At one time, at the edge of an Indian town, in a garden where nobody went, an old man sat in a hut of grass.
He had been the best weaver in the town. He had built a business out of cotton and silk, and when he grew old he had handed it to his sons. Then his wife died, and he aged all at once. His mind loosened, and his sons, who found him a nuisance, moved him out of the house and into the garden shed. A wandering yogin found him there, saw what he was, and gave him the teaching. For twelve years the old man practised in secret, where the sun came through the grass walls in thin lines. One morning he walked out of the hut as a young man of sixteen. His body shone like a polished mirror.
He went back to his loom and began to weave. While he wove he sang, and the song was remembered:
The ordinary weaver lays out warp and weft. I, taught by my guru, weave the strands of my own experience. My thread is the emptiness of fivefold awareness. My loom is perfect insight into emptiness. The cloth that comes off it is the body of reality.
The tradition remembers him by his trade. In India he is Tantipa, and in Tibet Thags mkhan, which means “the Weaver”. His name is the word we are going to follow.
The tantras themselves say that a tantra is complete when it has five perfections: a perfect place, a perfect Teacher, a perfect retinue, a perfect teaching and a perfect time. All five are already in the story. The place is a hut of grass, which is also the loom, which is also the sky. The Teacher is an old weaver. The retinue is everyone who ever held a thread: the seers, the sages, the grammarians, the Buddha and his monks, the masters of the Great Vehicle, the potters and washermen and hunters who became siddhas, the sky-goers who weave in space, and the Omniscient Longchenpa, who gathered the whole inheritance into one great sheet. The teaching is a single word. And the time is now, whenever the thread is picked up.
The tantras also say how a tantra is to be explained. It is explained in five ways: by the meaning of the root, of the gate, of the purpose, of the words, and of the history. Here the word tantra will be explained in those five ways, in that order.
I. The Meaning of the Root
What is a tantra?
A thread that is stretched.
And what is stretched?
Whatever continues. The warp on a loom continues from one end of the cloth to the other. The line of teachers continues from the first teacher to the one who is teaching now. A mind continues from moment to moment. The nature of that mind continues from the beginning through every state it ever passes through.
And what is it that continues in all of these?
Awareness. It is the same thread whether it runs through a cloth, a lineage, a mind or a life.
And what is awareness?
Light that knows itself.
That is the whole history of the word in five questions. A piece of wood on which a thread was stretched became the name of a book. The book became the name of a path. The path became the name of the continuity that runs from the ground to the fruit. And the continuity turned out to be the very nature of mind, which the Great Perfection calls the Vajra Chain and which it says was never broken. A loom becomes a book, a book becomes a way, a way becomes a thread of light, and the thread is the reader.
One further thing about the root can be seen at once by anyone who has watched a weaver. A loom has three parts, and each is a different kind of thread.
The first is the warp. These are the long threads stretched tight from one end of the frame to the other, before any cloth exists. They do not move. They wait. The weaver does not make them, he only stretches them, and everything that will ever be woven rests on them.
The second is the weft. This is the thread that moves. It is carried back and forth across the warp on the shuttle, over one thread and under the next, over and under, forward and back. A cloth cannot be made without it.
The third is the cloth itself, which is neither the warp nor the weft but what appears when the two meet.
Now remember what the Buddhist tantras say a tantra is. It is a continuity with three parts: the ground, the path and the fruit. The ground does not move. It is simply there, stretched from the beginning. The path is what moves: the practice, the shuttle, the going forward and back. The fruit is the cloth that appears when the moving meets the still. The Veda told the weavers of the sacrifice to “weave forward, weave back”. The Tibetan masters say that the ground, the path and the fruit are one tantra. It is offered here as a reading and not as a citation, but it is hard to miss: the doctrine of the three continua is a description of a loom.
II. The Meaning of the Gate
How does one enter a tantra?
Not as a visitor enters a museum, and not as a believer enters a church. One enters it as a weaver enters a loom, with the hands.
The Tantra of the Union of the Sun and Moon is blunt about this. It says that for a tantra to give its meaning, one must be fit for it and not “used to taking objects of focus”, for to such a person “the tantras become fragments”. A mind that grasps cuts the thread into pieces and then holds the pieces, and no cloth ever appears. The same tantra says, in a line that has surprised every reader who has met it, that in this tantra there is no meditation. To a mind that has become familiar beforehand, liberation comes in the interval between the two births. The tantra asks for familiarity and not effort. A person does not make a thread by trying hard. A person recognises one.
There is a lovely detail in the craft of weaving that serves as a gate. When a weaver prepares to throw the shuttle, he does not push the weft between the threads. He raises half of the warp threads and lowers the other half. A gap opens between them, a clear open space running across the whole width of the loom, and this gap is called the shed. The shuttle simply passes through. The cloth is made of repeated openings. The weaver’s whole art is the making of a space and the passing of a thread through it, again and again, until the space has been filled with a pattern.
The tradition has an old word for a gateway, and the word is sgo. The gate of the tantra is a shed: a space opened between what rises and what falls, through which the thread of awareness passes. The student’s part is to let the space open. Everything else is done by the thread.
III. The Meaning of the Purpose
Why weave?
There is a verse from the tradition of the Kāmika Āgama that has been repeated for a thousand years as the answer, and it is an answer built from the word itself:
tanoti vipulān arthān tattvamantrasamanvitān
trāṇaṃ ca kurute yasmāt tantram ity abhidhīyate
“Because it stretches out great meanings joined with the principles and mantras,
and because it protects, it is called tantra.”
The word is read in two halves. Tan is to stretch and extend. Trā is to protect and to save. A loom does both. It stretches threads and spreads meaning across a surface, and what it makes is a cloth. A cloth is the first human mercy. It covers the naked, wraps the newborn, and shrouds the dead. A tantra, on this old reading, does for the mind what a cloth does for the body.
The Buddhist tradition gives its own account of the same two halves, and the Tibetan form of it is exact. The word mantra, in Tibetan sngags, is explained as that which protects the mind. The word tantra, rgyud, is explained as that which does not break. A tantra is the unbroken thread. A mantra guards the mind that works at it. Together they are the whole of Secret Mantra: a mind that is kept safe, and a thread that is not cut.
The purpose of the thread is that nobody is left out. This is the extraordinary claim at the centre of the tradition. The Union of the Sun and Moon declares that in every living being, in every collection of a body, the cause of nirvāṇa abides without any difference from all the buddhas of the three times. The Great Vehicle’s treatise on buddha-nature says that the seed of awakening is present in every being, in the monk and the murderer alike. The purpose of a tantra is to show that there is a single unbroken thread, and that every being is on it.
IV. The Meaning of the Words
What did the word mean, when it was a word?
A word this old has many lives, and each of them is worth holding in the hand. Here they are, one at a time.
Tan, the root. The Sanskrit root √tan means to stretch, to spread, to extend. It gives the verb tanoti, “he stretches”, and the prayer-form tanotu, “let him stretch”. It is a cousin of the Greek teínō, the Latin tendere, and the English words tension, tendon and tent. All of them go back to the gesture of drawing a line taut.
Tra, the instrument. The suffix -tra makes the names of tools. Mantra is the tool of thinking, from √man, “to think”. Yantra is the tool of holding, from √yam, “to restrain”. Tantra is the tool of stretching, and in a world that made its own cloth, the tool of stretching was the loom. The three words are the triad of the contemplative craft: a tool for the mind, a tool to hold it still, and a tool to weave what the mind has gathered.
Tantu, the thread. From the same root comes tantu, the single thread, which is also a thread of lineage and of continuity. In the Taittirīya Upaniṣad the teacher, as his student leaves him, gives a charge to be remembered: prajātantuṃ mā vyavacchetsīḥ, do not cut the thread of your line.
Sūtra, the sewn thread. Next to tantra stands its sister word sūtra, from √siv, “to sew”. A sūtra is the thread on which meanings are strung like flowers, and a tantra is the loom on which many threads are held. The Buddha’s discourses are sūtras, and a later class of his scriptures are tantras. The Buddhist canon preserves a sewing and a weaving. Latin has its own version of the same thought: the word textus, from which English gets text, means “something woven”.
Tantrī, the string. The form tantrī is the string of a lute. In Pāli the same word is tanti, and a tantissara is the sound of a string. Tantidhara, in Pāli, is “bearer of the tradition”. Tibetan keeps the whole family in the single word rgyud, which is the string of an instrument and also a line of teachers. A tantra is a string that sounds when it is struck.
Rgyud, the Tibetan word. When the Tibetan translators met the Sanskrit tantra, they chose rgyud, and the choice was brilliant. Rgyud means a thread, a string, a lineage (brgyud pa), a mind-stream (sems rgyud, the Tibetan for citta-saṃtāna), and the unbroken continuity (rgyun mi ‘chad pa) of any flow. The commentators say it means that which does not break. One Tibetan word holds the loom, the lute, the line of masters, the stream of a mind, the book, and the buddha-nature.
Kalpa, the fashioning. The earliest Buddhist tantras call themselves kalpas, and the word is from √kḷp, to fashion, to arrange, to make fit. A kalpa is also an aeon, the great cycle in which a world is fashioned. The Tibetans translated kalpa as rtog pa, the ordinary word for conceptual thought.
Jāla, the net. The Sanskrit jāla, a net, appears in titles of the Mahāyoga and of the mother tantras. The Tibetan is drva ba, and the net is, as we shall see, one of the oldest and strangest images in the whole story.
That is a garland of meanings, and the garland is the point. Nobody in the tradition ever asked the word to give up any of them. Hold them all at once and the history that follows will read itself.
V. The Meaning of the History
1. The First Loom
The oldest book of the Indian world is the Ṛgveda. The word tantra appears in it, and it appears in a hymn about speech.
Hymn 10.71 describes the beginning of language. Brihaspati, it says, set going the first beginning of speech, when the first names were given. The wise fashioned speech with the mind and sifted it, as grain is sifted through a sieve. They followed the track of speech by sacrifice, and they found it dwelling in the seers. Then, in the ninth verse, the hymn speaks of people who have reached the Word in the wrong way, ignorant and barren:
sirīs tantraṃ tanvate
“They spin out the thread, like weavers.”
That is the earliest use of the word in any Indian text, and it is already doing the work it will do for three thousand years. The Word is the fibre. A man who has not understood it nonetheless spins it out into a thread, because that is what speech does. It stretches.
Another hymn, 10.53, speaks to the priests who tend the fire, and it gives them an instruction in the sixth verse that sounds like a verse from a tantra:
tantuṃ tanvan rajaso bhānum anv ihi,
jyotiṣmataḥ patho rakṣa dhiyā kṛtān
“Stretching out the thread, follow the light of the middle air.
Guard the shining paths made by thought.”
Let us read it slowly. There is a thread, and it is being stretched. There is a light, and it is being followed. There are paths, and they are made by thought, and they are shining, and they must be guarded. The verse goes on to ask that the song be woven without a roughness. In one sentence, three thousand years before any Buddhist tantra, a Vedic poet has put down the whole vocabulary: thread, light, path, thought, protection, weaving.
The greatest of the weaving hymns is 10.130, and its subject is the sacrifice itself. The sacrifice, it says, is a cloth.
yo yajño viśvatas tantubhis tataḥ
“The sacrifice, stretched out on every side with threads.”
It is stretched, the hymn says, with a hundred and one divine works. The fathers, the ancient seers, are weaving it. They sit beside the stretched warp saying, “Weave forward, weave back.” A man stretches it, and a man draws it out, here beneath the vault of the sky. And then, in the sixth verse of the same hymn, the poet says that by this sacrifice the seers and the men and the ancient fathers cākḷpre, they fashioned the world. The root is √kḷp, the same root that will later give the name kalpa to the first tantras of the Buddhists. The Veda fashions and weaves in a single breath, and the two verbs are the two hands of one craft.
So the first loom was built in the sky. Its warp was the thread of the sacrifice, stretched from the earth to the heavens. Its weavers were the seers, and its cloth was the world that the seers fashioned. A little later, in the Brāhmaṇa literature, the word settles into the ordinary meanings of loom and warp, and in the Mīmāṃsā it will come to mean a single ritual act that serves many purposes at once, one thread holding many offerings.
2. The Universe on a Loom
The Upaniṣads take the loom and put the whole of existence on it.
There is a scene in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka that every student of the tradition remembers. The sage Yājñavalkya is being questioned by Gārgī, a woman of great learning, before an assembly of brahmins. She asks him what the earth is woven upon, and he answers: on water. She asks what water is woven upon, and he says: on wind. And wind on the atmosphere, and the atmosphere on the worlds of the sun and the moon, and so up through the worlds, each one the warp and weft of the next, until she asks the last question, what the highest world is woven upon. He warns her that she is asking too much, that her head will fall off if she does not stop. She asks again, and the answer is:
etasmin khalv akṣare gārgy ākāśa otaś ca protaś ca
“On this Imperishable, Gārgī, space itself is woven, warp and weft.”
Ota and prota are the lengthwise and the crosswise thread. Even space, which everyone assumed was the place where things are, is a woven thing, and it is woven on the Imperishable. The loom is not in the sky. The sky is on the loom.
The same Upaniṣad has another vision of the universe held by a single cord. In the passage on the Inner Controller, Yājñavalkya says that the wind is the thread by which this world, the other world and all beings are bound together. The Muṇḍaka speaks of the one in whom heaven, earth and the atmosphere are woven, together with the mind and all the vital breaths, and says he is to be known as the Self. In the Bhagavadgītā the master says that all this is strung on him like a cluster of jewels on a thread.
The Upaniṣads also supply the weaver. The spider, which draws a web from its own body and draws it back in again, is the favourite figure. The Muṇḍaka says that as a spider sends out its thread and takes it in, so the world comes forth from the Imperishable and returns to it. The Śvetāśvatara speaks of the one Deity who covers himself with threads born of his own nature, like a spider. The universe is a web, and the weaver is the one who is woven.
This is the first great turn in the history of the word. In the Veda the loom is a ritual instrument. In the Upaniṣads it is the structure of all that exists, and the weaver is the ground of being.
3. The Grammarian’s Loom
By the time of Pāṇini, perhaps the fifth century before the common era, tantra is an ordinary word of the language. His rules give a form for cloth just taken off the loom, built on tantra (5.2.70). He also gives the most famous definition in Indian grammar. The agent of an action, he says, is the one who is svatantra: svatantraḥ kartā (1.4.54). The agent is the one who is independent.
Svatantra is sva plus tantra: “having one’s own tantra”. The independent one is the one who holds together by his own warp, who is self-woven. When the Śaiva philosophers of Kashmir, a thousand years afterwards, build their philosophy on svātantrya, the freedom of consciousness to act as it wills, they stand on this grammatical ground. Freedom, in the oldest understanding of the Sanskrit language, is the freedom of a thing that holds itself together.
By the classical period, tantra has taken a second great meaning, which is system. Śaṅkara calls the Sāṃkhya philosophy a tantra; he also calls the Upaniṣad a tantra. The medical treatises and Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra list thirty-two tantra-yuktis, the devices by which a treatise is put together and expounded. The great surgical treatise of Suśruta ends with a section called the Uttaratantra, the “Later Treatise”. The word has moved from the loom to the book, from the thing that holds threads to the thing that holds knowledge in order. And the name Uttaratantra has been given to the last part of a great Indian work. Let us keep it in mind.
4. The Tangled Skein
The Buddha lived in a world in which all of this was in the air, and he took the thread and used it in the way that was most needed. He used it to describe saṃsāra.
In the Mahānidāna Sutta, Ānanda says to the Buddha that dependent arising seems clear to him. The Buddha answers: do not say so. It is deep, and it appears deep. Because beings do not understand and do not penetrate it, this generation has become tantākulakajātā, like a tangled skein, like a knotted ball of thread, like matted reeds and rushes, and does not get beyond the lower realms and the round of birth and death. It is a very plain image, and anyone who has tried to unpick a bird’s nest of yarn knows what it means. Saṃsāra is a snarl. The same thread that could have been cloth has been pulled in a hundred directions at once and has knotted on itself.
The Dhammapada gives the sharpest version (verse 347). Those who are infatuated with passion, it says, follow the stream like a spider along its own self-made web. The wise, having cut even this, go on, unattached, leaving all suffering behind. The spider of the Upaniṣads, the Self weaving the world, has become the spider of grasping, caught in what it has made. The Brahmajāla Sutta, the Net of Brahmā, completes the picture. The Buddha says that every possible view about the world and the self is caught in this net, like all the fish in a pond under the net of a skilled fisherman.
So for the first Buddhists, the thread, the web and the net were all pictures of bondage. The Pāli language has the whole family of words, tanta, tantavāya the weaver, tanti the lute string, tantidhara the bearer of tradition, tanoti he stretches. But the Buddha does not call his own teaching a tantra. His teaching is a sutta, a thread, and the thread he gives is the one that leads out of the tangle.
Here is the question this part of the history leaves behind, and everything after it is an answer. If the thread tangles us, what is the thread that unties us? Is it a different thread, or the same one woven another way?
5. The Net of Jewels
The Great Vehicle answered that it is the same thread. It took the net, which had been a trap, and turned it into a mirror.
The Atharvaveda (8.8.8) knows a net of Indra, an indrajāla, a great net with which the king of the gods traps his enemies. It is a weapon. In the Mahābhārata the same word names a weapon of Arjuna. The Sanskrit word indrajāla also came to mean magic and conjuring, because a net of that kind catches the eye.
The Avataṃsaka Sūtra, the Flower Garland, one of the largest and most luminous of the Great Vehicle’s scriptures, took this net and gave it a new meaning. It is full of nets of jewels, and over the palace of Indra it hangs a net that is infinite in every direction. At every knot of the net there is a jewel. Each jewel reflects every other jewel in the net. In each of the reflected jewels, all the others are reflected again, and in those reflections again, and so on without end. The Chinese Huayan masters Dushun and Fazang, in the seventh century, built a whole philosophy on this image, the philosophy of a universe in which every part contains the whole, with no centre and no edge.
The net that had been a snare was now the picture of the way things are: each thing a jewel, each jewel holding all the rest. The trap had become the sky.
The Great Vehicle gave the net another form, and it is the one nearest to our word. The pilgrim Sudhana, in the Gaṇḍavyūha, travels from teacher to teacher across a continent, and at the end Maitreya shows him a tower, a great house, and Sudhana goes in. The house opens into endless other towers, each of which contains endless others. There the thread of the pilgrimage and the net of the jewels become one thing: a path through a space that turns out to be a web.
6. The Continuum
There is another strand in the Great Vehicle, quieter than the net and closer to the heart of our word.
In the great treatise on buddha-nature, attributed to Maitreya and Asaṅga, the title in full is the Ratnagotravibhāga Mahāyānottaratantraśāstra. The Tibetans call it the Rgyud bla ma. It is the book that teaches that every being has the womb of the Tathāgata, the seed of awakening, and that this seed runs without a break through all beings, in the sinner as in the saint. What does tantra mean in the title? The first answer is the one the Suśruta has already given us: uttaratantra is “the later treatise”, “the supreme doctrine”, a system that completes a body of teaching.
But the Tibetan commentators saw something more. Rongtön and Gö Lotsāwa read the title as “the supreme continuity”, a continuous flow. And Mipham, in his commentary, ties the name of the treatise explicitly to the tantra of Secret Mantra. They had good reason. The doctrine of the book is that there is an unbroken thread. The word they chose for it, rgyud, is the thread, the lineage, the mind-stream. In the treatise on buddha-nature, a tantra is no longer a book at all. It is the thing the book is about: the unbroken continuity of the awakened nature through every state of every being.
So a century or two before the first Buddhist tantras, the Great Vehicle had already decided what the word would mean. A tantra was the supreme continuity: a thread that cannot be cut, because it is what each being is.
7. The Art of Fashioning
The earliest Buddhist texts that scholars call tantric do not yet call themselves tantras. They call themselves kalpas. The Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa is “the Root Kalpa of Mañjuśrī”. The Guhyasamāja, which stands at the root of so much of the later tradition, carries in its full title the words mahākalparāja, “the great king of kalpas”. There is a whole genre of Buddhist kalparājas.
Kalpa is fashinoe from √kḷp, the same root that fashioned the world in the Vedic hymn of the weaving sacrifice. It means to arrange, to fashion, to make fit. In the Vedic tradition a kalpa is the manual of the sacrifice, the exact arrangement of its parts. As a measure of time a kalpa is the aeon, a whole cycle of a world’s making and unmaking. As kalpanā it is imagination, the faculty that fashions pictures in the mind.
Now let us see what the Tibetan translators did. They rendered kalpa as rtog pa, which is the ordinary Tibetan word for conceptual thought, the very thing the Buddhist path has been trying to quiet for a thousand years. The Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa became ‘jam dpal gyi rtsa ba’i rtog pa, and the “great king of kalpas” became rtog pa’i rgyal po chen po, the great king of conceptual fashioning. The root that Buddhism condemns in its negative form, vikalpa, the dividing of experience into a knower and a known, is the root of the word that names the greatest tantric scriptures.
That was not a mistake, and it was not a joke. It is the central discovery of Secret Mantra. The faculty of the mind that builds saṃsāra out of misconception, which is the same faculty that tangled the skein, can be taken back into the hands of one who understands it. The practitioner of the generation stage envisions a palace, a deity and a whole world of ornaments and light, with every detail in place, and knows at every moment that it is a fashioning, that nothing in it is fixed. The great masters could fashion reality because they had seen that reality was fashioned. They sat at the same loom as everyone else, but they sat at it with open eyes.
In the weaving hymn of the Veda, the thread and the fashioning were two hands of one craft. In the Secret Mantra the two hands have met again.
8. The Tantras Take the Word
By about the eighth century, a new class of Buddhist scriptures had grown up, and as it grew the word kalpa in the titles gave way to tantra. The Guhyasamāja, the Hevajra, the Cakrasaṃvara and a great many others took the word as their own, and in Tibet it was always translated rgyud. The tantras were arranged in classes, in the Nyingma school in the nine vehicles and in the other schools in four classes and in father, mother and non-dual tantras, but all of them were rgyud.
And the tantras said what the word meant. The Guhyasamāja tradition says that tantra is prabandha, continuity, and that the continuity is threefold: ground, path and fruit. The ground is the buddha-nature that every being has now, the cause. The path is the skilful method by which it is realised. The fruit is the full awakening in which the ground is seen as it has always been.
The great Tibetan commentators put it in many words but always in these terms. Kongtrul says that tantra means “continuum, like a stream”, of which there are three kinds, the base, the path and the fruit, and that the base tantra is the person who is practising. Dodrupchen Jigme Tenpe Nyima says that the tantra of the ground is what is to be realised, the tantra of the path is the skilful means by which it is realised, and the tantra of the result is awakening itself, and that these three are one continuum. The person at the loom, the weaving and the cloth are a single thread.
The Nyingma tradition adds a distinction that holds the key to everything that follows. There is the tantra of the expressing words, which is the scripture, the book, the ink. And there is the tantra of the expressed meaning, which is the buddha-nature itself, the real continuity that the words point to. The book is a tantra only because of what it expresses. What it expresses is awareness, the thread that runs through every being from the beginning.
9. The Weavers
The tantric tradition remembers its great practitioners as craftsmen.
The list of the eighty-four mahāsiddhas, the great accomplished ones, preserved in Abhayadatta’s twelfth-century Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas, reads like a register of trades. There is a potter, Kumbharipa, and a cobbler, Camaripa. There is a washerman, Dombipa, and a hunter, Śavaripa. There is an arrow-maker, who is Saraha, and a sesame-presser, who is Tilopa. There is the old weaver, Tantipa. They are not saints of the monasteries. They are people who found the nature of reality at the one task they knew how to do, and the task turned out to be a teaching. The arrow-maker saw the straight line of mind in the straightening of a shaft. The potter saw emptiness in the hollow of a pot.
The weaver is the one whose craft is the word itself, and Tantipa’s story is the story that the whole tradition could have been invented to tell.
A man who lived by the loom grows old and loses his wife. His mind loosens and his sons put him out in the grass hut. A yogin comes by and instructs him. He spends twelve years in secret practice and emerges as a youth of sixteen with a body like a mirror. He returns to the loom, and now it is not the same loom, though the shuttle is the same shuttle and the cloth is made of the same cotton. He sings about it in the song we began with: the worldly weaver lays warp and weft, and the siddha weaves the strands of his own experience, with a thread of emptiness and a loom of insight, and the cloth that comes off the loom is the body of reality.
The most vivid of the tales connects him to another master. Kṛṣṇācārya, called Kāṇha, “the Dark One”, was a siddha of enormous power, and as Abhayadatta tells it, he had become proud of his attainments. His teacher Jālandhara, whose name the tradition reads as “the bearer of the net”, saw this and sent him to find a weaver in the city of Pāṭaliputra. Kāṇha was to do whatever the weaver asked of him. The weaver was an old man in a hut, and he tested the proud master with the strangest of instructions, about eating what is revolting as though it were butter and bread, and treating the dead as a wolf does: the practice of non-discrimination, of a mind that no longer divides the world into clean and foul. The master of the net sent the master of powers to the master of the loom.
The tradition remembers a number of other weavers and spinners among its adepts, and the image has never gone away. Centuries afterwards, in the same river-plains of northern India, the poet Kabīr, who was a weaver by birth, would sing of the loom and of the cloth that the Lord had woven out of the body. It is one of the oldest and most persistent images of Indian spiritual life that the weaver is the figure of the Absolute’s own craft.
10. The Nets of the Ḍākinīs
The net that began as Indra’s weapon and became the Avataṃsaka’s mirror takes two more forms in the tantras, and the two deserve to be held together.
The first is the Māyājāla, the “Magical Net”, the “Net of Illusion” or “Net of Magical Emanation”, in Tibetan sgyu ‘phrul drva ba. This is the name of the cycle to which the central tantra of the Nyingma, the Guhyagarbha, belongs. The Omniscient Longchenpa’s great commentary on it is a commentary on the king of tantras, the Net of Magical Display. Māyā is the power that makes appearances, and jāla is the net in which they hang. In its own name, the central tantra of the Ancient School is the Net.
The second is the Ḍākinījāla, the “Net of the Ḍākinīs”. It appears in the title of one of the earliest of the tantras of the mother class, the Sarvabuddhasamāyoga-ḍākinījālasaṃvara, and it recurs throughout the Cakrasaṃvara literature, where the ḍākinījāla is the maṇḍala itself, the assembly of the ḍākinī wheels bound together. The Tibetan translators rendered jāla in that title as sgyu ma, illusion, so that in Tibetan the same net is read twice, as a net and as a magic.
And who are the ḍākinīs? They are the sky-goers, khecarī in Sanskrit and mkha’ ‘gro ma in Tibetan, the women of space. A reading follows, and it is offered as a reading. If the tantras name their own gathering a net, and the ḍākinīs are the ones who hold that net, then the ḍākinīs are the weavers. They are weavers of a particular kind, because they are sky-goers, and their loom is space. The Upaniṣad said it long before: space itself is woven, warp and weft, on the Imperishable. Those who move in the sky are those who work at that loom.
The tradition’s own stories bear it out. Tantipa is said to have culminated his life in the paradise of the ḍākinīs. The Omniscient Longchenpa, the great gatherer of the Great Perfection, brought together the Heart-Essence of the Ḍākinī, the Mkha’ ‘gro snying thig, alongside the Heart-Essence of Vimalamitra. In the tradition’s language the teachings came from the ḍākinīs, and the ḍākinīs are the weavers of the net in which the teachings hang.
So the net has made a journey that matches the journey of the thread. It began in the hand of Indra as a snare. It became the infinite mirror of the Avataṃsaka. It became the Net of Magical Emanation, in which appearances are seen as woven. And it became the Net of the Ḍākinīs, the web of space in which the sky-goers dance. Each time it lost something of its power to hold, and gained something of its power to reveal.
11. The Great Perfection
When the Great Perfection came to define a tantra, it did not give a list of rituals. The Tantra of the Union of the Sun and Moon, one of the Seventeen Tantras, gives its account in its own first chapter, and the account is a miniature of everything we have been tracing.
The Great Sage of Non-Conceptuality asks the Teacher how a tantra is to be explained, and the answer comes in two parts. A tantra, the Teacher says, has five perfections: the perfect place, the perfect Teacher, the perfect retinue, the perfect teaching and the perfect time. And it is to be explained in five ways: by the meaning of the root, which seizes its identifying mark; by the meaning of the yoga, which shows the gate of entry; by the meaning of the purpose, which sets it in its own place; by the meaning of the words, which gives the very substance; and by the meaning of the history, which satisfies the minds. The tantra warns of what is lost if any of the five is left out. If the meaning of the words is not explained, it says, the letters will not gather. They will be a heap of marks and not a cloth.
This is why the history of a word matters in the Great Perfection. A tantra that is read without its words is a tangle. The thread is there, but it has not been laid out, and it cannot be recognised.
The Great Perfection also tells us what it considers the real tantra. In the Union of the Sun and Moon and in the Array of Jewels, the name of awareness itself, the nature of mind as it is, is rdo rje lu gu rgyud, the Vajra Chain. The Tibetan word for chain is lu gu, a link, and the word for continuity is rgyud, the very word that translates tantra. The last word in the Great Perfection’s name for awareness is the word for tantra. The tantra of the expressed meaning and the tantra of the expressing words, which the commentators divide so carefully, meet in the name of awareness.
The titles of the Seventeen Tantras confirm it. One is the Mu tig phreng ba, the Garland of Pearls, which is a string with pearls on it, and the Omniscient Longchenpa built his Treasury of Words and Meanings on it. Another is the Nor bu phra bkod, the Array of Jewels, in which bkod is the setting-out of fine things in their order. The Dzogchen tantras are strings and arrangements of jewels. The Heart-Essence of Vimalamitra itself is arranged in three kinds of text: the tantras, which are the thread; the scriptural transmissions; and the pith instructions that put the thread into the hand.
The word has a last ancient meaning which the Great Perfection puts to use, and it is music. A tantrī is a lute string. There is a tantra among the Seventeen called the Sgra thal ‘gyur, the Tantra of the Reverberation of Sound, the sound that resounds everywhere. A tantra is a string that sings when it is touched, and what sounds is the ground. When the Omniscient Longchenpa gave the Song of the Vajra in the Treasury of the Supreme Vehicle, he gave it in the form of a song, because a song is the sound of a thread.
The Great Perfection’s use of the continuity is the boldest of all. In the other classes of tantra the thread has to be woven: the practitioner carries the ground along the path to the fruit, working the loom step by step, passing the shuttle back and forth across the stretched warp. The Great Perfection says that the thread is not made. The cause of awakening, the Union of the Sun and Moon declares, abides in every being without any difference from the buddhas. There is a ground-light, which is called the Mother, and a path-awareness, which is called the Son, and the whole practice is the meeting of the two. They are two ends of one thread. It is not woven. It is recognised, and the tantra says that if it is recognised, “in this tantra there is no meditation”.
12. The Web of Light
The history can now be read in one movement. The word began as an instrument, a loom, and the first thing woven on it was speech. The seers of the Veda stretched the thread of the sacrifice from the earth to the sky and fashioned a world on it, following a light. The Upaniṣads put the whole of existence on the loom, and found that even space is woven on the Imperishable. The grammarians made the loom the name of freedom, and the schools made it the name of a system. The Buddha gave the thread to saṃsāra, a tangled skein and a spider’s trap, and asked what could untie it. The Great Vehicle turned the trap into a net of jewels in which each jewel holds all the others, and turned the thread into an unbroken continuity that runs through every being. The Secret Mantra called itself the art of fashioning and took back into its own hands the faculty that had built saṃsāra. The siddhas, who were weavers and potters and washermen, showed that the craft of the hands is the craft of the mind. The tantras named themselves after the thread and gave it a threefold nature: ground, path and fruit. The Net of Illusion and the Net of the Ḍākinīs hung the whole of appearance in the sky. And the Great Perfection said what all of this had been pointing at.
A tantra is not a book. It is not a method, and it is not even a path. It is awareness itself, the Vajra Chain, the web of the light of liberation. It runs from the beginning through every being to the end, and it has never for a moment been broken.
The word keeps all of its meanings at once, and the tradition has never asked it to choose. The rgyud is the thread of the loom, the string of the lute, the stream of a mind, the line of the masters, the book that expresses, the meaning that is expressed, and the path that leads from ground to fruit. A tantra is what holds. What it holds, from the first hymn to the last, is light: the light that the Ṛgveda told the priest to follow as he stretched the thread, the light of the jewels in Indra’s net, the light of the Heart-Essence, the clear light that the Great Perfection says was never absent from anyone.
At the end of a piece of cloth, the weft does not stop. It reaches the edge and turns, and goes back across the warp the way it came. That turning is the oldest instruction in the craft. Weave forward, weave back. So the history ends by returning to the old man in the garden.
His sons put him out of the house, and in the hut of grass he found that the loom was the world, that the thread was awareness, and that the cloth was the body of reality. Whoever opens a tantra sits where he sat. The text on the table is the warp. The attention is the shuttle. And when the reading is done rightly, the cloth that appears is the reader’s own awakened nature, which was the thread all along.
