Notes preface and acknowledgments 1. Various authors use the terms Tantra, Tantrism, and Tantracism more or less interchangeably to refer to this category of Asian religions. In this book I use Tantrism to refer to the category as it has been constructed as a particular “ism”— an abstract, unified category—in the scholarly imagination. For my own part, however, I prefer to use Tantra, which is at least somewhat less burdened with the awkward reifications of academic isms. 2. Jeffrey J. Kripal describes a similar narrative of his own early interest in Tantra in Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 152. 3. This research began in 1994 and eventually culminated in my two books The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4. Marianna Torgovnick, Primitive Passions: Men,Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 210; cf. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 8. 5. I found this particularly in areas heavily frequented by Western tourists, such as Rishikesh and Tàràpíåh, where every third sàdhu (holy man) invites a young Westerner over to smoke hashish and learn about Tantra. On the “advertisement of secrecy” in Tantric circles, see Hugh B. Urban, “The Torment of Secrecy: Ethical and Epistemological Problems in the Study of Esoteric Traditions ,” History of Religions 37, no. 3 (1998): 209–48; and Robert I. Levy, Meso283 cosm: Hinduism and the Organization of Space in a Traditional Newar City in Nepal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 337 ff. 6. For this critique of Western scholarship on formerly colonized peoples, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 34–94; and Bart Moore-Gilbert, ed., Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices , Politics (London: Verso, 1997), p. 18. introduction 1. The recent scholarship on Tantra is too vast to cite here in full; the more interesting recent works are: Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kàlí’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life andTeachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Sarah Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence, and the Worship of the Goddess Kàlí (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Charles D. Orzech, Politics and Transcendent Wisdom: The Scripture for Humane Kings in the Creation of Chinese Buddhism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: SiddhaTraditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and David Gordon White, ed., Tantra in Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2. Paul Ramana Das and Marilena Silbey, “Celebrating Sacred Sexuality,” on the Church of Tantra web site (www.tantra.org/amertan.html). On New Age appropriations of Tantra, see Hugh B. Urban, “The Cult of Ecstasy: Tantrism, the New Age, and the Spiritual Logic of Late Capitalism,” History of Religions 39, no. 3 (2000): 268–304. 3. “It so happened that it was in texts known as tantras that Western scholars first described doctrines and practices different from those of Brahmanism . . . so the Western experts adopted the word Tantrism for that particular, and for them, repulsive aspect of Indian religion” (André Padoux, “Tantrism: An Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 14, ed. Mircea Eliade [New York: Macmillan, 1986], pp. 271–72). For a detailed discussion of Western views of Tantra, see Hugh B. Urban, “The Extreme Orient: The Construction of ‘Tantrism’ as a Category in the Orientalist Imagination,” Religion 29 (1999): 123–46. 4. William Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos , vol. 2 (1811; reprint, London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1817), p. 247; J. N. Farquhar, An Outline of the Religious Literature of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 200. 5. Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphics Society, 1973), p. 9; cf. Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 576. The most recent argument for the empowering nature of Tantra is Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). As Pratapaditya Pal observes, “We . . . have gone from one extreme to the other. While early scholars were unnecessarily apologetic about some of the sexual . . . practices of Tantra , modern scholars revel in the sexual...