All of this had a direct hand in the creation of Tantra (and its close cousin, Vajrayana Buddhism), the real flowering of the Third Great Turning. (As already noted, a few Buddhists, in fact, count Tantra/Vajrayana as a Fourth Turning, although this is not as well known. But if we do so, then of course this volume would be talking about the possibility of a Fifth Turning. But since this is less well known, we’ll stick with the standard Three Turnings as presented here, and then go to discuss a possible Fourth Turning.)
Tantra was especially developed at the great Nalanda University in India from the eighth to the eleventh centuries CE. For Tantra, what Early Buddhism (and most other religions) considered sins, poisons, or defilements were actually—precisely because of the union of Emptiness and Form—the seeds of great transcendental wisdom. The poison of anger, for example, instead of being denied, uprooted, or repressed, as in so many other spiritual approaches, is rather entered directly with nondual Awareness, whereupon it discloses its core wisdom, that of pure brilliant clarity. Passion, when entered and embraced with nondual Awareness, transmutes into universal compassion. And so on.
