Thread by @Meaningness

🎙 @_awbery_ with @JaredJanes, introducing a distinction between "method" and "technique" in meditation; and using that to contrast the principles and functions of some superficially similar meditation approaches.

Vajrayana Buddhism is explicitly meta-systematic—unlike any other religion, afaik. It contains many dissimilar approaches that blatantly contradict each other.

This is a pervasive difficulty for understanding when initially approaching it. approachingaro.org/yanas

"Truth" is the conceptual foundation of both great Western ideologies: Christianity and rationalism. Encountering any contradiction, doubt, or nebulosity, we ask "which is True"?

That's an absolute impediment to making sense of Vajrayana. approachingaro.org/truth-and-meth…

"Meta-systematic" does NOT mean reconciling multiple systems harmoniously and synthesizing them into a unified meta-system. It means using different approaches in different contexts, for different purposes. approachingaro.org/principles-and…

If you take Vajrayana seriously, it should be shocking when you first encounter it. It radically contradicts rationalism, Christianity, AND mainstream (Sutric) Buddhism.

(If it's not a shock—you may have encountered a fake, "nice" substitute.)

approachingaro.org/yana-shock

It's natural to try to understand a large, unfamiliar, conceptually difficult system by relating it to things you already know. Sometimes that works well.

Vajrayana is so different in its fundamental principles and functions that attempting this invariably backfires.

Vajrayana is usually approached via Sutric Buddhism. That is a great impediment.

Unless you accept at the outset that Vajrayana is radically alien to Sutra, you spend typically three-plus years painfully unlearning misunderstandings caused by assuming they can be reconciled.

Extra difficult because Vajrayana did grow out of Sutrayana by repurposing elements of it, and of several other religious systems, to serve new needs and ends.

So there are extensive apparent, non-coincidental similarities that are misleading because they are only superficial.

Here @_awbery_ explains how "Shi-ne," a Vajrayana meditation practice, is radically different from "Shamatha," understood as a Sutric meditation practice, despite *sounding* nearly the same in most presentations.

It's not coincidental that they sound similar.

A particular Vajrayana system (Dzogchen) appropriated and reworked this practice (Shamatha) to serve a different purpose.

Getting the distinction requires a commitment to conceptual precision. It takes extended hard work.

Most presentations of Buddhism are incoherent, wooly jumbles of pleasant, unsurprising “wisdom.”

If you are used to that, it is difficult to hear precise explanations of material that you have to take on its own alien terms, not by analogy with the familiar.

Think math class, not Sunday school.