Vajrayana practice, also known as secret mantra practice and tantric practice, can appear from an observer’s point of view to be exotic, inaccessible, and far removed from our practical ordinary, daily experience. After all, how could practices that originated...
Vajrayana practice, also known as secret mantra practice and tantric practice, can appear from an observer’s point of view to be exotic, inaccessible, and far removed from our practical ordinary, daily experience. After all, how could practices that originated in India in the 5th-7th centuries and that were further developed in Tibet not long after that be relevant to our complex and multifaceted Western lives today?
Whether we are parents, teachers, activists, artists, musicians, healthcare or mental health professionals, whether we work in the fields of tech, engineering, science, law, business and more, on a regular basis, we can find ourselves struggling because we don’t feel we have enough patience, enough energy, time, compassion, empathy, creativity, or understanding. And with all the demands of our lives beyond work, how could we ever find time to learn and develop these qualities that could make our moment-to-moment experience more ease-full and fulfilling?
Imagine for a moment that you could have continuous access to unlimited resources of all these qualities and more without having to develop them from scratch? How might your experience with your family or partner be different? How might your experience at work and your downtime be different?
From the point of view of Vajrayana or tantric practice, we don’t need to create these qualities and skills in ourselves. Though it doesn’t appear to be so, all these capacities are already inherently present within every one of us without exception. We already have an unlimited resource of these qualities. The aim of Vajrayana practice is to help us recognize this and to then access these ever-present resources. In the short term, this helps us to feel more capable and supported in our lives which then allows us to better communicate with, engage with, and support our partners, children, family, friends, work colleagues, clients, students, and those we encounter but do not know. Ultimately, these practices can lead us to full liberation from all habitual patterns and the suffering that they create.
The Sanskrit word tantra and the Tibetan equivalent gyü (Wylie: rgyud) both mean thread, continuity, or continuum. The word tantra is derived from the term for weft, the thread that runs continuously through the fabric in traditional weaving methods. In this case, this continuous thread refers to the ever-present innate goodness, or buddha nature of every sentient being. Each of us today, just as those living in 7th Century India and Tibet, are inherently pure. Though we do not experience it this way, our mind is fully awakened, and we possess all awakened qualities. This true, original nature is timeless. It is the thread that weaves from each of our lifetimes to the next. It is present in each of us in this very moment and has been present in every moment of this lifetime and all previous lifetimes. It remains dormant, though, because it is veiled to us by our habitual ways of perceiving ourselves and others.
On a fundamental level, we have a deeply ingrained habit of coalescing around a sense of self and perceiving everything else as other. We strongly identify with our body, our thoughts, our habit patterns, our skills and talents, our history, the demographics with which we align and then define everything else as something separate, different, and independent from us. We deepen that separation by creating opinions and storylines around various people and phenomena. This constructed experience of self and other and the need to preserve it takes an immense amount of energy. We are so accustomed to it that we don’t recognize the amount of energy it takes. If you place your hand in a fist and continuously exert muscle tension, focus, and energy to maintain that tight fist, soon your hand and arm will get tired and begin to hurt. This is an infinitesimal fraction of the intense energy we use to contract from the vastness of our buddha nature into a contained sense of self. This severe contraction keeps us from accessing the unlimited energy, creativity, and awakened qualities that are our birthright. As we learn to loosen that grip, the energy that had been bound up in that contraction is released and available to us to use for other purposes. Like the free flow of water that is stopped or restricted by bending the hose through which it flows, when the hose straightens, the water unimpededly rushes forth.
Constantly constructing, maintaining, and functioning on this scaffolding of self and other keeps us from letting go into the ground of our true nature. Similar to how the earth supports, provides for, and nourishes us, the ground of our true nature is our ultimate resource. While we tirelessly work to preserve our constructed world of self and other and function within that scaffolding, we have cut ourselves off from the ground of our being which is our limitless source of patience, compassion, wisdom, generosity, energy, time, creativity and more.
Like the sun and its radiance are inseparable, this ground of our being, our mind, is the union of awareness and luminosity. This constructed world of self and other comes to be because we mistakenly experience awareness and luminosity as two separate things. We have taken awareness to be a self and we have taken luminosity, the natural radiance of mind, to be all that we consider as other. After having made this fundamental separation, we have solidified it with layer after layer of conceptual thought and emotional confusion.
Vajrayana practices are a brilliant methodology for helping us to repair that fundamental rupture. They do this in a particularly skillful and unique way, by engaging us right where we are. They meet us in the heart of our confusion. They meet us right in that constructed world of self and other and liberate it from the inside out, so to speak. They provide a means for us to see the transparency and innate purity of all we experience, even the scaffolding. They show us how to relate to ourselves and our world in a way that allows us to release the energy bound in constructing and maintaining our habitual experience and to let go into the ground of true being, our ever-present, limitless resource. They shepherd us into an experience of who we truly are which frees us to see, relate to, and engage with the true nature of all the people and phenomena in our lives.
In order to function in our daily lives, we have become masters of multitasking, and this is another way in which Vajrayana meets us where we are and is a practice that is effective for us in our 21st century lives. It works to engage us simultaneously on multiple levels in relationships and dynamics that are familiar to us by engaging us on the levels of body, speech, and mind as we relate to others’ bodies, speech, and mind. We normally experience ourselves through our ordinary body which we perceive as solid and tangible and dress and adorn with clothes, watches, and jewelry; our ordinary speech with which we communicate thoughts, ideas, and emotions with one another; and our ordinary mind which is a masterful thinking machine, strategic planner, etc... In Vajrayana, we take the result as the path, or in casual language, we act as if we are awakened as a means to help us recognize that that has been our innate state all the long. We do this through a process of letting go of this ordinary experience of body, speech, and mind and immerse ourselves in the experience of awakened body, speech, and mind.
Because we do not recognize our buddha nature, it is easier for us to recognize an awakened expression of body, speech, and mind outside of us. Every Vajrayana practice is centered around a particular being, called a yidam. A yidam is a manifestation of an awakened quality, such as compassion. They arise in a body made of light that is ornamented with silk garments and beautiful jewels. They appear like a rainbow, apparent yet insubstantial. The yidam serves as the focus of a Vajrayana practice. We engage with them by activating our body through mudras (sacred hand gestures) and offerings, by activating our speech through mantra and the chanting of a text that expresses and praises the brilliance of awakened qualities and calls upon them for support, and we activate our mind through visualization and recognizing their nature.
As we move deeper into the practice, the yidam dissolves into light, merges with us, and we then visualize and experience ourselves as the yidam, as awakened body, speech, and mind, arising as a beautifully adorned body of light. We enact our enlightenment. We experience ourselves as the manifestation of a fully developed quality of awakened mind. Within the practice, we then engage with the world around us. We see our ordinary environment and all the beings within it in a way that is more representative that they truly are, in essence, the radiance of awakened mind. Our ordinary environment now manifests as an exquisite palace and landscape in which everything that we encounter is utterly delightful and blissful. We recognize the buddha nature of all beings by seeing them as the yidam. We relate to them in this way. We train ourselves to recognize that we can not only tap into an awakened quality in any moment of our daily lives, but that we can be that quality, that we are that quality.
As we do this practice over and over, we gradually remove all the veils that have been obscuring our innate goodness from our experience and come to recognize that we have been a manifestation of awakened mind all the long. We loosen the constructs of self and other and see and relate to the innate goodness in all people that we live with, work with, and encounter as we move about in our lives. We are supported by the ground of our true being, we have access to the limitless depth of our capacity as we engage in all aspects of our daily lives.