Tantra in Practice: Mapping a Tradition

As with all the books in this series, the present volume has the word ‘‘practice’’ in its title. Practice is impossible without agents of practice, that is, practitioners, and the first four sections of this volume comprise those contributions that focus on Tantric practitioners or actors. These include Tantric preceptors (gurus) and their followers; kings and priests; and devotees and the Tantric gods they worship (for the gods too are Tantric actors). These relationships were not static, however, and the fourth section contains accounts of traditions in transition and conflict. The last three sections of the volume are devoted to the practices themselves. Those contributions which describe the broad general practice of an entire tradition or region of the Tantric world make up the fifth section. A wide gamut of types or elements of Tantric practice, both external rites and their internal correlates, is explored in sections six and seven. It may be that the ideal medium for a presentation of Tantric practice (or any practice, for that matter) would be a video or CD-ROM, in which one could actually view Tantric practitioners practicing their Tantra. This is impossible for a number of reasons—Tantric secrecy, the fact that many of the practices detailed here disappeared centuries ago, the practical limitations of scholarly publishing— so the reader is presented with a thick book. But books have their advantages as well, and the Tantras themselves (which are texts) clearly state that scripture is the necessary complement to the oral teachings one receives from the mouth of one’s guru. Furthermore, ‘‘pure’’ practice without interpretive theory is like a map without a legend: if you don’t know what the various elements of the practice mean, then it is nothing but empty gestures. The reader should therefore not be susprised to find that this volume on Tantric practice contains a significant amount of material on Tantric theory. Very often, this is built into the structure of the Tantric texts themselves: instructions for practice are contextualized in the theories—of man, the universe, and everything—that undergird them. Yet these theories can be as impenetrable as the practices themselves, especially in such © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.