Tantra: Fundamental Features

I’ve been asked to speak a little bit about tantra in general. When we look at the word tantra, it’s a Sanskrit word, and what it means is the warp of a loom. A loom is something that we weave cloth on, and the warp are the strings of the loom that we weave other strings across in order to make a piece of cloth. The image of that is that tantra is a type of practice that provides a structure onto which we can weave all the different themes of practice that we’ve developed already in sutra. Sutra practice is the basic practice. 

Within Buddhism, we have a general tradition of Hinayana and Mahayana. Hinayana covers 18 different schools, one of which is Theravada (the schools that we have now in Southeast Asia). Mahayana is the form of Buddhism that we have later in India (it went to Tibet and Mongolia in one way; in another way, it went to China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam). 

Anyway, tantra falls within Mahayana. Within Mahayana, we learn various themes of practice in our sutra training, starting with putting a safe direction (or refuge) in our lives in terms of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, working in that direction; taking advantage of our precious human life; thinking of death and impermanence, and all the various aspects of karma and how this will affect our future lives in terms of what we experience. Then, thinking in terms of all the disadvantages of any type of future life that we have, and in terms of being under the influence of disturbing emotions, disturbing attitudes and these karmic impulses, and then developing a strong wish and determination to get out of that (which is called renunciation), on the basis of that, on the basis of ethical discipline, on the basis of concentration, then we develop – wisdom, it’s often called – discriminating awareness of reality, of how we exist, how others exist, in order to overcome what’s causing all the problems and suffering in our uncontrolled recurring existence. 

Then, in Mahayana, we have to develop bodhichitta, which is our mind focused on our future enlightenment, the enlightenment that we personally, individually, are aiming to attain, with the wish to be able to achieve that in order to help others. So, it’s based on love and compassion. With that, we develop the far-reaching attitudes (or perfections) of generosity, ethical discipline, patience, enthusiastic perseverance, mental stability, and again, discriminating awareness. 

That’s a long list of things, isn’t it? These are all the aspects that we cultivate in our practice of sutra. The main ones really being love and compassion, ethical discipline – these far-reaching attitudes – concentration, and especially this understanding of reality, this discriminating awareness (particularly, we speak in terms of voidness). Now, how do we put all of this together? We put all of this together in our practice of tantra. Tantra is a very advanced practice. It is absolutely – I can’t underline this enough – not a beginner practice. People who start out their Buddhist practice with tantra most often get into a lot of trouble because of that, because they do not have the foundation. Tantra is an advanced practice for putting together all the things that we’ve learned and trained in before. That’s the etymology of the Sanskrit word tantra

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