How can Highest Yoga Tantra help today’s Buddhists?

“Why do I need Tantra when Sutra already seems enough?”

Some Buddhist practitioners are happily enjoying stages of the path (Lamrim), Buddhist psychology, and the Bodhisattva path. They wonder “”Why add another layer?” “What’s the point of Tantra?” “There’squite a lot to do already! Can’t I just attain enlightenment through Sutra alone?”

Carrying on from the Q&A in this last article: Who’s ready for Highest Yoga Tantra?

To answer this, it’s helpful to understand why Tantra is called “the resultant vehicle” (to enlightenment) and Sutra “the causal vehicle”. One of Tantra’s main features is that it teaches the methods for bringing the result—the enlightened experience—into the path to enlightenment right now, first through the correct imagination of self-generation (in generation stage) and then through transfiguring the ingredients of our very subtle mind and body into the actual mind and body of a Buddha (in completion stage).

First for a potted history … If you know the life story of Buddha Shakykamuni, who founded Buddhism in our world 2600 years ago, you’ll know that as Prince Siddhartha he was thoroughly indulged with sense pleasures in the palace but understood that this couldn’t possibly be the real meaning of life. Sneaking out to the local villages with a trusty assistant, he saw in turn a sick person, an old person, and a corpse; and, astonished by the suffering we all have to experience, he realized that death wasn’t even the end because living beings had to start all over again in their next life. Seeing that a life pursuing pleasure, fame, power, and so on was basically deceptive, built as it was on the rotten foundation of sickness, ageing, death, and rebirth, he escaped his royal destiny to find the true purpose of life and an end to everyone’s suffering.

And, at first, the ex-Prince went from one extreme to the other. Thinking that physical asceticism must be the answer to the craving and desire that perpetuates the cycle of dissatisfaction and suffering, he practiced severe self-mortification in the forest until he resembled a skeleton. But it didn’t work. He came to understand that pursuing happiness from everything and everyone other while neglecting our own minds doesn’t work; but nor does deprivation, denying pleasure, or harming the body. Thus he discovered the middle way, went on to attain enlightenment, and then, luckily for us, turned the Wheel of Dharma.

The Wheel of Dharma

His 84,000 Dharma teachings are divided into Sutra and Tantra, but their common foundation is our Buddha nature, the potential every living being has for full awakening. Just as the sun is an inexhaustible source of light, so our clear light mind is an inexhaustible source of blissful compassion and wisdom – but our underlying nature is obscured by the clouds of delusions and their hallucinatory projections.

The purpose of all spiritual practice, arguably in any religion, is to uncover our essentially pure nature. As we start to identify with our own potential, we also start to see this reflected in others, instead of projecting others as being as limited as ourselves. After all, things existing from their own side do not exist – our outer reality is no more than a projection of our inner reality.

Dharma is not about dogma or blind faith – it’s about personal experience of this truth; and countless people through history have gained this thanks to Buddha Shakyamuni (and all the Buddhas who came before him). Many in turn have passed these liberating insights onto their own disciples.

One such example is my teacher, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, a master of Sutra and Tantra who spent his forties until his death painstakingly and patiently passing on all these practices to his modern-day students, all the time displaying unwavering confidence that we have the same potential and abilities as the practitioners of ancient India and Tibet. Like all great Buddhist teachers, he brings out our superpowers.

As he points out all over the place, the ultimate goal and real meaning of human life is enlightenment, an experience of unlimited wisdom, compassion, and power that is attainable by everyone. Sutra provides a gradual path to purifying our mind, creating specific causes that include higher moral discipline, concentration, wisdom, and the six Bodhisattva perfections – hence “the causal vehicle”. These practices are essential, and included in Tantra; but Tantra takes the future result of enlightenment as the very starting point of this path. We learn to think, speak, and act right now as if we are already an enlightened being. Enlightenment is not far away in time or space. It is not a question of behaving well now and going to heaven later. Enlightenment is the only mind that that is IN reality, that is experiencing reality, and that, finally, IS reality. And with Tantra we touch the reality of enlightenment right here and right now. That’s why it is called the “resultant” vehicle.

Thinking big

Tantra helps us speedily overcome our low, dismal, limited, deluded concepts of ourselves and others, imagining the results we seek – a pure body and mind – and identifying with that. So although we’re still practicing renunciation, the six perfections, wisdom and so on, we’re now doing all of this from a transcendent perspective. We think very big about ourselves, as big as we possibly can think about ourselves; and this works to rapidly accelerate our spiritual development. We generate as a Buddha or Deity who is the living embodiment of our renunciation, bodhichitta, wisdom, and other good qualities – I sometimes call Tantra “Sutra in technicolor”.

We do this by first dissolving away our ordinary version of ourself into emptiness and mixing this emptiness with the bliss of the Guru Deity’s mind. As Venerable Geshe-la says in Modern Buddhism, in the chapter “The Tantra of Generation Stage”:

As Buddha explained in his Tantric teachings, first we learn to purify our body and mind by meditating on the emptiness of the body, mind and all other phenomena. Perceiving only emptiness, we then generate ourself as an enlightened Deity such as Heruka…. If we are normally called John, for example, we should never believe that John is Buddha Heruka, but feel that John disappeared into emptiness before we generated as Buddha Heruka.

The dead end of materialism

Compared to being a radiant, blissful enlightened being, our materialist world view is pretty dismal, if you think about it, basically reducing us to lumps of matter. How could we have a lower opinion of a living being?! What’s the point of anything, including gathering sense pleasures and building nice memories, if it all collapses into dust? With this starting point, it’s not really surprising that people have so little self-esteem or indeed so many mental health problems. But of course we are not just physical but spiritual beings, and our formless awareness is infinitely more flexible, creative, blissful, and boundless in its scope than a meaty body and brain.

Along these lines, I read something in The Atlantic the other day about the effects AI might have on human cognition depending on how much effort human beings want to put into using their own cognition as opposed to outsourcing it.   To me, the crux of the matter is that AI is not consciousness, it is part of our physical reality. It can be a very useful tool; but although it is very clever at collecting and crunching data, that cleverness will never be our own cleverness any more than a calculator or books in a library. If AI writes a brilliant essay for us, for example, how exactly do we benefit from that? It is not our essay. AI will never be able to actually think for us, much less increase our good mental qualities – we will always have to do that for ourselves.

I asked my (admittedly accommodating) ChatGPT whether it agreed with this, to give it a chance to tell its side of the story:

I can’t meditate in the way a conscious being can. I can generate a guided meditation, analyze a meditation text, or simulate the language of someone reflecting deeply. But I don’t have subjective experience, awareness, or a mindstream. I don’t experience concentration, clarity, compassion, bliss, or wisdom. When I “answer,” I’m producing text based on patterns, not observing my own mind. So, from both a Buddhist perspective and a philosophical one, I think your main point is well made.

“Why is it a quick path?”

There are several reasons why Tantra is called “the quick path to enlightenment”, including that it is a resultant vehicle as just explained. Sutra is a gradual, incremental, causal path, so practicing the Sutra path alone requires three countless great eons to accumulate the necessary virtue and wisdom to attain Buddhahood. Tantra provides the immediate, skillful methods required to achieve enlightenment in a single lifetime. Rather than merely aspiring to become enlightened someday, practitioners bring the result into the path right now by imagining themselves, others, and their world from the perspective of enlightenment. This is enlightened psychology.

Enlightened psychology

Let’s say we want to become a surgeon – clearly, we don’t go out wielding a knife on day one before the proper training. On the other hand, if we show up at hospital each day thinking, “What am I doing here?! Why am I wearing these scrubs?! I’m not a surgeon! Someone’s made a terrible mistake … get me out of here!” we’re going to be too scared or discouraged to attempt a single doctorly thing, even to pick up a scalpel, no matter how many brilliant teachers are encouraging us. To become a surgeon, we need two perspectives at the same time: one knowing that we still have a lot to learn, and the other identifying with being a surgeon, “This is who I’m becoming.”

Even Sutra teaches us to identify with our gold nugget potential rather than the dirt of our delusions. We learn to think, “At heart I am peaceful. I have limitless potential. Like everyone, I struggle with my delusions, but they’re not me. I have the power to defeat them.” This genuine self-confidence taught in Sutra gives us the strength to overcome our delusions rather than be suffocated by them. Otherwise, what happens? Maybe we see the benefits in kindness and try to become kinder, but underneath we’re thinking, “Honestly, I’m not really a very nice person”; or we try to practice patience while believing we and others are hopelessly flawed. How far can we get like that? The answer is, not very. It’s like we’re piling Dharma on top of an ingrained limited, faulty self-image, and then wondering why we don’t seem to change very much. Sooner or later, discouragement will follow.

Keeping our spiritual life alive

If you ever feel uninspired in your meditation practice, or if it comes and goes, I think it’s worth checking to see if this really is because we’re too busy, or because others are negative about it, or because of whatever other excuse we’re coming up with – or is it because being kind, patient and so on feels like too much hard work? It’s exhausting and demoralizing to keep snapping back to who we think we really are underneath it all, which is not a kind or patient person, and having to start over. Sometimes people lose confidence in their Dharma practice altogether and even give up; I have seen that happen.

Tantra is amazingly helpful for us in this regard – it turbo charges our confidence and inspiration in our spiritual practice, and I think this is why we really need it in these degenerate, materialistic, largely uninspiring times. Instead of thinking that we could maybe become enlightened one day, we train from the correct belief that this already is our deepest identity. As with the surgeon example, to do this we first have to let go of our previous self-image of being someone who is not a doctor – in Tantra we do this effectively by dissolving it into its true nature, emptiness, as mentioned above. We understand that from one point of view we’re not a Buddha yet, but from another point of view we train within the identity of being a Buddha rather than someone who is decidedly not a Buddha.

I sometimes think of Tantra as like a jigsaw puzzle – we have the picture on the box in our mind, “Wow, that’s beautiful,” while patiently putting the pieces together.

Transforming everything – bad AND good – into rocket fuel

The ability to transform the fun stuff in our lives is the other reason why Tantra is the quick path. As we can see from Buddha’s life story, we don’t need to indulge in objects of enjoyment but we also don’t need to deny ourselves happiness. We have a saying in Kadampa Buddhism:

Always rely upon a happy mind alone.

Buddhas are very happy so it stands to reason that to become a Buddha we need to learn how to maintain our mind in as happy and peaceful a condition as possible. This means that we need to learn to remain truly content, even blissful, when encountering good and bad conditions alike.

In Sutra, we hear a lot about how to transform unpleasant feelings or suffering into the spiritual path by increasing our understanding and practice of purification, renunciation, compassion, and wisdom. With Tantra we are given many methods for also transforming pleasant feelings or happiness. We learn to transform all our pleasant experiences into bliss, mix that with emptiness, and quickly destroy attachment, dissatisfaction, and self-grasping. Umpteen Indians and Tibetans have attained full enlightenment by following these methods, and there is absolutely no reason why we cannot benefit in the same way. Modern people are actually very well suited to the practice of Tantra with our high energy lifestyles and endless search of pleasure.

In other words, whatever comes up in our lives, bad OR good, we are able to transform it into rocket fuel for our journey to enlightenment. Once we have studied Tantric practices such as the Eleven Yogas of Vajrayogini, all our actions – walking, eating, shopping, talking, etc – are brought into our spiritual path. We can truly integrate our whole life into Dharma, day and night, while doing the kinds of things we’re already doing. Even our sleep can turn into the clear light experience such that, 24 hours a day, we’re drawing closer and closer to enlightenment. 

More coming soon. Meantime, your comments or questions are warmly welcomed.

I am writing a few articles to help people prepare for the upcoming Highest Yoga Tantra empowerments and teachings coming up at this year’s International Summer Festival: click here for information: Kadampa Summer Festival.