buddhism

Viewed from Dzogchen, tantra’s attempts to bring about enlightenment are comical. It’s like a school of sharks scheming about how to get wet.

That doesn’t make tantra useless, however. It can be reinterpreted as practical methods for accomplishing practical ends.

Compassion is about having good intentions. Tantra is not interested in that. Good intentions pave the road to mediocrity, self-righteousness, and irrelevance. Tantra cares about effective action, not socially-acceptable sentiments.

Because they are methods, the visionary and objective worldviews have functions . A main function of Tantric pure vision is to produce “divine pride”—the confidence, based on direct experience, that we are actually Buddhas. A main function of the objective worldview is to support practical activity in the physical world.

Buddhism is unique, as far as I know, in insisting that the kind of answers we want cannot be had, anywhere. Emptiness—inherent uncertainty—is at the heart of Buddhism. For this reason, Buddhism is sometimes described as “The Way of Disappointment.” If we follow it sincerely, Buddhism repeatedly crushes our hope that somehow it will satisfy our lon... See more

From the Dzogchen perspective, tantra is a bunch of cool things for Buddhas to do .

If panic attacks are real, and people can be coached to not experience them, why is it so controversial to assert that people can learn to induce the opposite of a panic attack? Furthermore, why isn’t there a secular word for such a concept?

For some reason, the notion of others being happy seems to trigger a “tall poppy” syndrome among the unhappy, as if there were only so much happiness to go around. Even Zerfas, when he tried to explain his early experiences to friends, found that they were “either skeptical or concerned,” which made him not want to talk about it. I, too, avoided te... See more

For Buddhism, there is, actually, only one big-T Truth: the non-duality of form and emptiness.

Buddhism is pragmatic. It is a religion of methods , not of Truth. The methods are ways of approaching enlightenment.