Vajrayana Buddhist Quotes

Just calling one's practice "approach and accomplishment" and staying in retreat for years will produce nothing but hardship. Completing hundreds of millions of mantras will not even bring the warmth of the ordinary qualities that mark one's progress on the path! In other words, if the essential points of the path are not taken into account, perseverance will amount to nothing more than chasing a mirage.

The aim of far too many teachings these days is to make people "feel good," and even some Buddhist masters are beginning to sound like New Age apostles. Their talks are entirely devoted to validating the manifestation of ego and endorsing the "rightness" of our feelings, neither of which have anything to do with the teachings we find in the pith instructions. So, if you are only concerned about feeling good, you are far better off having a full body massage or listening to some uplifting or life-affirming music than receiving dharma teachings, which were definitely not designed to cheer you up. On the contrary, the dharma was devised specifically to expose your failings and make you feel awful.

We cannot rely on the phenomenal world to provide either continuous pleasure or continuous pain. We can be surprised: good friends can turn against us, and generous support can be forthcoming from unlikely quarters. The ‘security of insecurity’ and the ‘insecurity of security’, is a theme that will run through this book; and, any other book that deals with Buddhist psychology.

Making ourselves feel solid, permanent, separate, continuous and defined – by constantly scanning the phenomenal horizon for reference points which substantiate these criteria – is a convoluted process. The phenomena of our perception will only serve us temporarily in this capacity. So if we take this course, we sentence ourselves to the continuous activity of establishing and replacing reference points. When we engage in this process, we convert our perceptual circumstances into a prison. In fact, our perceptual circumstances not only become an incarceration, but a very subtle personal torture chamber. We need to be continually on the look-out for new reference points. We need to reassess old reference points. We need to imbue ourselves with a certain pervasive nervousness. We need to foster a sense of unease about the whole process of experiencing existence. It could become unrelenting hard work in our own personal forced labour camp. In our attempts to establish reference points we react to the phenomena of our perception in three ways. We are either attracted, we are averse or we are indifferent. Attraction, aversion and indifference are usually referred to, in the translations of Buddhist texts, as lust (desire or attachment); hatred (anger or aggression); and ignorance. Although these words have a distinct application to the three distorted tendencies (usually referred to as ‘the Three Poisons’), they have connotations in English that lend them the tone of ‘the Seven Deadly Sins’. If we encounter anything that seems to substantiate our fictions of solidity, permanence, separateness, continuity, and definition – we are attracted, we reach out for it. If we encounter anything that threatens these fictions – we are averse, we push it away. If we encounter anything that neither substantiates nor threatens these fictions – we are indifferent. What we cannot manipulate, we ignore. But what is left of our responses if these three fictions dissolve? The question of what our experience would be like without attraction, aversion, and indifference poses an interesting challenge to our rationale. In fact, we cannot approach this question at all, if we approach it through conventional reasoning. Fundamentally this question deals with the nature of experience itself. If attraction, aversion, and indifference dissolve, what remains is not any ‘kind of experience’; it is simply experience – experience as such. In terms of experience as such; we are completely present, open, and free in the experience of whatever arises as a perception. Dechen, Khandro; Chogyam, Ngakpa (2014-01-14). Spectrum of Ecstasy: Embracing the Five Wisdom Emotions of Vajrayana Buddhism (p. 45). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

As a foundational principle, all Buddhist practices are based on clear perception, using the naked and direct honesty of mindfulness practice as a basis to create a bare attention and direct experience of the present reality. At the same time, if Vajrayana is about ritualizing every aspect of our consciousness in the service of awakening, then paying attention to the way things really are includes making use of the mind’s imaginative capacity. The point of self-awareness is not to turn off our projector, per se, but to study the projector, to realize that the projector is always on, and to notice that our experiences are projections that arise in the theater of the heartmind. The

Some people think that expedient meanings are false and deceiving and thus should not be relied upon. Also, some Buddhists say, "We are practitioners of Madhyamaka" or "We just follow the Vajrayana," and deprecate the rest of the Buddha's teachings. Clearly, all such attitudes are completely mistaken. In general, the Buddha never said anything false or deceiving. Moreover, since all expedient meanings are pervaded by the definitive meaning, they are the methods of becoming introduced to the definitive meaning and realizing it. This is the same as when it is said that seeming reality is the means and ultimate reality is the outcome of this means. Thus, all the turnings of the wheel of dharma serve as means to cut through the entirety of reference points with regard to the way things appear and teach their true way of being.

The two major branches of Buddhism are Theravada and Mahayana. Mahayana has several subsets that you may have heard of, like Zen, Tibetan, and Pure Land Buddhism. There is also an extension of Mahayana Buddhism called Vajrayana, which is sometimes referred to as a distinct, third branch of Buddhism. Theravada is the main form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, while Mahayana dominates in China, Japan, Taiwan, Nepal, Mongolia, Korea, and Vietnam. Vajrayana is the main form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet and the form that the Dalai Lama practices and teaches.

The special skill of esoteric Buddhism is transmutation by right view and pure perception, using all appropriate means for training. For example, eating food is not itself a Buddhist practice, but if one uses it as a means of training, it becomes a Buddhist training in transforming one's daily life as Buddhist practice.

Meditation on the “seal,” that is, the “immobilization” of all dependent things, is for the purpose of liberation from the cycle of existence. The notion of “empti- ness” (Tibetan: stong pa nid) is central to Vajrayana Buddhism (as indeed it is to many schools of Buddhist thought) and is derived from Nagarjuna’s teaching that the essential nature of all dharmas (phenomenal existents) is sunyata, void or empty. As Tibetan scholar Herbert V. Guenther translates the term, sunyata or stong pa nid means “no-thing-ness,” all existents being inherently insubstantial.⁴⁵ The sense of “seal” (mudra) in Gyatso’s commentary is clearly the sense of being sealed in to this state of inherent “no-thing-ness.

The scholar and Buddhist teacher Chö- gyam Trungpa explains that all Vajrayana practices accept the body as the “basic being” that is “highly workable and full of all kinds of potentialities”⁴⁸ and that the mudra of mahamudra does not indicate a “symbol” (a sign, writing) as such, but a certain ontological level of realization.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, a contemporary Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhist) scholar, states that the “great seal [mahamudra] refers to emptiness,” and quotes the statement of the Buddha in the King of Concentrations Sutra: “The nature of all phenomena is the great seal.”⁴³ Gyatso explains, “Here, ‘nature’ refers to the ulti- mate nature of all things: their emptiness, or lack of inherent existence. Such emptiness is called the great seal because phenomena never move or change from the state of lacking inherent existence.

Our limited insight into our own nature is part of the human condition, and leads us into confusion and suffering time and again. From a Buddhist viewpoint, our fundamental ignorance of the nature of reality leads us to circle endlessly in the cycle of death and rebirth. While we lack the insight to free ourselves from this cycle of existence, the teacher can offer us a way to break free of our ignorance and suffering. The Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions consider the guru to be the root of the path, the source of realizations and the one who liberates us from the bondage of ignorance. The tantric teachings of guru yoga say that the guru should be considered synonymous with the Buddha, and emphasize that without the guru the student cannot proceed. Because the role of the guru is given such emphasis, it is important to examine it closely, and in recent vicars awareness has grown of the hazards involved in the guru-disciple relationship. When students meet a teacher who touches them deeply, the experience can be overwhelming. They might become aware of their potential in a way they have never recognized previously. Disciples still captivated by the inspiration of their teacher often speak as if they have fallen in love, full of wonder and admiration. The teacher has opened their eyes, and they see him or her as fundamental to that experience. What empowers this experience is partly the quality of the teacher, who acts as a catalyst to awaken an inner quality that was unconscious.