Watch a Tantric ritual and you might assume the climax — the actual worship of the deity — is most of it. It isn't. "Though the worship is, of course, the consummation of the rite, the bulk of the pūjā ritual is concerned with the purifications and 'divinizations' that make it possible to summon the energy of the deity."1 The worship is the short part at the end. The long part — the real labor of the rite — is everything that prepares for it: purifying and divinizing the practitioner and the space until summoning becomes possible.
This is the external (āṇava-upāya) face of pūjā, which Abhinava precisely calls sthāna-prakalpana — "visualizing and worshipping internal structures in external substrates."2 And it points to "the key element of Tantrik worship for all Tāntrikas": pūjā "consists in the main of a procedure for summoning the energy of a particular deity into a form that can temporarily house it, then worshipping that energy, that particular vibration of the one Consciousness, never confusing it with the form or image in which it is housed."2 Summon the energy into a temporary housing; worship the energy; never mistake the housing for the energy.
The rite runs on two distinct technologies, and Wallis names them as "Tantra's unique contribution in the arena of Indian ritual."3
Divinization is the preparatory transformation: the practitioner purifies and divinizes themselves (and the ritual elements and space) — becoming, in effect, a fit vessel and a being capable of consorting with the deity. This is most of the rite. Summoning is the evocation of the deity's energy into a form that can temporarily house it. Together — "these technologies of divinizing and summoning" — they constitute what's distinctively Tantric about Tantric ritual, "though the summoning rite is no doubt linked to much older, undocumented forms of shamanism."3 (The summoning of spirit-power into a vessel is, after all, shamanism's signature move; Tantra systematized and gnostically refined it.)
The reason the bulk of the rite is preparation rather than worship is itself a profound teaching. Why does it take so much divinization to summon a deity? Because the deity isn't actually absent. "It is only our karmic obstacles and contracted perception that hinder us from experiencing the divine power that is in reality present every moment."1 The divine power is already here, always. The elaborate preparation isn't fetching a distant deity; it's clearing the obstacles in you that prevent you from perceiving what was never gone. The bulk of the rite is preparation because the work was never "getting the deity to come" — it was getting you into a state where you can register the presence that was there all along.
This is where the nondualist quietly reinterprets the entire dualistic-looking apparatus of summoning. Ritual looks radically dualistic — you call a separate deity from elsewhere into an image here. But for the nondualist, "since Deity — in any of its many forms — is all-pervasive and omnipresent, what is usually called 'summoning' is correctly understood as 'evoking awareness' of the presence of that form of the Deity."4
The shift is total. In the dualistic reading, summoning transports an absent deity into a present vessel (the deity moves from there to here). In the nondual reading, summoning evokes awareness of a deity that was already fully present everywhere (nothing moves; your perception clears). The ritual actions are identical; the metaphysics is inverted. The "form that can temporarily house" the deity isn't a container you've trapped a distant god inside — it's a focus that helps your contracted perception register the omnipresent divine power at one concentrated point.
And this is why the practitioner must "never confuse the energy with the form or image in which it is housed."2 If you thought summoning had put the deity into the statue, you'd worship the statue. But the deity was never in the statue in that sense — the statue is a focusing-substrate (an icon of essence) for an energy that pervades everything. Worship the energy, not its temporary local housing. The whole engine of Tantric pūjā, read nondually, is: clear yourself (divinization) so you can focus the omnipresent divine into a vivid local form (summoning-as-evocation) and commune with that energy directly — while never forgetting it was everywhere the whole time and the form is just where you've concentrated your perception of it.
The structure of Tantric pūjā — most of the rite being preparation, the worship being brief — is a case study in a counterintuitive truth about transformative practice: the preparation is not the prelude to the practice; the preparation is the practice.
Consider the logic. If the deity were genuinely absent and summoning genuinely transported it, then the summoning-and-worship would be the substance and the preparation mere setup — like cleaning a room before a guest arrives, where the guest's arrival is the point. But Wallis's account inverts this. The deity is always present; the only variable is the practitioner's capacity to perceive it, which is exactly what the divinization addresses. So the "preparation" (purifying, divinizing, clearing karmic obstacles) is the part that actually does the transformative work — it changes the practitioner's state. The "worship" is the consummation, the moment of communion that the changed state makes possible, but it's brief precisely because once you've genuinely cleared yourself, the communion is immediate (the deity was already there). The bulk of the labor is in becoming able, not in the being-with.
This reframes the common impatience with ritual's elaborate preliminaries. The modern practitioner wants to skip to the "real" part — the communion, the experience, the worship — and treats the lengthy purifications as tedious throat-clearing. Tantric pūjā says: the purifications are the real part; the communion is what happens automatically once they're complete. You can't skip the divinization to get to the worship, because the worship is just the natural result of the divinization having succeeded — there's nothing to "get to" that isn't already produced by the preparation. The case study's generalizable lesson: for any practice whose goal is already present and merely obscured (rather than absent and needing to be fetched), the entire substance of the work is the obstacle-clearing, and the "arrival" is not a separate achievement but the immediate consequence of the clearing — so treating the preparation as secondary is exactly backwards.
The practical reorientation is to perform (or understand) pūjā as self-clearing toward an ever-present divine, not as fetching an absent one. Approach the rite knowing the deity-energy is already fully present everywhere; the work is removing the contracted perception that hides it. So invest in the "preparation": the purifications and divinizations are not preliminaries to rush through but the actual transformation — give them the weight the tradition gives them (the bulk of the rite). When you summon the deity into the image or yantra, hold it as evoking awareness of an omnipresent power at a concentrated focus, not as importing a distant god — and worship the energy, scrupulously not confusing it with the statue or image that's merely housing your perception of it. The marker that you're doing it rightly: the "summoning" feels less like calling something from far away and more like a veil thinning on something that was right here; and the communion, when it comes, feels immediate and unforced — because, the tradition insists, it always was available, and the rite only cleared your eyes. More broadly, apply the clearing-not-fetching frame to any practice aimed at a presence you suspect is already there (peace, awareness, love): stop trying to produce it and start clearing what obscures it.
The account comes from Abhinava (sthāna-prakalpana) and Wallis's framing of the broader Tantric ritual, with the nondualist reinterpretation of summoning.24 The tension worth holding is the same that runs through all of Abhinava's ritual interpretation: there's a real gap between the dualistic experience of the rite (you genuinely feel you're calling a deity, the summoning is dramatic and directional) and the nondual interpretation (nothing is summoned; you're evoking awareness of the omnipresent). The ordinary practitioner performing pūjā may well experience and intend the dualistic version — actually summoning a real, distinct deity — and the nondual reading reclassifies that intention as a lower understanding of what they're "really" doing. Open question: does the divinization-and-summoning technology require the nondual interpretation to be valid, or does it work just as well (or differently) for a practitioner who sincerely believes they're calling a genuinely distinct deity into a vessel — and is "summoning is really evoking awareness" the true account of the rite, or Abhinava's gnostic overcoding of a practice that, in its shamanic roots and popular performance, really did mean to summon a real spirit into a real vessel?
The page stages the now-familiar tension between the shamanic/popular roots of the summoning rite and Abhinava's nondual reinterpretation of it, with Wallis explicitly noting both. He acknowledges the rite is "no doubt linked to much older, undocumented forms of shamanism" — where summoning meant literally calling a spirit-power into a vessel — and then relays Abhinava's nondual reframe, that summoning is "correctly understood as 'evoking awareness'" of an omnipresent deity. These converge on the ritual procedure (the same divinizations and summonings are performed) and on the practical fact that preparation is the bulk of the work. They diverge on what summoning is: a real transport of spirit-power (shamanic/dualist) versus a clearing of perception toward the ever-present (nondual/gnostic). Wallis sides with the nondual reading as the "correct" understanding while honestly flagging the shamanic substrate — which means he's telling us the rite originated as literal summoning and was reinterpreted as evocation-of-awareness. What emerges is the characteristic layering of Tantric ritual: a powerful, ancient, dualistic-shamanic technology (summon the spirit into the vessel) preserved intact at the level of action while being progressively reinterpreted at the level of meaning (the spirit was never absent; you're clearing your own perception) — so the gnostic Tāntrika and the village shaman can perform recognizably the same rite while understanding it as opposite things, and the tradition's genius (or sleight of hand) is keeping the potent old form while installing a new metaphysics inside it.
The bridge: this is a page about a process where the bulk of the work is preparation/clearing rather than the visible climax, and about reframing "fetching something absent" as "clearing perception of something already present" — both of which connect widely.
The Sharpest Implication If the deity was present the whole time and the entire elaborate rite is just clearing your perception to notice it, then the structure of Tantric pūjā quietly indicts the way most people pursue almost everything they want spiritually. We treat the divine (or peace, or awareness, or love) as absent — something to summon, fetch, achieve, produce — and so we strain toward it, and the straining itself is part of the contracted perception that hides it. The rite says: it was never absent; you were never far; the work was always to clear the obstruction in you, not to cross a distance that doesn't exist. Take that seriously and the most ambitious spiritual summoning collapses into the humblest act of clearing — and the impatience to "get to the real experience" is revealed as the very thing keeping you from the experience that's already, fully, here. You can't summon what was never gone. You can only stop blocking your perception of it.
Generative Questions