The sutras are carefully preserved records of the Buddha's oral teachings
The sutras are carefully preserved records of the Buddha's oral teachings, or the teachings of advanced disciples that were approved by the Buddha. The Pali suttas of the Hinayana give factual accounts of the Buddha's life and teaching. We see him seated in jungle clearings or calmly walking the dusty Indian roads. Everywhere he goes, he teaches. His teaching is pragmatic, avoiding all metaphysical speculation. In essence it is all related to suffering, and the practical methods for overcoming it. There are miraculous events, such as the 'twin miracle', where the Buddha is represented rising into the air and producing fire and water from his body simultaneously.
Most of the time, though, we are in the everyday world, being taught how to work patiently with our mental states to overcome craving, hatred, and ignorance. That done, we can see life as it really is, and attain the deathless state. Reading the Mahayana sutras we find ourselves on the very summit of existence. The Buddha sits on a Vulture's Peak that no Indian traveller would recognize. He is Sakyamuni transfigured, emanating light from his body to call Buddhas to visit him from distant universes. Dimensions expand and contract.
Miraculous beings appear from nowhere in the midst of the vast assembly of Bodhisattvas and arhats who are listening to 2 The Tantric Approach the Buddha's discourse. The medium of these sutras is the message. An infinite number of universes are embraced by the Buddha's compassion, just as his radiance lights up endless galaxies.
The teaching is subtle, mysterious, ungraspable. The intellect is confounded by Perfect Wisdom, which defies the laws of logic, just as the Buddha's display of psychic powers transcends the laws of science.
Our hearts expand to embrace all beings, just as the Bodhisattva appears everywhere, in all realms, in his tireless work of salvation. The Mahayana sutras appeal to the imagination. Their cosmic drama lifts us out of our mundane world and everyday selves into the archetypal realm. We are shown a vision of the Ultimate, beyond duality, beyond time and space.
Any approach to human development can become one-sided or stagnant. After a while, the Hinayana approach tended to fall into dogmatic literalism, and to spend much time in academic classification of negative and positive psychological states, rather than getting down to the job of transforming one into the other.
The Mahayana's rich imagination overcame any tendency to dogmatism and narrowness. Its radical reduction of all concepts to sunyata put the academic categories of the Hinayana in their proper perspective. However, the Mahayana also fell prey at times to certain dangers. Rejoicing in the subtle sharpness of its dialectic, entranced by its archetypal glory, the feet of some Mahayana followers began to lose touch with the ground of everyday reality. The attempt to counterbalance this tendency of the Mahayana finds expression in the Vajrayana ('way of the diamond thunderbolt').
The Vajrayana is synonymous with the Buddhist Tantric schools. The Hinayana, at its worst, had kept its feet on the ground of direct experience, but lost touch with its spiritual imagination. The Mahayana occasionally lost its head in the golden clouds of the archetypal. The Vajrayana, in a radical stroke of genius, aimed to see the archetypal in the everyday, the exalted goal of nirvana in the mud and dust of samsara.
It fused Hinayana pragmatism and Mahayana imagination into the vajra of the Tantric approach to life. (I am not suggesting that these waves of counterbalancing reactions between schools were conscious. They were probably largely intuitive.) By and large, the followers of Tantra did not deny the Mahayana 3 A Guide to the Deities of the Tantra approach. They saw it simply as a foundation on which to lay down their unique approach to Enlightenment. The Vajrayana teachings find their authority not in the sutras but in the Buddhist tantras. Sutra literally means thread. Each sutra contains a teaching by the Buddha that has a logical thread or continuity to it.
Tantra, however, means something woven. This suggests an added dimension. The tantras are not usually logically connected pieces of teaching. It is as though the threads of the sutras have been woven into a tapestry, in which the continuity of any individual thread may be lost from sight. The tantras are all attributed to Sakyamuni - usually under his Tantric name of Buddha Vajradhara - and it is claimed that their teachings were bestowed by him in secret.
When you attempt to relate to the everyday through the archetypal, or to manipulate spiritual forces through natural ones, what you are involved in is magic. The contents of the tantras are a witch's brew of magical spells and rituals, yogic instructions and profound teachings, often in jumbled fragments which make them unintelligible to the uninitiated. They are like the grimoires of an Enlightened wizard - who practises a transcendental magic that cannot be said to be either black or white. The fact that Tantric texts often make little sense to a reader unprovided with the keys for deciphering them underlines the central importance of the guru in the Tantra.
As we shall see in Chapter Four, the guru occupies the centre of the mandala of Tantric practice. It is through him that realization dawns. In fact, traditionally one cannot even step onto the Tantric path without the guru, for it is he who opens the gates to each stage of the path by bestowing initiation. Tantric practices and their associated initiations are divided into different levels. Most Tibetan schools recognize four main ones: kriya (action), carya (performance), yoga (union), and anuttarayoga (supreme union). The first three are known collectively as the Lower Tantras; their practice involves more external rituals. The anuttarayoga, or Highest Tantra, needs no external ritual at all.
At each level of Tantra one is introduced to a different degree of under-4 The Tantric Approach standing, and one's relationship to the Buddha, Bodhisattva, or other Tantric deity around which the ritual centres changes. The higher the tantra, the more intimate the relationship - the more totally identified you become with the state of Buddhahood. Highest Tantra is itself divided by most Tibetan schools into the two stages of kyerim, the generation stage, and dzokrim, the completion stage. In the generation stage you work to identify yourself as completely as possible with an aspect of Enlightenment through visualization.
This serves as preparation for the completion stage, which is concerned with the manipulation of subtle psychophysical energies in order to bring about a profound transformation of consciousness. However, rather than become involved in a lengthy analysis of the technicalities of the Tantric tradition, we shall concentrate on the underlying principles of Tantra. If we can set these cornerstones in place we shall understand the essentials. Then we shall be able to approach the Tantra with confidence, without being bewildered by the extraordinary luxuriance of its forms. To do this, we are going to look in turn at seven characteristics of the Vajrayana.
