Source Text
Drukpa Kunley was truly a wild yogi who achieved realization and taught through his sexuality and other strange and unconventional means such as the hunting of animals and subduing of invisible demons with mantra and wrathful deity practices.
Imitating the behavior of Drukpa Kunley while completely lacking in his wisdom is very dangerous.
If we understand the stories of Drukpa Kunley and Crazy Wisdom practices in a more indirect, subtle or metaphorical manner, we can see them as masterful teachings on how to work with our negative emotions and fears and to tame and slaughter the wild and dangerous demons of our own mind. Karmamudra is the most important practice for working with desire.
The dance of his Vajra Body Is the illusory mudra seal of Form-Emptiness The song of his Vajra Speech Is the magically emanating music of Sound-Emptiness The essence of his Vajra Mind Is the inseparable union of Light and Clarity, Bliss and Emptiness!
Karmamudra uses powerful yogic techniques to work with human desire in a mindful way and to transform ordinary, worldly sexuality into a vehicle for spiritual advancement and liberation. Practitioners of Karmamudra cultivate and refine their sexual desire and pleasure in a non-dualistic way, shifting these away from fixation on self-and-other. In doing so, they are able to use the orgasmic state as a means of eliminating their mental afflictions and obscurations and as a springboard to recognizing the ultimately empty and blissful Buddha-nature of mind and reality.
Tantra refers to a diverse set of religious practices, texts, and orientations which rose to great prominence in India from around the sixth century. Tantra’s elaborate liberatory rites of initiation involving cosmological diagrams or mandalas embodying the perfection and ideal alignment of outer and inner realities, its practices of guru devotion, mantra recitation, techniques for the manipulation of body, breath and subtle energy, propitiation and visualization of often fierce and often female deities, and other special technologies for bringing practitioners beyond dualistic mind and appearances, came to have broad appeal. Its approaches were taken up and reframed at various points by Shaivites, Vaishnavites, Shaktas, Buddhists, Jains and later Muslims.
Tantric Buddhism or Vajrayana, the ‘Indestructible, Non-Dual’ Vehicle, makes use of such approaches within the broader moral and cosmological framework of Mahayana Buddhism. Here powerful, transformative Tantric methods allow for the actualization of the so-called Bodhisattva aspiration to attain Buddhahood – to ‘wake up’ and free oneself from suffering in order to help other beings do the same, with lightning speed and precision.2
One way to understand the logic of this is with an analogy often used by Tibetan teachers to distinguish Sutric versus Tantric orientations (do and ngak in Tibetan, respectively): when a poisonous weed of afflictive emotion – anger, hatred, lust, pride, ignorance etc. – sprouts forth rapidly from the soil of our mind, the Sutric approach tells us that we should uproot it thoroughly and swiftly, that we should pull it out and disown it entirely. Once eradicated in this way, we should then plant the seed of a different kind of plant in its place. Having eliminated distracting, harmful emotions, we should cultivate mental stability, peace, clarity, virtue, and compassion instead. This is why the Sutric path is called the path of ‘rejection, renunciation, elimination, turning back, or reversing’ (dok lam). Tantra takes a different tack. It too acknowledges that poisonous plants are potentially deadly, it too is concerned with producing stability, clarity, compassion and virtue. Yet whereas the Sutric orientation sees in poisonous weeds only disruption, pollution and a problem, the Tantric approach sees opportunity. Tantra is a medical or alchemical path. Just as a chemist can carefully and strategically cultivate toxic herbs to process them into powerful medicines provided they are smart, careful, and possess a laboratory and the requisite technical know-how, Tantric yogis and yoginis can make beneficial use of the active ingredients of their human mental poisons. By chemically refining their desire, anger, ignorance, pride, and envy they can distil something positive and beneficial out of what might otherwise plague or endanger them. It is for this reason that the Tantric path is known as the path of transformation or transmutation (gyur/jyur lam). It is this clever, pharmacological approach which Dr. Nida Chenagtsang explains with such rare insight and clarity in this book.
As a Highest Yoga Tantra practice, Karmamudra is linked with the so-called ‘Perfection’ or ‘Completion Stage’ (Dzogrim) in Tibetan Buddhism. This stage of practice involves working with the energies and architecture of the subtle body and with highly refined states of awareness in very advanced ways. It is thus regarded as one of the highest echelons of esoteric Buddhism and has traditionally been offlimits for all but the most well-trained and elite practitioners.
The most extensive Tibetan adaption of Kamasutra was written by a controversial and brilliant Tibetan scholar called Gendün Chöphel in the early 20th century. Gendün Chöpel made his own translation of Indian Kamasutra texts and borrowed from Master Mipham’s teachings.
AI Summary
Karmamudra by Nida Chenagtsang presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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