nondual shaiva tantra

antra is a spiritual movement, which began in the five hundreds or the sixth century, in our Western calendar, and spread throughout all of South Asia, initially, as well as later East Asia and Southeast Asia. And I call it a spiritual movement because Tantra itself is not a religion, but rather a way of doing religion, one might say. So all the major religions in South Asia at that time developed a tantric component, that is to say, Tantra first appeared within the religion called Shaivism, which is the religion of Shiva and Shakti, now subsumed into Hinduism, and that’s been true for the last seven or eight hundred years. And then it propagated from there into Buddhism and Vaishnavism, and so on.