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Tibetan Buddhism in the UKNot long ago I had a conversation with the assistant Human Resources director of an NHS Trust. She was defending a course running at her hospital which was designed to promote spiritual values. I challenged her on the grounds that the course was promoting panspiritualist religion under the guise of helping people to work better in the Health Service. My argument was that the promotion of such things is fair enough, but that it should be made explicit and not hidden behind vague terminology like ‘spirituality’. We had a lengthy interchange, in the course of which I asked her certain questions about her personal spiritual orientation. Had she been involved in TM? ‘I looked into it’, was the reply. Had she been involved with Gurdjieff-Ouspensky? ‘I looked into it.’ What about Zen Buddhism? ‘I found that helpful.’ What about Tibetan Buddhism? ‘I found that helpful, and also Theravada.’ She told me that she had been brought up a Christian, by which she meant Anglican, but had not found that helpful. The fastest-growing religion?The rapid increase in interest in Tibetan Buddhism, otherwise known as the Vajrayana, in the USA and UK over the last 20 years has turned Buddhism into one of the three fastest-growing world faiths. A book which has done much to popularise the Vajrayana in recent years is Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. On the back cover is this statement by John Cleese: ‘One of the most helpful books I have ever read.’ Originally published in 1992, it has become an international million seller and a revised edition is now available. Many books by the current Dalai Lama, too, are worldwide bestsellers. So what is Tibetan Buddhism? What makes it different from other kinds of Buddhism? And what makes it so attractive for British spiritually-inclined intellectual types today? One of the chief popularisers of Zen Buddhism in the West, Alan Watts, commented: ‘Tibetan Buddhism is Roman Catholicism on acid.’ At the time of this remark, the Vajrayana was known for little more than the garments of its lamas and monks, particularly their hats, its rites and ritual artefacts. But little was known of its teaching on sgom (pronounced ‘gom’) — often ignorantly called ‘meditation’. Branches of BuddhismHow does it differ from other forms of Buddhism? The simplest, possibly most primitive form of Buddhism, is called the Theravada [= The Way of the Elders]. It teaches that the main problems for human beings are ‘desire’ and ‘attachment’. ‘Suffering’, according to Buddhism, includes the inevitable multiple returns to earth after death, or ‘rebirths’, to enable the person to work out the ‘karma’ accumulated in previous lives. Because of the universality of ‘desire’ and ‘attachment’, everyone experiences suffering. If these can be eliminated, suffering will cease, and eventually there will be no need for any more ‘rebirths’. So the aim of Buddhism is to eliminate these obstacles to ‘enlightenment’ and ‘freedom’. This type of Buddhism is found mainly in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia. However, this simpler form of Buddhism later developed into something more complex known as the Mahayana, or ‘Greater Vehicle’. This is found in China and Japan. Here the obstacles are not so much our cravings, but rather our ‘ignorance’. Our root problem is that we mistake what is unreal for what is real. Because our present self-image is distorted, we imagine that our ‘self’ is our true nature. On the other hand, we regard our ‘true nature’ as false. This ‘true nature’, according to Mahayana, is our inherent Buddha-nature and is regarded as the true nature of everyone. The Vajrayana [= ‘Diamond’ or ‘Thunderbolt Vehicle’], as it is commonly known, grew out of the Mahayana to which, at least in theory, it is close as it shares a common worldview. However, the actual practice of Vajrayana is sufficiently different to the Mahayana to make it a distinct path in its own right. Mahayanins believe in patiently nurturing the embryonic Buddha-nature, mainly through ethical conduct. Then slowly, gradually, after many, many lifetimes, a person will eventually be reborn as a ‘buddha’. By contrast, the Vajrayana holds that if we already have the Buddha-nature, it makes sense to utilise that nature right now in the pursuit of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘liberation’. Therefore, the Vajrayana makes extensive use of visualisation techniques to activate this dormant Buddha-nature. In ‘deity-yoga’, for instance, the practitioner visualises himself as an actual deity. As a result, glimpses of the inherent Buddha-nature occur during visualisation or in everyday life. In this way, the prescribed techniques are exercises designed to strengthen and build up what the practitioner believes to be his truest, inmost nature. According to Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English convert, these are not pretence, but actually gateways to our true being: ‘… they are an extremely skillful conduit back to very profound realms of our psyche which we cannot access by means of logical, linear thinking. ‘There are very subtle levels of our psychological makeup which we can access only through enlightened imagery. These meditations … open up profound levels of the mind very quickly.’1 The Vajrayana, then, in contrast to other traditions, utilises positively the energy which is normally released in neutral and negative situations (such as in fury, sensual gratification or fear) and refines them, using them as fuel for the journey to ‘enlightenment’. This is done by means of practices designed to manipulate ‘inner energy’ and redirect even anger and heated passion to positive effect. To achieve all this, Tenzin Palmo, the daughter of a Cockney fishmonger, spent 12 years in a cave in the mountains of North India. Recruiting WesternersIt is this aspect of the Vajrayana, sgom (so-called ‘meditation’), which is its main attraction for Westerners. Paul Dennemeyer, a convert to Christianity in the 1970s, testified: ‘The Tibetan meditation, especially, became such a very heavy thing; it seemed to expand almost on its own, and it easily goes beyond the limitations that we normally seem so hung up in. It’s a lot deeper than LSD, say, or dope — it just keeps on going, and it seems pure, so that that’s why it’s a very attractive thing to many people, because they notice that through LSD your spiritual experience is limited to a certain sphere.’2 Tibetan teachers are well aware of this. Instead of trying to debate with people to convince them of the superiority of their system, they simply get people practising sgom and it comes in by the back door. People are told that they don’t need to ‘convert’ because ‘it’s not a religion’ and there is no distinction between ‘missionaries’ and ‘heathens’. However, once people have experienced the effects of sgom, they often decide to ‘take refuge’ or undergo ‘initiation’ — and they are in! There is, without question, a massive market for this product, judging by the meteoric success of its promoters over the last 20 years, during which the Vajrayana, from being the pursuit in the UK of possibly a few eccentrics, has become a rapidly-expanding movement penetrating mainstream British society. References Mike Taylor© Evangelicals Now - July 2005 |