Tantra is not one tradition but a broad current of ritual and philosophical practice running through Hinduism, Buddhism and, to a lesser extent, Jainism — united by a distinctive premise: that the body, the senses and even ordinarily forbidden experience can themselves become vehicles for liberation, rather than obstacles a seeker must renounce to reach it.
A note on the Western word "tantra." Since the 1960s and 70s, "tantra" has become widely used in the West as shorthand for a specific practice of sacred, extended sexuality — a genre often called neo-tantra. This is a real, documented modern development, but it is a considerable narrowing of a tradition whose actual scope spans cosmology, deity worship, meditation, ritual and philosophy far beyond that single association, and which developed largely independently of the Hindu and Buddhist lineages it borrows its name from.
Classical ascetic paths within Hinduism and Buddhism generally treat worldly experience — desire, the senses, the body — as obstacles to be renounced on the way to liberation. Tantra, emerging as a distinct current roughly from the 5th century CE onward, takes a different approach: rather than withdrawing from embodied experience, the tantric practitioner engages it directly and consciously, treating the body itself as a map of the cosmos and a genuine vehicle for realisation rather than an obstacle to it.
This principle is sometimes summarised through the traditional distinction between two broad currents: dakshinachara ("right-hand path"), which works with tantric symbolism in a more sublimated, internalised way, and vamachara ("left-hand path"), historically associated with more literal transgressive ritual elements — the "five Ms" (Pancha Makara: wine, fish, meat, parched grain and sexual union) — the precise historical extent of literal versus symbolic practice of these elements remains genuinely debated among scholars and across different lineages.
The body is the temple; the senses are the doorway, not the enemy. — A recurring tantric formulation, paraphrased across sources
Tantric practice draws on a consistent technical vocabulary across its Hindu and Buddhist branches: mantra (sacred sound repeated as a technique of concentration and invocation), yantra (geometric diagrams, such as the Sri Yantra, used as visual supports for meditation on specific cosmic and deity principles), and mudra (symbolic hand gestures used in ritual and meditation to embody particular states or invoke particular energies). Deity visualisation — imagining oneself as identical with a chosen deity rather than merely petitioning them from a distance — is a further distinctive tantric technique, particularly developed within the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition.