Tantra

Tantra is the name for the texts in which the Vajrayana teachings are recorded, and for what those texts are about: the unbroken continuity of the nature of mind. The Sanskrit word means "thread", or the warp on a loom. Tibetans translated it as gyü, a stream that keeps flowing. Just as the cord runs through every bead of a mala, awakened nature runs through the whole path, present at the start, along the way and at the end. The tantras speak of three continua for this reason: ground, path and fruition.

What tantra isn't

Search for "tantra" online and you'll mostly find massage and workshops on intimacy. Buddhist tantra has very little to do with any of that. Walk into a Tibetan centre and you'll see people with a text in front of them and a mala in hand, chanting a prayer, reciting a mantra or quietly visualising a deity.

It is true, though, that tantra shuts nothing out of life. Emotions like desire and anger aren't treated only as things to guard against. The tantras teach that the energy in them is wisdom at heart, and they work with that energy directly. This happens in meditation, within a clear framework and with a teacher's guidance. It is not a licence to do as you please.

A tantric practice is called a sadhana. Ordinary appearances dissolve into emptiness, you arise as the deity, recite the mantra, and then let everything dissolve again. That is the development stage, kyerim. Then comes the completion stage, dzogrim. It has several methods, but in its simplest form it is resting in the nature of mind itself.

The tantras in the Nyingma tradition

The Nyingma school divides the path into nine vehicles, and the last six are tantric. The three outer tantras emphasise purity and ritual. At first the practitioner relates to the deity rather as a servant to a lord, and gradually more as an equal. In the three inner tantras, mahayoga, anuyoga and atiyoga, that distance falls away. Your nature and the deity's are not two. The principal text of mahayoga is the Guhyagarbha Tantra, the "secret essence", and a great many Nyingma sadhanas trace back to it. Atiyoga is better known as Dzogchen.

You don't work through a tantra on your own. You receive an empowerment, a reading transmission and the explanation of a teacher who has received the lineage themselves. Only then does the text really open. That is how it has been handed on for centuries, teacher to student, and how the thread stays whole.

In September 2026 Khenpo Tseten taught a weekend on the Guhyagarbha Tantra at Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling. You don't need to wait for a weekend like that to get a first taste, though. In the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro, which we practise every Saturday in Hoofddorp, you visualise, recite Vajrasattva's mantra and close with guru yoga. That is tantra, at a scale you can keep up at home every day.