The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (59 page)

As I need prepare for nothing, I am happy;

Since all I do complies with dharma, I am happy;

Never desiring to move, I am happy.

As the thought of death brings me no fear, I am happy;

Bandits, thieves, and robbers ne’er molest me,

So at all times I am happy!

Having won the best conditions for dharma practice, I am happy;

Having ceased from evil deeds and left off sinning, I am happy;

Treading the path of merits, I am happy;

Divorced from hate and injury, I am happy;

Having lost all pride and jealousy, I am happy;

Understanding the wrongness of the eight worldly winds, I am happy;

Absorbed in quiet and evenmindedness, I am happy;

Using the mind to watch the mind, I am happy;

Without hope or fear, I am ever happy.

In the sphere of nonclinging illumination, I am happy;

The nondistinguishing wisdom of dharmadhatu itself is happy;

Poised in the natural realm of imminence, I am happy;

In letting the six groups of consciousness go by

To return to their original nature, I am happy.

The five radiant gates of sense all make me happy;

To stop a mind that comes and goes is happy;

Oh, I have so much of happiness and joy!

This is a song of gaiety I sing,

This is a song of gratitude to my guru and the three precious ones—

I want no other happiness.

Through the grace of buddhas and the gurus,

Food and clothes are provided by my patrons.

With no bad deeds and sins, I shall be joyful when I die;

With all good deeds and virtues, I am happy while alive.

Enjoying yoga, I am indeed most happy.

But how are you, Rechungpa? Is your wish fulfilled? [111-112]

Rechungpa assured Milarepa that he was cured and wished to stay with him. He received further teaching from Milarepa and in time attained realization. . . .

. . . One day Milarepa went toward Balkhu to meet Rechungpa, who was returning from his second trip to India. Milarepa saw in a vision that Rechungpa was suffering from pride. When they met, Rechungpa was indeed thinking that Milarepa should return his obeisance because now he was as great as Milarepa; he was in fact much more learned in theoretical Buddhist philosophy. Milarepa did not acknowledge Rechungpa’s feelings about this, but instead sang to him of the pitfalls of pride.

They proceeded along the road. Milarepa saw an old yak horn lying by the side of the road and asked Rechungpa to pick it up and bring it along as it might prove useful to them. Rechungpa thought that Milarepa was being miserly and didn’t bother to pick it up. So Milarepa picked up the yak horn and carried it himself. Suddenly a great storm broke loose accompanied by violent hail. Rechungpa quickly covered his head and didn’t bother to take care for his teacher. When the storm abated, he looked for Milarepa but could not find him. He heard Milarepa’s voice coming from the yak horn. When he tried to pick the horn up, it was too heavy. He bent down and looked into it and saw Milarepa seated comfortably inside. His body was no smaller and the horn no bigger than before. Milarepa sang to Rechungpa, inviting him to come into the horn since he considered himself so accomplished. But when Rechungpa tried to get into the horn, he could not even get his head and hand in. Putting his mouth close to the horn, he sang a song of obeisance to his guru.

Then Milarepa came out of the horn and gestured toward the sky. The storm passed and the sun came out. . . .

. . . One day as Milarepa sat with his disciples, a young monk came to see him. He prostrated and offered Milarepa sixteen ounces of gold and a brick of tea. Milarepa said, “Gold and yogi don’t agree with each other. There’s no stove to cook the tea, so take these things back and use them for your own needs.” He took a full skull cup of wine and drank half of it, offering the rest to the young monk. Gampopa, the monk, was reluctant to take it as it was against the precepts, but not wanting to upset the symbolical pattern, he drained the cup. Up until that time, Gampopa’s training had been scholarly, so Milarepa gave him the initiation of the oral instructions and also the Cinnabar Mandala. Having seen successive visions in yogic practice, Gampopa became very excited and thought that each vision was the ultimate discovery. Milarepa, with his greater knowledge, guided him further so as to avoid all pitfalls. He finally accepted Gampopa as part of the lineage of transmission and made him his successor. He advised him to start the monastery of Gampo Lhari. Gampopa fulfilled all the instruction he had been given, and the monastery of eight thousand monks, half of them scholars and the other half in retreat in caves, became renowned. . . .

. . . In order to teach his disciples and some of his patrons, Milarepa one day performed some miracles. He flew into the sky and transformed his body from one to many and then retracted them back into one. He also preached in an invisible form. One of his disciples, Sevan Repa, also tried to fly. He held his breath but all he could do was to walk above the ground.

Another time, Milarepa became invisible to all who came to see him. Some people saw light; some saw a glowing lamp shining on his bed; some saw a rainbow, water, a bar of gold, or a whirlwind; others could not see anything.

If there be obstacles,

It cannot be called space;

If there be numbers,

It cannot be called stars.

One cannot say, “This is a mountain,”

If it moves and shakes.

It cannot be an ocean

Should it grow or shrink.

One cannot be called a swimmer

If he needs a bridge.

It is not a rainbow

If it can be grasped. [31]

The Art of Milarepa

T
HE
T
IBETAN TRADITION
is sometimes referred to as “lamaism,” but it is rather the tradition of the practice of meditation. “Lamaism” is a purely fanciful and inaccurate term most frequently associated with the idea of high priests performing magic. Fundamentally, Buddhist traditions in Tibet are no different from those of such countries as Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand. But at the same time, the prolonged peaceful and uninterrupted social situation in Tibet favored the thriving living tradition of its transmission of Buddhist wisdom.

Being geographically closer to India, Tibetans had the opportunity to watch and absorb the evolutionary process of Buddhism as the teaching grew from Sangharakshita’s philosophy of Yogachara to the tantric crescendo in the period of Saraha, Naropa, and Kukuripa.

In the ninth century, tremendous enthusiasm for the secret practice of Buddhist yoga developed in the great universities of Nalanda and Vikramanshila. The secret practices inspired great pandits like Naropa and Saraha to a more thorough and rugged level of receiving teachings and of practicing them. One of the songs of Saraha says “up to now I was the perfect bhikshu, the complete bhikshu.” At this time, great pandits began to leave the security of the monasteries in search of wild yogis such as Tilopa and Kukuripa. They did this at the expense of their previous way of life. They had to give up vegetarian diets, monastic vows (such as the twelve repentances of Naropa), and other ascetic practices.

The problem for Tibetan devotees who wanted to translate and receive teachings from Indian yogis was how to approach such outlandish people and what criteria to use in relating to them. Marpa was one of the adventurous people who went in search of the yogis. He was willing to throw his store of gold (which he had saved for the journey) into the Bengali jungle and to do other crazy things, including being willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of receiving the teachings. Although Marpa was a solid, stable Tibetan scholar and farmer, his faith and romantic notion of Indian tradition led him to this point. But having received the teachings, he found that the only way to communicate them to other Tibetans was as himself, as a very earthy person, rather than to make himself over into a replica of Naropa and Kukuripa.

Marpa taught people in his spare time for he was mainly occupied with plowing the fields, harvesting, and taking care of his seven children. Probably he even had to care for another dairy farm up in the mountains. The pattern developed that he generally had other householders and farmers interested in his teachings. Pilgrims, travelers, and mendicants flocked to visit Marpa’s farm. Milarepa was an exception, for he was inspired to stay.

Mila was his family name, but he was known as Tuchen, the great powerful one, because of his reputation as a black magician able to kill his enemies by conjuring great scorpions to uproot the structures of their houses. Such success with his powers and subsequent guilt and conflict led him to seek Marpa, but merely unburdening himself was not the way to communicate with his teacher.

Milarepa was forced to relate to his own body by undergoing all sorts of extremely difficult physical work and suffering in payment for receiving teaching. Marpa said, “I cannot promise you food, lodging, and teaching. Either you seek food and lodging elsewhere and I give you teaching, or I provide food and lodging and you receive teaching elsewhere. But in any case, if you want to receive teaching, you will have to present a gift.” Finally, Milarepa was accepted with the provision that he build a certain tower for Marpa. But Milarepa thought that he should receive the teachings on the basis of his workmanship as a kind of exchange. However, his anxiety and restlessness presented more problems than he realized, for in order to receive teaching, he had to give up not only all expectation, but also wanting to be free from the conflicts and guilts of his previous wrongdoings. This was, in a way, the gift he had to give.

Milarepa was led to believe that he was not worthy of receiving the teachings in his lifetime, so he gave up all hope—which it was necessary for him to do—not only psychologically but literally as well, for he decided to commit suicide. At that moment, when expectation and a sense of wanting to be saved did not exist in him anymore, he was accepted into the abhisheka circle and was able to receive teachings. He practiced diligently for the next six years.

Marpa realized that Milarepa had to relate to his unfinished karmic debts and to have the experiences of working them out, and so he encouraged him to return to his homeland. Perhaps until this point, the teachings were to a great degree only theoretical, except for the presence and word of Marpa which had naturally made a deep impression on Milarepa. But it was not until he met with disappointments and the desolate situation of his home village, that he was really connected to the teachings.

The rich, fertile barley fields were overgrown with weeds. The family scripture—the
Prajnaparamita Sutra
—had been blown over the neglected fields by the wind. His relatives hadn’t touched the property because they thought it was bewitched by Milarepa’s magical powers. His sister had become a beggar and his mother had died. Using the bones of his mother’s skeleton as a pillow as he lay in the derelict mansion of the Mila family, Milarepa was thrust into the literal application of the teachings.

After some searching in his homeland of western Tibet, Milarepa found a cave in the Red Rock Castle Mountain of the Garuda. There, living purely on a diet of nettles, the loneliness and sense of freedom were like having pain and pleasure simultaneously. In a way, the loneliness that Milarepa felt was very romantic and inspiring. There was a sense of support from the whole lineage behind him. It was a kind of love affair with the desolate mountains. Naturally, there was a sense of longing and need for comfort from Marpa. Intoxicated by the beauty of aloneness: “He went out. But when he had gathered a handful of twigs, a sudden storm arose, and the wind was strong enough to blow away the wood and tear his ragged robe. When he tried to hold the robe together, the wood blew away. When he tried to clutch the wood, the robe blew apart. [Frustrated] Milarepa thought, ‘Although I have been practicing the Dharma and living in solitude for such a long time, I am still not rid of ego-clinging! What is the use of practicing Dharma if one cannot subdue ego-clinging! Let the wind blow my wood away if it likes. Let the wind blow my robe off if it wishes!’ Thinking thus, he ceased resisting. But, due to weakness from lack of food, with the next gust of wind he could no longer withstand the storm and fell down in a faint.”
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