The Teacher Who Opens the Door

Vajrayana Buddhism, the tantric path that took its most fully developed form in Tibet, holds that certain practices cannot be entered through study alone. A text can be read by anyone, but a tantric practice is understood to require a formal transmission from a qualified teacher, a lama or guru, who has himself received it in an unbroken line reaching back to the practice's origin. This transmission, called empowerment or initiation, is treated as the doorway without which the practice may not be undertaken at all; performing it on the strength of the text alone is regarded as both ineffective and improper. The teacher's role does not end at that doorway. Because tantric method works by transforming ordinary experience directly rather than by gradual renunciation, the tradition holds that only a living teacher, who has traveled the path himself, can guide a student safely through it and correct the way a text is being misread or a practice misapplied. The relationship this creates is called samaya, a bond both parties are understood to have taken on and which the tradition treats as binding rather than casual, closer in weight to a vow than to an ordinary teacher-student arrangement. Vajrayana is practiced today across the Tibetan, Bhutanese, Mongolian and Newar Buddhist worlds, each preserving its own lineages of transmission.