One way of distinguishing among the Three Yanas is by looking at the distinct ways in which they each handle the Duk Sum, the Three Poisons, described below:
The Buddha grouped the thousands of emotions like fear, worry, longing, etc.,into three basic categories:
1. Ignorance, delusion, laziness, narrow-mindedness, and similar emotions.
2. Desire, clinging, longing, and such.
3. Aversion, aggression, hatred, dislike, fear, and such.

Sometimes these are spoken of as the Five Poisons, with the fourth and fifth categories under the third category, aversion/aggression. The fourth is pride, inflation, and such, and the fifth is jealousy, competitiveness, and such. They are often subsumed under the third category because they are considered to be forms, subsets, of aversion/aggression.
If you come upon poison, you could take one of three approaches to dealing with it. (1) You could avoid it altogether. (2) If you’ve already eaten it, you could take an antidote. (3) If you’ve already eaten it, you could also apply enough awareness that it’s distilled to its purely positive quintessence. (This third approach might work better with emotions than, say, arsenic. In the case of physical poison I’d say, don’t try this at home! With the emotion of anger, for example, when we remove all the drama and distill it to its quintessence, we have one of the Five Yeshes—Mirrorlike Yeshe.

Below are three simple ways to remember the Three Divisions of Buddhism:
Theravada, or School of the Ancient Ones, takes the first approach mentioned above—avoiding the poison.
Mahayana buddhism, or Great Vehicle, follows the second approach—taking an antidote.
Vajrayana buddhism, or Diamond Vehicle, is actually a subcategory of Mahayana buddhism, and it takes the third—distilling the poison to its pure essence. Vajrayana meets us where we’re at, with all our afflictive emotions, and leads us to our Buddha Nature. It uses the impure parts and helps us to smelt them like gold, to come to the pure essence.

We probably need to use all three approaches at various times, but each of us has a stronger natural inclination toward one or another of these vehicles. One of the many reasons I like the Vajrayana path is that it actually contains all three vehicles within it. As you can imagine, Vajrayana is a highly efficient path to enlightenment, but also a risky one. That’s why, while you might get away with pursuing the Theravada buddhism path without a lama, you really can’t do that with Vajrayana.

Advice for following the Vajrayana Path
If you’re pursuing Vajrayana on your own, it’s just too easy to fool yourself. Just as with any very powerful tool or strong medicine, if you use it incorrectly, you can do more harm than good. With less concentrated and powerful medicine, there’s less risk of damage (harder to overdose on cough drops than on beta-blockers). It’s easy to think, “Oh, I’ve distilled my anger to Mirrorlike Yeshe on this one,” when in fact you just haven’t. The lama would probably see that and point it out to you, and you would have to take a more honest, though less comfortable, look.
It’s a bit like the sorcerer’s apprentice, playing with something very powerful but not fully knowing how to wield that power. Another example is the story of Icarus, who didn’t listen to his father’s advice and flew too close to the sun, melting his wings and falling into the sea.
One feature that helps us stabilize ourselves on the Vajrayana path is that, as I’ve mentioned, it contains the other two. Especially in the earlier stages, we do many of the same practices that are done in Theravada, though in slightly different styles.
I don’t know about you, but I would feel a lot better following the Vajrayana path if there was a way to keep me from going off track. Fortunately, there is a very effective one: the lama. A lama performs several functions similar to those of a typical minister, but also serves as a teacher and guide for students on the particular path to Vajrayana Buddhism.
Of course, you have to make sure you’ve found a qualified lama. You would want the lama to be well trained in the practices, have accomplished the practices, know the theoretical foundation, have sufficiently worked on themselves that their own Buddha Nature is evident, and be proceeding from motives that are pure.

If a lama has all of the above qualifications, is of a lineage you are drawn to, and you feel some connection, then they can be immensely helpful as your spiritual friend and guide.
Since they’ve worked deeply and intensely with their own Three Poisons and have successfully used proven methods to distill them, they can see when you might be off track and how you might right yourself. There is no substitute for your regular connection with a live lama. Not all the teachings are written down, for the very purpose of making sure the student learns from a qualified lama and doesn’t proceed into powerful and risky territory unguided. Because of this intention, even the scriptures that teach practices always leave out the most important parts.
But beyond being a safety net, the lama provides us with a projection screen for our own Buddha Nature, which we can’t see very well. If we could see it perfectly well, we wouldn’t still be here in Samsara.

Yet another benefit we gain from our lama is that, if we truly join our minds with them, we can piggyback onto their level of realization. No kidding! I learned this one by sort of stumbling upon it.

I had been studying with Rinpoche for a few months, doing Guru Yoga, which is the practice of joining one’s mind with the lama, in my daily meditation sessions. The next part of my session was the actual meditation. An odd thing was happening during the meditation part. My awareness was far beyond anything I’d experienced before and somehow didn’t feel like my own mind that I was so familiar with. It was striking and lovely—very freeing. I called Rinpoche to ask him what that was.

“You’ve been doing Guru Yoga, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been connecting with my mind during Guru Yoga?”

“Yes.”
“Well, then you’re feeling a connection with my level of realization,” he said, in a very matter-of-fact way. To him as a Tibetan lama, this was everyday meat and potatoes. To me it was mind-blowing. 

Now perhaps you’ve gotten a taste of the Three Yanas or three forms of Buddhism, and where Vajrayana falls within.

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