| Welcome to From the Academy, a monthly newsletter for Premium subscribers offering a scholarly take on topics in Buddhist thought and practice. Each issue highlights a key theme and points to further readings and videos for exploration, developed in collaboration with Tricycle’s resident Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar. |
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 | An image of Dainichi Nyorai (Mahavairocana), the cosmic buddha at the center of Japanese esoteric Buddhism. The untrained eye would not call this “tantric,” but his cult is rooted in some of the earliest Buddhist tantras transmitted from India to East Asia. Unknown maker (ca. 1150–1200), Heian period. | RISD Museum / public domain |
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In a recent Tricycle podcast, scholar and Shingon Buddhist priest Richard Payne discusses his new book, Tantra Across the Buddhist Cosmopolis, which challenges a common assumption: that tantra occupies Buddhism’s margins. Often associated with secrecy and esoteric transmission, tantric forms are, in fact, widespread. Even where tantra’s imprint is minimized or ignored, most schools of Buddhism have been touched by tantric thought and ritual. |
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Plus: Don't miss an upcoming Premium event with Payne to learn more about tantra and his new book. Sign up for free here. |
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A Pan-Asian Footprint
Tantra did not originate with Buddhism. It developed within the broader Indian ritual landscape, drawing on Vedic traditions and taking a distinctive form in Shaiva and Vaishnava communities. Buddhist tantric scriptures began to appear around the mid-7th century. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (602–664) walked thousands of miles across Asia during this time, recording ritual practices in India that later scholars identify as proto-tantric. These were similar to Mahayana rituals but differed significantly from the more elaborate tantric systems of later centuries.
Buddhist tantras range from the early kriya and yoga texts, which focus on purity and ritual efficacy, to the later mahayoga and yogini scriptures, which employ deliberately transgressive sexual and violent imagery. Developing alongside Indian political culture—where the mandala served as a model of divine sovereignty—these traditions eventually spread throughout Buddhist Asia. New commentaries and ritual liturgies continued to emerge in response to changing historical and cultural contexts. |
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So What Is Tantra?
Given its diversity, tantra has long resisted easy definition. The term—derived from the Sanskrit root meaning to extend or to weave—refers to scriptures that present embodied ritual and contemplative techniques as the path to awakening. Where earlier renunciant traditions often treated worldly life as an obstacle, tantric systems reframed the body, desire, and ritual action as potential vehicles for liberation. In deity yoga, for example, the practitioner transforms the phenomenal world from within by assuming the deity’s body, speech, and mind.
For its adherents, tantric practice represents Buddhism’s most direct path to enlightenment. Others, however, have viewed it as a corruption of the Buddha’s original teachings, and in some regions its influence has been intentionally downplayed or obscured. Assessments of tantra have often depended on whether one stood inside the tradition or outside it. |
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 | The sexual imagery of tantric art symbolizes the union of wisdom and compassion, though early European observers interpreted such images as evidence of decadence or moral corruption. Chakrasamvara with Vajravarahi (ca. 1450–1500), Sakya Order, Central Tibet. | The Vincent Astor Foundation and the Zimmerman Family Gifts, the Met / public domain. |
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Through a Western Lens
European observers who first encountered tantric images—often sexual or wrathful—cast them as demonic, sometimes using that characterization to justify colonial rule. Tibetan Buddhism was polemically framed as a deviant form of Roman Catholicism, its saints described as wayward missionaries. Later scholars positioned tantra as a degenerate foil for what they defined as “true” Buddhism, grounded in meditation and rational philosophy.
These distortions proved durable, shaping perceptions of tantra well into the 20th century. In popular culture, tantra is still frequently reduced to sex. While sexual imagery and rites do appear in certain tantric traditions, detractors often emphasize them out of traditional proportion. Such readings reveal more about Western anxieties and assumptions than about tantric Buddhism. |
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Closer Than You Think
Archaeological discoveries and newly uncovered manuscripts continue to demonstrate tantra’s historical reach across the Asian Buddhist world. Many tantric schools remain vibrant, from Newar Buddhism in Nepal to Shingon and Tendai in Japan, and others—especially Tibetan traditions—have spread far beyond their homelands. As these lineages enter new cultural spheres, some elements are preserved, while others are adapted.
Richard Payne’s work underscores how wide-ranging tantra has been; it cannot be captured by a single text or defining principle. Its ritual technologies and yogic principles became embedded in major Buddhist lineages across Asia. Because Buddhism, writ large, was shaped by tantra, even those who don’t consider themselves tantric may find that its legacy likely runs through their own practice. To understand tantra, it must be seen in context—and the same is true of Buddhism itself. |
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Additional Material- Kate Crosby, “Why Does Traditional Theravada Meditation Look Like Tantra?” Video lecture, Mangalam Research Center, 2019. Crosby argues that premodern forms of Theravada meditation incorporated tantric practices that were later marginalized by reform movements that privileged textual study and insight meditation.
- Jacob Dalton, “The Goodman Lectures: Tibetan Tantra at Dunhuang.” Video lecture, Khyentse Foundation, 2021. Dalton examines tantric ritual manuals from the Dunhuang manuscript cache—some of the earliest Tibetan-language Buddhist texts—and explains what they reveal about the formative years of tantra in Tibetan Buddhism.
- David B. Gray, “Tantra and the Tantric Traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, 2016. Gray surveys the historical emergence of tantric traditions in Hindu and Buddhist contexts, clarifies common misconceptions, and traces their ritual, doctrinal, and transregional impact in Asia.
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