Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion

Preface and Acknowledgments: The Extreme Orient and the Quest for Ecstasy

Preface and Acknowledgments The Extreme Orient and the Quest for Ecstasy O Mother! At your holy lotus feet I pray that I have not transgressed all the Veda and Artha Tàstras and destroyed your worship; with this fear, I have revealed many profound matters. Please forgive me for whatever sins I have incurred by revealing these secret things. . . . Forgive me, for, with an ignorant heart, I have revealed the most secret things of your tantras. KKãJànanda ÄgamavàgíMa, BKhat-Tantrasàra (sixteenth century) For the last 150 years . . . we have been orientalizing; in reality , it is precisely because the whole world is Westernizing that the West is becoming more permeable to Indian philosophy , to African art . . . to Arabic mysticism. Hindu philosophy , African art acquire a consciousness of self by virtue of those structures through which Western civilization assimilates them. Michel Foucault, interview, “Who Are You, Professor Foucault?” (1967) This book was born in large part out of my own long and deeply ambivalent relationship to the phenomenon of “Tantra” or “Tantrism” and its role in the contemporary Western imagination.1 It is the product of my own fascination with this most tantalizing aspect of the “exotic Orient”— this brand of Indian spirituality that seemingly could combine sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life. Coming as I do from a fairly strict and conservative middlexi class Episcopalian background, and generally bored with that brand of Christianity, I was drawn naturally to Tantra—an enticing and wonderfully Other form of religion that seemed in every way the perfect opposite of the stodgy religion of my childhood. Many years ago, as a college freshman sitting in on an “Introduction to Eastern Religions” class, I was captivated by accounts of sexual rituals, the use of alcohol and other intoxicants , and the explicit violation of conventional social laws, all in the name of a powerful, ecstatic religious experience. In Tantra, it seemed, I had discovered the ideal alternative to (and wonderfully liberating inversion of) everything I thought “religion” was supposed to be about; it seemed the embodiment of everything my upbringing was not.2 My own first immersion in the world of Tantra occurred many years later, as a graduate student, when I undertook a detailed study of the role of secrecy in one particular sect—the Kartàbhajàs, or “Worshipers of the Master”—which emerged in the Calcutta area at the end of the nineteenth century. The focus of my work at that time was the difficult question of how one could—and indeed whether oneshould—study a tradition such as Hindu Tantra, which is emphatically esoteric, meant to be understood only by initiated insiders.3 However, in the course of my study, I was faced by an even more difficult, self-reflective question: why was I, a middleclass , Episcopalian, white kid, so fascinated with a bunch of poor, lowerclass Bengalis performing secret rituals and engaging in illicit sexual activities ? Still more broadly, why has Tantra now assumed such a central place in American popular culture, with pop stars like Sting practicing seven-hour-long Tantric sex and New Age gurus offering Tantric workshops such as the “Path to Total Ecstasy”? Is this part of what Marianna Torgovnick called our “primitive passion” and our “quest for ecstasy”— that is, the contemporary Western search for an irrational, mystical, or ecstatic experience that we feel we have lost amid a rationalized, demysti fied, modern world? Torgovnick writes: “Westerners seem like Adam and Eve banished from the Eden of the primitive, convinced that some ecstatic primal emotions have been lost, almost as penalty for being Western . Yet . . . what is now sought in the primitive is really a reflection or projection of something . . . in the West.”4 In the course of my probing into the mysteries of Tantra, I interviewed , studied under, and became friends with a number of Tantric practitioners in West Bengal, Assam, Himachal, and Uttar Pradesh. Like many curious travelers, both Western and Indian, I was fascinated by the aura of secrecy, power, and danger that surrounds great Tantric centers , such as the cremation ground at Tàràpíåh, West Bengal, or the temxii Preface and Acknowledgments ple of Kàmàkhyà in Assam, where rather grisly animal sacrifices are still performed on a regular basis. And I encountered a wide variety of responses and...