acters form the basis of the hieratic siddham script employed
in Chinese and Japanese tantric man:d:alas and texts. The
yogic practice that is so central to tantrism is also of Indian
origin (albeit influenced by Daoist techniques).
Tantrism has persisted and quite often thrived across
much of Asia since its Indian origins in the middle of the first
millennium of the common era. Its practitioners have lived
in India, China, Japan, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Sri
Lanka, Korea, and Mongolia, as well as in the “Greater
India” of medieval Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Burma, and
Indonesia. The medieval history of South Asian Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Jainism is saturated with tantrism. In Hindu
India, the Pa ̄ñcara ̄tra, Gaud: ̄ıya Vais:n:ava, Sahajiya ̄, Pa ̄ ́supata,
Ka ̄pa ̄lika, S ́aiva Siddha ̄nta, Siddha Kaula, Yogin ̄ı Kaula,
Krama, Trika, S ́r ̄ıvidya ̄, Pa ́scima ̄mna ̄ya, Na ̄th Siddha, and
S ́a ̄kta movements, orders, and sects have all been tantric or
heavily colored by tantrism since the medieval period. Medi-
eval Jain tantric works such as the tenth-century Jva ̄lin ̄ı
Kalpa resembled coeval Hindu and Buddhist Tantras in
every way but for the names of the deities who were the ob-
jects of their ritual practice. Although Buddhism disappeared
from the subcontinent in the thirteenth century, India (in-
cluding present-day Pakistan) was the cradle of Buddhist
tantrism in its Maha ̄ya ̄na, Mantraya ̄na, and Vajraya ̄na forms,
which were exported into Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, China,
Korea, Japan, and Tibet. Certain of the Yogin ̄ı Tantras of
early Buddhist tantrism originated in the Swat Valley of pres-
ent-day Pakistan, and the tenth-century Ka ̄lacakra Tantra,
an important Vajraya ̄na work, was likely written by an au-
thor living in the same region. Tibetan Buddhism is nearly
entirely a Vajraya ̄na tradition: this applies to the four major
existing schools (the Rnying ma [Nyingma] pas, Bka’ brgyud
[Kagyu] pas, Sa skya [Sakya] pas, and Dge lugs [Geluk] pa),
as well as to specific forms of practice, such as Rdzogs chen
(the “Great Perfection” practice unique to Nyingma). The
ritual of the medieval Chinese state was tantric, and China
was the medieval changing-house for nearly every Buddhist
tantric tradition transmitted to Japan, Korea, and Mongolia.
In China, tantrism has persisted, since the twelfth century
CE, within Daoist ritual practice. In Japan, all of the eight
traditional schools of Buddhism have a tantric pedigree: of
these, the Shingon and Tendai schools have persisted as
Japan’s most successful exponents of “Pure Buddhist Esoteri-
cism.” In Southeast Asia, Cambodian inscriptions indicate
the presence of Hindu tantric specialists there in the early
medieval period; the medieval kings of Bali underwent
Hindu tantric initiations, and present-day Balinese Hindu-
ism continues to display its Indian tantric origins.
From 1642 until the exile of its Dge lugs (Geluk) pa
leadership in 1950, Tibet was a tantric Buddhist theocracy.
Today, the constitutional monarchies of Nepal and Bhutan
are the world’s sole surviving “tantric kingdoms,” with their
state ceremonial comprised of tantric liturgies and rituals and
nearly all of their deities tantric. One of these, Bhairava, is
a tantric god found in every part of Asia, and worshipped in
a tantric mode by Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists alike. Simi-
larly, the originally Indian tantric gods Ta ̄ra ̄, Ambika ̄,
Aks:obhya, Maha ̄ka ̄la, Gan:e ́sa, Avalokite ́svara, and Skanda,
as well as numerous groups of multiple tantric deities, are
found throughout much of Asia.
FUNDAMENTALS OF TANTRIC PRACTICE. Tantric practice
consists of a set of ritual and meditative strategies for access-
ing and appropriating the energy or enlightened conscious-
ness of the absolute godhead that, coursing through the uni-
verse, infuses its creatures with life and the potential for
salvation. Humans in particular are empowered to realize
this goal through strategies of embodiment—that is, of caus-
ing that supreme energy, essence of nirva ̄n:a, or quality of
buddhahood to become concentrated in one or another sort
of template or grid (a man:d:ala or mantra, the human body,
or a ritual structure)—prior to its internalization in or identi-
fication with the individual microcosm. This they may do
by appropriating elements of this world (which is real and
not an illusion) such as words, images, bodies, and sub-
stances, into rituals that collapse subject and object, thereby
projecting them into a realization of their inherent buddha
nature or S ́iva-self.
Drawing on its feudal Indian origins, tantrism also re-
mains a body of practice with explicit this-worldly aims: the
control of all of the beings located in the universal power
grid, including lesser gods, living people, the dead, animals,
and demons. While much of tantric practice has become
sublimated into tame forms of “pure esotericism,” it must be
recalled that the great volume of early tantric texts were de-
voted to sorcery—that is, to magical techniques for control-
ling other beings against their will. Such remains the primary
goal of tantrism as it continues to be practiced on a popular
level throughout much of Asia.
The key to understanding tantric practice is the
man:d:ala, the energy grid that represents the constant flow
of divine and demonic, human and animal impulses in the
universe, as they interact in both constructive and destructive
patterns. This grid is three-dimensional, in the sense that it
locates the supreme deity (god, goddess, celestial buddha,
bodhisattva, or enlightened t ̄ırtham:kara)—the source of that
energy and ground of the grid itself—at the center and apex
of a hierarchized cosmos. All other beings, including the
practitioner, will be situated at lower levels of energy/
consciousness/being, radiating downward and outward from
the elevated center point. Because the deity is both transcen-
dent and immanent, all of the beings located at the various
energy levels on the grid participate in the outward flow of
the godhead, and are in some way emanations or hypostases
of the deity himself (or herself).
This is particularly the case with the tantric guru, the
preceptor from whom a practitioner receives instruction and
initiation, and with whom tantric practitioners frequently
identify the godhead at the center of the man:d:ala. Here, the
guru, as an already fully realized or empowered tantric being,
plays a pivotal role, linking the human with the divine. InTANTRISM: AN OVERVIEW 8985