The path that leads beyond the world has two aspects: the vehicle of characteristics and the Diamond Vehicle. The vehicle of characteristics has three further divisions: the Listener Vehicle, the Solitary Realiser Vehicle, and the Bodhisattva Vehicle. The followers of the Listener Vehicle believe that the views of the eternalistic extremists and so on amount to conceptual exaggerations and depreciations of phenomena as a whole. They thus consider that the nihilistic view that things have never existed and the eternalist view that they exist permanently and so on are as invalid as the belief that a rope is a snake. They consider that the infinitesimal particles of the four great elements that make up the aggregates, elements, senses-and-fields, and so forth, and also the instants of consciousness, exist on the ultimate level. By meditating on the Four Noble Truths, they progressively accomplish the four results. Those engaged in the Solitary Realiser Vehicle agree with the listeners in denying the permanent self and so forth imagined by the eternalistic extremists and others, with their conceptual exaggerations and depreciations of the whole of phenomena. But they differ from them in that they have partially realised the absence of self in phenomena related to the aggregate of form. And unlike the listeners, when they attain the result (enlightenment as solitary realisers), they do so without relying on a spiritual teacher. It is, rather, by the force of previous habituation that they realise the profound ultimate nature of phenomena in terms of the twelve links of dependent arising and subsequently attain the result: the solitary realisers’ enlightenment. The view of those engaged in the Bodhisattva Vehicle is that, on the ultimate level, all phenomena, whether of total affliction or of complete purity, are devoid of inherent existence, while on the relative level, they are mere illusions, each with its own distinct characteristics. As a result of their training in the ten transcendent perfections, Bodhisattva proceed in stages through the ten levels, at the end of which, they attain unsurpassable enlightenment.

-- Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche