Initiation, Deity and Mantra

Tantric practice is built around initiation. A qualified guru formally admits a student through diksha, a rite that is held to transform the student's capacity to receive and safely use tantric teaching, and tantric texts generally assume this prior step rather than functioning as self-sufficient manuals. Once initiated, a practitioner typically receives a personal mantra and is instructed in visualization practices that identify the practitioner, at least provisionally, with a chosen deity, understood as a means of drawing the qualities of that deity into the practitioner's own being. Ritual worship (puja), the construction and use of diagrams (yantra and mandala), and the recitation of mantra in fixed repetition are common elements across Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions alike.

A smaller, historically controversial current within tantra developed transgressive rites using substances or acts ordinarily proscribed, understood within their own traditions as a deliberate use of transgression to break down the practitioner's ordinary dualistic perception; these currents were always a minority position, contested within tantric traditions themselves, and are not the whole or even the majority of tantric practice. Because tantric teaching is traditionally held to require oral transmission and situational guidance from a qualified teacher, and because texts are traditionally described as coded or intentionally incomplete without that guidance, this entry describes tantra's structure and history without setting out initiatory content.