The shortcut, and why it is guarded

There is a sentence you hear early, usually from somebody who has just discovered the subject, and it is not wrong: tantra is the shortcut. The Geluk tradition says so itself. What almost nobody adds is the second half, which is that a shortcut is only a shortcut if you are already on the road.

This piece is about that second half. It contains no practice instructions and no mantras, for reasons that will become obvious.

What the claim actually is

Tantra, in the Geluk presentation, is a Mahayana system that uses buddha-figures as the path, aimed at full enlightenment for the sake of every being. The claim made for it is efficiency, not difference of destination. Sutra and tantra go to the same place. Tantra is held to get there sooner.

Alexander Berzin, working from Geluk sources, sets out four reasons the tradition gives. The practice is closer to the resultant stage: instead of building towards a buddha over an unimaginable stretch of time, the practitioner works with the appearance of a buddha now. Method and wisdom are more closely united, held in a single act of mind rather than alternated. And there are special bases and levels of mental activity available for understanding emptiness.

Taking the result as the path

That first reason is the one worth slowing down on, because it is the whole logic in miniature. In sutra practice you cultivate the causes of buddhahood and eventually get the result. In tantra you take the result itself as the path: you meditate on the appearance of a buddha's body as the basis for understanding emptiness.

This is not pretending. It is closer to the difference between studying a language and living in the country. Berzin's account of the four purities makes the mechanism explicit, and it is precise rather than mystical.

Why the Geluk tradition guards it

Now the part that gets left off the poster. Lama Yeshe, who spent his life explaining this tradition to Westerners and was not a man who enjoyed gatekeeping, was flat about what tantra requires.

Two things. First, an initiation. Not a book, not a video, not a weekend. Second, and this is the one people skip, a foundation in the three principal paths: renunciation, bodhichitta, and the wisdom of emptiness. His three introductory talks in California in 1980 were about those three, not about tantra at all. That was the point of them.

Put the two together and the shortcut looks different. It is fast for somebody who has already turned away from grasping at this life, who genuinely wants enlightenment for everybody rather than for themselves, and who has some real understanding of emptiness. For anybody else it is not a shortcut to anywhere. It is a technique without the thing the technique operates on.

The uncomfortable bit

Tantric iconography is full of things that look like exactly what a Western reader hopes or fears they are: wrathful figures, skulls, figures in sexual union, and a great deal of imagery about desire. The tradition does not pretend otherwise, and it does not apologise.

What it says is that these are working images with defined meanings, that the energy of desire is transformed rather than suppressed, and that the whole system is unusable and dangerous without the foundation above. Both halves of that are said equally loudly inside the tradition. Only the first half travels.

What this site does about it

The buddhas and deities page shows Guhyasamaja, Chakrasamvara, Vajrabhairava and Vajrayogini, because their images hang in public museums and looking at a painting is not a transgression. Each one is labelled as requiring initiation.

The mantras page carries nine mantras and deliberately excludes the Highest Yoga Tantra ones, and says so. This is not coyness or marketing. It is that printing a mantra whose practice requires an empowerment invites somebody to start in the middle, and the tradition regards starting in the middle as worse than not starting.

So what do you do instead

The same thing everybody who ever got anywhere did. The graded path, in order, which is the least glamorous answer available and the only honest one. Find a qualified teacher. Do the foundation. If you get there, the door is not locked and nobody is hiding the key.

The shortcut is real. It is just further along the road than the people selling it tend to mention.

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Terms used here are defined in the Lexicon, which links from the first mention of each in the text above.