In the last century this was the scholarly consensus, that Bon was that 'pre-lamaist' shamanism, but they did not really study Bon back then. Some Buddhists opposed to Bon may have added to the confusion. There was shamanism in Tibetts before, but it wasn't Bon.

The Bon have something they call primordial Bon, so this is something like the primordial Deen of all men. Like us, they circumambulate 'objects' counter-clockwise.

We also read prof. Suzukis books (mostly) on the Lankavatara, Zen is very similar to Chan, and Chan is very similar to Dzogchen and Dzogchen is very similar to the Mahamudra of the ancient psychonauts, the Mahasiddhas.

Btw: Bhanga (skt) just means plain cannabis, only pressed with milk and datura seeds, melon seeds, poppy seeds and crushed almond its called Bhang ki thandai (mislabeled as bhanglassi) but lassi is made from joghurt. Sometimes other stuff is added, like pistachio-saffron syrup and pandanus water (kewra essence) Even children drink Bhang ki thandai and during Holi or during the various Uras, also in Pakistan and Bengal, they can turn into little ferocious demons when they do....

Edit: we consider (an aspect of) haoma an immortal saint (but a makara is not just a fish, it's moar of a seamonster-dragon-beast)

ALLAN BADINER: You have emerged as the leading spokesperson for the use of psychedelics
. What is the history of your encounter with Buddhism?

TERENCE MCKENNA: Like so many people in the sixties, I came up through D. T. Suzuki’s books on Zen, which were very popular at a certain point. And then early on because of my art historical bent, I became interested in Tibetan Buddhism. But my interest was not exactly Buddhism. It was more the shamanic pre-Buddhist Tibet phenomenon of the Bön religion—which grew out of the shamanic culture of pre-Buddhist Tibet. I found among Tibetan Buddhists a lot of prejudice against the Bön. They were definitely second-class citizens inside theocratic Tibet, and they still are.

Buddhist practice didn’t attract you?

Buddhist psychology was very interesting to me. I came to it through the works of Herbert Günther, who was a Heideggerian originally, and then found Mahayana thought parallel to his Heideggerianism. I was influenced by a book called Tibetan Buddhism Without Mystification, published later as Treasures of the Tibetan Middle Way, which contrasted paradoxically differing schools of Buddhist thought; Nagarjuna’s writings on nothingness were also a big influence.

What did you make of the Abhidhamma—the psychological component of Buddhist teaching?

The Buddhist style of talking about the constructs of the mind is now a universalist style. The puzzle to me is how Buddhism achieves all of this without psychedelics; not only how but why, since these dimensions of experience seem fairly easily accessed, given hallucinogenic substances and plants, and excruciatingly rare and unusual by any other means.

How would Buddhism fit into your notion of the psychedelic society
that you often talk about?

Well, compassion is the central moral teaching of Buddhism and, hopefully, the central moral intuition of the psychedelic experience. So at the ethical level I think these things are mutually reinforcing and very good for each other. Compassion is what we lack. Buddhism preaches compassion. Psychedelics give people the power to overcome habitual behaviors.

Compassion is a function of awareness. You cannot attain greater awareness without necessarily attaining greater compassion, whether you’re attaining this awareness through Buddhist practice or through psychedelic experience.

So compassion and awareness are the twin pillars of both Buddhism and the psychedelic society.

Compassion and awareness. To my mind the real contrast between Buddhism and psychedelic shamanism is between a theory out of which experiences can be teased and an experience out of which theory can be teased.

Well, this is a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, to abandon belief systems for direct experience.

Yes, but like an onion, Buddhism has many layers. For instance, folk Buddhism is obsessed with reincarnation. Philosophical Buddhism knows there is no abiding self. How can these two things be reconciled? Logically they can’t, but religions aren’t logical. Religions are structures in the mass psyche that fulfill needs not dictated by reason alone. Any complex, philosophical system makes room for self-contradiction.

One of the significant contributions Buddhism offers this culture is that it creates a context for the experience of death. You have said the awareness of death is one of the most important insights that the psychedelic experience offers. Are they similar perspectives?

Well, they’re similar in that I think the goal is the same. The goal, the view of both positions is that life is a preparation for death and that this preparation is a specific preparation. In other words, certain facts must be known, certain techniques must be mastered, and then the passage out of physicality and on to whatever lies beyond is more smoothly met. So in that sense they are very similar, and they seem to be talking about the same territory.

You’ve said that the twin horrors or twin problems of Western society are ego and materialism, combining in a kind of naive monotheism. Why is Buddhism any less a remedy than psychedelics?

Well, it’s less a remedy only in the sense that it’s an argument, not an experience.

But it’s a series of practices that enable experience.

Yeah, but you have to do it. The thing about psychedelics is the inevitability of it once you simply commit to swallowing the pill. But Buddhism and psychedelics are together probably the best hope we have for an antidote to egotism and materialism, which are fatally destroying the planet. I mean, it’s not an abstract thing. The most important thing Buddhism can do for us is to show us inner wealth and to de-emphasize object fetishism, which is a very primitive religious impulse. It’s an aboriginal religious impulse to fetishize objects and Buddhism shows a way out of that.

The way you describe ecstasy has kind of a Buddhist flavor . . . the edge or the depth of human feeling that includes suffering. This resonates with the Buddhist notion that nirvana encompasses samsara.

True ecstasy is a union of opposites. It’s the felt experience of paradox, so it is exalting and illuminating at the same time that it’s terrifying and threatening. It dissolves all boundaries.

Are you anticipating the emergence of a Buddhist psychedelic culture?

No, it’s a Buddhist, psychedelic, green, feminist culture! I’ve always felt that Buddhism, ecological thinking, psychedelic thinking, and feminism are the four parts of a solution. These things are somewhat fragmented from each other, but they are the obvious pieces of the puzzle. An honoring of the feminine, an honoring of the planet, a stress on dematerialism and compassion, and the tools to revivify and make coherent those three.

The tools being psychedelic substances?

Yes. It would be very interesting to find Buddhists who were open-minded enough to go back and start from scratch with psychedelics and not do the ordinary “We’ve got a better way” rap, but to say, “Maybe we do, maybe we don’t. Let’s go through these things with all our practice and all our understanding and all our technique and put it with botany, chemistry, and all this ethnography.” And then what could you come up with? If, as Baker Roshi says, people advance quickly with psychedelics, then advance them quickly with psychedelics. And then when they reach a point where practice and method are primary, practice and method should move to the fore. And maybe there are several times when these things would switch position.

You don’t see any contradiction in being a Buddhist and exploring psychedelics?

No, I would almost say, how can you be a serious Buddhist if you’re not exploring psychedelics? Then you’re sort of an armchair Buddhist, a Buddhist from theory, a Buddhist from practice, but it’s sort of training wheels practice. I mean, the real thing is, take the old boat out and give it a spin.

Maybe you should try taking out the old zafu for a spin!

Or, try both!

..except that, due to either not accessing the right people/schools of Buddhism, or not having the time to really investigate, Terence has missed that a number of Buddhist schools do/did use entheogens..
i've written or hinted about this briefly in a few places (in the context of trees), and Mike Crowley of course discusses mushrooms..

the core difference between Terence (bless him)'s approach and the Buddhist (tantric) is that they say people should do at least seven years meditation and study before working with entheogens...then one is more likely ready enough to navigate the bardos and not fall into delusions of ego, and integrate...Terence (and indeed most of the modern entheogen world) take the 'jump in first' and see approach (i guess partly to tackle european/western often complete dispossession of a spiritual core/mind-set in the past few hundred or couple thousand years)

ultimately such buddhists (or vedantans, or indeed indigenous masters) would point that, while entheogens are very powerful tools for understanding many levels of reality, the ultimate objective is beyond anything that can be 'seen'..

but again...there isn't just one entheogen, one 'soma'...
just as one plant doesn't suit all..

anyway...ancient psilocybe is the topic..

If we was a 'terton' or someone else who holds the great seal, and we wanted to place a 'terma' for future generations, we would hide it in plain sight, yet with it's contents releasing miraculously in layers (seven just being a random symbolical and colourful number). The average Joe would abort long before penetrating to the first layer, or they would adapt to its zahir (apparent) meaning, or scrap the whole idea that there is something of interest (to be found) there.

While we was fast asleep, in one of Mckenna's audio talks, we heard him mention, that eventually he found a Tibetian Lama, who was open enough to try spice with him. He didn't say who it was, but we have an idea....

Accordingly, the Lama said he went as far as the five lights, beyond of which there is no 'return' other then for one's hairs and nails

But yeah, lets return to Hunnic use of shrooms

I gave it to Tibetans, they said "this is the lesser lights, the lesser lights of the Bardo. You cannot go further into the Bardo and return. This takes you as far as you can go." -terence mckenna

I'm completely unaware of entheogen using Buddhist sects...

You did leave me some leads as well, though I wanted to actually sit down with some good free time and really dive into this stuff, rather than skim through it and leavening a half-hearted response.

I wonder how McKenna managed to miss this?

Regardless, this is very interesting to me.

And I very much appreciate your input, thank you again.

There's actually hours of information in this thread alone to sift through, specially regarding eastern religion, which was not fully off topic, the article from the original post did mention soma.


Ok, back to the mushroom.

Look up Hunnic Bronze Cauldrons (it seems very clear....hahaha)


map: note that they call it mushroom knob design

Reconstruction from a find in Hungary

Hunnic cauldron


So these are mostly from Hungary, so the practice seems to have lived on as the Huns moved through the Scythian lands into Central Europe. We wonder if they where the ones who also brought p. harmala to Hungary (its most northern wild occurrence in Europe). Anyways, some near identical cauldron from Xinjiang (China) are associated with Saka culture. Perhaps the Xiongnu picked up the haoma culture from the Sakas? Because their vessels start to have mushroom knobs as the Xiongnu moved into southern Sibera (at that time co-inhabited by the Sakas, perhaps early Alans).


Cauldron found in a Saka grave yard in Xinjiang

deformed cauldron from the grave of a Saka woman from Kazakhstan

another Hunnic cauldron

another one (from Hungary)

and another...

Chinese Shang dynasty cauldron


The Huns, together with their Goth allies raided as far as Burgundy (France) and even Rome.
There was still old people with Hunnic style head binding in France in the 1940s. Look at this guys ears . Was that the reason they did that???

It [the textile] was made someplace in Syria or Palestine, embroidered, probably, in north-western India and found in Mongolia.

....

The origin of this embroidery and characters depicted on it is associated with North-Western India and the Indo-Scythians (Sakas). How the embroidered cloth made it into a Xiongnu grave is a surprise of the so-called Silk Road, a network of trade routes crossing the whole of Eurasia. Judging by the Chinese chronicles, veils and blankets from Northern India were highly valued in the Han China.
http://scfh.ru/en/news/w...ma-we-became-immortal-/

..yes i always drop leads..
there was a mention in a certain nexian article done in conjunction with jamie (helped by dreamer042)
and then there's a very long thread with info...

i don't know why or how Terence missed this, but offer these possibilities -
firstly, maybe he didn't have enough time, maybe he didn't ask the right questions,
and maybe it's because he was talking about a concept called 'DMT', not a plant..

but think about what the buddhist told him..
(a rinpoche said something very similar to me, but a bit more too)

"this is the lesser lights, the lesser lights of the Bardo. You cannot go further into the Bardo and return. This takes you as far as you can go."

..that's obviously someone who Knows...
that's why smoking 'DMT' is no big deal..

finally, there are different schools of buddhism, often with very different stances...and within those schools, the ones who use(d) entheogens are what are defined as 'tantric' - experiential..
almost all tantric traditions (like inner level shamanic traditions) are not openly broadcast..you have to find a teacher..

as for mushrooms and buddhism and pre-buddhism, Mike Crowley is an initiated buddhist monk..
.

“The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an anti-drug position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies that the psychedelics mitigate.” -terence mckenna

Look up Hunnic Bronze Cauldrons

Whatever spirituality that may have been in India has long since evaporated...and been replaced by priestly hierarchies, etc...

...I scoured India and could not convince myself that it wasn't a shell game
of some sort or was any more real than the states manipulated by the
various schools of New Age psychotherapy...

-Terence mckenna