Guru and transmission
How the tradition hands itself on: the guru, the disciple, initiation, and the unbroken chain of teaching that no book can replace.
A guru exists because the tradition holds that some things cannot be learned from a book. Not because the book is inadequate, but because what is being transmitted is understood to pass person to person, in a chain that the lineages take care to record.
Diksha is the moment of that transfer. It ranges from the formal giving of a mantra to what the Tantric texts describe as a direct transmission of energy, and the schools disagree sharply about what actually happens. The word guru has meanwhile travelled further from its origins than almost any Sanskrit term, and now covers everything from a village teacher to figures the tradition itself would not recognise.
These pages set out what the texts describe, what initiation involves in the living lineages, and where the whole structure has been abused. The tradition’s own literature on false teachers is older and blunter than most readers expect.