Talk:Tantra
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The page covers Tantra as it bears on cannabis: what the Tantras are and how their transgressive rites were read, the five Ms and their substitutes, the Sanskrit texts that name cannabis in a Tantric setting, the testimony on Tantric use from Bengal, Orissa and Assam, and the Buddhist Tantras and Nepal. The consecration of vijayā step by step is on Tantric cannabis use in India; the name and its lexicography on Vijaya; the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra as a text on its own page.
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Record source conflicts, dating problems and unresolved readings here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Sources
- Sanderson (1988) is a survey of the Śaiva and other Tantric traditions; it is the source for the general account of the Tantras, the Kaula reading of the offerings, the Nepal Valley texts and Kṣemarāja's objection to substitutes. It does not discuss cannabis.
- The 1894 testimony is from volume IV of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (Bengal and Assam). Nyayaratna's list of Tantras came in a further statement sent after his first written answers, in which he had called the Bijaya-day custom social. Chakravarti's translations and his dating of the Tantras are his own and are given as such.
- The equation of wine with hemp in the ādyatattva is Woodroffe's report of the Kaulikārcanadīpikā, and the Viśvasāra Tantra passage is his summary; both are attributed to him.
- The reports of ganja at the Ambubachi Mela are from the Guwahati press and HuffPost India in June 2017. The words of the state anti-drugs council chair reached HuffPost through a 2015 Indian Express report.
Śaṇa in the Cakrasaṃvara Tantra
- Gray translates śaṇa in chapter 50 as hemp (Cannabis sativa). Both Tibetan translations read tsa na ka, which he takes as chickpea, and Pandey's 2002 edition reads caṇakam. Śaṇa also names sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea), and the word stands in a list of edible plants. Sarbacker (2026) cites the passage for cannabis as an aid to long life. Which plant the verse meant is not decided by these readings.
Date of the Mahānirvāṇa Tantra
- Pakhomov (2017) dates the text to the second half of the 18th century. Chakravarti in 1894 put "these Tantras", in a passage that names the Mahānirvāṇa and the Muṇḍamālā, at the 11th and 12th centuries. Avalon's 1913 translation gives the printing history (first printed in 1876 with Hariharānanda Bhāratī's notes) but no date of composition.
Page numbers in McHugh
- Sarbacker (2026) cites McHugh's An Unholy Brew (2021), pp. 185–186, for surā as an umbrella term for intoxicants in Tantric worship. In the publisher's chapter list those pages fall in the chapter on drink in ritual, myth and epic; the chapter on drink in Tantra (pp. 245–279) is the one whose summary mentions cannabis. The article reports the point as Sarbacker's summary.