Introduction to Preparing for Tantra

Rob Preece

When we first meet Tibetan Buddhism, we inevitably come across the path of tantra, or Vajrayana, around the same time because the two have become inextricably interwoven. The presence of tantric Buddhism has blended into Tibet’s highly elaborate ritualized culture, with its haunting ceremonial music and chanting and its extraordinary mystical art. However, discriminating between what belongs essentially to Vajrayana Buddhism and what is actually Tibetan culture is very difficult. The first encounter that many of us in the West have with the world of Tibet is when a highly revered Tibetan lama gives some form of tantric transmission to an audience of many people. Such an experience creates the opportunity to receive a glimpse of something extraordinary that can have a profound effect on our view of ourselves and our life. The task then becomes to try to make sense of and integrate these experiences into our life. However, we may not be fully aware of the implications of this initial encounter with Tibetan Buddhism, or, indeed, be totally prepared for it.

As Tibetan Buddhism becomes established here in the West, we have the opportunity to receive profound teachings and glimpses into the extraordinary potential of this path. What we then start to see is that this path is challenging and requires that we truly begin to do the work necessary to awaken our potential. In the tantric and dzogchen traditions particularly, we may be introduced to the innate potential of our mind, but to make it truly manifest, we first have to clear what obscures it.

In the text by Asanga called Changeless Nature, or Uttara Tantra Shastra, several metaphors describe what we know as buddha nature: it is like a golden statue wrapped in filthy rags, a jewel buried beneath the house of a pauper, a seed hidden within a rotting fruit, or honey deep within a swarm of bees. What these metaphors all suggest is that although we may be given an insight into the presence of our innate buddha nature, we must then go through the process of removing the obscuring veils of our emotional habits and karmic imprints before we can reveal its natural quality. While our innate nature may be primordially pure, our task is to free this pure nature of its gross and subtle psychological obscurations.

For a rare few this process may happen spontaneously, and the mind then awakens with little effort. This quick result suggests that these people have had a deep experience from previous lives so that their obscuring veils are thin. For the majority of us, however, there is no such sudden awakening, we must instead do the spadework and clear our mind of the accumulated debris of our troubled psychological or karmic history. Then the question inevitably arises; are we ready and willing to engage in a process of dedicated and consistent practice to clear the ground for any “realizations” to grow?

Bearing this question in mind, many people involved in Tibetan Buddhism, from all the different schools, embark on the process of groundwork (Tib. ngondro) or preliminary practices. The four primary schools of Tibetan Buddhism all present a path of practice that evolves and deepens as the meditator is guided forward.

Page 1 of 9

There are stages in this process that require preparation before a practitioner is ready to move forward. This is particularly the case with the practices of highest yoga tantra, or maha-anuttarayoga tantra, as it is often called, and dzogchen, so that teachers usually require someone who wishes to enter these advanced practices to go through the preliminary practices as a preparation. All the Tibetan schools have some form of preliminary practice, although they vary in subtly different ways.

It is now very common for people in the West to receive empowerments into extraordinary and complex tantric practices. However, to embark upon them without having first prepared the ground may have a number of negative consequences. Our psychological and energetic maturity simply may not have been developed sufficiently to bring out the real potential of the practice. We may try to engage in a particular deity practice only to become disillusioned when it does not really come alive. There is also the very real hazard that these practices may become polluted with our psychological and emotional confusion, in which case tantric practice does not clear this confusion but instead actually exacerbates it. In extreme cases this can lead to the kind of disturbance where there is no stable psychological vessel to hold the process that is unfolding. Finally, we may begin to develop our practice only to discover after some time that we are held back by inner hindrances we have not yet dealt with.

To embark upon the tantric path safely and well, we need to be prepared psychologically, emotionally, and energetically. To do this we need guidance from skillful experienced teachers, together with the willingness to go through the required preparations. It is inevitable that at some point we will be advised to embark upon the series of meditations and ritual processes that make up the preliminary practices. Unfortunately, when we are so advised, we can sometimes see the preliminaries as a kind of ordeal or task we have to go through in order to do what we really want, which is to perform high tantric practices, or receive dzogchen teachings. It is all too easy to view the preliminaries as a kind of hurdle we have to leap over to get somewhere else, rather than actually seeing that they are something we could benefit from in their own right and even enjoy. As a result we may try to get through them as quickly as possible, sometimes even with a sense of competitiveness with fellow practitioners who may have done more, or less, of some of the preliminary practices. Also, because there is a tradition of repeating hundreds of thousands of mantra recitations, prostrations, offerings, and so forth to complete the preliminaries, there is always the danger of becoming caught up in a culture that is focused on completing a certain number of repetitions rather than genuinely deepening the experience of practice. This potential spiritual materialism can lessen the value of the preliminaries. They are not just prescriptive rituals that we have to get through as some kind of duty. The preliminaries are an extraordinarily rich collection of practices, which have much to offer as a means of cultivating and maturing our psychological ground. They can enable experiences to unfold, and they can clear the way when there seem to be problems or hindrances we are struggling with.

For many of us there is also the hazard of thinking that because we are doing the preliminaries this is all we need to do to prepare ourselves psychologically for the practice of tantra. From my own experience, this is not so. The preliminary practices may fulfill what is traditionally required as a preparation for tantric practice, but this alone is not enough. For example, there are those who have gone through this process, and even done three-year retreats, who still have unaddressed psychological problems.

Page 2 of 9

When I first began to embark upon the preliminaries in the late 1970s, the practices gave me a strong feeling that I was engaged in a process similar to an apprenticeship. Having gone through an apprenticeship in electrical engineering when I first left school, this was a very familiar feeling. I felt I was beginning a journey that was clearly under the guidance of my teachers, and I was aware there were some specific tasks to perform. What unfolded over the next five years or so was a journey that involved the gradual completion of a series of nine preliminary practices, several of them more than once. There were times when I wondered why I was embarking on such a challenging process, yet at other times I felt exhilarated and inspired to go on. With every practice I undertook, I felt an extraordinary process unfolding and a richness that was both deeply satisfying and yet also sometimes very painful.

It was on my return to the West and when I began to train as a psychotherapist that I began to realize there were still aspects of my own psychological wounding that had not been resolved, despite going through this process of the preliminaries. I also came to see that my relationship to my body and its energetic processes needed to be developed further. This led me to understand that the preparation for tantric practice may require more than just the traditional preliminaries if we are to address all aspects of our psychological wounding. It also brought me to see that, without a deeper relationship to the body and our emotional and energetic life, our tantric practice can remain disembodied and thus won’t engage with and transform our energy.

As I continued my own practice and eventually began to teach the preliminaries, their value became even more apparent to me. I now realize, however, that in my own practice all those years ago, I would have benefited from a more psychological understanding of what I was doing and how the different preliminary practices worked. Collectively, they constitute a profound preparation for more advanced practice, and, as such, they challenge many aspects of who we are emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Each preliminary has a distinct quality, which will have an effect on our psychological and emotional makeup, and this effect, if understood clearly, can be significant.

In my own life, I have found that these practices are an incredible resource that I can draw upon whenever needed. As the foundation of our spiritual life, the preliminaries are the base from which our psychological and spiritual path can unfold and mature. Just as the foundations of a house are not removed once the house is built, so too these practices are not discarded once we begin to practice tantra—they remain as a base upon which we build our experience of tantra. This book is partly a reflection of my own journey through the preliminaries and beyond, thereby demonstrating the breadth of preparation needed for tantric practice to be integrated and beneficial. I look deeply at the factors involved in the preparation for tantric practice, from both traditional and psychological perspectives. The psychological view suits our Western mind and can provide a contemporary base of understanding that complements traditional understanding. This view can address some of the hazards we may encounter in becoming involved with tantric practice before we are adequately prepared. It may also provide a context in which the practice of the preliminaries may become more meaningful and psychologically transformational. I also want to broaden our view of preliminary practice, describe some of the difficulties we might encounter along the way, and offer ideas on how best to resolve them. Using my background in psychology, I have tried to illuminate some of the ways in which the preliminary practices can be of immense psychological benefit, if

Page 3 of 9

engaged with creatively to bring out their essential qualities. In particular, I want to counter the tendency to see these preparations as something we should try to get out of the way as quickly as possible so we can get on with the “real business” of the tantric path.

In part 1, I will explore some of the psychological ground upon which tantra in general, and the preliminary practices in particular, is based. This will help broaden the scope of the foundation for tantric practice for practitioners in the West and will clarify the intention and explain the effectiveness of many of the practices that follow. In part 2, I will examine the nine preliminaries themselves. Although not every school of Tibetan Buddhism designates the last four preliminaries as necessary, they are nevertheless useful to know. In part 3, I will look at the implications of having completed some, or all, of the preliminaries. I will also clarify some of the possible effects of practice, which can manifest in a host of signs or symptoms that may be disturbing and confusing unless we understand what is happening. Finally, I will discuss the journey into highest yoga tantra that can unfold once the ground is prepared.

If we are skillful in how we prepare for tantric practice and apply the methods with dedication and understanding, it will bring us great benefit. With the right conditions to support the process of practice and the psychological understanding that makes it relevant to our own psychological issues, the preliminaries can act as a kind of therapeutic process. When guided by a teacher who has this understanding, the effect can be extremely beneficial. We can then begin to genuinely prepare the ground for the practices that follow, on many different levels: emotionally, psychologically, physically, and energetically. But without this depth of preparation, we may suddenly wonder why after years of practice we still have psychological issues and emotional problems that have not been addressed.

Extract : Groundwork

MILAREPA WAS one of Tibet’s most famous meditators. His life story begins with the death of his father while he was still young, after which tragic event his uncle threw him and his mother out of their home. His family had been fairly well off, but following the eviction they were left destitute. Milarepa, by now a seriously troubled adolescent, was so distressed to see his mother’s plight that he took it upon himself to seek revenge. He developed magical powers and learned a way of invoking malign forces powerful enough to kill his uncle and his family. In due course Milarepa carried out one of these magical rituals and succeeded in killing his mother’s enemies. A total of thirty-five members of his uncle’s family died.

After having committed this terrible act of retribution, Milarepa went into hiding.

Page 4 of 9

Eventually his sense of remorse took him off in search of someone who could help heal his pain. He found spiritual guidance from another well-known figure in Tibetan history the translator Marpa, who was then a married man living in Eastern Tibet. When Milarepa found Marpa, he was not sure that this man was actually his teacher, and before Marpa would take on Milarepa as a disciple, he set him a series of incredibly severe tasks.

Over many years Marpa gave Milarepa the task of building several towers out of rock, each time on the pretext that the current site was where he wanted to live. When a tower was finished, Marpa would decide it was not what he wanted, or that it wasn’t built where it should be, and would tell Milarepa to move it elsewhere. Milarepa carried the rocks from place to place on his back, his body torn and battered by the process, but because he was determined to follow his teacher’s instructions, he struggled on. Sometimes out of desperation he sought out other teachers for help, only to find that the practices they taught him did not work, and every time this happened he was brought back to a furious Marpa. This grueling schedule continued for many years until one day Marpa told Milarepa he was now ready. Marpa then gave Milarepa empowerments and instructions and sent him off to practice. With immense gratitude and devotion to his teacher, Milarepa went into retreat, and within a relatively short space of time began to gain extraordinary realizations.

The moving life story of Milarepa gives us a powerful example of someone really willing to do the groundwork to clear his karmic debt. Marpa recognized that this young man, having done some terrible things in his past, needed some fairly drastic purification. The tasks he made Milarepa perform were his preliminaries, his groundwork, that had to be accomplished before he was able to experience the fruits of future practice. In this way Marpa’s severe guidance and hard tasks enabled Milarepa to purify even the karma of killing.

My teacher, Lama Tubten Yeshe, valued work highly as a means of clearing the ground, obviously not labor with the same degree of severity as Milarepa’s hard toils, but physical work nonetheless. He felt particularly that working for the sake of the dharma, or for the lama, was as powerful a preparation for practice as doing many prostrations. In my early years as a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, this advice became hugely important to me.

Hopefully we have not committed the same atrocities as Milarepa, but we each still need to clear ourselves of the history of past events that have occurred, both in this and previous lives. The severity of Milarepa’s actions gave him an intense motivation to do the groundwork, and I recall Lama Yeshe once saying that if we had committed some particularly heavy actions, our motivation to purify them would be equally strong. Later on I was speaking to a friend who had become a monk, and I began to understand what LamaYeshe meant.This man had been a soldier and was responsible for the deaths of several men, which had given him an intense desire to practice.

Page 5 of 9

In 1976 a small group of dharma students, including myself, moved to an enormous mansion in the north of England, and over the following years our lives were bound up with demolishing and rebuilding this monolith. At first I was involved in ripping out huge areas of dry rot and then, because of my electrical background, I began rewiring the entire building. LamaYeshe used to joke that this was our Milarepa trip, living in austere conditions during extremely cold winters and hacking away at the building. This was indeed our groundwork, and little by little we restored the building and created a dharma center. After four years of devoted work for my teacher in this place, I left for India, but a short while later the center was taken over by another Tibetan lama in a kind of coup. Having dedicated so much time and energy building a center for my teacher, this coup was an extremely painful thing to bear.

From Lama Yeshe’s point of view, it was clear that certain kinds of work undertaken with the right motivation could be seen as a form of preliminary practice. For some people this might mean working in dharma centers in service of the teacher. For others it might take the form of work dedicated to the dharma, such as working to publish Buddhist books. For still others it might mean working in the service of those who are in need of care and support. Thus someone dedicating his or her life, with the right attitude, to working in a hospital caring for the dying could gain as much benefit as someone else doing traditional preliminary practices. The emotional and psychological challenges of dedicated service to others can have a profound effect. If this work is clearly motivated by a quality of intention dedicated to the welfare of others, then it becomes a profound aspect of dharma practice.

People whose lives are deeply involved with, and responsible for, caring for children or elderly sick parents sometimes ask me how they can practice the preliminaries when they have no time or energy My response is that if we broaden our understanding of what preliminary practice actually means, it is clear that caring for others with the right attitude can be an alternative form of preliminary practice. Being a parent can be dharma practice and can be hugely transformational if we dedicate ourselves to the work of parenting with the right attitude. Alternatively, those in a meditation retreat who remain totally self-preoccupied and overprecious demonstrate little positive effects of their practice. Those who, through dedicating their lives to the service of others have manifested profound changes in their capacity for compassion and selflessness, demonstrate that the basis of accumulating merit is having the motivation of bodhichitta, which can apply to the parenting of children as much as meditation, if not more so.

There are occasions in the modern world when people’s personal journey, their work and other commitments, means they are unable to practice the preliminaries as traditionally understood. I have spoken to people for whom this problem causes considerable conflict. Their teacher may perhaps expect them to do the preliminary practices in a particular way that for some personal reason is not possible. There is a danger that if the preliminaries are applied in too

Page 6 of 9

prescriptive a way, they may actually become inappropriate. So, if someone is able to do this groundwork with dedication through some other form of activity such as work, or service for others, then these actions may actually be more appropriate.

If we are prepared to engage with the psychological process of a particular task and put in the spadework, then we will experience the effect that the traditional preliminary practice was designed to have. If, for example, we immerse ourselves in an altruistic task, sometimes called "right livelihood" such as working in a dharma center or in the service of others, it will change us. This work will bring out our inner struggles and give them a channel or vehicle to be transformed. It will challenge our weaknesses and develop our strengths. I found this to be true in my own work rewiring the building. The combination of a growing understanding of the dharma together with the intensity of work brought so much of my emotional life to the surface. Understanding that it was all part of the process of transformation helped me to continue working. I knew that this was my practice, and all my peers working on the building had similarly strong feelings, and indeed faith, that this was what they needed to do to clear the ground and gradually awaken.

Our work also involved developing other capacities, particularly the willingness and commitment to actually engage in something that was not just for our own sake but also for the welfare of others. It challenged our preoccupation with our own self-interest. We may embark upon some of the rich and elaborate practices that form the preliminaries, but if in that process we have not learned to apply ourselves to them consistently, then they will be of little value. Gen Jhampa Wangdu once told me he thought meditation was the hardest job we can try to do. Having spent many years cultivating my own meditation practice and then teaching others, I have seen this is certainly true. Meditation is hard work when we really dedicate ourselves to it, and it requires a dedication and self—discipline that is not always easy to find. One of the most beneficial aspects of work as a preparation is that within the process we can cultivate the kind of dedication and commitment that is then very useful for later meditation practice. As LamaYeshe also recognized, through work we can clear many of the inner obstacles that would prevent us from being able to meditate at a later point.

Whatever form the preparation takes, whether it is dedicated work, caring for or serving others, or one of the traditional practices, what counts is the depth of immersion, quality of presence, and quality of heart we put into what we are doing. There is no shortcut, and trying to rush the process, so we can get it out of the way does not help. Doing the groundwork is really an attitude of mind, one in which we are prepared to engage in a process that will change and shape us. We do, however, need to relinquish expectations and a competitive sense of needing to get it all done quickly to keep up with others. The preliminary practices are not a competition to see who has done the most prostrations, or who is quickest at doing them. Groundwork is about applying ourselves consistently to a process that gradually rubs off the rough ego edges and

Page 7 of 9

changes us. It requires that we let go of pride and ambition, stop seeing ourselves as special and gifted, or as one of the teacher’s chosen ones. In this process of practice we come down to earth and work with our basic nature, going deeper and deeper into the aspects of ourselves that are a block to cultivating experiences on the path.

In The Wisdom of Impefection I wrote at some length about a disposition known as the Puer or Puer aeternus, (the eternal youth) .When this archetype manifests in people, they are usually spiritually gifted and inspired but often ungrounded, idealistic, and sometimes reluctant to do the groundwork. As a practitioner, if we have any illusions about being spiritually gifted or special, the preparatory process is there to bring us back to the place of our raw authenticity. It brings us back down to earth. While working on the building in England, I would sometimes feel I desperately wanted to stop all the filthy hard work and just do retreats and study like all the fortunate visitors who came to stay there. I felt that I should be doing something special and profound, rather than day after day simply putting on my work clothes and crawling around under the floorboards laying cables. But something in me knew that this was where I needed to be, that the work was really worthwhile, and that it was deeply grounding, purifying, and humbling at the same time. In retrospect I feel extremely glad I had the opportunity to dedicate my time to that way of practice and was prepared to put in the work. I know that I would not have been able to do the meditation retreats I later did if I had not first done that groundwork. This hard, physical work had given me sufficient dedication and perseverance so that I could take up the challenge of the more advanced practices to come. It had also, according to my lamas, been a powerful purification of obstacles and a way to generate merit.

This is not to say that the process has to be harsh and severe, or that it has to be tough to be beneficial. The preparatory work we do does not have to be like wearing the puritanical hair shirt, or the masochistic beating with birches of Catholic monks. The work we engage in can be enjoyable and rewarding, as well as something that tests us. Our hard physical work on the dharma center gave us huge joy to know we were doing something that was really worthwhile. It also was a delight to be working with peers going through the same journey, and we really appreciated each other’s gifts and qualities.

After four years working on the building, I remember meeting Lama Yeshe and telling him I felt I needed to go into retreat. “Yes,” he said, “now is the time, this is what I want you to do?’ I felt like an elastic catapult that had been gradually pulled back tighter and tighter over the four years until I was ready to be sprung forward into retreat. His response finally released me from the task that I had been committed to for the years I had worked on the building. I had accomplished some of my groundwork, and I was very happy, just as Milarepa must have felt a sense of relief and elation when Marpa eventually said, “Now I will teach you:’ after years of seriously hard labor.

We may see the traditional preliminary practices as the primary way to prepare

Page 8 of 9

for future tantric practice and retreat, but not exclusively so. Indeed, according to KhenchenThrangu Rinpoche, there was a time in India and the early years of Buddhism in Tibet when there were no formal preliminaries as we understand them today. Instead, a teacher would put a disciple through a process that involved other challenges, as the example of Milarepa shows. We can still see this process reflected in the way that some students work for their teacher as a major part of their preparation process, while for others it might be another form of dedicated work. The crucial thing about this preparatory work is that it has the gradual effect of maturing and strengthening our minds, as well as clearing and purifying our emotional hindrances. Within the preliminary practices themselves, this process is usually considered in two ways—as purification and accumulation.

Page 9 of 9