The ritual sexual intercourse begins with the male practitioner drawing a triangular diagram—symbolic of the Goddess and the Serpent Power which is her aspect in the human body—upon his couch. For some time the practitioner worships the Goddess, mentally projecting her image into the triangle he has drawn, and then he calls his female partner. After various ritual purifications he lays her upon the couch and then, visualising himself as the god Shiva and the woman as the wife of Shiva, “offers the father face to the mother face”—i.e. copulates, all the time repeating various traditional mantras (there is a special one for each stage of intercourse, including a special one designed to be recited at the moment of orgasm) and mentally concentrating upon the idea of using the senses as a means of sacrificing to the Goddess.
Such is left-handed Tantric practice—as one Tantra says “with alcohol, meat, fish, mudra and women, so should the great initiate worship the Mother of the Gods”.
1 In spite of the low repute in which orthodox Hindus hold the Tantras—they generally regard them as being not only heretical but “dirty”—actually erotic passages only make up some six to seven per cent of the total bulk of Tantric texts.
2 For an interesting variant of this latter theory see chapter eight of Agehananda Bharati’s brilliant Tantric Tradition.
3 There is an important divergence between the Buddhist and Hindu Tantras regarding the nature of the principles. Hindu Tantras regard the female as being the active principle, while the Buddhist Tantras assign this role to the male. Mysteriously enough, Tibetan Buddhist iconography seems to disregard its own philosophical outlook, for in the famous yab-yum icons (which show a god and goddess in sexual intercourse of a yogic nature) the female clearly in energetic motion, sits astride the male, the latter in a position which makes movement impossible.
4 On both sides of the Buddhist/Hindu fence claims have been made that members of their own faith do not indulge in sexual practices involving actual physical copulation. Certain Hindu pandits, for example, have claimed that all the Tantras dealing with physical intercourse are to be interpreted symbolically and that those who think otherwise are immoral, evil and “dirty”. It is a pity that this sort of nonsense has received the support of some western scholars who should have known better; thus Evans-Wentz, who displayed an extremely puritanical attitude towards Tantricism—no doubt a hangover from his early years as a member of the Theosophical Society—so far forgot that moral detachment which is so integral a part of the equipment of Scholarship as to refer to “those hypocrites who follow the left-hand path in Bengal and elsewhere”. Even Lama Anagarika Govinda has claimed that physical sexuality plays no part in Tibetan Tantricism—a statement that, in its literal meaning, is quite simply untrue. Agehananda Bharati has made the ingenious suggestion that by “physical” the Lama meant “consciousness of physical” in which case the statement is probably correct, for there is some evidence to show that the advanced Tantric adept engaged in copulation is more or less unaware of what is happening on the physical plane.
5 That is to say, the female partner in ritual sexual intercourse.
6 In spite of many statements to the contrary made by present-day puritanically inclined devotees of Transcendental Meditation and other syncretistic religious cults of oriental origin there is no doubt whatsoever that many early Buddhists and Hindus used psychedelic drugs as one of the many means of inducing ecstatic mystical states. It is probable that the soma, the divine drink of Vedic literature, was an infusion of the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. In reality almost the only difference between genuine mystical states and drug-induced ecstasy seems to be that the effects of the latter are only temporary while those of the former are permanent.
CHAPTER FOUR
Chinese Sexual Alchemy
There is some resemblance between the theoretical aspects of Tantricism and the ancient Indian Siddha cult. The main emphasis of this latter movement is on a psycho-physical yogic process designed to achieve spiritual development through an intense physical development supposedly leading to a vast extension of the life-span or even actual immortality. The cult, which in somewhat altered form survives at the present day, holds that “death may be either put off ad libitum by a special course of re-strengthening and revitalizing the body so as to put it permanently en rapport with the world of sense, or be ended definitively by dematerialising and spiritualising the body, according to prescription, so that it disappears in time in a celestial form from the world of sense, and finds its permanent abode in the transcendental glory of God”.1 This immortality is to be achieved by “drinking” the “nectar” dripping from the “moon” in the thousand-petalled lotus, the chakra, or psycho-spiritual centre, believed to be situated above the head.2
It is probable that the Siddha cult evolved out of ancient Indian alchemy, which, like later western alchemy, was not purely a primitive chemistry but was an amalgam of a physical praxis with mystical techniques and speculations having some similarity with those of Tantricism. According to Dr. V. V. Raman Shastri (op. cit.) there was an ancient vernacular tradition that the Siddhas were “a band of death-defying theriacal and therapeutic alchemists indebted in all respects to Bhoga, a pre-Christian Taoist immigrant from China, who, in his methods of keying up the body of impure matter through reverberation and projection to the pitch of practically cancelling demise, merely sought to promulgate the lesser athanasic precepts of Lao-tse, since the vital objective of the Tao-Teh-King is the transfiguration of the immortalised ethereal body into a permanent garment of celestial virtue, in order to fit it to associate to eternity with the Tao”.
It seems probable that the name (Bhoga) of this legendary alchemist was a corruption of the Chinese Bo-yang, one of the titles of Lao-tse, to whose authorship the alchemical classic Tsan-tung-chi (“Doctrine Regarding the Three Similars”)3 was falsely attributed. Whether or not this was so, it is in any case likely that there was a certain amount of truth in the traditional belief that the doctrines of the Siddhas had a Chinese origin, for a sexo-yogic alchemical school putting great emphasis on the prolongation of life survived in China proper until the Communist takeover in 1949, and at the present time it still has living adepts in Hong Kong and amongst the overseas Chinese of South-East Asia.
The date of the origin of alchemy in China is uncertain, but it was clearly very early, tradition averring that it was first practised in the fourth century B.C. by a certain Dzou Yen, a magician whose miracles included ripening millet in a cold climate by playing music on a set of warm pipes.
As early as 144 B.C. an imperial edict forbade the manufacture of alchemical gold—on the ground that unsuccessful experimenters turned to robbery and murder in order to regain the wealth they had squandered—but the prohibition does not seem to have extended to the search for the pill of immortality; for only eleven years after the prohibition the Emperor gave a friendly reception to an alchemist who claimed to have discovered