Why is vajrayana so complex? How do all the practices work together, or do they?
Here I lay out a rough map based on my experience in the Tibetan tradition. I don't have knowledge or experience with the Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian or Russian systems of vajrayana -- just the Tibetan. And even in the Tibetan tradition, my knowledge is limited to the Kagyu and Shangpa traditions and a bit of Nyingma and Dzogchen.
First, what is vajrayana? Vajrayana is a body of teachings and practices based on the principle that human spirituality is present in every moment of experience and that that spirituality can be made explicit by transforming how we experience our lives.
Vajrayana is not a nice neat system. It didn't start that way, and despite the efforts of many teachers over the centuries, it has admirably resisted the imposition of a rigorous taxonomy or classification scheme.
Vajrayana most likely originated in the mystical and sorcery cults of ancient India. Precise dates are difficult to establish, but possibly as early as 100 - 200 CE, approximately the same time as the development of the
Silk Road, the network of trade routes across Central Asia that connected China with Mediterranean countries.
In contrast to most Mahayana practice, in which the qualities that lead to awakening are nurtured, vajrayana largely depends on transformation. To this end it combines three different kinds of spiritual practice: sorcery, energy transformation and direct awareness. Sorcery or magic is the use of attention and energy to affect change. One of the principles of sorcery is that what happens in your world is shaped by how you experience the world and yourself. When you transform your own experience, other possibilities emerge -- though not always predictably and not always as you intended. The theme of transformation continues into energy practices, in which you transform the basic energies of the body (sensory sensations, emotions, etc.) into higher states of attention, similitudes of awakening -- bliss, clarity and non-thought. Direct awareness practices such as mahamudra and dzogchen are aimed at what in the West we would usually call mystical knowledge, a direct experience of life that does not depend on the conceptual mind, a third and altogether different kind of transformation.
These three categories of practice gave rise to a plethora of specific practices. In Indian Buddhism, there were well over twenty practice systems or tantras, including Tara, Avalokiteshvara, Vajrayogini and Mahakala and numerous subsidiary practices. Originally, energy transformation practices were associated with a specific deity - the practice of clear light, for instance, was associated with the deity Lord of Mysteries (Skt. Guhyasamāja). Over time, they were brought together into sets of practices such as The Six Yogas of Naropa in the Kagyu tradition and the Anu Yoga practices in the Nyingma tradition. The origin of the direct awareness practices is less certain. They may have come into Buddhism from Central Asia or evolved out of Mahayana teachings such as the perfection of wisdom. Whatever the case, they dovetailed with Buddha's insight and understanding. The direct awareness practices became the core principles for which the sorcery and energy transformation practices functioned as both entryways and ways to deepen and broaden experience.
Many frameworks are used in vajrayana and another is called the three roots, guru, deity and protector. This framework spans a spectrum of practices, which comprise the range of vajrayana, and it is this framework that I will use now.
We begin with direct awareness practices, such as mahamudra and dzogchen. Once you have developed the skills and capacities for such practices and have connected with the essential knowing of direct awareness (usually through pointing out instructions), there is literally nothing to do. You sit and let understanding unfold on its own. That is why direct awareness path is called the path of release, of letting go. You sit and do nothing, and your self falls away. You lose your self by doing nothing. To do so requires an extraordinary level of faith and confidence. Not everyone can just do that, so other methods have to be employed.
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The genre of practices known as guru yoga, or union with your teacher, aim to develop the faith needed. In these practices you cultivate faith and devotion and an emotional relationship with direct awareness, represented by your teacher, though usually in symbolic form. In practice sessions, you pray to your teacher, usually imagining him or her as Buddha Vajradhara, Guru Padmasambhava or other mythical or historical figure depending on the lineage and tradition. Prayer is a way of reaching out to what is unknowable through the conceptual mind, to what is behind the world of the senses, to what is free from the turmoil of emotional reactions. Prayer and the devotion we develop through prayer transform how we experience our thoughts, sensations and feelings. As faith and devotion are stabilized and deepen, we open to what cannot be put into words and move into the practice of direct awareness.
Prayer and devotion are not enough for everyone, however. Over the centuries, teachers developed another genre of practices called guru practice. These practices are usually based on an historical individual. In the Kagyu tradition we have The Guru Practice of Milarepa and a Guru Practice of Marpa, as well as Karma Pakshi. You imagine that your teacher appears in the form of this person and you pray, present offerings and recite a mantra associated with that person very much as you would in deity practice (see below). The idea, here, is to use some of the sorcery methods of deity practice to develop and focus attention and intention. The additional energy that is developed through these methods brings about the transformation of experience we are seeking.
In both these kinds of practices, you lose your self primarily through devotion.
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Deity practices form another large genre. These practices are also based on transformation, but the transformation here is how you experience life, the universe, everything. They employ the full range of sorcery methods including creative imagination, direction of attention and will, ritual, the use of spells (mantras), sigils (seed syllables) and gestures (mudras) and the charging of ritual objects with energy. The deity is always an aspect of awakened mind. Manjusri, for instance, is regarded as the expression of awakened intelligence, Green Tara as the expression of awakened compassion in action and Hevajra as awakened anger. You create the experience of being the deity and inhabiting the deity's world. You imagine being the deity in order to change how you experience life through your body, speech and mind. Many people feel it is sufficient simply to imagine the form of the deity and that by doing so, the qualities of the deity will arise in them. That may happen in some cases, but it is not how magic works. Rather, you exercise your creativity by first imagining, then feeling, that you are the deity. You have a different body, a body of light, every feature and ornament of which expresses a quality of awakening. You have a different voice, and every word you say is said with the power and authority that naturally arises when you are awake and present. You have a different mind. You see things clearly, without distortion. Thoughts and feelings may come and go, but you are never confused by their content or movement. As Green Tara, for instance, you sense directly what needs to be done and you just do it. Because you are working with magic, stuff happens, seemingly inexplicably, but you gradually learn to trust this way of knowing. Bit by bit, you transform the way you experience yourself and the world and the ordinary sense of self drops away. In effect, you lose your self by imagining that you are something else.
Another set of practices completes this experience with the experience of emptiness. Some of these practices rely on energy transformation methods to generate powerful experiences of bliss, clarity and non-thought, each of which may be used as a entryway into emptiness. Other practices involve dissolving the experience of being the deity as systematically as you created it. Whatever the practice, you come to know experientially that who or what you think you are (your self) is a product of your own mind and that awareness doesn't require a self to function.
Because these practices fundamentally restructure our way of experiencing life, imbalances can and do arise. A third genre of practices evolved to address those imbalances and to enhance the possibilities they offered. This genre is known as the protectors, expressions of awakened mind in action.
What are the protectors? They are representations of the dark forces that operate in the world, or the dark forces that operate in you. It doesn't really matter how you conceive of them. From the perspective of sorcery, there is not a lot of difference. Protectors are usually nightmarish in form, wrathful distorted figures all too capable of wreaking havoc in your world. Many of them are derived from Kali in Indian mythology, but there are others, such as Ekajati whose origin is not as clear. The protectors are responsible for creating the conditions in which you can practice and wake up and dispelling the conditions that work against practice or lead you to forget about waking up. Protector practice uses the traditional methods of sorcery and through those methods you form a relationship with these dark forces, those parts of your life that do not rely on the conceptual mind yet can change or influence what happens at any moment.
Some deities function in dual roles. Green Tara, for instance, is a very popular deity in Tibetan Buddhism, but she also functions more or less as a protector. And certain protectors - the Six-Armed Mahakala comes to mind - also function as deities. In other words, there is not a sharp demarcation between deity and protectors and their respective practices. There is, however, a difference in intention. As noted above, in deity practice, you lose your self by imagining that you are something else. In protector practice, you lose your self by being willing to meet whatever the world throws at you, by engaging what arises in your life with such immediacy that you as a separate self drops away.
The relationship with the protectors is basically transactional. You are invoking these forces for a particular purpose. You are using them to direct your attention, intention and will to waking up and you are asking for their help. In one section of protector practice, you present suitable offerings to them with the express purpose of putting them in obligation to you. And what are you asking them to do? You are asking them, no, commanding them to bring about those conditions into your life that will lead you to wake up and remove those conditions in your life that distract you or lull you back into the conceptual mind and a materialistic life. Your commitment here is to waking up and you don't particularly care what the protectors do to your life to bring that about. For instance, if you have a wonderful job and enough money to set you up for life but your commitment to practice fades away, the protectors may take care of that. Along these lines, Peter Kingsley writes in
In the Dark Places of Wisdom:
We want healing from illness, but it's through illness that we grow and are healed of our complacency. We're afraid of loss, and yet it's through what we lose that we're able to find what nothing can take away from us. We run from sadness and depression. But if we really face our sadness we find it speaks with the voice of our deepest longing; and if we face it a little longer we find that it teaches us the way to attain what we long for.
Finally, at the end of the spectrum we find still another genre of practices, those concerning the propitiation, appeasement and enrollment of those parts of us, or parts of the world, that have no connection with being awake. In these practices, essentially you take the role of a shaman, establishing a connection with those parts through intention, energy and ritual, and either enrolling them in the work of awakening or making sure they don't get in the way.
Is it necessary to do all these practices? That's another question, and I'll come back to it in a future newsletter. My aim here has been to give you a rough overview of vajrayana practices in the hope it helps you to understand better what you are doing in these practices and make your efforts more fruitful. I am most interested in your thoughts and you can email me at
ken@unfetteredmind.org.
