Healing and Subtle Energies: Vajrayana Buddhist Approaches for Rethinking Education

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines archives within Buddhist philosophy as a thought experiment toward rethinking what counts as education. Specifically, it revisits archives within Vajrayana Buddhism (11th century onwards), for “holistic” practices that target problems posed by conceptions of self and allied suffering. In Vajrayana Buddhism, education for the alleviation of suffering is tied to the perception of subtle energies. Multiple mechanisms and implications within this approach are analyzed: (I) preliminary meditations on compassion; (II) tantric preliminaries involving devotion to the master and initiations into mandala; (III) mandala meditations; (IV) meditations on emptiness, subtle energy channels, and bliss; and (V) implications for discourses of healing and education. Through an analysis of the techniques from the “Six Yogas of Naropa” in the work of the iconic Je Tsongkhapa [b. 1357] who was the founder of the Tibetan Gelukpa school of Buddhism and whose lineage the current H.H. Dalai Lama holds, the possibilities for rethinking education in terms of discourses of healing are mapped. Extrapolating these techniques, the chapter identifies several implications that pertain to rethinking education when conceived as for healing, in personal, multispecies, and “cosmic” terms: generating pedagogical clearings; addressing deficit discourses; and rethinking purposes of education via symbolic language that relates to “energies.” Together, such approaches may be re-imagined as not only producing a new and “healed” world, but also as simultaneously integral to recognizing its emptiness, to not be grasping at “thingness” or universalized diagnoses, solutions, identities, categories, or attachments.