A Sexual Ritual with Māyā in Matsyendrasaṃhitā 40

In this short article I revisit the Matsyendrasaṃhitā (hereafter MaSaṃ), a Kubjikā-Tripurāoriented tantric yoga text of the Ṣaḍanvayaśāmbhava tradition, probably from thirteenth-century South India, core chapters of which I edited and translated for my PhD studies under the supervision of Professor Alexis Sanderson. My purpose there was to demonstrate that this text provides evidence for a transitional phase in the history of Śaiva Tantra, revealing aspects of a transition from Kaula practices to early Haṭhayoga. In the present essay I analyse, and partly edit, MaSaṃ chapter 40, in which a unique and somewhat ambiguous variant of a Śrīvidyā-type sexual ritual is described, and which Professor Sanderson was kind enough to read with me in Oxford in 2005. I would like to dedicate this paper to him, offering new interpretations of some key elements, and thus updating my previous analysis (Kiss 2009, 66).1 My approach is based on textual criticism: by restoring the text using four available manuscripts, I aim at giving an accurate translation and interpretation, which then enables me to draw some modest conclusions regarding the history of Śaivism around the thirteenth century.2 I would like to contribute to the contemporary research on Śaiva sexual rituals which focuses on their religio-historical importance. For although it is now generally acknowledged that sexual rituals are a distinctive feature of some of the Śaiva tantric tradi-