Basic Dharma Practices in Translation
23 Wednesday Oct 2013
The Buddhadharma, the principles underlying Buddhism separate from the culture of Buddhism, has many profound insights about the nature of spiritual practice, which I find illuminative in my Pagan ritual and meditative practice. Since Buddhism is a cosmopolitan religion and attempts to spread itself, this relieves me of many of the problems of culture appropriation. Further, a Lama taught me that the Vajrayana, Tantric (read magical) Buddhist practice is not culturally bound, but needs to be recreated in each culture that adopts it. Hindu Tantra has the problem of being culturally bound, but also the literature on it is more pious than analytical and harder to penetrate for uncertain benefit.
For these reasons, over the last two decades I have been applying my skill as a ritualist to make the methods of Tantric Buddhism available to Pagans. This site, under the ‘Dharma’ menu above, has some of my work on this and more is to follow. Today, I am posting the “Most Basic” set of practices in translation. Translation here is the idea of bringing the ‘tech’ into our culture, not linguistic transposition.
While I am no Lama, I teach this material in the hope of improving our spirituality and ability to invoke. Contact me if that is of interest.
3 Comments
October 23, 2013 at 2:32 pm
Very intriguing! Is it all going to be filtered through Thelema?
October 23, 2013 at 3:08 pm
Thelema makes for a good translation matrix with Tantra, the most elaborate form of which is in my book Tantric Thelema. But this Dharma material is not specifically Thelemic in its intent or nature, even if it uses “Abrahadabra” or “AL” which have long pedigrees before Crowley. The other seed syllables are mostly taken from Ancient Egyptian.
Thanks for commenting!
December 27, 2013 at 5:46 am
I really appreciate your thinking and writing about the Buddhadharma and how it might fruitfully inform pagan practice.