The Cross-Fertilization of World Religions
My teacher Ramananda has said that it should be really understood that Shiva is not a Tibetan image. Shiva is not used in Tibetan Buddhism.It’s Vedic. And that it is one of those things where we can get caught up trying to mix them, and yet there is a very fundamental connection all the way through here. Because Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, was a Vedic practitioner. And he developed his teachering for awakeningwhich is what Buddha means in Sanskrit, ‘awake’from the teachings of the Vedas.
And just to be clear for our readers, the Tibetan tradition of this Deity practice came after that. In other words, the Vedas are far more ancient than the Tibetan lineage that we’re discussing today.
They say that Buddhism came to Tibet the first time in 700 AD.
Now there is an indication that Buddhism did come to Tibet earlier than that. Shakyamuni Buddha was alive about 500 years before the birth of Christ.
So we’re talking about at least a thousand years after Buddha passed away as a living person. Buddhism in Tibet ended up being combined with what would be called a folk religion called the Bn, B-O-N, another umlaut over the ‘O’, of Tibet. And the folk religion of Tibet utilized a tremendous amount, a tremendous number, of names and qualities of the Deities of the Vedas. One has to really understand that, contrary to the belief that all these religions in the world grew up in isolation, just the opposite has happenedthere was communication all over the place.
In fact, we’ve even talked about the scholars, the pundits, who were from India, would travel through the de-militarized zone between Babylon and Egypt, where the Palestinians lived. And literally, the way in which the scholars got food and survived was to tell stories. The stories they told were the stories of the Vedas, so that we have, even within the development of the Torah, Vedic stories.
