Maithuna

Maithuna is the term for ritual sexual union as it appears in certain tantric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the last and most secret of the five transgressive elements of the "left-hand" tantric rite. In this restricted context, the sexual act is not pursued for pleasure or procreation but is undertaken as a controlled ritual by initiated practitioners, framed by elaborate preparation, visualisation and the deliberate identification of the partners with a deity and consort, so that the union enacts on the human plane the cosmic union of the divine masculine and feminine principles from whose interplay, in tantric thought, all reality arises. The practice aims, in its own understanding, at the transformation of the powerful energies of desire into a means of liberation rather than bondage, harnessing what ordinary religion shuns.

Several cautions are essential to describing maithuna accurately. Within the tantric traditions themselves it is a rare, highly restricted and closely guarded practice, hedged with initiation, secrecy and strict discipline, confined to qualified adepts and often understood symbolically or internally, as the union of energies within the practitioner's own body, rather than performed literally. It is emphatically not representative of tantra as a whole, the vast bulk of which consists of mantra, ritual, visualisation and yogic discipline with no sexual element. And it is quite distinct from the modern Western "tantric sex" or "sacred sexuality" movements, which borrow the vocabulary of maithuna but are largely twentieth-century constructions only loosely connected to the historical traditions and their demanding ascetic and initiatory frame. Scholars stress that the ritualised, disciplined and often symbolic maithuna of the tantric texts must not be conflated with the popular Western reinterpretation that trades on its name.

Whether maithuna was, or is, practised literally is a genuine and long-running disagreement among both practitioners and scholars of Tantra rather than a settled question with one accepted answer, and the disagreement runs along the same line that divides Vamachara, the left-hand path willing to use the pancamakara literally under ritual conditions, from Dakshinachara, the right-hand path that has generally read the five Ms symbolically from the outset, treating maithuna as an inner union of currents within the subtle body rather than a physical act involving another person.

Textual scholars of Tantra note that many of the surviving Kaula and Vajrayana sources most associated with literal maithuna are themselves ambiguous or deliberately encoded, using what scholars call twilight language, sandhya bhasha, in which sexual and physiological vocabulary is understood by initiated readers to refer to internal yogic processes, breath, subtle channels and the movement of consciousness, rather than to the literal acts the words describe on their surface, which means even specialists disagree case by case about which passages in which texts intend a literal reading and which do not. This ritual practice, whichever way particular lineages have read it, sits within a Tantric literature overwhelmingly occupied with mantra, visualisation, deity yoga and subtle-body practice that has nothing to do with sexuality at all, so that maithuna's prominence in popular Western awareness of Tantra considerably overstates its place within the tradition's own much larger and mostly non-sexual body of practice, a disproportion Tantric scholars have repeatedly pointed out as a distortion introduced by outside popularisation rather than a reflection of the textual corpus itself.