But there is a further stage of degradation.  I have already mentioned that various Bodhisattvas are represented as accompanied by a female deity, particularly Avalokita by Tara.  The mythological and metaphysical ideas which have grown up round Siva and Durga also attached themselves to these couples.  The Buddha or Bodhisattva is represented as enjoying nirvana because he is united to his spouse, and to the three bodies already enumerated is added a fourth, the body of perfect bliss.[301] Sometimes this idea merely leads to further developments of the practices described above.  Thus the devotee may imagine that he enters into Tara as an embryo and is born of her as a Buddha.[302] More often the argument is that since the bliss of the Buddha consists in union with Tara, nirvana can be obtained by sexual union here, and we find many of the tantric wizards represented as accompanied by female companions.  The adept should avoid all action but he is beyond good and evil and the dangerous doctrine that he can do evil with impunity, which the more respectable sects repudiate, is expressly taught.  The sage is not defiled by passion but conquers passion by passion:  he should commit every infamy:  he should rob, lie and kill Buddhas.[303] These crazy precepts are probably little more than a speculative application to the moral sphere of the doctrine that all things are non-existent and hence equivalent.  But though tantrists did not go about robbing and murdering so freely as their principles allowed, there is some evidence that in the period of decadence the morality of the Bhikshus had fallen into great discredit.  Thus in the allegorical Vishnuite drama called Prabodhacandrodaya and written at Kalanjar near the end of the eleventh century Buddhists and Jains are represented as succumbing to the temptations of inebriety and voluptuousness.

It is necessary to mention this phase of decadence but no good purpose would be served by dwelling further on the absurd and often disgusting prescriptions of such works as the Tathagata-guhyaka.  If the European reader is inclined to condemn unreservedly a religion which even in decrepitude could find place for such monstrosities, he should remember that the aberrations of Indian religion are due not to its inherent depravity, but to its universality.  In Europe those who follow disreputable occupations rarely suppose that they have anything to do with the Church.  In India, robbers, murderers, gamblers, prostitutes, and maniacs all have their appropriate gods, and had the Marquis de Sade been a Hindu he would probably have founded a new tantric sect.  But though the details of Saktism are an unprofitable study, it is of some importance to ascertain when it first invaded Buddhism and to what extent it superseded older ideas.