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"Possessing merely the form of man, he moves about this earth for the salvation of the world and the instruction of men." These are aspirations common to all Indian religion. The peculiarity of the Tantras is to suppose that a ritual which is shocking to most Hindus is an indispensable preliminary to their attainment.
Such conceptions as Prakṛiti and the Guṇas colour most of the post-Vedic religious literature. Their working may be plainly traced in the Mahâbhârata, Manu and the Purâṇas, and the Tantras identify with Prakṛiti the goddesses whose worship they teach. The unethical character of the Sâṅkhya enabled it to form the strangest alliances with aboriginal beliefs.
For the essence of Vishnuism is passionate devotion and self-surrender to a deity and this idea is not prominent in the Tantras.
Ram Chandra Bose, of Lucknow, declares himself unable, for the same reason, to give a full and unabridged account of the ancient Hindu sacrifices. The later literatures of the Puranas and the Tantras are lower still.
But whereas the Purâṇas approve of both Vedic rites and others, the Tantras insist that ceremonies other than those which they prescribe are now useless. They maintain that each age of the world has its own special revelation and that in this age the Tantra-śâstra is the only scripture.
It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most popular of Hindu gods, and the divine love, of which he was at first the personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their origin from the ancient ideas of sexual dualism immanent in some of the Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of the great gods into the Sakti worship of the female principle, often with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both.
The former is a compendium of doctrine illustrated by quotations from what the author regarded as scripture. He cites about a hundred Mahayanist sutras, refers to the Vinaya and Divyâvadâna but not apparently to the Abhidharma. He mentions no Tantras and not many Dhâraṇîs.
A later and mysterious but most important method of Yoga is known to the Tantras as Shaṭcakrabheda or piercing of the six cakras. These are dynamic or nervous centres distributed through the human body from the base of the spinal cord to the eyebrows. In the lowest of them resides the Devî Kuṇḍalinî, a force identical with Śakti, who is the motive power of the universe.
The change probably occurred in the next half century for Padma-Sambhava, the founder of Lamaism who is said to have resided in Gaya and Nalanda and to have arrived in Tibet in 747 A.D., is represented by tradition as a tantric wizard, and about the same time translations of Tantras begin to appear in Chinese.
In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face.
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