Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Thubten Dondrub opens this 45-minute teaching with a foundational breath meditation, then establishes the difference between sūtra and tantric practice. He explains that sūtra develops bodhicitta and wisdom separately, while tantra unifies them simultaneously, making it the faster path to enlightenment. He introduces the three levels of mind in tantra—gross, subtle, and very subtle clear light—showing why tantra alone can access the primordial mind that carries enlightenment from life to life. He outlines the four levels of tantra, focusing on Kriyā tantra, where practitioners visualize external deities like Chenrezig, Mañjuśrī, and Tārā as pure emanations of enlightened qualities. He emphasizes the power of mantra recitation and deity visualization, comparing enlightened images to how advertising images affect the uncontrolled mind. Crucially, he connects sūtra and tantra practice, stressing that morality and concentration are essential foundations—attachment is the main obstacle—and that tantric practice without ethical discipline is impossible. In highest yoga tantra, the goal becomes identifying as a deity oneself while perceiving all phenomena as pure and perfect, which Lama Yeshe taught Western practitioners as an antidote to deeply ingrained self-doubt and limited self-view.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18.mp3
UUID: a3b3ae13-a8af-42ee-982a-b778e8f5b674
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: done but no sheet no info (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~4,606
So maybe we’ll just start with just a short breathing meditation just to focus our our minds. So again, try and sit comfortably in the the Vairocana posture, placing main emphasis on keeping the back straight but relaxed, comfortable. Just be aware of the body breathing just naturally. And focus on specifically on the the breath, the sensation it causes at the nostrils as it comes in and goes out. So with this more calm, clear mind, use that to try to imagine Śākyamūni Buddha appearing in space in front of oneself as one’s object of refuge, source of inspiration, and guidance, appearing on a very beautiful throne, lotus sun and moon seat with a body of transparent light, oneself surrounded by all the different beings of the six realms, and generate the thought that, in order to perfectly repay the kindness of all mother sentient beings, then I need to develop my mind to its highest extent, become completely enlightened, and to try to do this as effectively, as quickly as possible.
Therefore I’ll take refuge in the Buddha and listen to these teachings in order to consider their usefulness and therefore maybe adopt them in practice for the benefit of all sentient beings. So one of the reasons it takes so long to achieve enlightenment, according to the following just the sūtra path, is that one has to generate this mind of bodhicitta, this quality of bodhicitta in the mind, and also wisdom, these two things. Although the idea is to develop both and to bring them together, they talk about bodhicitta and wisdom being the two wings that enable us to fly to enlightenment. But in the sūtra method, these two qualities are developed separately. They remain somehow separate, and only at the very end are they somehow unified into one mind, the mind of enlightenment.
Whereas why tantra is said to be the fast path is because it is a way of generating, combining bodhicitta and wisdom in one consciousness and developing them simultaneously. So this is one of the reasons why it is said to be the fast path. Especially why it is the fast path is because both in following the Hīnayāna path to liberation and also following Mahāyāna path to enlightenment, basically what we’re working with we’re always working with our mind, right? But the mind that we’re working with on the ordinary sūtra, the Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna sūtra paths, is the gross mind, the ordinary mind of this life, the gross mind. So one of the things that really distinguishes tantra from the Mahāyāna teachings and the Hīnayāna teachings is this much more subtle understanding of the mind and the basis of the mind.
Because in the sūtra teachings it only talks about the mind in a very, very general way, Whereas in the tantras it explains that there are three levels of consciousness or mind. There is the gross mind that exists in this life, and that gross mind, of course, to some extent is dependent on the body of this life, and it works through the nervous system and brain of this life. So it’s dependent to some extent. But the real basis of this gross mind, of this life, is a more subtle mind. And this subtle mind itself is dependent on an even more subtle level of mind called, naturally enough, the very subtle mind.
Or a more technical term it has is the mind of clear light, the fundamental mind of clear light. So this is the most subtle level of mind. It is this mind that according to tantra, and is not explained in any other system, it is this mind which goes from life to life. Or another maybe a better way of putting it, it is this mind that creates various lives. That it is the functioning of this mind that generates different life experiences, different types of life.
Maybe that’s not a very good way of putting it anyway. Maybe she should have left it the ordinary way. So there is this very subtle mind that proceeds from life to life. There is this continuity of this primordial mind of clear light, primordial in the sense that it’s beginningless, right, and it’s endless, and it is this mind that contains contains contains, Has I know that it’s our language. We just gotta be careful.
Anyway, possesses for want of a better word, possesses the Buddha nature. What is the Buddha nature, by the way? Do you know what the Buddha nature actually is? Actually, all the Buddha nature is is just the emptiness nature of the mind. Because the mind is fundamentally empty of true existence, enlightenment is possible.
That’s basically what the Buddha nature is. So it’s just the actual nature of the mind being empty. Because it is empty of true existence, it is enlightenment is possible. So anyway, it is Of course, the gross mind is empty of true existence as well. The subtle mind is empty of Everything is empty of true existence.
But it’s especially this very subtle mind that is empty of true existence, and it is this mind that goes from life to life that is indestructible. It is this that develops into the enlightened mind. It is this which becomes enlightened. Your gross mind doesn’t become enlightened. The subtle mind doesn’t achieve enlightenment.
It is the very, very subtle mind, the primordial mind of clear light. So this mind isn’t in the practices of the sūtra path, one is not able to work with this mind. It is always there. It’s always there, but it is not accessible in the ordinary practices of the sūtra. It is only something accessible in tantra.
I don’t want to go into lots of these partly because I don’t know, but anyway, you can spend hours talking about this stuff and you can read it in books. But there are four levels of tantra, and there’s various explanations why they are. I won’t go into them. But there is what is called the lowest level of tantra. That’s not a nice term.
First level of tantra sounds insulting. The first level of tantra is called Kriyā tantra. Then there is what is called Caryā tantra. The third level is Yoga Tantra. And then the highest level of Tantra is called the highest or in English we call it the highest yoga Tantra, or Maha Anuttarayoga Tantra.
The past there was a very special way of practicing all these four, from the first leading to the highest level. These days, from my experience, this is not operating anymore, and that the tantras that are taught these days, that if you take tantric initiations these days, the initiations that one receives are either from Kriyā tantra or highest yoga tantra. There’s very few that are taught or given from these two middle ones, and very rarely are any commentaries and explanations given of them anymore. Why this is, I don’t know. But that’s how it is functioning these days.
So it is said that in Kriyā tantra So for example, some of you are familiar with a Thousand Arm Chenrezig or Four Arm Chenrezig here. This is a Kriyā Tantra deity. So the deities of course are Buddhas. What a deity is is an emanation of the Buddha. It’s a Buddha mind manifesting.
And then there is like Mañjuśrī Mañjuśrī. At the back there, Mañjuśrī and Tārā, green Tārā, white Tārā. Yeah. Right. So these are all Kriyā tantra deities, Thousand Arm
Chenrezig is a a Kriyā tantra deity. vajrapani is another one. Oh, there’s many, many. So these are all Kriyatantra deities. So according to this system, it is also possible to achieve enlightenment in one lifetime.
But the interesting thing about this is that this one lifetime is an extremely long life, because in the Kriyā tantra there are practices where you extend your life, and you can extend it eventually to thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and then not just to have a long life, but so in order to practice and achieve enlightenment. But this system is rarely from my understanding limited knowledge, this system is rarely used anymore. The main thing is to practice highest yoga tantra. This is the main thing that is emphasized these days, and people are introduced to this very quickly now. You can practically just stumble off the street, hardly knowing anything about Buddhism, and be given the highest yoga tantra initiation.
This is what happens. But most of us are really not prepared for it and understand what we’re doing, so it’s good if you want to do these things to know more about it, what you’re really getting involved in, in order to make it really worthwhile and meaningful. Maybe this could be a course. Yeah. So So just very briefly, in Kriyā Tantra you visualize deities outside yourself, deities Buddhas external.
So it’s a way of making the Buddhas more real for oneself. You visualize them and visualize being purified by them and receiving blessings from them and thinking like each deity symbolizes various aspects of the enlightened mind, such as Chenrezig or Avalokiteśvara embodying the compassion of the Buddhas, Mañjuśrī embodying the wisdom of the Buddhas, and Tārā embodies the enlightened activity of the Buddhas, vajrapani embodies the power of the Buddhas, so there are qualities like that. So it’s a way of more directly relating to enlightened energy and connecting with it and being inspired by it. And also it’s a way of developing concentration by concentrating on the deity and concentrating on the mantra, and through that one also can gain various powers as well. And one thing that Lama Yeshe used to explain about reciting mantras is that he used to say that actually within us we have all the qualities of enlightenment already.
We have love, compassion, wisdom. The potential is there, and these exist in a sense as vibrations of the mind, one way of thinking it, energies of the mind which have their own vibration. So when you recite a mantra, it itself has a vibration, which causes that inner vibration to start vibrating more, just like with a tuning fork. So when you hit a tuning fork, then anything with that vibration in the room will start vibrating. Is that right?
Yes. Yes. Right, right. So it’s something like that. I mean, that’s one way, a very rough way of understanding how one purpose and benefit of mantras is that you recite the mantra, but it’s helping to develop that quality within oneself that’s already there.
Right? But the point is, in a way, to understand the connection, relationship between sūtra and tantra, if you do the meditations, the sūtra meditations on compassion, if you’ve already trained in those and you’ve developed some compassion, then when you visualize the deity that symbolizes compassion and recite the mantra, it’s much more powerful. Right? But if you don’t have that, having worked on the sūtra practice of generating compassion, then just visualizing Chenrezig as the Buddha of compassion and reciting the mantra won’t have so much power, effect. Right?
So the more we combine these two things, the more power, the more effective it is. The two things enhance each other. Just reciting by itself or or visualizing Chenrezig by itself without trying to generate compassion won’t generate. It it will have some effect because somehow these mantras visualizations have some something there. They don’t exist from their own side, but there is I don’t know how to express it exactly, but they have some quality just like nothing exists from its own side, but fire does burn.
It has some quality. Right? And ice is cold, so mantras have some power. It doesn’t inherently exist, but there’s something there. I don’t know how to explain this, but it’s there.
But it doesn’t inherently exist. But from our side we work on also the sūtra practice of meditating on compassion and also work with these tantric practices, then it becomes something very powerful, the two reinforce each other. But tantra by itself is something a little bit dead. It certainly, as I said before, it really depends on faith. You really have to have faith in it it to work.
And of course it depends on concentration. Even at this level of practicing Kriyā tantra, it will have more effect depending on the level of one’s concentration. The more concentration, the more you’re able to visualize the deity. And then it kind of really goes into your mind. It really has some effect.
And if you can concentrate on the mantra at the same time, it has some power. Because, as I was saying was it yesterday, talking about attachment? I I can’t remember what I said yesterday. I I talked many places, can’t remember where I say things. But, like, in our world, we are constantly bombarded by all sorts of images, right, which have a great deal of power for our uncontrolled minds.
Most of these images are related to desire. Yeah. They they are they are generated by people wanting us to desire these things. And a lot of thought and desire energy goes into making these images very desirable in one way or another. And since a tin of paint is not very desirable, they stick some naked lady on top of the tin of paint to make it desirable for the men.
I don’t if they have naked men on tins of paint these days, but it will come for sure. So these images have a lot of effect on our mind, uncontrollably, these deluded images. So these deities are pure images. These are enlightened advertising. Right?
These are coming. These are creations of enlightened mind. And every aspect about them, You don’t have to understand what went into an advertising campaign, you just see it and it has some effect, even if you don’t want it to have an effect. Right? There is some of not always, but some of them.
Or in the cookbooks with the food, the way food is photographed in cookbooks is just amazing. No real food ever looks like that. But it’s just so totally amazing the way they get it to look. Yeah. Just the most boring thing, you know, it is made just so succulent, and you just wanna eat the piece of paper straight away.
You know? Oh, okay. I got off my subject. So so there there is that power there, which is a deluded power, where so you don’t have to understand that. It just works on our deluded mind, whereas these images of the Buddhas, the deities, works on our on our wisdom mind.
Yeah. It really touches our mind. We don’t have to understand what these images mean. They work. They are created by enlightened minds.
It doesn’t really matter whether it is a being called, who exists called, you know, having this shape of Chenrezig and Mañjuśrī or not, but these forms were thought up, in a sense, by the Buddhas. They weren’t thought up by human beings, they’re creations of an enlightened mind. And they enlighten us just like these deluded images just delude us. So enlightened images do enlighten us. Yeah.
So they have some power just like that, just like fire has power. If you stick your hand in the fire, it will burn you whether you want it or not. If you look at a Buddha image, it will enlighten you whether you want to or not. It says in the teachings, even if you look at the image of a Buddha with an angry mind not completely enlightened, I didn’t mean that. Even if you look at a Buddha image with an angry mind, it benefits you.
You create good karma. Of course, if you look at an enlightened image with faith, there’s more. It has more effect. And of course, if you understand the meaning of the images, it has more power. But you don’t have to understand it for it to have some effect.
You know, there is the story in the teachings of was it Ānanda? I think it was Ānanda who was the Buddha’s attendant, and the karma he created to be the Buddha’s attendant occurred in many previous lives, maybe think even eons ago, when he was a monk in another time, and he was in a broken down monastery repairing his shoes late at night nice story, these details repairing his shoes at night in this broken down monastery, and there was a painting of the Buddha on the wall, of of a previous Buddha, not Śākyamūni Buddha, but another Buddha on the wall. And he looked up and saw that and thought, how beautiful how beautiful to be able to see such a being. And that created the cause to be the Śākyamūni Buddha’s attendant. That’s karma.
Anyway, and that’s the power of images. So maybe that’s hard to believe, but one thing I find interesting is that I’ve been a monk twenty years, and I’ve somehow ended up wandering all over the place meeting different people and teaching. Many people make the point they feel that one of the things that brought them to Buddhism was that at some point, when they were young, either in their own house or in their auntie’s house or granny’s house, there was a statue or a picture of the Buddha. I’ve heard so many people who’ve had this experience. They didn’t know who it was.
They were so nice to look at. Granny used to have a Buddha on the didn’t know what it was, but it was Buddha, but it was on the mantelpiece, and they used to stare up and look at it. Granny’s husband had been a sailor who’d gone China or India and bought it, they’d brought it back, stuck it on the mantelpiece as a decoration, and they just used to look at it, and it stuck in the mind. Many people have or not, you know, not a vast quantities, but there there are a number of people who have this experience. It has some power, definitely.
These images are very powerful because they come from the Buddha. So the more we can actually concentrate on them, the more power, more effect. Right? Oh, that’s obvious. And just to go back to the relationship between sūtra and tantra and practicing morality, how do you develop concentration?
What what is the main obstacle to concentration is attachment. That is the single biggest obstacle to developing a con single pointed concentration. And in relation to that, just when we sit and breathe and we can’t focus on that much, there’s so many things going on that prevent us having single pointed concentration on our breath. What causes that? That’s all our disturbing thoughts that arise from attachment, from our previous negative karma.
While we follow or why we don’t observe the law of cause and effect, we follow our delusions, create negative karma, and just agitate our mind. No way to concentrate. So there’s no way you can even practice Kriyā tantra while you’re not observing morality, let alone highest yoga tantra. Yeah. It is just so obvious, the relationship.
It is so obvious that you cannot ignore the law of cause and effect effect in practicing tantra until you’re so high. Right? And anyway actually, at any point, you can’t ignore the law of cause and effect. Even though tantric yogis who do outrageous things, their mind is in a completely different state, completely different. When you can see the emptiness of things, then but we we don’t see that.
Right? We don’t experience that. So I forgot to make make this quotation, but just to remind the point that Nāgārjuna Nāgārjuna said Nāgārjuna was no idiot. Right? Excuse me.
Nāgārjuna was the great being. He was the person who reintroduced the Mahāyāna into the world. It is Nāgārjuna who understood emptiness. Nāgārjuna was also a great tantric yogi. Nāgārjuna said, Until one has the highest right view, for an ordinary person, the ordinary person’s right view is the law of cause and effect.
This is what Nāgārjuna said. He said it more elegantly than that, but that’s basically what he said. I can’t remember the exact quotation. I think it’s either in the Ratnāvali or the letter to a friend, one of those texts of Nāgārjuna. That’s what he said.
Until you have the view of emptiness, the best right view, the right view, is the law of cause and effect. So in highest yoga tantra, what we’re trying to do, the purpose of that, is not only to visualize deities outside, but for oneself to become a deity, to imagine that oneself is a deity, and that everything that one is perceiving is pure, is a pure land. Right? Everything you see, every person you see is a deity. Every physical thing you see is utterly pure, is actually part of a celestial mansion.
Everything is pure and perfect. This is one of the basic aspects of highest yoga tantra, and this comes from the view of tantra, especially as it’s taught in highest yoga tantra, that from a sūtra point of view the cause of our suffering is ignorance. That is the root cause of suffering. So this is true, of course, but in tantra it’s expressed in another way. They argue well, it’s they, I shouldn’t put it that way.
In tantra, the view is that the cause of our suffering is our impure appearances, having an impure view of ourselves and an impure view of all phenomena. So these two things are not contradictory, because why we have this impure view is because of our ignorance. But from a tantric point of view, it’s having this impure view that it’s the real cause of suffering, our limitation, that blinds us and limits us. And it’s by changing that that we can achieve enlightenment quickly. So what we have to do is rather than having holding on to this impure view that I am a limited, confused, deluded person, and therefore I act in a deluded, confused, limited way, and so on, see everyone else in that same way, see everything as suffering and miserable and limited, one tries to hold the view right now that I am a Buddha right now, and everything is pure and perfect.
So this sounds like just craziness, like, you know, I’m, you know, Napoleon or I am Christ. But it has that that view has to be based on an understanding of renunciation, wisdom, and bodhicitta, that everything is empty. If one is thinking things are truly existing, then it’s diff you can’t have this view. One has to have to be able to have some understanding of emptiness in order to have to to generate this view, this pure view. So although for us it’s really very difficult to do this, almost impossible, this is one of the reasons why the Lamas teach tantra.
I think it’s particularly why Lama Yeshe, who was one of the first great Lamas to come to the West and teach tantra, because many Tibetan Lamas don’t teach it. Lama Yeshe, when he came to the West, was very open in teaching tantra, and he was criticized a great deal in the early days by other Tibetan lamas for making tantra very easily available to Westerners. But he did out of his great compassion and wisdom. One of the main reasons he did that, I think, is because if you read his teachings, or if you heard them, I had the good fortune to hear some of them. I think in all the years that Rinpoche Lama Yeshe was teaching in the West, which wasn’t long enough unfortunately, but really he only taught one thing, I think, most of the time.
There’s one major thing he taught, and that was that Western people have a very limited view of themselves. They have a very low opinion of themselves, which he used to call something like the self-pity poor me. His English was very interesting, but it was very something like the poor self-pity poor me, which we all have, thinking I’m so bad, I’m so weak, I’m so hopeless, terrible. We can think like this even if we’re very proud and arrogant. Actually, if you’re very proud and arrogant, usually it’s because deep down one has a very low opinion of oneself, so you have to create this big inflated ego to hide that.
So we we all have this. And so I think Lama saw that tantra is just the opposite to that. It is this view that I am pure and perfect, because basically we are in nature. And for people to try and generate that, that view would be so helpful, even just a little bit. Not out of pride and arrogance, but this view of seeing oneself as a deity is called divine pride.
It’s not ordinary pride that is a delusion, that is an affliction that leads to more suffering and more negativity with other people. Divine pride is something that overcomes ego and limitation. But it has to be done with a bodhicitta motivation. Yeah. If you don’t have a warm heart and you think, I am a Buddha, then that is disaster.
This is what Chogyam Trungpa called, I think in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, becoming a cosmic guru. A lovely term. Yeah? If you have no understanding of what you’re doing in tantra, and you generate the thought, I am Buddha, I am enlightened, I am benefiting every sentient being, then that is just becoming a cosmic guru, you know, Godzilla or or King King Kong, right, stomping through New York. Because it’s not that kind of pride, and it’s not that hard sort of thought, and superiority has got nothing to do with that.
Yeah. It’s just identifying with one’s inner nature. And to be able to have that divine pride, one has to have somehow made some some little contact with it in some way, at least some trust in it, to have gone beyond, somehow seen beyond one’s delusions. That one’s delusions not, you know, to be able to see that one’s delusions aren’t me. Right?
There is something intrinsically pure there all the time. And on that basis, one one can develop this divine pride with a good heart and with renunciation. You need we need all those things. At the same time and the point is, in having divine pride I don’t know if I’m supposed to teach all this stuff, but you can read it. But anyway, just say very general things, because other things you go to hell for talking about tantra without people having initiations.
And the thing is, you’re only supposed to practice this if you have tantric initiations. If you don’t have them, you shouldn’t do these things. I’m just kind of saying generally how it’s done, a little bit. I know I lost my point. Oh, so the point is, in having this divine pride seeing oneself as a deity, what goes with it is equally seeing everyone as a Buddha.
Right? It’s not that I am the Buddha and everyone else is the low peasant. It has to go along with seeing everything as pure and every being as perfect.