I welcome you to this session.
So today,
We are asking the question that to which dimension does Buddhist Tantra belong?
And to understand this,
We explore the concept of Trikaya.
Kaya means body or dimension.
Three means three.
So Trikaya means three dimensions,
Or you could also say three realms,
Or three planes of existence,
Or three levels of consciousness.
So what are these three levels of consciousness?
What is this Trikaya?
The three Kayas are,
The first one is called Nirmanakaya.
The second one is called Dharmakaya.
And the third one is called Sambhogkaya.
Let me explain these three.
The first one is Nirmanakaya.
This is the realm of forms.
This includes our physical body.
This includes our emotions,
Our feelings,
Our thoughts,
And the world that we can see around us.
Then comes Dharmakaya.
Dharmakaya is the realm of ultimate reality,
Ultimate truth.
And this realm is experienced through what is known as emptiness.
It's called shunyata,
But the English word for that is emptiness.
So through the experience of emptiness.
This is experienced,
The dharmakaya is experienced.
And finally we have Sambhog Gaya.
Sambhogkaya is the realm of luminosity or the realm of infinity.
So,
How does these three work and what is then Buddhist Tantra to which out of these three does Buddhist Tantra belong?
As we start with our meditation practice,
We first are usually aware of the Nirmankaya,
Which is the realm of forms,
The realm of duality,
The realm of physicality,
And also the realm of thoughts,
Emotions.
And this is what we are usually aware of.
This is when we follow mindfulness practices that are based on forms.
But then we go deeper and we enter the experience or the realm of emptiness.
And this realm of emptiness is a state which is beyond the experience of the mind,
Beyond physicality.
It is also known as the realm of absolute truth.
But this absolute truth is experienced through nothingness or emptiness.
And then comes Sambhogakaya.
Is when through emptiness we enter into the realm of infinity.
There is a saying by the Buddha,
When you enter the space of nothingness,
Everything is known.
So when you go through nothingness,
When you go through emptiness,
Infinity luminosity is experienced.
And there is a parallel in quantum physics for this and this is the concept of quantum vacuum.
That when they created a vacuum,
They thought that this vacuum will have nothing,
Will have zero energy.
But they found out that this vacuum has a lot of energy.
Richard Feynman,
You know,
The popular quantum physicist,
He said that there is so much energy in a vacuum.
There is so much energy in just empty teacup that this energy can used to be boil all the oceans of the world.
There's so much of energy in empty space.
And this energy is also known as zero-point energy in quantum physics.
The point being that when we go through emptiness,
That emptiness is not really empty,
That nothingness is not really empty.
It has infinity.
We enter infinity through that.
We enter luminosity.
This is the realm of the Buddhist Tantra,
Where the luminous experiences of deities,
Of higher forms,
Of our deepest self,
Of our multidimensional self is experienced.
But I'm using the word experience here.
When I say experience,
It's not really the experience through senses because that's how we usually understand experience.
This experience of the Dharmakaya and Sambhogakaya,
These experiences are beyond experience.
So I would rather call it experience beyond experience.
This also means that we cannot really understand these realms through intellect.
We are talking about it,
Yes.
But this is something that cannot be understood.
It can be experienced.
And again,
That experience is beyond experience.
Experience beyond experience.
