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an understanding with Buddhism (as a reaction to the official religion)
and from it received an ideological background (as yoga received it from
sankhya). Further more, the sadhanas were taken over by Hinduism during its
struggle against Buddhism. As often happens in the history of culture, a
conflict brings about an exchange of cultural features between opponents.
Thus, Saiva tantra seems a reunification of Saivism as filtered in a long
speculative tradition of metaphysics and the tantric method, i.e. an attempt
to cast the inherited techniques into a new philosophical and rational armour.
The manner in which Saiva tantra
appears to us
is more sophisticated then the Sakta branch. This is because a long series
of pandits successively edified a theoretical apparatus around it, hardly
accessible to the wide public, while the Saktism was preserved mainly by a
folk tradition. It explains why today the "practitioners" of Saiva tantra
are less in number than the Sakta followers and also justifies the tantric
division into periods. By the tenth century the whole classic bulk of
1 Saiva tantric literature was thoroughly completed, while the "golden age"
1-
=
of s膩kta scriptures was the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This made
even very serious historians of Indian Philosophy, like Heinrich Zimmer,
ascribe the whole tantric movement to the Sakta branch of the later centuries
(H.Zimmer The Philosophies of India, Meridian G6, New York, 1958, the last
chapter, on tantra).
What is beyond any doubt is that during the last
centuries tantra has changed much of its content. And these aspects appear
mainly within Sakta schools which extrapolate the power of action, hence the