heart wrote:I do believe in lineages actually and my Guru has several lineages to uphold and one of them is his family lineage. If you read "Blazing Splendor" you will find out a lot about that particular lineage and how the transmission is done. I also found Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoches "Brilliant Moon" very touching. In my opinion there is definitely a transmission that is reflected by the official lineage and it is of great value. There might be people outside Tibet becoming lineage-holders in time, I heard there are a few already, but it is none of my business. I am just a simple practitioner. If only Tibetans can keep the lineage it is ok as long as it is genuine.Aemilius wrote:Chögyam Trungpa had this great idea of "Dharma without credentials", but the fact is that Dharma is mostly or only about credentials. What we can say is that teaching and communication of Dharma take place, informally and with all elaborate formalities. Once it has happened, i.e. you have understood something, then it is very unlikely that you will ever acknowledge how and from whom you heard it. You will go to enormous lengths to create the image that you have heard it from some real credential source, some real credential authority. This is how the lineages come into being. The images of lineages do exist, I think, they have some use, they are not useless. Truth is beyond comprehension.
Then there are the evolutionary tendencies, which means that a particular ethnic population creates the lineages. This is to say that all or most teachings are put into the names of people of that particular ethnic lineage, or into the names of powerfull families within it. Population is an ethnic lineage. Dharma has another purpose than promoting a particular human population or a particular family-lineage, which is why the real Dharma-lineage loses to the evolutionary forces, and it is then replaced by a hereditary lineage.
/magnus
What is "keeping the lineage "? What do you say when you say it ? To me it sounds like some authoritarian & army-like system. In a Sravakayana sutra Shakyamuni says that he is not the leader of the Sangha, Sangha consists of free individuals, who teach freely those whom they think are receptive.
If we take for example the Nyungne, that is being done, and has been done, in Europe in many countries, like Hungary, Sweden, France, Germany, Danmark, etc... and there are several persons with vast experience in it. Do you call it freedom, if some hitherto unkonwn person is then brought to Europe, -what ever his ethnic origin may happpen to be-, and who is then declared to be the Lineage-holder of Nyungne!! And because you are a tantrika you will believe anything and everything that is told to you ????