Vajrayana

The phurba's wrathful iconography follows the wider Vajrayana convention in which fierce forms serve a protective and transformative function.

The whole Vajrayana vehicle takes its name from the vajra.

Shingon is Vajrayana transmitted to Japan by Kukai in the ninth century; uncontroversial, no new research needed.

Tibetan Buddhism is the Tibetan form of the tantric vehicle. Vajrayana is wider: Japanese Shingon is Vajrayana with no Tibetan lineage.

The eight auspicious signs are painted on temple walls, printed on offering scarves and drawn in coloured powder on the ground before a teaching, and they are enumerated as a set rather than used singly.

Danced by monks in the monastery courtyard at the great festivals, in mask and costume, to a written text that prescribes the steps.

Vajrayana divides its mantras sharply. Some are taught to anyone and some are given only within a specific empowerment and held under samaya. The atlas records that the division exists and reproduces nothing from the closed side of it.

The seals worked inside a sadhana are conferred with the empowerment rather than taught openly. The atlas names the restriction and does not describe the gestures.

The knot with no beginning and no end is read as dependent origination made visible, which is why it is the one of the eight that travels furthest outside the set.

The bell is paired with the sceptre, wisdom with method, and neither is used alone.

The three seeds of enlightened body, speech and mind, used to consecrate offerings and to bless food.

Addressed to Padmasambhava, printed on prayer flags and carved into rock along the pilgrim roads.

Recited daily by lay Tibetan Buddhists against fear and obstacle, and one of the few tantric mantras given openly to anyone.

Twenty-one verses chanted daily by lay people and monastics alike, often three or seven times over.

Received as the origin of the common early canon that underlies the Vajrayana inheritance as well.

Part of the northern scholastic inheritance the Vajrayana receives through the Sarvastivada Abhidharma.

The tantric colleges sing a single voice sounding more than one pitch at once, a technique taught inside the college rather than a style a chanter may take up.

The sceptre is the emblem the vehicle is named for and is held in every rite of it.

Tantric Buddhism maps a subtle body of channels and winds that is not the Hindu scheme, differing in the number of the centres and in what they are held to do.

Vajrayana teaching holds aversion as transmutable rather than only removable, corresponding when recognised to a mirror-like wisdom.

Vajrayana teaching holds delusion as transmutable when recognised in its own nature, which is a different account of the affliction from one that treats it only as a root to be dug out.

Vajrayana teaching holds that the afflictions are not only to be abandoned but recognised in their own nature and transmuted, attachment answering to a wisdom of discernment rather than being merely cut off.

The perfections are held in Vajrayana as the common path, and the tantric path is presented as a swifter means to the same result rather than as a substitute for them.

Anatta, that there is no permanent unchanging self, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Vajrayana holds no-self with the Mahayana and puts it to work in practice, since deity yoga depends on the practitioner having no fixed identity to dissolve and re-imagine as an enlightened form.

Buddhahood attainable within a single lifetime through tantric method is this tradition's central soteriological claim.

Buddha-nature as the basis tantric method works with is affirmed across this tradition's schools.

Tibetan practice chants mantra rather than plain recitation, syllables tied to particular buddhas and received at initiation, counted on beads and often sustained toward totals of a hundred thousand within a deity practice.

Tibetan Buddhism holds both, fully ordained celibate monastics in the great monasteries and married yogic and tantric lineage holders alongside them, with the Gelug school the most strictly monastic of the four.

Tibetan mantras are tied to particular buddhas and given at empowerment, counted on a mala toward totals of a hundred thousand or more, and also set turning in prayer wheels and printed on flags so recitation continues without a voice.

Dependent origination, that phenomena arise in dependence on conditions, is the central explanatory principle shared across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence and the first Noble Truth, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Vajrayana takes over the Mahayana teaching of emptiness and joins it to bliss, so that the union of emptiness and blissful awareness is what its tantric methods are designed to realise directly.

The Karandavyuha Sutra, source of the mantra Om Manipadme Hum, underlies this tradition's mantra and deity practice around Avalokitesvara.

Karma, action and its consequence, is affirmed as the mechanism of rebirth across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Vajrayana accepts the law of action and result and adds ritual means, purification practices, mantra and confession held to exhaust karmic debts more swiftly than ordinary moral effort.

Clergy or specialist role within Vajrayana.

The Nilakantha Dharani Sutra, a dharani text embedded in ritual recitation, belongs to this tradition's scriptural basis for mantra practice.

Nirvana, the cessation of craving and the end of rebirth, is the shared goal named across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Vajrayana holds that buddhahood can be reached in a single lifetime by tantric means, a claim to speed that distinguishes its account of the goal from the long path of successive lives.

Samsara, the beginningless round of rebirth from which the Buddhist path seeks release, is affirmed across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

That buddhahood can be reached in this life and this body, rather than over incalculable aeons, is the Vajrayana's central promise and the ground of its self-description as the swift path. The methods are transmitted under initiation and are not set out publicly.

Vajrayana is Buddhist tantra: mantra, mandala, mudra and deity visualisation transmitted by initiation under a guru, offered as a swift path to enlightenment within a single lifetime and closed to the uninitiated.

Tantra is what gives Vajrayana its name and character, a body of initiatory practice using mantra, visualisation and ritual said to bring enlightenment in one lifetime rather than over many.

Vajrayana takes the bodhisattva vow as the necessary ground of tantric practice, holding that its powerful methods may be used only by one who has undertaken to liberate all beings.

The Four Noble Truths, the Buddha's foundational diagnosis of suffering and its cure, are affirmed as the basis of the path across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Vajrayana keeps the Four Noble Truths as the base of a graded path, teaching that the foundational, Mahayana and tantric vehicles are taken in sequence rather than set against one another.

The Noble Eightfold Path, the fourth Noble Truth's prescribed practice, structures the path across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

Going for refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is the formula of Buddhist identity across schools, including this tradition, with further tantra-specific refuge objects.

The three marks, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and non-self, are held as characteristics of all conditioned things across Buddhist schools, including this tradition.

The Madhyamaka distinction of conventional and ultimate truth underlies this tradition's philosophical basis.

Tantric method, transmitted through empowerment and structured around deity yoga and mandala, is this tradition's defining practice.

Non-injury is held in Vajrayana on the Mahayana ground of compassion for all beings.

The three poisons are held in Vajrayana, and the tantric claim upon them is that they are transformed rather than only abandoned.

Impermanence is held in Vajrayana, and the contemplation of death and impermanence stands among the preliminaries every tantric path begins from.

The intermediate state between death and rebirth is held in Vajrayana and is a field of practice rather than only a doctrine, the transference of consciousness and the bardo instructions being addressed to it.

The bodhisattva motivation is the stated prerequisite of tantric practice in Vajrayana, and empowerment is withheld from a candidate who has not generated it.

Giving is held in Vajrayana as the first of the perfections, and the offering practices of the tantric path are built on it.

Dharma is held in Vajrayana in the Mahayana sense, with the tantras counted among the Buddha's word rather than beside it.

Collected absorption is held in Vajrayana, and the generation and completion stages are described in its terms.

Vajrayana describes itself as the swift path and so stands on the sudden side of the question, while keeping the graded preliminaries in full. The two are held together rather than chosen between.

Emptiness is held in Vajrayana as it is in the wider Mahayana, and the tantric method presupposes it rather than replacing it: the deity a practitioner is empowered into is generated from emptiness and dissolved back into it.

The five aggregates are retained in Vajrayana and given a use the earlier tradition does not have: in deity yoga they are correlated with the five Buddha families as the material the practice works on.

The four immeasurables are cultivated in Vajrayana and are recited at the opening of tantric practice as part of setting the motivation.

The six realms are held in Vajrayana and are the standing subject of the wheel of becoming, painted at the entrance of monasteries as the picture of what the practice is for.

The six sense bases are retained in Vajrayana as the account of how experience arises.

The three realms of desire, form and the formless are held in Vajrayana.