What is Tantra?
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Westerns would be forgiven for thinking it's something to do with Kama Sutra, but that's certainly NOT the case. Tantra is a word with a lot of connotation. So if “Sutra” means stitch, or suture (as in a single stitch in a bookbinding), Tantra has connotations of binding, continuity, and even 'spine' in the book context. It's the thread holding those stitches together. But that doesn't actually tell us much.
Rig Veda describes wild renunciates who practice alone. While Gordon White asserts that there's little evidence that Tantra is non-Vedic, the Agamic sources assert an oral lineage that's at least as old as the Vedic contact and synchretism. Frederick Smith – a professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions, views Tantra to be a parallel religious movement to Bhakti movement of the 1st millennium CE. Tantra has been an esoteric, folk movement without grounding.
Tantra means many things; each subsect of Hindi practice has it's own methods of interfacing with Tantra. Some of it involves esoteric sexuality. Slightly more often it's simply a corpus of any given group's occulted or esoteric knowledge. There's Jain tantra, which is asexual, and other groups encode the methods of sacred geometry into tantras. For others it's linguistic knowledge that looks more like Kabbalah than not.
Some of the first reflections of Tantra in history come from the Buddhists. A series of artwork discovered in Gandhara, in modern day Pakistan, dated to be from about 1st century CE, show Buddhist and Hindu monks holding skulls. One of them shows the Buddha sitting in the center, and on his sides a Buddhist monk and a Hindu monk each. The legend corresponding to these artworks is found in Buddhist texts, and describes monks "who tap skulls and forecast the future rebirths of the person to whom that skull belonged".
