Categories in Tantra  Conceptual thought involves categories. How is that relevant in tantra? There are categories with these Buddha-figures, so there is the category Chenrezig, Avalokiteshvara. There can be many different forms of that deity, with four arms, with two...

Four Gateways to Liberation We’ve been speaking about tantra, and we’ve discussed many different aspects of it, as well as refuted some of those aspects several times. There’s no need to repeat again. However, there’s just one thing that I want to add to our discussion, which...

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...

We have been speaking about the necessity for preparation for engaging in tantra practice. We have the common preliminaries (or preparation), which are shared in common with all Mahayana practices, sutra as well as tantra. In addition, we have the unshared or uncommon...

Powa (Transference of Consciousness)  We were speaking a little bit about some of the features of mother and father tantra as one of the questions. Another feature that I should mention that we have in mother tantra, because I know that many of you are practicing this, is...

For the remainder of this seminar, I’d like to not follow a strict structure, but just answer questions you might have about tantra and let a wider picture of tantra unfold from that. Can Visualization Help with Dealing with Disturbing Emotions?  When, on a practical...

Questions about Initiations (Empowerments) You said that after the preliminaries or preparation, then we take the empowerment. Does that mean that we have to have completed our ngondro before receiving an empowerment? That’s a very good question. It depends on what level we...

The Benefits of Taking the Body of a Buddha-Figure as the Basis for Voidness in Tantra  The next point in our four-point analysis of why tantra is more efficient than sutra is that there’s a special basis for voidness. When we focus on voidness, voidness is the total...

Review  We’ve seen that to be able to practice tantra properly, we need proper preparation. That preparation entails the common preparation of the main aspects of the sutra path and also the uncommon preparation (or preliminaries) which are known as the ngondro, doing a...

Recap Buddha-Nature: Two Networks of Positive Force and Deep Awareness We’ve been speaking about Buddha-nature and trying to understand tantra in terms of Buddha-nature. We’ve seen that it refers to, first of all, the two networks of positive force and deep awareness. These...