Tantra its Origin and Presentation

by Herbert V. Guenther and Chögyam Trungpa

edited by Michael Kohn

illustrated by Glen Eddy

Introduction

WESTERNERS WANTING to know about tantra, particularly the Buddhist tantra of Tibet, have had to work with speculation and fancy. Tibet has been shrouded in mystery; “tantra” has been called upon to name every kind of esoteric fantasy; Buddhism has been left either vague or inaccessible. Academic treatments have been of little help, being in the main inaccurate or remote, failing either to comprehend or to convey.

In The Dawn of Tantra the reader meets a Tibetan and a Westerner whose grasp of Buddhist tantra is real and unquestionable. Dr. Guenther holds Ph.D. degrees from the Universities of Munich and Vienna. In 1950, he went to India to teach at Lucknow University and, in 1958, became Head of the Department of Comparative Philosophy and Buddhist Studies at the Sanskrit University in Varanasi. Since 1964, he has been Head of the Department of Far Eastern Studies at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Because of his tremendous intellectual energy and scholarly discipline, knowledge of Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese, and his years of collaboration with native Tibetans, he has become one of the few Westerners to penetrate to a deeper understanding of Tibetan tantric texts. His books, such as The Life and Teaching of Naropa and the Tantric View of Life, bring us nearly the only accurate translations and commentaries from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Chögyam Trungpa was born in the heart of the Buddhist tantra tradition. As the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa line of spiritual teachers, he was enthroned at the age of eighteen months as abbot of a group of monasteries in eastern Tibet. Beginning at three, he underwent intensive training in the intellectual and meditative disciplines of Buddhism. He had completely assumed his responsibilities, both spiritual and temporal, by the age of fourteen

and went on to become a master of tantric Buddhist meditation. His journey toward the West began in 1959 when he fled the Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet. He first experienced the modern world in India, where he spent four years studying English. Since then he has traversed the West. He studied comparative religion at Oxford and founded a meditation center in Scotland. He arrived in the United States in 1970, where he has published several books,

among them Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, founded a number of meditation centers, a community working in art and theater, and another for helping the mentally disturbed, based on tantric principles. He has not remained cloistered, but has fully and frankly encountered the Western mind on the learned and gut levels. He has mastered English to the level of poetry.

Having worked toward each other, so to speak, for years, Dr. Guenther and Chögyam Trungpa met in Berkeley, California, in 1972, where together they gave a public seminar on Buddhist tantra. Dawn of Tantra is the edited record of that seminar, including part of the general discussion. The “Visualization” chapter is from a seminar given by Trungpa in San Francisco in 1973. The “Empowerment and Initiation” chapter is from a talk given by Dr. Guenther when he

visited Trungpa’s meditation center in Boulder, Colorado, in 1973. Dr. Guenther has also since lectured at Naropa Institute, a university founded by Trungpa in Boulder, Colorado.

Guenther and Trungpa are an interface very much alive to the Tibetan tradition of Buddhist tantra and very much alive to the current everyday world of America. They communicate warmly and freely in both directions and give no quarter to wishful thinking.

THE TERM TANTRA, from the time of its first appearance in the West up to the present day, has been subject to serious misunderstandings. The term was introduced into the English language in 1799 when tantric works were discovered by missionaries in India. These were not Buddhist works. In fact at that

time it was hardly known in the West that such a thing as Buddhism existed. The term tantra was then known only as the title of these works, the contents of which were quite different from what people expected in books dealing with philosophy and religion. The missionaries were for the most part quite shocked that other people had religious and philosophical ideas so different from their own. To them the word tantra meant no more than these expanded

treatises; but since the subject matter dealt with in these treatises was so unusual from their point of view, the term began to acquire quite a peculiar connotation, a connotation which proper study of the texts has not borne out. Unfortunately, in this case as in so many others, once a false conception has been formed, a nearly superhuman effort is required to root out and set right all the wrong ideas and odd connotations that have grown up around it. I am going to try to tell you what the term tantra actually means in a technical sense.

First of all, one must distinguish between the tantra of the Hinduist tradition and the tantra of the Buddhist tradition. These two traditions, both indigenous to India, for a long period of time used the same language—Sanskrit. But each tradition stipulated particular uses for its terms. What one tradition understood by a specific term was not necessarily what the other tradition understood by it. When Buddhist studies originated in the West, which was only comparatively recently, it was assumed by the first investigators that since the Buddhists used the same Sanskrit terms as the Hindus, they would mean the same thing by them. This was the first of many wrong conclusions that they drew.

Let us apply ourselves to an understanding of tantra as it developed in the Buddhist tradition. A term that has been used from the beginning in close association with the term tantra is the Sanskrit prabandha. Prabandha means continuity. This is a continuity of being, which divides into two grounds: we

have to start somewhere, and then go a certain way (and perhaps arrive at a goal). This is the way tantra was presented. It refers to an immediate human situation which arises out of the question of how we are going to be. Tantra also sees the question of how we are going to be in terms of relationship, realizing that man is always related to something or someone.

Tantra approaches the question of being in various ways; thus there is more than one presentation of it. The first approach is called kriyatantra. In the kriyatantra the emphasis is on how a person acts. Kriya means “action.” Action is here seen symbolically and dealt with in terms of ritual. We need not be mystified by the idea of ritual. An example of ritual is the custom of a man’s removing his hat when he meets a lady. It is a kind of formalized gesture.

It is also a way of going about a human relationship. The emphasis in the kriyatantra is on relationship as expressed in this kind of formalized gesture. In this case the emphasis is far-reaching and covers many aspects of relationship. The kriyatantra is further particularized in its approach to human relationship in that it deals with the simplest and earliest stages of it.

The earliest form of relationship is that of a child with his parents. There is a kind of dominance involved here. Someone has to tell the child what and what not to do. When this relational situation is transferred into a religious context it becomes the idea that man is subject to a transcendental entity. This is perhaps the generally accepted idea and it is also the framework in the kriyatantra. Here the practitioner tries to gain favor with the one with

whom he is interrelated. This and the strong ritualistic emphasis are two main characteristics of the kriyatantra. This tantra also stresses purification. The ritual includes various ablutions. Some of them are purely symbolic in importance, and perhaps the sense of cleanliness involved might seem somewhat exaggerated. We must realize, however, that the sense of being clean can become extremely important in an emotional context such as this one. It has a much more profound significance than in ordinary circumstances when someone says: “Now before you eat, wash your hands.” So this emphasis on purity is another characteristic of kriyatantra.

But man is not content with merely being told what to do. He is also a thinking being and will ask questions. And here is where a further approach to tantra, known as the charyatantra comes in. Again here, tantra refers to a relational situation. But here the emphasis has shifted. We are no longer only concerned with following certain accepted rules of relationship, but also to a certain extent with understanding the implications of them. This marks the entry of a certain questioning of ourselves. Why are we doing these things? Why do we behave in such-and-such a way? Certainly we do not discard our behavior at this point, but we ask about its significance. And this we do by thinking more about it. We try to gain insight into it and this can be a kind of meditation.

Here there begins to be a balance between thought and action. This change from the previous mere acceptance of authority corresponds to a change in the character of our relationship with the one to whom we are relating. It is no longer a question of a master telling his servant or slave what to do. There

is now more of a feeling of intimacy, of comradeship, more of an equal status. The one is still willing to learn, but the other now realizes that he is in the same situation as the first. It is a relationship of friendship and friendship can only be based on an acceptance of the other person in his or her own right. Servitude makes friendship impossible.

But friendship can be developed still further than this first intimacy. Friendship often entails our trying to find out more bout the relationship. What is valuable about this relationship that compels us to cultivate it? This questioning process leads to the further development of insight. The emphasis has shifted again. This new aspect of the total situation of how we are together brings us into the yogatantra.

The term yoga has many meanings. In the Buddhist context, it means “to harness.” It is etymologically related to the English word yoke. It means to harness everything in us in order to gain more insight. Thus the situation, the tantra, in which this is the emphasis is called the yogatantra. Here there is a

teamwork which is even better than that between two friends. But there is still room for further development because we still consider the other slightly different from ourselves. This is where the fourth division, the mahayogatantra, comes in.

Maha basically means “great,” but here it is used not so much to mean great as opposed to small, but with the sense that there could be nothing greater. It is used in an absolute sense. The mahayogatantra partakes of this sense of absoluteness in its approach to the situation of relationship. We no longer make any distinctions; we just are, spontaneous, free. The question of whether or not the other is my friend no longer arises. There is a complete unity—we are just one.

So there is a progression in the tantras, beginning from the level of a child related to its parents and developing to the level of complete maturity. Thus when we use the term tantra, we not only refer to a particular situation, but we also describe a process of growth, a process of inner development which

takes place when we try to understand what there is. This process goes on until we come to the proper assessment of experience, the proper way of seeing.

There is a dialectical relationship between action, the way in which we behave, and the insight we have attained. The more we know, the more we learn about another person, the more responsive we become to that person. We begin to realize what he needs and stop imposing the idea of what we think he should need. We begin to be able to help that person find his own way.

This leads us to the practical significance of tantra. Tantra, as a way of inner growth, makes us see more, so that we really become individuals rather

than mere entities in an amorphous context. But tantra goes still further. It goes beyond the idea of a growth or a progress. There are further stages and subdivisions within the tradition, which deal with the fact that even after we have learned to relate properly to our problems, life still goes on. The

idea here is that spiritual practice is a continual movement. It is only from the point of view of discursive thought that we begin somewhere, progress or develop, and then reach a certain goal. It is not as though, having found enlightenment, the process is completed and everything comes to an end. Rather,

the fact is that we continue to live, so we must continually start anew. Nevertheless, through the previous stages, we have found a way, a way of relating, a certain continuity. This continuity of a way of relating is the basic meaning of tantra. In a sense this is an extremely simple point. In general, however, we find that there is scarcely anything more difficult than this kind of simplicity.