Especially if you unnecessarily revert to jargon when trying to explain your beliefs, you mention "tulku" four times, but define it zero times. This is indicative of in-group signaling.
I avoid articles about pay in the SF area, AI models, Tesla cars, and many other topics. If I read one by accident, I just move on - I don't post a comment whingeing that I'm not interested.
I don't belong to an "in-group" here; I used to be a Buddhist, but I no longer profess any religion. The subject still interests me though; I devoted 40 years of my life to it, and unsurprisingly it has had quite an impact on me.
For what it's worth, a tulku in Tibetan Buddhism is a re-incarnating lama. I realise that I used the wrong word; what I meant was "terton", which is a revealer of hidden teachings. Those hidden/revealed teachings are a specialty of a minority of Tibetan Buddhists - so an "in group", almost by definition. Tertons an interesting subject - if you happen to be interested in such things.
- I had from the beginning espoused a non-religious view of Buddhism. About 20 years in, my teacher stated that Buddhism was definitely religious, and that devotional practices like pujas were non-optional. I didn't like it, but if you take on a teacher, it behoves you to at least try to go along with the teaching - which I did.
- I learned some things about Tibetan history that were the opposite of my earlier, naive beliefs. Pre-communist Tibet was not Shangri-La.
- While I never practiced tantra, the tradition was tantric; I eventually learned some important things about tantra that I found unacceptably obnoxious. I can't go into detail, because I don't want to undermine anyone else's commitment to tantra.
- The group that I had been involved with gradually changed, I became an outsider, and things got difficult. Friends in the group cut me off.
- The behaviour of Buddhist nationalists in places like Myanmar and Srilanka towards non-Buddhist minorities appalled me - this was the tipping point.
- I did my back in through long sitting sessions. The amount of my life that I had spent sitting was beginning to look like heavy expenditure for no obvious gain (I wasn't making much progress).
These are my reasons; they don't apply to anyone else, and I don't deprecate Buddhism or Buddhists. I just gradually came to see that I'm no longer one of them.
There is a great deal that I integrated from Buddhism. It remains the basis for my morality, and my world-view is still largely based on Buddhist thought. But I no longer do any kind of formal practice, and I don't identify as a Buddhist.
You may be able to teach yourself meditation from a book, without a teacher. But that can't confer on you the confidence that you're doing it right. Many practices depend critically on confidence. Of course, you have to be confident that your master has really mastered the particular practice; you gain that confidence by knowing that the master received transmission, from someone who received transmission... etc. That line of transmission is referred to as the "lineage" of that practice.
There are no ritual formalities for mindfulness; every monk learns mindfulness, from other monks. The first monks learned it from the Buddha; but if you're going to learn the practice from a layman, you need to start inquiring into your teacher's transmission lineage.
In tantra, there are rituals that accompany the process of mastery: permission to study the text, a reading of the text, a commentary on the text from the master.
But these rituals are not the transmission.
There's usually some kind of "inner" transmission that depends on a personal relationship between the master and the student. But even that doesn't seal the transmission; the student still has to internalise the practice, which might take years.
It's very interesting to look into the process by which tulkus "produce" innovative practices. Often, the teaching is delivered to the tulku by enlightened beings, who learned the practice from some Buddha other than The Sage of the Munis. The tulku must then practice the teaching, usually for many years, until the insight stabilises, before it's safe for him to disseminate it.
Tulkus often have hard lives.