Best Of

@Jeroen said:

@person said:
Many highly realized people are quite smart and knowledgeable.

True. Osho for example was wel known as a voracious reader, with a library of 150,000 volumes when he passed away. He had also been a university professor and All-India debating champion. But he was rather poor on physics and science in general. He spoke many times on the effect of scientific thought on the mind, though, and what he said was quite insightful.

My personal experience was that science encourages you to take things apart, simplify them, and model them in your mind as a way of understanding them. I studied engineering at university, and that was very much done in that way. It’s very logical, a world of parts where things have well-known properties and are replaceable.

In the world of mythology, things are very different. It is a world of relationships, of gods and heroes who often have blood ties. It is a world allied to the world of dreams, where one might see a heroic journey to retrieve a lost soul from the underworld.

I think my general approach to things like this is one of integration and synthesis. Rather than moving from one to the other, see how they each have their own domain while at the same time can help strengthen and learn from each other.

I always seem to come back to the idea of yin and yang. For example, we all have a masculine and a feminine side, social norms are often such that we will attempt to elevate one and repress the other. I've found it healthier to embrace both and seek to find a balance that makes sense for my own disposition.

@Kotishka said:
Tantric precepts?

Yes, there are "tantric" precepts. There are 14 of them.

1. disrespecting the vajra master
2. transgressing the words of the buddhas
3. insulting one’s vajra brothers and sisters
4. abandoning love for sentient beings
5. abandoning the bodhichitta in aspiration or application
6. criticizing the teachings of the sutras and tantras
7. revealing secrets to those who are unworthy
8. mistreating one’s body
9. abandoning emptiness
10. keeping bad company
11. failing to reflect on emptiness
12. upsetting those who have faith in the teachings
13. failing to observe the samaya commitments
14. denigrating women

@Jeroen said:
Tilopa was said to be a tantric teacher… although it can also refer to Tibetan vajrayana.

Nothing said, about it, Tilopa was a tantric teacher. He's the founder of the Karma Kagyu practice lineage.

Although not a Tibetan and didn't live there, his teachings on Mahamudra were passed down in a lineage that is now associated with Tibetan Buddhism. Tilopa passed his teachings on Mahamudra to his student Naropa who in turn passed the teaching to Marpa, a Tibetan.

Vajrayana and Mahomudra, strictly speaking, are not the same thing. Vajrayana is tantra comprising a family of rituals, while Mahamudra is a meditative discipline.