On a hot afternoon on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, I sat with my legs crossed and eyes closed trying to keep my attention on the air moving in and out of my nostrils. This was during the ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat.
But my legs kept pulling me away. They had been folded for what felt like forever. Sitting with your legs crossed is hard enough for a few minutes. Try it for ten hours a day. Then add nine days of silence and just two light meals a day.
Meditation is difficult. Stillness is harder still. Left alone, the mind seems to prefer restlessness and agitation may even be its natural state. And yet India has a long, rich tradition of techniques for quieting this monkey mind. They do work for some people. It worked for me too during that retreat, though it took considerable effort.
A central idea in Vipassana is to cultivate stillness by not reacting to your own thoughts and feelings. You simply watch them as passing sensations. They rise in the mind and if you don’t react, they fade on their own.
Another path built on stillness is Yoga, specifically Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the foundational text on the subject. Its second verse defines Yoga as the stilling of the mind.
Traditions like these were mostly practised by ascetics, by people who stepped away from ordinary life, at least for a while. Their central aim was to let go of desire, so they left their homes and cities to find quiet places to meditate.
For most of us, though, this is simply not an option. Imagine asking for ten days off from your job and your family. Walking away from household life is hard. Sitting at home with your eyes closed, watching your breath while the world carries on around you, is harder still.
There is another reason many people struggle with these paths. They leave little room for emotion. But emotion is at the very core of being human. In the stillness traditions, desire was often treated as something dangerous, a force to be overcome and removed.
Running alongside all this, from the age of the Vedas and Upanishads was a parallel tradition. The stillness paths grew out of the same ancient soil but this other current took the opposite view of emotion. Instead of setting feelings aside, it treated them as a form of energy to be used. This was the tradition of Tantra.
It helps to clear up what Tantra is not. Thanks to films and the odd self-styled guru, the word now brings to mind dark rituals or exotic practices. That picture is a caricature, drawn from a few fringe corners and mistaken for the whole. The real tradition is something else entirely. Tantra is one of the great currents of Indian thought, with a vast body of texts, serious philosophy and centuries of practice behind it.
So what is Tantra, in plain words? At heart it is an approach that works with the energy of life rather than against it. Where the stillness traditions try to quiet a strong feeling until it fades, Tantra treats that same feeling as fuel. Anger, fear, longing, grief, love, none of these are seen as enemies to be removed. They are powerful currents of energy and the real skill lies in pointing them in the right direction rather than shutting them down. This is what links Tantra to devotion.
If emotion is energy that can be aimed, then the most natural place to aim it is at something far larger than yourself. When a frightened or grieving person turns their whole heart towards a deity, they are not suppressing what they feel. They are pouring it into a vessel big enough to hold it. That outpouring is bhakti. Seen this way, the simple act of praying at a temple, which millions of Indians do without ever hearing the word Tantra, is the tantric spirit quietly at work in everyday life. When most people feel anxious or overwhelmed, their instinct is to pray, not to sit with their legs crossed in a meditation pose.
Here is another simple way to picture the difference between the two traditions. Imagine a glass of muddy water. The stillness approach keeps the glass perfectly still and lets the mud settle to the bottom. The movement approach shakes the water hard to turn it into something new. It is a little like using snake venom as medicine, taking the very thing that disturbs you and putting it to work.
We carry both natures inside us. People are built differently and depending on their temperament and their circumstances, one path may call to them more than the other. Sometimes both do.
Our culture has woven the two together seamlessly. Yoga itself is the best example. Patanjali describes the eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga. They are Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi. One of these limbs is Asana, or posture, yet only three of the 196 sutras deal with the body. The real weight falls on the final stages, above all Samadhi.
By the 15th century, the emphasis had shifted. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika of Svatmarama leaned heavily into physical postures, even though the ultimate goal stayed the same. Today’s yoga poses come mostly from this book. Here too you can see a quiet drift, from stilling the mind by transcending the body to moving the body with an intent to transform it.
These two currents have always run beneath the surface, subtle and intertwined, because they rest on two basic facts of being alive, stillness and movement. As an Indian, I feel lucky to have had both within reach since childhood. They are stitched into everyday life. There is always a temple nearby where I can pray to my deity and connect through feeling. And there is always a Vipassana centre where I can sit, close my eyes and quiet my mind.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
