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The Tantric movement proper did not reach its height until about 700 AD, by which time the word had spread, suitably adapted by Tantric missionaries, to China. By this time Tantrism was embodied in a series of Tantra scriptures and had been colonised by Hindu sects,
Shaktis
, which venerated everything feminine. They were opposed by
Lingayatis
, who worshipped male gods. Tantrists came mostly from the middle castes, but their belief system was later appropriated by elite Brahmins. Isolated Tantric sects continued almost to the present day; one was studied in Bengal as late as 1980.

As in China, the most basic principle of Tantrism, drawn, it appears, from the folkloric belief in the super-carnal desires of women, was that men and women are like positive and negative in electricity – that energy flows via sexual intercourse from women to men. Shiva, the male god was thus often shown ‘plugged in', in perpetual flagrante with the goddess Shakti.

Tantra defines orgasm as the blissful and indescribable result of interaction between the sexual potential of the two lovers, producing a polarisation of the bio-electric energies in the form of an ecstatic tension release similar to thunder. The orgasm produces in each of the lovers, separately or simultaneously, a profound feeling of contentment that has synchronous echoes in each plane of their being.

So fundamental to a healthy life and spiritual advancement was orgasm that some Tantric sub-sects required their monks and nuns to have sex as a religious duty. Temples dedicated to the goddess of love, Kama, were erected to celebrate Shiva and Shakti's lovemaking sessions. The inner sancta of such temples would be built to represent Shakti's
yoni
and kept permanently moist by a natural spring.

The femininity of the Tantra, as well as many of the sacred books of Hinduism, cannot be overstated; there is a real sense that the Hindu culture places as central to sex the woman's
desire for safety, confidence, commitment and luxuriously extended physical fulfilment. Andre Van Lysebeth, a respected teacher of Tantric sex who spent decades studying in India, explains in his book
Tantra: The Cult of the Feminine:
Tor Tantra, each and every woman incarnates the Goddess,
is
the Goddess, Absolute Woman, the Cosmic Mother … A Tantrist worships the cosmic goddess Shakti in all women. In all women: fat or thin, young or old, able-bodied or disabled.'

The male Tantrist, for Van Lysebeth (and it is significant before getting too excited about the cult, that nobody mentions there being any female adherents), ‘is able to “feminise” his sexual experience. To the ordinary male, sex is a convergent experience both in time and space – revolving around his sex organs and becoming progressively narrower in space and time. When the spasm is over … men's desire vanishes and men turn away from women, wounding their self-esteem.'

The Tantrist, however, ‘does not make love to a vagina, but to a human being as a whole, i.e., the physical, psychic and cosmic woman, the incarnation of the cosmic Shakti … He intensely shares the Shakti's ultimate sexual emotion when she experiences a deep orgasm. This makes him aware of the sacred part of the woman, without trying to appropriate her body or her sex life. He does not think nor say, “This is my wife, her vagina is my property, I own her sensuality.” He perceives sex as the manifestation of cosmic creative power, which is suprapersonal.'

The Hindu/Tantric tradition fostered an open attitude towards sex, as would ultimately be exemplified by the
Kamasutra
. But a great liberality, bordering on licentiousness, was in evidence long before that. Much of the continuing racy reputation of Tantric sex has its foundation in the practical eroticism of Ancient India. It is curious that Ancient China, with its equally sexy reality, has tended to be remembered in modern times more in terms of its martial arts and fireworks.

Precise directions are given by Tantric sex masters – part of the reason, perhaps, why male adherents in the modern era
are often derided as the kind of men who like to read instruction books in bed. Sex must only take place when a woman is sexually excited. The goal is, for some, not ejaculating at all; for others, not ejaculating until the woman had one or more orgasms. As in Taoism, the longer the male can stay in some sense inside the woman, even if his penis is not erect, the more female energy he will absorb for his own benefit. This practice of
coitus reservatus
or
askanda
is sometimes portrayed in Hindu art by images of a flaccid or ‘pendulous' penis.

As to what methods should be used to delay or block ejaculation altogether
(coitus obstructus)
, Tantrists were advised to use meditation, self-discipline and manual intervention via ‘the million-dollar point'. To avoid premature ejaculation, Tung-hsuan is at one with Indian thinking when he advises that at the last moment, ‘the man closes his eyes and concentrates his thoughts: he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth, bends his back, and stretches his neck. He opens his nostril wide and squares his shoulders, closes his mouth, and sucks in his breath. Then he will not ejaculate and the semen will ascend inward on its own account.'

It is not clear whether Tantrism was the tail or the dog in the sexual foment of Ancient India. A sect that utilises sex as a means to spiritual development sounds a little
avant-garde
by the standard of most societies, yet in India it is striking how almost every form of orgasmic attainment conceivable was venerated in antiquity by one sect or another. Fellatio, cunnilingus, prostitution, masturbation, anal sex, voyeurism, incest, transvesticism, masochism, coprophilia, bestiality and even, in rare cases, cannibalism, were acceptable to the holy men of some cult somewhere. Necrophilia was quite common; there are many images in Hindu art of the goddess Kali making love to the corpse of Shiva, and resuscitating him through orgasm. Tantric sex seems quite a tame interest against such a colourful background

It does not rule out gay sexuality, which is considered sacred and divinely ordained by many Tantric adherents. What harm,
after all, if two males agree to share their sexual pleasure? They may not gain the essential feminine energy from the experience, but so long as they are bisexual they will not suffer lasting damage. The male's sacred spot in some Hindu scriptures lies between testicles and the anus, and is best invoked by a thrust of
lingum
in the anus. Many Tantrists aver that this gives a thousand times more pleasure than penetrating
i yoni
. Married women who indulged in lesbianism, however, were not tolerated by the early Tantric cultists. They were supposed to be punished by being shaved bald, having the two relevant fingers cut off and being led through their town on an ass.

Tantric sex is not necessarily synonymous with love and affection. In some ways Tantric sex is sex for its own sake. Removal of self is the central tenet of the Tantra, not devotion to any one other person. The important thing is that at the point of orgasm, the Tantric practitioner rises above ‘self', the consciousness of one's own being. This is why ritual intercourse is an important part of Tantric sex for many practitioners. The term
Chakrapuja
(circle worship) refers to the basic religious ceremony of early Tantrism. The guru conducting the ceremony was charged with preventing it from becoming an orgy, but the event was still essentially about sex with strangers.

Such evenings were lubricated by wine or hashish, after which the small group of couples moved forward to feasting and then lengthy, promiscuous intercourse. For the truly dedicated Tantrist, the next step towards enlightenment was a ceremony that culminated in ritual intercourse with specially trained women known as
dakinis
. The ultimate orgasmic bliss on this continuum, the closest approximation to union with the divine, was described, as ‘intercourse with oneself, in which the same feeling as sex with a woman could be reproduced as a soloist. This was the entrance to a new state of bliss in which the male Tantric practitioner, though a man and therefore weak and spineless, could be freed from dependence on women.

Heterosexual, mainstream and recommended for married
couples, the
Kamasutra
– it means, ‘treatise on sexual pleasure' – was very much the late-to-market, mass-consumption version of India's lubricious culture. It is, nevertheless, the most famous sex book of all time. It is astonishing that the World Wide Web contained nearly a million references to the
Kamasutra
in 2003, as opposed to less than a hundred for the equally explicit Chinese pillow books of the same period.

The
Kamasutra
is an edited collection of Indian writings, both spiritual and practical, going back hundreds of years from the time of the author, one Mallanaga Vatsyayana, about whom nothing is known other than that he lived in the city of Benares on the Ganges, he was upper-middle-class, and assumed his readers similarly had servants – and took himself a little too seriously; he states at the end of the
Kamasutra
that he wrote the work ‘in a state of mental concentration and chastity'.

The
Kamasutra
was composed in Sanskrit for precisely the same people as Dr Alex Comfort would aim at in
The Joy Of Sex
1,700 years later – young, educated, broad-minded urbanites, known in Vatsyayana's India as
Nagaraka
. Despite the highly detailed illustrations with which the book is generally published, it was not a sex manual, unless you were a Yogic contortionist – athletic, often implausible, sexual positions are what the
Kamasutra
is most famous for. Neither was it a work of pornography. Graphic sexual paintings were common in Indian culture; wealthy Hindu husbands would commission pictures of themselves having sex with their wives as routinely as eighteenth-century Europeans had themselves painted in formal poses with their hunting hounds.

Unless one was a Sanskrit scholar, it has only been possible very recently to read the
Kamasutra
free from the androcentric language and prejudices of Victorian England. The standard translation has always been that published in 1883 by Sir Richard Burton, a daring progressive in his time, but very much of that time when, broadly speaking, only male sexual desire was acknowledged.

In 2002 a new translation appeared which had almost the
same clarifying effect on our view of the sexual life of long ago as when astronomers saw the first images from the Hubble space telescope. The new translation by Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and Sudhir Kakar, a leading Indian psychoanalyst and a senior fellow at Center for Study of World Religions at Harvard, both flatters the sexual democracy of Ancient India – and lays bare its sometimes shocking male prejudice.

It is now clearer that the
Kamasutra
, as an avowedly popular, mass-market book, did not attempt to place itself at the leading edge of sexual knowledge; it was more a conservative, accessible guidebook, a compilation of what all sensible, normal people should know about sexual pleasure from the accrued wisdom of the ages thus far. It is not state-of-the-art, certainly not experimental, and cannot have seemed particularly progressive to the real sexual gourmands of fourth-century India. In modern terms, the
Kamasutra
is more at the suburban level of the
Daily Mail
or
USA Today
market than the
Playboy
or even the
Cosmopolitan
reader – although Vatsyayana was far more liberal about both sexes having affairs outside marriage than would be acceptable in suburbia today. The view on fidelity from fourth-century India was that it is inevitable that couples tire of one another sexually, and so long as they are discreet, the odd sensuous fling with another man's wife or another woman's husband was acceptable.

The mixture of advanced positional gambits and geometric advice as to the relative coordinates of
lingam
and
yoni
, all of which excited twentieth-century young men in the West, is surprisingly bland stuff. Vatsyayana gave no credence to the reality that most women can never reach orgasm solely from intercourse, no matter what Tantric heroics the man goes to in prolonging his thrusting into the small hours. The
Kamasutra
also seems to disapprove of oral sex: ‘It should not be done because it is opposed to the moral code,' he says, explaining that during intercourse, according to scripture, a woman's mouth is an exceptionally holy place, and should not
be defiled by fellatio. If men must enjoy it, the
Kamasutra
says, it should be with ‘loose women, servant girls, and masseuses' with whom a man ‘does not bother with acts of civility'. Cunnilingus is also rather damned with faint praise by Vatsyayana: ‘Sometimes men perform this act on women, transposing the procedure for kissing a mouth.' (He does go on nonetheless to give detailed and elaborate instructions for what he calls ‘sucking the mango', and even notes without comment that some men even enjoy sucking each other's mangoes.

There is no unambiguous mention in the
Kamasutra
of the clitoris, and certainly nothing on the arcane matter of female ejaculation. Doniger and Kakar believe the clitoris, or even the G-spot, may have been alluded to, but only elliptically. Burton's
Kamasutra
refers vaguely to ‘the part of the woman's body which should be touched while making love', specifying that the man, ‘should always make a point of pressing those parts of her body on which she turns her eyes'. Doniger says this is wrong, but what the Sanskrit more accurately says is not a great deal clearer: ‘What the text says is that when a man is inside a woman and touches her and when her eyes roll around, he should touch her more in that place,' Doniger has explained.

On female ejaculation, the sources Vatsyayana used were venerable to the point of being thoroughly out of date. For the final word on the female ejaculation question, for example, he turns to Svetaketu, a Vedic sage of over a thousand years earlier: ‘Females do not emit as males do,' Svetaketu opined, and Vatsyayana echoed. ‘The males simply remove their desire, while the females, from their consciousness of desire, feel a certain kind of pleasure, which gives them satisfaction, but it is impossible for them to tell you what kind of pleasure they feel. The fact from which this becomes evident is that males, when engaged in coition, cease of themselves after emission, and are satisfied, but it is not so good with females.' (It is probable that more progressive authorities were
already aware of female ejaculation. It is clearly described in the seventh century in a work of the poet Amaru called the
Amarusataka.)