Dalai Lama's Tibetan Buddhism explained

What is Tibetan Buddhism?

(ReligionForBreakfast) Feb. 16, 2023. Tibetan Buddhism (a variety of Mahayana known as Vajrayana) is a unique expression of Buddhism that has developed over centuries in the high Himalayan region of Tibet and the surrounding areas.

Massive Himalayan Padmasambhava

[The capital of Tibet, Lhasa, was once the head of a Himalayan empire, and its Potala Palace was a kind of Vatican with its bishops and monks or rinpoches and lamas.]

The Dalai Lama, the current spiritual [and former temporal] leader [or "pope-king"] of the Tibetan people, is perhaps the most well-known figure associated with Tibetan Buddhism.

Goddess of Compassion

This video explores the key teachings and practices of Tibetan Buddhism, including tantric meditation, compassion [Avalokitesvara, the "Lord Who Hears the Cries of the World"/Kwan Yin, who is said to be a manifestation or incarnation/avatar in the person of the 14th Dalai Lama (formerly Mr. Tenzin Gyatso) being reincarnated again and again] and the concept of emptiness [which means impersonal, not-self, or is the understanding that all things are composites dependent for their whole existence on parts and are therefore not separate from those parts yet, in a deeper way, they are not those parts. Those things that seem most personal are, in fact, impersonal.]

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  Male Avalokitesvara

  [This is explained in The Heart Sutra but largely goes un-understood by most ordinary people and scholars, whereas monastics and meditators may break through to a direct understanding that there is no "self" (no compact or unity) but what there is are the Five Heaps Clung to as Self: form, feeling, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. This is the unique liberating message of buddhas past, present, and future. The Buddha understood this and by his understanding was liberated, had a great enlightenment, and became the "Awakened One" or Buddha. It is on account of not seeing this, not knowing this, not penetrating this truth that beings carry on -- impersonal, impermanent, and disappointed -- in the long wandering on called samsara, suffering in all kinds of ways, falling into miserable existences, forms of rebirth, re-arising now here, now there, constantly chasing cravings of various sorts -- for eternal existence, for annihilation, for this kind of sense sphere pleasure, or that kind of supersensual pleasure, or this kind of fine material or that kind of immaterial state of being, always instead becoming and beset by dukkha.]

Special thanks to Dr. Connie Kassor for co-writing this episode. Follow her on Twitter at: @constancekassor.

To learn more, check out Dr. Aaron Proffitt's introduction over at: @AmericanBuddhistStudyCenter • Introduction to T...

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