Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 48-minute talk, John Landaw introduces the Buddhist path of Tantra by first establishing its philosophical ground in the doctrine that mind’s essential nature is clear light, obscured only by temporary delusions like clouds covering the sun. He then contrasts the two main Buddhist approaches: Sūtra, the gradual perfections path, and Tantra, the swift transformation vehicle, illustrating Tantra’s power through the example of Milarepa, who went from mass murderer to full enlightenment in roughly twelve years of practice. Landaw emphasizes that Tantra cannot be practiced effectively without a solid foundation in Sūtra teachings, which train the mind to look inward rather than seeking happiness through external rearrangement. He then walks through the opening steps of the Sūtra path: recognizing that mind determines experience; appreciating the rarity of human rebirth with both leisure and motivation; understanding mortality and the limits of worldly pursuits; and seeing how negative mental states ripple into future suffering. Suitable for practitioners new to Buddhist psychology and the relationship between Sūtra and Tantra.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Intro to Tantra Day 1 no date.mp3
UUID: 399df542-2f1b-4e89-b980-578f9b0f9d85
Teacher: John Landaw
Collection: Introduction to Tantra (John Landaw)
Date: 1984 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~4,741
This is the part of the course where twice daily you get a chance to run off of the mat for about an hour and a half. So that in itself isn’t of any great value, but perhaps if during the talk that can also be turned into meditation by just trying to listen to whatever is said with the type of mind which is continually checking if thoughts, these expressions have any relevance for for our life. If they make any kind of sense out of experiences we ourselves have had or experiences that we’ve heard about. So in other words, means listening with the mind, is open, on one hand open to hearing ideas which are new, which are different, which may initially sound unusual, some of them. But also listening with a mind which has a certain critical edge to them, checking, analyzing, seeing does this make sense out of my experience, of others’ experience?
Does it have a logical consistency to it? And does it seem something that will be fruitful for practice? So if we listen in this way, then even the act of listening becomes an act of meditation. We needn’t think that meditation is just this quiet contemplation of the breath. But even such open minded analysis itself becomes the heart of meditation.
So the subject here, the subject for the weekend, is an introduction to Tantra. The main goal of all Buddhist practice, especially the practice of Tantra, is to bring about what we might call a revolution in the mind. This revolution is based upon the observation that the mind’s nature, the mind’s most essential nature, is clear. It’s in the nature of clear light, in and of itself, unobstructed by any defilements, any of the delusions, any of the afflicted emotions, any of the coverings of ignorance. That the mind in its essential nature has this pure, clear light quality to it.
And that all of the various limiteachings that we experience, all of the frustrations and dissatisfactions, all of the feelings of self alienation, all of the emotional afflictions, all of these are like coverings, coverings over this mind. And to explain this, or to give an analogy for it, Buddha and many of his followers have come up with many various images. One of them is that the essential nature of the mind is like the sun clear, bright, radiant. And that all the various limiting defilements and delusions, all our jealousies and hatreds, of our actual sleepiness, all our ignorance and dullness, all of these states are like clouds temporarily obscuring the sunlight. But because the clouds and the sun are of different nature, because they’re not one, for that reason, even though clouds may temporarily obscure the sun, they can be blown away.
They can dissolve. And when they do, for instance, right in the middle of a very stormy cloudy day, it’s possible for the weather to change suddenly, the clouds to be blown away. And when that happens, then the sun shines through naturally, effortlessly. And the same is true for our mind. We know from our own experience that even in moments of incredible turmoil and confusion, it’s possible suddenly for some type of native wisdom to arise in the mind.
Or, in other cases, in times of strong hatred, when the mind seems caught up in that kind of burning red quality in which everything appears as an enemy, a state of intense paranoia, it’s possible. It’s possible, right in the midst of those types of experiences, for something to crack open the mind and for thought, a feeling of love and compassion, to well up from the depths. And many, many more examples can be given of states in which the mind at one moment seems totally occupied by these various delusions or afflictions or limiteachings, And yet, after some period of time, sooner or later, from a deeper level comes forth this clear light of wisdom, compassion, love, of sympathy for one’s fellows, of skill, of radiance. Another image that’s often given to explain this is that the mind is like a clear mirror capable of reflecting anything that’s in front of it, but that the this mirror is covered with a layer of dust. And for different people, for different beings, this layer of dust is thicker than it is for others.
And for any one person, this layer of dust is thicker and thinner at different times. And the entire path laid out in the Buddhadharma is a path of attempting to remove these layers of dust from the mirror, attempting to remove these layers of clouds from in front of the sun, so that the pure clear light potential of the mind has this ability to shine forth, not just occasionally or periodically, but for that to be the stable, constant state of the mind. Now when the various coverings have been removed from the mind, and the mind achieves this continual clear mirror state, or this fully radiant sun state, this radiant clear light, that achievement is known by various names and various traditions, and within the Buddhadharma, it’s generally termed enlightenment, or sometimes Buddhahood. Buddha being a term signifying the mind in a totally awakened state. Buddha having the significance of having awakened from the sleep of ignorance.
So Buddhahood, enlightenment, sometimes known also as the higher nirvana, the higher peace. So the entire purpose of all the teachings of the enlightened ones, the Buddhas of the past, whatever their so called religion was called, whether it was called Buddhism or not. But the entire path of enlightened beings is to reveal to others ways in which the clear light nature of the mind, this potential for full enlightenment, can be actualized. That’s the whole purpose. The purpose is not to found a sect or a religion or a tradition.
It’s not to get people thinking one way as opposed to thinking another. It’s not to get people to have their allegiance in one camp rather than another. The whole entire purpose is to show to others, to demonstrate to others that we all have this enlightened potential within, sometimes called the Buddha nature within. Different religions give it different names. There is this universal recognition by all of the mystic traditions that there is this potential, this enlightened potential.
So the entire purpose is to introduce others to the fact that they have this potential, and that this potential can be the steady, constant basis of their existence, rather than something intermittent, something occurring on the occasion. So within the Buddhadharma itself, there are two general approaches for achieving this clear light nature of the mind. These approaches are called that of Sūtra and of Tantra. Another way of calling them is the path of the perfections and the lightning vehicle. Now Tantra is this lightning vehicle, and it’s so called lightning because it has this power to transform the mind from its present un enlightened state into the state of complete enlightenment, a state in which wisdom, compassion, skill are effortlessly forthcoming.
And all of the various delusions such as hatred and jealousy and so forth are totally eradicated from the mind. Tanter has the ability of performing this type of transformation in a very, very short period of time. Within the space of one short lifetime. To give an example from history, many of us are familiar with Milarepa, who was a Tibetan living around the year one thousand, slightly later. In an earlier part of his life, he was a dabbler in such things as black magic and so forth, And through the resentment that his mother had for relatives who had stolen his birthright, he, and through powers he developed, he murdered, caused the death of quite a number of people and even a larger number of animals, all in one stroke.
And so, at this early part of his life, he was not only a murderer, but you might say he was a mass murderer. And yet, after a while, met a spiritual master, a spiritual guide, Marpa, who had received the sūtra and the tantra lineages from Indian gurus, Tilopa, Naropa. He received that lineage. And for six years, Milarepa became the disciple of Marpa, and then for about another six years, he put the meditative practices that he received from Marpa, he put them into practice in solitary retreat situations in the Himalayas, around the area around Mount Everest and so forth. And in that relatively short period of time, a very, very short period of time, he was able to transform his mind from that which was capable of committing these murders, holding resentment to such a great extent, that into a state of full enlightenment.
He was able to accomplish that by putting the Sūtra and the Tantra teachings together in a graded connected path. And this is just one example. There are quite a lot of other examples of people, even within this century. There’s an example of a very, very highly respected Nyingma Lama who in an earlier part of his life was responsible for the death of his wife out of anger, and yet, towards the latter portion of his life, was one of the most highly respected of all of the spiritual masters in Nepal. So it is indeed possible to have this most radical transformation of the mind from something which is polluted by all of these limiting qualities, transforming that into a completely unlimited state of enlightenment.
And we may feel, well, if Tantra is this lightning path, then that’s what I want to practice. I mean, why practice anything slower? Why practice sūtra, if sūtra is a path which can only reach completion after countless ages, continual lifetimes of practice, peeling away the layers, the limitations of mind? If that’s the case for Sūtra, then I don’t want to practice that. I want something instant, I want something quick.
But the truth of the matter is that there is no way of practicing Tantra effectively if the mind hasn’t already been trained to some extent in the basis of the Sūtra path, the basis of the path of the so called perfections. This morning, and perhaps into this afternoon, I’m not sure, I’d like to offer what many people here have already experienced, but which is new to some of us. It’s always worth reviewing. That is an overall picture of what is entailed in the Sūtra path, the perfection vehicle, and what the most fundamental points of that path are for carrying on into the Tantric path. Because one thing that we should keep in mind is that though the elements of the Sūtra path can be thought of as preliminary to those of the Tantra path, they are not preliminary in the sense that first you cultivate them and practice them, and then at some point we stop and then go on to something totally different.
That’s not the case. All the fundamental points of the Sūtra path are continually cultivated within the Tantra path as well. But in addition, there are further methods added on to that base. So the sūtra teachings are preliminary in an ongoing way, in a continual way, not something that we do and then eventually outgrow. We never outgrow any elements of the sūtra path, though we may change their emphasis.
So, just as the Tantric path is described as a revolution in consciousness, based on understanding the essential nature of the mind, and being able to reach it and transform our being through that, so too Sūtra, in general, is a science of the mind. In fact, it’s sometimes easier to think of Buddhism as a psychological system than a religious system, since its emphasis is so totally upon the mind. And in looking at the mind, it seemed that the mind lies at the root of our experience in a very simple yet profound formula, which indicates that whatever the state that the mind is in determines the nature of our experience. And therefore, if we want to change the nature of our experience, we’ll have only limited success if we concentrate our attention on external facets of our life. And yet this is precisely what most of us do most of the time.
In our life, we do experience various frustrations, various dissatisfactions, problems, miseries, and so forth. We do meet up with them. Sometimes it seems like that’s all we meet up with. Other times they’re intermittent. But our general response to these problems is to look outside of ourselves and ask, What can I rearrange to make my life happy?
We develop this type of mentality or type of approach which thinks to rearrange these elements in our life in something more suitable, something capable of producing an experience of pleasure, of happiness, something to quench the thirst that we have, this thirst of dissatisfaction. But from our experience and of the experience of others, we can see how limited approach this is. But the most we can hope by limiting our approach to externals is a momentary sensation or impression, in the way that if we have a headache and we take an aspirin, we can actually remove the symptoms of the headache for a while and the pleasure of the release of that pain. But we’ve done nothing fundamental about the source of the headache. And since we’ve done nothing fundamental, but have only calmed or anesthetized the symptoms, as it were, then whatever it was which was the root cause of the headache is still there, still part of our physical makeup, part of our mental makeup, and therefore after some period of time that headache returns.
Or it may return in an altered form. And the same is true of our dissatisfactions. On very gross levels, we may be dissatisfied with, let’s say, the house that we’re living in. And so we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort redecorating it so it looks totally new. And for the first weeks or so, amazes us how beautiful a job that we did, and there’s some very kind of intense pleasure that we get in showing it off to our friends and so forth.
But what happens after a while? Since we’ve done nothing about the internal source of dissatisfaction, then even this newly decorated house ceases to be something that gives us that same kind of pleasure and happiness anymore. After a while, it too now seems to need a change. It too seems worrying, confining, limiting, frustrated, and so forth, and eventually productive of dissatisfaction, problems, and suffering. And if we check carefully, we may find that all of our ordinary, externally directed activity leads to that same type of result.
The image that’s very commonly used is trying to gain satisfaction in this way is like trying to quench one’s thirst by drinking salt water. And if you’ve ever tried to do that, you know that all that does is increase one’s thirst. And so the so called spiritual path, the path of mental and spiritual cultivation, begins, in a sense, when we become disillusioned with our efforts to gain happiness, to gain some permanent sense of well-being out of these external type manipulations, and look instead at what we can do about transforming our mind. And we have a hint that it is the mind which governs, which is at the basic cause of our experience, from very simple things that have happened to us during our life, very simple and obvious things that have happened. We know, for instance, that there are circumstances which normally produce a certain feeling of happiness, if only temporary, and yet there are states of mind which when they arise prevent us from experiencing that happiness.
For instance, going to the cinema. For some of us that might be something which is always something enjoyable. And seeing a movie with our favorite stars by our favorite director is always something very nice, or a comedy by someone who always makes us laugh. And yet, if we have had an argument beforehand or a great sense of loss, We can enter the cinema, sit through the movie, and be profoundly bored, be completely untouched by what’s happening. On the other hand, we can endure situations which normally cause us a lot of pain and discomfort, and yet because our mind, for some reason, is in a very good state for the moment, we can not only endure that situation patiently, but we can actually find something enjoyable about it.
So what very simple examples like this indicate is that though the external situations in our life do definitely provide conditions for our experience, they’re not completely irrelevant, they do provide the conditions for our experience. The root cause determining whether we have an experience which is pleasurable and painful lies within the heart, within the mind, karma and samskara. If something inside is clouded and confused already, then even an ordinarily pleasurable experience is capable of giving pain, whereas if the mind is in an open, expansive, loving state, for instance, then even ordinarily painful situations can give rise to happiness. So the beginning of the spiritual path is a realization that while there may be some degree of necessity to arrange or rearrange external circumstances in one’s life, If this is done without also cultivating inner attitudes of mind, then the effort is in vain. It’s like trying to quench one’s thirst by drinking salt water.
And so there is a looking inwards that takes place. So the Sūtra path typically begins with a realization that we are, in fact, capable of this inward looking mentality. In other words, we can take stock of our situation, look inwards, and try to change it. And it’s very important to realize that we have the ability, the freedom, the leisure generally, we could say just the opportunity to do such inward looking, to do such examination. And if we think about it, we realize that merely having this opportunity is very precious and very rare.
Because there are countless forms of life, nonhuman as well as human, that lack this ability, that don’t have this opportunity. For instance, if we were to go to take a very gross example, if we were to go to the area of the sub Sahara now, where where so many millions and millions of people are experiencing unrelenting hunger and starvation, and try to introduce anyone there to spiritual training, in the sense of looking inwards, taming the mind, getting hold of the enlightened potential within, there would be no way there would be no way to communicate that fact to someone who is suffering from humer. A state like that doesn’t allow the leisure and the opportunity to investigate the nature of the mind, because the mind, in that case, is so plunged into the nonstop suffering caused by the physical conditions. And we can go to the other end of the scale. We can think of those people who, at the moment, are experiencing what many people consider extraordinary good fortune.
Their life is like an endless summer, and they have the wealth and the mobility and the connections to be experiencing whatever sensual delights there are available on the planet. They can surround themselves with beautiful sights, pleasing sounds, the nicest possible sensations. And they have the wealth and the power to surround themselves with these kinds of beautiful objects continuously. Generally, what we find for people who have that experience is that just as the starving person, we might say, is intoxicated by his or her hunger, and therefore has no room to consider anything else, so too this rich, powerful person tends to be intoxicated by the sensual enjoyments, and again, has no room to consider anything else. And so typically, we find if we read the biographies of people who have entered into states like that, For instance, oh, in these decades, for instance, rock stars are often good examples.
People who were brought up, maybe middle class or maybe poor, who quite quickly enter the world with fabulous wealth and fabulous power and influence. And therefore, we’re able to have it there that can call any type of pleasurable journey that’s possible to have from travel, food, drugs, men, women, whatever. And yet, what we generally find for people throughout history who have had that experience is that it tends to have this numbing effect on the mind, this intoxicating effect on the mind. And eventually, it’s like coming down from an addiction. The mind is left in a state of even more intense craving and grasping, even more intense dissatisfaction.
That a cycle of finding deeper and deeper sources of pleasure, the cycle is entered into, and the stakes become higher. And eventually, one starts living one life right at the very edge, and then often tragedy will fall. So our life in general somewhere falls somewhere between these extremes. We have tastes of the extremely painful, or we have tastes of the extremely pleasurable when everything seems to be going right. Yet most of the time, our life seems to be somewhere between.
There’s enough pleasure, there’s enough leisure, so that we can have the ability to do something about our situation, and there’s enough problems to have the motivation to want to do something about the state of our mind. So this position that we’re in, this ability to have a reflective quality to our life, not to be so totally engrossed in one end or the other of our experiences, this is sometimes referred to in teachings as the precious human form, or the precious human rebirth. And so the spiritual path typically begins when we appreciate how precious and rare our opportunity is to do something about our life. And that if we waste it, if we waste this precious opportunity, if we just continue to keep our life on its ordinary external rounds without doing something deep about changing the nature of the mind itself, then we are throwing away an opportunity which is very, very hard to come by. So there is an initial realization that our present opportunity has this power, has this chance to gives us this chance to affect a true transformation.
But together with that, there is a certain element of urgency, of immediacy, because we realize that our present situation is not permanent. It’s changing from minute to minute, from hour to hour, and day to day. And we can never tell when we’re going to find ourselves in a position where we no longer have the type of freedom or the leisure to begin to control our events, and instead find ourselves in a situation in which events are controlling us. And eventually, the biggest obstacle to control over our destiny, the biggest obstacle to remaining in a state of this precious opportunity is the fact that we must face up to our eventual death. That no matter how young and vibrant and healthy we may be at the moment, there’s no assurance whatsoever of how much longer we have to live in this present form.
Now, for many people, many different traditions, people outside of those traditions, the thought of death is a very frightening one. Usually, you can see how deadening and frightening the subject is if you’re at a dinner party and you suddenly bring it up as something to be thought of and the conversation goes very, very quiet, and people try very frantically to change it to something else. And yet, it’s one of the very few experiences in life that we can count on having. One of the few things that we know we’re going to experience. And so having this kind of silent, ignorant attitude towards it, well, I don’t want to consider it now because now I’m alive, having that attitude is actually depriving us of a chance to learn something very basic and fundamental about our life.
So in fact, thinking about death, understanding that it will come, instead of being something frightening, and somehow morbid or fatalistic, can actually be an ally to our practice, an ally to staying alive and living life at its fullest potential. Actually, at this point, why don’t we just take about a five minute break and then continue. So this whatever opportunity we have now to gain some deep control of our life is something that you can cut short at the time of death. And at the time of death, the vanity of our ordinary activities becomes quite apparent. If we think of those objects upon which we’ve lavished most of our attention during our life, then instead of helping us at the time of death, these things themselves can become burdens or totally irrelevant to the dying process, totally meaningless.
If a person hasn’t trained his or her mind and hasn’t been able to transform them in some positive way. Then at the death time, the sight of all the riches that have been collected during the life, being surrounded by loved ones, the all of these things, wealth, possession, friends, and so forth, whatever fame we imagine amassed in that lifetime. All of these things become quite meaningless, and in fact can add pain to the dying experience, because now we get the feeling that we have to leave all of this behind. And the only thing that is of possible help is the state into which we put our mind, its ability to remain clear, alert, conscious, to be endowed with this kind of clarity and benevolence and so forth. And yet all our efforts have been expended on rearranging external circumstances in our life, and we haven’t given time to purify the nature of the mind itself, then death is experienced as a very painful, very traumatic and confusing event.
But this is not the end of the difficulty of having an untrained mind. And to understand that, we have to realize that our mind is a continuum. If we look, for instance, in this life, we can see how the states of mind that we cultivate today help determine the type of experiences we have tomorrow. And the more we generate negative emotions, such as anger and jealousy and the like, the more we set ourselves up for experiencing mental and physical harms in the future, in either the short, near future, or in the distant future. So we know rather clearly how the unhealthy cultivation of certain states of mind can even lead to the ripening of physical symptoms.
Of the diseases that we experience, many of the accidents that we have, are psychosomatic in nature, not in the sense that they’re imaginary, that they’re just in their mind, that we’re actually quite healthy, but in the sense that having cultivated certain negative, tight or uptight states of mind, this sets into motion a cause and effect sequence which can easily lead to the experiencing of physical difficulties, illnesses. We can become accident prone, and so forth. So not only are the various delusions painful at the moment that they arise, It’s easy to see the truth of that if we just check what our mind is like when it’s caught up in jealousy. There’s no pleasure in that feeling. But not only is the case that these deluded afflicted states of mind hurt while they arise, but they also set in motion future experiences, mental as well as physical, which are in the nature of dissatisfaction and suffering.
Merely seeing that merely seeing that far is enough to have a motivation to do something about purifying one’s mind, just to be rid of that level of anxiety and sickness and so forth. But we can also take a larger view and have a deeper motivation, and that is to begin to understand that mind is not only a continuum which stretches out through this lifetime and has experiences as the result of this cause and effect relationship of state of mind producing one’s experience, shaping it. But that this is a continuum, this mental continuum is something which has no discernible beginning.