"Exotic Orient"

 

    The category “Tantra” is a basic and familiar one today in the vocabulary of most scholars of religions and generally considered one of the most important and controversial forms of Asian religion. In academic discourse, Tantra usually refers to a specific brand of religious practice common to the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions since at least the seventh century; above all, it is identified as a particularly radical and dangerous practice that involves activities normally prohibited in mainstream society, such as sexual intercourse with lower-class partners and consumption of meat and wine. Not surprisingly, given the rather racy nature of the subject, interest in Tantra has skyrocketed in the past two decades in both the popular and scholarly imaginations. On the academic level, Tantra has become one of the hottest topics in the field of South Asian studies, generating a large body of provocative (and often controversial) new scholarship. Still more strikingly, Tantra has also become an object of fascination in the popular imagination, where usually it is defined as “sacred sex” and often is confused with Eastern sexual manuals such as the Kàma SÜtra and Western occult traditions such as Aleister Crowley’s “sex magic.”

     Tantra was quickly singled out as the most horrifying and degenerate aspect of the Indian mind. Identified as the extreme example of all the polytheism and licentiousness believed to have corrupted Hinduism, Tantra was something “too abominable to enter the ears of man and impossible to reveal to a Christian public,” or simply “an array of magic rites drawn from the most ignorant and stupid classes.”4 Yet in our own generation, Tantra has been praised as “a cult of ecstasy, focused on a vision of cosmic sexuality,” and as a much needed celebration of the body, sexuality, and material existence.

     This ambivalence has grown even more intense in our own day. On the one hand, the scholarly literature often laments that Tantra has been woefully neglected in the study of Asian religions as “the unwanted stepchild of Hindu studies.” It would seem that Tantra is anything but neglected in modern discourse. Tantra has become among the most marketable aspects of the “exotic Orient.” Tantra has by no means been repressed or marginalized; on the contrary, like sex itself, Tantra has become the subject of an endless proliferation of discourse and exploited as “the secret.” Tantra represents the ideal religion for contemporary Western society. A religion that seems to combine spirituality with sensuality, and mystical experience with wine, women, and wealth, Tantra could be called the ideal path for spiritual consumers in the strange world of “late capitalism.”

     But despite the contradictory and wildly diverse constructions of Tantra, both popular and scholarly, there is still one key element that all of these imaginings share, namely, the very extremity of Tantra, its radical Otherness, the fact that it is considered to be the most radical aspect of Indian spirituality, the one most diametrically opposed to the modern West.

     The India of Orientalist scholarship was constructed as the quintessential Other in comparison to the West. Conceived as an essentially passionate, irrational, effeminate world, a land of “disorderly imagination,” India was set in opposition to the progressive, rational, masculine, and scientific world of modern Europe.  And Tantra was quickly singled out as India’s darkest, most irrational element— as the Extreme Orient, the most exotic aspect of the exotic Orient itself.

     Tantra is a far messier product of the mirroring and misrepresentation at work between both East and West. It is a dialectical category—similar to what Walter Benjamin has called a dialectical image—born out of the mirroring and mimesis that goes on between Western and Indian minds. Neither simply the result of an indigenous evolution nor a mere Orientalist fabrication, Tantra is a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish fulfillments, at once native and Other, which strikes to the heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and of the contemporary West.

 The moment one hears the word “Tantrism,” various wild and lurid associations spring forth in the Western mind which add up to a pastiche of psychospiritual science fiction and sexual acrobatics that would put to shame the most imaginative of our contemporary pornographers.