Reddit reviews Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Contexts
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This. Tantra is a term used to describe a movement of esoteric meditation and ascetic body control. To practice Tantra, one must have already achieved previous statuses of being a Yogi or Monk. This is explained by religious studies scholars by history: there was already a monk class in society which took 20-30 years of devotion to achieve. This class tended to continue its oral traditions and assist the public with spiritual matters, but around the same time as the European dark-ages, monks in india started inventing meditation techniques which involed imagining oneself as a diety (a previously taboo practice). Once the impression that they were god-like set in, then came the asceticism, body manipulation, and other odd practices (mediation on piles of rotting human bodies), which were all things deities did to achieve power.
Religious sexual practices existed in India prior to Tantric and Vajra (Buddhist tantra) movements. Really, everything is about sex: All major hindu Devas have "consorts" or Yogini and are usually depicted making love to her (to some degree, the mystic power of the deity is based on the union between the Deva and the consort).
When you combine these two ideas, you get the standard tantric practice of Yogis: to combine with a Yogini (female tree spirit/consort) and enter into eternal copulation for the sake of mystical powers. Powers are not derived from 'finishing' per se, but rather are only built up and stored during the act of sex. The practice started as a purely mental meditation on mountain-tops and in forest temples (popular places to find the flying female spirits), but over the years it evolved to start using actual human women. There is some historical evidence showing that, at that time and for a couple hundred years, the women were not consenting participants.
The tantric sex which has eventually made it to the western world is really a guide written in the 19th century based on images found depicting the sorts of meditative positions which were thought to allow the monk the best chance to drain the magical energy from the consort. The whole "sex without finishing" thing is based on the idea that if the male finished, he would release that energy back into the female. Therefore, the goal was to go for hours and not finish so that one could do nifty things like fly and walk through fire.
tl;dr tantric sex is an altered guide to rape from the middle-ages.
Edit: For those who are interested in the historical side, David Gordon White has studied and written extensively on the subject.
What is Tantra?
That's complicated, because the word has so many meanings and is part of so many different religious traditions. There have been strong tantric branches of Hinduism, Jainism, Daoism, Bon, Buddhism, and other Asian religions.
The common element in most tantric religions is a more functional view of the supernatural realm, using prayer, ritual, and spellcasting to manipulate nature, supernatural beings, and other people. The closest analogies in the West would be shamanism, wicca, and voodoo, but even the "least tantric" religions allow room for tantric elements, like prayers for the sick, for rain, for success, and so on.
The dominant non-tantric forms of most Asian religions have a strong ascetic and spiritual orientation, devaluing the body, the senses, and the physical world in favor of a spiritual realm. Escaping from the physical world by extinguishing all earthly pleasure and desire is often taught as the path toward enlightenment.
Tantric branches of these religions tend to push the other way, looking for ways to improve life in this world, not the next. Some versions of this have been benign, but often this has taken the form of using highly transgressive rituals to manipulate demonic spirits and obtain supernatural powers.
Traditional Tantra
Originally, Tantra had little or nothing to do with what we think of as "enlightenment." It was a form of "spiritual technology," i.e., magic, concerned primarily with rituals for gaining siddhas, magical powers, and exercising those powers for personal gratification and for material or political gain. The written tantras from the 5th through 10th centuries were mainly treatises on spellcraft and collections of spells, including black magic rituals that supposedly allowed tantrikas (sorcerers) to gain wealth and and power and to murder, seduce, control, and torment others.
Some examples, from the Vinasikhatantra:
> Vinasikh 162 reads as follows: 'Having collected human flesh together with sour milk, honey and clarified butter, an immediate elevation of one's position is obtained by offering them a thousand and eight times.'
> In Vinasikh 189cd-190ab there is a rite for one who desires all, in which human flesh (naramdmsa) and the flesh of goats are offered one hundred thousand times.
> Vinasikh 190cd-193 describes a magical rite to revive a dead person who then grants one of the performer's desires.
Traditional tantric sorcery is still practiced widely in South Asia even today, which is why many Hindus regard tantra as an embarrassment and like to pretend that it doesn't exist, or that it is really just an alternative path to enlightenment, and that the frequently barbaric black magic rituals in the ancient tantras were somehow "code" for benign spiritual practices.
But Google "Reddit tantra-mantra" and you will find hundreds of offers to cast spells for you. Want money? Want that hot person in the next cubicle to become your love slave? Want your mean boss to die in a fire? There's a host of tantric sorcerers willing to cast a spell to get you whatever you want...for a stiff price.
For a hilarious and very public failure of tantric sorcery in modern times, read this account of a dead serious attempt to kill a person with tantric magic on Indian national TV in 2008: The Great Tantra Challenge.
The most fascinating thing about it is that most of the people in the TV studio clearly believed that there was a real possibility that they were going to see someone murdered by "tantric magic" on live TV. And when the initial try failed and the challenge was moved to a new setting outdoors later that night, millions of people tuned in to watch Surender Sharma, the mighty tantric sorcerer, try to kill Sanal Edamaruku, the volunteer target!
> After nearly two hours without success, the programme was overrunning the channel's schedule. Sharma asked to stage an "ultimate destruction ceremony" which could only be performed at night, and the show was extended to accommodate it.
> Several hundred million viewers watched that night. A ceremony was performed on an altar under the open night sky, in the hour before midnight. Sharma was accompanied by a group of tantric chanters. A piece of paper with Edamaruku's name on it was torn into pieces, dipped in butter and thrown into a fire. A clod of wheat that Edamaruku had touched had nails pierced through it, was cut into pieces and thrown into a fire.
> The challenge ended with a dramatic countdown, and Edamaruku was not killed.
Tantric Buddhism
Starting around the 9th or 10th century, there was a concerted attempt to convert the more barbaric forms of tantric practices into a more civilized, more cerebral, and more benign religious philosophy. This produced a new kind of tantra, more religious and philosophical in form, that partially transformed the clan (or "Kaula") forms of tantra over the next 200-300 years.
Unlike the Vedic religions, tantra has always depended on personal transmission of esoteric knowledge from guru to disciple. However, all of the recognized "lines" of authority for tantric Shaktism and Shaivism were broken during the Muslim conquest:
> For all intents and purposes the Kaula disappeared in the 12th and 13th centuries, with a catastrophic break in most of the guru-disciple lineages, a break most likely occasioned by the progressive Muslim conquest of north India. Thereafter, it is only appropriate to speak of Tantric or Kaula revivals.
This means that recent attempts to resurrect tantric Shaktism and Shaivism (e.g., Trika, aka "Non-dual Kashmir Shaivism," "Non-dual Shaivist Tantra," or NKS/NST) as viable religions, not as mere history, are all modern reinventions, forms of neotantra.
The exception is non-sutric Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism). As Buddhism mostly supplanted Bon on the Tibetan plateau, it absorbed a strong strain of tantric spell-casting from both Bon and the tantric forms of Shaivism and Shaktism in northern India.
With the rise of the political and economic power of the monasteries, this was channeled into a kind of ritual "methodism," with emphasis on repetitive chanting of mantras and use of yantras, and even mechanical repetition of spells, as in the famous prayer wheels. This was accompanied by a philosophical shift toward the written sutras, or canonical scriptures, and away from the oral tradition, personal transmission, and rawness and power of the old tantric approaches to magic.
Outside of the monasteries, however, there has been a continuous tradition of Bon/Buddhist priests/sorcerers in outlying villages, serving the religious needs of peasants and keeping the old tantric practices alive.
In many ways, the split between "sutric" and "tantric" Buddhism has paralleled the split between "vedic" and "tantric" forms of Hinduism. The difference is that there are tantric practitioners in Tibet who claim continuous lines of succession going back a thousand years or more.
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