He then returned to our realm of existence and in his physical body went out into the world to teach the dharma, or the path to breaking free from the cycle of rebirth. According to the Yoga Tantra, at the moment the Buddha reached enlightenment ( 2012.458), he left his physical body and ascended to the highest heaven, where he assumed the perfected, crowned, and bejeweled form of the Buddha Vairocana ( 1997.152) and taught the path to enlightenment to the assembled gods. Vajrayana Buddhism builds on these ideas, formalized in a corpus of esoteric texts called tantras written in India between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Mahayana Buddhists looked to living Buddhas residing in heavens that can be accessed through veneration and ultimately by rebirth in one of their realms. At the foundation are the unchanged teachings of the historic Buddha Shakyamuni, but there emerged a belief that he was just one among many who had attained enlightenment. The Buddhist tradition in the Himalayas has a complex pantheon of deities who give form to Mahayana and Vajrayana ideology.
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