Essence Over Form: The Heart of Tantra

It’s easy to mistake the outer appearance of someone for who they really are. We see someone who is healthy, wears beautiful clothes, and think they must be happy and successful. But inside, they could be overcome with anxiety and the constant search for more.

In tantra, we see elaborate rituals, colorful deities, or monks intoning mantras and think: this is tantra. But those are outer forms. What matters is the meaning inside, the essence that animates the form.

Tantra is not about a specific cultural container. It is about activating and embodying buddhanature. The forms are secondary. They are skillful means for the main act of accomplishing buddhahood in this life.

The Same Essence, Different Forms

In India, tantra cut across boundaries of caste and purity. It exercised taboos–meat, sexuality, charnel grounds–to show that no one and nothing is outside the path of liberation.

In Tibet, tantra transformed the world of spirits, oracles, and local guardians. Padmasambhava didn’t banish the deities of the land, he bound them by oath, transforming them into guardians of the Dharma.

Two very different cultures. One essence: whatever arises becomes workable on the path.

Our challenge is the same today. We have inherited tantra from India and Tibet, but we live in a different world. The challenge is to understand the function behind those forms and ask: what carries that same function now?

Inclusive Without Vagueness

It’s tempting to swing too far in either direction.

One mistake is falling into spiritual nostalgia, clinging to the old ways of doing things simply because they are traditional or esoteric. We repeat rituals and practices without knowing why, treating the cultural container as more important than the contents.

The other mistake is discarding forms altogether, drifting into a “new age buffet” where anything goes, so nothing goes deep.

And in between lies what Trungpa called spiritual materialism: turning practice itself into an ornament for the ego. We accumulate empowerments, sacred art, or exotic symbols like collectors, mistaking quantity for conviction, appearances for realization.

The art is to stay rooted in lineage without being trapped by it. Lineage gives weight and continuity. It keeps us accountable to centuries of lived experiment. But the function, the activation of buddhanature, is our main goal and must always come first.

Our Modern Charnel Grounds

In ancient India, the spiritual taboos meant eating meat, having sex, or drinking alcohol. For tantrikas, the charnel ground was never just a cemetery. It was a place of fear, impurity, and the hard reality of truth. Practicing there meant confronting what society hides.

Today, our taboos look different. They are the places we exile what we don’t want to face, the spaces our culture treats as invisible, shameful, or dangerous.

• Economic charnel grounds: unemployment offices, refugee camps, food banks, aging homes, skid row. Places where “the useless class” is gathered, out of sight.
• Digital charnel grounds: the endless doomscrolling, bot chatter, algorithmic junk. A cemetery of attention, where human presence is consumed and scattered.
• Ecological charnel grounds: landfills, strip mines, oil fields, bleached coral reefs. Our planetary shadow, where the cost of consumption is buried. 
• Psychological charnel grounds: trauma clinics, addiction centers, prison cells. The inner exiles of society’s failures and our own unhealed wounds.
• Cultural charnel grounds: the silenced and invisible: the elderly, the disabled, those outside dominant political tribes.

Each of these is taboo in its own way. We don’t want to look. We don’t want to linger. Yet, in tantric fashion, they can be seen not only as sites of suffering and despair but as practice grounds. Precisely because they hold the energies polite society represses, they contain the very power tantra seeks to transmute.

Spirits and Protectors in Modern Form

Tibetan tantra tamed the eight classes of local gods and demons–spirits of sky, earth, water, and charnel grounds–and made them guardians of the Dharma. The point was not to banish them, but to bind their power by oath and redirect it.

What are our equivalents?

• Consumerism is our modern lu (nāga): always hoarding wealth, threatening sickness if left unappeased.
• Workaholism is our sadak (earth lord): the local lord of productivity, always demanding more offerings of time and energy, threatening collapse if you stop paying tribute. Its transmutation is to recognize that dignity is innate, not earned.
• Polarization and ideological possession act like the wrathful tsen (warrior spirits): red, fierce, fueled by rage, pulling whole communities into conflict.
• Social media craving is our lha (local deity) with a hunger for visibility and approval, but unstable and fickle, easily turning from friend to foe.
• Trauma is our mamo (feminine spirits): fierce feminine energy, chaotic, vulnerable, and overwhelming, yet capable of becoming a fierce ally when honored.

And of course, algorithms may be the most fitting bdud of our age: invisible, obstructing forces that direct our attention without consent.

Each of these is a powerful energy that usually possesses and controls us. Tantra’s genius is not to repress them but to bind them by oath, turning obstacles into allies.

May my drive to accumulate be directed towards generosity for the collective good.

May my drive to be productive turn toward benefitting others, not endless self-optimization.

May my passion for my cause become compassion for all beings, even my opponents.

May my longing to be seen help others recognize their worth.

May my trauma guard me against arrogance and deepen my compassion.

May the nets which catch my attention turn my mind toward the Dharma.

Nothing is wasted. Nothing is outside the mandala.

A Modern Caste: The “Useless Class”

In India, tantra said no one was outside the mandala, not even those cast as ritually impure. Today, the homeless and emerging “useless class” functions like a modern caste: people deemed redundant in a culture that equates worth with productivity and success.

Tantra answers with the same radical inclusivity: no one is useless if everyone has buddhanature. Worth is intrinsic, not assigned by markets or titles.

How do we harness the forces that cast people aside–automation, the endless search for more, the cult of productivity–and bound them by oath? 

The mandala has no outside. The edges of society are often where the deepest wisdom emerges.

The Tantric Posture in Today’s World

Across India, Tibet, and our world today, the tantric posture is the same:

We go to the edges, not the center.

We face the darkness that society denies.

We refuse to define worth by productivity or the status quo.

We discover that the “outcast” energy, whether a person or a place, is not other than emptiness and the very ground of awakening.

This is the heart of tantra. Forms change. The essence remains. Whatever arises becomes workable on the path.