The way it's presented in my own training —and with most people who study with Tibetan teachers— is you are presented with all three yanas. That doesn't mean, in any way, that you know even the first thing about the Foundation Yana. But, there's something about the presentation of all three that enriches your experience of the Foundation Yana and the Mahayana and the Vajrayana. Somehow, there's something about all three of them.
My personal experience as a teacher was that for years I only taught the Foundation Yana —maitri and meditation and this curiosity and inquisitiveness. And that was it, I didn't teach any Mahayana at all. And then, at some point, I started feeling confident enough to teach the Mahayana. And for the last five, six years, or something, I've taught nothing but the Mahayana. But, that doesn't mean that I feel like I've mastered the Foundation Yana in any way. It's just that somehow as I go deeper into the Mahayana, I begin to understand the Foundation Yana more profoundly.
You don't really have a sense of graduating from yana to yana, you have a sense of each one going deeper. And somehow as you get more teachings and more practices, such as tonglen, with a Mahayana practice, somehow, everything starts to go deeper —your understanding of the Foundation Yana, like of the Four Noble Truths, for instance, or the meaning of maitri, or any of these Foundation Yana principles, begins to go deeper. That's my own experience, rather than graduating, I feel like it's more like sinking in more— becoming more my personal experience.
This Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge was taught, as it says in the first line, at Rajagrha at Vulture Peak Mountain.
And, it's referred to as the second turning of the wheel of dharma. I think last week, I referred to the Four Noble
Truths (the very first teachings of the Buddha), and it's referred to as the first turning of the wheel of dharma.
And those teachings were given in Sarnath, Deer Park, which is right near Varanasi, or also called Benares. That was
the first turning.
All the Foundation teachings have, basically, this quality of curiosity, of investigating —not just saying, "We suffer," but saying, "Why do we suffer?" That was the Buddha's question.
