A student who is new to the tradition recently asked me for some reading recommendations. I’m always a bit stumped when I get this question.

If I were a Buddhist, the question of what to read would pose no problem. uddhists, it seems to me, love logic, argument, and orderliness. I know quite a few “techie” Buddhists. People who spend a lot of time working with computers often feel right at home with Buddhism. Of course, this is a silly generalization, but I hope you enjoyed it.

In any case, there are numerous comprehensive and readable books that lay out the View of the different schools of Buddhism. No so with Indian Tantra.

I once had a student who had ported over from a Daoist teacher. After a time, she felt she had to port herself back to Daoism. Before she left our class, she expressed her concern about all of the weird deities that populate the Tantrik world. Daoism, she thought, only worships Nature. This is true–of both Daoism and Tantra–but her view of nature was humans, animals, trees, mountains, rivers, and so on. No weird other beings. I guess she hadn’t gotten too far into things.

At any rate, we had an interesting in-class discussion about the styles of different non-dual traditions. Reality is what it is, but it likes to dress up in different clothes and throw theme parties. So non-dual Buddhism dresses up in logical progression and order. There’s plenty of weirdness, but only the higher ups get to indulge, along with the few students who can take the chaos. Daoism is the most reserved and cultured guest at the party. And Tantra is the outrageous one.

Being outrageous isn’t so conducive to producing easily digestible, comprehensive texts. Also, Tantra loves to trade in paradoxes. And secrecy. And teasing. And quadruple-quadruple entendres. Reading Tantrik philosophy or Tantrik poetry can light up your brain like a birthday party sparkler. It’s really cool. If you like that sort of thing.

There are some modern books that try to organize the tradition into a digestible form. These books are useful up to a point, but reading them really hammers home what is left out: the actual flavor of the tradition. So, you’ll get a sense of what the tradition says, but not of how it feels, smells, or behaves.

I traveled a long and wacky road in my readings before I really began to get a sense of the tradition. I had been taught some Tantrik practices, but my teacher “forgot” to mention name of what I was doing. So I read nothing for the first five or six years. Then, when I began looking for information, I quickly became overwhelmed. I knew nothing about India, and less than nothing about this crazy, huge, ancient, multi-faceted thing called “Tantra.” I felt I had been dropped onto the surface of another planet with no supplies other than a pack of matches and the tail end of a candle.

The first book I read was this absolute bear of a philosophy book. I hardly understood anything it said, and half of it was in Sanskrit. But I paddled along, and something grabbed me. I recognized that I had finally encountered the real deal. It was terribly exciting. After several years of reading, I felt only minimally oriented to Indian history and culture and to the various expressions of Tantra.

Now, after a dozen years of reading, writing two books about Tantra, and working under the close supervision of a lineage teacher for the past five years, I still feel like an adolescent on the path. I have to say, though, that my reading now is generally in the more poetic vein.

Many of the books and articles that helped me are listed on Living Tantra. Feel free to write to me for more suggestions if you have some idea of what you’d like to learn about. I’m happy to help if I am able. If the philosophy puts you off, you might want to begin with some of the personal narratives. My advice is to start wherever you happen to start, follow that starting point to wherever it takes you, and don’t mind if the bottom drops out of your world now and then. That would be the Tantrik way.

OM Shanti,
Shambhavi

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