Within the scriptures of the Buddhist canon, there are two basic groups of texts. One group are discourses ("sutras") given by the Buddha Shakyamuni to those who attended his teachings. The second group are "tantras," esoteric teachings taught by other buddhas to small groups of highly realized beings that have been preserved and transmitted to the human realm, but which are not considered immediately understandable by humans. They are terse and use cryptic and obscure language -- often intentionally offensive -- to prevent the uninitiated from accessing their contents, which teach powerful meditative techniques which, if misunderstood and misapplied, could be harmful to even the most sincere of practitioners. The Guhyasamaja Tantra is one such text, and is of great importance in subsequent Tibetan lineages where it plays a central role in the Gelukpa and Sakyapa traditions, and in the Nyingma tradition as well, where it is considered one of the "Eighteen Tantras".

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To understand the teachings concealed in the Guhyasamaja Tantra, the Indian scholar-yogi Chandrakirti wrote an extensive commentary ("The Pradipoddyotana") explaining, word-by-word, the meaning and significance of statements in the Guhyasamaja Tantra, how to understand them in a meditative context, and how those statements can be understood differently by tantric practitioners at different levels of realization and at different stages of the practice.