Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Thubten Dondrub walks through the Mahāyāna path to Buddhahood, explaining how bodhisattvas progress through ten levels while maintaining the compassionate intention to benefit all beings. He traces the journey from generating bodhicitta—the cornerstone motivation that distinguishes the Mahāyāna from individual liberation—through the Four Paths, describing how bodhisattvas eventually eliminate all obstacles to omniscience and achieve the three Buddha bodies. Dondrub emphasizes that this journey typically spans three countless great eons, though exceptional cases like the Ever-Weeping Bodhisattva show devotion to the teacher can accelerate progress. The teaching covers why the Mahāyāna sutras were taught by Buddha but preserved secretly, introduces tantra as a faster method for specially qualified practitioners, and critically clarifies that tantra requires the three principles of the path—renunciation, wisdom, and bodhicitta—not just external practices. Dondrub concludes with a forceful defense of moral discipline and the law of cause and effect as non-negotiable foundations, rejecting contemporary distortions of tantra that claim enlightenment practitioners transcend ethics.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15.mp3
UUID: 3bdc6bd0-c214-4f9b-8776-16a336b45657
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: z done but no sheet no info (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~5,121
bodhicitta and their wisdom, the the bodhisattva goes through the ten levels, the second level, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. At the eighth level, a bodhisattva has the same level of wisdom as an arhat. At eighth level, a bodhisattva has completely destroyed all the obstacles to liberation, just as an arhat has. But because an a bodhisattva has got bodhicitta, they don’t fall into the bliss of nirvana. They keep going because they’ve generated the thought, the bodhicitta thought, to benefit all sentient beings.
So then they go into the eighth, ninth, and tenth levels, and in those three pure levels, the bodhisattva, through the power of their bodhicitta, Actually, I didn’t was it on before? This was showing here. I thought it was just a red light. Now it’s green on this one. Oh, I see.
I thought it was a red light the whole time. Oh, because it was getting better. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah.
But it flat. Right. We’re alive, but we’re dying. Getting flat. Okay.
So on the Okay. Maybe it’s because it’s all is there alright? Yeah. So yeah. So then then when all these subtle obstacles to omniscience are eliminated, then after the tenth level, one enters the oh, so sorry.
There is the the path of insight. So that’s on the path of insight, there’s the direct realization of emptiness. One becomes a first level bodhisattva. So then after that, one enters the path of meditation, which is the fourth of the four paths. So, on the path of meditation you go through the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth levels of a bodhisattva.
Then, at the end of that, when all the obstacles to omniscience are eliminated, then one enters the fifth path, which is the path of no more learning, which is the equivalent of being Buddha. That is Buddhahood. One is an enlightened being irreversibly. One has destroyed the obstacles to liberation and omniscience. One has omniscience.
Then one effortlessly, spontaneously, continuously just benefits sentient beings, manifests countless ways to benefit sentient beings. And one has achieved the three bodies of a Buddha, the one of the three bodies, the Rūpakāya, the Sambhogakāya, and the no. The Nirmānakāya, the Sambhogakāya, and the the Dharmakāya, which continuously benefits sentient beings. So this process so now so I’ll stop. I I’m bombarding you with endless things, but oh, okay.
Now I’ll stop here. We’ve we’ve got enlightened. Right? So I’ll stop here for a tea break. Yeah.
Okay. We’ll do just a quick dedication. No questions? Okay. So by following the the Mahāyāna path, and and generating bodhicitta, one is able to generate this power some that empowers one’s wisdom to go beyond just destroying the obstacles to liberation, but also to destroy the obstacles to omniscience.
Thereby one liberates the Buddha nature, the Buddha potential. One achieves complete enlightenment, which is a state of omniscience literally, where one knows everything all the time, the past, present and future, in each moment, of every single thing continuously, which is inconceivable, utterly inconceivable. But this what is meant by the quality of the mind knowing. Mind knows, and if you let it know, it can know everything. It has the potential for omniscience.
So I’m not completely sure on this, so you better check. But from what I remember, if we go back Generating the three principles of the path, we need to do those in order to actually enter the Mahāyāna path. We have to develop renunciation, bodhicitta, and have some degree of wisdom. But especially one has to have generated bodhicitta. That is the is the key to entering the door to the Mahāyāna.
One isn’t a Mahāyānist without bodhicitta. So when we generate bodhicitta, we actually enter the mahayana path. And then, as I said, in order to generate bodhicitta we have to have renunciation, and we have to have some degree of understanding of emptiness as well. So there is no fixed amount of time that it takes to enter the Mahāyāna path. I’ve never read anywhere or heard any lama say that it takes such and such an amount of time to enter the Mahāyāna path, because we haven’t entered it yet.
You know, we’ve been going around during beginningless time, and we haven’t entered it. Right. So it’s completely up to us how long it takes to enter the Mahāyāna path. So we’ve been existing during beginningless time, and we haven’t entered the Mahāyāna path yet, whereas other sentient beings entered it eons ago and became buddhas. But then once one enters the Mahāyāna path, even from then to enlightenment, it takes, as you probably already know according to the Mahāyāna teachings, it takes three countless great eons to achieve enlightenment from the time you generate bod bodhicitta and enter the Mahāyāna path, until the moment, that split moment, when one actually becomes Buddha, that period of time is generally said to be three countless great eons, which is an extremely long time.
I mean, it’s not billions of years. It’s billions and billions and billions of years. I mean, it’s just so long. That’s another inconceivable thing, how long that takes. I’m not really sure on this, so you’d have to check, but I think approximately according to the teachings it says that from the time you generate bodhicitta until you the until you enter the path of insight, so from the path of accumulation and the path of preparation, to go through those two paths takes one countless great eon.
Then from path of insight to the eighth level of a bodhisattva, so the path of insight, you start, you enter the first level, but you become a first level bodhisattva, first level ārya bodhisattva. So from the first level till the eighth level, that takes another countless eons, following the mahayana path. And then from the eighth, ninth, and tenth levels, this takes another one, the third countless eon. All right. Generally speaking.
Generally speaking. But they say there are exceptions, and one famous exception is this great bodhisattva called the Ever-Weeping Bodhisattva, whose story is told in the last section of the Prajñāpāramitā, the Prajñāpāramitā in eight thousand verses. He was the one who was called the Ever-Weeping Bodhisattva because he was always looking for his guru. He kind of found it unbearable that he hadn’t found his teacher, and he was crying all the time trying to meet this person. He went everywhere looking for this person, and eventually he found him and asked for teachings, but the guru wouldn’t teach him.
He said, Go away, I’m busy. He cried and cried and cried and waited and waited and waited. Eventually the guru said, Now I will teach you. On that day, in order to prepare the ground where the teacher would come and teach, the tradition was, you know, you sprinkle it with perfume water and sprinkle flowers all over the ground and everything like that. So there was nothing there, it was in some vast desert or something.
So the Ever-Weeping Bodhisattva cut his arm and sprinkled his blood all over the ground to settle the dust, things like that. So that was the Ever-Weeping Bodhisattva. Because he had this profound devotion to the guru, it’s said that just by doing that kind of thing he traversed the path of accumulation and preparation, which normally takes one countless eon. He did it in several years, just through the power of his devotion to the teacher. So there are exceptions like that.
And it actually can take longer than three countless eons or shorter, but generally that’s what they say. So this is an unbelievably long time. This can be very depressing, of course, thinking like this, but really we shouldn’t be depressed because in one sense there’s no choice. Because even though it takes a very long time, one is on the path to bliss. One is going from happiness to happiness all the time.
One is going away, one is continuously going away from suffering all that time. And on that path of bliss, as bodhisattva, you always benefiting sentient beings. Right? Not perfectly, completely yet, but one still has far, far greater abilities to benefit sentient beings. The only other alternative is to suffer.
Our alternative is to achieve liberation, to become an arhat for one’s own sake, but that’s not an alternative. We don’t want that, do we? We don’t just want to have bliss for ourselves. But this is why, in the Tibetan tradition, with all the lamas, they always emphasize why we try to have the right motivation to talk about the bodhicitta motivation at the very beginning, and to try and have that motivation for everything we do, from the moment we wake up to try and generate that thought, every time we meditate to start out with that motivation, every time we listen to the teachings to try and have that motivation. Of course we don’t have that motivation, but by trying to generate it, it creates the imprints that make it possible for that motivation to become real in the future, so that we can actually enter the path that benefits not only ourselves but all sentient beings, and therefore fulfill our complete potential.
So anyway, this path that I’ve been talking about is called the sūtra path. It’s explained in the Mahāyāna sutras. There are the Hīnayāna sutras that explain the path to individual liberation, And then there are the Mahāyāna sutras that explain the path to omniscience, to Buddhahood. These are the exoteric teachings that the Buddha gave on this earth. Of course, from the Hīnayāna point of view, the Mahāyāna teachings aren’t the teachings of the Buddha, right?
There’s only the Hīnayāna path. That was what was literally taught by the Buddha. But from the Mahāyāna point of view, this is not true. At the same time that the Buddha was teaching the Hīnayāna path for those people who could only follow that path, The Buddha was also teaching at the very same time the Mahāyāna Sutras. He taught them mainly to other bodhisattvas, not to so many human beings.
Because if you read the Heart Sūtra, which is the condensation of all the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras, then it mentions that this was given at Vulture’s Peak Mountain. So if you go there, and you can go there, there’s a great pilgrimage to go, it’s just outside of Bodh Gaya, about one or two hours away by bus from Bodh Gaya where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. So if you go to Vulture’s Peak Mountain, there’s no way a countless mass of Buddhas and bodhisattvas could fit on it. It’s very small, where the Buddha actually sat and taught the Prajñāpāramitā. This is because the people he was teaching weren’t in these kind of bodies occupying a whole lot of space on that mountain.
They were floating around in space or something, probably just in different dimensions or something. But he did teach. He taught to some human beings who were able to hear, but to other kinds of beings. Historically, this and then the Mahāyāna teachings actually died out very quickly on this earth and weren’t revived until many hundreds of years later after the Buddha’s death, particularly by Nāgārjuna, who brought them back into this world. So from the point of view of many Hinayanas, Theravadans and Buddhist scholars, they say that the Mahāyāna sutras were just written by human beings.
It’s just a historical evolution, but this is not our view, that the Mahāyāna teachings, sutras, were taught by the Buddha, definitely, and were preserved by all sorts of special beings. And then when the karma changed, they were reintroduced back into the world. If you are familiar with the Lama Chöpa merit field, why it’s set up like that. On the right hand side up there at the top is Mañjuśrī surrounded by all the Indian bodhisattvas. In front of him directly is Nāgārjuna, because Nāgārjuna is particularly associated with the Sorry, that’s the right On the left hand side is Mañjuśrī.
On the left of Tsongkhapa is Mañjuśrī, and directly in front of him is Nāgārjuna, because he introduced the Mahāyāna Sutras, especially the wisdom sutras, back into the earth. And on Tsongkhapa’s right, up the top, in that top circle, yeah, you see, is Maitreya Buddha, because it was Maitreya Buddha who taught Asaṇga, many of the other Mahāyāna sutras. These two great masters, Nāgārjuna and Asaṇga, kind of reestablished the Mahāyāna teachings historically in the world. But they came from the Buddha. That’s what this merit field is kind of indicating.
Why those rainbow lights is because it means it’s all an emanation of the Buddha, because Je Tsongkhapa is also an emanation of the Buddha. Anyway, the sūtra teachings are the general teachings that the Buddha taught. But also, at the same time, it is believed that very secretly, some cases, the Buddha manifested Śākyamūni Buddha manifested as vajradhara, the tantric aspect of the Buddha, and taught the tantras to special people, a very unique group of people who were able to understand these teachings. These teachings were kept very secret, and historically, of course, they again only became kind of emerged and became well known quite late in the history of Buddhism around what? Something around the My Buddhist history is not very good, but something around the seventh century, eighth century like that, Tantric Buddhism emerged historically.
But from the tantric point of view, these teachings were taught by the Buddha. There’s no doubt of that. Again, from an ordinary Western or not just Western, but an academic point of view, they say that the Buddhist tantra is something that was influenced by the Hindu tantras. Again, this is just a very worldly view, that Buddhism is just like a philosophy made up by people, and they think, Oh, well, let’s have this, and let’s hell realms, and let’s have this, and then it developed, first we’ll have a Hīnayāna path, and let’s have a Mahāyāna path, and let’s have a Tantra path. Very nice package.
But from within the Dharma, this is not the view. This all was taught by the Buddha at the very same time when the Buddha was here. Because the Buddha is an inconceivable being, he can teach many different things to many different people at the same time with a complete understanding of what’s happening and why he’s doing it. Right? So the sūtra, the tantras, were taught at the same time as the Hīnayāna teachings and the Mahāyāna teachings.
And in fact, it’s important to understand that the tantric teachings are part of the Mahāyāna. They are not a separate vehicle. They are an integral part of the Mahāyāna teachings. The Mahāyāna teachings have two aspects. There is the exoteric aspect of the sutras, the general Mahāyāna, which is also called the Pāramitāyāna, because it emphasizes the practice of the six Paramitas, the six perfections.
Because what a bodhisattva does is to practice the six perfections. The way to help generate bodhicitta and the way you practice bodhicitta is through the six perfections: generosity, morality, patience, perseverance, concentration, and wisdom. Wisdom, right? And a bodhisattva develops the perfection of wisdom, the prajnaparamita. And a bodhisattva practices these things with with the Mahāyāna motivation, the bodhicitta motivation.
But this is the slow path that takes through countless great eons. So for very special people whose compassion was much stronger, not because they were more cowardly and couldn’t wait, too impatient, but because they couldn’t bear the thought of having to take so long because sentient beings would suffer during that time for these very special people the Buddha taught, the tantras. He didn’t borrow it from Hinduism at all. An enlightened being isn’t influenced by other beings. If you say the tantras were somehow influenced by some other thing, you’re saying Buddhism you know, the Buddha isn’t enlightened.
An enlightened being can’t learn anything from anybody else. Right? Impossible. The Buddha enlightened being knows everything all the time. So the Buddha taught the tantras for unique people, this group of people.
So the tantras are called it is called the Tantrayāna or the vajrayana or what is it called? It’s the path of secret mantra. And it was kept secret because this path, if one is actually practicing it, these teachings in many ways, at least externally, can look and sound quite different from the traditional teachings and can be quite shocking for people, and because of not understanding their meaning. So they were kept secret for that reason, and they were also kept secret because secret in the sense of limited to people that were suitable to practice them. Not secret because the Buddha wanted to, you know, keep them away from people, that he didn’t have compassion.
He didn’t want people to practice them, but only secret in the sense that not everybody is suitable to practice them, is ready to practice the tantra. And so it would be harmful to teach it for those not ready, it was kept secret, because it is dangerous. Because it’s a fast path, it can be dangerous for the mind. So it is said that by following the tantric teachings, one can achieve enlightenment in sixteen lifetimes, or seven lifetimes, or even in one lifetime. Even in three years from practicing these teachings, can achieve enlightenment.
But we shouldn’t take this too literally these days, because although the tantra is the fast path, it still is very difficult, One has to be prepared for it. We have to accept that these are the degenerate times. These are the degenerating times. Although we are very fortunate people, we have the good karma to have a human rebirth where we’ve met the Dharma and faith in it and have met teachers and so on. So we have a precious human rebirth which needs a great deal of good karma.
And especially if we have met or are meeting the tantric teachings, have the opportunity to do that and have faith in it, develop faith in it, still we don’t have the good karma that things in the past had. For example, when the Buddha appeared on this earth and he spoke, he taught. Like when the Buddha first taught the four noble truths to his first five disciples, they realized they became an arhat straight away just by hearing those words that there is suffering, there is the cause. Well, it was a bit longer than that, but it was much longer. The sūtra of the four noble truths is only a couple of pages long.
When those disciples heard those words spoken directly by the Buddha, one time at the end of that sūtra they were arhats. Most of us now I don’t want to be rude. When you go out of this room, won’t even remember what I said. Not that I’m a Buddha, but even if we heard a Buddha, we don’t remember. Even we hear great teachers.
Not only does it not make such an impact on our mind, we can’t even remember it. We go out and say, oh, that was a great teaching. What was it about? Well, what was a great teaching anyway? Because our minds are much more deluded than in the beings in the past, even though we have good karma.
Alright? So tantra is difficult to practice. So now this tantra. One thing I should say at the very beginning is that tantra really isn’t any, essentially, if one really understands it, different. It is Mahāyāna.
So what is different between tantra and the general sūtra Mahāyāna is the technique rather than motivation and so on. By itself, tantra won’t get you anywhere. It is just a technique, and if you have the technique without the right understanding motivation, it won’t work. It will certainly bring some experiences, but those experiences won’t bring you to enlightenment. They could actually bring you in the very opposite direction.
And this is what happens. Some people practice tantra or think they’re practicing tantra, but because they don’t have the right understanding, they’re just doing the external things without the inner understanding. So they’re not practicing tantra at all. They’re not even practicing Buddhism. They’re just practicing a cause for suffering.
And they may gain some insights, like some concentration and some bliss and even clairvoyant powers from doing it, and think, Oh, I’m gaining tantric realizations, but you’re not. This is the problem. Just because you’re practicing looks like you’re practicing tantra because you’ve got these things and you’ve done initiations and this and that doesn’t mean you actually are. And even if you get bliss and all these things, it doesn’t mean tantra is working at all. Because if you concentrate on anything, if you concentrate on visualizing a spark plug, you will develop single pointed concentration and bliss.
Yeah. Because that’s how the mind works. So if you do tantric things continuously, certain things will happen to your mind, but that doesn’t mean you’re practicing Dharma and practicing real tantra. As my teacher points out, and there are so many people doing this kind of stuff now and being taught by people like that. Because what my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, points out Lama Zopa Rinpoche is a genuine, accomplished, great tantric yogi of the very first order.
What makes tantra special is the three principles of the path, renunciation, wisdom, and bodhicitta. That is what makes tantra special, and that’s what makes tantra tantra. If you’re doing tantra without renunciation, wisdom, and bodhicitta, it is not tantra. It is not even Buddhism. That is very important to remember, because many people now teach that you don’t need, if you’re practicing tantra, you don’t need renunciation, because tantra is so special that you go beyond all these ordinary things.
And this is utter garbage, utter garbage, and complete corruption of the Buddha’s teachings, by people who have not got a clue about what they’re talking about. And this I don’t care who tells you this. If they’re Tibetans, if they’re Tibetan lamas, they’re Tibetan lamas, they’ve got brocade thrones and fancy hats. If they say that, they are talking nonsense. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
At very, very high levels of tantra, you can do all sorts of interesting things, but that’s when you’ve already well advanced on the path. In order to enter tantra, to become a tantric practitioner, you have to very, very carefully observe the three principles of the path, and particularly morality. One of the integral parts of renunciation is practicing morality, pure morality. And there are people going around saying, You don’t need this if you’re a tantric practitioner. If you’re maybe an eighth level bodhisattva, you maybe don’t need to it, because an eighth bodhisattva can’t harm sentient beings anyway, even if they wanted to.
And they can do all sorts of conventionally outrageous things, but their mind is in a state of utter, utter purity. But before that and people who are going around saying these things aren’t there at that level at all. In Atisha’s text, the Lamp Illuminating the Path to enlightenment, which is the basis of the lam rim teachings, and which is designed to encourage people to practice tantra. Also in Lama Tsongkhapa’s text, the Lamrim Chenmo, the great graduated path to enlightenment, it is written from the perspective of encouraging us to enter the Mahāyāna path in order to practice tantra.
Right? So anyway, in Atisha’s text, if you can read this, it’s translated into English, the root text, and there are commentaries on it in English. Towards the end it says that the perfect, the most qualified tantric practitioner is a fully qualified monk. That is the best tantric practitioner. That was spoken by Atisha, who was a great tantric bodhisattva yogi, who knew what he was talking about, that you have to observe morality.
In the teachings where it says that by practicing tantra, you can achieve enlightenment in sixteen lifetimes, it explains that you can achieve enlightenment having taken the tantric initiations from a qualified tantric master. From then, you definitely achieve enlightenment in sixteen lifetimes without practicing tantra actively. You don’t even have to practice it. You don’t have to do one sadhana, ring your bell once, meditate once, but you will get enlightened if, if, you keep your vows purely. Right?
By just observing the tantric vows purely without any mistake for sixteen lifetimes. Simple, right? You will achieve enlightenment without meditating on tantra. This is indicating the power of the vowels, how essential they are. Somewhere it says something about we’re supposed to observe our vows like protecting our eyeballs, Like when something comes to our eye, we instantly blink, you know, just because it’s so tender and precious.
So that’s how we’re supposed to observe our vows. And I would like point out, for those people who know anything about the tantric vows, I can’t talk about them because there are people here who haven’t taken tantra, but when you take the tantric vows, one aspect of taking the tantric vows is that you observe, you vow to keep the bodhisattva vows, and you vow to keep the pratimoksha vows. So if you break the pratimoksha vows you’re breaking your tantric vows. If you break the bodhisattva vows you break the tantric vows. And the word for tantric vows, there is a special word for these vows.
The Tibetan word, I don’t know yeah, the Sanskrit word is samaya. I don’t know literally what this means. I should know after all these years, but I can’t remember what samaya means literally in Sanskrit. But this word was translated by the Tibetans into the word dam tsik, dam tsik. So my teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, has explained that the etymology of this word dam tsik means dam means holy and tsik means burn.
So if you observe your samayas, dam tsik, you become holy. If you don’t observe them, tsik, you burn. And the point is, again, to try and emphasize this, because there’s so much garbage being spoken about tantra, so much utter garbage, that as I try to point out, what we’re trying to achieve is wisdom and what a bodhisattva is trying to do. Know, loving kindness and compassion are wonderful, wonderful things which we all definitely should develop. But loving kindness and compassion doesn’t stop suffering.
It doesn’t eliminate the causes of suffering. This is something we should understand. Right? The only thing that actually stops suffering and the causes of suffering is the wisdom that eliminates ignorance. So a bodhisattva is a being who is completely pervaded by the purest, most powerful love and compassion possible.
But it’s not that as such that benefits sentient beings. The bodhisattva doesn’t go around oozing love and compassion on others, and they become enlightened as such. Right? It’s not their love and compassion. It’s their wisdom.
Yeah. What a bodhisattva is trying to bring to other people eventually, finally, is wisdom. Not that not that a bodhisattva or a Buddha can give wisdom, but to create the causes and conditions for people to develop their inner wisdom. If you read the bodhisattva, the last chapter or the ninth chapter, sorry, on wisdom, this very famous chapter of this text on wisdom. It says, everything else that the Buddha taught was for this purpose, to develop wisdom.
Everything else is a skillful means in order to experience wisdom. This is the point of the Buddha’s teaching. So it is also the point of tantra. It is the fastest way to develop wisdom. It is also a fast way of generating and increasing one’s compassion in bodhicitta as well, but especially it is the fast way to develop wisdom.
But to practice it, one already needs some degree of wisdom and renunciation and bodhicitta. Right? So if you know anything about this tradition, the Gelugpa tradition, the great bodhisattva and tantric yogi who was an enlightened being, Lama Tsongkhapa, said that the easiest way to understand wisdom, generally speaking, is through dependent arising. If you understand dependent arising, the teachings on dependent arising, this is the easiest way to understand emptiness. How everything lacks true existence, inherent existence, existence from its own side, under its own power, appearing to be independently existing.
Right? So what is dependent arising? Dependent arising says there are three aspects of dependent arising. Is things arise in dependence on causes and conditions, parts, and the labelling mind. Right?
These three things. What was the first one? Things depend on causes and conditions. This is one integral major aspect of understanding dependent arising. When you understand dependent arising, one understands emptiness.
Repeat this: things depend on causes and conditions. And what is the law of cause and effect? It’s talking about causes and conditions. The law of cause and effect is an integral part of dependent arising. If one doesn’t understand the law of cause and effect and observe it, there is utterly no way to develop wisdom.
Right? And the law of cause and effect, the practice of that is the practice of morality in Buddhist tradition. Right? Because certain causes produce certain effects just naturally. Right?
So if you understand that, that is an understanding of emptiness. If you understand emptiness, you understand the law of cause and effect. These two things go together. Lama Tsongkhapa, when he manifested realizing emptiness, said, actually emptiness is not such a big deal. Oh, he never said it this way, but gross version of it.
Lama Tsongkhapa said, emptiness understanding it is not such a big deal. What is truly amazing is dependent arising. Although things are empty, they appear and function. Isn’t this related to the law of cause and effect? Absolutely.
So how can anyone, no matter what their title is, go around saying that you don’t have to observe the law of cause and effect if you practice tantra? It is garbage. These people haven’t got the slightest insight into the Buddha’s teachings. When you’ve realized emptiness, then it’s different. But then you can’t create negative karma anyway.
Of course, there are tantric yogis who go around doing very strange things, but they are very high level. And there are other tantric yogis who go around doing strange things, and they’re just phonies. They’re just confused people who think they’re tantric yogis but who are just very misguided people.