BUDDHIST TANTRISM

Herbert V. Guenther, The Tantric View of Life (Boulder & London: Shambhala, 1976) ("It is my conviction that Tantrism in its Buddhist form is of the utmost importance for the inner life of man and so for the future of mankind. If the life of the spirit is to be invigorated, there must be a new vision and understanding, and there is hardly anything of such value as the study of the experiences and the teaching of the Buddhist Tantrics. For Tantrism is founded on practice and on an intimate personal experience of reality, of which traditional religions and philosophies have given merely an emotional or intellectual description, and for Tantrism reality is the ever[present task of man to be." Id at ix. "The fact that in the Western world the word Tantra is almost exclusively used with reference to a power- and sex-inflated esoteric teaching and not at all in its broader connotation of 'expanded treatise', is highly illuminating as far as Western thinking is concerned, but it does not throw any light on what Tantra means in itself." Id. at 1-2. "Buddhist Tantrism aims at developing man's cognitive capacities so that he may be, here and now, and may enact the harmony of sensuousness and spirituality ." Id at 2. "In Buddhism, Tantra means both 'integration' and 'continuity', as stated in the Guhyasamjatantra: ' "Tantra' is continuity, and this is three-fold: Ground, Actuality, and Inalienableness.'" Id. at 2. "It is in tune with the practical nature of Tantrism that it is centred on man, though not in the sense that 'man is everything', which is to depersonalize and to depreciate him as much as to subordinate him to a transcendental deity. The problem is not man's essence or nature, but what man can make of his life in this world so as to realize the supreme values that life affords. If there is any principle that dominates Trantric thought, it is so thoroughly a reality principle that nothing of subjectivism in contrast to an 'objective' reality remains. In the pursuit of Being there is a joyousness and directness which appears elsewhere to be found only in Zen, that is, the culmination of Sino-Japanese Buddhism, not the dilettantism of the retarded adolescents of the West, which in certain quarters at least is already on the way out. By way of comparison, Tantrism can be said to be the culmination of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism." Id. at 4-5. "There is  of course a connection between what we may call aesthetic and moral awareness in Tantrism. The point is first to see the other in his or her Being, not through the distorting opinions that are the loss of Being-awareness, be this of oneself or of others. Thus again it is insight and knowledge that is of primary importance, and whether we like it or not because of vested interests, morality is still grounded in knowledge. I am morally responsible only for having  done what I know I ought not to have done and for not having doing what I know I ought not have done. Just as opinion is the travesty of knowledge, so morality based on opinions with its dogmatism is a travesty of morality.  Man not only is, he also acts, and in order to act according to his Being he has to attend to it...." Id at 31-32. "The alienated man is controlled by his emotions (klesa), the compulsive activity (karma) initiated by them, and the accompanying sense of frustration (duhkha) because whatever he does falls short of what he expects to be the outcome." Id. at 46. "The attempt to resolve the tension that exists between the feeling of frustration and the sense of fulfilment, between the fictions about man's being and the awareness of is Being, is termed 'the Way'. It is not an inert rod lying between two points, nor is it the favouring of one side in the dilemma that constitutes the human situation, but grounded in Being it is an exercise of regaining and staying with Being. In other words, it is the actualization of intrinsic awareness. Mind-as-such (semsnyid), together with or inseparable from value-being (chos-kyi-sku).  Id.a t 57. "The less an individual is aware of his Being and the more he is concerned with what he believes himself to be, the more he comes under the spell of the fictions of his own making, and the more he becomes entangled in the so-called 'objective' world, where he believes that he can find what he wants and needs, the farther he is led away from himself. The dependence on the object, the woman, will not appear to him as dependence. By having intercourse with the woman and by becoming absorbed in the spell of the sex drive he may have the feeling that his insularity has been abolished and that he has been reunited with what was wanting in him. However, only an extremely fragile solution has been found. Plagued by frustration and haunted by anxiety, he is tempted into the vicious circle of seeking all the more in the objective world around him in order to quench the burning thirst and to still the gnawing hunger for total satisfaction." Id. at 68. "Since Tantrism aims at bringing man closer to his Being, it employs many methods of which the sex experience is only one. Because of this fact Tantrism is not a philosophy of sex. However due to the fact that it recognizes sex as a powerful means of bringing about a change in perspective, much misunderstanding has resulted. It is true that the sexual organs are a natural focus of both sensation and interest in erotic experience, but it is not so much the physiological aspect with which Tantrism is concerned, but the experience itself and the effect it has on the individual. Somehow, in the course of history, Western man has been led astray by his economic and biological model so that he can hardly think of sex as anything else by the gratification of a physiological need. Consequently the subtler distinction that Tantrism makes between the physiological side and its 'symbolical' meaning is overlooked and reduced to the 'nothing but'." Id. at 78. "The goal of Tantrism is to be, and the way to it may be called a process of self-actualization. However, it is extremely important not to be mistaken about the term 'self', which in a subjectivistic context is the excuse for any oddity that might pop into one's head. The self is never an idiosyncrasy, it in not even an entity, but a convention to point to the subject character of man as man, but not of man as this or that particular individual with these or those particular traits. If the goal is to be, and if we let 'self' stand for the way it feels to be, there is a hidden premise in this: the determining self (which makes us feel to be a self) must be a possible self. It must represent a set of authentic potentialities of the individual and must be a self whose realization lies within the realm of genuine possibility. This fact has constantly been forgotten in the course of the history of philosophy, and the solution of the problem of man's Being has been attempted by either belittling or aggrandizing man.... The godlike self is an image that man forms of himself as an 'idealized person' which is then identified with man's 'real self' and so becomes the perspective from which he views himself and discovers that his everyday life self, his phenomenal self, falls remarkably short of the imaginary and postulated qualities of the supposedly real self.... The impossible attempt to identify oneself with an impossibility only leads to self-deception, which immerses man deeper and deeper in his own fiction...." Id. at118-119.).