Public by Design, Private by Necessity

Two very different things both go by the name Kalachakra in public discussion, and the tradition treats them differently. The empowerment ceremony itself, the ritual initiation into the practice, has been given by the Dalai Lama to audiences of tens of thousands on a public schedule roughly every few years, a scale and openness the Dalai Lama and other teachers including Kalu Rinpoche have explained as appropriate to what they describe as a degenerate age in which wide exposure to the tantra's blessing does more good than restricting it narrowly. That public event, well documented in photographs, news coverage and the Dalai Lama's own published commentary on the ceremony, is not the same thing as the six branch yoga of the completion stage, the sequence of inner practices this belief's own name refers to as the culminating stage of the system. That material is transmitted only within an ongoing relationship between a qualified teacher and a student who has received the empowerment, is not set out in publicly available literature in instructional form, and this entry accordingly describes the tantra's history, its Jonang custodianship and the public initiation phenomenon without reconstructing the six branches it withholds.