Khenpo Tsultrim Lodro
A unique characteristic of Tantra which is absent in Sutra is the attainment of the Vajra body. When the Vajra body is accomplished, one’s outward appearance remains no different from that of an ordinary person, yet, in reality, birth, aging, sickness, death, and the four elements—earth, water, fire, and air—cease to have any effect on one’s body.
The Vajra body is unobstructed by materiality, feats such as levitation, leaping over roofs or walls, or passing through solid walls become effortless. Of course, these are not the purpose of cultivating the Vajra body. The true aim of Tantra is to transform the ordinary human body into that of a Buddha—the Sambhogakaya form endowed with the thirty-two major and eighty minor marks.
From the standpoint of Sutra, this is inconceivable. Sutra holds that the physical body belongs to samsara, is impure and must be renounced or relinquished. For ordinary people, this view is correct. However, Tantra utilizes wisdom and many skilful methods to transform the impure body into a pure one.
To give an analogy: an ordinary person who consumes poison may die, but someone who knows how to use it skilfully may instead counter poison with poison. Before realization, our body is indeed part of samsara and if we wish to reach liberation, we must abandon all clinging to it. But when one possesses wisdom and skilful means, not only does one not need to renounce the body, one can instead transform it into a Buddha’s body. To achieve this, we need either the tantric practices of channels, winds, and drops, or the luminosity practices of Dzogchen. Apart from these two paths, the Sutrayana schools of Pure Land, Chan (Zen), Yogācāra, or Madhyamaka are unable to achieve this.
If one has never studied Tantric scriptures, even some Sutric teachers find it difficult to accept the idea that the physical body can be transformed in this way. Yet Tantra does indeed possess such methods. The root of these methods lies in realization itself which is a function of the mind. The formation of an impure body is also a function of the mind, arising from impure mind and karma. When the mind realizes luminosity, it can transform the impure body into a Vajra body. Of course, in the process of attaining the Vajra body, other additional practices are also required.
This is not merely theoretical. Throughout Tibetan history, there have been many recorded cases of great masters who accomplished this. Many people have heard of Dzogchen practitioners whose physical bodies gradually shrunk until they dissolved into light while colorful rainbows appeared in the sky. This was witnessed by many people on many occasions.
The reason a human corpse can dissolve into light is also due to the power of the mind. Ordinary beings do not know how to develop this capacity, whereas practitioners who have mastered the pith instructions can manifest this phenomena for all to see.
This is much like how people five or six hundred years ago would have found today’s technology unbelievable. If people of that era had possessed sufficient technical knowledge, they too could have developed the same advanced technologies; these methods did not appear only recently. In other words, the possibility for producing such advanced technological products have always existed, but people were unaware of them.
Likewise, we now have the potential of developing the capacity of the mind and discovering many of its amazing aspects. However, lacking this ability, we believe that afflictions and discursive thoughts must be eliminated completely. At the beginning, when wisdom is insufficient, this approach is correct. Once wisdom is present, afflictions can be transformed into the path and no longer need to be eradicated. This is a defining characteristic of Tantra.
In Sutra practice one must undergo countless great kalpas of practice to attain the initial realization of the first Bodhisattva bhūmi. Then, from the first bhūmi to the seventh bhūmi. one must again practice for countless great kalpas. Upon realizing the eighth bhūmi, the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mental consciousness among the eight consciousnesses are fully purified; at that point, mountains, rivers, earth and all appearances are perceived as the Buddha’s maṇḍala. This is clearly recorded in Sutric teachings.
In Tantra, by contrast, one can transform the impure body into a Vajra Body within a single lifetime. The key instructions lie in the practices of channels, winds, and drops, as well as Dzogchen. In Tibetan Vajrayāna, the teachings on channels, winds, and drops are divided into outer, inner, secret, and extremely secret levels. What non-Buddhists practice (such as in Qigong or Taoism) is only the simplest outer level of Tibetan Vajrayāna; they have no contact with inner levels of the practice. It is through these key instructions that Tantra generates the practices for the Vajra body.
Within Dzogchen, there are also practices concerning the bardos which describe the process of death with great clarity. Many people have heard or read of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Its descriptions of the experiences of dying shocked some Westerners who had near-death experiences because what they experienced in the early stages of death had already been recorded with such clarity in Tibet thousands of years ago.
The experiences of these Westerners only touch on the initial phase of dying, whereas The Tibetan Book of the Dead not only describes the entire process of death but also gives precise instructions on how to master it. While alive, a practitioner can use these bardo practices to gain control over and utilize the process of death itself.
Such approaches are unimaginable in Sutra; even within general Tibetan Vajrayāna such practices do not exist, only Dzogchen contains these methods. This is another distinctive feature of Dzogchen. Since the unique qualities of Dzogchen are innumerable, only one or two of the more important points have been briefly mentioned here to illustrate how Tantra differs from Sutra.
