Empowerments

Empowerments – what happens?

You’ve been to a Buddhist ceremony. Perhaps you knew it was an empowerment. Whatever does that mean? Are you cooked?

Words or phrases you might want to look up:

• Einweihung
• Ermaechtigung, Ermächtigungsgesetz
• Wang
• Lung
• Tri
• Khata

The seed-syllable HRIH

Episode Transcript

(00:15):
Hello dear listeners, welcome back or just welcome to the Double Dorje podcast. I'm Alex Wilding. And today we're going to kick around a few questions about what is an empowerment, what it isn't, and what it means anyway.
Here we are standing outside the main shrine room.
We are about to receive an empowerment. We can hear the ringing of the bell, the clatter of the hand drum, as the lama completes the preparations for what is about to happen. Outside the door, a little saffron water is poured into our hands. We swirl it around our mouth and spit it into a bowl.

(00:52):
That means that, ritually at least, we have been purified and are fit to receive this empowerment.
The Lama, who has been qualified through extensive practise, has now invoked the particular form of the Buddha with which we are going to be empowered. Through a range of prayers, mantras, visualisations, ritual actions and so forth,

(01:16):
we are introduced to this form of the Buddha, to this deity, as a result of which a seed has been planted, giving us the blessing, the authorization, the power to cultivate the practises of that deity.
Ultimately, to gain the fruit.
It's not always quite that simple though.
Let's think about it.

(01:38):
Let's sit down over a delicious cup of Nepalese Chai and talk about it.
As the door of the Double Dorje closes behind us and we find a table, briefly, let me remind you, please if you can, to press whatever button it is you have that you can use to be nice. The like button, the subscribe button, whatever it is. In particular, if you like this podcast,

(02:01):
do please share with your friends.
As we read the menu, I'll also remind you that there is nearly always a bit of extra material, such as words you might want to look up. It might appear on your usual platform, but if not then you can find that material on podbean, where this podcast is first hosted.

(02:26):
Empowerment. It is not something that's essential to Buddhism in general, perhaps not even important in many cases, but it is the very backbone of the vajrayana.
It is as a result of empowerment that our Lama or guru is our Lama or guru, and not just a very valuable spiritual friend, wonderful as that may be.

(02:51):
And it is practising the meaning of the empowerments that actually is practising Tantra.
So it would be good to
start with a
look at why I for one, and I think most others, prefer the word empowerment as a translation of Wang.
The other fairly common translation is initiation, but that brings some very misleading baggage with it.

(03:18):
It was a key term in the study of the phenomenology of religion. Perhaps it still is. It's many years since I was involved in that kind of study.
Writers such as Eliade, very influential in his day, but I guess looked on as old hat now, put forward the idea that initiation was an almost universal feature of religious and spiritual systems around the world.

(03:43):
As I understand it, the thinking now is that these ideas were perhaps sort of true, but too general to actually be very useful.
All the same, phenomenology was an improvement on what had been called comparative religion. This term sounds rather fascinating at first, but it turns out that at least some of the time it was being used as an apparently dispassionate label

(04:12):
for a system in which religions are arranged in a form of pyramid with animism and polytheism near the base, and guess what was at the top?
Triune monotheism, in other words, Christianity.
Well, no doubt there were, and perhaps are, more unbiased approaches to comparative religion, but fortunately we don't have to wrestle with that issue here. In any case, initiation was a term important to phenomenology, though, as I said, I'm not sure how much clout that word carries these days.

(04:45):
Leaving that aside, empowerment has connotations that are much closer to the meanings carried by the Tibetan word Wang.
As an interesting aside, although perhaps it's only interesting to me because I lived in Germany, Germans have a different problem related to this translation. Their word Einweihung is arguably very close in meaning

(05:14):
to initiation and we have seen that empowerment is probably much better.
Unfortunately in Germany
this empowerment translates to Ermaechtigung.
You may know how German tends to form new words by sticking two existing words together, where in English we would not do that, and that gives us the Ermaechhtigungsgezetz, or empowerment law.

(05:42):
This was a legal instrument that in effect, installed Hitler as a dictator.
Oh, horrors. It's a word that carries a very bad taste with it.
I'm not actually sure what word they're using these days, as it is nearly 30 years since I was living amongst German Buddhists.

(06:08):
In Tibetan Buddhism, the word has a few different senses. So now that we've ruled out those, particularly Western misconceptions, we should have a look at these.
Sometimes, a Tibetan style Buddhist will pray to some deity, to a Buddha, or to a lama, asking to be given empowerment in a fairly general sense.

(06:31):
This is not so very different from blessing. Oh, and by the way, going back to Western misconceptions, these empowerments are not at all the same as Reiki empowerments.
I have heard, some while ago, at least one reiki enthusiast saying that they had received a green Tara reiki empowerment and wondering whether that qualified her to practise a Green Tara sadhana. The answer is simply no.

(06:58):
It's just not the same. This is not meant as a judgement of Reiki, about which I do know very little, but it really is not the same thing. Green Tara is of course, very forgiving, so it would not be like, say, attempting to 42 00:07:13,000 --> s00:07:21,000 do some fanged, blood drinking, fire breathing wrathful deity without the appropriate prerequisites, empowerments and transmission. 43 s00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:25,000 But even so, it's just not the same sort of thing.

(07:25):
If you for example take a green Tara empowerment, you will be authorised and blessed to perform one or more of her sadhanas. This is a wonderful thing, but the thing that is much more of a hot potato
is what comes into play when we speak of the four empowerments.

(07:49):
These four empowerments are the entirely standard framework for the High Tantras. And just to avoid doubt, this is not a list of perhaps four specific deities, the empowerment of this, the empowerment of that. There are such sets, where students might want to receive empowerments for, say, the eight deities of this or that cycle.

(08:10):
But that's not what's intended here.
The four empowerments refers to four ways - four successive ways, in fact -
of encountering and working with a high tantric deity, whether this is a peaceful or wrathful deity, male, female, father-mother, or whatever.
Now the problem is this. Well, perhaps problem is overdoing it, but it's the place where we can trip up and get confused.

(08:38):
Apart from receiving the kind of empowerment just mentioned, perhaps before that stage or outside of it,
we are expected to receive these four empowerments from the Lama visualised in front of us.
This happens in particular in the Guru yoga practises such as those that form perhaps the most important part of the preliminary practises, the ngondro. We looked at those a bit in episode 31.

(09:08):
Usually this involves a visualisation in which 3 or 4 lights come from centres in the lama's body and dissolve into our own.
I don't think it's giving too much away to mention that generally this is a white light from the head representing the body, a red light from the lama's throat to ours representing speech, and a blue light from the lama's heart representing mind

(09:33):
for the first 3 empowerments. Then either all three lights come at the same time,
or a fourth light in another colour comes from the navel centre for the 4th empowerment.
All these details, naturally enough, are specific to the system that you are studying and practising, and you have to get them from the appropriate commentaries and sources.

(10:03):
There is no question here that these 4 empowerments are in principle the same as the four empowerments of a high tantric ceremony.
On the other hand, it most definitely does not mean that because we've done a guru yoga like this, perhaps extensively, we have now received the four empowerments in the formal sense that we might mean when somebody says, for example,

(10:28):
Have you received the Hevajra empowerment?
They are intended here
either to prepare the ground for receiving those four empowerments formally, or if that's already happened, to cultivate the seed that we should have received at that time.
They represent the same meaning, even though they aren't quite the same thing.

(10:49):
It's not the same as when we receive the empowerment formally from our Lama or from a high lineage holder of the lineage to which our lama belongs.
Classically, and ideally, that formal empowerment would come later, but things are messy these days. It's a fact, and it's silly to expect classic rules to be followed every time.

(11:13):
Now I don't want to get too deeply into this, partly because I'm not qualified to do so, and also, as I often point out, I am not your Buddhist teacher, just somebody who's been on the same path as you for quite a while. All the same, to get a handle on this, it might be worth saying at least a few words about
these famous four.

(11:36):
One. The first empowerment is called the vase impairment. It relates to the body, and to the idea that you are being empowered to embody the deity.
One aspect of empowerment is that, at least in the first stages, it parallels the investiture of the ruler of a Kingdom. That kind of ceremony would begin with the body of the soon-to-be ruler being washed with water poured from a vase.

(12:05):
This is why the Sanskrit term for an empowerment is abhisheka, meaning sprinkling.
The word meaning "empowerment" is, I believe, in fact closer to the meaning and context.
Two. The secret empowerment, as it is known. This relates to speech, and here it is important to note that the word speech has connotations in this context that are not quite the same as speech

(12:34):
in the western pattern of, say, body speech and mind.
Speech here is associated with breath, which is of course what we use in order to produce speech, but with a strong connection to subtle bodily energies.
Three, the wisdom-knowledge empowerment. Now... this is the one that is associated with sexual energies.

(13:00):
That, as I think we know, is a whole garden full of earthly confusion.
But suffice it to say that in reality you will find this is quite a chaste affair.
It is often said that there is hardly anyone, possibly no one at all, qualified for the actual physical tantric sex practise in the world today. That's not to say that there are a few people who think they are - and who am I to say

(13:25):
whether they are correct or not?
In addition to this, as recently mentioned, if someone is on this path, there are two things to bear in mind. The first is that the practitioner must never ejaculate or have an orgasm.
Hijackers, please note!
The second is that there are nevertheless other ways of handling this energy. There are other less problematic methods of manipulating those bodily energies to produce warmth and bliss.

(13:56):
Four. The word empowerment.
This is a question of the true, clear, blissful, empty nature of the mind itself, and so comes closest to the Mahamudra and Dzogchen practises that popped their heads up in episode 34.

(14:19):
Yes, what I've just said is all rather vague. I admit it, and that is in fact deliberate. The only real value in these things is when you actually follow this path, take these teachings, receive the transmissions in the proper way.
And then with all the extra information and advice you get, it will become clearer.

(14:43):
On an entirely practical level, one or two tips for newcomers would be as follows.
Make sure you go armed with a long white scarf, commonly known as a khatag. If you don't already have a drawer full of them from previous occasions, ask your centre where you can get one.
Make sure you also go armed with an envelope to put some cash in at the end.

(15:07):
If you can, dress up in your Sunday best. And be ready to prostrate, chant things that you can't understand, stand up, sit down, make hand gestures and do various other things for which you will have to take your cue from those around you.
If it all seems a bit weird, don't worry, it will be seeming weird to many of the other participants. If you are lucky, the presiding Lama will make sure that things are actually explained to you as you go along.

(15:36):
Pay attention to this as it will make the whole thing much more meaningful.
If you are not lucky, there will be no explanation, and that is just tough. I mean it. The explanations make a huge difference.
People do argue about whether meaningful empowerments can be given online. Some people say yes. Some even say that it's possible to take empowerment from a recording.

(16:02):
The fact that there are such people cannot be wished away. My own view is that online empowerments are rather like cybersex. Perhaps it's fun, but it's hard to imagine that it's the same as the real thing.
But - others have a different point of view. What can I say? There is also discussion to be had about whether mass empowerments, sometimes with thousands of recipients, are a good thing or not.

(16:29):
Once again, there are multiple views. My view - just mine but quite commonly held - is that they are really not much more than a blessing, although that can be a great thing.
When the number of recipients is so large that the Lama no longer knows them all, knows who they are, or in some cases can even see them - isn't it becoming so diluted that it doesn't really amount to all that much?

(16:58):
But again...
Others have a different point of view. What can I say?
There is one more thing that you will probably hear about and will want to look as if you know what's being spoken about, and that is lungs. These are spelt like those spongy things that you have in your chest.

(17:20):
The tradition is that when the power to perform a practise is being fully transmitted, there are three essential parts.
One is the empowerment as we have just been discussing.
The second is the lung, and the third is called the tri. Lung literally means wind. Only a few minutes ago we mentioned how the associations of this word are not quite what we have in the West, at least not as far as I know. And in this case it again is really talking about speech,

(17:52):
and the fact that it is held that we need to be introduced to the text through a reading transmission.
This gives the authorization to study and actually recite the text concerned.
I have myself seen longs given over the course of about two or three minutes and lungs given over the course of two or three days. You will find lungs given for extensive volumes of texts that even take months.

(18:19):
So well done to those who have sat through that kind of thing!
The third key element that must be received from the Lama is the tri, or explanation.
Even after receiving an empowerment and the reading transmission for a text, it is very likely, especially at first, that you can look at the text and be left thinking - errr,

(18:44):
What on earth am I to do here? This is where the tri comes in.
In some cases there is a straightforward text for the tri of a certain sadhana. In my limited experience, this has also been very much a matter for the discretion of the Lama, who may give explanations
in the light of how much the students already know, and give details of what to visualise, what to think, how to meditate at the various stages, and so on.

(19:14):
If there is a straightforward text, it is of course also possible for this to be extended by commentaries and - guess what? There may be commentaries on commentaries, all deending on how much of a heavy duty or important practise we are talking about.
As ever, it is beyond my skill and beyond the scope of the time available to be at all thorough about this kind of thing. All the same, my hope, again as usual, is that this might help you to feel a little less uncertain about what's going on,

(19:46):
especially if the possibility of taking an important empowerment is somewhere on your horizon.
At last, then the end! Please do take a moment to, like, subscribe, tell your friends and all that stuff. And remember, yes, it is all terribly complicated, but with any luck you'll find more experienced students who will be happy to share more advice with you.

(20:11):
Good luck with it all! And - bye!