This Summer, Highest Yoga Tantra empowerments and teachings will be given at the International Kadampa Buddhist Festival – they come around approximately every two years. If you’re mulling over attending these for the first time, and are feeling curious (or a bit intimidated), you might have some questions. Like these, for example: 
- Is Tantra just for couples?!
- Who should practice Tantra?
- Am I ready for Tantric empowerments?
- Does it come with commitments?
- Why do I need Tantra at all?
- Why is it a “quick path”?
- I keep hearing about “bliss and emptiness”, what does it mean?
- What is a “sadhana” and how does that work?
- What on earth is a Tantric Deity? Those are some very esoteric images!
- Isn’t Tantra escapism or fantasy?
- What do the empowerments involve?
- Can regular busy people really practice Tantra?
- Why is Tantra kept secret?
- How do I prepare?
- The accommodation at the Summer Festival seems to be full up, do I have to camp?!
My recommendation is that you attend beginner Tantra courses at a Center, if you can, and talk to your local teacher and/or other senior practitioners. I’m also going to suggest that you download the free eBook Modern Buddhism and read the chapter called “The Preciousness of Tantra.” You may not understand it all just yet, but it’ll give you invaluable background information on Highest Yoga Tantra.
For context … Buddhist Tantra has only been around in the West for 60 years or so. We wouldn’t have it were it not for the Chinese invasion of Tibet; and back in the 70s and 80s we modern disciples of Venerable Geshe Kelsang were all complete and utter novices. Luckily Geshe-la, a deeply realized Tantric master, took the time and effort to painstakingly explain everything that we need to know. Many practitioners in the Kadampa Buddhist tradition have taken these teachings to heart and are now very accomplished. So do find one of them and ask your questions!
Now, I thought I’d chip in a bit as well because although I’m by no means an authority, I do deeply value and love Buddha’s Tantric teachings. Also, finding Buddhist Tantra is rare and exceptional – only the fourth (Buddha Shakyamuni), eleventh, and the last of the thousand Buddhas of this Fortunate Aeon even teach it! So if you are interested in the Buddhist path to liberation and enlightenment, it’s certainly worth entering this quick path as soon as you’re ready.
(By the way, please feel free to add your own questions and/or replies in the comments.)
Ok, here we go …
Is Tantra just for couples?
If the only literature you’ve seen on Tantra is in your local Barnes & Noble or on social media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Tantra is a bit strange or even inappropriate, perhaps designed for couples seeking to improve their sex lives in Hawaii. What’s this got to do with Buddha’s teachings?! I thought Buddha was a celibate monk!
He was! This equating of Tantra with increasing our worldly pleasures is probably the biggest modern misunderstanding of Tantra. As Venerable Geshe-la says in Modern Buddhism:
Although Tantra is very popular, not many people understand its real meaning. Some people deny Buddha’s Tantric teachings, whereas others misuse them for worldly attainments …
You don’t need another person to practice Tantra – it’s an inner realization that we gain through our own personal understanding and meditation. Its essence is training in renunciation, compassion, concentration, great bliss, wisdom, correct imagination, and pure view as the quick path to full enlightenment for the sake of all beings. It was Buddha who gave the Tantric teachings, and it is true that he was a celibate monk with many celibate Sangha in his audiences.
Attachment and Tantra
We can however use Tantra to transform our experiences of pleasure into the path to enlightenment. Normally we pursue pleasure day and night because we have attachment or uncontrolled desire. In both Sutra and Tantra, we understand the faults of attachment – how it causes us endless dissatisfaction, craving, and disappointment, and how it binds us to suffering in lifetime after lifetime. We need to contemplate impermanence and the sufferings of samsara in order to lessen our attachment, as indicated for example in Atisha’s succinct advice:
Since the happiness, pleasure, and friends you gather in this life last only for a moment, put them all behind you.
and
Friends, the things you desire give no more satisfaction than drinking sea water, therefore practice contentment.
However, Buddha explained that we humans are “desire realm beings”, never separated for long from objects of attachment. Our whole life is driven by it.
Take an average day
See if any of this describes you … We wake up and reach for the phone (fatal!), hoping for something reassuring or exciting that we might have missed in the night. For the rest of the day we’re now looking forward to the next thing: coffee, messages, praise, lunch, shopping, entertainment, the weekend, a relationship, the gym, a stroll, a holiday. On our commute, we want the train to arrive on time, the traffic to move, people not to annoy us, and our journey to be comfortable. When things go our way we might be happy for a few minutes, but when they don’t our irritation is never far from the surface.
At work, we seek success, recognition, money, status, and security – or the simple relief of getting through the day. Whenever we can, we get a quick stimulation hit: we check social media, read the news, browse Amazon, watch a cat video, check out when and where to go on our next holiday. We are continually scrolling or swiping for new items, hoping one of them will finally provide actual satisfaction. But we often feel strangely worse because other people seem better off, more attractive, or more relaxed than us. We might conclude that happiness exists somewhere else, in someone else’s life.
But maybe lunch will make me happy! … we enjoy the first few bites of that mozzarella sandwich, but halfway through the pleasure is already on its way out and we’re thinking about the chocolate brownie. Perhaps I’ll be truly happy when this day is over and I’m back home and can finally relax? Four hours of drinking/partying/Netflix later and we’re ready to collapse, only to start this frustrating rigmarole all over again just a few hours later. We fall asleep with unfinished desires and wake up the next day with a fresh set.
Perhaps we think a partner, friends, children, or family are what will make us feel finally loved, valued, or understood? “You complete me!” When they manage to cooperate with our expectations, we might feel good for a moment; but it seems we can just as easily feel disappointed, resentful, or lonely. And as for the searing pain of a broken heart …
If you check, the only reason we turn to others and crave them is because we don’t feel whole – we feel incomplete, we feel cut off from something that we need. And so we naturally seek it in other people, which leads to insecurity followed by disappointment when our exaggerated, projected objects inevitably fail to deliver the goods. Check this article out for more on attachment: Can attachment ever work?
In other words, with attachment we are directed outward toward external objects of desire and, when we cannot find or hold onto these, we become frustrated and unhappy. But no sooner have we got what we wanted than we’re looking for the next thing: another message, another video, another purchase, another achievement, another person, another experience. It’s never enough – trying to satisfy our desires is about the same as trying to fill in a black hole. As Geshe-la says in Joyful Path of Good Fortune:
We may think that if we keep getting a new partner or a new job, or keep travelling about, we shall eventually find what we want; but even if were to travel to every place on the globe, and have a new lover in every place, we would still be seeking another place and another lover.
The type of desire we ordinarily have for a pleasant object or attractive person distorts our perception of that object, and the more obsessive our desire, the more unrealistic our mental image, until it comes to bear no relation whatsoever to reality. We make up incredible stories about them, don’t we: “This person is sooooo cool, this cake is soooo delicious, that vacation/money/phone is soooo just exactly what I need!” If you check, you’ll see that we are attracted or infatuated by projections which we ourselves have created.
And our attachment contracts around its object as we grasp at it for more and more satisfaction, ironically receiving less and less. Our focus becomes very narrow.
The striking thing is that there is nothing wrong with food, relationships, work, or enjoyments in themselves (as long as they are not harming anyone). There is however a lot wrong with the futile attachment that drives their pursuit: “The next object, the next experience, the next person, the next achievement will finally give me satisfaction or complete me.” We keep looking outside ourselves for the missing piece, but how can an external object ever fully satisfy an endless craving? The result is a lifetime spent searching for happiness in all the wrong places.
The Tantric solution
It is precisely because our whole life is driven by desire that we must make use of this foreceful energy if we want quickly to transform our life into something transcendental. This is as true for lay people as it is for ordained people. Pleasure is not something suspicious to be feared or even suppressed. We don’t need to feel guilty about pleasant feelings. The state of enlightenment, after all, is deeply pleasurable.
Therefore, once we’ve got our attachment somewhat under control through our practices of renunciation and compassion (and ideally our Pratimoksha vows to protect us from the worst excesses of attachment), we are ready to transform our experiences of pleasure into the quick path to enlightenment. As Venerable Geshe-la says in Modern Buddhism:
Buddha’s Tantric instructions on how to transform attachment into the spiritual path are the quick method for abandoning attachment! In this way, they are the method to fulfil the aims of Sutra teachings. ~ Modern Buddhism
Tantra is ideal for modern people living in busy, fast-paced societies that are pretty much built on the premise of endless pursuit. Instead of running away to a cave to suppress our human desires (which is a little impractical these days), a Tantric practitioner is someone willing to harness and transform their everyday experiences of pleasure—including worldly enjoyments and relationships where applicable—into a transcendent experience of bliss and emptiness. Instead of a tight narrow focus on inherently desirable objects that exist outside our mind, we use the pleasant experience to generate open-ended bliss mixed with the realization that this object/person/situation does not exist outside the mind. Freedom! The way out is through, as they say. This destroys our delusions, including the attachment, and accelerates our spiritual development. There are a lot of ways we do this, as you’ll discover once you start practicing Tantra. Meantime you can check out this article if you like: Transforming enjoyments.
Who should practice Tantra?
I am unsure about how to practice Tantra but I’m happy with my Sutra practice. Is it better to wait until I have a good understanding of Tantra before starting or is it better to start even though I might make mistakes?
To get started in Tantra, we actually only need some understanding and experience of Sutra. This is because we practice Tantra in order to fulfill the aims of Sutra, for no other reason. As Venerable Geshe Kelsang says in Modern Buddhism:
Practicing Sutra teachings is the basic foundation for practicing Tantric teachings, and the practice of Tantra is the quick method to fulfil the ultimate goal of Sutra teachings.
We need some commitment to the core teachings of Sutra, known as the three principal aspects of the path, which we practice through the stages of the path to enlightenment (Lamrim). If you attend a Buddhist Center, you will probably already be somewhat familiar with these because the teachings you hear are all included within them. Here’s a quick overview.
Renunciation
This doesn’t mean deprivation, but the sincere determination to free ourselves permanently from the cycle of suffering and an understanding that nothing in samsara will ever bring about true or lasting happiness. As Milarepa said to the thief rummaging around in his cave at night:
How do you expect to find anything valuable here at night, when I cannot find anything valuable here during the day?
As long as we remain with delusions, everything will remain impure and suffering. Every time you hear a teaching on precious human life and death, or on delusions and how to get rid of them, or on refuge, or on how to cultivate your good qualities of moral discipline, concentration, and wisdom, you are hearing teachings on this principal aspect of the path.
Bodhichitta
Because the ordinary Sutra path takes eons, the Tantric practitioner chooses this path out of a compassionate urgency to achieve the Union of No More Learning – enlightenment – as quickly as possible to liberate all beings. The quick path of Tantra is intended for people who look at the immense suffering in the world and find it completely unbearable to wait any longer to bring it to an end.
Wisdom realizing emptiness
This is our understanding that everything is like an illusion, like a dream, or like a reflection in a lake. Everything is the nature of mind, so when we purify our mind we also purify our world, our self, our enjoyments, and our activities, known in Tantra as the “four complete purities”:
Because our world, our self, our enjoyments and our activities are the nature of our mind, when our mind is impure they are impure, and when our mind becomes pure through purification practice they become pure. ~ Modern Buddhism
If our mind is like a muddy lake, everything reflected in it is contaminated or muddy. If we purify our mind, removing the mud of our delusions and mistaken appearances, everything reflected in it becomes pure. We start this process of purification from the day we start practicing Dharma; but to fully purify our deepest or most subtle obstructions to enlightenment we need to engage in the practice of Tantra. The reason for this is that we need to use our deepest level of awareness, which is a penetrating, extraordinarily blissful, and concentrated mind called “the clear light of bliss.” More on that coming up and also here: The Tantric journey.
In short, Tantra is not for spiritual hobbyists – we have to be pretty sure that we want to practice Dharma for our entire life and that we have found the right Buddhist tradition for us. We have to want to free ourselves and others from suffering and its causes, and we need some rudimentary understanding of emptiness.
If we have this, it is better to start our Tantric practice. Our understanding will improve over time, of course. It takes years to fully understand it, but that’s fine, we’re obviously not supposed to understand everything from day one.
Don’t worry about making mistakes – after all, we’ll have mistaken appearances all the way till we reach enlightenment. We can just enjoy our Tantric practice, not see it as a scary thing, and own but not identify with our mistakes. Practice makes perfect but we have to start practicing. My final suggestion if you decide to go for it this Summer is that you receive the commentaries at the Festival (not just the empowerments) and ideally do the short retreat. Then, once you’re home, find out from your local teacher how to do a simple, manageable, enjoyable daily Dharma practice that combines both Sutra and Tantra.
Well, it looks like we’re outta time, and I only got through your first two questions, lol. To be continued.
Ps, thank you for letting me share some pictures of London.
