ABSTRACT
The volume of study on Tantra (or 'Tantrism') is as prolific now as it was scant in the time when Woodroffe and Ghose wrote their books. This chapter is not a comprehensive survey of the field of modern tantric studies, for to do this would take us beyond the scope of a book about Woodroffe. Instead I have followed closely some scholars whose work I have found specially relevant. In particular, André Padoux's book on the doctrine of the Word revisits in greater detail the area which Avalon/ Woodroffe entered in his books, especially in Garland of Letters. His second chapter is also a useful survey of Tantrism.1 Alexis Sanderson's articles on the history of the tantric cults and their literature throw much light on what were for Woodroffe and his collaborators the vexed questions of the relationship between Tantra and the Hindu mainstream, and the role of horrific symbolism and trangressive rituals. It also becomes possible to perceive the Avalon/Woodroffe writings themselves as an extension in the early twentieth century of the process of domestication which Sanderson defines.2 For the theological and ritual world of Saivite Tantra - 'Kashmir Śaivism' — I have drawn mainly on the work of Debabrata Sen Sarma who is a disciple of the influential 'insider' Gopinath Kaviraj, and on Gavin Flood's study of body and cosmology. For kundalinī yoga, Eliade's Yoga: Immortality and Freedom is still a 'classic' and more recently the work of Liliane Silburn.3
