PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

Paradigm Change in Meditation onSelflessness in Tibetan Buddhism:The Progression from Space-LikeMeditative Equipoise to Deity YogaJeffrey HopkinsUniversity of VirginiaINTRODUCTIONACROSS THE VAST REACHES of the Tibetan cultural region in InnerAsia—stretching from Kalmuck Mongolian areas near the Volga River (inEurope) by the Caspian Sea, Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, the BuriatRepublic of Siberia, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh, parts of Nepal, and what iscurrently called the “Tibetan Autonomous Region” but also most ofQinghai Province, and parts of the Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan Provincesthat were included in greater Tibet before the Chinese Communistsremapped the area—Buddhism is practiced in many forms by a plethora ofsects and sub-sects. Though their systems vary widely, they agree ondividing their practices into basically two styles of meditation, Sutra andMantra (also called Tantra), and all schools put forth reasons why theMantra system is superior. Based on Indian expositions of the greatness ofMantra, many scholar-practitioners catalogued and creatively developedthese explanations, which came to be the means through which theyperceived and ordered the otherwise overwhelmingly diverse forms ofpractice inherited from Buddhist India and elsewhere.Most of the presentations of the distinctiveness of Mantra employmultiple formats for demonstrating its greatness, but one Tibetan scholarboils these down into a single central distinguishing feature—deity yoga,the meditative practice of imagining oneself to be an ideal being fullyendowed with compassion and wisdom and their resultant altruisticactivities. Whether or not one accepts that deity yoga is the central distinctivefeature of Mantra, it is an important feature, and since meditation onemptiness is said to be the “life” of the Sutra and Mantra paths and thus alsoof deity yoga, this essay initially presents how Sutra and Mantra describethe practice of reflecting on emptiness and then how this understanding isrelated to appearances. As a basic theme of Great Vehicle Buddhism, thecompatibility of emptiness and appearance offers a window through117