In our previous teachings on the preliminaries, we emphasized the three stages an ordinary person must undergo on the path from initial practice to final attainment of buddhahood. The first stage is to give up the pursuit of worldly pleasures and cultivate renunciation; the second stage is to give up selfishness and develop bodhicitta; the third stage is to give up self-attachment and establish the wisdom that realizes no-self. In the first and second stages, there is no difference between sutra and tantra.

~Depicted from GATEWAY TO VAJRAYANA PATH - Sutra and Tantra: Similarities and Differences