The Double Dorje: Looking at Modern Vajrayana Buddhism.
Secret Teachings in Tibetan Buddhism
Wed, 09 Oct 2024
When secret teachings are spoken of in Tibetan Buddhism, the word "secret" is much closer in meaning to "sacred" or "holy" than it is to the meaning of "unknown to outsiders". When the 15th Karmapa, Khakhyab Dorje, refers to the Mani, the most famous mantra of all, as a "secret" mantra, we know the word has meanings quite different from what we might expect. A dorje and bell with an unusual design Here are some words or phrases you might want to look up: Dorje Vajrayana Mahamudra Dzogchen Mala Dudjom Rinpoche Ekajati #Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #secret #secrecy Note that other distribution platforms do not usually pass the transcript on, and if you want to read it you may need to listen on podbean. YouTube has been making its own transcript, which was an unholy mess. I think I have now deleted all of these "auto-generated" scripts, but it will not be possible to retrospectively add properly edited transcripts to episodes prior to September 2024.
Full Episode
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.
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