Would a tantric master have taken you as a disciple?

The Tantras do not ask for what people imagine. They give a list of qualities, and a longer list of people to refuse. Seven questions, each set beside what the text says.

John Woodroffe, a judge in Calcutta, published under the name Arthur Avalon the first serious studies of the Tantras. In Shakti and Shakta (1918) he reports what two of them require of anyone who wants to be initiated. The test is for a woman as for a man: these texts, he writes, provide for both sexes. Nothing is sent anywhere.

1. Is your mind quick — do you grasp at once what you are shown?

Gandharva Tantra, chapter 2: the aspirant must be “intelligent”. It is the first quality on the list.

Yes Sometimes No

2. Are you master of your senses — of the table, of sleep, of desire?

Same list: “with senses controlled”. The Kularnava Tantra for its part rejects “the slave of food and sexual pleasure”, the lustful and the voracious eater.

Yes Sometimes No

3. Do you abstain from harming any living being?

Gandharva Tantra: “abstaining from injury to all beings”. Woodroffe remarks that these are strange qualifications for a path said to be a bad one.

Yes Sometimes No

4. Do you try to do good to all, and not only to your own?

Same list: “doing good to all”, and “pure”.

Yes Sometimes No

5. Do you have a real desire for spiritual knowledge?

The Kularnava Tantra, chapter 13, rejects the ignorant and the one “who has no desire for spiritual knowledge”.

Yes Sometimes No

6. Do your acts follow your words?

The same chapter rejects the “hypocrite with Brahman on his lips but not in his heart”, and the shameless.

Yes Sometimes No

7. Are you capable of devotion — of holding to one thing for a long time?

The last one rejected on the list: the one who is “without devotion”.

Yes Sometimes No

John Woodroffe, Shakti and Shakta, 1918.

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Where this comes from, and its limits

We have not read the Tantras themselves, but what Woodroffe reports of them in Shakti and Shakta (1918), read on archive.org. He quotes the list of the Gandharva Tantra in full and says of the thirteenth chapter of the Kularnava Tantra that it holds “a long list” of which he gives only part: our test therefore cannot be complete.

Woodroffe was writing to defend these texts against the charge of licence; his choice of quotations serves that argument.

This test sets your answers beside a book of 1918. It initiates no one, belongs to no school and replaces no teacher. The choice of the two points of “the door” is ours, not the text’s.