The Schools and Lineages
The tantric schools as the record has them: the Krama, the Nath Sampradaya, the Aghoris, the Paschimamnaya, and a monastery known only from its own praise.
A lineage is a claim about descent, and the claim is usually the most contested thing about it. One Kashmiri school worshipped the four phases of a single act of perception as goddesses. One order is known to outsiders largely through what those outsiders found repellent. One monastery held three hundred thousand villages, a maternity house, a hospital and a kitchen open to every caste, and survives today only in the inscription that praises it.
These pages take each tradition as the record has it: who taught whom, where a line is attested and where it is merely asserted, and what a tradition says about itself that nothing outside it confirms. Initiation lineages are closed by design, so a living line is often documented only in the generation that happened to write something down.
Where a school’s account of its own origin differs from the documentary record, both are given.