Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute exploration of sadhana theory, Alex Berzin walks through the four components of guru yoga and the three types of ritual ceremonies that empower tantric practice. He opens with a detailed clarification of regret versus guilt in confession, stressing the psychological importance of honest acknowledgment and a realistic promise to improve one day at a time. He then unpacks mandala offering as cultivating willingness to give everything for others’ benefit, and guru yoga as integrating one’s body, speech, and mind with the enlightened qualities of a spiritual teacher or Buddha form. Berzin explores the distinctions between empowerment, subsequent permission, and mantra gathering ceremonies, explaining what each authorises a practitioner to visualise. He concludes by explaining why the four classes of tantra exist, from Kriyā through Anuttarayoga, and addresses the importance of vows and living lineage connection in sustaining serious practice. Pitched at students beginning to understand tantric frameworks.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 SP.mp3
UUID: 51e1daa6-62ea-43b5-a798-423111531942
Teacher: Alex Berzin
Collection: Theory of Sadhana practice (Alex Berzin)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~6,255
There has to be something more going on than just that. What’s important is the actual feeling, the attitudes, and that’s of opening openly admitting to the negative things that we’ve done in the past that these were wrong. It’s usually translated confession. Again, that’s a heavily loaded term. It’s openly admitting, being honest with yourself, examining your past, looking at the negative things, and admitting to ourselves this was wrong.
Then feeling regret. Remember regret is very different from guilt. Guilt is a strong identification with being the naughty child. Regret is like you ate poisoned food or food that was rotten. You regret that you ate it.
It made you sick. You don’t feel guilty that you ate it. It’s two very different feelings. Like I was differentiating before, dread and fear. It’s important to differentiate regret from guilt.
We regret it. Then we promise that we’re going to do our best not to repeat this, not to do it again in the future. Again, you have to be a little bit realistic. Obviously, as was pointed out in one of the long run texts, if we were to promise, I’m never gonna get angry again, well, how could you really make that type of promise? You would feel as though you’re a hypocrite.
You try your best. I’m gonna try my best not to get angry. You do a little bit like Alcoholics Anonymous, one day at a time sort of thing. I’m going to try not to get angry for the next hour or for the next day and so on. Anyway, we had this promise.
There’s reaffirming Reaffirming our foundation is to reaffirm the safe direction that I’m going in life. Direction of overcoming my limitations, realizing my potentials to be able to benefit everyone, rededicating my heart to everybody, so expanding your heart out to all others and to reaching our fullest potentials to be able to help them. Then applying the remedial forces of this Vajrasattva meditation with the visualizations and so on to actually feel in a graphic way. You see because things work, the way that our mind works, if you just say, Well, now I’m pure, that’s a little bit hard to really believe or to digest. Graphic way with all these visualizations of purification happening, the negativities leaving us and so on, psychologically it works better to feel that we’re actually doing something.
To go Definitely. Definitely. Absolutely. Absolutely. You want to do all this beforehand so that it’s not just a mechanical process or a trip to Disneyland with these fantastic visualizations going on.
It’s like what I was saying about meditation. What’s important is the feeling. Seeing things, feeling things, not just the words, not just the mechanical process of the visualization. Because really, you could just be going blah, blah, blah on and on. What’s the difference?
Yes, you do do these things before you do the Vajrasattva. We have Vajrasattva, it’s purification. Mandala offering is a round symbol of the universe. Mandala means a round symbol. Doesn’t necessarily have to be round.
Again, one of our ideationally based disturbing attitudes is our inheritance from the Greeks of grasping for inherent symmetry. That things should be symmetrical. If there’s five of this, there has to be five of that. It doesn’t sit nicely. If there’s five of this, four and a half of that.
There are many examples of how we grasp at, you know, things to, exist in that way. But anyway, you know, this round symbol, although it means round, doesn’t have to be round. But, in any case, what, we’re doing is we are offering symbolically the entire universe. Now what does that mean? It means that we develop the state of mind of being willing to give anything anything and everything in order in order to be able to benefit others, in order to be able to reach our fullest potentials, in order to be able to overcome our limitations.
It’s this state of mind, if I want to give everything, I’m willing to give everything the whole universe developed with this mandala offering. That builds up a tremendous amount of positive potential, puts a lot of petrol in the engine, gets a lot of energy going in that direction. Guru yoga is a Guru is a spiritual teacher. Yoga is a way to integrate. The word yoga means integration.
So it’s integrating our body, speech, and mind with the enlightening body, speech, and mind of a Buddha. Enlightening, I use, because you know, you have different words for our type of body, speech, and mind. We are sentient beings. Now, sentient being, again, is not a very good term. Sentient doesn’t usually mean anything to people.
If just think that sentient being means a living being, and you hear that a Buddha is not a sentient being, then it throws us for a loop. What it’s referring to is a limited being. Somebody with a limited mind, limited awareness, limited body. It’s a limited being and a Buddha is not a limited being. It makes perfect sense.
What we’re trying to do is to We have our limited body, speech, and mind, and we want to integrate that with enlightening body, speech, and mind. It’s not that their body is enlightened. That sounds silly but it’s enlightening. It can bring others to enlightenment. You have different words for Buddha’s body, speech, and mind.
We want to integrate that. Now make it one. That’s what integration means. That can be with any spiritual master. We shouldn’t think that it has to be with just one tradition as such.
That it’s limited to that because in each of the traditions you’re going to do this with the founding figure or several of the founding figures of that tradition. So whether it’s done with Tsongkhapa with the recitation of the verse called Miktsema, which is a verse of praise to Tsongkhapa for the Gelugpa tradition or if it’s done with the mantra of Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava in the Nyingma tradition or in the Sakya it’s done with Virūpa or in the Kagyu Let’s say in the karma Kagyu, there are thirteen different Kagyu traditions. In the karma Kagyu, which is the one with the karmapa is the head, then, that can be done either with, marpa, milarepa, Gampopa. It can be done with the second Karmapa, the sixteenth Karmapa, vajradhara. There’s many different ones that are practiced in that tradition.
It doesn’t make any difference because any of these figures are just representatives of Buddha. The state that we want to achieve. We shouldn’t get hung up in sectarianism about things like this. Sectarianism is basically a football team mentality. Tradition is my football team and all the other ones are the other football teams and we have to compete.
That’s silly. That’s childish. We have these preliminaries which are putting more petrol in and keeping the engine clean. We shouldn’t just think that there are only these four. These are the most commonly ones.
However, there are many others. In the Gelugpa tradition, for instance, nine are done. You have also things like one hundred thousand water bowls, one hundred thousand of this specific practice called Damtsig Dorje which is for purifying one’s close bonds with the teachers. There’s also making a hundred thousand little clay statues, a hundred thousand refuges, a hundred thousand offering of sesame seeds into a fire with a particular mantra and visualization for purification. There are lots and lots of preliminary practices.
This is something which is worked out with your own spiritual teacher according to your needs, according to the situation. You could be asked to do six hundred thousand Om Mani Padme Hums as a preliminary or a million Tārā mantras as a preliminary. There are many different ways of building up positive potential. Cleaning your engine, putting petrol in. We shouldn’t think of it in just a very limited, big black line around it.
It has to be like this, black and white. As I say, just because there isn’t a big emphasis on doing all of this as an event as you would do, let’s say, in the Kagyu tradition of first you do one hundred thousand of this, this, this, this, and this. Then we’ll talk about taking initiations. Just because it’s not done in that style, you shouldn’t think that in the Gelugpa it’s dispensed with. It’s not.
Then that brings us to the actual initiations. Ceremonies. There are, I should say, what’s called in Tibetan a wang. Now, wang is translated either as initiation or empowerment. Right?
It’s talking about the same thing. Empowerment is closer to the connotation of the Tibetan term because it’s the word to power, to give you the power. Empowers you to be able to do something. The Sanskrit word, the connotation is a sprinkling, so a sprinkling of seeds. It’s planting seeds for success in a practice.
Then there is a jenang in Tibetan. A jenang is a subsequent permission. Right? Then there is also a something called a Naktu which is a gathering together of the mantra. So there are these three ceremonies.
The first one, the empowerment, the Wang, is what empowers you to visualize yourself as meditational figure. These deities now we’ll get into a lot of discussion of these deities. The word deity itself is one that puts off a lot of people because, you know, you come into a Tibetan center and you see all these pictures and what are these? And, you know, the the people there say, well, these are our deities. People get the idea that you’re into idol worship, worshiping all these gods and so on.
It becomes a really weird trip. What these are, you know, I mean, deity, you know, is a is an easy way of saying it. But these are Buddha forms or Buddha figures that we’re working with in order to build up the causes to achieve a body of a Buddha. In any case, we’ll get into a discussion of that. What an empowerment does is it empowers us to be able to visualize ourselves as one of these meditational figures.
That’s done with a whole big You have a mandala which is the world system, the building that this deity lives in. There’s usually a picture of that. You’re going have ribbons, blindfolds which are used, tossing flowers into the mandala to see the affiliation. There’s a lot of steps to it. If it doesn’t have all of that, you’re not receiving an empowerment.
You’re receiving one of the other ones. You can identify it from the paraphernalia that’s used in the procedure. Know exactly what you’re receiving because what happens so often in the West is that terminology is used very sloppily. You know, because either you have people who are speaking English as a second language and so it’s used loosely or people who are coming from an English background who don’t know all the possibilities of what is occurring in the Tibetan system so they just call it one everything several by the same English word. If you haven’t received an empowerment, you can’t visualize yourself as a deity.
You can visualize the deity in front of you, on your head, head, all these sort of things but not yourself as the deity. In Sūtra, you do have a lot of practices which are done with visualization. We’ll get into the whole discussion of visualization a little bit later. It’s basically using the powers of the imagination. For developing concentration, the most commonly used object to focus on in the Tibetan tradition is not the breath.
That’s used in some of the other traditions. It’s a visualization of a Buddha. Imagining the Buddha in front of you because you want to develop the powers of the mind, not the powers of focusing on a physical sensation, that’s sensory consciousness. And By focusing on a Buddha in front of you, then you have clearly in front of you the direction that you’re going in. It reaffirms that direction, the refuge.
It is very helpful for bodhicitta because you’re expanding your heart out to reaching this state in order to help others. There are many, many advantages of gaining concentration on a visualized figure in front of us. By the way, I should point out, you know, for when we’re doing these type of practices, we shouldn’t think, you know, when you visualize, when you’re using your imagination, it’s not visual. It has nothing to do with the eyes. You’re not looking at these figures.
What you’re doing is using the imagination. You imagine it in your mind’s eye that, for instance, this figure is in front of us. Now, that’s something which I skipped over it. In terms of the meditation posture, the posture for meditating, you should sit on a cushion so that you’re slightly raised. You should sit on a cushion that your bum is slightly raised, your rear end is slightly raised, but not that you’re entirely on the cushion so that you’re flat.
The point of it is to lift your hips up so that the pressure is off the hip joint so your legs don’t fall asleep so quickly. Now, there are some cushions which are very stiff and hard. Those are Zen cushions used for sitting cross legged, not cross legged, kneeling in one of the Japanese postures with a heavy, very thick, high cushion under you. If you try sitting cross legged on one of those, for most people, it’s murder. It doesn’t work.
You have to get the right cushion, the right type of thing. That cushion should, you have to see about the height of it, about the softness of it because I know for myself if it’s too hard, again my legs fall asleep. You judge for yourself what is the best height and thickness. Then, it’s important to sit with your back straight with your head slightly leaning. The legs should be in the cross legged position if possible.
Even better would be in half lotus. Even better than that is in the full lotus. It’s called the vajra position in Tibetan. Lotus is a Hindu way of talking about it. That’s for being able to get the energies going in a smooth way.
Now, if you want to know the stages for being able to sit in the full lotus because later on in Tantra when we’re dealing with the subtle energies in the body, you’re going to want to be able to sit in that posture because it will get the energies going in the best flow. It’s something which is going take a very long time for most of us to be able to sit that way. It certainly took me many years to be able to sit comfortably in that posture. The way you start out is to sit cross legged in the normal position. When you can do that comfortably with your knees down, then you would start by first moving your left leg, your left foot from out from under you.
When you can do that fairly comfortably, that’s not so hard, then you put your left foot up on your right thigh. When you can do that comfortably with your knee down, with your knees down, then the next step is to take your right foot out from underneath you and see if you can sit comfortably with both knees on the ground. If you can do that, once you get to that point, then you simply take your right foot and put it up on top of your left thigh. There are stages that you can build yourself up to doing it. Shouldn’t feel, Freak out.
I can’t do it. Gradually over a period of time train yourself to be able to do that. Anyhow, the spine is straight. The head is slightly bent. It doesn’t mean all the way down in your chest.
It doesn’t mean your head back up but just a little bit down. Your shoulders should be back and even and down. That’s an important point during the day. If we can keep a watch on how we hold our shoulders it’ll be very helpful because a lot of the time our shoulders are up at attention. That causes a great deal of tension in the back muscles and the neck muscles.
It pinches the nerves and makes for tension in the body so we become anxious. If you can put your shoulders back down and forcibly put them back down and then that will relieve that tension. If we’re feeling tension during the day it can be helpful to put the shoulders up and let them forcefully drop back down. That relieves that tension in the neck and the muscles. Shoulders should be down and even back.
Your lips should be well, let’s do the eyes first. The eyes should be looking downwards. This is the point why I raised this. Your eyes should be looking downwards towards the tip of your nose which means they’re not cross eyed but just looking down at the floor in a line out from the tip of your nose. Your eyes should be half open, half shut, loosely focused.
Now, what does that mean? It means that they shouldn’t be wide open and they shouldn’t be shut. If they’re wide open, you tend to see too much. Your mind wanders. If they’re shut, then it says there’s a tendency to fall asleep.
Now, there’s a lot more reasons though why you don’t want to get into the habit of meditating with your eyes shut, which an awful lot of us Westerners do. That is that it sets up this whole habit of putting a big block, a distance between our meditation process and life. Shut everything out. Don’t bother me. Don’t bug me.
I’m meditating. You put the curtains down and so it puts a big distance between the meditation and life. It’s sort of like what happens when you’re stoned. There’s sort of this distance between yourself and life out there. Want to sort of the attitude of don’t bum me out, I’m meditating.
We can avoid that by getting into the habit of meditating with our eyes half open, half closed. We’re part of the world. It’s not that you’re rejecting things or closing things out. Closing the world out in order to be able to meditate. Now, that may be a little bit difficult.
You also don’t want our eyes to be half open, half closed in the way in which it’s fluttering. You know, that your eyes are fluttering, you know, the eyelids are fluttering back and forth. That’s due to having too much tension in the muscles around the eyes. You relax those muscles. You know, it’s very easy.
You can just look down. When you look at the floor, your eyes are half closed. It’s natural. That’s the way that they are. It’s not that you unnaturally have to hold them in some special position.
When you’re doing that, you could be reading, for instance, and there’s no hindrance between reading and visualizing at the same time. For instance, try looking down towards the floor in front of you. While you’re doing that, you can be aware of the person sitting in front of you, that there’s somebody sitting in front of you, can’t you? That is what is done. That’s how you visualize in front of you.
It’s an awareness. It’s a feeling of something being in front of you. Your eyes don’t have to look at it. It’s just a feeling of the thing being there. Don’t worry about the clarity and the details.
The thing is to just have some feeling of something being there. It’s something quite feasible to do. We have the eyes are like that. The should be the lips and the teeth should be in a normal position, not clenched. The tongue should be slightly raised up towards the upper palate, not curled back in an unnatural position, but touching the palate just behind the upper teeth.
The purpose of that is so that you won’t have excess saliva formation. You don’t have to swallow all the time or dribble or these sort of things. It’s a little bit more helpful. You won’t be so distracted by the saliva in your mouth. These are the position, the meditation position.
As I was saying, we are Let’s see. What did this derive from? Empowerment empowers us to be able to visualize ourself as the deity. If you haven’t received an empowerment, would just be able to visualize it in front of you like we’re using this example of visualizing a Buddha in front of us or on our head. Now, the way that Serkong Rinpoche described it was that this is giving us a sword and jenang or the subsequent permission is what is sharpening the sword.
Now, the subsequent permission you can identify it quite easily. This is sometimes called getting blessings or something like that. Again, you know when people use the word initiation sloppy, then they use it to refer to that as well. It’s sloppy usage. It is a ceremony in which you have a torma, one of these sculpted cakes on a plate.
Usually has a little stick in it with an umbrella on the top and a picture of the of the particular deity. During the so you have no mandala. You don’t have a table with usually a little building around around it in a picture. You don’t have that. You have just this dorma cake and you receive the blessings of body, speech, mind, and the three together.
That is a subsequent permission. That’s It’s not an empowerment. It’s like sharpening the sword. Now, there are two occasions, two situations in which you can receive these. There are various classes of tantra.
We haven’t gotten into this yet. Maybe we should get into that actually. I’m sorry if I left it out. Tantra is What the word Tantra means is an everlasting stream of continuity. This is what the word means, an everlasting stream.
Just like the word Sūtra means a theme of practice. A theme. Buddha taught many themes. Anyway, Tantra is an everlasting stream and it’s a stream of continuity. You have a basis path and a resultant level of this.
The basis level is the everlasting stream of continuity of our mind stream. The path level is the everlasting stream of continuity of these various practice with these Buddha forms. The resultant level is the everlasting stream of continuity of the various bodies of a Buddha that we want to achieve. What we’re doing is we’re working with the everlasting stream of continuity of these Buddha forms, practice of the Buddha forms to purify the everlasting stream of continuity of our mind stream in order to achieve the everlasting stream of continuity of the bodies of a Buddha. This is Tantra and then also the texts which refer to this, those are also called Tantras.
Now, there are four classes of Tantra. There is I’ll give the Sanskrit names. There’s Kriyā. Kriyā Tantra is a ritual type of deity practice. Ritual practice of these Buddha forms.
If you talk about external and internal thing, practices, this is the one that puts the main emphasis on external practices, external rituals. So, Rituals of cleanliness, ablution, particular detail with diet, vegetarianism, these sort of things. The practices of Avalokiteśvara, Tārā, these sort of things that you’re involved with here in Mañjuśrī. That’s on this first level. The Nyuni, the fasting practice, these sort of things, that’s part of this first level.
Then there is Caryā, which is behavioral practice of a Buddha figure or behavioral deity practice. That’s putting an equal emphasis on the external and the internal practices. That’s Caryā, behavioral practice. Then there is Yogatantra. Yogatantra is the third level that is an integrated deity practice.
If you talk about the two external and internal, this is the one that puts the major emphasis on the internal practices. Now, the highest class of Tantra, the fourth class, is called Anuttarayoga. Anuttarayoga is sometimes you’ll hear the Sanskrit mispronounced as Anuttara Yoga. Incorrect Sanskrit pronunciation. Anuttarayoga is peerlessly integrated deity practice or a highest integrated deity practice.
This puts its emphasis on even higher, even more profound ways of yoga, of internal practice. Now, don’t get confused. Sometimes you hear Maha Nutra Yoga, the word Maha, great, put in front of it. It’s the same thing. Sometimes unfortunately the word yoga, Tantra, is used as a very general term to refer to the highest class as opposed to just as a general term but it’s not used that frequently.
We shouldn’t be misled by that into thinking that’s talking about the third class. You’ll see in some of the translations. I know Lama Yeshe used to use it that way. The yoga tantra method of blah blah blah that is misleading because it’s not the third class he’s talking about the fourth class it’s Anuttarayoga now so we have these four classes now to get back. In that highest class, by the way, that’s where you would have Heruka, you’d have Vajrayoginī, you’d have Yamāntaka.
It’s pronounced Yamāntaka, not Yamāntaka. Yamāntaka, Guhyasamāja, Kālacakra, these sort of deity systems. Also, shouldn’t Well, I’ll get into that later. There are, by the way, certain deities which are practiced in many different classes. You will have a highest yoga, a Anuttarayoga form of Chenrezig, of Avalokiteśvara.
That would be the Gyalwa Gyatso practice. You also have a a Anuttarayoga form of Tārā, the Chittamani Tārā. So we shouldn’t think they’re just limited to one class. But in any case, yeah. When, it’s when an anuttara yoga is divided into Maha, Anu, and Ati yoga, that’s in the, Nyingma system, system.
And that’s a matter of which aspect of the Anuttarayoga process is emphasized. We’ll have to get into that a little bit later. You have basically the generation stage and the complete stage type of stage of practice. We’ll get into that later. Right.
That’s not only in the Gelugpa, that’s in the Kagyu and the Sakya as well. In the Nyingma, you have the six tantric vehicles and the three vehicles there which are subdivisions of the Anuttara form. Well, we’ll get to that. I mean, it’s easier to present. Wait till we get to the discussion of Anuttarayoga and then we can talk about that.
Let’s just finish this point before lunch of the subsequent permission. Now, if you have received an empowerment into the most commonly practiced classes of Tantra, the first and the fourth. Kriyā and the Anuttara Yoga. Now, if you have received an empowerment into a deity in the first class, the most commonly given one is the Thousand Arms Chenrezig. If you’ve received that, then that would empower you to visualize yourself as one thousand arm Chenrezig, nothing else.
It doesn’t empower you to visualize yourself as four arm Chenrezig, it’s one thousand armed Chenrezig. Now, if we’ve received that, then if we receive a subsequent permission into any other deity in that class of tantra, we can visualize visualize ourself as that deity. We don’t have to have received the empowerment of that deity. But if we haven’t received an empowerment, then if we receive the subsequent permission, we can only visualize that deity in front of us or on our head. We can’t visualize ourselves as the deity.
Do you follow that? If I’ve received Thousand Arms Chenrezig and nothing else, I can just visualize myself as Thousand Arms Chenrezig. I can’t do the Tārā practice. I mean, I can’t visualize myself in the Tārā practice or anything like that. If I have received that Thousand Arms Chenrezig empowerment and then later I receive the Tārā subsequent permission, the jenang, then without needing to have a Tārā empowerment, I can visualize myself as Tārā.
Otherwise, as I say, if we haven’t received empowerment, then technically you can only visualize the deity in front of you or on top of your head. Now, some spiritual teachers, when they give these subsequent permissions, they will waive that requirement. Then it’s up to them. If they do that, then fine. But if not, this is the technical way in which it’s done.
Now, if you’ve received an empowerment into one of the highest of Tantra in the Anuttarayoga form, the peerlessly integrated practice. Let’s say you’ve received Kālacakra or something like that, Heruka. Then, if you’ve received the subsequent permission for any deity of any any class, you can do the visualization of yourself as that. So, it empowers you. The empowerment will then allow you, when you’ve received the subsequent permission, to do any of the other practices.
Follow that? Now, that’s different from receiving a lung. A lung is an oral transmission. You can get the oral transmission of a mantra. That some power to saying the mantra.
You know, that’s just repeating the mantra after, somebody who’s received it from their teacher has received it from their teacher. So, you know, it’s slightly different. We don’t need necessarily a, an empowerment or a subsequent permission to be able to just do the mantra. Right? Or to do some simple practice of, of the deity.
Right. You wouldn’t visualize yourself as a deity if you’ve just been given the mantra. Well, obviously you’re not allowed to. You’re not allowed to. Obviously you could if you wanted to but it’s not going to have very much force behind it.
There’s that. Then there is the Naktu, this third ceremony which is to It’s the collected mantra, collecting the mantra. What that is, is it’s not given so commonly. We have the You can tell what it is because usually you have a mirror which is just a piece of polished metal and it will have the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet arranged in a certain cryptic order, as in a crossword puzzle, in rows and columns. There will be many different ways of arranging the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet.
You have a ceremony in which it says the first syllable, the consonant is the third one over and the fourth one down. It’s with the fifth vowel. Take some of the powder from that and you draw. Somebody draws the writes the mantra on the mirror with that. The whole point of that is then the spelling becomes absolutely without any doubts.
You know what the mantra is because each consonant, each vowel is specified according to its order in the Sanskrit alphabet in this way of writing the Sanskrit alphabet. That makes the mantra even more confirmed, more settled, more stable. So there’s these three types of ceremonies. Why don’t we break for lunch? Then after lunch, I’ll just finish the topic of initiations up with what’s the importance of receiving one?
Why do we want to receive one? Okay. So, the end of this morning, we were speaking about, the whole process of, various, empowerments and, subsequent permissions and this gathering together of the mantra. The were there any questions, by the way, so far? That was taking, you know, each letter of the mantra, the consonants and the vowels, and putting it together so you knew exactly, you had total confidence in what the mantra was.
Yeah. That’s a ceremony that does that. As I say, it’s fairly rare. Alrighty. Now, the importance of an empowerment or initiation, however you want to call it, is that it really links us up with the whole living tradition.
It makes it into something very alive. That’s extremely important, especially general in dharma, it’s important to have some living tradition, some living example of what it is that we’re aiming for. But particularly in tantra, it’s very easy to have some really strange, weird idea of what’s going on. And when we have when we have the example of a teacher, then we see that this is here it is that what we’re aiming brings us sort of down to earth so we don’t have such a strange, you know, weirdo idea. Also, it gives us confidence that this is something which can be done.
Here’s an example of somebody who’s done it. And again, that is very important otherwise. It’s sort of some abstract goal that we might feel that nobody can do. Also, by linking it with the old tradition that goes all the way back to the Buddha, then that will give us more confidence that this is a valid method. It’s not just some you know, I’m not just some crazy person imagining that I’m Napoleon or Mickey Mouse or something like that.
I mean, there has to be a difference between a crazy person imagining that they’re Mickey Mouse and ourselves imagining that we’re Tārā or Mañjuśrī. And one of the factors, I mean, aside from having all these background things, the preliminaries that we’ve been talking about, is having an actual empowerment and initiation. It becomes an event at which now I’m seriously going to enter into this practice. The reason why we want to do it is because I want to actually practice. You know, if you don’t wanna do the practice, there’s no reason to, involve ourselves in getting the, empowerment.
And, you know, this is something which is valid. It goes all the way back. Here’s a living example of somebody who’s done it, who’s traveled this path. So it becomes real to us. And we have some reference points.
Another very important thing in the empowerment is that, you see what the empowerment is going to do is continue this process of cleansing out negativities or purifying and building up more positive potentials by planting seeds. So during the empowerments, we’re going to imagine that that different obstacles, obscurations are purified from us and that seeds are planted in terms of conscious experiences during the initiation and also actual seeds planted, as it were, which will bring about more success in the practices to follow. As I say, if a seed isn’t planted, you’re not going to get any crops to grow. And so the empowerment deals with all of that. As the Sanskrit word means, it’s a sprinkling.
So it’s the sprinkling of seeds. One very very important aspect of what goes on is the taking of vows. These are vowed restraints to restrain from various detrimental types of behavior which would prevent us from having the best success in the practice. Now, as Tsongkhapa said, to think that just the usual preliminaries, the prostrations and so on, that these are the only preliminaries for success, shortchanging ourselves because the initiation and the keeping of the vows, those are as much what is essential for success. Now, with the vows, vowed restraints, we have, first of all, there is some sort of basis level.
This is, again, Tsongkhapa tradition of the Gelugpa tradition that there should be some basis in the general what’s called Prātimokṣa vows. These are the vowed restraints for the first step liberation. That’s what Prātimokṣa means. It doesn’t mean individual, but first step, liberation. And this is, you know, doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody has to become a monk or a nun or a novice or, even a lay person, but just some general level of ethical self discipline, even if it’s trying to restrain from the destructive actions.
This forms a foundation, and then one takes bodhisattva vows and also Tantric vows. Now Tantra is an aspect of Mahāyāna, and any level of empowerment, no matter what class of Tantra it is, any Jainang or permission, is going to have the bodhisattva vows. Now, the bodhisattva vows are basically we have there are certain actions which certain ways of thinking, speaking, and so on, are going to be very detrimental for our being able to best help others. The bodhisattva vows are giving these guidelines. We’re very fortunate that these are pointed out.
I always thought that was really great. Here, they point out the mistakes that we could make in terms of working to help others. For instance, if we’re always praising ourself and putting down others because we want to take advantage of others, make money off of them, or so on, that is going to be a big detriment. For instance, if we’re a doctor and our sole motivation is to make a lot of money off of people, and so we go around saying that I’m the best doctor and you put down everybody else, then obviously that’s going to undermine our sincere interest in taking care of the patient. All we want to do is make money off of them.
It’s this type of thing that is pointed out and that we want to restrain ourselves from in order to be able to best help each other. This is part of that involved state of expanding our hearts out to others. When we’re actually involved and we engage ourselves in the activities to help others, what are the things that we want to restrain from which are going to cause us some difficulties? That’s the bodhisattva vows.