Taoist Texts

No, Hinduist Tantra did not. VY did. Different teachings. Hinduist Tantra was incorporated to mix with Buddhism and to become the Buddist VY. How do we know it was from lay mendicants and not temple priests? (And of course a mendicant religious practitioner is not lay.) And what exactly did they practice? VY or Hinduist tantra? I dont know if you mean Hinduist tantra or VY? If VY then sure why not? You heard about the chakravartin dogma. Of course if you claim that VY existed for multiple centuries before Padmasabhava's Vajrayana in Tibet (circa 8th – 9th centuries) then there is no evidence of that. i would like to read some sources .people just claim things. nobody provides sources anymore. well, except myself. and wikipedia.

yes thank you very much for that perspective. There is totally opposite view in academia. To sum it up: VY started in universities in India, was brought to Tibet by a scholar and a high-ranking priest on orders of a Tibetan king as an organised, country-wide population conversion to Buddhism. The goal of VY was to subdue the local cults which would oppose the said conversion. So right from the get-go VY was anything but a powerless oral secret transmission with a goal to cultivate our beings. A total 180 degree opposite of that. But thats all good;)

i am not sure either but i suspect that this is not an apt metaphor for how the VY method works . But thats the trouble with metaphors they can mean anything to anyone. Thats why i always ask for concrete examples and pps get annoyed when i do that. hmm VY is a religion. if you said a peasant believer or a priest or a practitioner i would understand. but i do not know what a peasant cultivator is. what does he cultivate?

entirely possible i like it. i am all for personal freedom and personal responsibility

its a nice metaphor but whose? Does it come from a VY sutra?

that is totally true we do that. But for the purposes of this discussion our task is not to distinguish the meanings of vajra-weapon and vajra-diamond. We can easily know which meaning a modern VY proponent means. Rather we should determine why the very first VY founder decided to call his teaching vajra. What did he had in mind? A mace, a diamond, or both? I propose it was a mace because the primary purpose of a religion is to slay demons and you cannot do that with a diamond. Diamonds are small and fragile.

a girl's best friend?

Not at all. You are always welcome. Yes, in my professional opinion of a trained linguist it does. Otherwise we would not be able to understand each other. the notion that a same word can have different meanings is a misunderstanding This one is a good example. E g one could think this refers to two different things - a toy and a gun. Instead it denotes just one thing: the semiautomatic action common to those things. you dont say

Apech you are a highly educated man. How can the same 4 letter word mean both a diamond and a thunderbolt and a weapon? Come on.

umm you probably missed that scandal when his access to Wang Liping turned out to be a fraud scheme

thats a great place to start. 'vajra' is a weapon and the path's goal was kill demons with that weapon (the path being a religion). Thats about it.

you have a will of iron, ma'am. whenever i try to watch one of these i last only a few minutes before wondering if perhaps pulling a tooth would be less painful. thats how weak i am.

may be they did already

i am lost on this point. is it a good thing or a bad thing?

There is this ritual when a stalk or a blade of grass is inserted into the crown. Some say it is inserted into a physical hole ; some say it is inserted into a swelling lesion. My question is why to insert anything into it if that spot is visible to the eye and accessible to touch? I do not understand why it needs to be pierced and what exactly does the piercing proves? https://dakinitranslations.com/2022/09/25/practice-given-by-guru-padmasambhava-to-king-trisong-detsen-for-his-minister-who-accidentally-killed-his-parents-the-treasure-tradition-of-phowa-introduction-to-the-treasure-phowa-tradition-its-hist/

good question. yes it is trivial for most. but for a professional like me its an important research topic: the last stage of the whole process! Also it is an intellectual puzzle which is amusing to solve especially when all the experts are so widely mistaken on it. In reality what is going on here is a sacred grass (kusha in tibet/india or yarrow in china) is needed to find and to improve the hole. The hole is not a physical, visible opening as the experts naively think but an energetic one which transforms the flesh and bone around itself into a mix of matter/energy that can be penetrated with a sacred grass only. Without inserting a grass the opening is not visible. And the purpose of the grass insertion is twofold: 1st - to find and to confirm the hole; 2nd - to enlarge and to preserve it energetically . (an additional layer of complexity here is that all of the above might take place not in physical reality but in the minds of the native buddhist community).

https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=829751&remap=gb perhaps. The crown is mentioned 28 times but nothing about the grass in the hole.

thank you very much you good gentlemen. So you both believe that the grass is just a sign to show serving no useful purpose except showing success. Thats a valid viewpoint. Of course i am still in doubt why you need an addition sign beyond a visible hole? Is the hole too small to see without the grass? And to whom is the sign directed to? The rest of the monastery? And if it is just a sign why to keep the grass there for three days? Thanks again for your replies! Your are the best!

given who he was it most likely is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobsang_Rampa now the question is - how we know the grass inserting story is not a fabrication as well? one way to know is to ask 'is there a reason to do that'? And there is none so far exactly! no reason no value... now, to me the reason is a religious vestige of Hinduism (similar to medicine buddha=shiva). the ritual is intended to turn the practicer into the god Vishnu providing the former with a token of Vishnu's hair:

probably they are immortal by this stage

no no it was not you. there was this guy, exceptionally gifted and noble of character. he also telepathically communicated with the ascended shaolin monks and somehow that contributed to our falling out. also there was this nice guy who could sense me all the way from australia. i gotta make a mental note to ask people first thing if they are telepathing with anyone.

sorry to hear that. i did not mean to. sorry again.

well somebody connected the dots. probably not solidly enough for everybody to see. but on the other hand these things are not for everybody so all good. Ishana (Shiva) as one of the Ten Gods in the retinue of the Medicine Buddha https://www.himalayanart.org/items/48347

thats true. the article i quoted was to show the origin of the blue coloring. we have to be able to connect the dots on our own. medicine=poison. Here is another dot for you;) yes they are partially the same. if a god would move to a new religion staying completely the same it would not be a new religion. for some reason it is believed that buddhism is centered on compassion. It is not. It is centered on '4 truths'. as for compassion, it is pretty central to hinduism

yes he did come from Hinduism https://isha.sadhguru.org/mahashivratri/shiva/shiva-blue-throat/