Kissing and Telling 

… the (Tantric guru’s consort) is one whose central space is wide open. The guru should cause the “Clan Object” (gnosis transmitted through his semen) to pass to her alone; and she should cause it pass into males through her orifice … The venerable Kalla˛an›tha has declared a woman to be soaked in an excess of Clan Fluid (i.e. sexual fluids) … This, her principal cakra (i.e. vulva), has been called the “mouth of the Yoginı” by the Lord, because it is there that this transmission of the teachings takes place, and from there that gnosis is obtained. The teaching that cannot be committed to writing is said … to be passed from mouth to mouth. The mouth is the principal cakra. Men who wish to obtain supernatural powers should therefore eat the combined sexual emission (of the guru and the Yogini), and worship with it alone … Furthermore, that emission goes from the “mouth of the Yogini,” into the mouth (of the male practitioner) and back again.
—from Tantr›loka (“Elucidation of the Tantras”).

What is being described here is “tantric sex” as it was understood by one if its greatest theologian-practitioners, the eleventh century Indian polymath Abhinavagupta.

The early tantric record is replete with doctrinal statements like this one, which are also graphically represented in temple sculptures from across much of South Asia. These sculptures generally depict a man (the tantric guru) and a woman (his consort, called the yogini) standing with genitals prominently displayed above a small crouching male figure holding a bowl above his head.

The crouching figure is the male tantric initiate who receives the “fluid gnosis” of Tantra in the form of the sexual fluids dripping from the vulva or “mouth” of the yogini, fluids which he drinks in order to become transformed into a member of a tantric lineage (the “Clan”) and to obtain such supernatural powers as the ability to destroy one’s enemies and the power to fly through the air.

Here, we are far away from the product marketed as “tantric sex”  on Internet websites and in new age boutiques. It was, in fact, my discovery of a video for sale in one such boutique that first piqued my curiosity on the subject. I had just moved to California from the East Coast and was visiting Big Sur when I came across a video with a naked couple locked in steamy embrace on its sleeve and a title that read something like “Secrets of Tantric Sex.” As I came to learn over the years, the self-styled western gurus of the tantric sex trade have, by and large, invented a tradition that never existed, in which delayed or sustained sexual orgasm generates a breakthrough into a higher level of consciousness. While the product that they sell may help people to live better lives, it has no connection whatsoever with Tantra as it was originally practiced in India. Such distorted appropriations of other people’s religions are forms of cultural imperialism that should be condemned as vigorously as political or economic imperialism.

An even closer look

Linked to the person of the yogini, core sexual practices gave medieval Hindu Tantra its specificity, distinguishing it from all other currents of Hindu doctrine and practice. All of the other elements of Hindu Tantra—the use of sacred formulas (mantras), ritual diagrams (mandalas), elaborate visualization, and worship sequences—are found in other Hindu scriptural or sectarian traditions.

This being the case, I decided in 1996 that the “tantric sex” of the yoginı cults was a subject worthy of independent investigation. I had become intrigued with tantric sex while writing a book on Hindu alchemy, a medieval Indian science in which the prime alchemical reagents, mercury and sulfur, were identified as the sexual emissions of the phallic god Siva and his consort the Great Goddess. The same alchemical treatises recommended that the alchemist employ a female laboratory assistant whose principal role was to provide him with the sexual emissions (or menstrual fluid) needed to augment the transmutative power of his mercury, mercury that he could in turn consume both to enhance his own semen production as well as obtain the same sorts of supernatural powers as enjoyed by the tantric practitioners mentioned above. What was it about sexual fluids, I wondered, that led Indian alchemists to value them as “power substances” capable not only of transmuting base metals into gold but also mortal men into immortal supermen? As I came to learn, the answer to this question is a complex one, and Kiss of the Yoginı: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts contains my answers to that question.

One of Hindu Tantra’s principal innovations was to elevate the Great Goddess to the summit of its divine pantheons, pantheons that shaded from the divine to the human precisely at the level of the yogini, the T superhuman female entity (embodied in a human woman) who transferred the “germ plasm” of the Great Goddess, contained in her sexual emissions, from her “mouth” into that of a human male initiate. In order for her to be both the “mother” and “father” of the tantric lineages, the Great Goddess had to be the bearer of both male and female sexual fluids. This is what certain tantric scriptures state in no uncertain terms when it calls her “Goddess Semen” or “She Whose Menses is Semen.”  

What this means is that, while the theoreticians of Hindu Tantra were able to remove the usual male gods from the summit of their pantheons, their shifting metaphysics could not function without male sexual fluids. What changed was that it was a goddess, and not a god, who “wore the pants.” (The role of the male guru in tantric initiations does not undercut the supremacy of the Goddess, since the male guru himself had, in an earlier time, ingested her germ plasm in his initiation. In other words, his semen also contained her feminine sexual fluids).

Without exception, every tantric scripture and commentary that has come down to us is written from a male perspective, by males and for males. Even as they exalt the female sex and supernatural female entities, their goal is to instrumentalize women, who remain the source of the fluids that they, as men, genetically lack. As such, the Hindu tantric scriptures are a record of early medieval Indian male attitudes toward the mysteries of the “Wholly Other.”

The “Wholly Other” was the female organism, a locus of both fascination and terror of which the distillate was female sexual fluids. Long before the advent of Tantra, both the blood of defloration and menstrual blood were considered to be lethal substances, giving rise to all manner of prohibitions and male defensive strategies that continue down to the present day in South Asia.

This in particular is what made Tantra such a dangerous path to power, that only a seasoned tantric virtuoso, appropriately called a Virile Hero (vira), would dare to undertake. Yet, at the same time, the men, by and for whom the tantric scriptures were written, were fully aware of the life-giving and nurturing power of women’s bodily fluids.

Here, South Asian understandings were quite identical to those of Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci (as found in his illustrations of female anatomy).  To begin, the body of a woman was considered to be naturally “soaked in an excess of … fluid” that irrigated her reproductive system. Following conception, this fluid was transformed into the white “uterine milk” with which she nourished the embryo inside her womb. Following childbirth, she would feed her infant with that same fluid, now channeled up from the womb to the breasts through two subtle ducts, in the form of breast milk. When “wasted” by not being used to nourish an embryo or infant, the same fluid would redden inside a woman’s body, to be discharged in the form of menstrual blood. The emissions of female orgasm were yet another transformation of a woman’s fluid, although it is difficult to know on the basis of Sanskrit terminology which precise fluid is being described: the term rajas is employed for both sexual emissions and menstrual fluid.

A song from an eighth century Buddhist tantric anthology vividly expresses this ambiguity:

Pressing the triangle [of the pubis], give, O Yoginı, an embrace; in the rubbing of Lotus [vulva] and Thunderbolt [penis], bring on the evening.

O Yoginı, without you I cannot live for a moment; having kissed your mouth, I drink the juice of the Lotus!

Given the fact that the tantric scriptures often call for the performance of rites involving “tantric sex” during a woman’s menses, the “juice of the lotus” may be either the yoginı’s red menstrual blood or her clear sexual emissions. In either case, the “kissing” this poem is describing is also a “telling” inasmuch as it constitutes the transmission of a tantric gnosis that cannot be committed to writing because it is always already inscribed female fluids.

David Gordon White is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the past fifteen years, his research and writing have been focused on the South Asian Hindu traditions of alchemy, yoga, and Tantra. In addition to Kiss of the Yogini, he is also the author of The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (University of Chicago Press, 1996).  His first book, Myths of the Dog-Man (University of Chicago Press: 1991), was listed as one of the “Books of the Year” in the 1991 Times Literary Supplement. A new book, entitled Sinister Yogis is forthcoming (2008) from the University of Chicago Press.