Tantra literally means a loom, and it is rarely about sex
Western pop culture treats Tantra as a bedroom technique. Scholars say sexual rites were rare, reserved for initiated adepts and meant as a route to transcendence. The word itself comes from weaving, and for most of its history it simply named a system, a doctrine or a kind of text.
Tantra is an esoteric yogic tradition that grew up in the Indian subcontinent from around the middle of the 1st millennium CE. It began within Shaivism and Shaktism and later spread into Buddhism and Vaishnavism. Its cosmologies are intricate, treating the human body as divine and often mirroring the union of the god Shiva with the goddess Shakti. Practitioners sought supernatural attainments called siddhi, pleasure, and the rising of kundalini energy, and some texts deal with possession and exorcism.
Mantras are central, which is why the Hindu strand is called Mantramārga, the Path of Mantra, and the Mahayana Buddhist strand Mantrayāna, the Mantra Vehicle. Practice revolves around initiation, ritual and yoga as set out in texts themselves called tantras. In Buddhism the Vajrayana schools build on Indian Buddhist tantras, including Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism, Japanese Shingon and Nepal's Newar Buddhism. Tantric influence also reached Jainism, Tibetan Bön, Taoism and Japanese Shintō.
The etymology explains a lot. The Sanskrit root tan means to stretch or spin out, and André Padoux lists senses from weave to compose. The Rigveda uses tantra for the warp threads on a loom, and later Vedic texts use it for the main point or framework of something. In the Hindu epics and law books it means a rule, theory, method or chapter, even appearing as a suffix, as in atma-tantra, doctrine of the Self.
From about 500 BCE the word served as a bibliographic label in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, much like sutra, which means sewing together; some texts carry both names. Ron Barrett points to the image behind it: teachings interwoven like threads. The notion that tantra means secret ritual, by contrast, was a European invention of the colonial era.
Source: Tantra
