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TANTRA
virtuous. Indeed, they had had to cast away the capacity for sinning at the very start, as the first prerequisite of their approach to a guru.28 But in the Tantra, whereas the goal is that of the meditating yogi (not worldly power, such as was sought by the ancient Brāhman conjurers of the forces of the universe, but enlightenment, absolute consciousness, and the beatitude of transcendental being), the manner of approach is that, not of Nay, but of Yea. That is to say, the world-attitude is affirmative, as in the Veda, but the gods are now addressed as dwelling within the microcosm.
Thus it may be said that if the Vedānta seems to represent the conquest of the monistic Āryan Brāhman heritage by the dualist ideology of the pre-Aryan seekers of integration-isolation (kaivalya),29 in the Tantra we are, perhaps, justified in recognizing just the opposite influence: a rerendering of the preĀryan problem of psychophysical transubstantiation in terms of the nondual philosophy of the all-affirmative Brahmanic point of view. Here the candidate for wisdom does not seek a detour by which to circumvent the sphere of the passions-crushing them within himself and shutting his eyes to their manifestations without, until, made clean as an angel, he may safely open his eyes again to regard the cyclone of saṁsāra with the untroubled gaze of a disembodied apparition. Quite the contrary: the Tāntric hero (vīra) goes directly through the sphere of greatest danger.
It is an essential principle of the Tāntric idea that man, in general, must rise through and by means of nature, not by the rejection of nature. "As one falls onto the ground,” the Kularnava Tantra states, “so one must lift oneself by the aid of the ground." 80 The pleasure of love, the pleasure of human feeling, is the bliss of the Goddess in her world-productive dance, the
24 Cf. supra, p. 52. 20 Cf. supra, p. 459. 80 Cited by Woodroffe, op. cit., p. 593.
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