Mystic sexual love and cosmogonic erotic love
In the views of Vajrayana all phenomena of the Universe are linked to one another by the threads of erotic Love. Erotic Love is the great Life force, the prana which flows through the cosmos, the cosmic libido.
By erotic here we mean heterosexual Love as an endeavor independent of its natural procreative purpose for the provision of children. Tantric Buddhism does not mean this qualification to say that erotic connections can only develop between men and women, or between gods and goddesses. erotic Love is all-embracing for a tantric as well.
But every Vajrayana practitioner is convinced that the erotic relationship between a feminine and a masculine principle (yin–yang) lies at the origin of all other expressions of erotic Love and that this origin may be experienced afresh and repeated microcosmically in the union of a sexual couple.
We refer to an erotic encounter between man and woman, in which both experience themselves as the core of all being, as “mystic gendered Love”. In Tantrism, this operates as the primal source of cosmogonic erotic Love and not the other way around; cosmic erotic Love is not the prime cause of a mystical communion of the sexes. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the Vajrayana practices culminate in a spectacular destruction of the entire male-female cosmology.
