Am I a vajrayana practitioner?
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Hello and welcome, whoever you are, to the Double Dorje podcast. I'm Alex Worling and today I want to kick around some ideas concerned with the question of what it really is to be a Vajrayana practitioner. Briefly, a reminder, if you please would, to press the appropriate buttons, the like button, subscribe button, whatever it is. And it would be especially great if you like this podcast, if you would share it with your friends. Also, there's nearly always a bit of extra material, such as words to look up, which you can find on Podbean, where this episode is first hosted, if it doesn't appear on the platform that you usually use. I was prompted to think about this question because I was recently accused of not being a real Vajrayana practitioner at all. In fact, this happened twice. In both cases, the accusation was made because I don't buy into the myths surrounding a certain Lama who had a very high profile in the West a few decades ago.
Interestingly, although this was certainly annoying, I didn't actually find it hurtful. I have a general suspicion that when we are criticised about something and we don't really accept the criticism but we feel hurt by it, that's often because deep down we have a slight suspicion that there is at least a bit of truth in it. I don't know if that's the way it is for you, but it certainly is for me. Anyway, in this recent case, the accusations were so laughable that based on totally made-up stories and made with such anger that they didn't cut deeply at all. All the same, it did raise the question of just what a Vajrayana practitioner actually is. Am I one? Are you one? And does it matter? A huge amount of stuff is done in the name of Vajrayana.
the empowerments, the preliminaries, the great ceremonies, the accumulations of mantras, the retreats, the practices on certain days of the month or year, the physical yogas, and more. On the formal side, the question is perhaps not so very hard to answer. A Vajrayana practitioner has to have begun with a foundation in refuge and bodhisattva vows. They will have received empowerments. To put things beyond any doubt, the practitioner needs at some stage to have received what we call a high tantric empowerment from an authorized lama, and to have received it live in circumstances where the lama knows who the empowerment is being given to. So, I wouldn't really want to count those mass empowerments that are given more as a blessing than as a key step on the spiritual path.
don't necessarily mean to knock those mass empowerments, but I would like to question how deep their value goes. Our would-be practitioner will have received the reading transmission, that's what we call the lung, for the practices concerned, along with the full instructions for that practice, and will have accumulated a probably large number of mantra recitations. In the course of a full-scale tantric empowerment, they will have received the tantric vows, The list of these vows varies slightly, so the practitioner must get clear about how they are to be understood in the particular tradition that they are practising. When looked at closely, it turns out that there aren't just the main 14 vows, which you may relatively easily hear of.
Vast numbers of subsidiary vows are spoken of in the commentaries. This means that it's extraordinarily difficult to keep all of the tantric vows, so the practitioner will also regularly be doing purification practices to make up for not having kept the vows. These will include confession prayers, reciting things like the Dorje Sempa mantra, and regular tsok practices. I said a tiny bit about those tsok practices in episode 23. One of the main purposes of tsok is to repair broken vows. In the Nyingma tradition, the most important date for tsok practice is the 10th day of the lunar month, which is dedicated to Guru Rinpoche, followed closely in importance by the 25th day, which is dedicated to the Dakinis, about whom I said a bit in episode 26.
All this means that it is a relatively straightforward matter to check whether somebody's outer performance is what is expected of a Vajrayana practitioner. We can check ourselves in that way quite easily. If somebody is doing all of that, there can't really be much of an argument about whether they are a practitioner. Superficially, at least.
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