Now this seminar this weekend concerns a subject which is so alien from anything that we understand
 in the West that it may stretch your skulls a little. I don't know. But as Westerners face
 certain forms of Mahayana Buddhism from the outside, they see what reminds them of total
 irrationality and superstition. And this in particular applies to a form of Buddhism which
 has several names and they're all, well it's really one form of Buddhism but it's named
 differently, and they are all sub-schools of Mahayana. It's variously known as Vajrayana,
 Tantrayana or Mantrayana. You remember the word yana means a course basically, sometimes
 a vehicle. And Buddhism is fundamentally likened to a vehicle or something like a raft which
 you use for crossing a river. Or let's say you want to get in at a door and you have
 to knock and you need a brick to knock on the door with, so you pick up the brick and
 bang on the door. That's a yana. It's an instrument, an expedient, a means, a technique,
 a method. And the Buddha's doctrine is called in Sanskrit the dharma, and dharma has a whole
 multiplicity of meanings but one of them is method. Although it's usually translated law
 in English this is not a good translation. So the yana, the whole idea of a yana is related
 to the idea of upaya which I have previously explained to you. U-P-A-Y-A meaning skillful
 means what we would call a pedagogical device or sort of trick because upaya in politics
 means cunning. But in religion or philosophy it means the skill of a teacher and getting
 something across to a student. And so the whole essence of upaya is really surprise.
 Because everybody wants a surprise but you can't surprise yourself because you know in
 advance what you're going to do. When you have hiccups then indeed you surprise yourself
 because you didn't intend to. And upaya and surprise is deeply connected with the whole
 inner meaning of Buddhism. Life has to surprise itself because if it doesn't you don't know
 you're there. Because you only know existence to the degree that there is a balance between
 knowing and not knowing. See? So there must be the surprise. There must always be something
 in you in other words that is sort of spiritual hiccups that happens unbeknownst. So a an
 upaya is a method of the teacher producing the surprise of enlightenment in the student
 and he uses a yana that is to say a vehicle or a course just like we say we give a course
 in philosophy or semantics or chemistry or something. And so the course then is the the
 Mahayana the great course which includes ever so many different upayas or different ways
 the Hinayana the little course which has only a few ways. Now in the Hinayana they are very
 tough-minded and they stick to the notion that all enlightenment depends on your own
 effort. The Buddha is supposed to have said just before he died, "Be you lamps unto yourselves.
 Be you a refuge unto yourselves. Take to yourselves no other refuge." And in Japanese classification
 of Buddhist schools they have two that are respectively called Jiriki and Tariki and
 they classify all schools of Buddhism under these headings. Ji means self, Riki means
 power. So there are ways of salvation or better more accurately liberation by your own power
 Jiriki and then Tariki are the ways by the power of another. That is to say liberation
 through what Christians would call grace rather than works. And it's fascinating how the problem
 of faith and works or grace and works turns up in Buddhism just as it does in Christianity.
 And it's really the same problem. You see in the history of Christianity there was a
 huge argument around 400 AD between a Welshman or a Celt by the name of Pelagius and Augustine
 of Hippo. And Pelagius was a kind of optimistic Britisher who believed in muddling through
 and playing the game and putting your nose to the grindstone and so on. And he believed
 that one's own will and effort could obey the commandments of God because he argued
 that God would not have given us any commandments unless we could have obeyed them. But Saint
 Augustine said that he missed the point entirely. That if he had read Saint Paul properly, especially
 the epistle to the Romans, he would have found out that God did not give us commandments
 in order that we should obey them, but in order to prove that we couldn't. That is to
 say that Saint Paul put it to convict us of sin. That the law in other words was a gimmick,
 an upiah. Nobody was ever expected to obey the law. The Ten Commandments summarizing
 the law. Especially "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all your heart, with all your
 soul and all your mind." Nobody can do that at all. And so even the greatest saints are
 always beating their breasts and confessing that they're abysmal sinners because they've
 realized that they can't live up to the commandments. So therefore Saint Paul taught that the law,
 he said, is a pedagogue to lead us to Christ. And you see a pedagogue has the same meaning
 as upiah. So what the law does is make you feel absolutely awful because you can't obey
 it or do anything about it. Now the Buddhists have come to an exactly similar conclusion
 in the course of time. Because the Buddha was apparently in his original teaching, tough-minded,
 and said, "Listen boys, you better discipline yourselves, see? And you get to work and you
 cut out women and drink and possessions and meditate and control your minds." Well everybody
 tried this. And of course they couldn't do it. A few people did. Only they dried up.
 They found that was a kind of a Pyrrhic victory. That what you gain by stopping your humanity
 and stopping your emotions isn't worth getting. It's like cutting off your head to cure the
 headache. So they realized that wasn't the way. But that was why Buddha suggested it,
 so that they'd find out. So then came in the new schools of Buddhism, which said that you
 must be liberated by tariki. And ta, as I said, means other power. That is to say the
 power of something in you that is not your ego. Just in the same way as your heart doesn't
 beat at the will of your ego. So in psychoanalysis, for example, we would say that the unconscious
 has to be worked on and that it will be watered and nourished and so on. And eventually the
 unconscious will produce your integration. This is Jungian language, not Freudian. And
 you depend on that. It's not you. Because of course integration means that you get the
 two aspects of yourself together and acknowledge them both as you. The conscious and the unconscious,
 the power of the ego and the power of the natural organism, of the psyche. And so in
 every art one realizes there comes a point where your will is exhausted. You've tried
 everything to make something work and it won't work. And then to achieve the perfection of
 the art, something has to happen of itself, which we variously call grace, inspiration,
 or tariki. And the problem that everybody's always wanted to know is how to make that
 happen. Now you see, if we knew how to make it happen, it wouldn't be it. Because it would
 be something we were doing. And it would be therefore the old story of just simply an
 ego effort. And so we don't know how to make it happen. But if you just settle for that
 and say, "Well sorry, but there's nothing you can do about it." Everybody's just going
 to go home. And forget the whole thing and commit suicide. The thing is therefore, the
 state we call faith is the key. And faith means that we know it will happen. Only we've
 got to wait. Only don't wait too hard. Because that will be ego effort again and will stop
 it happening. So the thing is to learn to wait soft. That is to say in a state of openness.
 Well now, how do you do that? There are all sorts of upayas, you see, means that help
 one to do this. And one of them is this thing that I've been referring to as the Vajrayana.
 That means the diamond vehicle. The Tantrayana, that means the web vehicle. And the Mantrayana,
 which means the sound vehicle. Sound in the sense of incantation. I may as well begin
 with Mantrayana aspect of it. Because this is the most perplexing to us, from our point
 of view. And doesn't make any sense. That you know there is an age old belief in spells.
 And that certain formulae set in the right way will produce results. All of this descends
 philosophically so far as Asia is concerned. From the Hindu Upanishadic idea that the world
 is the creation of sound. The Hindus say that in the beginning was Vak, which is exactly
 the same thing as saying in the beginning was the word. As in the Gospel of St. John.
 But that doesn't mean the orders, like give him the word. The Vak means vibration. And
 so the name that is fundamentally Vak is the Sanskrit word Om. Because when you say Om,
 you begin at the back of your throat with O, and you finish at your lips. And so you
 take in the whole range of sound. And so this word Om is called the Pranava. And it is the
 holiest of all names. And so you can chant Om, you know, and really stir up things. And
 so all Hindus and Buddhists alike use this word Om. And we'll use it to set going a meditative
 state. This is very easy to do because it's awfully easy to concentrate on sound. It's
 much more difficult to keep your eyes still. You flicker. Because your eyes tend constantly
 to -- it's natural for the eyes to rove over things. And you get -- have difficulty in
 stopping your eyes from scanning. But sound is very easy to concentrate on. And the whole
 point of a mantra is it's a method of digging sound. I hope you know what I mean by that,
 because I purposely used a very slangy popular word to dig. That means get right down into.
 So that you realize that the flow, the vibration of sound, is a way in which you experience
 basic existence, being here. And you can learn everything from it. Because sound is not a
 constant. It comes and it goes. It's on and off. You only hear it because it is vibrating.
 And so herein is the lesson that life is on and off, black and white, life and death,
 inside and outside, knowing and not knowing. They're all in the vibration. But it's easy
 to explain that in words. But to understand it in your bones, to feel it, you have to
 learn how to listen to a sound. So then they invented this way of making chanting sounds.
 Now there are various ways in which this is understood by people in Asia. Incidentally,
 I should say that this, as a form of Buddhism, what I'm calling Vagra Yana, the whole movement,
 sprung up in about the ninth century AD. And its geographical distribution is from North
 India into Tibet, China, and Japan, and Mongolia. And it is highly characteristic of Tibetan
 Buddhism. So then, let's say there are various ways of understanding it. The word, the formulas
 used for mantra, are understood by the ignorant as being shortcuts. Instead of saying the
 whole sutra, the whole sutra is summed up in the formula, "Om Mani Padme Hum." And you
 can say that, that'll do. You're a poor weak slob. And out of infinite compassion, the
 bodhisattvas have arranged to get you into nirvana, instead of going through all the
 heroic efforts of those saints and sages and meditation practices. You can just say, "Om
 Mani Padme Hum." And in fact, you don't even need to say it. You can have it printed on
 paper and enclosed in a silver box on the end of a stick. And all you have to do is
 rotate the thing. So the popular idea of this is the shortcut. The next idea of it is the
 one I've been sort of talking about, which is that you concentrate on these formulae,
 on these sounds. And there's a third interpretation, which is, you might call the esoteric interpretation,
 which was originally, as far as I know, the first person to really bring this up was Vasubandhu,
 whom I told you about last week, who lived, oh, shortly before 400. And he said the whole
 point of mantra is that they don't mean anything at all. And that the word "om" is completely
 meaningless. And that all these various different kinds of incantations are totally senseless.
 And the idea of repeating them is to liberate yourself from the notion that the universe
 means anything. All those forms of Buddhism which are associated with the Vajrayana are
 what is called Tantric. And Tantric, the word basically means web structure, warp and woof.
 So now, Tantra in Hindu context is a discipline that is sometimes called the fifth Veda. There
 are four Vedas, which are basic holy scriptures of Hinduism. The fifth Veda is, as it were,
 the esoteric one. Now, according to the four Vedas, in order to be liberated, you have
 to give up physical life. That is to say, you must not eat meat, you must not have sexual
 intercourse, you must not take alcohol or any kind of consciousness-changing substance.
 There are various other things, I forget them all. But in Tantra, the whole idea is liberation
 through the forbidden things. That is to say, liberation in the world, belonging to the
 world, participating in the world. And sometimes it is therefore called the left-hand path.
 Once there's a Hindu story, you know, that the Brahma was asked the question, "Who will
 gain to union with you first, he who loves you or he who hates you?" And Brahma replied,
 "He who hates me, because he will think of me more often." So, you can, in other words,
 attain to liberation by one of two ways. One is by complete altruism, and the other is
 by total selfishness. And the moral of the whole thing is, that if you are completely
 and consistently selfish, you will discover that your self is the other. That you don't
 really experience your self at all, except in terms of others. When you say, "I love
 myself," what do you mean? You mean you love being alive. And when you push it, you see,
 this is the point, to push it to an extreme. So, the left-hand path is a very dangerous
 way of going about things, because nobody approves of it. I was discussing this morning
 with my father, that sometime in the distant past, we had witnessed a comedy, wherein the
 stage was set of a man asleep in bed, in a highly Victorian bedroom, with all kinds of
 fancy furniture and terrible stuff, you know. And the alarm clock goes off, and he wakes
 up in a total rage. He immediately picks up his shoe and smashes the alarm clock. He then
 gets out of bed in fury. He rips the sheets to pieces, overturns the bed, finds a hammer
 somewhere and starts breaking up all the crockery, the windows, and still the place is a total
 demolition. Finally, there is left in one corner, one of those enormous standard lamps,
 you know, with all this sort of huge gauze on it. And he takes several runs at this,
 and finally he picks it up and he flings it in the air, and as it comes down, it bounces.
 It is made of rubber. And this is the flip, you see, that... And that's the surprise I
 was talking about in the beginning. Satori, sudden awakening, it bounced. You know, you
 thought you were going to crash and you bounced. And you see, this is the whole thing about
 Buddhism. We all think we're going to crash. And it must seem that way, because otherwise
 it won't be a surprise to bounce. So, if, in other words, you press your selfishness
 and you go into this whole question of, "What do I really want? Supposing I could have it,
 supposing I have all the money, anything I can think of, what is it I'm after?" And you
 explore all the sensations you can imagine, all the delights of pleasure, all the ecstasies,
 all the drunks, all the orgasms, all the... Anything you can think of, go right through
 to the end of it. What is it you're looking for? And you say, "Oh, I want to be flipped.
 You know, I want to be let out of myself." Well, when you're let out of yourself, that's
 altruism. He that would save his life shall lose it. And he that loses his life, or looses
 his life, shall find it. You go one way or the other and it all comes to the same thing.
 All right, so, in the same way, take the path of meditative discipline on concentration,
 where somebody is sitting there with a stick and says, "You attend, see, I'm the master."
 You follow that way. See what you want to get out of that? Try and get rid of yourself.
 That's one way of doing it. And there's certain kind of people who ought to take it that way.
 They want to. They don't know they're here unless they hurt. And that's the right way
 for them. We shouldn't condemn it. It's just like, there are certain kinds of plants that
 grow this way, there are certain kinds of plants that grow this way, and so there are
 many types. On the other hand, there's the mantra game, where people say, "Oh, this is
 so simple to do, you really don't have to chant it at all. It's just the shortest formula,
 and it's this kind of cut." And then they get going into this thing and they get fascinated,
 singing "Om Mani Padme Hum." So something like that. Or like those Pure Land Buddhists
 in Japan, "Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida Butsu, Namo Amida
 Butsu." And it eventually comes, "Namandana, namandana, namandana, namandana, namandana,
 namandana, namandana, namandana, namandana, namandana, namandana, namandana, namandana,
 namandana." And you really get with it. And when you get with it, you suddenly realize
 it's doing you. Now what's the difference between you and it? Self and other. Self power,
 other power, jiriki, tariki. It's all one. Only you play it isn't. Because you have to
 do that. I say "have to," that's not quite the right word. You do that in order to create
 the sensation of existence. Which is called "Now You See It."
 I want to draw your attention to the fact that a very vivid Tibetan painting has a curious
 way of creating a state of mind, if you really start looking at it, that I can only call
 psychedelic. It's, I don't know anything else quite like it. As you get into the detail
 of it. It's like this. Let's suppose that you look at some object and instead of the
 thing becoming fuzzy and fading out, it always gets more detailed, more clear, more alive.
 And you suddenly find out that what you thought was just a bunch of blur was sixteen thousand
 maggots with bright eyes on them. And that every eye was a deep jewel. And you go down
 into these deep jewel like eyes and you find inside them that there are cross-legged Buddhas
 with Orioles round them. And necklaces of human heads. And then you start looking at
 those and by Jove in every eye on one of those human heads you look inside it and there's
 another Buddha sitting there. See? And you go on like that forever and ever and ever
 in myriad detail. See? But now that is a state of consciousness which these artists are trying
 to represent. It is the idea of the dharmadhatu which I explained in last seminar. That is
 to say the net of jewels where every jewel reflects all the other jewels and therefore
 naturally contains the reflection of all the other jewels in each other jewel that
 it reflects. You see? The infinite interrelatedness or they call it mutual penetration of everything
 in the universe. And so this is an art form designed to get you into the mood to understand
 that by looking at it. It is absolute total fascination. But what I was trying to describe
 to you about the nature of these art forms where you look at the details and then you
 suddenly discover that behind the details there are millions more details. And you never
 fuzz out. You find in other words that the possibility to see down into something goes
 on forever and ever. Now then, that is the visual equivalent of hearing when you work
 with mantras, with these formal chants. To get to hear sound in such a way that just
 as you could say that a visual field is rich in detail like these paintings are, like a
 piece of Hindu beautiful silk weaving which is rich with gold and flowers and you see
 detail in that. Now you can hear sound in the same way and that's what Hindu music is
 playing with. And so when you get down into that you see, you are what I would call truly
 listening in to the universe. Because eventually if you listen to sound that way or you look
 at form that way, you discover its secrets. This is just another way of investigation
 of life comparable to our scientific investigation with microscopes and chemical analysis and
 this that and the other. But it's a different road. Scientific investigation does what we
 call looking out into matter, into the physical world. This is going in the opposite direction
 but it's all the same thing. It's the same continuum. But it's going into the nature
 of your feeling of it. That is to say into the center of awareness, into the self. And
 what these, all these drawings are from various points of view is they're drawings of your
 own interior world. Looked at in this way under the influence of the traditions of a
 indeed a particular culture which is not our culture and which therefore strikes us as
 a little strange. But whenever you look at a work of art and you feel, "Gee isn't that
 weird?" It's not the way people look. You know for people's first impression of Chinese
 art say, they perhaps don't meet Tibetans so easily, is that it's well everything's
 got curls on it. It wiggles. It's a very strange. And that the the reason for that
 is that they are showing you a vision of the universe which you haven't looked at. And
 so it looks odd to you. And what you mean by odd is well it curls where it shouldn't.
 Or I don't see things that way. I don't see them with that extra flip on them. No
 indeed you don't. Because the way you see things is what you call ordinary and what
 you're used to. And as you know we when we see things we ignore. We screen out certain
 aspects of things which we don't notice. And therefore by studying other people's art forms
 we are taught to see things that we wouldn't ordinarily notice. So that when you become
 used to Chinese or Tibetan painting you say, "Why of course that's the way the world is
 also." So the feeling of the strange of the we say the we use the word exotic. And that
 means looking a thing looks exotic when you look at it from somebody else's point of view.
 And eventually you get used to it. So if you move into a state of consciousness such as
 I've been trying to describe that is not the usual kind of state of consciousness you say
 it's kind of weird isn't it? And if you aren't prepared for that you might be afraid of it.
 And say, "Am I going mad? Am I going out of my mind?" Yes you are. You're going out of
 your set ordinary set of mind. But you're going into just another aspect of mind. And
 at first it always feels weird. That's why people have difficulty in meditation. When
 they really start moving they say, "Well I'm going to go out of my mind if I think about
 that." You know all those famous stories about people who invented computers and went mad?
 Or who thought about the nature of thought and absolutely were never heard from again?
 There's a certain fear in other words of the loss of one's own ego of the sort of regular
 world where conventions go on, where the familiar gestures are made so that you feel at home
 and you get into other dimensions of awareness where the gestures are different. The nerves
 are doing something else. Or in Eden you don't know whether they're even nerves anymore.
 They may be Adi Buddhas and all these charming girls who you see in these things and you
 don't know who they are. Some kind of weird Tibetan fantasy. You say, "Uh-oh." You get
 cultural shock. Stay away from that. But it isn't cultural shock with respect to some
 other people. It's cultural shock with respect to your own inner life. In other words that
 we all have in us levels of vibration which we are not used to, not familiar with, and
 therefore are scared of. So this particular kind of Buddhism, Vajrayana, is a rather adventurous,
 not to say dangerous, exploration of man's inner consciousness, depicting it in an elaborate
 symbolism which although to a Westerner used to Christian symbolism, looks as if it were
 a drawing of some heaven somewhere, of potentates seated on thrones and receiving homage and
 all that political bit. All these are quite definitely, I'm not making this up, all these
 are quite definitely to be understood as exteriorizations of your own being. In other words, let us
 suppose that we looked on a microscope slide at the cross-section of a spinal column or
 of an area of the brain. This would show us certain designs, certain patterns, and they
 would be rather central to you. Now, these are equivalent to those, but they are moving
 in a different direction, and you have to understand now the difference between what
 is called the material body and the subtle body. The rupa, actually that means the formal
 body, as I explained last, second seminar. The word rupa in Sanskrit, which is applied
 to the material world, means the world of form, the world seen in a certain form, a
 form to which we are accustomed. So you have a formal body, which is you as you appear
 to any other objective observer. Then you have a subtle body, which is the way you are
 as you feel to yourself. In other words, supposing you've been on a drunk and you wake up with
 a headache and it feels that your head is so big, well that's the shape of your subtle
 body. Spiegelberg used to show a wonderful cartoon of Corky in the comics, looking at
 a plane going over, which was doing some stunts, and it made his neck grow longer and longer
 until it all got tied in knots while watching the plane. That was the shape of Corky's
 subtle body, which is called his linga sharira in Sanskrit, as opposed to sthula sharira,
 which is your gross body, that means more dense. Now, so when you get the drawing of
 the microscope slide, of say a cross-section of the spine or something that is quite fundamental
 to the structure of nervous system, you've got a design of the gross body. But when you
 start looking into the other direction of things, which is how you feel, and you really
 go into feeling, to what sound is, to what touch is, to what emotion is, and you trace
 the senses back along their channels till you get to the mano vijnana, which is the
 central sense behind each separate sense, and you find that it isn't just kind of a
 goo, it's an incredibly detailed experience. And then you draw pictures like this to represent
 what you found. We would draw them in a different way, if we genuinely made this inquiry ourselves,
 because we have different traditions. And we would find ourselves, goodness only knows
 what we'd be drawing. But we would make, we would be making things like the stained glass
 windows in Chartres Cathedral, you see, and crucifixes, because when you investigate sensation,
 you go down into it, and you feel it getting more and more intense, more and more intense,
 more, more, more. You see, right down, how much can you stand? Well, there's Jesus on
 the cross. See? Cover it with jewels. Make it gorgeous. So all these things you see are
 investigations of the basic sensation of being alive. And people are curious about that.
 You know, where are we? What's it all about? Well, the only way is to look and see. So
 if you want to find out what you mean by meaning, by asking a question, by being conscious,
 by being here, well, you have to meditate. And meditation, as not meditating on something,
 like thinking it out in an intellectual way, it is looking more closely at what you're
 asking the question about. So you could do that externally, with a microscope, with chemical
 analysis, and so on. That way is valid. But it has to be balanced by the internal way,
 going down into your own sensation, and your own consciousness. And the point that I'm
 going to make again, in another way that I made this morning, is that this isn't something
 you're supposed to do. That is to say, isn't a chore, it isn't your solemn duty, unless
 you want to come on, that's the sort of person you ought to be. This is a delight. To, you
 know, get into that out of total fascination, and joy, and love, of whatever it is that
 you are, and everybody else's. So that this is a different spirit of religion than that
 to which we are normally accustomed. Instead of saying, which I suppose is an attitude
 characteristic of what you might call a patrist, that's distinct from the matrist culture,
 go and read your Bible. Get down on your knees and repent, you see. We feel pretty spooked
 by that attitude. This one says instead, pssst, I've got something to show you. Look in here.
 You all know what all this is about? You watch. Take a look. You look in there and you say,
 oh no, it can't really be like that. You look at this other guy who was the guru, you see.
 He says, it's all right, don't be afraid. Oh, that's not possible. Yeah, you know. And
 this is the attitude. And I don't know how to suggest it except by this sort of drama.
 Of the two different approaches. So this then is the, as near as I can get to describing
 it, the inner meaning of Tantra, of an attitude which is common to both Hinduism and Buddhism.
 They say Tantra. It means not only the web, the warp and the woof, where you can't have
 yes without no. You can't have this direction without having this, that direction, because
 this direction, to have it there, needs this other one to hang on to. But he says, no,
 look here. I've got to have something to hang on to too. So we hang on to each other and
 there, so there we are. See? That's the nature of a web. And so, Tantra means the comprehension
 of the unity of opposites, of the good and the bad, of life and death, of love and hate,
 of all extremes in the whole spectrum of our emotions, our sensations, everything. In a
 sense, this is not something for children, because you have to be reliable to get into
 this, because otherwise you go berserk. You wouldn't pay any respect to any rules or anything
 if you didn't have a mature attitude before getting mixed up in this, because you suddenly
 see anything and everything goes. There is no way of being wrong, because you are it,
 whatever there is, forever and ever and ever, and that's so. You can die, fantastic, forget
 everything altogether, blow right out, come back, because the light is the other side
 of the darkness. Be all new again, but it's all you, just as it was before, because you
 do the same patterns, same kind of stars, same kind of physical properties, the same
 dance, blot it out, it starts again, just like the physical forces in things, you see,
 repeat their fundamental laws and patterns. It's exactly the same with the inner world
 I'm talking about. Investigating the outer world, investigating the inner world, it's
 all one, and that's you. So, the Buddhist enlightenment is simply to know that secret,
 and that's what it means really, finally, to grow up. You see, again, just as I said,
 that we find in our own preachers and religious people an attitude of against lifeness, and
 we get a funny feeling about that, that they're full of reprimands and they're full of, there's
 a trap, you see, and they have the young people's fellowship, as I explained, to suck you into
 this trap. It's exactly the same thing exists here. In particular, I think one of the basic
 tantric texts is called Saraha, the Treasury of Songs, by Professor Gunter of the University
 of Saskatchewan. Saraha was a tantric teacher living probably in the area of Bengal about
 1000 AD. He is making a critique of both the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy. So he says,
 "The Brahmins, who do not know the truth, recite the four Vedas in vain. With earth
 and water and kusha grass they make preparations, and seated at home they kindle fire, and from
 the senseless offerings that they make they burn their eyes with the pungent smoke. In
 lordly garb with one staff or three they think themselves wise with their Brahmanical law.
 Vainly is the world enslaved by their vanity. They do not know that the Dharma is the same
 as the non-Dharma. With ashes these masters smear their bodies, and on their heads they
 wear matted hair. Seated within the house they kindle lamps, seated in a corner they
 tinkle bells. They adopt a posture and fix their eyes, whispering in ears and deceiving
 folk, teaching widows and bald-headed nuns and such like, initiating them as they take
 their fee. The giant monks mock the way with their appearance, with their long nails and
 their filthy clothes, or else naked and with disheveled hair, enslaving themselves with
 their doctrine of liberation. If by nakedness one is released, then dogs and jackals must
 be so. If from absence of hair there comes perfection, then the hips of maidens must
 be so. If from having a tail there comes release, then for the peacock and yak it must be so.
 If wisdom consists in eating just what one finds, then for elephant and horse it must
 be so. For these giant monks there is no release, Saraha says. Deprived of the truth of happiness,
 they do but afflict their own bodies. Then there are the novices and bhikshu, that means
 a Buddhist monk, with the teaching of the old school. That's not the same as old school
 Thai, it means the old school of Theravada Buddhism. With the teaching of the old school
 who renounced the world to be monks, some are seen sitting and reading the scriptures.
 Some wither away in their concentration on thought. Others have recourse to the Mahayana.
 This is the doctrine which expounds the original text, they say. Others just meditate on mandala
 circles. Others strive to define the fourth stage of bliss. With such investigating, they
 fall from the way. Some would envisage it as space. Others endow it with the nature
 of voidness, and thus they are generally in disagreement. Whoever deprived of the innate,
 that's what you really are, seeks nirvana, can in no wise acquire the absolute truth.
 Whoever is intent on anything else, how may he gain release? Will one gain release abiding
 in meditation? What's the use of lamps? What's the use of offerings? What's to be done by
 reliance on mantras? What's the use of austerities? What's the use of going on pilgrimage? Is
 release achieved by bathing in water? Abandon such false attachments and renounce such illusion.
 [end]


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