Mystic Mantra: The Tantra way of life

The spiritual science of Tantra was born thousand of years ago in India, but it has never been so popular as it is now, specially in the West. There are more Tantra teachers there than in India. In India, it is still thought to be something immoral, hence avoidable. But in the West, it continues to be gaining popularity, though they do not have any such Tantra temples as we have in Khajuraho.

Tantra is a unique alchemical science of transformation of the human energy of a practitioner — from a lower level to a higher level, just as in some mysterious process a piece of coal becomes a real diamond. Tantra has nothing to do with any superstition or with worshipping a God. It neither jantar mantar (magic), as has been misunderstood in India, nor is it indulging in sex as has been widely misunderstood in the West. Both in the East and the West, people have been misguided about Tantra. In the East, people have believed that they will gain some magical powers by practising Tantra and become rich. While in the West, many practitioners have brought it down to the level of kamasutra. In each case, it is the human greed that has been creating illusions in the minds of millions of people.

Tantra is really a deep science, which has its origin in the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra of Shiva and the Buddha’s disciples such as Sri Kirti and Saraha. Osho had reintroduced Tantra with proper perspective by giving his talks on Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, which is the compilation of Shiva’s sutras and the royal song of Saraha who comes from the glorious lineage of the Buddha.

Osho had said: Saraha was born about two centuries after Buddha. He was in the direct line of a different branch. One branch moves from Mahakashyap to Bodhidharma and Zen was born. Another branch moves from Buddha to his son Rahul Bhadra to Sri Kirti to Saraha to Nargarjuna — that is, the Tantra branch. It is still bearing fruit in Tibet. Tantra converted Tibet, and Saraha is the founder of Tantra just as Bodhidharma is the founder of Zen.

Here are a couple of lines from the songs of Saraha, which signify the basic understanding of Tantra: “Bees know that in flowers, honey can be found. That samsara and nirvana are not two. How will the deluded ever understand?”

Tantra has a holistic approach towards life — it does not divide and does not teach to live a fragmented life. All is divine — body-mind-soul — from the physical to the non-physical, from the mundane to the spiritual, from sex to superconsciousness.