The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (43 page)

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The whole style of teaching is personal. The teacher minds your business forever. It’s not necessarily a matter of the teacher’s physical presence, having a constant relationship with your teacher physically present. But whenever the teaching is given to you, the means, methods, and techniques of conveying the teaching are very personal.

Student:
Is it that on the vajrayana level, you yourself become an embodiment of your spiritual friend?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s more that the guru is like a pill that you swallow that always remains in your stomach. Either it could poison and kill you on the spot, or it could grant you everlasting life. It’s very personal. One of the basic principles of the vajrayana is what is called the samaya vow. The guru sows a seed in you which is part of himself, and you have that seed in you, and the guru has remote control of that seed.

Student:
In Naropa’s acts of self-denial, there is that repeated formula in which Tilopa says something like, “If I had a disciple wanting instruction, he would (for example) jump into the fire.” Then Naropa does it and almost gets killed every time. I don’t understand why he does that. Is it that he is still clinging to his ego?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s something more than ego. It’s that he has to become more naked. He is still not unmasking enough. It’s more a process of stripping than of giving up ego—which he has already done anyway. Each one of his acts seems to be an enormous example of surrendering ego. But after surrendering his ego, he also has to unmask properly.

Student:
You said that the mahamudra experience is irritating because of its nakedness, very irritating. Then later you said that in the mahamudra realm, you are bliss. My approach may be very dualistic, but for me, irritation and bliss don’t go together.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Irritation happens at the level when you are still ambitious, when you are first committing yourself to the mahamudra path and you are beginning to see new views of the world. Seeing new views is very irritating. It’s like, in the middle of a sunny day in Greece, taking off your dark glasses. The glare is so irritating to your eyes. And that’s the first experience. But then you get used to it, and you learn to perceive things without distortion. And that becomes bliss. So it’s a gradual process. Irritation comes first. Things are so close to heart, so immediate. Then you become used to it and develop confidence. Then the whole thing becomes bliss.

Student:
How is assimilating the teacher as a pill or a seed different from taking a drug? How do you get rid of the sense of the teacher as the other?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, drugs don’t last very long, and the teacher lasts your whole life.

S:
But is the sense of the teacher always there?

TR:
Until you become a teacher yourself.

Student:
Are the other visions that Naropa had after the old lady’s shadow fell on his book and before he met Tilopa also manifestations of shunyata?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. Very much so.

S:
But it seems that they’re so concrete, that their whole point is somehow this concreteness. How is that connected with shunyata as emptiness?

TR:
It’s because of its fullness. The fullness does not allow any room; therefore, that frozen space could be called empty space.

S:
Then how does that fullness lead into the fullness of mahamudra?

TR:
Mahamudra is very sharp, not just full alone. It’s colorful. Shunyata fullness is rather gray and transparent and dull, like London fog. But the mahamudra experience of fullness is humorous; it is also the fullness of little particles dancing with each other within the fullness. It’s like a sky full of stars and shooting stars and all the rest—so many activities are taking place.

SIX

The Levels of Mahamudra

T
HERE ARE DIFFERENT
levels of mahamudra, which are related to different levels of clarity. Clarity here means confidence and fearlessness, rather than being a purely phenomenological quality.

According to the Buddhist approach, advancement toward enlightenment does not come from insight alone but also from skillful means. On the bodhisattva path, a powerful skillful means is the practice of the six paramitas—working with other sentient beings. In the vajrayana, exchange with the world is also a means of development. That seems to be a general pattern. In the vajrayana experience of mahamudra, first one develops one’s basic sanity, and having done that, the only way to grow up and mature further is through further openness to the world. That is one of the important elements.

In order to relate with the world, one has to develop confidence. In order to develop confidence, one has to have some level of identification with one’s basic being. As a result, at this stage, the five buddha principles become very prominent. One begins to develop an affinity with a particular buddha principle through receiving an abhisheka, or initiation, from a vajra master, that is, a vajrayana teacher. That vajra master, or teacher, teaches one how to conduct oneself as a real practitioner of the vajrayana. He is also the example one can follow. The key point is the meeting of his mind and your mind, together with the mutual discovery of a particular mandala. In this case, the mandala is a host of deities, which are associated with one’s basic being. That is to say, the deities represent your type of energy rather than being divine beings who are external separate entities or even internal separate entities. At the moment of the discovery of this mandala, your own basic beingness is discovered in an enlightened form—the Jack-ness or the John-ness of you. Your basic beingness is seen in an enlightened form, in a mahamudra form. You begin to see that. You develop, not fascination, but an identification with such principles, which have your own particular characteristics, which are those of a particular buddha family: vajra, ratna, padma, karma, buddha.

The point of this is realization of the sacredness of the universe and of yourself. There are different ways of viewing sacredness. One might think, “The world is sacred because it was created by God and the mysteriousness of God, and His power and all-pervasiveness are beyond mind’s measure.” They boggle the mind, they’re beyond our limited capacity. And because they are beyond the measure of our small mind, they should be regarded as divine principles. Since we don’t have the power or the knowledge to make a rock, since we couldn’t invent planets or create the four seasons, since that is beyond our control and reflects such power, it is unthinkable and therefore sacred. No one could conquer this large Conductor of the universe. Only God is on that level. By associating with this great principle, you might be helped to become one with it, but that is questionable; it depends on how good you are.

Another approach to sacredness might also be connected with meditative absorption. If you succeed in developing meditative absorption, you tend to get an ineffable experience of something-or-other. You can’t name it. It is associated with divine power. One connects it with how He created the universe. It’s beyond words, beyond concept.

The approach of vajrayana Buddhism to sacredness has a different quality. It is not so much a matter of things being big and enormous and beyond the measure of one’s thought; rather it has to do with things being so true, so real, so direct. We know a fire burns. We know the earth carries us. We know that space accommodates us. All these are
real
facts and so obvious. Obviousness becomes sacredness from the point of view of vajrayana. It is not that things are sacred because they are beyond our imagination, but because they are so obvious. The magic is simplicity. Winter gets cold, summer gets warm. Everything in every situation has a little magic. If we forget to eat, we get hungry. There is a causal aspect, which is the truth. So in this case, the sacredness is a matter of truth, of the obviousness of the whole thing.

This has nothing particular to do with how things happen to be
made,
but rather how they
are.
There’s no reference to the past in vajrayana, no concern with the case history of things or with chronology. The concern is with
what is.
When we look at things as they are on a very simple and ordinary level, we find that they are fantastically, obviously true, frighteningly true. Because of their quality of being true and obvious, things are sacred and worth respecting. This kind of truth reveals falsity automatically. If we are slightly off the point, we get hit or pushed or pulled. We get constant reminders, constant help. It’s that kind of sacredness.

Another part of sacredness is a sense of well-being, which is a very interesting thing. It is a very typical characteristic of the vajrayana approach. This sense of well-being has to do with the fact that although you might be awestruck by the penetrating truth and obviousness of things, at the same time, in spite of this awesome quality, there is no sense of threat. There is a sense of courtship, of a love affair between the obviousness and you perceiving it.

The obstacle to this well-being is naiveté or mindlessness. Things are taken for granted; things are never questioned, never looked at. The sense of well-being has a quality of appreciation. You appreciate that you possess, or are in, such a beautiful universe, that the universe is part of you and you are part of it.

The mahamudra experience of clarity and sharpness allows us to develop a new attitude in which things are never taken for granted, in which every moment is a new experience. With that sense of sacredness, of well-being, one begins to rediscover the universe. Since this is not a fantasy but a real experience, it cannot be destroyed. As much doubt as comes up, that is how much clarity shines through. Because of this, this experience is called
vajra,
a Sanskrit word which means “adamantine” or “indestructible.” Even the threat of defeat of this vajra quality is used as fuel for it to maintain itself. Therefore, it is constantly indestructible, imperturbable.

In the vajrayana practice of performing the sadhanas of the particular yidams who are appropriate to you that were given to you by your teacher, you identify with the iconographical representation of a yidam. Identifying with the iconographical details is no longer a problem, because you know the basic characteristics of the deity, and you have a sense of that in your mind already. Probably we would have no problem at all visualizing Uncle Sam, because we know what Uncle Sam represents. The image is very vivid. It is a similar kind of thing when you are given the practice of a particular deity and mandala. If you have a complete and thorough understanding of it, then it is no longer foreign or alien but easy to recognize and identify with.

Still, visualization is very tricky. It is not just fingerpainting your imaginings in your mind. It’s getting into the spirit of what you’re visualizing. Take as an example visualizing Broadway in New York City in the early evening. You close your eyes and begin to see yellow cabs and other traffic and neon lights and buildings and people walking. You visualize it completely. You don’t actually have to visualize it; you just switch your mind to it and automatically you are there. You feel as though you are in New York City already, so you don’t have to pay too much attention to details. You don’t have to think about how many lampposts there are on Broadway or what color the neon lights are, particularly. You just get a sense of the general proportions and the general climate.

So that’s the approach to visualization, rather than imagining an alien-looking guy with three heads and twelve arms, who turns into something plastic rather than a deity. Because if you don’t have a real sense of who the deities are and what they represent, then visualization becomes just a child’s game.

In tantric practice, there is the notion that sights, sounds, and consciousness turn into the expressions of those deities. Sight, or visual objects, become part of the realm of the deity, and sounds become the deity’s mantra, and the thought process, or consciousness, becomes the wisdom of the deity. This does not mean that everybody appears dressed up as a deity, and that everyone’s conversations are in the form of mantra, and that everybody’s mind is blissed out. Rather, what you see has the quality of a particular deity. The principle is all-pervasive because it is your principle. You can’t see any other world than your world, and sight, sound, and thought process become a part of that style. Then it becomes very vivid. At a certain point, even if you would like to forget about this or it becomes too much for you, it still follows you. That awareness comes back to you by itself rather than your having to try to be aware of it. This kind of identification with your basic principle, the awakening of your basic principle, is the starting point for developing confidence at the beginning. This is very important, extraordinarily important.

When you have achieved this confidence and dignity, the awareness is not constant all the time, but hundreds of flashes of awareness happen to you instantaneously. At that point, probably it is time to extend your practice out into relating with your exterior, with your expressions. So far, you have been working with your
im
pressions, with your interior. Now you are going to work outward into the exterior, which is composed of all kinds of states of being. The first thing is to arouse energy. At that point, you still have all kinds of neurotic leftovers remaining, so you have to have a way of utilizing those leftovers as part of the energy. You also have to destroy any sense of preserving your perceptions of sight and sound and so on. Destroying that sense of preservation is a giving-away process.

This is where the first dharma of Naropa, called tumo, comes in. You may have heard of this. It does not simply mean developing central heating within your body so that you don’t have to depend on warm clothes. It’s not quite as utilitarian as that—or as cheap as that.
Tumo
is a Tibetan word that means “wrathful one.”
Tum
means “wrath” or “anger”;
mo
is a feminine ending, so it is “female wrathful one.” This is related to what is called
chandali
in Sanskrit, which is “flame” or “energy.” But one cannot develop the physical effects of this practice until one has conquered or destroyed the sense of preserving one’s being. One is consumed by this flame of chandali, which has no compassion, that goes in only one direction. Because it
is
compassion, it does not require any extra compassion. It is an all-consuming flame.