The Trans-Sectarian Genesis of Yogic and Tantric Traditions: A Philological and Physiological Reconstruction of Buddhist Derivation from Hindu Paradigms

"[T]he vast repositories of Sanskrit Hindu literature [continue to be dismissed] as mythological, degenerate, or historically unreliable. This colonial gaze effectively stripped the plural religious history of South Asia of its foundational Hindu layers, projecting a false autonomy onto Buddhist developments. However, contemporary philological, ethnographic, and textual analyses reveal a radically different genealogy. The esoteric practices of Vajrayāna Buddhism, the complex visualization methodologies of the Hevajra Tantra, and the somatic codifications found in the earliest Haṭhayoga manuals, such as the Amṛtasiddhi, are demonstrably and deeply derivative of older, dominant Hindu Śaiva and Śākta models. The central argument of this essay is that Buddhist forms of yoga and Tantra did not emerge sui generis from an isolated doctrinal core. Rather, they represent a sophisticated, systematic appropriation and adaptation of Hindu metaphysical paradigms, ritual architecture, and physiological mapping." The editor of ESamskriti suggested that I write this...I request the reader to read the brief note I have appended here. I have removed all annotations because one a blog, one cannot have all manner of citations including those from Reddit. Interestingly, Reddit discussions help me a lot in formulating my own understanding of most theological and philosophical matters. The books I refer to are mostly with very few exceptions PDFs since hardcopies are hard to come by and are too expensive. I cannot afford hardcopies of books anymore.