19 Facts About Tantra

Term "Tantra" after about 500 BCE, in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism is a bibliographic category, just like the word Sutra.

The various contextual meanings of the word Tantra vary with the Indian text and are summarized in the appended table.

Patanjali offers a semantic definition of Tantra, stating that it is structural rules, standard procedures, centralized guide or knowledge in any field that applies to many elements.

In modern scholarship, Tantra has been studied as an esoteric practice and ritualistic religion, sometimes referred to as Tantrism.

Many definitions of Tantra have been proposed since, and there is no universally accepted definition.

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Tantra has been labelled as the "yoga of ecstasy", driven by senseless ritualistic libertinism.

David Gray disagrees with broad generalizations and states that defining Tantra is a difficult task because "Tantra traditions are manifold, spanning several religious traditions and cultural worlds.

The challenge of defining Tantra is compounded by the fact that it has been a historically significant part of major Indian religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, both in and outside South Asia and East Asia.

Tantra defines Tantrism as an apologetic label of Westerners for a system that they little understand that is "not coherent" and which is "an accumulated set of practices and ideas from various sources, that has varied between its practitioners within a group, varied across groups, across geography and over its history".

Frederick Smith – a professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions, considers Tantra to be a religious movement parallel to the Bhakti movement of the 1st millennium AD.

Ayurveda has primarily been an empirical practice with Vedic roots, but Tantra has been an esoteric, folk movement without grounding that can be traced to anything in Atharvaveda or any other vedic text.

Matrikas, or fierce mother goddesses that later are closely linked to Tantra practices, appear both in Buddhist and Hindu arts and literature between the 7th and 10th centuries.

Tantra cites numerous elements that are found in the Saiva Vidyapitha literature, including whole passages and lists of pithas, that seem to have been directly borrowed by Vajrayana texts.

Jainism seems to have developed a substantial Tantra corpus based on the Saura tradition, with rituals based on yakshas and yakshinis.

Saiva Tantra is called the Mantramarga, and is often seen as being a separate teaching than the ascetic "Atimarga" tradition.

One of the main elements of the Tantric literature is ritual Rather than one coherent system, Tantra is an accumulation of practices and ideas from different sources.

Andre Padoux notes that there is no consensus among scholars as to which elements are characteristic for Tantra, nor is there any text that contains all those elements.

Unlike previous Western scholars Woodroffe advocated for Tantra, defending and presenting it as an ethical and philosophical system in accord with the Vedas and Vedanta.

Woodroffe practised Tantra and, while trying to maintain scholastic objectivity, was a student of Hindu Tantra.