Secret Drugs of Buddhism (Lama Crowley)

Lama Mike Crowley (JFzF. 10/9/16); Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

The Secret Drugs of Buddhism with Lama Mike Crowley at Beyond Psychedelics, Prague

(Jörg Fuhrmann zur Freiheit) Mike Crowley began studying Buddhism with a Tibetan lama in 1966, becoming an lay-disciple (upasaka) in the Kagyud lineage in 1970. He was ordained as a lama ("monk") in 1987.

Drugs of Buddhism: Psychedelic Sacraments

In order to augment his Buddhist studies, he acquainted himself with Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mandarin Chinese.

Crowley has been a guest lecturer at Jagellonian University, Cracow, the Museum of Asia and the Pacific, Warsaw, the California Institute for Integral Studies, San Francisco, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His work has been published in Fortean Studies, Time & Mind the Journal of Archeology, Consciousness and Culture, Psychedelic American, and Psychedelic Press UK.

In January 2016, he received the R. Gordon Wasson Award for outstanding contributions to the field of entheobotany for his book Secret Drugs of Buddhism: Psychedelic Sacraments and the Origins of the Vajrayana.

(psychedelicsangha.org)

The Vajrayāna Buddhist movement began in the 5th and 6th centuries ACE. Among its many innovations was the use of a sacrament called amṛita in Sanskrit or the “nectar of immortality.”

The word amṛita (English and ancient Greek ambrosia) is much older than Vajrayāna, however. The Brahminical Ṛig Veda composed circa 2000 BCE used it as a synonym for soma, the divine intoxicant.

Although many scholars believe that soma was the fly agaric mushroom Amanita muscaria, the White Yajur Veda describes two varieties, one red (A. muscaria?) and the other “blue-throated” (Psilocybe cubensis?)

Psych-Tibetan Book of the Dead

There is little mention of amṛita after this until it plays a central role in several Hindu myths circa 500 BCE and, a millennium later, in Vajrayāna Buddhism, circa 500 ACE.

Buddhist texts indicate that their amṛita was a truly potent entheogen (a psychedelic, psychoactive hallucinogen). There are even drawings from 9th century Japan that depict certain Buddhist deities (devas) as identifiable psilocybe mushroom species.

Indeed, it would seem that many Vajrayāna deities are, in fact, apotheoses of psychedelic plants.

Thus, the fact that Panaeolus camboginiensis, a particularly potent mushroom, grows exclusively on water buffalo dung could explain such buffalo-deities as Vajrabhairava or Yamāntaka as well as the legend of an enlightened buffalo-herder with magical excrement.

Another group of deities -- for example, Khadiravaṇi-Tārā, Hayagriva [Horse-headed Vishnu], Vajrakila [wrathful Vajrasattva] -- relate to an Indian analog of Amazonian ayahuasca that used Acacia catechu as its source of DMT.

Text from Beyond Psychedelics (beyondpsychedelics.cz) edited by Wisdom Quarterly.

• Beyond Psychedelics 2018 (Prague, Czech Republic) - MAPS