7/29/2019 Great Misunderstanding Surrounds the Many Deities of
Buddhist Tantra
1/2
Great misunderstanding surrounds the many deities of Buddhist
tantra. On the surface, the veneration
of tantric deities looks like polytheism. And it's easy to
assume that a "goddess of mercy," for example, is
someone you pray to when you need mercy. There are folk
practices throughout Asia that employ the
deities in a similar way. But this is not how tantric Buddhism
understands the deities.
First, what is tantra? In Buddhism, tantra is the use of
rituals, symbolism and yoga practices to evoke
experiences that enable realization of enlightenment. The most
common practice of tantra is deity
identification, or realizing oneself as a deity.
Read more:Introduction to Buddhist Tantra
Of this, Lama Thubten Yeshe wrote,
"Tantric meditational deities should not be confused with what
different mythologies and religions
might mean when they speak of gods and goddesses. Here, the
deity we choose to identify with
represents the essential qualities of the fully awakened
experience latent within us. To use the language
of psychology, such a deity is an archetype of our own deepest
nature, our most profound level of
consciousness. In tantra we focus our attention on such an
archetypal image and identify with it in order
to arouse the deepest, most profound aspects of our being and
bring them into our present reality."
(Introduction to Tantra: A Vision of Totality[1987], p. 42)
Often a teacher chooses the appropriate deity to match a
student's personality and spiritual barriers.
Tantra as a Path to Enlightenment
To understand how deity identification works, we need to review
some Buddhism basics.
All Buddhist teachings begin with theFour Noble Truths. The
Buddha taught that the frustrations and
dissatisfactions (dukkha) we feel about our lives is created by
grasping and greed, which in turn is a
result of our misunderstanding ourselves.
Mahayana Buddhism teaches that, in our deepest selves, we are
already perfect, complete and
enlightened. However, we don't understand ourselves this way.
Instead, we are caught up in the
delusion of ordinary appearances and conceptualizations to see
ourselves as limited, imperfect and
incomplete.
http://buddhism.about.com/od/vajrayanabuddhism/a/tantra101.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/vajrayanabuddhism/a/tantra101.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/vajrayanabuddhism/a/tantra101.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/fournobletruths.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/fournobletruths.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/fournobletruths.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/dukkhaexplain.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/dukkhaexplain.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/dukkhaexplain.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/dukkhaexplain.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/thefournobletruths/a/fournobletruths.htmhttp://buddhism.about.com/od/vajrayanabuddhism/a/tantra101.htm
