Comments on “Reinventing Buddhist tantra badly”

“In fact, Consensus Buddhism does sometimes seem to consist of no more than simple meditation methods plus vague feel-good ethics. That is not a vehicle that will take you far.”

I’m not convinced that you actually need anything else, or that anything else can take you any further. “Simple meditation methods” can take you very far indeed. I quite like consensus Buddhism.

Hi David,

It seems to be that Western Tantra already exists in the form of Ceremonial Magick, and its relatives (Theosophy, et al) You seem to be familiar with it. Why should we create a Western BuddhistTantra, if a Western Tantra already exists. Or is something wrong with CM?

I suspect that you already have ideas on this, and I look forward to your answer.

David-
I agree with you on all of this. Any reinvention of Buddhist tantra should come from the roots which are already there, and are actually Buddhist. I honestly don’t see that anything needs changing, but really mostly needs repackaging.Also, the more ngakpa approaches are the ones that fit better and should be emphasized.

Western Ceremonial Magic is not Buddhist and is not a substitute- it has built into it all kinds of non-Buddhist understandings. Consensus Buddhism makes a major error in not having enough Compassion and devotional practice. It ends up cold and sterile as a result- but westerners are afraid of it, or averse to it, or don’t see why it belongs in Buddhist training so it is not taught in Mindfulness teaching centers. The teachers learned these practices in Thailand and Burma but chose not to import it, or to teach it.

I think the training programs needs to be organized and presented in a way that makes sense to westerners. One issue I struggle over is that westerners want the highest teaching right away- dzogchen- when it’s actually way above their heads and is counterproductive to learn it without preparation- but nobody believes this, and they won’t believe it.

There needs to be some initial mahayana teaching accompanied by shamata and vipassana practice- mindfulness practice, basically- as a foundation training. This kind of teaching can have the same level public interaction as the consensus mindfulness groups- but a mechanism can be taught that entices people to come to the next level teaching classes. Maybe there’s a little bit of light philosophy taught. At that point dzogchen can be hinted at, peripherally. Actually, madhyamika is so close- although not identical- that they can also be taught that and taught how that is almost the same and is a highest teaching also. In this way they are getting what everybody else is being taught elsewhere. This would be a public level teaching, and could easily include discussion of western teachings. The only issue here is that the teacher needs to know these teachings, and that probably requires a western lama- but this could be taught by western senior students. Also, we have needed supportive books written by westerners which translate and interpret tantra for our culture- but these are being written slowly. Tantra is a great fit, but it needs explaining and cross-indexing with other western ideas for it to make sense why you should bother with it.

Transitioning them to ngondro is another big step. Ngondro also contains the entire path, in a tantric sense, and can be taught as a far more rapid, and more complete, method that builds on the previous approach. In our center our lama has also added a variant approach, which is to teach the Guhyagarbha tantra and Shitro practice (not the Karma LIngpa version). This is a variant path which does not require ngondro practice and the various levels of deity yoga after. This approach preceded the nyingthig tradition, and is the entire tantric system in one practice, and is typically taught and practiced from a dzogchen perspective. That simplifies things- although many still choose to do ngondro. It sounds like your Aro Ter ngondro practice may be similarly used. Pure dzogchen texts are taught after or alongside the tantra teaching, and trekchod practice is folded into that teaching- which is basically thogel practice.

Once students are doing ngondro it is an easy step to further practices, as they are already onboard, and are probably already participating in some of them at tsoks, or have listened to lamas who have taught some of the practices.

If this is all taught in a manner that makes sense to westerners, with some public entry-level teachings then people are usually able to get on board. In Asia they had the same issues, which is why most people in Tibet only practiced Mahayana and some sutra chanting, or Chenresig mantra chanting, and merit building offerings- another thing westerners won’t go for.

True, Ceremonial Magick is not Buddhist. But it is Tantric. And it presents a set of techniques that are in line with Western symbolism. Add Buddhism and stir?

My Lama is Khenpo Sonam Tobgayl Rinpoche. Our center is Lhundrup Choling, in Los Angeles. His lineage is very close to yours- he teaches Dudjom Tersar, and used to teach under Lama Tharchin at Pema Osel Ling. He was also a student of Thinley Norbhu, and it was he who authorized the founding of our center. Check our site out- although it’s not much- but at least we have it up and slightly attended to- at www.lhundrupcholing.com.

To add to my previous comments re the Guhyagarbha tantra and Shitro practice: The Guhyagarbha tantra itself is the foundation of the Nyingma school’s approach to and understanding of tantra.It is also the source of the first textual mention of Dzogchen. In this one tantra and its commentaries one has a single text tradition which contains the entire teaching of tantra in one book. It is the root tantra of the Nyingma of which every other tantra can be seen as an elaboration.The text comes from India and has been taught throughout the entire history of Vajrayana in Tibet. The shitro practice is the practice distillation of the tantra.

It makes sense to me that such a teaching is a potentially perfect approach for us here today. First, it comes from the early days of Buddhism in Tibet, from a time when conditions are similar to ours here today. Second, we have no elaborate support structure for vajrayana so the simplicity of one book and one practice is very simplifying- even though the practice itself is complex- but not terribly so- lets just call it rich. This would still require earlier mahayana training- something accomplishable in a modified Consensus Buddhist approach. In the more modern nyinghtig approach the ngondro process is meant to accomplish much of that preliminary teaching.

There may well be other meditation practices similar in principle to this approach- I don’t know- and they would all be good fits I suspect. OTOH, this doesn’t negate the value of the more modern stage-like approaches. It only gives the option of another way of going about things that may work better for some people’s impatient characters. It probably takes just as long to achieve realization, but at least there’s not the sense of waiting to later learn the deep secrets. Tantra wasn’t always taught in stages in India and Tibet, so maybe it’s an option worth trying more in the West. We like options here.

I’d have to agree with 5GhostFist, as a CM practitioner myself, there is much there that could be useful in making a Western Buddhist Tantra, since as he points out, it is Tantric. So is the modern practice of Alchemy. The obvious obstacle is the total lack of Madhyamaka teachings on emptiness and the illusory nature of dichotomic existence in these systems. The unobvious obstacle is that there is a thick patina covering it made of circle-jerking (as it is known on the internet), auto-fellatio, and self-help-bullshit marketing.

But these practices exist, have their merits when the patina is polished off, and also must be addressed in some fashion, whether by appropriation or the less optimal method of condemnation.

However it plays out, a thoroughly Western Buddhist Tantra has a long way to go.

@ David Chapman - Indeed. These are not insurmountable, and will definitely can provide for the making of something unique.

I read your email on my phone at class tonight and extended your greetings to Khenpo after the class. He remembers you, and remembers your sangha. He says Hello and sends his best wishes to you and your sangha :) Yes, he opened up this center about 5 years ago so at the time he didn’t have his own students.

David - I hope you speak more about how “Dzogchen functions as the fulfillment of Tantra”. I feel this is a very interesting and subtle point. True for the Aro tradition and also possibly with Shangpa tradition. Heard Ken McLeod once use the term ‘the union of insight and ecstasy’. To which I thought - “hell ya!”.
One other point. Some vipassana yogis practice a very deep level of ‘metta’, which I have personally coined as ‘secret metta’. It’s not about nice phrases and ‘wishing’, it’s about raising your energetic body to ecstatic levels and radiating it out. (sound a bit like tantric transmission?) Perhaps like some kind of Chenrezig practice, except maybe not with that specific visualization. I am just speaking here from my personal subjective experience, which may be skewed by my deeply tantric perspective. ;-)

David-

Actually, we are doing a lot more than just practicing Shitro. We have also been experimenting with delivery methods for Khenpo’s teachings. We video stream on U-stream, and now Youtube (through a private channel) so that students across town, out of state, and now also a group in Vancouver, Canada are also able to receive the teachings.
All of our classes have downloadable audio so you can listen to a podcast of the classes.

Mind you we’re doing this in LA where almost none of us have much spare time and most students work full time, and the ones that don’t tend toward being un-techsavvy- but we are making progress, slowly.

Students come for empowerments, or in the case of Canada, Khenpo goes there to do the empowerments, then listen to the classes online, or in person when they can make it.
We are also working to develop some sort of an online discussion board for people in various classes to be able to do virtual debates. We are in development of an online and in-person Khenpo training shedra. Every one of Khenpo’s classes have been recorded and we are accumulating classes. All of his classes have been ones taught in his shedra, and have been taught according to traditional shedra teaching standards- as he received them in Nepal and Sikkim. We have 3 nights per week of classes- Tantra night, Dzogchen night, and Ngondro night-, and will soon introduce Saturday mornings for Mahayana/Madhyamika training. In this way each of the stages of class as taught in the traditional 9 year shedra are being offered- although not in the traditional sequence. Later they can be studied by the students in sequence- once all the classes have been taught and recorded. The teaching is all being done in English, as (almost ?) all the texts have been translated. Tibetan will probably be up to the students themselves to decide on whether they want to learn it or not. Hopefully we will have a system of senior students teaching mindfulness and basic mahayana as the more public outreach aspect. We are trying to mimic online university classes, while not losing the direct personal transmission aspect.

The goal is to teach the real teachings but in an accessible manner.
How they are taught and what ones students pick up on is an ongoing experiment.
Also, once we have the training then we can experiment with the next level of Americanization.

re: “Maybe you had something more than that in mind?”
It’s about energy. Tantra, as ecstatic practice or subtle body practice (Tsa-lung, Tummo, etc), raises the level of energy, which makes it easier to discover the non-dual state in ordinary experience. There’s so much joy, that ordinary sensory experience is constantly reminding you of that fountain of joy, and you just can’t help noticing the non-dual nature of your joy and sensory experience! I think Vipassana yogis could also do this through ecstatic-metta, but maybe not so many people are practicing ecstatic-metta. I know one guy who is.

You mention that renunciation is the engine of sutrayana but not tantra. However, it is my understanding that renunciation is also central to mahamudra. How would you distinguish these two?

Hey David!

Been trying to get some clarity on the similarities and differences between psychotherapy and tantra then I finally read your previous post. Here’s what intrigues me. One of the spiritual facts you list is:
“Fully experiencing emotions transforms them from a source of trouble into a source of wisdom.”

Later you say that:

“Consensus Buddhism has:
Borrowed from psychotherapy, to address the insights that fully feeling emotions is spiritually valuable and transformative, and that relationships are central to spiritual growth.
There appears to be some similarity between therapy and tantra, in that both use the content of daily life as part of the path. However I’m not familiar enough with the tantric view to say where that similarity ends.”

My question: specifically on this point of seeing emotions and relationships as transformative, how are the tantric and psychotherapeutic views different? What is missing, if anything, from therapy to be a source of tantric transformation?

Love to hear your thoughts on this!
Eran.

+Eran +David My experience of psychotherapy-based buddhist teachers vs. more tantricly based buddhist teachers is that the psychotherapy-based teachers are more likely to be concerned about helping you maintain your sense of ‘safety’. As your sense of self starts getting threatened, you might start to feel a bit, shall we say, unsafe. A tantric teacher is more likely to push you into the chaos of that feeling. They are less afraid of throwing you into chaos. That’s why the tantric relationship with the teacher is quite important. You really have to trust that person, because your ‘self’ is getting reconstructed at a very deep level. Like, tearing down the house completely, rather than changing the furniture and adding new fixtures.

Tantra and psychotherapy both provide positive approaches to engaging with emotions, but it seems like there’s a false meta-narrative when they’re brought together: psychotherapy is ‘a safe way to encounter and work through your emotions,’ Tantra is often met with a knee-jerk reaction as ‘potentially dangerous.’

Obviously psychotherapy can go wrong - but mostly these days it’s viewed as an acceptable, safe option. We know that there are ways in which Buddhist Tantra can go wrong too. At this point in time, this knowledge gets in the way of Tantra being seen as ‘mostly safe’. It’s true there’s much work to be done, to change that view.

But maybe part of the problem is that Tantra is mistakenly viewed as ‘inherently dangerous’ because it’s almost without exception contrasted to Buddhist approaches that view emotions with caution, at best? Maybe it would be more useful if, in presenting Tantra in the West, we were to follow the line of comparison between Buddhist Tantra and psychotherapy instead? What if, in the future, people were to ask ‘do you think psychotherapy, or Buddhist Tantra, would be best for me at this point?’ with the underlying assumption that both were tried, tested and legitimate ways to develop a mature handle on emotions?

Maybe that’s the ‘killer app’ that you’re looking for in Tantra? A secular way in, that cuts out the renunciative approach altogether.

Terminology gets a bit confusing and these topics are pretty wide-ranging so I’ll try to clarify and focus.

When I speak of psychotherapy in this context I’m not referring to the kind of work that addresses deep psychopathology rather to the kind of work that can support someone in moving toward increased fulfillment, self-actualization, etc. Moving from “normal” to “awesome”, is how I’d describe it in a nutshell. This work includes (and is not limited to) discovering and releasing self-limiting beliefs, healing trauma (often early attachment trauma), shadow work, etc. All of these aspects of therapy require facing unpleasant experiences and often repressed emotions/thoughts. The process can be one of expanding one’s definition of what’s “allowed”, expanding the definition of self while also loosening the hold on it. It doesn’t aim at Enlightenment but like you say, David, the definition of what Enlightenment is, is kinda murky. Right now, I’d be satisfied with Enlightenment == Happy with my current level of Enlightenment :)

I think with this definition, the difference becomes even harder to find. If both tantra and psychotherapy can aim at a way of being that is “more” than normal, how are they different? I think we need to break this down further.

Goal: Is tantra’s “more” bigger than therapy’s “more”? Is it self-actualization vs. self-realization vs self-transcendance? (Do these terms even mean anything?)
View: What are the assumptions/stories that tantra includes that Western psychotherapy might reject? And vice versa.
Practice: How are the practices different? How are they similar? It might be interesting to begin with the similarities.
The nature of the relationship with the teacher/therapist. 

To say more about some of the points you bring up:

Emptiness definitely seems like a point of difference. However, emptiness is just a word. What is the experience it is pointing at? How is that experience transformational? If we take one classic explanation - empty meaning empty of inherent existence, transitory, illusory even - and apply this to feelings, thoughts, etc. then it seems to me that the goal is trying to free a person from the bondage of feelings, emotions, and thoughts. This doesn’t sound too far-fetched of a goal for therapy. The difference, IMO, would be that therapy tends to be focused on specific emotion clusters whereas tantra and contemplative methods in general, go for the root cause. That could be because of a simple difference in views (what is possible and what is desirable).

Transforming negative emotions into positive is not explicit in therapy but definitely exists. Pulling back projections, I think, is one way it’s done. Another is through asking the client to stay with an emotion long enough to see what’s behind it. Again, therapy would usually go on a case-by-case basis (this experience of anger, that experience of anger,…) is this different in tantra?

I’m not quite sure what you mean by transforming the total mandala. Can you say more about that? Or do you have any resources that describe that more?

Last, the teacher/therapist relationship. There’s some research showing that the therapist’s way of being is just as important as the method of therapy employed (for the purpose effecting successful therapy). No doubt this is key to therapy. A good therapist provides a place to heal old relationship trauma (through the transference relationship), creates a safe place for the client to experience new ways of being and models what this new way of being could be like. I don’t know that that is very different from the role of a tantric teacher…

BTW, If you watch old videos of Fritz Perls, I think you’d find he’s very different from what most people expect. He’s more on the crazy wisdom side, there’s a confrontational aspect to his work and a willingness to involve himself that you don’t see in “normal” talk therapy. Is the kind of transformation that Perls is aiming at closer to the tantric goal? If I’ve ever seen an example of including/transforming the whole mandala, it’s him.

Maybe a good start would be to do as Gurdjieff tried to (he’s been into Vajrayana, that’s for sure): using new terminologies.

Tantra and Buddhism are already linked to some clichés. Tantra is somewhat confused with Hindu Tantra and taken just as a sexual exercise for doing an hours long intercourse with no ejaculation in order for man and woman reach multiple orgasms together.

Sometimes people confuse Tantra with what Osho’s direct students teach today, which is a great salad sometimes falling back on the previous line I mention above.

For instance, here in my country there are places where people associate the word Tantra with sexual organ massages that many high class prostitutes utilize as preliminaries on their clients and as a disguise for their main source of income.

Buddhism and Yoga most people associate with relaxation, hippie sterile peace-and-love and boredom. Even meditation is commonly linked to non-thinking, relaxation and doing nothing.

While all these points may have interesting things (such as doing nothing and eroticism) that can offer something on a society that sees doing nothing and sex still as taboos, the terminologies generate disinterest from those that could benefit from Tantric Buddhism.

“Fully experiencing emotions transforms them from a source of trouble into a source of wisdom.”

Now, this really struck me as probably the most important statement from the list I found it in above. Why? Because it implicitly stands at the intersection of intersections (myriad crossroads) which unite the themes you’re talking about here in this blog. What are these themes? Modernism (naturalism) and Buddhism and tantra (as contrasted with non-tantric forms of Buddhism).

Tantra (I would guess! I’m not an expert!) seems to be among the most positively oriented toward feeling and emotion (which we might call “somatic energy”) of all of the Buddhist traditions. How so? Well, let’s look how Shinzen Young (who got his start in a Japanese form of tantric Buddhism) defines the term equanimity.

Equanimity: the Radical Permission to Feel
–by Shinzen Young (Jul 05, 2010)
http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=703

Now, to realize the significance of this in a deeply modern context, one has only to spend a day or three reading about contemporary trauma theory and therapy, then to go and have a look and listen at what Reggie Ray says about the very same topic.

It won’t take long to realize how trauma creates “trance states” which are bound (held in place) by two primary factors: somatic energy and cognitive habit (usually quite unconscious). These are two sides of a single coin. And this is as modern as we can get! –by which I mean modern psychology, neuro-science…, etc., are fully on board with this trend line.

When we’re willing to deeply, without resistance, FEEL what the trauma-habit-pattern in the soma (body-mind-psyche) feels, that pattern begins to dissolve, releasing what Buddhists have called by names like “freedom” and “awakening”. No need to have literal demons here, nor gods. Nor supernatural powers....

PS -

David, I see from what you’ve written in the above comments that you’re not especially familiar with modern (western) psychology and psychotherapy. I think you will find more study in this area enormously beneficial, as your project is to understand Buddhist Tantra in a modern setting. To my mind the key is the soma and somatics, broadly understood. So you will want to explore somatic psychology as well as other somatic practices, then to associate these with contemporary trauma theory and therapy. This will take some time but you can have your money back if you find this approach fruitless.