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Oct 3Liked by David Chapman

It’s been interesting for me to go through the process of being introduced to Vajrayana primarily from a principals/functions approach… It’s led to something like a minimum viable supplementary instructions/texts/analysis heuristic for inspiration/passion, clarity, context purposes.

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Thanks! I didn't completely understand the second half of that... did you mean something like "when explaining Vajrayana, I try to minimize complexity by emphasizing principles and functions, which is clearer and more inspiring than going into all the details?" (Which is what I try to do, although sometimes I include details which are fun or beautiful or inspiring or illustrative.)

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Oct 10Liked by David Chapman

From what I can put together, since Vajrayana hasn't been traditionally taught from a P&F-first approach it has meant that practitioners spent A LOT of time learning all about the details (history/theory/details/rigid sequences of practices). A few exceptional, rare practitioners were able to step back far enough to see the principal & function view of Vajrayana.

Since I was taught in the reverse, I have a common shocking experience when learning about details: it's utterly amazing how few Vajrayana details I know. Which opens up a whole other topic about the pros and cons of teaching from this approach... too much to explore in comments for sure!

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Oh, I see! Thank you, very interesting! Possibly this may be appropriate to bring up at a Q&A (or in some other gathering). It might be a common experience for eG people with little/no previous exposure to more traditional approaches?

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Oct 5·edited Oct 5Liked by David Chapman

How does one get this deep understanding of theory which, you say, many lamas may not even have? How do you think you got it?

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Oct 5·edited Oct 6Author

I was lucky to have lamas who had deep understanding of Vajrayana *and* could explain it in less-culture-bound terms. Some can, though many can't.

You can also learn a lot from reading; but probably you can't bootstrap yourself into deep understanding that way. You need to get the key points in person. (This isn't a mystical woo claim, it's an empirical observation. The reason is probably that the texts are not very good.)

You can also learn from peers, or people only somewhat ahead of you on the path; but again, probably only after you've understood the fundamental structure, which you probably can only get from a teacher with decades of deep experience.

https://vividness.live/how-to-learn-buddhist-tantra

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