The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness

by Chogyam Trungpa

  The vajrayanist does not have to stick to any logic. You could say “yes” or “no” at random, because when you say “yes,” that means “no.” When you ask a question that seems related with a “yes,” it could mean “yes” or “no.” It is not quite random, however. There is still some logic involved. The seed of this logic is that if there is any kind of lie, it will bounce back on you. The vajrayana is the most highly supersensitive lie detector that ever existed in any yana. Even the mahayanists do not have such a highly sensitive lie detector. The mahayana works very vaguely with trusting in the karmic consequences, and the hinayana works very basically with the level of suffering and personal neurosis. But the vajrayana acts as a police officer. The consequence comes back to you very sharply. It is like feeling pins and needles in your legs when you sit for a long time.

  BONDAGE AND FREEDOM

  Samaya has nothing to do with maintaining a particular territory. That is why understanding the meaning of samaya is so important. Samaya is a territoryless-ness that is able to cut through falsity and lies of all kinds. Because there is no territory, there is no gain or liberation. The guru is the executioner from that point of view, and at the same time the guru is the person who inspires you. The guru is the initiator or the preceptor of the abhisheka, the one who could bring you into the realm of the body, speech, and mind of your inherent buddha nature. The guru could bring your buddha nature to the surface.

  The full experience of samaya can only fully occur when a student receives empowerment. Nevertheless, the basic samaya principle comes up when you are about to enter into vajrayana discipline altogether, when you are about to begin your practice. At that point, there is a basic bond already, which consists of your trust in the truth of the teachings, and the teacher’s trust in your genuineness. Combining those two aspects of trust—that of the student and that of the teacher—creates the vajra world. There is a sense of commitment, and there is the willingness to accept the vajra world and jump into it. That commitment seems to be very important, even before a student decides to practice ngöndro, or any other preliminary practices.

  The samaya principle is bondage; it is an oath that exists between the teacher and the student. Basically, the vajra master and the student of vajrayana are joined together in a love affair instigated by the various tantric deities. In vajrayana, you study and work with different deity principles and you actually become a part of their world, but it is not based on the worship of any god. Tantric deities are part of your innate nature, which is shining through and being experienced. In the vajrayana, you are celebrating that experience properly and fully. It is very moving.

  The strength inherent in the samaya bond is based on the fact that nobody is deceiving anybody else. It is reality in the fullest sense. The vajra master and the vajra student have taken their mutual vow, and if either the vajra master or the vajra student violates that, they will suffer in the lower realms: the animal realm, the hell realm, or the hungry ghost realm. So that particular bond, or samaya, is very important and very powerful.

  The interesting thing about the samaya bond is that the more freedom you experience, that much more bondage takes place in you. The more you develop openness and a letting go or shedding of your ego, that much more commitment there is to the world of sanity. Therefore, student and teacher are bound together eternally.

  Samaya binds you not only from the outside, like a belt you put on, but at the same time it binds you from within. If you let go of that bondage, you will find that you are on the top of a garbage chute and that you will go right down the drain. But if you constantly maintain the bondage and stay bound together, you will go further and further on your journey together. You can actually go along and uplift yourself with delight, confidence, and sanity in the vajra world. And finally, you transcend the vajra world and go beyond even the dharmakaya level and attain absolute sanity. At that point, the bondage is dissolved, and you become one with coemergent wisdom.

  1. For more on the six paramitas, see volume 2 of the Profound Treasury, part 6, “Bodhisattva Activity.”

  2. An abhisheka is an empowerment or formal initiation into the vajrayana path. In the context of such an empowerment, the student takes the samaya vow and makes a formal commitment to the vajra master and to the tantric path. For more on the topic of abhisheka, see part 8, “Empowerment.”

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  Positive Entrapment

  At the beginning, you have a devotional inspiration to get into the vajrayana, so you commit yourself into the samaya trap. Your approach is open; you decide to commit yourself. But having committed yourself, the vajra gate closes, and you are included in the vajra world. This could be regarded as imprisonment or as entering into the vajra world. In either case, it is somewhat the same.

  ENTERING A CROCODILE’S JAW

  The initial vajrayana samaya is the starting point. It is where we gain some understanding of how dangerous the vajrayana is. Deciding to get into vajrayana is like entering into a crocodile’s jaw. A crocodile will not let you go; all the crocodile’s sharp teeth are pointing inward, so you cannot get out. Likewise, once you get into samaya, there is no way out.

  The earlier yanas present liberation; vajrayana provides entrapment. That seems to be the basic point of the vajrayana. We could say that vajrayana equals a trap that entraps you into the higher yanas. That trap is provided by your guru and by your yidam, and your own basic being is the subject of the entrapment. So you could regard the vajrayana path as a gigantic entrapment, but it is also possible to regard it as dance or play.

  THREEFOLD NAILING

  Samaya has also been described as a kind of vajra nailing in which you, your guru, and your yidam are bound together by your guru in order to make a sandwich that you cannot separate. The diamond or vajra nail that binds together your guru, yourself, and your yidam is like the nail that is put in the sole of your shoe, binding the first, second, and third layers of the sole. Samaya is very direct and simple and powerful. You cannot regress, and you cannot step back. Even the thought of regressing or stepping back suggests violation of the samaya vow.

  Tantra is called “vajrayana” because of that diamond quality. However, the vajrayana is not so much a yana at this point, so referring to it as a yana may be misleading. It is no longer regarded as a yana, or as a journey, but as a vajra command. You accept the process by which your teacher, yourself, and the yidam or deity that you are going to work with are bound together by the nail. That is the command. You are bound together and nailed down by the guru. So there is a very blunt approach in the vajrayana; it is very brutal and blunt.

  The Guru

  In the vajrayana, we do not talk about the kalyanamitra, or spiritual friend; we simply say guru or lama. The lama is not a heavenly being at the spirit level, but a human being who lives above you. That is to say, the lama has achieved the hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana disciplines. The lama or guru also has the power to use their nail and hammer to nail you and the guru together into the teachings. You are bound together by the threefold tantric samaya of technique, devotion, and being beyond technique.

  The guru’s attitude to relating with the student is somewhat suicidal, you might say. They are not afraid of being stuck with you for the rest of their being. If a guru decides to nail themselves to you and the teaching, then that teacher is not a very practical person; but this seems to be the tantric approach, which is very blunt. That threefold nailing is precisely the meaning of empowerment, or abhisheka; you bind yourself to the practice.

  In an abhisheka, you are bound together by the body of the guru, the speech of the guru, and the mind of the guru. You are bound together by the vajra nail of indestructibility. If the guru decides to chicken out, they are going against that nail, the same as if the disciple decides to chicken out or if the yidam decides to chicken out. But actually, your guru and your yidam have a pact—they will not chicken out, although quite possibly you yourself, as an insignificant part of the sandwich, might do so
.

  The Yidam

  The yidam is a deity that you agree to take on as a manifestation of your basic being. It is the psychological manifestation of enlightened mind in a form you can relate with, connected to your particular style and energy. In the word yidam, yi means “mind,” and dam is related to “samaya”; so yidam is “mind samaya.” The longer word for yidam is yikyi tamtsik, the “samaya of your mind.” The yidam is a part of your basic being that your mind finds applicable or that you could relate with. It has nothing to do with Yiddish!

  Having a yidam gives you a way to relate with or express your samaya. In visualization practice, you visualize the yidam as an expression or manifestation of your basic being. This visualization is referred to as the samayasattva. Samaya, again, is “sacred word,” and sattva is “being”; so samayasattva is “samaya being.” By means of the samayasattva, you can relate with your guru, yourself, and your basic being as the yidam. So the samayasattva is a way of making a link with the basic discovery of the spiritual path. By the samaya vow of dedication to your own being or nature, your basic neurosis or basic sanity is visualized as the yidam. So the yidam is related with your self; but in this case, when we talk about your self, we are talking about the utterly confused or distorted self.

  The Distorted Self

  You may think that you can relate to your self as a tangible being, but it is a distorted being. This distorted self is the middle of a sandwich; it is the overripe chicken or overripe pork that exists between your yidam and your guru. It is a confused being, stinking and paranoid and ignorant. You have the guru on the topside of the sandwich and the yidam on the bottom. So the guru is a part of your basic being; they are another kind of yidam, not purely a teacher who tells you what to do. The guru is not quite involved with you on that level. But the guru is highly involved with you in that your guru’s basic being is connected with your basic being, and with your particular mentality or psychological approach. That is why we call the guru a heavy-handed and superior being, rather than purely a spiritual friend.

  THE TANTRIC EXPLOSION

  It is important and necessary for you to understand the outrageousness of this. So let me use another analogy. In this analogy, your basic being is like the gunpowder in the middle of a hand grenade; your yidam and your guru are forming a shell around that gunpowder; and the samaya bond represents the fuse. When you pull the ring out of the hand grenade, the grenade explodes, and at that point you become one: you are united with your guru and your yidam at the same time. The guru is no longer a separate entity from you and your yidam. The guru is your yidam, and the yidam is your guru, from that point of view. They are in league, and they are conspiring against you from the point of view of tantra. So you should regard the tantric approach as explosive. It is producing an explosion in which the basic shell is broken and expanded.

  COMMITTING YOURSELF INTO THE SAMAYA TRAP

  From the tantric point of view, devotion is extraordinarily important. If you have no attitude of appreciation and no understanding of the vajrayana preceptor as the guru rather than as a kalyanamitra, then you will have no way of actually getting into the discipline of vajrayana. The starting point of vajrayana is to realize that all the different samayas are based on the samaya of devotion.

  Samaya could be regarded as a booby trap, a net, or a vajra prison. But actually, it is less like a prison than a mental institution. In a prison, you have no choice about committing yourself, but in a mental institution you do have the choice. So samaya is more like a mental institution in that you commit yourself. At the beginning, you have a devotional inspiration to get into the vajrayana, so you commit yourself into the samaya trap. Your approach is open; you decide to commit yourself. But having committed yourself, the vajra gate closes, and you are included in the vajra world. This could be regarded as imprisonment or as entering into the vajra world. In either case, it is somewhat the same.

  Once you have entered the vajrayana, you have no choice. There is no opportunity to manipulate your deceptions. On the bodhisattva path, you have the possibility of manipulating your experience, and exposing and demonstrating your characteristics. There is still showmanship at the bodhisattva level. You have a good chance of becoming a star, and if you become a mahasattva, or “great being,” there is a good chance of becoming a superstar. But in the vajrayana, there is less chance of becoming a superstar and more chance of becoming an inmate of a vajra dome. Like a geodesic dome, the vajrayana is a round world. It is no longer square, because square worlds give you too many chances to hide behind something.

  THE ROLE OF THE YIDAM

  The guru’s power goes beyond your desire to create a league with the teacher as a personal friend who could save you from whatever mistakes you make, as someone who could transmute your mistakes by saying that they are misunderstandings rather than mistakes, and then communicating that message to headquarters or to the yidam. Samaya is very important, but it does not mean committing yourself to the guru so that the guru will save you if you go wrong. In fact, there is a possibility that your guru will not be able to save you if you go wrong. That is why there is the need for the yidam. The yidam comes in if you have gone so far away that the guru’s love, dedication, and kindness cannot save you. So the yidam seems to be another expression of imprisonment.

  A person who enters into the vajrayana must be highly inspired so that they are not afraid of entering this realm of vajra imprisonment. By means of samaya, you are bound to this particular realm and you realize that you have no way out. At first, the guru can point the way for you and show you how to handle your yidam. But at the level when you have identified with your yidam completely and thoroughly, the guru can no longer control the situation. It is as if the guru has sold you a pet lion, and then that pet lion grows up and eats you. The person who sold you the lion has no control over what happens; it purely depends on your way of handling that particular pet. If the lion eats you up, the guru says that it is too bad, but this is all they can do.

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  The Different Types of Samaya

  Without the relationship with the vajra master, there is no vajrayana at all. That is quite definite. The vajra master is the buddha, the dharmapalas, the dakinis, and everything else at the same time. So it always comes to the same point: in order to have electricity, you have to have both a negative and a positive pole. In this case, you could say that you are the positive electrical element; you are putting energy in. But there is also the negative element, somebody who subtly plays with the energy you put in—that is the vajra master.

  WHEN YOU take part in an abhisheka, or empowerment ceremony, and you take the samaya vow, you are empowered to be a tantric practitioner and the holder of a certain lineage. You are entered into a particular sadhana practice. The holiness and fullness of the lineage, the sacred word, and the magical aspect are all transformed into you personally, step-by-step. So abhishekas are an aspect of the sacredness and wholesomeness of samaya.

  In addition to the samaya vow taken during abhisheka, there are other types of samaya commitments that one can assume, such as the samaya of making offerings, the samaya of reciting mantras, and the samaya of visualization. The samaya of mantra is connected with the principle of wholesomeness as it applies to utterance or words, and to the mantric quality of experience altogether. There is the samaya of realizing the world as being beyond the petty world, and the samaya based on the wholesomeness of your relationship with the yidam as a symbolic or psychological entity that has inspired your fullness. Another samaya is based on the sacredness of vajrayana formless meditation practice. This samaya is similar to the mahayana meditation experience of shunyata, but it is more playful and more realistic than the experience of shunyata. A sense of openness, playfulness, vividness, and inquisitiveness in vajrayana formless meditation practice brings the shunyata experience into the mahamudra level. Another samaya is the samaya of experiencing everything as completely sacred in vajra nature.

  THREE ASP
ECTS OF SAMAYA

  Samaya has three aspects: seed samaya, upaya samaya, and fruition samaya.

  Seed Samaya

  The first aspect of the samaya bond is known as the seed samaya. The essence of this samaya is that all dharmas—that is to say, whatever is perceived or heard—are regarded as self-existing wisdom. When the seedsamaya principle comes into your system, you realize that you already have self-existing wisdom, which is very basic and prominent. So you are not trying to get better, particularly, but you are trying to realize your own nature.

  Upaya Samaya

  The second aspect of samaya is known as upaya samaya, the samaya of skillful means. In the context of samaya, the idea of skillful means is that all the different techniques that have been developed for overcoming the conceptual mind in its rough and refined aspects are now transcended in the greater skillful means of visualization practice, or utpattikrama.

  Fruition Samaya

  The third aspect of samaya is called fruition samaya. In fruition samaya, whatever occurs, whatever has occurred, and whatever is about to occur in your phenomenal world—everything that there is—is regarded as a part of the body and wisdom of the buddhas. Here “body” refers to the tangible reactions that take place in relation to whatever is cluttering the mind, particularly your emotional response to the world. It is the actual visible personal and emotional level. Wisdom goes beyond the emotional level; it is more comprehensive. You see basic phenomena and general frames of reference as expressions of wisdom. Body refers to both speech and physical manifestations, and wisdom refers to more ethereal phenomena and insights—but in fact, they are both saying the same thing.