation, with obligations attached at every stage, and the initiate took on more rules rather than fewer. The version in which the conclusion is available on a weekend and the formation is optional was assembled for a market, by people who had the conclusion to sell.

And the reason all this happened to this tradition in particular: it is the one whose surface features are legible without any of its content. Deities, ritual, the body, a taboo. Those travel as images. The philosophy underneath, which is about non-duality and the status of experience, does not travel as an image at all, so it was left behind. What arrived in the West was the packaging, and the packaging sold.

Where it sits next to what came before and after

Where and when it starts is not settled, and the scholars say so rather than papering over it. The main body of the early tantras was composed somewhere between roughly 400 and 800 CE, and the two standard treatments both state plainly that the dates cannot yet be fixed more closely than that.

Before: the Vedic mainstream, which called these sects non-Vedic as early as a fourth century layer of the Mahābhārata, and which they in turn did not so much reject as absorb, presenting their own scriptures as a further and more powerful revelation stacked on top of the ordinary one. A practitioner could be described as outwardly Vedic, at home a Śaiva, a follower of Śiva, and in private a Śākta, a worshipper of the goddess: three layers, each more restricted than the last.

What changed is not that renunciation was abandoned, and this is the tidy story to resist. The oldest branch was for ascetics only, and the transgressive material came out of extremist ascetic orders rather than out of a householder revolt against them. What changed is that a path appeared which promised the world as well as the way out of it, and which householders could enter.

Beside: Buddhism. Buddhist tantra, the Vajrayāna, is close enough to the Hindu material that scholars argue whether these were ever separate traditions at all, or one overarching thing wearing three religions. Who borrowed from whom is still open. Among followers of the Mahāyāna, the broad northern form of Buddhism that Zen also comes out of, it was generally recognised as the highest and most direct route, so what the piece on Zen says about the Mahāyāna account of self applies upstream of here too: a different branch from the same root, not a different plant.

After: two inheritances, both partial, and worth telling apart. Modern postural yoga took the mapped body and the energy vocabulary and left most of the metaphysics behind, which is a larger loss than it sounds: on Mallinson and Singleton's reading those centres were never observations of a body, they were a tradition's metaphysics installed on one. The route is traceable: the six-centre scheme reached English mainly through a 1919 edition of a sixteenth century text, published under the name Arthur Avalon by a British judge in Calcutta called John Woodroffe. And Western neotantra took the sexual material and built something new on it, sincerely in some cases, which is not the same as accurately. It has a date and a paper trail too: an American calling himself Pierre Bernard registered a Tantrik Order in America in 1906, Woodroffe put the vocabulary into English between 1918 and 1919, and what is sold now was assembled on top of a nineteenth century missionary caricature by people who had read the caricature rather than the texts.

Kept next to the others in this library, the difference is clean. All of them start from the same small agreement: the thing showing up is not the problem, what happens next is. Stoicism says what happens next is a verdict, and the verdict is yours to get right. Zen asks who is demanding that it be settled. ACT asks what obeying it is costing you. CBT asks whether it is accurate and sends you out to find out. This one is the only one that says what happens next can be used, that the heat itself is the equipment and not the weather. One agreement, and no two answers to it are the same.

Go deeper

• David Gordon White, Tantra in Practice (Princeton University Press, 2000): thirty-six translated texts from China, India, Japan, Nepal and Tibet, Buddhist and Hindu and Jain, with a long introduction that maps the whole thing. Read it also to watch the argument happen: White's own position on how central the sexual material is, is one of the two sides.
• Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003): the book that dates the Western version instead of repeating it. Chapter 4 on what Woodroffe did to the material in English, chapter 6 on how it became a New Age product.
• Christopher Wallis, Tantra Illuminated (2012; second edition 2013): written from inside the tradition by a Sanskritist trained under Alexis Sanderson, and published by the author's own press rather than a university one. Scholarly enough to argue with, on the non-dual Śaiva material.
• Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975-1025), the philosophical high point of the non-dual schools, and not a first book: the Tantrasāra is the short one, the Tantrāloka the long one. David Peter Lawrence's entry on Kashmiri Shaiva philosophy in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a free and reliable guide to keep beside them.

What this changes in how you'd use Kitehold

Where you felt it. Kitehold asks where a thought landed in the body: chest, stomach, throat, shoulders. It is easy to treat that as a detail on the way to the real question.

This is the one tradition in the library that would say you have it backwards. The tightening in the chest is not the symptom of the thought. On this account body and awareness are not two things, so the tightening is not evidence of the event: it is part of it.

Nothing here asks you to do anything tantric with that, and this piece cannot hand you the practice anyway. But the next time the field is filled in, it is worth a slower second: not what does this mean, but what is it like, exactly, and where. That is a different question, and it is available whether or not you find the answer this tradition gave.