The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (11 page)

Our civilized world is so orderly that we do not see places like this charnel ground. Bodies are kept in their coffins and buried quite respectably. Nevertheless, there are the greater charnel grounds of birth, death, and chaos going on around us all the time. We encounter these charnelground situations in our lives constantly. We are surrounded by halfdead people, skeletons everywhere. But still, if we identify with Padmasambhava, we could relate with that fearlessly. We could be inspired by this chaos—so much so that chaos could become order in some sense. It could become orderly chaos rather than just confused chaos, because we would be able to relate with the world as it is.

Padmasambhava went and found the nearest cave, and he meditated on the principle of the eternity of buddha nature: buddha nature is eternally existing, without being threatened by anything at all. Realization of that principle is one of the five stages of a vidyadhara. It is the first stage, called the vidyadhara of eternity.

Vidyadhara
means “he who holds the scientific knowledge” or “he who has achieved complete crazy wisdom.” So the first stage of crazy wisdom is the wisdom of eternity. Nothing threatens us at all; everything is an ornament. The greater the chaos, the more everything becomes an ornament. That is the state of Vajradhara.

We might ask how a young, innocent prince came to have such training that he was able to handle those charnel-ground situations. We might ask such a question, because we generally assume that in order to handle something we need training: we have to have benefited from an educational system. We have to have read books on how to live in a charnel ground and been instructed on what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to eat there. No training was necessary for Padmasambhava, because he was enlightened at the moment of his birth. He was coming out of the dharmakaya into the sambhogakaya, and a sudden flash of enlightenment does not need training. It does not require an educational system. It is inborn nature, not dependent on any kind of training at all.

In fact, the whole concept of needing training for things is a very weak approach, because it makes us feel we cannot possess the potential in us, and that therefore we have to make ourselves better than we are, we have to try to compete with heroes or masters. So we try to imitate those heroes and masters, believing that finally, by some process of psychophysical switch, we might be able to become
them.
Although we are not actually them, we believe we could become them purely by imitating—by pretending, by deceiving ourselves constantly that we are what we are not. But when this sudden flash of enlightenment occurs, such hypocrisy doesn’t exist. You do not have to pretend to be something. You
are
something. You have certain tendencies existing in you in any case. It is just a question of putting them into practice.

Still, Padmasambhava’s discovery might feel somewhat desolate and slightly terrifying from our point of view if we imagine him meditating in a cave, surrounded by corpses and terrifying animals. But somehow we do have to relate with that in our personal life situations. We cannot con the existing experience of life; we cannot con our experiences or change them by having some unrealistic belief that things are going to be okay, that in the end everything is going to be beautiful. If we take that approach, then things are not going to be okay. For the very reason that we expect things to be good and beautiful, they won’t be.

When we have such expectations, we are approaching things entirely from the wrong angle. Beauty is competing with ugliness, and pleasure is competing with pain. In this realm of comparison, nothing is going to be achieved at all.

We might say, “I’ve been practicing; I’ve been seeking enlightenment, nirvana, but I’ve been constantly pushed back. At the beginning, I got some kind of kick out of those practices. I thought I was getting somewhere. I felt beautiful, blissful, and I thought I could get even better, get beyond even that. But then nothing happened. Practice became monotonous, and then I began to look for another solution, something else. Then at the same time, I thought, ‘I’m starting to be unfaithful to the practices I’ve been given. I shouldn’t be looking for other practices. I shouldn’t look elsewhere, I should have faith, I should stick with it. Okay, let’s do it.’ So I stick with it. But it is still uncomfortable, monotonous. In fact, it is irritating, too painful.”

We go on and on this way. We repeat ourselves. We build something up and make ourselves believe in it. We say to ourselves, “Now I should have faith. If I have faith, if I believe, I’m going to be saved.” We try to prefabricate faith in some way and get a momentary kick out of it. But then it ends up the same way again and again and again—we don’t get anything out of it. There are always those problems with that approach to spirituality.

In Padmasambhava’s approach to spirituality, we are not looking for a kick, for inspiration or bliss. Instead, we are digging into life’s irritations, diving into the irritations and making a home out of that. If we are able to make a home out of those irritations, then the irritations become a source of great joy, transcendental joy, mahasukha—because there is no pain involved at all. This kind of joy is no longer related with pain or contrasted with pain at all. So the whole thing becomes precise and sharp and understandable, and we are able to relate with it.

Padmasambhava’s further adaptation to the world through the attitude of eternity, the first of the five stages of a vidyadhara, plays an important part in the study of the rest of Padmasambhava’s aspects. This subject comes up again and again.

Student:
Why couldn’t Padmasambhava’s making his home in the charnel ground be considered masochism?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
To begin with, there is no sense of aggression at all. He is not out to win anybody over. He is just there, relating to things as they are. In masochism, you have to have someone to blame, someone to relate to your pain: “If I commit suicide, my parents will know from that how much I hate them.” There’s nothing like that here. It is a nonexistent world, but he is still there, existing with it.

Student:
I don’t understand this extrahuman quality of being born out of a lotus plant—like Christ’s having a virgin mother. Isn’t that presenting Padmasambhava as an ideal beyond us that we have to relate to as other-than-human?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
In some way, being born from a mother and from a lotus are exactly the same situation. There is nothing all that superhuman about it: it is an expression of miracles that do exist. People who watch a birth for the first time often find that that is a miracle too. In the same way, being born from a lotus is a miracle, but there is nothing particularly divine or pure about it. Being born from a lotus is an expression of openness. The process of being in the womb for nine months does not have to be gone through. It is a free and open situation—the lotus opens and the child is there. It is a very straightforward thing. With regard to the lotus, we do not have to discuss such questions as the validity of the statement that Christ’s mother was a virgin. There could only be this one lotus there at that time. Then it died. So we could say it was a free birth.

S:
Birth from the lotus could also mean the negation of karmic history.

TR:
That’s right, yes. There is no karmic history involved at all. Just somewhere in Afghanistan a lotus happened to bear a child.

Student:
Could you please say something about the relationship between the Vajradhara aspect of Padmasambhava and the dharmakaya buddha of the Kagyü lineage, also called Vajradhara?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
As you say, for the Kagyü lineage, Vajradhara is the name of the primordial buddha on the dharmakaya level, who is continuously existing. Padmasambhava’s Vajradhara aspect is on the sambhogakaya level of relating with life experiences; or on a secondary dharmakaya level, it is connected with the all-pervasiveness of sentient beings, there at your disposal to work with. But it is primarily a sambhogakaya principle. In this sense, the five aspects of the sambhogakaya, the five sambhogakaya buddhas, are the eight aspects of Padmasambhava.

Student:
You talked about staying with the irritation; in fact, savoring it. Is the idea that pain is associated with withdrawal and avoidance, so you move into the pain or closer to the pain, and it disappears? Is there some possibility of enlightenment coming out of that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
This is actually a very delicate point. We have the problem that a sort of sadistic attitude could occur, which we find in a lot of militant attitudes toward Zen practices as well. We also have the “inspirational” approach of getting into the teachings and ignoring the pain. These attitudes lead to blind confusion. And we find our bodies being abused, not taken care of properly.

In this case, relating with the pain is not quite the sadistic approach or that of militant practice on the one hand, nor is it based on the idea of ignoring the whole thing and spacing out into your mind trip on the other hand. It is something between these two. To begin with, pain is regarded as something quite real, something actually happening. It is not regarded as a doctrinal or philosophical matter. It is simple pain or simple psychological discomfort. You don’t move away from the pain, because if you do, you have no resources to work with. You don’t get into the pain or inflict pain on yourself, because then you are involved in a suicidal process; you are destroying yourself. So it is somewhere between the two.

Student:
How does making a home in the irritations relate to the mandala principle?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That seems to be the mandala already, in itself. Relating with the irritations has the sense of there being all kinds of irritations and infinite further possibilities of them. That
is
a mandala. You are right there. Mandala is a sense of total existence with you in the center. So here you are in the center of irritation. It is very powerful.

Student:
In defining
vidyadhara,
you talked about scientific knowledge. What does scientific knowledge have to do with Padmasambhava’s life?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I am using “scientific knowledge” in the sense of the most accurate knowledge on how to react to situations. The essence of crazy wisdom is that you have no strategized programs or ideals anymore at all. You are just open. Whatever students present, you just react accordingly. This is continuously scientific in the sense that it is continuously in accordance with the nature of the elements.

FIVE

Let the Phenomena Play

W
E MAY NOT HAVE THE TIME
to go through the rest of the eight aspects of Padmasambhava at the same pace as we went through the first two. But our discussion so far has provided a basic ground for the discussion of the whole process of Padmasambhava’s life and his personal expansion. What I would like to do is try to convey a sense of Padmasambhava that brings all of his aspects together. This is very hard to do, because the medium of words is limited. Words do not cover enough of the insight. But we shall do our best.

We are not talking about Padmasambhava from an external historical point of view or an external mythical one. We are trying to get at the marrow inside the bone, so to speak—the instantaneous or embryonic aspect of him and how he relates to life from that. This is a sacred or tantric way of seeing Padmasambhava’s life, as opposed to accounts and interpretations that see him purely as a historical or mythical figure—like King Arthur or someone like that.

The inside story is based on the relationship of the events in Padmasambhava’s life to the teachings. This is the point of view from which I have been trying to work into the story of Padmasambhava as the young prince and as the young siddha, or accomplished yogi, in the charnel ground. These two aspects are extraordinarily important for the rest of Padmasambhava’s life.

Padmasambhava’s next phase arose from the need for him to be accepted into the monastic life. He had to be ordained as a bhikshu, or monk. Relating with the monastic system was important because it provided a disciplinary situation. Padmasambhava was ordained by Ananda, a disciple and attendant of the Buddha. As a monk, Padmasambhava acquired the name Shakya Simha, or Shakya Senge in Tibetan, which means “lion of the Shakya Tribe.” This was one of the Buddha’s names (the Buddha was also sometimes known as “the Sage of the Shakyas”), and through this name Padmasambhava became identified with the tradition of the Buddha. This was very important, because one needs a tremendous sense of relationship with the lineage. So Padmasambhava associated himself with the lineage and realized what an important part it plays.

The lineage of the Buddha is a lineage of constant basic sanity, a sane approach to life. Becoming a monk means living life sanely—sanely and saintly—because it is a complete and total involvement with things as they are. As a monk, you do not miss any points. You relate with life from the point of view that the given moment actually permits a sense of a living quality, a sense of totality, a sense of not being moved by passion, aggression, or anything at all—you are just dealing with things as the monastic life permits, as they are.

As Padmasambhava developed in his monastic role, he again began to manifest in the style of a young prince, but in this case, as a young prince who had become a monk. He decided to become the savior of the world, the bringer of the message of dharma.

One day he visited a nunnery. At this particular nunnery lived a princess called Mandarava, who had just recently become a nun and had completely turned away from worldly pleasure. She lived in seclusion, guarded by five hundred women, whose task was to make sure that she maintained her monastic discipline. When Padmasambhava arrived at the monastery, everyone was quite impressed with him—naturally. He had the innocence of one born from a lotus and a pure and ideal physique. He was very beautiful. He converted all the women in the nunnery: they all became his students.