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The History of
Tantra
from
YogaJournal.com
Tantra emerged early in the post-classical period, around the
fourth century c.e., but didn't reach its full flowering until
500 to 600 years later. This school represents a rather
radical departure for yoga philosophy. In what could only have
been understood as heresy, tantra rejected the Vedas (the most
sacred texts of Hinduism since at least 1500 B.C.E.) as
irrelevant. It refuted the notion that liberation could be
attained only through rigorous asceticism and meditation, and
it dismissed the Samkhyan precept that a yogi must renounce
the world in order to free himself from it. Tantra also
eschewed karma yoga (the path of action or service), choosing
instead to focus on devotion (bhakti), most particularly
worship of the Goddess.
In teaching about the causes of suffering and the path to
liberation, tantra shares common ground with its ancestors.
Like the nondualistic authors of the early Upanishads, tantric
yogis believed that human suffering comes from the illusion of
opposites, from the mistaken notion that the Self is somehow
separate from the objects it desires. Being good nondualists,
tantrikas (tantric yogis) see all possible sets of opposites,
all dualities (good and evil, hot and cold, hard and soft,
male and female) contained within the universal consciousness.
The only way a yogi can liberate himself from suffering,
according to tantra, is to unite all the opposites or
dualities in his own body. Like Patanjali, tantrikas believe
in the need to have a strong, pure physical body.
While Patanjali may have acknowledged the need to strengthen
and purify the body, he ultimately believed that the body was
defiled and that a truly liberated yogi would shun the company
of others for fear of becoming contaminated. Tantrika, on the
other hand, celebrated the physical body, which they
considered to be a sacred temple of the Divine, as a means to
conquer death. The body became the vehicle for attaining
liberation. In tantric yoga, the universal consciousness,
which earlier philosophers called purusha, became Shiva and
resided within the body. The principle of nature or creation,
called prakriti in earlier yogic thought, became shakti and
lived at the base of the spine. The ultimate unity—the male
energy of Shiva with the feminine principle shakti—took place
internally and led to final liberation or samadhi. Unlike the
more traditional nondualists, however, tantrikas believed that
the whole world was not an illusion, but a manifestation of
the Divine and that all experience brought the practitioner
closer to his or her own divinity.
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