Comments on “Reinventing Buddhist Tantra”

This piece has the feel of something very personal that was just dieing to come out. I have the distinct impression that this is what you’ve been waiting to write about all along, and the tasks you’ve set yourself sure look like fun!
Having practiced a lot of Tibetan Tantra in the past I am curious to see what you will have to say about taking the boring monotony out of tantric ritual. I developed a rather strong allergy to Buddhist ritual after doing too many retreats with the NKT and FPMT back in the day.
When you talk about making rituals ecstatic, exhilarating, it made me think of many shamanic rituals that I’ve been involved in, including rites of passage ceremonies, which are highly trans-formative when done properly. Although seemingly magical, their function is to shake us out of our inner status-quo and connect us to raw experience the body.
http://buddhatrieste.blogspot.com/

My only dabbling in the world of Buddhist tantra (if it even can be called that) was taking a few classes at the local Shambhala Buddhist center in my city. As much as I appreciated the aesthetics of the facility, the basic practice (shamatha-vipashyana) and the emphasis on creativity, I felt the need to terminate my association with Shambhala. I found their uncritical devotion to both Chogyam Trungpa and his son “Sakyong” Mipham to be extremely creepy. The people seemed, frankly, robotic: everything had to fit the standard Shambhala language and absolutely no mention could be made of the well-publicized scandals surrounding Trungpa or his first appointed successor. Committed Shambhalians strike me as very sincere and highly educated people who have left their brains at the door in return for the wonderstruck bliss of the so-called “Kingdom of Shambhala.” Please, David, don’t tell me this is what you have in mind when you talk about modern Buddhist tantra. Guru-devotion in all it’s myriad manifestations: No thanks!

Interested to hear more, however…

Best,
Bradley

Wow, brilliant post!! Very helpful. Thank you.
This was a titillating introduction for your next 30 - 40 posts.
Stop meditating and write, will ya? :-)

As other commentors have said, this is fantastic book material. I think, after this is all done (in a few years), you should hire an editor to organize all of these posts into a web book or a book series. I envision a title like: “The Promise and Curse of Tantra”.

Waiting with baited breath for more – please be careful during your mountain climbs, we need you!

I have been thinking about mountain climbing as well.

I don’t think you can improve on this!
6hr love play
6hr meditation
6hr work/socialization
6hr relaxation

I forget where this came from, maybe Drukpa Kunley

Hug some emptiness today…lol

@ David,
So, thinking in terms of Yanas, I imagine that leaves Dzogchen as your main practice?

Thanks for the response, David. My understanding is that much has changed in the Shambhala world since the Sakyong took over. There’s a website about this change from a critical point of view at www.radiofreeshambhala.org. Worth a look if you’re interested.

Since I was not around for the “good ‘ol days” of pre-Rich, pre-Sakyong Shambhala I cannot pass any judgment as to the organization back then. However, in reading through Trungpa’s books I cannot help but conclude that he engaged in a lot of mystical thinking and played a lot of games with his devotees. That’s not to say there isn’t value to his teachings: I think there is. I’m just not willing to believe him (or anyone else, for that matter) hook, line and sinker. And that’s the problem with guru-based systems: they don’t leave (enough? any?) room for doubt and critical thinking. Can there be a modern tantra without gurus? Could it still be called tantra?

One last thing: In your response to Sabio above you say you need to be “enlightened” to practice Dzogchen. What exactly do you mean by “enlightened”?

Thanks,
Bradley

@ David: Without speaking about yourself in particular, how would a teacher decide, in general, when the practice of Dzogchen sem-de ngondro would be preferable to Tantra for a given person. Just an example would be helpful. Likewise, what type of mind would be better not practicing Tantra or Dzogchen sdn?

Very funny David ! still only 13hr and 3 min used up
OK here is one adaptable solution. Realistic and feasible
Your own personal live in consort Goddess who plays as a devoted monogamous wife in disguise.

http://youtu.be/26DD0JwAbAc

1. 1hr argue with American Express about a billing error-( Goddess fixes this in 5 minutes)
   3hrs answer Buddhism-related emails and web comments-reduce to 1 1/2 hrs
   1hr distracted by LOLcats
   1hr install critical software security update for sangha web site
   2hrs visit numerous stores trying to find a pair of jeans that actually fits; -(Goddess sews patches so you’re a Patched jean Thunderbolt)…lol
   1hr make dinner and clean up-( Split chores with Goddess)
   1hr talk to foreign girlfriend by Skype-(no need any more with in house Goddess)
   2hrs start working on income tax return-(hire accountant)
   1hr read depressing book about Tibetan politics in preparation for upcoming post
   3min start practicing Tantric sadhana, realize I’m utterly exhausted and it’s pointless, go to bed-(after one hour in bed with Goddess you will be unable to fall unconscious and can play with the cats, do security and read but no girlfriend or Goddess turns into she devil…lol Ten armed Black Kali . Your own personal tormenter but some dissolve ego the hard way)…lol
2. I do understand your predicament for after your vehicle analogy I blew 1-2 hr contemplating, searching, and looking at used Morgans. What a beautiful car but I don’t need it.

http://www.morgancars-usa.com/usedcars.html

They had me going with the ISIS and Aero stuff…lol

@ David:
So though you don’t practice Tantra now, how long did you practice it as your primary method until you found it was not the best fit for you? If I may ask.

I found your above post very interesting, lucid and creative - in many ways - the writing style is like a tantric practice which is designed to assist the ‘break-out’ from old habitual tendencies. In the postmodern age, it seems that new and unpredictable ‘freedoms’ are emerging from beneath the established social structures, and taking everyone by surprise - particularly governments who are having to pass new laws to limit (and control) such freedoms. Perhaps this new state of socio-economic development in the outer world, allows for a similar ‘mirroring’ development to occur in the inner world. This, I believe, is the essence of tantric practice.

@ David,
Yes, that helps, David. Thanks. I guess I have become clearer about my ponderings as we talk. Maybe these are really what I am wondering:

(1) Hmmm, David is concerned about Tantra being shut out of the picture, but he doesn’t do it. I wonder if he feels what he does is also trying to be shut down by the Consensus and why or why not?

(2) Did David leave Tantra because it had components that consensus people criticize or other reasons?

(3) Does David still use a mix of techniques, some that are Tantric? [seems you have said, “Yes”]

(4) Will David write not only about Tantric methods, but also about his best-fit methods as an option in future Buddhisms or does he feel they already have a safe home and only Tantric methods are being quieted?

I understand how personal teachers can answer questions, but you are writing us and so I thought I’d ask you. And I realize that you prefer not to talk about your personal practice so I will understand if you leave these alone.

I’m enjoying the ambition of this planned series of posts.

For anyone that might not have heard it, I will enter into the mix the definition of the tantra-yana as it is expressed by Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen.

They define tantra as the yana (method) whose ground is emptiness, whose path is transformation and whose result is nonduality.

Above you give the ‘experience’ a hard time in contrast with ‘action’, but it is I think helpful to realize that tantra requires experience with emptiness. Sure, there is hardly a better way to have experience than action, but experience can include the “taste” of moments when no action is taking place, and when we are confronted with the ambiguity of existence (proven by our characterizations of our actions) and non-existence (whatever it is we are when we can’t characterize ourself in any way).

I don’t think it’s surprising that yanas begin with an experience aspect, because in general they have an emptinesss - form - wisdom pattern, they start with an experience, where the practitioner finds themselves, then they employ a view and methods (form) to produce a result (wisdom).

So tantra requires the experience of emptiness. In “Wearing the Body of Visions” this is discussed at some length to clarify that this base requirement doesn’t make a sequence out of the yanas. Since sutra-yana has a base of the experience of unsatisfactoriness, the method of renunciation and the result of the realization of emptiness, one might conclude that in order to practice tantra, one would have to take the sutric path to completion, to arrive at the experience of emptiness that is required for the tantric path. Here Rinpoche is clear to explain that this is certainly one way of gaining that experience, but that the experience of emptiness is actually “sparkling through” our dualistic experience, the unsatisfactoriness, the wisdom bliss, it’s there to be accessed all the time. If anything, the advantage gained by some “preliminary” sutra-yana experience is the stabilization of our experience of emptiness, so that instead of just “sparkling through” (in very brief epiphanies) it is a more stable and reliable quality (if one can use those terms) of our experience of emptiness.

Transformation as the path, springs from that experience of emptiness, and unlike the sutra-yana (what you grant as being the dominant voice of the 97% of the consensus) rather than renounce, the tantrika is now in unconditioned and spontaneous liberty to relate to those very same objects of desire, appreciation, repulsion, aversion, indifference - but all from the context of, or as I enjoy when it is said - “in the dimension of” the experience of emptiness. So as has been commented, empptiness is not some sort of bland base from which all these things have a single taste and are the energetic color of gray, no each transformed “poison” (as the sutric path saw it) now becomes an experience of our nondual nature, an experience of the long-ku (sphere of energy) in which (and I often like quoting the law of thermodynamic here for allusionary reference) energy is neither created no destroyed, only transformed . . . So all these emptiness-based experiences of the non-dual energy of our being are “trainings” in accomplishing the realization of the nondual state, and the tantra-yana becomes the path for swiftly getting there, across those annoyingly vast perceptions of distance between that which I am at this very moment, and the “enlightened” me, over there, just beyond that cliff.

Anyway, I am looking forward to your treatment of this material, as I find it interesting when someone can personalize the teachings for themself, a skill I don’t demonstrate that much of an aptitude for I admit. I hope you don’t mind my interjection of this assembly of views here, and that hopefully it stimulates you to draw the verbal or conceptual razors that you want to across this “conventional” view towards the slant that you are experiencing as most potentially useful to the west, as it dabbles perilously near the dreaded “consensus” buddhism.

@ David: thanx, that helped much.

@ David
Just for fun, I saw this article on “Can you Train Someone to be a Hero?” which discusses two types of heroes. And since being a Hero is unique to Tantra (a training method), I thought it may be useful in discussing this term in possible future posts.

Man, David– that’s a heroic bit of research you did, in itself. I don’t think I’d have drilled down to discover the personnel and their link to that disturbing experiment. Seems a very interesting attempt at redemption on the part of PZ.

Hi David – let me second (or seventh or whatever) your other commenters and agree that this does seem like a breakout post. Looking forward to your future expansions on this theme and attempts to eff the ineffable.

From another old housemate: what happens when you put wings on a car ((pictures!)

Hi David,

I’ve been following along what you’ve been saying on consensus Buddhism and it’s great stuff. I have a minor quip about what you’re saying about Buddhism in the West and how it doesn’t meet the needs of Westerners - often you use language such as “Buddhism doesn’t meet what Westerners wants”, or sum such… and often add that Tantra is suitable because it appeals to Westerners “as we are”, with our interests in sensual experiences and so on.

What I wonder if is you’re missing the point in that all unenlightened beings are characterised by ignorance and wrong views. Of course, we are entirely deluded, and our obsession with sensory experience is a reflection of this. It’s not Buddhism that needs to change to suit Westerners, it’s that Westerners need to change their desires and what they THINK they want, in order to begin to understand and attain the realisations and truths of non-self in order to end the rounds of rebirth. That is a core concept of all Buddhisms that cannot be denied - ending the rounds of rebirth, either now or in the future, is the ultimate goal, and ending the craving of sense pleasures is the method to get there (if you’re going for more than Smaller Scope level of practice).

I think it’s very dangerous that we as Westerners tend to (in this modern and/or post-modern era) direct our spiritual seeking by /what it is we think we want/, when I think the very impulses themselves are what we need to question and contemplate whether they are in fact misguided or based on delusions/illusions.

Just my 2 cents.

Zac,
Dvids comments make what i am about to say pehaps redundent. I want to say them anyways.
Zac,
I desire peace and justice. Does that mean that I will never cease being reborn?

*,
In answer to your question I pose another question.
Are conflict and injustice infinite?
If that is the case then you will never cease being reborn.

During the game the goal posts got moved.
You started your journey thinking that it would lead to ending your cylcle of rebirth.
Then as you approached the goal posts the goal shifts. It now becomes ending OUR
cycle of rebirths. Who are WE anyways?

Hi again David,

Okay, I’m starting to understand a bit more now. I started out in Theravada for a few years but in the past 6 months I’ve started flirting with Tibetan Buddhism as I find the teachings fresh, inspiring and speak very clearly to me as a Westerner in the West. Tantra has intrigued me but again I find problems with how it conflicts with Sutrayana.

Basically, when I came to Buddhism, I wanted to get as close to the source teachings of Siddhartha Gautama himself. I initially dismissed everything post-Tripitaka as not the Buddha’s own teachings; in short, fan fiction. Only recently have I started to lighten up on this viewpoint and begin to consider myself more of a Mahayana Buddhist, inspired by Santideva, Nagarjuna’s madhyamaka philosophy and the bodhisattva ideal, and I feel refreshed in the imagery and symbolism of the bodhisattvas and Vajra deities which appeals to the ritual approaches I used to employ in the western hermetic occultism of my youth. It no longer matters to me that these things weren’t taught by the Buddha - I feel they conform to the spirit of what he was teaching and either a) extrapolate in ways he didn’t explicitly but can be argued are implicit in his teachings, or b) are innovations that speak to the dispositions of particular kinds of people and thus are potentially the most helpful for them.

However, I can’t seem to unite point b) with how contradictory to the Buddha’s teachings Tantra seems to be. I definitely don’t believe the Buddha taught Tantra and I have a strong feeling (whether it is well informed or not is another question) that if he were alive, he would denounce it. It is not from Hinduism, having more to do with Vedanta or esoteric Hinduism than Buddhism (as far as I can tell)? The samsara/nirvana being two sides of the same coin thing smells suspiciously of Vedantic atman/brahman talk, and their union or non-separation to begin with. That’s why I’m concerned with this appeal to Tantra as the most suitable path for Westerners - might it actually not be able to be considered Buddhism?

I am not familiar with these Inner Tantra ideas you are talking about - most of what I have read seems to be this bastardised sutra-conforming version you are talking about. Any suggestions on reading material to get more of an idea on the opposite variety?

Wow, this dialogue between Zac and David is fantastic – thanx to you both. It could almost be edited into a post on its own right!

Hi David,

Quite a few things to respond to! I hope you don’t mind me doing so, and I hope my thoughts are useful and not just distracting chatter… but I’m young (an undergrad), so please forgive if I’m not up to speed. I’m doing my best to “catch up” on all this history and /untangle the threads/ (haha, gotta love double entendres).

Re: Historical Buddha - I’ve not done a systematic historical search, as that guy you linked to has done, but my initial thoughts on the matter are this. There surely /must/ have been a historical figure that expounded the core ideas of what we associate with the Gautama character. Otherwise, where did the ideas come from? Surely not a group of people sitting around who then decided to do all of this. Otherwise, why the Three Jewels? Why the Buddha? Why the early Sangha that clearly didn’t do much practice in the first hundred years, but perfectly preserved in oral format verse upon verse upon verse of words from this Buddha guy?

Of course, all the mythical details of his life and supernatural elements could clearly have been exagerated, added, or a form of visionary history, as you suggest. No problem there. But, as with Jesus, I can’t believe there is not a historical figure behind the mythic when you have such strong fervour from direct disciples in the generations after his death.

Also, what about Mahavira? Given that it’s understood he was contemporaneous (I think?), is he similarly fictitous? Do they not reaffirm each other’s likely historical existence when we consider that their disciples debated one another?

“Tantra does contradict Sutra. Throughout Tantra’s history, people have wanted to gloss over that, and either sweep the contradictions under the rug or try to reconcile them. This has, in my opinion, always had bad results.”

I’d be interested in hearing more about how you see this in modern Tibetan Buddhism, such as that propounded by the FPMT. How does this seem to work? I know you’ve said the consensus leaders seem to be downplaying Tantra, but it’s obviously still an important part of the Gelugpa as well as the other schools, so is there a conspiracy of silence around this because Westerners “aren’t prepared” to hear the full deal? Do they practice Sutrayana in public and Tantra in private? Is there an exoteric and an esoteric face going on here?

I’ve read Lama Yeshe’s book actually, one of the few books on Tantra I’ve read… I was struck then as I am now at how different, indeed contradictory it seemed to the Dhamma I learned from the Theravada. I don’t see how the shift from Sutra to Tantra can occur or even switch around depending on circumstances/need, because engaging in Tantric desire is surely going to destroy the non-attachment that you’ve spent working so hard for in Sutrayana?

I’ve read Chögyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and loved it as something a bit fresh and different from what I was used to reading… and then I read about his life. I felt the same shock as when I read about Milarepa, and this is a character revered for how enlightened he was. Yet I can’t help but feel, how the heck can enlightened beings engage in such /tanha/ when Gautama taught that /tanha/ is what becomes extinct upon enlightenment?

I guess I’m experiencing what you aptly call “yana shock”… and I suppose the argument is that all the yanas /get you there/, but having not had much direct experience of progress towards the /there/ myself, I guess I’m flapping around in the dark…

And maybe it’s a shame I started out in Theravada, because now I feel like a deeply ingrained Catholic that wants to go a little further afield, but forever feels the guilt of the orthodoxy implanted in the back of my brain…

Anyway, sorry to rant on. This has all been coming to a head in my own studies and practice and so I am glad to have had a catalyst to prompt me to think about it more and try to concrete it in words somehow. For that, many thanks, good sir!

Hi David,

I love your sites and have been poking around them. I think this might be the right place to ask the question, since it is a thread about the practise of tantra in the West. I’m wondering about the yidams used in tantric practice. I don’t think I’m wrong to think that they are “Buddhized” Tibetan gods/spirits (if I am wrong, then stop me), so it would make sense that they are used by Tibetans - they have a mythic resonance for them. They leave me cold, however. I’m wondering whether you have thought about, or know of anyone who has, the possiblity of “Buddhizing” or “tantrifying” (pardon the terms!) Western gods/spirits/myth?. I think it would be a more appealing practise for myself if I were dealing with athena and aries, etc. - or am I missing something? What do you think?

Hi David,

Thanks for the response. I share your reticence to adopt Christian figures into a yidam pratices. I agree about the metaphysics, but they also seem to be lacking those emotional dimensions that make yidam practise what it is (or what I take it to be). I think the Greek pantheon, say, might work better that way (then again, it may not). I was just interested to hear what you had to say about that. I am presently in a weird place with my Buddhist practise, because I do not accept the consensus view for all the reasons you have spoken about, but I cannot find myself wanting to say that all desire is bad and that the best solution too life is to abandon it. This has always struck me as being one step away from suicide (drop the ‘trapped in rebirth’ and the recipe is there). I want life to be joyous! So tantra seems the way to go (this correlates well with some of my philosophical interests, too: Spinoza, Nietzsche). Like I said, though, super hard to resonate with these yidams, though (maybe more study under someone qualified is the way to go). So right now I’m hanging out in the ‘Hardcore Dharma’ crowd, but interested in tantra.

As for Tsogyel, she sounds like a girl I’d like to meet! ;)

James, and David,

Regarding Western/European gods and Tantra… I have some thoughts…

I have been a part of Western occultism, especially a certain scene in London, for a number of years now, and I have found it lacking in terms of the larger philosophical questions - it’s all well and good being able to manipulate the world with magick, but so what? To what ultimate end? There are some ultimate spiritual goals mentioned, and somewhat lauded as the “aim”, but I find these to be severely vague and people who I have met who are spoken of as advanced spiritual adepts struck me as nowhere near the level of being a decent human being, let alone spiritually “enlightened”. Even the humblest of novice monks can outshine these so-called occult adepts.
There’s lots of talk of finding your True Will and achieving union with your Holy Guardian Angel, but these things seemed like prize gems in an otherwise plentiful box of the ego’s toys, just another pretty adornment in the life of selfish people of the literary or failed musician kind. Magick and occult beliefs in general tend to feed into the underlying egoism that is already there in the individual.

However, it was by way of magick that I started making links with Buddhism - the illusory, malleable-like appearance of reality, and the self. When I moved into Vajrayana from Theravada, I started seeing lots of links with Western magick and ritual - shared tools and techniques, if not goals or values.

This is something I wish to explore more. Wherever the Dharma went, it used the archetypal forms of the local peoples to connect with their collective mind. If it results in benefits for those people, and does not serve to merely pay lip service to the Dharma but assists in bringing them into the practice of the path, then I believe it is skilful means. There is undoubtedly powerful conditioning and reverence in the minds of those who connect with cultural/regional forms of religious significance.

Sam Webster has been doing some of this work in the liminal space between Buddhist Tantra, Vajrayana and Western Occultism (albeit specifically Aleister Crowley’s system of Thelema, and the principle, synchretic deity of that current, Ra-Hoor-Khuit). He has written a small text called “Tantric Thelema” ( http://www.concrescent.net/book/tantric-thelema ) - it is mostly rituals combining Vajrayana structures with the idea of working with the Thelemic deity as a Yidam, but the opening few (short) chapters outline a kind of “Buddhism for Western pagans/occultists”, suggesting that bringing in the larger /telos/ of compassion, Liberation and the Bodhisattva ideal can infuse paganism/occultism with a more worthy cause to direct it’s means. (I can assure you, all he is saying is predominantly falling on deaf, uninterested ears.)

While I do not care for the Thelemic current in the slightest, what he is doing may be a good starting point for other Westerners who are either familiar with Western occultism / neo-paganism, or would like to find some way of bringing the Vajrayana into a European / Western cultural, mythic context. If you’re interested, much of the material in the start of the book can be found online as his “pagan dharma” essays (here: http://hermetic.com/webster/ ).

I personally am very comfortable with the Vajra-deities, and have come to adore their beauty, archetypal power and intricate symbolic significance. I think there is also something to be said (very powerfully) in favour of using them, as they are “bespoke” for the purpose and goals we are trying to achieve - they are literally like visual programs encoded for achieving the fruits of the path.

However, I can appreciate that for some, it is very difficult to connect with the distinctly Indian-Asian aesthetic. That’s why I think, perhaps, there might be a lot to be said for working together to bring the Dharma into a European Pagan context. I wonder if, like Ra-Hoor-Khuit, other pagan deities of the West could be appropriated as Dharma protectors. That’s certainly what happened to the Tibetan deities and spirits when the Dharma arrived there, no?

I would love to see more Greek, Roman and Egyptian deities in the beautiful Vajrayana-style depiction Webster worked on for the cover of his book with the artist Kat Lunoe. Their myths and samsaric dramas attest to the fact that the European gods clearly also suffer from impermanence, suffering and non-self, even if they do abide in the god realms. Imagine the splendour of a tantric Anubis of death and impermanence, psychopomp between the bardos, or a wrathful Athena who has turned her military intelligence towards the destruction of ignorance and the three poisons. Or perhaps a Hermetic, Mercurial Manjushri (Hermanjushri?).

If infused with the subtleties of Vajrayana iconography and it’s finer, detailed symbols, I am sure Western gods can be adorned with dorjes and bells amongst other things (Jupiter’s lightning bolt as Vajra? Why not?). It would just take a good artist learned in Tibetan art to take up the challenge.

There are so many ideas from this point. Very exciting…

After all, in John Blofeld’s ‘The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet’, he offers an interesting account of the abbot of Samye Ling monastery in Scotland just after it’s construction, when he heard there was an old druidic stone circle not too far away. He said something to the affect of, “Well, perhaps I shall go and meditate there and ask if the spirit of the place would like to come and be a Dharma protector for the monastery.” An interesting little tid-bit.

@Zac: Thanks for your in-depth response and the links you have provided. They are exremely interesting reading. I was thinking that, depending on their particular mythologies, they could work that way. Aries, for instance, is also a god of war, but unlike Athena, he’s the god of the darker sides of war (bloodlust and destruction) - I thought that would actually make him a perfect ‘wrathful’ yidam. I would need to know about how the practices work though, before I could even begin contemplating Buddhizing other figures.

@David: I really do appreciate your writing, it does make tantra more accessible - in fact, before reading your sites, I always rejected it out of hand (seemed too weird beforehand). The Hardcore Dharma scene has an interesting sort of relationship to ordinary life, desire, etc. None of its prominent practitioners are monastics, as I’m sure you’re aware. They definitely don’t take the classical Theravada approach to desire (i.e. that it is the problem and that it can actually be done away with). Indeed, some are quite vocally opposed to the notion. Daniel Ingram even talks a little about harnessing the defilements in practise, but for the most part that scene is pure Theravada with a “don’t worry, you’ll still get angry, upset, horny, etc.” attitude. As for Spinoza, I can’t recommend him enough, though in several ways he is not compatible with Buddhism. What appeals to me about him is his attitude that everything is alright the way it is, we just have to see that. Then again, I worry about that making one apathetic about things one ought not to be.

Difficult stuff, awakening.

@Zac: Interesting.

My own background before Buddhism has been in (neo)shamanism and chaos magic. Nowadays, I practice Vajrayana in the Aro gTér lineage. Yeshe Tsogyel is certainly one hot dakini <3 <3 <3.

I cannot go into any details, but I ended up as a Vajrayana practitioner after I had completed an type of a operation which Thelemites call Knowledge and Communication of the Holy Guardian Angel. Suddenly just some weird coincidences happened, and I found my teacher a bit later. HGA disappeared and yidams appeared.

I do not practice anymore any of my old occult practices, and I happily focus completely to Vajrayana. However, there are some questions remaining. I live in a strange little country called Finland and I still maintain contact with Finnish pagans/heathens. Finland has very peculiar old nature religion, which is distantly related to Siberian shamanic traditions (http://www.taivaannaula.org/finnish_paganism.php). It is very little related to the Indo-European religions, which are naturally more familiar to most western people. Although I do not actually practice it, I value Finnish paganism in the sense that it is a huge element in my cultural heritage.

I often wonder, how I could best communicate with the Finnish pagans when having slightly spiritual conversation. I have some sense of what they are talking about in experiential level - but I maintain the view of Vajrayana. How could I find the most communicative words and expressions? Could some elements of the old Finish nature religion be assimilated into Tantra? (Väinämöinen as a yidam? Tapio as a dharma protector?)

I have no answers, but it is sometimes fun to speculate.

@David. Re: your video of Shinzen’s discussion on Tantra. This is Shinzen’s yidam:
http://www.kweeper.com/pompoko/image/24409
He grew up in LA so had a relationship with Guadalupe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe
whose image is everywhere in hispanic communities. He tells a good story about going into the absolute worst areas of LA and doing her mantra, and never being hassled by anyone.

@SkySerpant You make me want to go to Finland. Long flight from San Francisco.

@David - Just an idle aside, but following the mention of Mahavira (above) did you know that there is (or at least, was) tantra in Jainism? I was tentatively starting to look at this area in the context on an MPhil with Dr William Johnson (student of Gombrich, and Jain specialist) when I carelessly became a Buddhist. I’ve often wondered what Jain tantra might contain.

That is an interesting thing about Nestorian Christianity. I have always wondered why Christianity has been so renunciative about the world in practise. Of course, there’s good reason to believe that Jesus (whatever his actual ontological status) was a renunciate, but even thinking about Augustine, I know that he argues at length that there is nothing wrong with the world - that the world as God made it is good. For Augustine, it’s that our perceptions about the world are wrong (that is, we see it in terms of what it can do for us, not as something beautiful God made). So I have always seen some room for a tantric approach there.

Unless it is done and the Church does a better job of keeping it secret than other organizations (which wouldn’t surprise me in the least).

We’ve sadly inherited a rather facile mapping of buddhisms (plural), one confounded by local myths being taken at face value as historical accounts, adaptation of local myth by Western colonial Orientalists as history (e.g., Theravada, a marginal tradition in India as Sthaivaravada, mistaken as ur-budddhismus), and then the divisions along nationalistic lines amplifying mistakes of 19th century colonial Orientalists. Then further mucking up the mess already made with those special agents of Western imperialism out to demonstrate the inferiority of savage or near so buddhist teachings as justification for foreign rule and certainly for invasive missionaries - nearly all of our interpretation of Japanese Buddhism is fouled as the work of American colonialist missionaries - they compiled dictionaries, translated sutras and ritual manuals, interpreting whole traditions without the slightest modicum of undergoing training.
This is serious business. 19th century Orientalists inherited close to 20 centuries of Western Churchianity’s persecution of the Gnostic heresy, and a subset called the Naturalistic Heresy. Such persecution was so effective, and the perpetuation of Catholic dogmatism into the Protestsant movement, our Orientalists were entirely ignorant of gnosis, suffering from what I call the Gnosis Deficiency Disorder!
If you’ve read the Allure of Gnosis, it includes Professor Conze’s paper on Buddhism and gnosis, one I made sure was included. Conze was the greatest 20th century Prajnaparamita scholar, and I was one of his students. That volume includes a badly edited article by myself on the same topic. Gnosticism, including post-Latin Renaissance gnostic movements, are akin to but by not means as sophisticated as bodhisattva buddhism.
The major deficit Western students face as obstacle is that of contemporary movements acting as the Roman Church for long did. Until the Protestant Reformation, and amplified by Guttenberg’s publication of Bible, priests along had access to scripture - they read Latin, no one else did. Laymen were tacitly forbidden to read scripture, creating a monopoly and condition of priviledge. For Western Buddhists, reading sutras is not mainstream: instead you’re admonished to read books of commentaries and homoliess by experts and gurus.

I was educated the old fashioned way, in a time when translations were scant and the annual volume of academic and popular publications less then a month’s worth today. We were a closer knit group, in part because the secularism of watered down/dumbed down Western neo-Buddhism had yet to occur save for Theravada Fundamentalists. My training began with learning by heart to recite from memory sutras in Sanskrit and Japanese pronunciation of classical Chinese. Once memorized, lessons began - including language lessons.

Those who don’t read buddhist originals and have training in living traditions overseas are fed pablum. You get misinterpretations telling you how 19th and 20th century Christians failed to understand gnosis-driven buddhism. You get sectarianism. You get Western neo-Buddhism’s Big Three - “Theravada, Tibetan, and Zen” learning anything else is second class or not the real deal. In other words, you get what in Japanese is described as “gaijin no bukkyo” - the buddhism of aliens who don’t understand that they don’t understand’

Both mahayana and vajrayana are pervasive movements, with deep roots in Central Asia and the Persian Plane, of an emerging buddhism being tempered with various forms of gnosticism run out of the Mediterranean by Catholic persecution, some Zoroastrianism, some mystical Islam (all elements in Padmasambhava’s work since he was a Central Asian Turk, not an Indian monk). If you take into account the Dunhuang caves of Western China, on the border of the great silk road deserts, just witness the evolution of artistic styles, including mandalas - elsewhere the liturgical voice and musical instrument expression is found.

Alan Cole’s recent Fathering the Father is based on findings of a hidden library sealed over at Dunhuang for a thousand or more years, a virtual time capsule of otherwise lost materials. Cole’s book deals with the invention of ch’an/Zen as a genre for polemical power aimed at ridding China of teachers from India, supplanting them with Chinese masters. But not just any master. The ch’an invention included fabrication of lineage - there’s no lineage in Indian Buddhism, merely awakening. Along with lineage was invented a cult of ‘living buddhas’. And you only need one living buddha at a time, and the emperor should lavishly support that living buddha to the exclusion of all other teachers and teachings. Richard Baker’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is such a polemic tract aimed at establishing unwavering authority upon the death of Suzuki roshi (Suzuki is a strange case, 2nd rate at best among Japanese, but elevated to a saintly pedestal as Baker used to him to jack himself up - didn’t last long since SFZC fired him within a decade. Those of use who studied with Conze understood that Baker’s parents understood his ‘original face’ since they’d aptly named him Dick).

We’ve inherited the zen and lineage paradigms as gold standards. Earliest known Tibetan texts are also found at Dunhuang, predating the official starting date of Buddhism in Tibet and a scant 400 years - Tibetan revisionism discovered! And who was the originator of dzog.chen and ch’an? Why, that literary character invention Bodhidharma, supposed an Indian monk by described as a Central Asian whose mixed ancestry would include Celtic DNA.

It’s time to reboot our comprehension of buddhism, and not reboot to an app driven system.

Hello Ken, I found your comment absolutely fascinating. I am an undergrad currently writing my dissertation on the modernisation of Buddhist traditions and I would love to hear more. You seem to have really done your research on this. Do you know of any sources I can use/reference/cite to show that what we have in the West as Buddhism today is an entirely reinterpreted invention? I am working with “The Making of Buddhist Modernism” by David L. McMahan but I’d love some other sources too if anyone is aware of any.

The flipside of this is that I am a Vajrayana practitioner experiencing a “disenchantment” of my tradition as I come to read and learn more about the history of Buddhism as presented in the West. I’m trying to understand what I practice as “Buddhist philosophy” and how that relates to what is really there in the sources. Any help would be appreciated!

Zac: I’ve been at it for more than 50 years. In November 1972 received lifetime teaching certification as a Kyoshi (Teachings Master) in Kyoto, Japan, in a nearly 900 year old post-monastic tradition co-founded by a couple.
Don’t know McMahan’s book & it sounds engaging.

I’ve written elsewhere about the need for post-modern interpretation of Buddhism: most all we have today is rooted in modernity, and imposition of Western religious concepts that just don’t fit Buddhism.
The history of Buddhism presented in the West is a travesty. As a grad student, I’d suggest drilling down in both the voluminous publications of Gregory Schopen and works of Bernard Faure for starters. Bob Scharf has done some great works as well. And Alan Cole’s recent Fathering the Father is a must read for liberative deconstruction.

David, your blog here is simply wonderful. A breath of fresh air - with younger generations finally arising to meet the challenge of authentic, authorative interpretation head on.

I was flabber ghasted with discovery of your blog yesterday. Totally unexpected and a blessed relief. Both by temperment and training (the old fashion way, in Japan), there’s been no dividing line between practice and independent scholarship - that’s how many buddhist teachers live, especially in a culture such as Kyoto. yet having witnessed emergence of conventional Western neo-Buddhism in recent decades, I’ve been aghast by the casual dismissal of the very verve shaping buddhism as a liberative movement. In other words, I’ve taken to beating wide circles around buddhist groups, deepening and applying dharma in my own way.

Thus discovery of your site is marvellous. More folks like myself out there, albeit considerably younger. Nearly 70 I’ve had growing concern about what to do with my library and flle drawers full of papers - with the feeling that traditional buddhist arts and scholarship was too marginal to Western buddhism. So what to do with a collection? Usually hiers hold garage sales or sell collections off to used book stores!

I’m running on memory about Bodhidharma since I have no idea of a source noted long ago. It could be in Guenther’s book on Padmasambhava but I’m not going to make that as a claim. The name is bodhidharma[matha] as I recall. My sense of vajrayana is not as an exclusively Tibetan development, rather more likely from that loss realm of Central Asia and the Persian plane. As an aside at a buddhist studies conference in Honolulu in 1995 a young Japanese scholar told me considerable research effort is underway in Iran due to translations from Sanskrit to Persian of otherwise lost Skt materials. We’re utterly in the dark about that. Then there are those lost cities with lost temples that Sir Ariel Stein excavated a century ago, then recovered with sand to protect from further erosion. An important key to mahayana/vajrayana development lies in monumental architecture and paintings, etc. Schopen’s article in The History of Religions, around 1990, on Buddhist Studies and the Cult of the Book is another piece needing inclusion in post-modern hermeneutics.
In the case of Tibet, something akin to archaeological excavation as textual criticism looking at layers and strata of development is really needed rather than just looking for doctrines, Same with myth and metaphor.

Thank you so very much for developing this incredible site.

Just for fun, here’s an interpretation of trikaya without a single Skt word: http://transevolutionaryfitness.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/body-by-play-physical-culture-2-0-in-practice/

Boredom is just another form of aversion. Wanting them “to work” for you is also aversion. New rituals will bore people too. It’s not the rituals that are the problem.

Hey,

I’m a religious studies student who has specialized mostly in Christianity. I’m taking some courses that touch heavily on Tantra now.

Anyways, this thought popped into my head and I thought I would run it by some people who are hopefully more knowledgeable than me to see if it even comes close to the mark.

I read one ethnography of the Aghoris (Hindu, not Buddhist, I know, but tantric), and a moderate strain (for householders) had taken up working with lepers, both as a kind of social service and spiritual path. So, this got me to thinking: a major part of Tantra seems to be confronting and overcoming dichotomies of the sacred/profane and overcoming aversion to what is hateful, disgusting, etc. All kinds of taboos around purity, sexuality, and caste are confronted. Is there an analogy here to some kinds of leftist activism? The first activists who championed causes like LGBT rights, needle exchanges and AIDS activism were all in their way working with populations who were popularly viewed in their time as being unclean, disgusting, degenerate, or the closest thing to “ritually impure” that secular society allows. So, could there be a kind of Tantric social practice that focused on working with the marginal, the outcast? Here, prisoners, the mentally ill, or other neglected causes or shunned types would be an obvious choice. Have I missed the point on Tantra, or is this an avenue that could lead somewhere?

A particularly extreme version of this practice, I thought, might include working in an institutional environment where one had to play a supportive, therapeutic role to those whose crimes were, by any imagination, beyond the pale. Like being a counselor or prison chaplain to violent sex offenders. In this way, the adept would have to take up a discipline few are called to in their daily lives: extending real empathy and compassion towards human monsters.

Can you recommend any scholarly sources on the Chödpa leper connection? I have found an absence of sources on those considered ritually impure in Tibetan Buddhism, and, although I gather from some sources (like the life of Gelongma Palmo) that leprosy and other diseases constituted a kind of ritual impurity, most of the scholarly articles I find refer to it in the Hindu context.

Hey David, just discovered your site and am thoroughly excited in checking it out. My interest in Tantra has been stoked lately, but knowing that a lot of teachings are secretive, I was wondering if you had any recommendations book-wise that go into some of the techniques. Thanks in advance, and look forward to reading you!

Hey David,

Thanks for the link. Also checked out your Imperfect Buddha podcast and enjoyed that as well.

My interest in Tantra came via Rob Burbea, author of “Seeing that Frees.” I’m a part of a pretty hardcore, DIY dharma group which is definitely beyond the Kegan stage 3 Consensus Buddhism, and one person receives tantra instructions from his teachers. Given what he’s described to me and having tried it out, as well as using Tantra as a framework of seeing (as you describe in one of your articles) I’m greatly drawn to this modality. That said, as a modern person I’m very hesitant to go the traditional Vajrayana route for reasons you’ve described in the blog, though it seems like the only option I’ll have. Given that I’m practicing Mahamudra and gaining a lot from it that’s a pretty deep well, but trajectory wise Tantra seems inevitable.

Given all of that, what would you suggest?

Your gymnastics analogy makes sense; as a martial artist I’d say the same!

I’ll take a look at your recommendations, as my practice has tantra-inspired elements (in the limited sense that I understand it) – having sources of inspiration might serve my purpose well enough.

I’ve also loosened up immensely around religion due to insights from practice, so I’d don’t feel that overly concerned about checking a Vajrayana school out if it feels right.

Thanks for all of your help and for the work you do to promote Tantra – it’s greatly appreciated!

Yes. Fresh and a conscious point of view. I support this style. Anyway, with time, the tantra will change in that direction, it’s inevitable. It must only die of a generation of people who are strongly connected with system what they represent. I miss the time when from Tantra will be removed by the image of cultivating human masters (almost always ended it upon abuse) when the master will not be known with the “name”, surname, faces and only through their texts or the effects of their own work. Ehh, I know - they are dreams. ;)