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A Third Path

From the first centuries of the Common Era, a mystical path whose roots date back at least as far as 3000 B.C.E. revolutionized Hinduism and certain schools of Buddhism. At the time all these traditions were permeated with a fairly acute puritanism and with a striking exclusion of women at the highest levels.

This third path is called Kashmiri Shaivism. Born in the Indus valley five or six thousand years ago, it underwent its most spectacular development in Kashmir and Oddiyana (a neighboring kingdom) and reached its peak between the seventh and thirteenth centuries A.D. Tibetan and Chinese masters of Buddhism and the Indians of the various traditions came to drink from the source in close proximity with the yoginis, women of knowledge who taught the path of the whole person, and with the Siddhas, realized or perfected men and women.

This path, of incomparable depth and subtlety, has nothing to do with the product that the West has commercialized under the name Tantra. It is a path whereby a person evolves through sensorality and consciousness. It stands in opposition to both the hedonistic sexual quest and the ascetic spiritual quest because it reunites the totality of the person. It is these profound teachings that I propose to introduce to you so that you may discover how to put them into practice in the setting of everyday life—finding joy, ecstasy, and autonomy through being present to reality.

Can that be called perfect knowledge . . .
If one is not released while enjoying the pleasures of sense?²

sings Saraha, one of the Buddhist masters who lived sometime between the second and seventh centuries. Saraha became the disciple of a yogini accomplished in the art of shooting arrows into the hearts of people. She belonged to the sahajiya school—“awakened adepts of spontaneity.” Returning the senses, desires, passions, emotions, and sexuality to the spiritual being is the most profound and the most audacious inner adventure ever imagined by these Buddhist, Hindu, and Kashmiri Tantric masters.

In the beginning the Tantric movement distinctly dissociated itself from the puritan orthodox traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. It produced such great masters—philosophers, poets, and artists—that Tantric creativity profoundly influenced both the various Great Vehicle Buddhist schools and Hinduism. Numerous historical masters discreetly adhered to the Tantric views. The Vedanta philosopher Shankara, for instance, was a Tantric master. Contemporary Indian figures such as Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and Ramana Maharshi—they too were tantrikas. All of Tibetan Buddhism is profoundly Tantric; Chinese Ch’an is permeated with this thinking to such a degree that a female contemporary, master Yuan-tchao, declares that “tantric practise was the crowning of Ch’an.”³Dzogchen has equally influenced and been influenced by Kashmiri Shaivism.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Small Vehicle Buddhism, and Hinduism all teach us that we must abandon or sublimate desires and passions in order to carry out a spiritual quest. This puritan position has historically been accompanied by the partial or total exclusion of women from the highest level, that of transmission and teaching.

The different Tantric schools, however, completely reject all formalism, dogmatism, puritanism, eviction of women, and existence of castes. They place the spiritual and mystical path in the social context by abolishing all differences between people. I believe that this profound revolution will blossom into unprecedented creativity in the mystical, scientific, and artistic arenas, a creativity in which each person regains her unity in the total acceptance of her nature.

Far from paving a way that extols the egoistic search for pleasure, the masters of these schools encourage us, through a refined yet playful discipline, not to cut off anything that makes us human, so that we may find a profound way to live our desires and passions by taking them to their ultimate point of incandescence. Attachment and suffering disappear when, as Saraha sings:

The faculties of sense subside,
And the notion of self is destroyed.
Such is the Body Innate.⁴

It is this path—with neither negation nor transcendence—that I have been exploring for thirty years, first with my Tibetan master Kalou Rinpoche, then with my Kashmiri Shaiva master the yogini Lalita Devi. I received permission from the latter to transmit to you this direct and spatial path, that of the recognition of the Self (Pratyabhijñâ).

Reintegrating desire, the senses, and passion with spirituality is the only serious antidote to religious and sectarian madness or to generalized materialism, because nothing terrifies their adherents as much as these words and the incandescence they point to. These people have a holy horror of anything that cannot be controlled, taken over, or subjugated. And today our desire, our passion, is to find absolute freedom, love, and plenitude without being bound hand and foot. We want to leave behind our ancestral guilt and accept the body wholly: It is our only door into infinite reality. Without the body, we would be nothing. With it, we can be everything.

The American ethnologist Gregory Bateson has also ventured into this complex terrain, which today fascinates a good number of scientists. It consists, Bateson writes, of

explor[ing] whether there is a sane and valid place for religion somewhere between these two nightmares [the material and the supernatural] of nonsense. . . . I regard the conventional views of mind, matter, thought, and materialism, as totally unacceptable. I repudiate contemporary materialism as strongly as I repudiate the fashionable hankering after the supernatural.⁵