The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (25 page)

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Definitely, because then you have no trust in anything else besides the fact that you have nothing to lose.

Student:
It seems to me that there is far less pain today than there was thousands of years ago when the Buddha taught. Is his teaching that existence is pain still applicable?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
We are not talking so much about physical pain but about this thingness in us that creates pain, which is the pain. This is a universal thing, always up-to-date. Creating happiness in us is beyond technological means. In the midst of trying to create happiness technologically, that sense of thingness will be present all the time. Thus Buddhism is completely up-to-date, therefore it is dogma, rather than being religion or philosophy. It is like telling a child, “Those electric burners on your stove may look beautiful, so nice and orangey-red, but if you put your finger on them, it will get burned.” Buddhism is as simple as that.

S:
Is it not the nature of ego that it is always suffering?

TR:
The ego suffers even without its expressions, its manifestations. Ego suffers bluntly, itself.

S:
It sounds like when you discover suffering as your foundation, it’s like building your foundation on sand, or even worse, in the air, like a castle in the air. It leads automatically to a sense of impermanence, to insecurity. It seems strange that that should be the beginning of the path. You have to put up with complete insecurity. The only security you get through discovering truth is insecurity.

TR:
Well said. That is what is called in Buddhist terminology
egolessness
. Discovering that is discovering another truth, which is a firm foundation on which you can build the nine stories of the nine yanas, a tremendous castle of enlightenment.

Student:
Where does joy come into the path?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Joy can only come when you realize that there’s nothing to be joyful about.

S:
That sounds morbid.

TR:
What do you mean by morbid?

S:
It seems to me that joy is as real as pain, and when you feel joy, to say all that there is is pain is to spit in the face of the joy that you feel.

TR:
Are you saying that you feel joy when you don’t feel pain? Or do you feel pain when you feel joy?

S:
Yes.

TR:
That’s it. Real joy comes when you experience that something is actually there. That is real joy as opposed to something flowery and sweet. The problem of pain is that there is nothing secure; you’re about to lose your ground. Usually when we experience joy, it is purely superficial joy with pain going on beneath the whole thing. Real joy comes when you realize the superficiality of that experience. Then you begin to realize that there is something really happening, whether in the form of pain or pleasure. Then you have the real security of a real discovery of truth. That is actually solid. Joy is related with the solid experience of securing one’s ground. Real security could be either pain or pleasure—it is that something real is happening. That is why joy is synonymous with truth. From that point of view, the discovery of the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, is the discovery of real fundamental joy. Because suffering is real; it’s absolute. There is nothing other than suffering, and it is very solid and fundamental. It is heroic, indestructible, and beautiful.

Student:
Can you explain again what you mean by suffering?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The idea of suffering here is the thingness in us, which is very lumpy and slightly inconvenient. It is the awkwardness in us, which is not very nice or pleasant or flowing. There is something that is in the way that doesn’t allow us to be free-flowing. There is a vast thing that is in the way somewhere. That’s the fundamental suffering. It is not particularly painful in the ordinary sense of physical pain. But it is in the way. It stops us from flowing. In that sense, suffering could be regarded as synonymous with the idea of a “hang-up.”

S:
It seems that you don’t always have to be suffering, though.

TR:
Well, you always have a thing with you, whatever you do. You don’t have to be suffering all the time, but you have a thing all the time. The thingy-ness is suffering, though it’s true you don’t have to be experiencing painfulness all the time.

S:
Should you just forget about distinguishing between pain and pleasure?

TR:
It’s not particularly a question of distinguishing pain and pleasure. The only thing that matters is to begin to realize your thingness, your beingness, that fundamental and deep feeling of awkwardness. That seems to be the point. You might experience pain and pleasure as two or as one, or you might feel that either is okay, you don’t care. But still there is this thing that says that pain and pleasure are one. This thingness is happening there—as if you swallowed a lump of rock and it’s still in your stomach.

S:
Is that real?

TR:
It’s up to you. It’s real as far as you are concerned, if you are talking about it. In that sense, of course it’s real. The more you discuss it, the more real it gets. In fact, it becomes a belief, a hang-up. It is definitely there.

Student:
A moment can be a warming thing and feel good, and it can also be a burning thing—

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It doesn’t matter. The dichotomy is there.

Ego and pain is a mystical experience, actually, which transcends both pleasure and pain and thingness and thinglessness. But still there is this thing there that is happening. Right there. That could be called spiritual experience, if you like. What I mean by spiritual experience is the indefinable, ineffable experience of thingness. It is beyond words, beyond concepts. But it is definitely there, hanging on there. It is a mystical experience that everybody has.

TWO

Hopelessness

W
E HAVE DISCUSSED
the nature of pain. That leads us to the subject of commitment, or discipline. What is meant by these words is committing ourselves to what is there, which is pain. The discipline is realizing that this commitment is self-existing. There is no way we can get out of this commitment, so we can make it a wholehearted one.

At this point, we have to understand the origin of pain. As we said, there is that sense of thingness that is hanging out with us all the time. It is part of our shadow. It constantly speaks to us the unspoken word of embarrassment, of inconvenient confusion. As we said, this thingness is connected with suffering and pain. Acknowledging that is our starting point.

It is more than just a starting point, because it inspires us to look further. It inspires us to discover what is behind that awareness of thingness. For example, I personally cannot say I love you or I hate you. There is something that holds us back, that is preventing us from saying such things. It is a sense that we do not want to commit ourselves to becoming involved with embarrassing private parts. And that thingness there that is holding us back has a back and a front. It is just a face, a mask. If you examine it, if you look at somebody who has a mask on and look behind it, you find all kinds of strings and knots. You begin to understand how this person keeps his mask on—with all the bundles of knots in back. Exposing this mask is discovering the origin of pain, of suffering.

The unmasking process is connected with the second yana, the pratyekabuddhayana. The mask develops when we try to trace our origins, trace back and back to the origin of the origin. The mask develops from our wanting to ignore ourselves as a confused person to begin with. There is a traditional image for this process of ignoring. It is called the blind grandmother.

The blind grandmother was the creator of our whole family, the whole race. She is also a professional in relating to all the functioning of mental games, ideas, objects, and so forth. But at the same time, she’s blind. She can’t see what’s happening right
there
, right
now
.

When we begin to understand the blind-grandmother principle, we realize how our process of ignoring, of not relating to the blind-grandmother-ness, is constantly creating further karmic chain reactions. Further levels of this process develop. The image for the next level is the potter. The potter makes a pot. He spins his potter’s wheel around. He throws mud, a dough made of mud, on his wheel, and in accordance with its speed and how he holds his hands, the potter makes a pot. He makes a pot out of the feeling, which is the volitional action of karma.

We have this thingness, this embarrassment, hanging out in our state of being. It is extremely embarrassing and inconvenient. When we look back, we want to ignore this; we don’t want to know anything about it. We might say, “It’s not me; it has nothing to do with me. It’s somebody else’s doing. She did it. He did it. I’m clean. I’m in the clear. My only duty is to stick to this thingness.” So we expand ourselves based on this thingness. We explore further and further and further. Having created these karmic situations, we go on with all twelve links of the karmic chain of existence, of our basic makeup: ignorance, volitional action, consciousness, name and form, sense perceptions, touch, sensation, desire, grasping, the further grasping that is copulation, birth, old age, and death. And we are back to square one. We go through all those processes, and each one has its traditional image.
¹

This entire map has been seen clearly, thoroughly, and completely by Buddha. Because of Buddha’s teaching, we know this entire map of our basic psychology and the origin of that thingness of ours in all the twelve causal links of karma. That thingness is created by going around and around through these twelve again and again. There is birth and death, which leads to a further birth, then ignorance and karma again. It is like a whirlpool, continually circling. That is what is called samsara. We go around and around and around in a circle. The end is the beginning. Each time we look for the end of the beginning, we create the beginning of the end. Each time we look for the beginning of the end, we create the end of the beginning. Each time we look for the end of the beginning, we create the beginning of the end. We go on and on in this way. We are in samsara, constantly going around and around trying to catch our shadow. The shadow becomes us, and we become the shadow again. It’s a constant circling, an endless game. Endless game after endless game after endless game. There are so many games happening.

What we are discussing at this point is the hinayana level, which involves making a complete study of the four noble truths. We are discussing the second noble truth, which is the truth of the origin of suffering. The origin of the suffering of our thingness is circling with speed. The origin of the suffering is the speed. Graspingness, re-creating one karmic situation after another. That is the basic point here.

This is all pretty ironic, maybe even funny. We could laugh at it—there is such foolishness taking place. It is such a foolish thing that we do. Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it actually absurd? Ha ha! But it is we who are ha-ha, and it turns out to be very grim actually. We might think, “Ha ha,” but it is not all that ha-ha, because it is
our
psychological portrait the way Buddha described it, which happens to be highly accurate. It’s very scientific. It’s very funny.

What’s next? Your guess is as good as mine. What’s next after what’s next after what’s next? What’s next? Could we get out of this? Trying to get out would be another circle? Sure we could get out of this. We could get out, and then we could get back in, and then we could start all over again.

You are expectant: “Tell us more” [your expressions say]. Sure. By telling you more, we could get into it, then we could get out and get into it and then we could get out and get into it again.

As a matter of fact, the situation is pretty scary, haunting, frightening. In fact there’s no ground except the speed itself. No ground, and we go on and on. We could discuss the next subject and give birth to the next thing; then we’d have volitional action, karma, pain and suffering, touch, desire, copulation, death and old age, birth, ignorance all over again. All over again.

“Tell us about freedom, enlightenment.” Sure. By all means. But then: all over again. You get out, you get in. You’re liberated. You get onto the liberator’s bandwagon, and you take a journey, and you come back. You want to be victorious, win a war of some kind: Then you go around all over again, all over again.

We are not making fun of the samsaric world, not at all. We are taking the whole thing very seriously. This is a serious matter. It is a life-and-death matter, very serious. We are talking about reality, freedom, enlightenment, buddhahood, if I may be so presumptuous as to use these words. We are talking about something that is actually happening to us. But so far we haven’t touched upon the
heart
of the thing at all. So far we have just discussed the nature of our reality, the confusion that goes on in us all the time. “Nothing new,” you say. That’s true.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are so faithful and so honest and so straight-faced. I appreciate your seriousness and your long faces, listening to me. That’s beautiful—in a way. On the other hand, it’s rather grotesque seeing you with your long faces trying to find out about enlightenment.

From this chair, I see lots of faces without bodies, serious faces. Some are wearing glasses, some are not wearing glasses. Some have long hair, some have short hair. But in all cases, it’s a long face, made out of a skull wall. These faces—if I had a big mirror behind me, you could see yourselves—are so honest, earnest. Every one of you is a true believer. Every bit of even the glasses you are wearing is a true believer. It is very cute and nice and lovable. It’s beautiful—I’m not mocking you at all. I appreciate your patience. You had to wait for a long time and it’s late, and now there are all kinds of other things. You’re hungry. Probably you had planned to eat after the talk. Probably you are not used to sitting on the floor and would like a nice comfortable chair. All kinds of things go into making up that earnestness. But there is one thing that we haven’t touched upon yet, which is that the whole thing is completely hopeless.