There are some specific Tantric and Daoist cultures that seek to explore the power of sexuality to develop a prominent spiritual state of awareness and attain immortality. These practices are regarded as Taoist Tantra and they are believed to have been invented from India and China. At a later period, they were discovered to have extended to Tibet as well as somewhere else in Asia. Both Daoism and Tantrism are experimental approaches to life and they share comparable micro-cosmic and macro-cosmic ideologies of the human body as an internal mirror of the outer Nature.
This experiential human body-focused cosmology of ideologies has brought up a wide spectrum of sexual acts that range from celibacy followed by a conscious subtle act of body lovemaking to ritualized physical sexual intercourse. Both Daoist and Tantric cultures hypothesize a multidimensional cosmos controlled by the divine and pervaded by polar energies that are recognized in Daoism as ying-yang forces of Earth and Heaven or Tantra as Shakti of Shiva deities.
These identified forces come from a mystified sole unity whose place in the physical plane tracks a five folds pattern of harmony controlled by the five phase principles, also known as the five families of deities. The two forces provide alchemical maps which are usually hidden in the interiorized mandalas located within the human body; I Ching (Yijing) patterns in Daoism and yantras in Tantra. This can be completely understood by only the initiated adroit.
The subtle bodily maps enable the adroit to direct the obvious chaos of contradictory sexual and physical desires to discover the way to true self and self-actualization at the center of the creation. In spite of the fundamental comparisons in their cosmology, the Daoist and Tantric techniques of sexual nurturing, both subtle and physical bodies are fundamentally different.
Daoists and Tantrics have usually taken up the role of going against the customary sexual and social values which were subjugated by the overtly anti-female values of the Confucianism of China and the strict caste system of India. In addition to this, Daoists and Tantrics were known to be early experimenters who have external alchemy, which is the utilization of mind shifting of natural materials to hasten the spiritual evolution of an individual. Over and beyond the physical and sexual derivative values inherent in both ideologies, the place of true self-actualization cannot be underplayed in Daoists and Tantrics cultures.