Strange Friends: Barry Boyce on The Dharma Protectors

The dharma protectors are among the most striking figures in Tibetan Buddhism. Fierce, wrathful, often terrifying in appearance. For the May Mindful Gathering, Barry Boyce joined Bill Moriarty and the community to talk about what they actually are and what it means to work with them in practice.

Barry laid out three levels of protector practice: outer, inner, and secret. At the outer level, protectors guard teachers and places. At the inner level, they protect the teachings from distortion. At the deepest level, protection means something more radical: an awake energy that disrupts ego's habitual patterns, the loops that keep pulling us back into the same cycles. The protectors, Barry explained, are not external entities you pray to. They are manifestations of mind, approached non-theistically, understood from the inside rather than from the outside.

The conversation got into timing too. Morning practices focus on inspiration and connection to lineage. Protector chants tend to come in the evening, at the shift between day and night, a transition that has always been considered a vulnerable time. There is something about that edge between states that the practices are designed to work with.

A few community members shared their own experience with protector practices. The question of how to hold theistic language in a non-theistic tradition came up, and Barry was direct about it: using the wrong frame can create real misunderstanding, and it matters how we talk about these things. He also spoke about how specific protectors are tied to specific places and lineages, some operating at what he called a sublime level, others more practical, and how faith plays a role when the full origin of a protector tradition can't be traced cleanly.