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Therefore the godhead must be summoned when prayers are offered, by means of bells and incense. When the god is not present, his idol is merely a block of wood or stone. Pu Hain, the Buddha of the Lion, is the Indian Samantabharda, one of the four great Boddhisatvas of the Tantra School. The old Buddha of the Radiance of the Light, Jan Dong Go Fu, is the Indian Dipamkara.
Let this be the prize; whoever beats the other in a race, let him have them all'. 'So be it', said the two fools, and set off running, but Putraka put on the shoes at once, and flew away with the staff and bowl up into the clouds'. Well, this is a story neither in the Pantcha Tantra nor the Hitopadesa, the Sanscrit originals of Calila and Dimna.
But in Hinduism and Buddhism alike such words as Tantra and tantric acquire a special sense and imply the worship of the divine energy in a female form called by many names such as Kâlî in the former, Târâ in the latter.
Indeed the force of evolution could not stop here; for, since even this primordial Buddha rested upon Ossa of hypothesis piled upon Pelion of hypothesis, there must be other hypotheses yet to come, and so the Tantra system, a compound of old Brahminism with the magic and witchcraft and Shamanism of Northern Asia burst into view.
He also observes that the Âcârya Ânanda-garbha did much to spread them in Magadha. It is not until a late period of the Pâla dynasty that he mentions the Kâlacakra which is the most extravagant form of Buddhist Tantrism. This accords with other statements to the effect that the Kâlacakra tantra was introduced in 965 A.D. from Śambhala, a mysterious country in Central Asia.
We must remember that, at the opening of the ninth century, the Buddhism rampant in China and indeed throughout Chinese Asia was the Tantra system of Yoga-chara.
C. The word Tantra originally meant a manual giving the essentials of a subject but later usage tends to restrict it to works, whether Hindu or Buddhist, inculcating the worship of Śiva's spouse. But there are exceptions to this restriction: the Panca-tantra is a collection of stories and the Lakshmî-tantra is a Vishnuite work.
The Prapañcasâra Tantra professes to be a revelation from Nârâyaṇa. Śâktism and the Tantras which teach it are generally condemned by Hindus of other sects.
As already indicated European usage makes the words Tantra, Tantrism and tantric refer to the worship of goddesses. It would be better to describe this literature and worship as Sâktism and to use Tantrism for a tendency in doctrine and ceremonial which otherwise has no special name.
Here too, as in so many other things, we have a proof that the world is older than we think it. The Beast-Fables in the Pantcha Tantra and the Hitopadesa, the Indian parallels to Aesop, reveal, in the connection in which they occur, and in the moral use to which they are put, a state of society long past that simple early time in which such fictions arise.
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