Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 48-minute session, John Landaw introduces core Tantric concepts that underpin meditation practice, beginning with the subtle physiology of the central channel. He addresses common misconceptions about visualization, clarifying that beginners should emphasize feeling the presence of subtle energy rather than achieving vivid mental images. He explains how seed-syllable meditation generates inner heat and bliss, which counteracts mental distraction by providing a compelling object that makes the mind naturally stable. He then pivots to Tantric Buddhism’s understanding of enlightenment—the three bodies of a Buddha: the truth body (dharmakaya), the complete enjoyment body (sambhogakaya), and the emanation body (nirmanakaya)—and shows how these correspond to experiences in sleep, death, and spiritual practice. He explains that enlightened consciousness manifests in different forms to benefit different beings, and that advanced practitioners cultivate the subtle clear-light mind as a rehearsal and eventual means to access the dharmakaya. Aimed at students new to Tantric study with some prior Buddhist familiarity.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 Intro to Tantra Day 2 no date.mp3
UUID: cabad9bb-eb4b-4b1e-b73c-e51f26ee8a81
Teacher: John Landaw
Collection: Introduction to Tantra (John Landaw)
Date: 1984 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,179
During this session, I’d like to say a few things about the Tantric view of enlightenment, how that relates, how it’s understood in terms of the sadhana practices. But also, during this talk, again, there will be a fair amount of new material to be added. I should have said before, but I neglected to. If while I’m speaking, some things that I say are unclear or seem to require further explanation, then please feel free to interrupt and ask for clarification. I should have said that before, but I neglected to.
In fact, even before I begin, if there’s any points that you may have remembered now that you would have liked to have asked during discussions, you can do that. Otherwise, I’ll just begin. Eventually, we try to reach a point where we’re actually having the mind right within the channel, right within the channels themselves. But in the beginning, that’s a little bit hard to do. So we just try to get the mind as close to it as possible.
One of the images that they use, for instance, for this sweeping gaze back and forth. One of the ways they say that is to pretend, in a sense, that the mind is a bit like the car in a lift, in an elevator, that thing that goes up and down. That’s one’s mind. And one’s mind is in, for instance, at the level of the crown and then descends as if descending in one of these contractions. And so it’s actually experiencing the channel from the inside.
But other times—that’s a very good technique for getting familiar with individual parts of the channels. But then we should also cultivate an overall picture of the whole thing. And in that case, we want a broader vision, so our mind, at that time, isn’t centered in any one place. It’s just picking up the entire field. Of course, the mind should try to be kept somewhere within the balance of the body. You know? Shouldn’t be way away looking back in. Should be close. And you try to see it. As a matter of fact, in the beginning, it’s stressed that it can be very, very helpful to visualize one’s own body as big as a mountain, let’s say. Bigger being helpful. Because to get things too small too quickly is very frustrating. It’s a real strain on one’s concentration. So it’s not a bad idea if you want to visualize oneself as being bigger, therefore all of the elements are bigger. That’s why I think I might have mentioned that even though the central channel ideally is visualized about that thick, in the beginning it’s not a bad idea to visualize it as this thick. And then as the concentration gets better and better, then to slowly reduce the size of it.
But again, I should say that the word “visualization” can be misleading. Especially in the beginning, we’re not interested so much in seeing any elements clearly as feeling their presence. So I do mention things like size and color and so forth just for a sense of completeness, to give an indication that these things are described, but not so much because that’s what we should be striving to actually see them, but more feel—so that when we breathe in, for instance, even just a tingling sensation that we can follow the same way we can follow along the surface of the skin. That itself is enough. Whether we see a tube or not is not so important. If we get the sense of a movement of energy, that’s—if there was such a word as “feelization” rather than visualization, I’d prefer that. That’s really what’s meant.
So many people can’t get this at all. And yet, that was the first thing I read in my first course, and I couldn’t get it there either. Well, one of the things that has to do with, I think, is that people have a higher expectation of what success is. They feel if they don’t get it clear, they’re not getting it at all. Like many people, not just for this, but many people say, “I can’t visualize. I just can’t. I tried to visualize a Buddha or something, I just can’t do it.” And yet all you have to do is to say, “Think of a hamburger,” and they get a mental image of what we do. You know? Like, there’s no problem with the ability to visualize. It’s just they expect that when they do it, they should see it as clear as, you know, all the details and all the colors and like this and like that. And it’s the same thing with the seed syllable. You know, we think, because of the way it’s described, we think we should get this incredible blaze of heat, and it should go on and cleanse the entire central channel and do that. But what we’re looking for is just to get the mind quiet enough so we can start to pick up some sensations. We can’t say that there’s no sensations within our body.
“What’s the matter with just watching the breath? That can’t be more basic than doing the seed syllable.”
Well, it’s a very good technique for calming the mind. It won’t—that technique by itself has limited applicability. It’s excellent for calming the mind, but it doesn’t arouse the kind of energy which is useful for that type of inspiration that we get when we can actually channel that energy. Actually, that ties in with something that I wanted to talk about in the lecture. I can go into it maybe directly, and then if there’s more questions that you have—
But as we’ve stated, and as has been mentioned before, the two main obstacles to concentration are the mind becoming dull, and for most people, the main obstacle is the mind becoming distracted. So of the two, mental distraction, especially in the beginning stages, and well on into the practice, becomes the major obstacle to having a concentrated mind, a really usable state of the mind. And when we start checking closely as to why the mind becomes distracted, it’s largely a matter of the fact that the mind, our mind is bored and is restless and craves variety, craves pleasure. So if we place it on one thing, after a time, it just wants something else, almost anything else. It’s not a particularly picky mind. Just anything. Variety itself would be pleasurable. Okay?
And actually, that’s one reason why the simple breath meditation can be a very profound one, because it is quite a boring thing to look at the breath. So to give the mind a very simple but very boring task, we learn a lot about ourselves. You know, a lot of things come up quite clearly in that state. We learn a lot about our hidden desires, as it were, restlessness, set off against it. But one of the things about the seed syllable meditation is that, to the degree that we’re successful and can actually begin to identify with and cultivate this sense of heat, then what grows together with it is an experience of pleasure. To differentiate it from ordinary pleasure, it’s called bliss.
Now in the beginning stages, it may be nothing more than just a little tickling type of sensation. But it’s possible for that to grow to a very consuming state. And later, when the heat is used to cleanse the central channel and open up the heart chakra, that experience—the experience of arousing the subtle level of consciousness—is an extremely peaceful experience when done in this controlled manner. And so one of the great benefits of this type of meditation is that while the mind is experiencing this type of pleasure, it loses its sense of restlessness. It doesn’t have anymore the tendency of being bored and wanting to go somewhere else. Like, if you’re at the movie theater and there’s just a great movie going on, then you find that you’re not distracted by anything because it’s so pleasurable. Well, similarly, this object of meditation is capable of producing pleasure to the extent that it really energizes one’s system, and there’s no longer any problem with concentration because the clarity is there and the distractions are just not there. They’re not powerful enough.
Usually, if we’re meditating before lunch, then we’re thinking about lunch. But if we’re meditating on something which is much more satisfying than lunch, then even if the smells of lunch were to reach us, it wouldn’t distract us because we’d still be concentrating. So I think Lama Yeshe was quite unusual in the sense that he introduced such a potentially advanced technique right, you know, for Westerners right at the beginning. I know when he—I wasn’t there, but when he came to the United States and taught his first course in California, the very first technique he gave was the seed syllable, which actually comes from a very advanced Tantric background. But I think his reasoning was that the Western mind has become very conditioned to looking for and desiring pleasurable experience. We have so much immediate input, for instance. Our life is so filled with so many variety of objects compared to peoples of other cultures, generally speaking. Quiet techniques themselves tend to get overshadowed by these distractions. So to help with that, he introduced techniques which have the ability of finding the inner source of pleasure. Then the mind can become concentrated. This is kind of the rationale behind it. But for us to be successful in it, we have to be really patient. We shouldn’t expect such big things from it.
Okay. So—
“Can I just ask a question?”
Yeah, please.
I can’t say exactly what that is. But in these types of meditations, sometimes what happens is the mind gets a bit more subtle than it normally is. And at that point, we start picking up on movements and energies which we’re normally not so aware of. And it could be that. It could be that your mind was settling into a subtler space and you’re just picking up on these energies. If we had really, you know, a very high degree of perception and skill, we could identify all of those movements of energies with different states of mind. But it’s hard to do it. I mean, it’s impossible for me to do it, but even it’s hard for us to do it in our own body at this point. They are all related with states of mind.
Sometimes, for instance, people get into certain meditative states, and they suddenly remember traumas that happened to them that they’d forgotten earlier in their life. They may come out in dreams, or they may come out in meditation. They may suddenly feel a pain where they’ve never had a pain before, but on checking, that was where they were injured ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, like that. The thing is that our body is this repository of all the various shocks and so forth that we receive in our life. Even things that are not on a conscious level—the body, on this subtle level, holds onto. And so when we move our whole system to a subtler level, we suddenly start picking up on these injuries and insults and traumas and so forth. So it could be anything like that. It could be something like that.
So, to get a perspective on Tantric practice, it’s also good to get an idea of the specific goal of enlightenment and the particular way that the Tantric practice talks about it. And this whole topic is talking about the bodies of a Buddha, or to give it the Sanskrit word, the kayas of an enlightened being. Now sometimes when they talk about the bodies or the kayas of the Buddha, sometimes they talk about two, sometimes they talk about three, and sometimes they talk about four different bodies or kayas. But whether they’re talking about two, three, or four, they’re all talking about the same thing. It’s just how they divide them up is different. So I’ll start talking about two, and then I’ll give you the subdivisions.
Generally speaking, if we take ourselves as an example, we have a body and a mind, speaking very, very generally. And while we can subdivide them, this is kind of the general way we can talk about ourselves. Now, the mind has the quality of knowing and perceiving, and generally speaking, the body is the expression, the medium through which we relate to others, through our physical expression, through our verbal expression, and so forth. Well, in a similar way, when enlightenment is achieved, then again we can talk about two bodies. Now here when we use the word “body” or kaya, we shouldn’t think of a physical body. Body here just means like a collection or a particular form.
So a Buddha, an enlightened being, also can be thought of as having a mind and a body. But unlike ours, both the Buddha’s body and mind are conscious. For us, our mind is conscious and our body is like flesh, just a medium through which the mind expresses itself. But for enlightened beings, the bodies that are taken, the physical bodies that are taken, aren’t physical at all. They are manifestations of the mind. They’re mental emanations, appearing, perhaps, as physical forms.
So they talk about the truth body and the form body. In Sanskrit, truth body is dharmakaya, and the form body is rupakaya. So the truth body, the dharmakaya, corresponds to what we generally think of as mind. And the rupakaya, the form body, corresponds to what we think of as the physical body, as the body itself. So now we can start with the truth body, the dharmakaya. This is the mind itself of an enlightened being. And what it is, it’s our own mind with all of the various coverings and obscurations removed, and all of the various good qualities, positive qualities developed to their fullest potential. So our mind, at the present moment, has the ability to know things, but that ability to know is limited. So when the restrictions are removed from the mind, this knowing quality becomes universal.
So when enlightenment is attained, if you think in terms of dharmakaya, dharmakaya is the accomplishing of our own purposes. In other words, we need to have an enlightened mind, you know, for our own purposes, because such an enlightened mind is beyond any limitation, is beyond suffering and so forth. So having a dharmakaya is an experience of ultimate happiness for us. We can get a sense, kind of a taste of the dharmakaya experience, when we think about the clear light nature of mind. You know, if we can think of going through the dissolution that was described in the meditation, consciously, eventually we reach this clear light mind. Now, we can see that such a mind is unconditioned and is removed from all of the gross input of the senses and so forth. And through a process of cultivation, that mind can be imbued with all of the qualities of spaciousness, wisdom, compassion, and so forth. So that will grow into the dharmakaya experience eventually. It’s not as if we already have a dharmakaya within us, that we just have to wake up, but we have a potential dharmakaya experience. And so we can get down to that level and nurture it and cultivate it, and then it does in fact become dharmakaya. It is completely unrestricted, blissful mind.
But it’s said that even though the dharmakaya is the essential experience of an enlightened being, merely staying in a dharmakaya state is of little or no benefit to other beings. We ourselves know about its existence. We ourselves benefit. The Buddha himself is happy in his dharmakaya state. But the link with other people is not possible because it’s such a subtle state that other beings have no way of relating to it. We can relate to it because it’s happening to us. But there needs to be an expression of this. There needs to be an emanation of this mind to establish, to communicate, a link. Because remember, the whole purpose for achieving enlightenment is not to settle into an experience of blissful dharmakaya, but to be able to communicate and bring benefit to others.
So from this space, this clear space of dharmakaya, come the emanations of rupakaya, the form body. Just as our ordinary body is the means of expressing and communicating with others, so too this rupakaya manifestation is the means of communicating with beings. Now, the rupakaya itself is divided into two subdivisions. In English, they’re often translated—one is called the complete enjoyment body and the other is called emanation body. Complete enjoyment and emanation.
“Do you want the Sanskrit for that? Do you want Sanskrit?”
Yeah.
The complete enjoyment is—that’s with a certain allowance for bad spelling—that’s s-a-m-b-h-o-g-a-k-a-y-a, sambhogakaya. And emanation body is nirmanakaya, n-i-r-m-a-n-a-k-a-y-a, nirmanakaya.
So, now the reason for there being two types of form body, complete enjoyment and nirmanakaya, has to do with the receptivity of other beings. Now, there are potential disciples who have already gained a very advanced spot along the spiritual path to enlightenment. They have gained—they’re known as Ārya beings, a-r-y-a, noble beings. And the reason they’re given this name Ārya or noble is because they have gained a direct insight into reality. They’ve gained a direct insight into emptiness. But they’re not yet fully enlightened. They have to cultivate this experience again and again and again before they can be called fully enlightened beings. But compared to ordinary beings, they’re quite extraordinary, and that’s why they’re given this title. Merely by attaining this state, they’ve already overcome a whole level of intellectually acquired delusions. So they are really a cut above ordinary beings.
Now these beings have a subtlety of perception which allows them to perceive the sambhogakaya, or the complete enjoyment body emanations. Because as will be described later, this complete enjoyment body is a subtler body than the nirmanakaya. Ordinary beings cannot perceive sambhogakaya directly. But these Ārya beings, they can, because of their acquaintance with reality, the penetration of their meditation. So for instance, history is filled with the example of beings who, centuries after the passing away of Śākyamūni Buddha two thousand five hundred years ago, received direct teachings from enlightened beings, like direct teachings from Chenrezig or from Tārā. There are stories of Atisha, for instance, who was in daily contact with Tārā, or Je Tsongkhapa, who was in daily contact with Mañjuśrī. So what’s happening there is that because of the elevation of the person’s mind, he or she can come into direct contact with these various sambhogakaya manifestations of enlightenment. Things that ordinary beings can only see as statues or as paintings, those beings can make direct contact with.
“Are you saying that those things existed?”
Oh, sure. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Once enlightenment is attained, a being doesn’t die or go out of existence.
“So who can we make contact with?”
Yeah. See what you mean. Once enlightenment is attained, all of these so-called bodies are attained simultaneously, and such things as the complete enjoyment body, the sambhogakaya, then continue to exist in areas known as Pure Lands.
“Why does one differ from another?”
They differ because of—again, it’s a matter of the receptivity of various disciples. Certain forms that one person would have a karmic relationship with would not appeal to another person.
I see.
So for instance, let’s say Chenrezig himself, he’s just one form. But among, in that family of Chenrezig, there are hundreds of different forms of Chenrezig, different colors, different shapes, different attributes, each one corresponding to some individual difference among potential disciples. That way also is a very good way for understanding why there’s such a variety of spiritual paths in the world. Because if there was only one, with only one set of iconography and rituals and so forth, it couldn’t possibly appeal to people from such different cultures. Similarly, enlightened mind manifests itself in different ways to appeal to different predispositions. But all of these so-called meditational deities, all of them are in fact synonymous with each other. They’re all completely enlightened, have complete enlightened qualities, but each one is like a specialist. Like they’re all doctors, but one specializes in this and one specializes in that.
“Isn’t it true, John, that Lama Yeshe said that on this level that you’re describing, the differences are there, perceivable by beings, but on the mind level of the Buddha, on the dharmakaya level, there is sameness.”
Yes. Exactly. So the diversity of Buddhas, the apparent diversity is purely from the diversity of perceptions of beings.
Right. Exactly. Exactly. Very good point to make.
That’s also one way that we can relate to having different gurus. If we think that on an ultimate level their mind is the same. But for the sake of different disciples with different tendencies, certain gurus appear in very wrathful forms, other gurus appear in very docile forms, and some very brilliant, and some very controversial, and like that, as different ways of contacting beings. Same way here.
So now, if the enlightened beings—if their only means of expression were these sambhogakaya, complete enjoyment bodies, which are described in very, very subtle terms, then it would be too subtle for the vast majority of people to gain benefit. Only the so-called Ārya beings would benefit, and they’ve already progressed very far. So that’s where we come to the nirmanakaya, or so-called emanation body. Now, these are bodies which, to a greater or lesser extent, can be perceived by ordinary beings, all ordinary beings. Now I say to a greater or lesser extent because among the various nirmanakaya manifestations, there are some that any ordinary being can see, and others that you still have to be fairly highly evolved to see.
Well, generally speaking, there’s no limitation. A Buddha could manifest even as an inanimate object if there is a need and a connection to manifest in such a way, or to manifest as an ordinary looking man, an ordinary looking woman. But the supreme emanation body, the body in which the wheel of Dharma is turned, is the body that Śākyamūni Buddha manifested, this fully ordained monk, and his body having certain extraordinary qualities to it. Now there would be a lot of people who would be in the presence of such a supreme emanation body and wouldn’t notice all of the good qualities. And there’s others who would. It depends on the purity of one’s vision. But there’s other nirmanakaya forms which are pretty much perceivable by everyone.
Okay. So if we look at it this way then, I mean, originally we talked about two bodies, truth body and form body. Now we’re talking about three because form body has been divided into two. It’s also possible to divide truth body into two as well, in which case you get four. But it’s not really important to go into that in too much detail. Staying at the level of three is sufficient for our purposes.
So, when Buddhahood is attained, there is the experience for one’s own purposes, which is the dharmakaya experience, and then the experience for the purposes of others, and these are the various form body manifestations, the complete enjoyment body and the emanation bodies. Because it’s through the means of those bodies that the teachings, the instructions are actually given, that the contact is actually made with others.
So, on the basis of this then, we can make a series of correspondences which perhaps will make the general practice of Tantra a little bit more meaningful to us. And we’ve already talked about six elements of the correspondence, and now we’re going to add another three to it. Earlier we were making a relationship between sleep experience and death experience. And we’re showing correspondences there. Now we can add to that the enlightened experience.
So it goes a little bit like this: In the sleep experience there is the clear light of sleep, dreams, and awakening. The clear light of sleep, dreams, and awakening. Then in death, there is the clear light of death, the bardo or in-between state, and rebirth. And then in terms of the enlightened experience, there is truth body or dharmakaya, complete enjoyment body or sambhogakaya, and emanation body or nirmanakaya. By the way, as a hint, usually when I’m taking notes in classes, I develop a system of abbreviations, DK, SK, and NK for the three bodies or something like that.
Okay. So the clear light of sleep and the clear light of death are similar to each other. And in terms of Tantric transformation, both of these clear light experiences are understood as being the potential for dharmakaya, the wisdom body. So to give an example, remember during the meditation we did this morning, we allowed the mind to grow subtler and subtler and subtler, going through all those various visions. And all of the gross elements of the mind drop off, or they cease functioning, and eventually we’re just left with the clear light nature of the mind. And, of course, just doing it once and doing it without any actual control over the psychic nervous system is a bit of a fake, you know, it’s just a very general rehearsal. But we could understand even from that, that the more we remove our mind from the influence of the gross senses, from gross conceptual thought and so forth, the more we’re left with a mind that has this infinite potential to it, that has this spaciousness and unstructured quality to it. It’s not as if the mind turns off or becomes dull. Rather instead it becomes very vibrant and full of potential.
And so during the practices of highest tantras, not on all levels of tantra, but during the highest levels, then there is a cultivation of this clear light experience, seeing it as dharmakaya, because there’s many points of similarity. And in fact, it’s through cultivating this clear light experience as a rehearsal and then later as an actual practice through the manipulation of the various winds and so forth, causing the inner heat to blaze and purify the central channel, opening up the heart chakra, we actually do come in contact with this very subtle mind of clear light. Instead of just imagining it, we actually come in contact with it. Then this subtle mind of clear light is seen as being an actual dharmakaya, the actual fully enlightened mind of the Buddha. It’s not yet the fully enlightened mind of the Buddha, but it is the actual element which becomes the fully enlightened mind of the Buddha. So it’s understood as being that already. In other words, it’s taking the future result into the present moment. And there’s a great logic behind that, because this is the actual seed which is going to grow into dharmakaya, so we identify it as being dharmakaya. And that speeds up the process.
Now when we actually attain enlightenment, it’s said that all of the bodies of the Buddha are attained simultaneously. But when we practice, we don’t think of them as all coming simultaneously. We see them as evolving one from the other. That’s much more sensible in terms of practice. So remembering a very, very strong bodhicitta motivation, that the whole purpose for achieving enlightenment is to be able to benefit others, there comes the realization that although we may have attained this clear light state, which is like the dharmakaya, if we stay in that state, we’ll not be able to make contact with other beings. The only beings we’ll be able to make contact with are other enlightened beings, and they don’t need our help.
So out of a strong and compassionate motive, the mind then manifests as the complete enjoyment body. Now, the type of complete enjoyment body it manifests as depends on the type of initiation you receive, into which practice of Tantra, which particular form. But we take on the identity of a deity. And the deity is always described as being immaterial, having a body made of light, being very glorious, and so forth. So we can see that this sambhogakaya, or enjoyment body, experience is very similar to the dreams that we have when we sleep. We come out of the clear light of sleep experience. The body gets a bit grosser. It’s no longer as subtle as it was at the clear light experience. It gets a bit grosser, and the mind takes on the various forms of the dream body. It’s not something that someone looking at us sleeping can see, but in our own mind, we feel its presence. And it’s not something solid. It’s in the nature of the mind itself. So it can be thought of as being made of light as an analogy.
And similar too is after the death experience, after the clear light of death experience, the mind is projected into the in-between state, into the bardo, where again it has a very, very subtle type of body. This body that the bardo being has doesn’t have gross physical form. It can move through objects. So again, it’s basically a mental type of body. Similarly, from the clear space of dharmakaya, the mind first manifests in a subtle form. Sometimes in practice, the way that’s done is first the mind manifests merely as a sound or merely as a letter, not as the full deity. A letter which is seen as transparent or just as sound. And the practitioner recognizes this manifestation as being the complete enjoyment body.
Then again, the compassionate motivation comes up today. If I were to remain just in this form, then I can be of benefit to these Ārya beings, these advanced beings. But what about everyone else? So there comes this need then to manifest in even a grosser form, to appear in a way that a relationship can be established between oneself and other beings. So then in the practice, transformations take place until one is actually manifesting in the full body of the particular deity. And this is similar to waking up after dreams, where one