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So it's not just the NKT who cannot take honest debate, but Tibetan Buddhism in general? Or am I mistaken?

Friends and readers, you can find the answer to this question by reading Turtle Feet by Nikolai Grozni.

He took vows as a Geluk monk in the DD's own lineage. He learned Tibetan, took private lessons in logic and was proficient enough to attend classes at the Buddhist Institute of Dialectics in Dharamsala, and participated in the debate contests.

Read this book and you will get a detailed answer to this and many more questions.

Grozni grew up in Communist Bulgaria. He so hated the authoritarianism that at risk of imprisonment, he sprayed anti communist graffiti on the walls of his high school.

After more than two years studying in Dharamsala, he went to study at another Tibetan Buddhist university further south in India.

Grozni paid his dues, learned the languages, lived in mud shacks with no indoor plumbing, and that were full of vermin. He did the cooking on a kerosene stove and got sick with both malaria and amoebic dysentary. Paid his dues and more.

He learned things that are not available to most travelers because he hung in despite hardships that most travelers and students would not have been able to endure.

I recommend that anyone thinking of getting involved in any lineage of Tibetan Buddhism/Vajrayana read Turtle Feet by Grozni and supplement it by reading The Double Mirror by Stephen Butterfield who studied with Trungpa and Ozel Tenzin.

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superscot
Dear Tenzin Peljor - la,

Thank you for sending the PDF of the vows.

I can't help roaring with laughter when after I emailed you and asked whether the deities of Tibetan Buddhism, ie Chenrezi, Manjushri et al were seen as actual deities to be worshipped or aspects of mind to be understood, I had no reply from you.

On emailing you again to say that I have thought over it and decided to go back to my Theravadin roots, you reply 'excellent'.

So it's not just the NKT who cannot take honest debate, but Tibetan Buddhism in general? Or am I mistaken?

As it has been said 'outwardly practise Theravada, inwardly practise Mahayana, secretly practise Vajrayana'.
Anything done in secret has undertones of shame in it, so maybe there is shame because a multiplicity of deities are indeed being worshipped and this is giving rise to some degree of Cognitive Dissonance in the western disciples.

Maybe that plus the overlay of Bon and Hinduism right enough.

I'm going back to the simplicity of the Dhammapada and the original Pali texts.

Thank you Tenzin Peljor, your silence spoke volumes!

Dear Superscot,
I am sorry but I get about 40 emails a day and have a lot of other things to do. I just missed the email you are referring to. The last email you sent where you said you decided to follow Theravada I recognized and I answered it very briefly because I feel it is excellent to follow the Theravada, and you had made your decision. So the reason of my silence is due to the amount of tasks I have to do and not having seen or read the email you are referring to. Actual I am not aware of that we started a debate. I just wanted to bridge your disconnection from NKT a bit.

With respect to the question above:

"whether the deities of Tibetan Buddhism, ie Chenrezi, Manjushri et al were seen as actual deities to be worshipped or aspects of mind to be understood".

They are in general seen as high Bodhisattvas on the 10th ground. In tantric practice they are seen as real enlightened beings. And the tantric practice is done with the aim to actualize an enlightened state which is done by overcoming grasping for ordinary appearances, inherent existence etc. So the deity is meant here also to actualize the qualities the tantric being is attributed to possess. (Actual the term deity is a bit misleading here because it invites a Christian context.) I think this topic has to be differentiated. I assume you find something on Alex Berzin's website.
Je Tsongkhapa himself said he had direct vision or contact with Manjushri, he (or the appearance of Manjushri to his mind) was his actual root guru. So for him Manjushri was not an inner aspect but a real existing being that helped him to develop his own inner wisdom / discriminating intelligence. (This example shows that there are different aspects here to be considered.) This topic about Bodhisattvas, tantric deities etc is quite vast. I lack time to go into detail.

As it has been said 'outwardly practise Theravada, inwardly practise Mahayana, secretly practise Vajrayana'.
Anything done in secret has undertones of shame in it, so maybe there is shame because a multiplicity of deities are indeed being worshipped and this is giving rise to some degree of Cognitive Dissonance in the western disciples.

Vajrayana is secret because it was meant to be a powerful tool for highly advanced Bodhisattvas, it was never meant to be used by newbees of Buddhism. It is powerful for those qualified and damaging for those unqualified. Actual the conferring of tantric teachings to improper spiritual vessels (who are not qualified) is said to contribute to the degeneration of the Vajrayana. (HH the Dalai Lama pointed this out different times.) So for me it is like this: the problem is not the Vajrayana or secrecy but the ignorance with respect to who is qualified to give such empowerments and who is qualified to receive them and to practice it. Je Tsongkhapa has restricted Tantric teachings to only very experienced disciples who were well founded in the Sutras and the studies of the Mahayana.

Maybe that plus the overlay of Bon and Hinduism right enough.

Quite complex all of this. I think Prof. John Powers book on Tibetan Buddhism and Bön is very helpful for a better understanding but also Alex Berzin has papers about this on his website if you wish to explore this deeper. Both are scholars and Buddhists.

I'm going back to the simplicity of the Dhammapada and the original Pali texts.

Very good. All the best for your spiritual path.

very best, tenzin



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2011 10:59PM by Tenzin Peljor.

to correct myself:
"I am sorry but I get about 40 emails a day" should be read: "at times I get about 40 emails day" because its not always like this ...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/17/2011 12:47AM by Tenzin Peljor.

It really sounds as if Highest Yoga Tantra is being touted as 'only for the intelligent/ highly realised etc etc'
This really does smack of the emperor's new clothes! In that story, the emperor was taken in by a charlatan who convinced him he was wearing cloth of finest silk, but actually there was nothing there.
That's how I felt in the HYT empowerment.
Anyhow, I'm outta here.
All the best

Stephen Butterfield, who did ngondro and the other practices for yoga tantra under Chogyam Trungpa's tutelage summed it up in his memoir, The Double Mirror

Butterfield and others were greatly attracted to Trungpa via his book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.

But the result when living in Trungpa's rank ordered world, with its ever higher levels of rank, practice, was, as Butterfield put it, the promise of being freed from craving, but the very methods used by Trungpa and the setting he created merely served inculcate yet more cravings in aspirants.

Or as an analogy, you go to a healer to get rid of some pimples. But the the healer runs a clinic environment that is full of bedbugs.

If you're lucky you may get rid of your pimples, but because you visited this healer, you now and you become ridden with a new problem--the bedbugs.

Or, if you're unfortunate....HIV.

This is an example of crazy tantric thinking....Trungpa drank copious amounts of alcohol, but because he 'said the magic words' over it, it was supposedly transformed into a 'pure substance'.

So , he dies of cirrhosis, amongst other things. the explanation that is given is...'he couldn't have been practising purely' (a direct NKT teacher quote)...oh for goodness sake! You cannae change the laws of physics (or chemistry) captain! (bad Trekkie quote!)

Dear Stoic, you nailed it. And, here is a morsel from Professor Dodds. On page 242 he wrote of the process of assigning divine status to rulers, even to athletes and writes



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So far as they have religious meaning for the individual, ruler-cult and its analogues, ancient or modern are primarily, I take it, expressions of helpless dependence; he who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal

(Corboy)And that includes gurus, tulkus, rinpoches, anyone considered infallible or the source of every desperate hope.

Dodds wrote that during and shortly after the conquests of Alexander, Greek science and culture reached a height that would not be reached again until the sixteenth century. For in the second century, this almost open society a society on the verge of creating a scientific method, pulled back. There was too great a gap in culture and education and social contact between the intellectual elite and the vast majority of persons.

"We have noticed evidence that in third century Athens a skepticism once confined to the intellectuals had begun to infect the general popluation; the same thing was later to happen at Rome. But after the third century a different kind of interaction shows itself: with the appearance of a pseudo scientific literature, mostly pseudonymous and often claiming to be based on divine revelation, which took up the ancient superstitions of the East or the more recent phantasies of the Hellenistic masses, dressed them in trappings borrowed from Greek science or Greek philosophy, and won for them the acceptance of a large part of the educated class. Assimilation henceforth works both ways; while rationalism of a limited and negative kind (eg today its the fad for deconstruction, relativism and post modernism in the form of reality is what you agree it is or what you think it to be or feel it to be-Corboy) continues to spread from the above and ddownwards, anti rationalism spreads from below and upwards and eventually wins the day. (Corboy interjection BNP gaining seats in the European Parliament. Parents refusing to get their kids immunized despite Wakefield being unmasked as an utter fraud and millions of dollars of rearch finding no statistically significant link between autism and vaccines. Presidents of the US witholding research monies from stem cell research and refusing to recognize global warming, crying in the night about the sanctity of stem cells while sending hundreds and thousands of young persons to be maimed in body and soul in search for non existant weapons of mass destruction WMD).

Dodds tells us more:


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"Astrology is the most familiar example. It has been said that it "fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people." But the comparison does nto quite fit the facts, so far as they are known. Invented in Babylonia, it spread to Egypt, where Herodotus appears to have met with it. In the Fourth Century BCE Eudoxus reported its existence in Babylonia, along with the achievements of Babylonian astronomy but he viewed it with skepticism. and there is no evidence that it (astrology) was taken up, although in the Phaedrus myth, Plato amused himself by playing his own variation on an astrological theme.

(Corboy Note that Eudoxus can see astrology as different from astronomy. This distinction was not made again until Johannes Kepler stated to Giordano Bruno that he, Kepler was using mathematics for the purposes of astronomy, not astrology, when presenting his theory of elliptical planetary orbits. Kepler did cast horoscopes, but, like Eudoxus could make a distinction between mathematics used for scientific astronomy vs when used for astrology-see Francis Yates Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition)

Dodds then notes a change


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About 280 BCE more detailed information on astrology was made available to Greek readers by the writings of the Babylonian priest, Barossus without (it would seeem) causing any great excitement. The real vogue for astrology seems to start in the second century BCE, when a number of popular manuals, especially one composed in the name of an imaginary Pharaoh, the Revealations of Nechepso and Petosiris begin to circulate widely, and practicing astrologers appear as far afield as Rome. Why did (astrology) occur then and not sooner? The idea was by then no novelty, and the intellectual ground for its reception had long been prepared by the astral theology which was taught alike by Platonists, Aristotelians and Stoics, though Epicurus warned the world of its dangers.
One may guess that astrology's spread was favored by political conditons. In the troubled half century that preceded the Roman conquest of Greece, it was particularly important to know what was going to happen. One may guess also that the Babylonian Greek who occuppied the Chair of Zeno encouraged a sort of 'trahison de clercs' (the Stoa had already used its influence to kill the heliocentric hypothesis of Aristarchus which, if accepted, would have upset the foundations of both astrology and the Stoic religion)

"But behind such immediate causes we may suspect something deeper and less conscious; for a century or more, the individual had been face to face with his own intellectual freedom and now he turned tail and bolted from the horrid prospect--better the rigid determinism of astrological Fate than the terrifying burden of daily responsibility.

Rational men like Panaetius and Cicero tried to check this retreat by argument, as Plotinus was to do later, but without perceptible effect; certain motives are beyond the reach of argument.

Dodds then tells us another development from this time.

"Besides astrology, the second century BCE saw the development of another irrational doctrine which deeply influenced the thought of later antiquity and of the whole Middle Ages--the theory of occult properties or forces immanent in animals, plants, and precious stones. Though its beginnings areprobably much older, this was first systematically set forth by one Bolus of Mendes, called 'the Democritian' who appears to have written about 200 BCE. His system was closely linked to magical medicine and with alchemy; it was soon combined with astrology to which it formed a convenient supplement. The awkward thing about the stars had always been their inaccessibility alike to prayer and to magic. But if each planet had its representative in the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, linked to it by an occult sympathy, as was now asserted, one could get at them magically by manipulating these earthly counterparts.,,,from the first century BCE onwards, Bolus begins to be quoted as a scientific authority comparable in status with Aristotle and Theophrastus, and his doctrines became incorporated into the generally accepted world view.

Dodds 247

[books.google.com]


In his introduction to The Greeks and the Irrational, Dodds tells his readers how he was at the British Museum, in the gallery housing the Parthenon sculptures.

It appears that Professor Dodds had a quality that made him approachable. Because he described how, in that gallery, he was approached.

"..a young man came up to me and said, with a worried air, "I know it's an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff does not move me one bit"

Dodds tells the reader, 'I said that was very interesting: could he define at all the reasons for his lack of response?

The younger man reflected for awhile, and said, "Well, its all so terribly rational, if you know what I mean."

Dodds continued in the introduction, 'I thought I did know. The young man was only saying what has been said more articulately by Roger Fry and others. To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such man as Modigliani and Henry Moore, the art of the Greeks, and Greek culture in general, is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience."

Dodds went on to demonstrate the extent to which Greek literature and art and culture was actually permeated with an awareness of mystery and of forces far beyond what could be accounted for by logic and introspection--and how the Greek atttitude changed over time.

But what worried Dodds most deeply was that by the end of the 4th century BCE, the Greeks had come close to creating an open society (in Popper's sense) had come close to a full on experimental-scientific method--but society lost its nerve and pulled back.

The Stoics in Athens arranged for the theory of Aristarchus to be condemned--the Stoics taught that the Sun was the visible image of divinity, not one among many stars.

Heresy trials in which subversive thinkers were exiled or made to recant appeared following the defeat of Athens. Socrates, teacher of enlightened self interest, stood his own teaching on its head by staying put, and choosing suicide despite many arrangements made by friends by which he, like others could have fled.

And Dodds tells us how suddenly, following the defeat of Athens, we find archeological evidence of an upsurge in magic--large quantities of curse tablets are found in Attica in tombs dated to this post war period.

Dodds writes:

"(With the foundation of the Lyceum(Aristotle) in 335 BCE, down to the end of the second century BCE this period witnessed the transformation of Greek science from an untidy jumble of isolated observations mixed with a priori guesses into a system of methodical disciplines.In the more abstract sciences, mathematics and astronomy, it reached a level that was not to be attained again before the 16th Century and it made the first organized attempt at research in many other fields, botany, zoology, geography, the history of language, literature, and many human insitutions. Nor was it only in science that the time was adventurous and creative. It is as if the sudden widening of spatial horizon that followed Alexander's conquests had widened at the same time, all the horizons of the mind. Despite the lack of political freedom, the society of the third century BCE was in many ways the nearest approach to an "open" society the world had yet seen. ..for the first time in Greek history, it did not matter where a man had come from or what his ancestry was...along with this levelling out of local determinants, this freedom of movement in space, there went an analogous levelling out of temporal determinents, a new freedom for the mind to (self consciously)
choose to travel backwards in time, and choose at will from the past experience of men those elements which it could best assimilate and expoit. The individual began consciously to use the tradition instead of being used by it. This is most obvious in the Hellenistic poets whose position in this respect was like poets and artists today. ..the rationalized psychology of Aristotle was matched by a rationalized religion.

(Dodds Greeks and the Irrational, page 236-40.

Ponder this. One could choose whether a particular tradition or literary style was appealing for a particular purpose. One could choose a method that was 'modern' or 'antique' or 'archaic', the way we can self consciously assert agency in relation to language and subject matter today. The poets who wrote Homeric material were inmates of thier method. Hundreds of years later, one could choose whether to imitiate thier style or go for something more modern. One had the ablity to look at ones subject matter objectively.

And that meant that in this age, Greeks who had a certain educational level were faced with a staggering number of new choices. And, in a few decades, had fled from them back into the child's world of magical thought.

Well, you know the 2 famous quotes...

If God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent him
and
man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains

Hope i got the wording right....

Despite Trungpa Rinpoche's more infamous qualities, his advice remains some of the most profound I have heard.

Cutting through spiritual materialism--what a concept.

I feel it's entirely possible that if I had met Trungpa Rinpoche, I might have been turned off by the other stuff and not been able to appreciate his advice. So in a way, it was a blessing to have it in book form, and only in book form ;)

Or even better, to get it via the wonderful Pema Chodron's interpretation.

But what a great and accurate concept--that people must be wary of getting hung up on the trappings of spirituality, or else those trappings just become another form of materialism.

I ponder this dilemma often--how important is the messenger? This discussion can run the gamut from, "Do we use life-saving information gathered in the Nazi medical experiments" to "How do you deal with the fact that someone you love and respect has flaws?"

Hi Sile,
You pose an interesting question.
I guess for me it depends on the flaws in question. at some point they become hypocrisy. I just can't respect another human being who is asking me to see them as a buddha - a teacher, yes, but a buddha, no.