How understanding Vajrayana theory boosts Vajrayana practice

The point of Vajrayana is to change your way of being.

It has effective methods for that, but they are weird and complicated and difficult, and there are a vast number of them. It can be overwhelming. It's difficult to know where to start, and traditional approaches and curricula may not suit you. Understanding Vajrayana theory—how and why it works, and for which goals—helps you navigate the complexity, to practice efficiently and enjoyably.

I extracted this eighteen-minute video from the recording of my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. It includes my ten-minute introductory explanation, a participant’s questions about it, and answers from me and from Jared Janes.

I offer these live Zoom gatherings monthly: answering questions, and maybe asking some, and leading discussion. The next one is October 12th. These are sponsored by Evolving Ground, the Vajrayana practice community co-founded by my spouse Charlie Awbery. The sessions are available only to eG members, but membership is free. If you are not a member, you can sign up, and you’ll get an email with information on how to access the eG Discord forum. The top item in the forum is Events, and if you scroll the Events to Saturday the 10th you’ll get the zoom link.

If you have questions about this discussion, you could ask them in a comment here on Substack—or attend the next Q&A!

Transcript

David: I’m going to begin each of these Q&A sessions with a little talk. Partly this is in case you haven’t got any questions, you could ask about whatever I blather about. But that’s not necessary at all. You can completely ignore my little talk and ask me whatever is most exciting for you.

I’m going to talk this time about the relationship between the theory of Vajrayana and the practice, and why understanding the theory is actually important; and how in order to understand the theory you need to actually know something about the history, which is kind of tedious because there’s an enormous amount of the history. But the practice doesn’t always make sense unless you know about things that happened many centuries ago.

Practice questions are often the really burning ones, where you really want an answer, because you’re a bit stuck in your practice, or you’re a bit stuck in your life even, or you see some opportunity. You can kind of see it, but there’s a doorway and you’re not sure how to access it. And you’re like, “Okay, I know that’s there. But how do I get there?” That can be highly motivating. And you so hope that if you ask the question, you get a good answer, then you’ll be able to move through that door.

Theory questions often are really dry. You have some kind of a jigsaw puzzle and there’s a missing piece. You know, there’s a missing piece in the theory and you just want to know, “Okay, what goes in this hole?” And that kind of question… I mean, I like that kind of thing. It’s less vital than something that’s coming out of practice, but it’s still good to understand what those gaps are.

I said last time that Vajrayana has a crystalline logic. And that is what makes sense of the theory, but it also is an enormous mess of contradictions and conceptual confusions. And that’s why maybe having this kind of a Q& A session can be helpful.

Traditional teachers of Vajrayana can’t see this, usually, and they can’t really help sort out these things. It’s like, if you go on a long vacation, you’re away from home for a couple of weeks, you come back and you suddenly realize your house is a god-awful mess. And you didn’t see that before, because you were living inside it, and it’s just how things are. The Tib