Origin 800 to 1500 CE
A geometric diagram used as a support for meditation and worship, built from interlocking triangles, lotus petals, circles and a square enclosure with four gates. The Sri Yantra, nine interlocked triangles producing forty-three smaller ones around a central point, is the best known and one of the more demanding constructions in the corpus.
A yantra is normally engraved on metal, consecrated, and installed, and in temple practice it may sit beneath the image rather than in view. Its use is generally tied to a specific mantra and to initiation from a teacher. What the diagram is and what it is for can be described publicly; the consecration procedures and the mantras attached to a given yantra belong to that transmission and are not reproduced here.
Facts
Use
Who May Handle ItAnyone; it is offered to the public 2 Printed and decorative yantras circulate freely and nothing here describes the former Who May Handle ItTrained or authorised specialists only 2 A yantra used in worship is set up by a qualified practitioner ConsecrationConsecrated in a rite before use 2 Origins
Origin Period Attributions
TraditionHinduism, chiefly Shakta Tantra 1 Learn More
The Diagram That Supports Meditation
A yantra is a geometric diagram used as a support for meditation and worship, built from interlocking triangles, lotus petals, circles and a square enclosure with four gates.
Form and use
The best known is the Sri Yantra, nine interlocked triangles that generate forty-three smaller ones around a central point, and one of the more demanding constructions in the corpus. A yantra is normally engraved on metal, consecrated and installed, and in temple practice it may sit beneath the image rather than in view. Its use is generally tied to a specific mantra and to initiation from a teacher, so the diagram is not a free-standing decoration but the visible half of a transmitted practice.
What is public and what is not
What a yantra is and what it is for can be described openly: it is a map of the deity and the cosmos, a focus that draws the worshipper's attention inward to a centre. The consecration procedures and the mantras attached to a given yantra, however, belong to the line of teaching that confers them and are not set out here. The tradition draws that boundary itself, treating the outward form as describable and the empowerment as something received rather than read from a page.
Why Some of These Diagrams Are Not Made for General Use
A yantra intended for actual ritual use, rather than as a printed poster or a piece of jewelry, is normally engraved on copper, silver or another metal plate by a craftsman working to precise geometric instructions drawn from tantric texts, with mantra syllables inscribed in a specified script at specified points, a construction where the proportions and placement are the substance of the object rather than decoration around it.
Consecration and transmission
Once made, such a yantra is understood in most traditions to require consecration, prana pratishtha, by a qualified priest or tantric practitioner before it is considered active rather than simply a correctly drawn diagram, and in several tantric lineages a yantra tied to a specific deity practice, sadhana, is transmitted from a guru to an initiated disciple as part of that practice rather than assembled independently by a newcomer from a book.
What this atlas will and will not say
This is a genuine restriction, not a formality: several yantra forms, including some of the best known Shri Yantra variants used in serious tantric practice, are treated by their own tradition as closed to uninitiated reproduction and use. The commercial yantras sold widely as posters and pendants are real objects and are not secret, but they are also generally understood within the tradition as devotional rather than as the fully activated ritual implement, and this entry describes that distinction rather than supplying construction or consecration instructions for the restricted form.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Buddhist tantra uses the same class of diagram, usually under the name mandala.
A yantra is a diagram used as a support for meditation and worship, and in tantric practice it is treated as the deity in geometric form.
Element Of
The geometric diagram is used as the seat of the goddess and as the object of worship in its own right.
Sources
1. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
Heinrich Zimmer, Princeton University Press, 1972On the yantra and the Shri ChakraView the Source 2. The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Sakta Tantrism
Douglas Renfrew Brooks, University of Chicago Press, 1990
Encyclopedia of Hinduism
Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.), Routledge, 2008s.v. yantraView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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