Secret Teachings in Tibetan Buddhism
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Listen. Do you want to know a secret?
Tibetan Buddhism is full of secret teachings. Wow. Wouldn't it be cool to know secret teachings? Well, hello, my listeners. Now, I know I say this every time, but I hope you do feel warmly welcome to this episode of the Double Doge podcast. I'm Alex Wilding, and in this episode, I want to talk about secrecy in Tibetan Buddhism. To begin, or rather before we begin, please, please would you pause for a moment to like this episode, subscribe to the podcast, tell your friends and so forth, in whatever way is appropriate for the channel on which you are listening. At the time of first publishing, the podcast is hosted on Podbean, but it's very likely that you're listening somewhere else. If you do want to see the brief comments, but they don't appear in your channel, you will find them on Podbean. I venture to suggest that it is as important to come to grips with the whole nest of ideas surrounding secret and secrecy in Tibetan Buddhism as important as it is to understand, for example, the significance of a Vajra or Dorje.
It's an essential concept in the Tantric approach to practice. Like the word Tantra itself, which, as we know, has been hijacked and distorted practically beyond recognition, secret has also been misunderstood. It's been abused, it's been used to generate fascination, because, like I said, it is cool to be in possession of deep yogic secrets, or even cooler, to be seen to be in possession of them. The word has also been used as part of the cover for psychological, financial and sexual abuse. The Vajra vehicle or Vajrayana has a couple of other names which, although they do appear on the surface quite different, are in fact synonymous. And one of these is the secret mantra vehicle. Knowing that, it should be no surprise that the term secret is centrally important and indeed as important as Vajra. I was on the point of saying that we should practically forget the meaning of secret in English and perhaps other Western languages, and start from scratch to understand its context here. Paradoxically, however, I don't think it's actually a bad translation.
One of the main possible meanings of sang is that something is not known to outsiders, exactly what our word secret means. So I think we might as well stick with it, rather than looking around for some weird and wonderful alternative that's never going to catch on. But in doing that, we really must realise, and we must make an effort to remember, that in our context of Tibetan-style Buddhism, although that meaning of secret may indeed be correct, it's only a seed of a much broader idea. you might say it's kind of a focal point for the whole wide idea called secret. In many cases, it doesn't at all mean that something is secret in this usual sense of outsiders don't know. Most importantly, it often means something intimate or private. The sangkang, for example, whose surface translation is secret room, is simply the toilet. The word toilet, of course, is our own indirect way of referring to the shithouse.
More interestingly, the term sangyum, for which a word-for-word translation would be secret mother, secret consort, or secret lady, of, let's say, a high lama, in no way means that the couple are having a secret affair. Referring to the woman concerned as a sangyum is a respectable and respectful, almost a honorific way of referring to her as a consort, or you might say wife. To be honest, I would tend to avoid the word wife because it's liable to bring in its wake the whole Western Christian superstructure of, indeed, Christian marriage. And that's a superstructure that does not apply. The thing here is that there is no secret in the normal sense involved in such a case. So we need to leave aside the idea that secret always means secret in the sense of being unknown to others. It can mean that, but that side of the meaning can be almost irrelevant. This issue does get deeper. There is a structure, as opposed to the word we might use is a trope, that's used ever and again in Tibetan Buddhist liturgy, meditation instructions, commentary, and so on.
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