tantra
तन्त्र tantraA major stream of revealed scripture and practice, the Tantras and Agamas, that treats the whole world as the play of one divine consciousness. From tan (to weave, stretch, extend) plus the instrumental suffix -tra, 'that which extends [knowledge]'; the word names both the body of texts and the esoteric path of mantra, yantra and initiation they set out.
Explained in depth in What is Tantra?Where this term appears
- Āgama and Veda: two revelations Lineages
The other is the Āgama, the Tantra, the Saṃhitā, held to be the direct word of Shiva or Vishnu or the Goddess.
- Bhuta Shuddhi: The Rite That Burns the Body to Ash Lineages
Only a god may worship a god The rule is a Sanskrit maxim repeated across the Tantras: nadevo devam archayet , "one who is not a god must not worship a god." It sounds severe, and it is meant to.
- Eighty-five titles and no text: the Saura tantras and how a tradition disappears Lineages
In 2018, in Varanasi, the Sampurnanand Sanskrit University published a book titled Saura Agama Tantra .
- Tantric Alchemy: The Quest for the Immortal Body Lineages
But the specifically mercurial , tantric alchemy, the science of parada , crystallised later, roughly across the eighth to fourteenth centuries, in texts framed as tantras and in the milieu of the Siddha yogis.
- The 28 Śaiva Āgamas Lineages
This is the canon of the Śaiva Siddhānta, one of the three great streams of the tantric revelation mapped in What are the Āgamas and Tantras?, and it is the scriptural backbone of temple Śaivism.
- The 64 Śākta Tantras Lineages
In it, Shiva is said to have brought the whole world under his sway with sixty-four Tantras, each one generating its own particular siddhi , its own occult power.
- The Kularnava Tantra: The Kaula Path and the True Guru Lineages
The Kularnava Tantra is the text most often invoked to support that picture, and it is almost exactly the opposite of what the picture suggests.
- The Nāth Sampradaya Lineages
The Nāth Sampradaya is an order of Śaiva yogis, ascetic and antinomian, known above all as the tradition that carries haṭha yoga and the pursuit of an immortal,…