As we saw in Chapters 10 and 11, there were striking innovations in both Śaiva and Buddhist practices from the seventh and eighth centuries onwards. While these innovations have been frequently lumped together under the label of ‘Tantra’, they include a variety of different components on both Śaiva and Buddhist sides.

To summarise, on the Śaiva side, a ‘transgressive’ tradition of rituals involving cremation grounds, polluting substances associated with sex and death, fierce gods and particularly goddesses appears to have been originally carried out as ritual sorcery by hereditary caste groups (kula). The initiation rituals for these traditions involved the consumption of the ‘clan essence’, the mixed sexual secretions of male guru and female consort.

These practices were adopted by renunciate practitioners in the so-called kāpālika style and gained increasing importance in the seventh to ninth centuries (the kaula lineages associated with the early Nāth siddhas). The more extreme elements were mostly dropped and the ‘external’ practices were progressively substituted by ‘internal’ yogic practices which have a marked sexual component and involve a subtle body physiology of cakras and internal flows and channels. Within these practices, sexual ritual became a mode of access to a state of the body-mind in which the liberating insight central to the tradition could be directly perceived.

On the Buddhist side, early ‘Tantric’ practices (sixth and seventh centuries) were mostly a further development of established deity-visualisation practices in the later Mahāyāna sūtras, with fierce, mostly male deities initially introduced as secondary figures in the maṇḍala.