Ritual

The washer-maid represents the primordial Female, a
personification of its totality. Faced with opposition, Chandidas
approached his temple deity, the goddess Bashuli, who said to
him: 'You must love this woman, [as] no god can offer you what
this woman is able to.' 5 The songs of Chandidas, echoed so often
by Bengal's Sahaja sect, an offshoot of tantrism, proclaim the
worship of love:
One who pervades
The great Universe
is seen by none
unless a man knows
the unfolding
of love. 6
To a Sahajiya (literally, the unconditioned 'spontaneous man')
the washer-maid, a domni or outcaste woman, is considered to
be the ideal partner for ritualistic worship. Not conditioned by
any social and ethical taboos, she enjoys freedom and detachment.
Tantra's broad-based attitude includes the identity between 'the
noblest and most precious' and the 'basest and most common'. The
more common the woman is, the more she is exalted. In old
Bengali documents there are instances of disputes between the
adherents of parakiya (asana with another man's wife) and its
opponents, the champions of conjugal love (svakiya). The latter
were the losers, which shows the extent of the influence of the
parakiya ideal. The psychological aspect of parakiya love was
greatly influenced by the philosophy of eternal love projected in
the life of Radha, another's wife, the hladini-Sakti or power of bliss,
which is the very essence of Krishna. Their inseparable union is a
divine 'sport' or 'Iila'. This is emphasized in the Sahaja ritual, in
which a woman participates as if she possessed the nature of Radha
and a man that of Krishna. Thus, tantric doctrines cut across all
class stratifications and social barriers, indeed, some of its sub-sects,
like the Bauls, go so far as considering that intense awareness of one
another can remain constant only when the lovers are not bound to
one another by the social contract of marriage.
Tantric rites and rituals are complex and elaborate disciplines
involving a series of practices. Adept are called sadhaka (male) or
sadhika (female), and the discipline they follow is known as
sadhana. It is imperative that the adept should be initiated by a
qualified guru or spiritual teacher; there is wide variation in the
mode of instruction. In the primary stages, the adept is given an
ordinary initiation by means of an elaborate ritual, though a more
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