The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness

by Chogyam Trungpa

  Through your connection with the vajra master, you can experience openness early on, often right at the beginning of the vajrayana path; and as you go on, you are still doing it—aah! You keep doing it, on the spot. From that, loyalty begins to develop. Loyalty means having a sense of oneness with that openness—aah! You are loyal to that. You find that as a student of the vajrayana, you are beginning to share the mind of the vajra master. You begin to catch glimpses of the vajra master’s mind on the spot. Whatever the experience may be, whether it is a memory or a confirmation—aah!—you have it.

  MÖGÜ: JOINING LONGING AND RESPECT

  Devotion, or mögü in Tibetan, can be divided into two aspects: möpa and küpa. Möpa means “longing” or “wanting,” and küpa means “humility,” “respect,” or “being without arrogance.” With küpa, you are not pretending to be somebody who has reached a higher level of wisdom. So in devotion, longing and humbleness are put together. That state of mind brings openness to the teacher and to the dharma.

  With möpa, there is so much longing. There is a very passionate longing for the vajra master and the lineage. An analogy for this kind of longing is when two people are about to make love. While they are in the process of taking off their shoes and shirts and becoming naked so they can jump into bed together, they look longingly at each other. Möpa is similar to that process of anticipation and longing. Such longing needs to have already been inspired early on by the sense of aah!

  With küpa, the longing of möpa does not become purely an emotional indulgence or demand on the part of either the student or the teacher. The devotion of küpa is the respect or sacredness that comes from that experience of aah! Küpa arises because every highlight in your life has always been touched by the sacredness of vajrayana, even before you knew it.

  A SPIRITUAL LOVE AFFAIR

  Devotion is somewhat like a spiritual love affair. You are longing to study with a learned and enlightened person, like a schoolchild. Without devotion, there is no possibility of learning or studying vajrayana teachings of any kind. Devotion is what leads to transmission.

  Rock Meets Bone

  In the Kagyü tradition, there is a traditional verse that says: “When you intensify devotion in your heart, rock meets bone in insight, and the ultimate lineage blessing is received.2 You could say that the lineage is the rock, and your practice is the bone. When your determination is very hard and bony, it begins to meet the rock-solidness of the teachings, and they begin to agree with each other. When the two meet, two hard cores are put together, and your bone becomes rock, and rock becomes bone. There is no frivolity. You do not need blood, skin, or flesh anymore. You are planted properly and completely in your practice and discipline. There is no other lingering experience.

  Driving an Oak Peg into Hard Ground

  A similar expression says that devotion is “like an oak peg in hard ground.” Again, the sense is that your entire core is meeting another entire core. When you have a peg made out of oak and you hammer it down far enough into hard ground, you cannot take it out. It is so solid and so real, so ordinary and so tough.

  UNREQUITED LOVE

  When you first meet your guru, you have been making your living by cheating everybody. That is how you have made yourself wealthy. Then you see another wealthy person, the vajra master. But the vajra master’s way of becoming wealthy is by being genuine all the time. So you have a mind-boggling revelation: previously you thought that you could not actually become rich except by cheating, and then you find that somebody else has done the opposite—they have become rich by being genuine and honest. That is the meeting of different minds. The product of kleshas, which is your search for pleasure, has met with nondual wisdom, and finally you are shocked to find that by being genuine, you could become wealthy. That is the starting point of the explosion. You actually see that you can practice dharma properly, and that you can actually attain enlightenment. It is an interesting discovery.

  Usually, according to our ordinary concepts, if you don’t cheat, if you are not trying to make a dollar out of fifty cents every minute, you will end up with nothing. You never think that anybody could get rich just by being rich in their natural state. And for the first time, you have met a vajra master who has never tried to cheat; they have never even heard of cheating. Earning wealth, from a vajracharya’s point of view, is entirely different from your way of becoming rich.

  There are a lot of stories about this in The Life of Milarepa.3 In one story, Milarepa meets a huntsman and says to him, “Hunting is not the only pleasurable thing you can do. Why don’t you practice? Then you can hunt your own mind, your kleshas, and you will become a better hunter.” The huntsman did what Milarepa advised, and he became a great yogi.

  Our lifestyle and our values are always based on either making love or killing, and in between these two activities, we get confused and fall asleep. Those are the only three possibilities taking place in our life: murdering, mating, and falling asleep. There is passion, aggression, and ignorance, to a greater or smaller degree, in whatever we do. That is our logic of happiness, whether in the form of socialism, democracy, capitalism, or what have you. Then we are confronted by somebody who has done something other than seeking happiness in those ways—but by being bored, by just sitting, by just being, by not resorting to any form of entertainment at all, but just remaining like a statue. It is mind-boggling. None of us expected that anyone could do that. Nonetheless, we begin to realize that it has actually happened, and it has turned out to be much more powerful than we had expected, much better than our version of business.

  It is a question of seeing the contrast. In the first moment of that meeting, in the first flash, you are paralyzed or shocked, and then you are amazed. You begin to feel doubtful of your ego; you begin to crumble. And when you resort to memory, you find that your memory is a collection of bad news or insults. You are revolted. But as we say in the Supplication to the Takpo Kagyü: “Revulsion is the foot of meditation.”4 So this revulsion essentially becomes a bank of energy.

  When the meeting of minds happens, the residue may be that the student falls completely in love with the mind of the master. There is a feeling of unrequited love. That unrequited love is very healthy; it is the path. The more unrequited you feel, the better. Traditionally, unrequited love means that you have been rejected, that you have no future with your lover. But unrequited love in the vajrayana sense is the best love. It means that you have a path together, or along with, your vajra master. You feel unrequited all the time; there is never enough. Even the hinayana tradition talks about unrequited love. In referring to the Buddha, The Sutra of the Recollection of the Noble Three Jewels says, “One never has enough of seeing him.”5 The idea that one never has enough of seeing the Buddha is a form of unrequited love. There is a hunger and appreciation for this giant world, this wonderful world, and that hunger is absolutely good. It allows us to practice and to get more into the world of the teacher all the time. At this point, the ground really becomes the path.

  Personally, in terms of my relationship with my teacher, Jamgön Kongtrül of Shechen, I still want to tell him what I have been doing. Fundamentally speaking, he knows what I am doing. He knows how much he taught me, and he has great confidence in me. He made me his regent, believing that I would make no mistakes. But I wish he could actually see what we are doing here. I want him to meet every one of my students so that he could see their discipline, their devotion, and their dedication.

  That is the kind of unrequited love that goes on in the Kagyü and Nyingma traditions. It is sad and real. It is even sadder because the teacher becomes very lonely. I personally feel extremely lonely. I have no one to talk to, no one to tell, “Look! Joe Schmidt is a great practitioner. He had a nice background, and now he has joined us. He has practiced a lot, and now he is beginning to understand coemergent wisdom.6 He is beginning to understand the wisdom of beyond beyond, and he is beginning to click.”

  That is the kind of unrequited l
ove we are talking about. Nonetheless, that love can make us feel quite satisfied. We can become intoxicated on our unrequited love and also inspired, as though we had been given some kind of liquor to drink. When we were translating The Life of Marpa,7 I was actually thinking, “If only Marpa were here.” If he could see how the English-speaking people are practicing, it would be very interesting for him. He would probably cry once again, and he would probably create a ganachakra, or vajra feast for us, in order to celebrate what we are doing.

  1. Abundance of heaps refers to the combination of five constituents of ego, called skandhas, or “heaps.”

  2. This quote is found in the collection of vajra songs of the Kagyü gurus. See The Rain of Wisdom, translated by the Nalanda Translation Committee under the direction of Chögyam Trungpa (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1980).

  3. Milarepa was a renowned teacher of the Kagyü tradition known for his deep practice, his austerity, and his teaching in the form of poetry and song. For more about this great poet-saint, see Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, The Life of Milarepa: A New Translation from the Tibetan (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977).

  4. The Supplication to the Takpo Kagyü is a profound and well-loved aspirational chant written by Pengar Jampal Sangpo as a summary of the essence of the Kagyü path.

  5. This sutra is included in full, with commentary, in volume 1 of the Profound Treasury, part 1, “Entering the Path,” in the section titled “Reflecting on the Three Jewels.”

  6. Coemergent wisdom refers to the simultaneous arising of samsara and nirvana, which gives birth to wisdom.

  7. Chögyam Trungpa formed, and worked closely with, a translation committee called the Nalanda Translation Committee, in order to translate Tibetan texts and liturgies into English. This story is about their work on The Life of Marpa the Translator: Seeing Accomplishes All, trans. by the Nalanda Translation Committee under the direction of Chögyam Trungpa (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995).

  Part Three

  THE TÜLKU PRINCIPLE AND THE TRUNGPA TÜLKUS

  11

  The Tülku Principle

  Once they are born, such blessed tülkus still have to study and go through various trainings. Otherwise, if each incarnation were either already totally enlightened when they were born, or had to begin all over again, it would defeat the purpose of the tülku system. If in each life a teacher had to struggle from the ground up, it would seem to contradict the perpetuation or furtherance of the development of enlightenment.

  HAVING DISCUSSED the principle of the vajra master, or guru, we could discuss the Trungpa lineage and how the idea of tülkus, or incarnate lamas, fits into our discussion of the vajrayana.

  The principle of lineage is very important. It is our heritage; it is what we have received. In particular, we have received the Kagyü and Nyingma traditions. These two traditions both emphasize practice methodologies. In these practice lineages, whether you are in the world or in retreat from the world, you are in retreat all the time.

  Kagyü vision is like seeing the colors, and Nyingma vision is like focusing, which helps you to see the precision of the colors. The Kagyü and Nyingma are almost like one tradition. It has been said that they are like using two eyes in order to see. Forms, such as the way the shrine is arranged, the way thangkas are hung, and the way meditators sit cross-legged, are not made up. They are part of a twenty-six-hundred-year-old tradition that is still being followed today.

  THE THREE KAYAS AND THE TÜLKU PRINCIPLE

  The tülku principle is connected with the guru and the yidam principles, and in particular with the vajrayana concept of the trikaya or the bodies of enlighenment: dharmakaya (Tib.: chöku), sambhogakaya (Tib.: longku), and nirmanakaya (Tib.: tülku). The idea of the three bodies or kayas is very simple: it is that the enlightened state has three levels. The dharmakaya is ultimate being, the origin of everything, formless and all-pervasive. The sambhogakaya is the manifestation of the activities of dharmakaya into the visible level of energy and play. The nirmanakaya represents actual earthly connections and energy materializing on a physical plane, particularly as human beings.

  The term tülku is the Tibetan translation of nirmanakaya. Tül means “emanation,” and ku means “body”; so tülku means “emanated body.” There are several types of tülkus. Gautama Buddha, the historical Buddha, or the Buddha on earth, is considered to be one type of tülku. Images of the Buddha are also known as tülkus, as art tülkus. Another type of tülku is one who continues to be reborn again and again in order to help beings on various levels.

  The good intentions of the buddhas extend to all the world realms, but in general the enlightened ones find that human beings are the most workable. Humans speak languages; they have developed intelligence; they have complicated social systems; and they also experience pain more acutely than the beings in the other realms. The beings in the other realms are said to be dissolved much more into their own confusion, and therefore they are more freaked-out than human beings. So the human realm is the most workable of all the realms.

  THE TIBETAN TÜLKU SYSTEM

  The Tibetan tradition of discovering tülkus involves identifying incarnate lamas, or proclaiming that somebody is the tülku of so-and-so. In this system, there are various types of incarnate lamas and various types of rebirth taking place. For example, one kind of tülku incarnates before the previous incarnation has died, several months or even years earlier; another kind of tülku takes rebirth directly after the previous incarnation has died. In general, we can say there are three types of tülkus: blessed, anonymous, and direct.

  Blessed Tülkus

  Among the various types of incarnation in Tibet, the most prominent seems to be the form of tülku called a blessed tülku. In this case, the teacher chooses someone to bless. They may choose the person who is closest to them, or bless some passing bodhisattva who has not quite attained the highest of the bhumis. The teacher, or current tülku, blesses that person by taking a certain type of spiritual energy that transcends ego, and then transferring this energy to the chosen person. This person then comes back in the next life as the incarnation of that previous tülku. So although he or she is a different person, there is spiritual continuity taking place.

  Blessed tülkus have to be raised and educated; they have to go through training and practice. Since they are recognized as a tülku of some previous teacher, they have more potential for realization than an ordinary person who is not pushed or encouraged in the same way, and who hasn’t had anything injected into them. So these young tülkus have a great deal of potential, but they have not quite realized it; therefore, they have to go through training and education. With training, and because such spiritual energy has been put into them, they can then begin to come up to the level of their previous incarnation.

  While this transfer of spiritual energy is possible, we ordinary people cannot transfer energy in this way because we believe ourselves to be one entity, in spite of philosophical indoctrination about egolessness. So we find it very difficult to split our personality, unless we become schizophrenic, which is not a very pleasant or enlightened way of splitting oneself. The principle of the blessed tülku shows us that there may be a higher level of splitting personality—not into just one person, but into many. In this splitting, usually the body, speech, mind, quality, and action aspects of a particular being are transferred, so you end up with five different incarnations of one previous teacher. Some may specialize in scholarship, and others in contemplation, and others in the activity of propagating the dharma, and so forth.

  His Holiness the Dalai Lama, His Holiness the Karmapa, and all the other tülkus you may be familiar with seem to be the blessed tülku type. Each of them was recognized by their predecessor, who blessed that person as somebody who was already making progress in some way. The previous incarnation encouraged them or pushed them in a certain way, so that they could reincarnate as the next Karmapa or the next Dalai Lama.

  But once they are born, such blessed tülkus sti
ll have to study and go through various trainings. Otherwise, if each incarnation were either already totally enlightened when they were born, or if they had to begin all over again, it would defeat the purpose of the tülku system. If in each life a teacher had to struggle from the ground up, it would seem to contradict the perpetuation or furtherance of the development of enlightenment.

  Anonymous Tülkus

  You might ask what happens to those people who have already injected their essence and their wisdom into somebody else. What happens to the original people? Where do they go? It seems that those original people also come back to this world, not as their official reincarnation, but anonymously or incognito. They may come back as farmers or fishermen or businesspeople or politicians or whatever. Anonymous tülkus do not necessarily have to come back into a Buddhist environment, because the teachings of enlightenment could be taught in many different forms, and people can be helped at all kinds of levels.

  The point of anonymous tülkus seems to be that it is possible to meet people who have never heard or thought about any form of the Buddhist teachings, but who somehow are realized in themselves. In such cases, some memories exist within them, and they have some idea of their basic being. But they see no point in advertising that eccentricity, particularly if they are going to communicate with the ordinary world.