The Dalai Lamas on Tantra

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OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES I have published almost a dozen books with Snow Lion on the lives and works of the early Dalai Lamas. As most readers will know, the present Dalai Lama, who was born in 1935, is the fourteenth in this line of illustrious reincarnations.

When I first started this project, almost nothing was known in the West about these extraordinary men. Coverage of them had been limited to a paragraph or two, or a page or two at best, in academic books on Tibetan cultural and political history. Even though many of these incarnations had written dozens of works on Buddhist philosophy, meditation, mysticism, and other enlightenment-related topics, and had also written hundreds of songs and poems, no significant text by any of them had ever been translated into English.

With each of these books I usually incorporated a traditional biography and a selection of their most accessible writings. Usually the selection would be on diverse subjects, in an attempt to convey the range and depth of these Buddhist teachers, from mystical poems to works on philosophy and tantric practice.

Most of these titles have been out of print for over a decade now. Sidney Piburn, my editor at Snow Lion, thought that it would be useful to bring out an anthology of some of the tantric works that I had used in that series. Tantric Buddhism is becoming better known in the West these days, but there is still a paucity of authentic translations from classical sources. The great popularity achieved by the early Dalai Lamas was due in part to the clarity and power of their tantric writings, so Sid's suggestion did not seem unreasonable. This volume is the result.

On the technical side, I have tried to keep footnotes to a bare minimum so as to allow the reader to enjoy the mood of the originals, rather than create the distraction of a constant barrage of "whispered asides." Moreover, I have also presented any Sanskrit and Tibetan terms that are used in a simplified "phonetic style" for ease in reading. For example, "Khedrup" looks far more palatable to me than does "mKhas-grub," and "Lobzang" seems more accessible than "blobzang." Scholars should be able to easily reconstruct the more formal spellings if they wish to do so, whereas these formal spellings are irrelevant to the general enthusiast.

With Tibetan text titles, however, a system of easy phonetics would be inadequate. Therefore here I have used the formal system of transliteration.

Most Dalai Lamas wrote extensively on Tantric Buddhism. The material chosen for this anthology is intended as a mere sampling of their contribution, with the intent to give the reader a sense of the authentic tradition.

THE LEGACY FROM BUDDHA SHAKYAMUNI BUDDHA TRAVELED and taught widely for some forty-five years after his enlightenment, and his audiences were diverse. Even though India at the time was a highly literate society, nothing of what he said was written down during his lifetime. Instead, various individuals were entrusted with memorizing the gist of each discourse. The work of transcribing his words took place only with the passage of generations.

Tibetans believe that this reluctance on the part of the Buddha and his immediate followers to commit the enlightenment teachings to paper, and instead to preserve them as oral traditions, was a purposeful strategy gauged to maintain the maximum fluidity and living power of the enlightenment experience. It only became necessary to write things down when the darkness of the changing times threatened the very survival of the legacy. An oral tradition becomes lost to history should its holders pass away without first passing on their lineages.

This intended fluidity, and the according safeguard against the establishment of an "enlightenment dogma," is perhaps best demonstrated by a verse that the Buddha himself said shortly before his death:

Do not accept any of my words on faith,

Believing them just because I said them.