The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (50 page)

T
HE
D
YING
P
ERSON

It seems that in the Tibetan culture people do not find death a particularly irritating or difficult situation, but here in the West we often find it extremely difficult to relate to it. Nobody tells us the final truth. It is such a terrible rejection, a fundamental rejection of love, that nobody is really willing to help a dying person’s state of mind.

It seems necessary, unless the dying person is in a coma or cannot communicate, that he should be told he is dying. It may be difficult to actually take such a step, but if one is a friend or a husband or wife, then this is the greatest opportunity of really communicating trust. It is a delightful situation, that at last somebody really cares about you, somebody is not playing a game of hypocrisy, is not going to tell you a lie in order to please you, which is what has been happening throughout your whole life. This comes down to the ultimate truth, it is fundamental trust, which is extremely beautiful. We should really try to generate that principle.

Actually relating with the dying person is very important, telling him that death is not a myth at that point, but that it is actually happening. “It is actually happening, but we are your friends, therefore we are watching your death. We know that you are dying and you know that you are dying, we are really meeting together at this point.” That is the finest and best demonstration of friendship and communication, it presents tremendously rich inspiration to the dying person.

You should be able to relate with his bodily situation, and detect the subtle deterioration in his physical senses, sense of communication, sense of hearing, facial expression, and so on. But there are people with tremendously powerful will who can always put on a smile up to the last minute of death, trying to fight off their old age, trying to fight the deterioration of their senses, so one should be aware of that situation also.

Just reading the
Bardo Thödröl
does not do very much, except that the dying person knows that you are performing a ceremony of some kind for him. You should have some understanding of the whole thing, not just reading out of the book but making it like a conversation: “You are dying, you are leaving your friends and family, your favorite surroundings will no longer be there, you are going to leave us. But at the same time there is something which continues, there is the continuity of your positive relationship with your friends and with the teaching, so work on that basic continuity, which has nothing to do with the ego. When you die you will have all sorts of traumatic experiences, of leaving the body, as well as your old memories coming back to you as hallucinations. Whatever the visions and hallucinations may be, just relate to what is happening rather than trying to run away. Keep there, just relate with that.”

While you are doing all this, the intelligence and consciousness of the dying person are deteriorating, but at the same time he also develops a higher consciousness of the environmental feeling; so if you are able to provide a basic warmth and a basic confidence that what you are telling him is the truth rather than just what you have been told to tell him, that is very important.

It should be possible to give some kind of simple explanation of the process of deterioration from earth into water, water into fire, and so on, this gradual deterioration of the body, finally ending up in the luminosity principle. In order to bring the person into a state of luminosity you need the basic ground to relate with it, and this basic ground is the solidness of the person. “Your friends know you are going to die, but they are not frightened by it, they are really here, they are telling you that you are going to die, there is nothing suspicious going on behind your back.” Fully being there is very important when a person dies. Just relating with nowness is extremely powerful, because at that point there is uncertainty beyond the body and the mind. The body and brain are deteriorating, but you are relating with that situation, providing some solid ground.

As far as the visions of the peaceful and wrathful divinities are concerned, it seems to be very much left to the individual to relate with them himself. In the book it says that you should try to conjure up the spirit of the dead person and tell him about the images; you may be able to do that if there is still continuity, but it is very much guesswork as far as ordinary people are concerned; there is no real proof that you have not lost touch with the person. The whole point is that when you instruct a dying person you are really talking to yourself. Your stability is part of the dying person, so if you are stable then automatically the person in the bardo state will be attracted to that. In other words, present a very sane and solid situation to the person who is going to die. Just relate with him, just open to each other simultaneously, and develop the meeting of the two minds.

O
RDERLY
C
HAOS

The Mandala Principle

EDITED BY

S
HERAB
C
HÖDZIN
K
OHN

Editor’s Foreword

T
HE TEACHING OF THE
Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is that of the Kagyü and Nyingma lineages of Buddhism in Tibet, which comprises three major yanas, or vehicles: hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana, or tantra. The culmination of the view, practice, and action of this teaching lies in the vajrayana. Therefore, in the vajrayana lies its greatest power and ultimate expression.

In these two seminars the Vidyadhara presents fundamental aspects of the vajrayana principle of mandala. Though speaking to an audience composed largely of beginners and near beginners, he was bent on uttering the victory cry of the ultimate view. He wanted to give students who were or might be joining him an impression of the full depth and vastness of the teaching of his lineage. Conveying this to beginners meant bypassing the sophisticated apparatus of traditional Buddhist terms usually employed in describing this material. It meant condensing many layers of meaning into simple images, developing a sense of mandala on the spot using the language of everyday life in the West.

In introducing the mandala principle, the Vidyadhara asks the student to relate to a sense of totality that transcends “this and that.” “This and that” is an ordinary expression employed by the Vidyadhara in a profound sense. You might ask someone what they talked about in a conversation and get the reply “this and that” or “one thing and another.” To highlight the qualities of any “this,” you have to contrast it with some “that.” Contrasting “this” with “that” is the essence of ego’s illusory game of duality, which it deliberately uses to obscure the total vision connected with the mandala principle.

Most fundamentally, “this” as opposed to “that” is ego, or self, as opposed to “other.” “Other” can be whatever the self is defining itself against at a given moment. Often people call that “the world” or “out there.” Sometimes when talking about “this and that,” in saying “this,” the Vidyadhara would put his hand on his chest to betoken the sense of self.

There are infinite variations to the this-and-that game. Ego continuously uses these to maintain itself. Sometimes “this” is projected as overstuffed and hopeless and “that” as a roomy saving grace (as in, “Let’s get out of here!”). The primary example is regarding all of “this” as samsara and opposing it to nirvana, the salvational “that” or somewhere-else. In fear or anger one is so trapped in the solidity of “this” that all of “that” becomes a threat. In fear one seeks to avoid “that,” in anger to destroy it. From the ultimate point of view of ego, it does not matter how projections of this and that are shaped, weighted, and colored. All that matters is that the illusion of this and that is maintained any way at all. In this cynical Realpolitik, which is ego’s ultimate insight, it comes ironically close to the total vision of mandala.

It was the Vidyadhara’s incomparable genius to convey the most recondite teachings in everyday terms on the spot. The two seminars presented here are excellent examples. A reader looking for conventional conceptual sequences may at times be disappointed. He will, however, find ample consolation in an inexhaustible treasure-stream of experiential bull’s-eyes.

In editing this difficult material from the recorded tapes, I have had the good fortune to be able to consult a version prepared in 1976 by members of the New York City group of the Vidyadhara’s students. I have found this helpful and would like to express my gratitude to those early editors.

S
HERAB
C
HÖDZIN
K
OHN

Nova Scotia, 1990

Part One

MANDALA OF UNCONDITIONED ENERGY

Karmê Chöling, 1972

ONE

Orderly Chaos

I
T SEEMS THERE HAS
been a lot of misunderstanding in the way the basic principle of mandala has been presented to people. Therefore, it is worth working further on the idea of mandala—what is mandala, why is mandala, how is mandala. This involves working with our life situation, our basic existence, our whole being.

To begin with, we should discuss the idea of orderly chaos, which is the mandala principle. It is orderly, because it comes in a pattern; it is chaos, because it is confusing to work with that order.

The mandala principle includes the mandala of samsara and the mandala of nirvana, which are equal and reciprocal. If we do not understand the samsaric aspect of mandala, there is no nirvanic aspect of mandala at all.
¹

The idea of orderly chaos is that we are confused methodically. In other words, the confusion is intentional. It is intentional in that we deliberately decide to ignore ourselves. We decide to boycott wisdom and enlightenment. We want to get on with our trips, with our passion, aggression, and so forth. Because of that, we create a mandala, a self-existing circle. We create ignorance deliberately, then we create perception, consciousness, name and form, sense-consciousness, touch, feeling, desire, copulation, the world of existence, birth, old age, and death.
²
That is how we create mandala in our daily existence as it is.

I would like to present the mandala principle from this everyday angle so that it becomes something workable rather than something purely philosophical or psychological, a Buddhist version of theology. From this point of view, orderly chaos is orderly, because we create the groundwork of this mandala. We relate to it as the ground on which we can play our game of hypocrisy and bewilderment. This game is usually known as ignorance, which is threefold: ignorance of itself, ignorance born within, and the ignorance of compulsion, or ignorance of immediate measure. (In the third ignorance, having developed a sense of separation from the ground, there is a feeling that we immediately have to do something about it.)

Since mandala is based on our ignorance and confusion, there is no point in discussing it unless we know who we are and what we are. That is the basis for discussing mandala. There is no point in discussing divinities, talking about which ones are located in which part of mandala diagrams, and about the principles that might quite possibly awaken us from our confusion into the awakened state.
³
It would be ludicrous to discuss those things at this point—completely out of the question. We have to know first what mandala is, why mandala is, and why such a notion as the notion of enlightenment exists at all.

The idea of enlightenment is born out of confusion. Because somebody is confused, there is the other aspect that contrasts with that confusion, which is enlightenment. We have to approach this scientifically: if confusion exists, then enlightenment exists, therefore confusion exists. We have to work with this polarity.

There is a sense of space, constantly. There is a sense of space, because there is a boundary measuring the space. In other words, if we had some land and we wanted to make a definite statement that it was our land, we would have to put up a fence around it. The fence would mean that this particular area belonged to us and that we wanted to work on that basis. With this approach, we get onto our land, we relate with it, and we begin to possess it. It belongs to us. Then we develop that sense of possession to the point where it is absolutely impossible to work any further in that way. That space of our land becomes solid space: it is
our
land, it completely belongs to
us.
The whole land is
ours.
This sense of
ours
automatically brings possessiveness, clinging to something, holding on to it. Holding on to it means solidifying that land that belongs to us. We concretize it as ours, we make it into concrete land, concrete space. We freeze the whole area.

Consequently, the only thing left to relate with is the boundary, the fence. That is the last hope we have. We begin to look into that as a way of relating further. Maybe the fence we set up originally might have some space in it. We begin trying to eat up that fence like a worm, seeking territory or spaciousness. Since we have no relationship with our basic space as openness at all, we make the boundary into space. This turns the whole thing upside down, like turning positive film into a negative. Everything black turns white, and everything white turns black. The only way left for us to relate further is based on the hope that the fence might be a spacious one—it might be hollow, not a solid wall. That is how we set up a mandala situation to begin with, with our confused mind.

Unfortunately, there is no point at all in relating with everything as beautiful and glorious, as in a love-and-light trip. That would be totally ludicrous, if I may say so. Impractical. If we are going to freeze the whole area that we have, then we have to relate with some other areas that might be space from that point of view. The proper introduction to mandala is to find out whether we are regarding the mandala as space or whether we are freezing that space and treating the situation around it as open space.