When modern readers first meet tantric texts—Buddhist or Hindu—it is often through a veil of frustration. Verses speak of “lotuses,” “vajras,” “women,” “wine,” “lakes of nectar,” and “secret places,” but rarely in a way that yields to straightforward reading. What looks like sensual poetry turns out, in the hands of a traditional commentator, to be a manual for meditation or ritual technology.

This is the domain of sandhyā-bhāṣā, commonly translated as “twilight language.” The term itself suggests a liminal light in which shapes are visible but indistinct, requiring trained perception to make sense of them. In both Vajrayāna Buddhism and Śaiva–Śākta Tantra, this mode of speech is not simply a fondness for metaphor; it is a deliberate system of encoding practice, doctrine, and social arrangements. The same phrase can operate on several levels at once: literal, erotic, ritual, and yogic.

To see how this works, it helps to read a few short verses in detail—following traditional commentators as they pry open the language. Only then does “twilight language” show itself as a kind of hermeneutic technology, designed within specific historical and political pressures.

What Is Sandhyā-bhāṣā?

In classical Indian usage, sandhyā can mean “junction,” “twilight,” or “transitional period,” while bhāṣā is “speech” or “language.” Tantric sources use the combined term to name a mode of expression whose meaning remains concealed for outsiders and unfolds only under upadeśa—oral, esoteric instruction—from a guru.

A verse from the Buddhist Hevajra Tantra describes this principle explicitly:

“This teaching is in the twilight language (sandhyā-bhāṣā);
the foolish think it obscene,
while the wise understand it as the path.”

Here the text warns the reader in advance: without interpretive keys, one will mistake instruction for impropriety. The same attitude appears in Śaiva and Śākta sources, where “secret speech” is said to be decoded only by those formed in a lineage (guru-śiṣya tradition). The category is thus technical. It does not simply mean “poetic” or “mystical”; it identifies a structured way of speaking that presupposes initiation.

Protective Obscurity: Politics, Persecution, and Lineage

For historical readers, the obvious question is: why go to this trouble? Why write dense manuals in a language even sympathetic readers cannot understand unaided?

Several overlapping motives appear when we place the texts in their historical contexts:

In Buddhist environments, particularly from the 8th to 12th centuries, tantric communities often operated at the edges of monastic institutions and royal courts. They developed ritual practices involving alcohol, sexual symbolism, and cremation grounds—activities that could be seen as antinomian, even scandalous, by mainstream Buddhists and by political authorities. Twilight language allowed practitioners to record instructions without producing an overt catalogue of transgressive acts.

In Śaiva and Śākta milieus, similar pressures applied. Royal courts might patronize certain ritual specialists while fearing their power; rivals might seek to appropriate rites without the accompanying ethical and initiatory framework. When Śaiva āgamas speak of “tridents,” “poison,” or “the cremation ground,” the words sometimes name literal objects and places, but they can also denote inner yogic spaces or subtle processes. Twilight speech thus limits the utility of the text to those who already have access to an interpretive community.

Lineage protection is also crucial. The oral upadeśa given from guru to disciple—often face-to-face, in restricted ritual settings—remains more authoritative than any manuscript. The text becomes a mnemonic skeleton whose flesh is supplied by the teacher. Without such instruction, even a complete manuscript yields little. Sandhyā-bhāṣā is a kind of encryption whose key is held socially, not individually.

A Verse from the Hevajra Tantra: Many Levels in a Single Line

Consider a short, often-quoted Hevajra line (in paraphrase, to emphasize the interpretive moves rather than philological detail):

“By uniting the vajra with the lotus,
one should drink the flowing nectar
and thus attain great bliss.”

For an uninitiated reader, the most immediate sense is erotic: a male “vajra” and a female “lotus,” joined, producing “nectar” and “bliss.” This reading is not denied; twilight language does not cancel literal or erotic senses. It embeds them inside a larger matrix of meanings.

A traditional Buddhist tantric commentary might open the verse in at least three further directions:

Ritual level. “Vajra” can designate a ritual implement—the metal vajra held in the right hand—while “lotus” names the bell held in the left. Their union is the ritual gesture of bringing the two together, symbolizing the inseparability of method and wisdom. “Nectar” refers to consecrated sacramental liquor used in a specific rite; “drinking” is the liturgical act of internalizing divine power. On this level, the verse encodes a detailed ritual sequence in compact, suggestive language.

Yogic level. The same words are then read as technical terms for energy and consciousness within the subtle body. The “vajra” is the central channel or awakened awareness; the “lotus” is a particular cakra or psychic center. Their “union” is a precise meditative alignment; “nectar” is the blissful awareness arising from this internal practice; “drinking” it is stabilizing one’s attention in that experience without distraction. The commentator may even map the verse to a chart of channels, winds, and drops known only within the lineage.

Doctrinal level. Finally, “great bliss” is not merely a psychological state, but an entry into nondual wisdom: the recognition of emptiness and luminosity as inseparable. The verse then frames an entire soteriological claim in the guise of a brief, almost casual sentence.

All of these levels coexist. Twilight language is not simply a code that “really means” something else more sober. It is a way of speaking in which erotic, ritual, yogic, and doctrinal resonances reflect and reinforce each other. The verse functions as a hinge between body, practice, and view.

Śaiva Āgamas and the Cremation Ground Within

Buddhist tantras are not the only texts to deploy this twilight idiom. Many Śaiva and Śākta scriptures, especially those related to the Kāpālika and Kaula streams, make heavy use of sandhyā-bhāṣā. Their favored vocabulary is somewhat different—cremation grounds, skulls, poison, blood, goddesses, weapons—but the underlying technique is comparable.

Take a Śaiva verse of the sort found in Kaula literature (again paraphrased to foreground structure rather than precise citation):

“In the cremation ground, adorned with ash and skulls,
the yogin embraces the fierce goddess
and drinks the poison that grants immortality.”

Read literally, this is a scene of transgressive ritual: a yogin in a charnel ground, smeared with ash, wearing skull ornaments, embracing a terrifying goddess-figure, consuming some kind of poison. Many historical practitioners did, in fact, perform rites in literal cremation grounds and use substances seen as impure in orthodox ritual frameworks. But Śaiva commentaries consistently insist that the verse also encodes inner yogic practice.

On an inner level, “cremation ground” is glossed as the body itself, where ordinary identities and attachments are “burned.” Ash becomes a metaphor for the recognition that all compounded things are already, in a sense, reduced to residue: empty, transient. Skulls are sometimes likened to the sense faculties or thought-constructs that have been stripped of their false solidity.

The “fierce goddess” in Śākta and Kaula commentarial literature may be identified with kuṇḍalinī or with a specific aspect of Śakti manifest in the heart or crown of the head. To “embrace” her is to join awareness to this dynamic energy, stabilizing attention in a particular subtle center. The gesture that looks like physical intimacy becomes a precise instruction in yogic union.

The “poison that grants immortality” is a striking oxymoron, and sandhyā-bhāṣā seizes upon just this kind of tension. On one hand, it may refer to ritual ingestion of an actual substance that is dangerous without proper ritual preparation. On another, it names intense meditative experiences—fear, bliss, radical disorientation—that are “poison” to the unprepared but transformative to the trained yogin. “Drinking” the poison is staying present with such experiences until they reveal their liberating nature.

Once again, the verse is not reduced to a single decoding. Instead, the literal scene, the outer rite, and the inner yoga each remain active. The twilight language holds them in suspension.

Mantra, Code, and Double Address

Sandhyā-bhāṣā intersects with another core tantric technology: mantra. Mantras are not just devotional phrases; they are compressed sound-forms believed to embody deities, states of consciousness, or complex ritual operations. In both Vajrayāna and Śaiva–Śākta contexts, public mantras are often accompanied by “heart” or “essence” mantras known only within a lineage.

Twilight language frequently appears in the prose or verse that frames these mantras. A passage may describe “speaking in the language of ḍākinīs,” or using “secret syllables” to communicate with initiates. The text operates on a double address: outwardly intelligible, inwardly a map of correspondences between syllables, body points, and ritual actions. Words like “gate,” “door,” “city,” or “fortress” are used repeatedly, each time bearing a network of associations that the commentary makes explicit only for the initiated.

Over time, commentators build dense glossarial traditions around these vocabularies. “Lotus,” for example, is not just a generalized symbol of purity; it is indexed to specific cakras, to particular goddesses, to stages of maṇḍala construction. “Vajra” refers not only to an implement or sexual organ, but to a type of mental stability, a ritual status, a set of vows. Sandhyā-bhāṣā thus becomes a shared technical language, internally stable but opaque to those without access to its lexicon.

Hermeneutic Technology, Not Just Secrecy

It would be easy to explain all this simply as “keeping secrets.” Certainly, protection of practice and community plays a role. But the closer one looks at actual passages and their traditional commentaries, the more it becomes clear that something more subtle is happening.

Twilight language is a hermeneutic device that forces interpretation to remain tethered to living instruction. A bare, explicit manual can be copied and circulated without context; its interpretations drift. A twilight-text, by contrast, is difficult to operationalize without an interpretive community. The text resists the fantasy of self-sufficient reading.

At the same time, sandhyā-bhāṣā preserves multivalence. A verse can function as an outer teaching for a novice, as a ritual script for a practitioner, and as a subtle yogic map for an adept—without needing to be rewritten for each audience. The same line continues to yield further dimensions as one’s practice deepens. Secrecy here is intertwined with pedagogy.

This stands in contrast to many modern appropriations of tantric material, which attempt to bypass initiatory and commentarial traditions by treating texts as open-access manuals or as purely symbolic literature. Classical tantric authors themselves, whether Buddhist or Śaiva–Śākta, repeatedly warn against such direct, uncontextualized readings. The Hevajra Tantra, for example, pairs its twilight language with admonitions that the teachings should not be given to those lacking preparation, generosity, or discipline. Śaiva āgamas similarly restrict access based on initiation and ethical commitments.

For present-day readers, this raises a tension: how to study and appreciate these texts responsibly without collapsing their complex social and ritual frameworks into either exotic spectacle or freely usable esoteric technique.

Reading at Twilight

When we approach tantric material through the lens of sandhyā-bhāṣā, our posture as readers shifts. Instead of asking “What does this really mean?” in the singular, we begin to ask “What kinds of meaning does this verse support, and under what conditions do those meanings become operative?” Twilight language becomes less an obstacle and more an invitation: to trace commentarial lineages, to notice how words travel between outer ritual and inner yoga, and to see how communities built and maintained shared codes over centuries.

In that sense, sandhyā-bhāṣā is not only a historical curiosity of esoteric literature. It is a reminder that language itself can be structured so that meaning depends on relationship—between teacher and student, text and commentary, body and symbol, politics and practice. The verses remain, quietly, on the page; what they say depends on who is listening, and how.

How might our understanding of religious texts change if we assumed, from the start, that some of their most important meanings were designed to emerge only in the “twilight” between the written word and a living conversation?