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The Tantric Experiment: Bringing Vajrayāna to the West

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN

LARRY MERMELSTEIN

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE

Tantra is by its very nature exotic and esoteric, so it can cause puzzlement or even disdain. How do you think tantra, Vajrayāna, is perceived in the West today?

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: In academia, there’s a lot of interest in tantra. There’s interest in assimilating it into other themes in religious studies. Because of its investigation of mind states, it becomes associated with different kinds of psychology. It is also associated with “the transgressive,” the encouragement to transgress certain societal norms.

But while scholars like to talk about tantra as transgressive, in my view that misses how tantra actually functions for its practitioners. It doesn’t take into account the long history of how tantric ideas and practices have been assimilated very gradually and very thoughtfully—first in India, but particularly in Tibet—into an organized, graded path that leads to the realization that is central to all of Buddhism. Vajrayāna is not predicated purely upon being radical and iconoclastic.

LARRY MERMELSTEIN: The understanding of tantra among Buddhist practitioners, translators, and scholars has changed radically in the last thirty years or so. It’s gone from being viewed as extremely bizarre to being everything from reasonable, albeit still strange and provocative, to having a kind of Hollywood allure. We now have dozens of genuine representatives of this tradition on Western soil. Compared with the early days, we have many more human exemplars of what it means to practice in this tradition, and the reality tends to replace the fantasy. People are therefore coming to understand tantra much better.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: In the West, there is a growing understanding of the tantric path. At the same time, I still see a lot of misunderstanding among practitioners of different Buddhist traditions. I interact with members of the Theravādin School, Chinese Mahāyāna, Zen, and so forth. There still seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what each of us is doing and the theoretical grounding, if you will, that each path rests on. Perhaps there’s a lack of trust. It would be good if we could make our path more theoretically approachable, so that the theory it operates on would be better understood.

What do you mean by more theoretically approachable?

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: The precise details of Vajrayāna practices are not something we can share publicly. They involve details that require a lot of context and initiation. However, we can share the basic theory of Vajrayāna: the principles of prajñā and upāya; the view of śūnyatā and how that leads to the idea of sampannakrama (completion stage); the view of compassion and loving-kindness; and the understanding of luminous mind. We can also discuss the wide range of skillful means, such as deity meditation and mantra recitation. We can make Vajrayāna practices and view more approachable, so people can understand the theoretical basis of what tantric practitioners are doing. That will clarify a lot of confusion, including the way in which tantra is not transgressive, as Anne was saying, and the way in which it is.

What is being transgressed, then?

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: Ego. If there’s no true sharing, about the Vajrayāna tradition with those outside of it, many people will only come to understand it from one individual or another. Some are very skilled practitioners and some are pretty crazy practitioners. Some can represent the tradition very well and some can actually generate more misunderstanding.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: I agree that some kind of larger-scale sharing is very important. Tantra seems at times to be talked about as if it’s another category, completely outside the main thrust of Buddhism. One of the harder things for practitioners of other Buddhist traditions to understand about tantra is that its goals are completely in line with Buddhism’s central goals of wisdom and compassion. That needs to be explained and understood, because that’s what will help make tantra more comprehensible to those practicing other Buddhist traditions, and perhaps to the world at large.

What about the fact that tantra is often talked about by its practitioners as being more advanced than other forms of Buddhism? Doesn’t that automatically put someone from another tradition on the defensive?

LARRY MERMELSTEIN: That’s an interesting and tricky area. There can be a superiority complex that radiates from Vajrayāna practitioners. My teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once stayed with a few professor friends of mine. One of them, who had spent a lot of time in Burma, said to Rinpoche, “I know you’re from the Vajrayāna tradition of Tibet and I know in Burma they practice Theravāda, but I have to say you’re completely like the people I knew in the monastery I lived next door to.” Trungpa Rinpoche himself recounted many times his experience of meeting a Burmese monk during his first days in India after he had escaped from Tibet. They compared notes about meditation practice and they both found themselves asking each other, “When did you travel to my country to study?”

In Vajrayāna, we are taught the three-yāna view: Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna, which are properly understood as stages on the path. But these categories can be misunderstood as referring to particular groups of people. For example, when we talk in the Vajrayāna context about Hīnayāna, we’re not talking about Theravādins. For Theravādin practitioners, I suspect there’s a huge amount of what we might identify as Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna in their manifestation and their practice life.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: I heartily agree with that. One thing that would help is for us to talk about our various practices for cultivating equanimity, compassion, and love. Every Buddhist tradition has these. What are our various practices for cultivating mindfulness? There’s a lot of potential for fruitful convergence. There are many wonderful techniques in the Theravāda tradition that would certainly be of value to Vajrayāna practitioners, and the dialogue would be good for the vibrancy of the Vajrayāna tradition.

Rinpoche mentioned that there are details in Vajrayāna that are not shared, that are secret. How do you explain why secretness is used? It can be misunderstood as the basis for a cult.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: For people to have an understanding of tantra will take some time. The details of what Vajrayāna means and how it works will come across in time as we begin to share more and see more teachers. It would be difficult to clarify everything in a short period of time. Many great Vajrayāna masters traveled to America, such as His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa, His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the venerable Kalu Rinpoche, His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche. The very venerable Trungpa Rinpoche took North America as his seat and set a very good ground. Nevertheless, we can see how acculturating people to tantra is necessarily a long process.

Practicing tantra requires a strong community context and careful training. How are we doing in creating Vajrayāna communities in a society that’s very different from the one in which Vajrayāna flourished for a thousand years?

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: People become attracted to Vajrayāna largely because of its teachers—because of their charisma, and their palpable compassion. The sparkling presentations of the great teachers are like beacons drawing people to them. Once the honeymoon has passed, there’s a process, which is not always so easy, of actually understanding and benefiting from the practices.

One of the first obstacles is that ritual is not prevalent in many parts of the modern West. So a core challenge for many people is to be able to work with ritual—to be able to experience it as way to realization, rather than experiencing it as a superficial traditional requirement. Often people see ritual as a bunch of rules and forms. The obsessive mind kicks in and it becomes a pursuit: How do you do this? How do you do that? Certainly one tries to do things correctly, but when that dominates, the quality of the ritual as a means of teaching can fade away.

LARRY MERMELSTEIN: This has been a difficulty for many people. I’d say we’re doing the best we can, and one of the things we can benefit from is translator–practitioners to support that process. In time, many if not most people find a good relationship with ritual, but we should always be attuned to helping them along.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: Another challenge is that steps have to be taken to include the body in practice. It’s possible to be reciting a mantra and imagining you are a deity but your body is completely checked out and not resonating with what’s going on. It’s all in the head. A certain amount of training is necessary to help people be in their body. What we usually translate as “visualization” is something that is much broader than that word implies. It does a great disservice to what one is actually doing.

The word “visualization” is very eye-sense oriented.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: It’s also very subject–object oriented. Our notion of visualization conjures up something like watching a movie. In the traditional cultures in which tantra arose, you never saw anything that wasn’t alive in front of you. Seeing has a certain richness and aliveness and freshness in that kind of culture.

So embodying a deity is not just done with the eyes; it’s done with the whole organism. We can also forget the power of the mantra itself to evoke the deity and her world, and the extent to which one needs to get out of the way and allow it to do that. Too often we stand in the way, and worry and obsess. It becomes a real interference with practice.

LARRY MERMELSTEIN: Making the ritual practice relevant and workable requires training, which is one of the jobs that our translation group takes on, in addition to simply translating. We try to help people engage with the texts and the methods in a way that allows that engagement to become a natural extension of their prior Buddhist practice, rather than a bunch of new bells and whistles.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: It’s also very important to bring general Dharma understanding to the practice, so that you really understand absolute and relative truth and how the practice of tantra shows you their union. That does not come automatically, so at the very least some basic Madhyamaka helps a lot.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: I work with a lot of students in America, and I agree that there need to be progressive stages of training in the view of meditation, bringing it to one’s experience, and then manifesting that in one’s action. I would say, though, that the students generally are doing pretty well. Of course, the path is a path. There is a quotation from Maitreya’s teaching that the path at the beginning is mostly impure with lots of mistakes; in the middle, the path is half and half; toward the end, it is more pure and perfect. That’s what everybody goes through, even in one sitting session. We start out very challenged, in the middle we calm down a little bit, and toward the end when we have to leave for work, we actually start to enjoy it.

LARRY MERMELSTEIN: We are part of a very big experiment of bringing an infusion of incredible wisdom from Tibet to the West. We have rapid communications across the globe, but the rate of transmission of the Dharma has a kind of natural rate. We’re proceeding slowly, from some aerial perspective. Or perhaps we’re moving quite quickly. Only future generations will be able to judge how we’ve done. It’s hard for us to see since we are in the middle of the experiment. Overall, though, the students seem to be finding the teachings very useful and relevant and are connecting with them slowly but surely.

It seems easy to want to be a sort of cognitive superstar in working with these practices, rather than engaging them with our whole body and mind.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: As Rinpoche said, a path is a path. And part of the path for many of us may be transcending the cognitive superstar syndrome. Because we’re so used to cognitive learning, we feel that if we can just get it intellectually, we’ll have it. On one of the very first visits that His Holiness the Dalai Lama made to the West, he said that if you’ve been practicing for about five years and instead of getting angry ten times a day you only get angry seven or eight times a day, you should understand that you’ve made progress.

That’s a very compassionate teaching. It helps people to understand the extent of the path—what a big job it is even to reduce your anger by 20 percent. Too often we idealize things. We suddenly feel we’ve changed radically and then are devastated when we see the old habits creep in again, as of course they will. The path is a path. It unfolds and it’s important to savor and appreciate that what may seem like a small thing is actually quite an important achievement.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: Patience is very important, especially in this time when instant gratification is expected. People think they must achieve something right away, and that becomes an obstacle. It is true that the Vajrayāna teaches about sudden awakening, but all of those teachings are based on the idea that our mind is primordially awake, already awake. So we discover that. That’s very different from instant gratification.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: I am reminded of something I just read from Longchenpa: the fact of primordial buddha nature does not contradict the fact that there’s much to purify.

LARRY MERMELSTEIN: Trungpa Rinpoche said, “I have achieved the bhūmi of patience due to the kindness of my students.”

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: Wonderful!

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: Another of the challenges is that we’re householders, by and large. There are constraints on the amount of time we have to practice. Will a few short, intense retreats ever add up to what people were able to do in Tibet? That’s a huge question.

LARRY MERMELSTEIN: I firmly believe that tantric practice is workable in the world we live in. If the Vajrayāna actually began with King Indrabhuti supplicating the Buddha for teachings that would work for him as a king, who was not willing or able to give up his worldliness and responsibilities, that means the Vajrayāna teachings are ultimately meant for householders.

Our world is moving a lot faster than it probably was back in those days and so, yes, the stresses and complexities seem to be much greater than centuries ago. But so what? The very choicelessness of it is good for us. We have to do everything we can to incorporate the teachings on a continual basis in our lives, knowing full well that many of us may not have time for intense long retreat. The teachings are geared to being applicable in our lives, as they are. It’s extremely workable. Thousands of people are currently engaged in that experiment. Many of us do experience the frustration of wanting it to be better, but that is the essence of path.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: The Buddha’s response to King Indrabhuti’s request clearly indicates that the tantric path is meant primarily for lay practitioners. In many of the mahāsiddha stories, their families also thoroughly engage in a Vajrayāna practice. Tantric practitioners manifest in many walks of life: as a carpenter, bartender, or farmer like Marpa. Of course we can be monastic yogis, but in many ways these methods are more suitable for lay yogis and yoginis.

ANNE CAROLYN KLEIN: Even if we feel that tantra is a workable path for householder yogis and yoginis, we still need to work with time management. It helps if we can constantly reflect on what is meaningful in life, and how precious time is. Almost any amount of practice is going to be beneficial. It’s not all or nothing. There’s a black-and-white thinking that can intrude. If I can’t be the next Milarepa, why bother? It’s always worthwhile to do what is possible and we need to get over the superstar, overachiever syndrome.