Practicing Tantra in the Modern Charnel Grounds

In ancient India, tantric adepts went to the charnel grounds, the places where bodies were burned and bones scattered. These were not symbolic sites. They were places of raw fear, impurity, and truth. To practice there was to sit face to face with what society hides: death, decay, the end of every illusion of permanence.

Most of us will never sit among corpses in that way, nor do we need to. But the principle of the charnel ground is alive. It is not about bones and ashes. It is about going where we’d rather not look. It is about meeting directly what society exiles and what we exile in ourselves.

Our Modern Charnel Grounds

Today, our charnel grounds are everywhere, though we often pass by without seeing them.

Economic: unemployment offices, refugee camps, food banks, aging homes, skid rows. Places where society hides those it calls “useless.”

Digital: the endless doomscroll, algorithmic spam. A cemetery of attention, where human presence is consumed.

Ecological: landfills, strip mines, bleached coral reefs, oil fields. The planetary shadow of our consumption.

Psychological: trauma clinics, addiction centers, prisons. The inner exiles of society’s failures.

Cultural: the silenced and invisible, the elderly, the disabled, the marginalized.

Each of these is a liminal space where society often turns away. And precisely for that reason, they are places where tantric practice can be most alive in our world.

Charnel Grounds as Practice Grounds (For Ourselves)

When we bring practice into these spaces, we are training ourselves to see clearly.

In the charnel grounds of distraction, grief, or despair, the illusions of permanence, purity, and control fall apart. What remains is the truth of impermanence and interdependence.

This is not about seeking out suffering for its own sake. It is about learning to stay present in places where we would normally look away. When we practice here, we discover that buddhanature is not fragile. It is not something that only survives in retreat or under ideal conditions. It shines most clearly when everything else falls apart.

Charnel Grounds as Fields of Activity (For Others)

But tantra does not stop at recognizing our own nature. Presence naturally becomes responsive. Once we see clearly, we act.

The Buddhist tradition speaks of four enlightened activities—pacifying, enriching, magnetizing, and wrathful. Each is a way the energy of awareness expresses itself in the world.

Pacifying: bringing calm where there is fear, balance where there is turmoil.

Enriching: adding dignity, nourishment, or beauty where there is scarcity.

Magnetizing: gathering people together where there is fragmentation or isolation.

Wrathful: cutting through delusion and protecting what is vulnerable.

These are not strategies to adopt but qualities that arise when recognition deepens. In modern charnel grounds, they become very concrete: listening to the wounded, planting trees on stripped land, speaking truth in a polarized space, showing up for those society ignores.

Nothing is Reject, Nothing is Outside the Path

The old charnel ground adepts practiced with corpses, skulls, and ashes. What was feared became sacred. What was rejected became a catalyst for awakening.

The same posture is possible today.

A landfill can teach the effects of materialism more directly than a philosophy book.

A refugee camp can awaken compassion more powerfully than a lecture.

A doomscroll can become a reminder to return to mindful presence.

Nothing is rejected. Nothing is outside the mandala of awakened mind.

The next time you encounter a modern charnel ground, whether it is online, in your city, or in your own heart, use it as a catalyst for awakening.

Recognize, What in me resists this? See clearly, don’t turn away.

What response is possible here? Use the situation as a call to presence. Act with intention, even in small ways.

This is the lived experience of tantra in the charnel grounds: presence that sees, and presence that acts.