Why is tibetan buddhism so full of weird superstitions?

Just like a turtle

>A lot of them contradict heavily the dharma itself

Examples?

Those gods are using up their good karma in heaven but are not spiritualy progressing further because they are distracted by pleasure and maya. Once they have exhausted their merits they will fall to a lower state like human and have to start building their good karma all over again.

Are there any good books that give a basic rundown of tibetan buddhism or do you have to be a super secret esoteric initiate to learn about most of it?

Essential Tibetan Buddhism - Robert A.F. Thurman

It heavily syncretized with the old beliefs in Tibet, desu Buddhism did this pretty much everywhere, but they really went all out in Vajrayana's case.
Japanese Buddhist monks are not required to be celibate, although this is more a case of accepting facts on the ground than anything

>weird superstitions

Actually the vast, vast majority of rituals and superstitions were imported from Buddhist tantras from India.

>A lot of them contradict heavily the dharma itself

No, they really do not.

>Why are images of dieties in Buddhism shown having sex with their consorts

Because they symbolize the tantric principle of the original purity of all phenomena. Tantra is not in the business of artificially fragmenting human nature and behavior in an effort to comport to delusory conceptions of morality.

>while monks have to be celibate?

The early Vinaya arose because of misbehaving monks in a culture where religious branding was extremely important. The Buddha viewed monks as critically representing the early Sangha and so made these rules. Advanced monks weren't the problem and frankly don't need any of these rules, though some derive pleasure from the sustained force of their vows.

There is the path of renunciation and then two tantric paths, the path of transformation and the path of spontaneous liberation. As the world increases in distraction and defilements, the path of renunciation correspondingly becomes weaker and less applicable. Which is exactly why a holistic path of tantra is far more efficient for contemporary people.

>Also Vajrayana is inherently heretical

Yes, if you mean Vajrayana qua the path of transformation. Then it is true that part of its power is exactly in its transgression. This doesn't necessarily apply to atiyogatantrayana (and a substantial portion of anuyogatantrayana) insofar as it is a path of spontaneous liberation and doesn't at all need to rely on intentional transgression.

Why do westerners who are into tibetan buddhism get so asspained and triggered when anybody points out that the Buddha wasn't a tantric and therefore he didn't teach tantra no matter how many catholic tier stories say that he manifested as Kek to teach it?

t. Pure Land singaporean

No, yidam deities are an entirely different category than samsarically bound deities.

Yidam deities are just a method for realizing the nature and propensity of your own mind. Speaking of them as individual mindstreams is almost always just upaya and explicitly rejected in higher tantras.

The problem is that people don't understand the hyperbole and willingness to conventionally conflate in tantric cultures, so will be confused unless they are given the proper context. This is just one of many aspects of Vajrayana being 'self-secret'.

For example, of the five so called Samantabhadras, only one refers to a 'being' out there in the external universe that was once a sentient being and is now a Buddha. The rest are methods and symbols that are actually distinct from the dude himself.

webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/elicap/en/uploads/Biblioteca/bdz-e.version.pdf

This is the book I recommend for beginners. It isn't dumbed down or paraphrased like other introductions. It is from the perspective of an academic yogi who has done years of retreat under legitimate masters.

Then I would read 'Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism' by Christian K. Wedemeyer to get a sense of the purpose and history behind the transgressive meme in Vajrayana.

I can't recommend this book.

Yeah it's all bullshit

This is a great question and there are many aspects of this.

For one they are imputing a sense of historical literalism that simply wasn't very important to most Indian or Tibetan thinkers.

For two they hold an attachment to the progenitor of Buddhism and his teachings, when from very early Mahayana onwards, the idea of clinging to a single realized person's teachings was considered impractical and unwarranted.

For three, they get tripped up with the cultural willingness to engage in hyperbole, myth, and conflation. Tibetans when referring to 'The Buddha' are often using a heuristic to refer to an emanation of awakened wisdom stemming from the gzhi of a realized person's mind, and are't nearly as considered with making historical claims related to what the actual physical nirmanakaya Shakyamuni did or didn't do or teach.

In part because they also blend together a lot of emanations, including Gautama the monk turned Shakyamuni, as merely a nirmanakaya emanation of Samantabhadra/Amitabha, who was the first actual Buddha in this eon.

There are many aspects of this that would need to be clarified to give the whole picture in a coherent fashion, it is built up from sources like the abhidharmakosa.

There is an elegance to it, but this is hard to see when first looking into it.

What do you mean?

>Japanese Buddhist monks are not required to be celibate
That happened during Meiji period, and I'd argue Japanese Zen declined afterwards.

Japanese Zen was never that great, so it was never much of a decline.