engagedharma.net

Hmm. I was thinking that I've understood renunciation as being something like withdrawing from ordinary life and the world (as described at e.g. http://arobuddhism.org/community/an-uncommon-perspective.html … ), and that if you are using a technique to accomplish your aims *in* the world, it wouldn't be renunciate?

Yes: when Sutra/renunciation is your yana (path/worldview) that’s right, it would make no sense at all. But Tantra is meta to Sutra, by definition, so when Tantra is your overarching worldview, Sutra is ‘object’ - ie, you can approach it as a method.

Tantric worldview is entirely different to Sutric renunciation. It looks, sounds and feels different. It can’t be held at the same time as Sutric worldview, they’re either-or. I mean, they are saying different things about the world and how it works that can’t both be true.

When Tantra is approached as a path, adopted as a worldview in its own right, Sutra/renunciation looks slightly different to how it looks when it’s your guiding worldview - and its purpose is subsidiary to the aims of Tantra, (ie, always localized and contextualized.)

Because Tantra is meta to Sutra, adopting renunciative, Sutric worldview and trying to incorporate Tantric-style practices within that as tools doesn’t really work, imo. Not only that it doesn’t make sense, I mean it actually doesn’t work: Tantric practice can’t function >

toward achieving the aims/purpose of Sutra, it can only mess it up. One *could* approach Tantric practice from a renunciative path if they’d been practicing renunciative methods exclusively very long-term, over many years. >

At that point Tantric practice functions with the whole intent of messing up the renunciative worldview! That can be extraordinarily powerful for long-term renunciate practitioners, as is any expansive psychological/spiritual breakthrough.

That makes sense. I guess in that case, my original objection could be rephrased as something like "you said that sutra is the Buddhism that most people are familiar with, but in practice I think that reading many modern teachers ends up imparting a tantric worldview".