Dharma Wheel

…he decided to go to Lhasa and he exchanged some odd sign language to the monastery (where the texts were kept), like turning over a box, and they recognized one another as Drikungpas And I always thought the secret Drikung handshake was to spend ten years in a cave on some really demanding practic...

Did you know that the Jonangpa are not recognised as an official Tibetan Vajrayana lineage by the Tibetan Parliament in Exile? Well, neither did I. If you wish to support their claim for recognition, you can do so by signing the petition at the following link: https://chng.it/N98VG2swdZ Are you sur...

Hey y’all. I was revisiting some videos of Drupon Rinchen Dorje Rinpoche’s teachings, and therein he said something to the affect of “Patrul Rinpoche is responsible for the upholding of the drikung lineage today.” Can anyone speak to Rinpoche’s involvement with Drikung Kagyu? I didn't know that... ...

It's a reductio ad absurdum because it's the easiest way to make the point. You don't know the lama's level of realization, you never will. 。。。。。 I think it's potentially dangerous to propagate the idea to casual readers of this board that there's some kind of route to vajrayana practice that doesn...

The authority of texts and the reliance on the lama aren’t contradictory. We rely on the lama to open the door to the Dharma: no lama, no vajrayana. But no lama can contradict authoritative texts. An ad absurdum example - your lama says that interdependent origination is a provisional teaching and ...

@PeterC You write: Reliance on scripture is not 'unique', it's what Tibetans do and have done for a thousand years. Our lineages use texts for authority. You turn to a teacher because the teacher can tell you what the relevant texts say. Ask this question of a Khenpo or Geshe and they'll cite an au...

Three observations here, the first of them completely trivial: if we’re talking about doing a regular yidam / dakini / etc practice that involves self generation, and you haven’t had the empowerment. What, then, are you doing exactly? None of the interdependently originated conditions that the empo...

What I find curious about practice empowerments is that although people say they are absolutely necessary, I have yet to meet someone who can explain precisely what they are. Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, Empowerments and the path of liberation. Was going to say the same. Anyone who doesn’t understand why...

Sure, people do ngondros on the basis of a lung, and occasionally the ngondro might say that they appear as some deity while doing the guru yoga, but really the only deficiency is that they either appear in mundane form or they do a self-visualization that has no effect: the rest of the ngondro, the...

There is no vajrayana practice without empowerment. In some (limited) cases if you’ve received a major empowerment and the lung of certain other practices you can do those practices as front-generation. But absent *any* empowerment, you cannot do vajrayana practice. End of story. This interpretatio...

My Sakya teachers have thought it was fine for some people to attend pujas of some practices without empowerment, peaceful practices mostly, and simple Guru yogas. I think who the student is matters too. I'm sure there's no harm in sitting in a room while someone does a puja. But they can't do the ...

There is no vajrayana practice without empowerment.

In some (limited) cases if you’ve received a major empowerment and the lung of certain other practices you can do those practices as front-generation. But absent *any* empowerment, you cannot do vajrayana practice. End of story.

There is one major elephant in the room in this line of thinking. I agree with you to some extent. But, for instance, we know the bulk of the Kālacakra corpus including the Kālacakra laghutantra, Vimalaprabhā commentary, Sekoddeśa, some of the ṭīkas on them, and so on, were written largely by Piṇḍo...

We can take The Seven Nails as an example. It places Śri Siṃha in China in its colophon. Why? David Germano notes how, because no Indian dzogchen texts have been found, the Nyingmas of the 12th century worked to give him Chinese origins instead as a way of explaining the lack of Indian textual sour...

Natan wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2024 6:04 pm --Vairocana Tantra

You’re quoting here from the Mahavairocanatantra? The one that Shingon is all over, but which isn’t so heavily studied in Tibet?

A better way to ask this is something like:

“I’ve done some research and am interested in teachers A, B and C - does anyone have experience with them, if so could they PM me to discuss?”

This is why the forum disapproves of thread necropsy…

Mods - close?

Is anyone familiar with a form of Mahakala, or other wrathful deity (Guru Rinpoche emanation, perhaps?) with two arms, one face, two legs, and holding a kapala in left hand, and brandishing a Phurba aloft in the right? Need to identify a Thangka for an auction, and haven't come across such iconogra...

The rhetorical trick of saying “so you disagree with Big Name Teacher” is one we should only use very carefully. wasn't a trick, was just a straight up question. i didn't know you disagree with Big Name Teacher, but you did answer that in your own way, thanks. In this case, you didn’t know him, you...

Problem is: nobody can agree on what that even means... ...whenever people start talking about the need to "achieve shamatha", the whole discussion becomes impossibly confused. .. what Togden Shakya Shri said is not good enough for you? The rhetorical trick of saying “so you disagree with...