Comments on “Reinventing Buddhist Tantra: Annotated Table of Contents”

Great post. You are in the right track but likely only 75% correct in all. That’s why you still seem to have some seemingly irreconcilable problems. But I love your efforts and the direction. However I really don’t feel that Buddhism is broken it does not need fixing we need the adjustment as practitioners. We need to find what it is that we need use it until we understand it then discard and move on.

Most of your links are invalid and won’t li k to the files.

QP

I get an error from inside the Wordpress app on all five links I tried to click on, but in the browser those links are fine.

Highly Esteemed Mr. David,

Superb! Congrats on going where no human has ever dared to go. This is what moves the wheels of civilization.

Two aspects that are essential for Vajrayana that I feel overlooked even by its so-called masters (as if it were possible to master life itself): (1) arts, mainly poetry and visual; and (2) humor.

Sufis, especially the Naqshbandi Afghan branch continued by the Shah brothers (and now by one of their descendants) have their Nasrudin short and enigmatic tales making use of humour to convey spiritual lessons that impact not only the intelect, but mainly the “heart” (where Vajrayana or Tibetans claim is mind’s root – v. esoteric anatomy).

As one can read in the Aro gTér materials, art is vastly stimulated.

How to bring those elements into play without losing its essence and without falling into mysticism?

Ok I use the normal Wordpress app and the links don’t work. I hope you can fix it. Your idea is very interesting

David good morning from London. I am a student of Ngakma Mé-tsal and Naljorpa Ja’gyür. I wonder if we might exchange email addresses? I am a big fan of your writing and ideas across meaningness, vividness and Budhism for Vampires. My first introduction to your writing was via ‘Approaching Aro’ which Ngakma Mé-tsal recommends I read. I look forward to hearing from you and exchanging views and ideas on Fluidity etc.
Take care.

Owen

I love this material. I read Reinventing Buddhist Tantra as a generalizable system to design attitudes and rituals to reshape and redefine aspects of atomized modern life.

It seems clear that rituals have emerged from necessity + materials at hand throughout history. Atomization + disruptive technology gives us an urgent need and opportunity to redesign almost everything about modern life. Starting from an attitude of participation instead of rejection seems sensible. Of course, creating a whole world of new rituals will be a lot of work! But your thoughts here can guide some of the work.

I’m delighted to find a blue book encyclopedia of Buddhism here that explains why those cars & trucks I test drove seemed to lead to more emptiness instead of happiness. Your honesty and clarity about Buddhism vehicles are two things that are impossible to find in the brochures ;)

Thank you!

The “I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl” article link seems to go to a dead link. The second Monty Python link (about Camelot) leads to a video that is not there anymore (ham & Jam, I think). I’m using iPhone Safari browser

Trying to naturalize Tantra/Dzogchen sometimes sounds too materialistic to me. Not in the way you treated materialism in your Meaningness materials.

Have you read “Waking Up” from Sam Harris? I might be wrong, but reducing mind to the brain kind of sounds extreme to me, but everyday experience seems to agree.

So, he might probably be right to leave aside Tulku Urgyen’s Dzogchen quotes of a state beyond birth and death… Or is there any experiential way that one might not reduce mind to the brain?

I’m not referring here to NDEs or OBEs that seem just eternalistic fantasies to me, but you never have anything to say about P’howa and Tummo practices. They seem to point to something more hyperspacial… I don’t know…

David, please, do you know someone that is able to explain the symbolic meaning of legends, such as in the stories of the 84 Mahasiddhas?

Maybe, if I’m not wrong, Keith Dowman and John M. Reynolds begun such process pointing at things like “dakinis flying in the sky” mean that one has a higher vision, that is vastly open, or “crossing walls” mean that one is able to go through dogmatic visions of others, helping them to awaken to the natural state.

I give my own shot when I say that, for instance, Virupa gave the 12-tone Heruka’s laughter to the cannibal witches he actually must have presented the 12 links of dependent origination, thus eliminating “wrong views” (eternallistic? nihilistic?) that those “Shakta witches” could’ve been nourishing.

This is a great aspect for me that made me abandon the ship of present Vajrayana (and of religion at all).

Once I asked in person a lama of worldwide fame – I won’t tell his name to preserve his image, as he’s still alive – about that story from Milarepa’s lore that he drummed the air and it resounded and he traversed his hand through rock as if it was water. This famous geshe said to me that this stuff was literal. But then I asked him if he had ever seen something like that and he said that spooky things are all around us, one just has to look for them.

Well, I must say that I live in a very mystic country – full of sorcery and folklore – and snuffed around a lot in the last 25 years, to no avail. Thus, it’s not that I want to be skeptical, but I think that those hidden meanings in the Tantrik legends are so much more valuable than to simply believe in supernatural occurrences…

What do you think?