Groundlessness is as if your experience is taking place in outer space. It is like a city in the air. It is like being in a jumbo jet, which is a world of its own. It is like being in a plane that has nowhere to land, but still continues to fly. If you want to go back to your home, you cannot do it; and if you jump out of the plane, it is suicide. It seems to be too late even by the time you buy the ticket.
The important point about samaya is not how much you have achieved, but how much you are willing to “be achieved,” how much you are willing to be a victim of something or other. Before taking samaya, a student of tantra has not developed completely and fully, but at the point of samaya that student is consciously willing to become a victim. You are willing to submit. That is the basic samaya principle.
Samaya involves both sacredness and respect. It is much more than just taking a vow: it is the attitude of letting oneself be exposed in this way. You do not hold a grudge against anything; and even if you have a grudge, it is not regarded as a problem. You are a willing student, rather than someone who is being pushed. It is your own choice, so you end up, basically speaking, with no choice, and therefore there is no grudge. You cannot kill the past. Samaya is very direct. You still might have resentment, confusion, and so forth while you are on the path, but those things are not regarded as terribly bad. They are workable—highly workable, in fact. They are the juice of the meal, and it is delicious!
Resentment is very different from fundamentally violating the samaya vow. Resentment is a temporary experience, although it could develop into a permanent experience, which would be violating samaya. When you are resentful, normally you do not just decide to leave the whole practice environment; you just feel resentful that you are there. However, the thought of stepping out onto the fire exit and making a run to the nearest airport is beyond resentment. It is beginning to get very heavy. You are getting into the area of going against the sacredness or wholesomeness. That is connected with self-destruction. You are actually executing some scheme, which is a suicidal process.
Samaya is not the style of a compassionate bodhisattva. The experience of nonreference point in the mahayana is very sane and domesticated, and coached by compassion constantly. And in the vajrayana, the experience of nonreference point is also coached by compassion, but here compassion is turned into ambidextrous skillful means. It is turned into resourcefulness, rather than just being kind and nice, gentle and polite. That seems to be the difference. It takes more guts; you are willing to be fearless, although you may feel extremely cowardly.
We could use the analogy of the mouse who tried to become an elephant. In this analogy, the mouse held its breath, thinking it could expand into an elephant. But the mouse waited too long, and it burst into pieces. Such is the case if you are without a vajra guru or the teacher principle. The guru shows you when to hold your breath in order to imitate an elephant, and when to be a cunning mouse. Nevertheless, you have to be brave, fundamentally and basically brave.
Samaya is an attitude that brings trust. It is based on awe and feeling awe-inspired. The attitude of samaya is one of wakefulness. It is not wakefulness on the level of hysteria or insomnia, but in the sense of fearlessness. You do not need any compliments or confirmation, and at the same time, you are willing to relate with the messages and directions that come to you.
THE TANTRIC UMBILICAL CORD
Samaya makes connections. When you enter into vajrayana discipline, it is as if you have been given another birth. In a sense, you are newly born, but this birth is slightly different from ordinary birth. When you are born into the vajrayana realm, nobody cuts your umbilical cord. For that matter, your umbilical cord never dries. You are born as a separate individual, but you have a link with your guru, and you have a link with your yidam. So becoming a vajrayanist is like growing up with an umbilical cord that is still fresh.
You are obviously still alone on the vajrayana path. Aloneness or loneliness is always there, but there is still an umbilical cord in the vajrayana, so there is still communication taking place. This means that although you are alone, you cannot get away; you have to remain in the vajrayana environment. The umbilical cord is the connection you have with the teachings and the teacher and yourself at the same time. But this connection is necessarily within the realm of loneliness. You could still be lonely even with an umbilical cord attached to you.
VAJRA PARACHUTING
Samaya is like deciding to jump out of a plane with a parachute. You may feel both pain and pleasure at the same time. On one hand, you experience pain, because there is a lot of terror involved. You realize that if you decide to let go of your cord, you will go down and make a mess on the ground, to say the least. On the other hand, there is also pleasure. An accomplished or confident parachutist would appreciate the experience of floating through the air. Such a parachutist would enjoy the sport of parachuting, and appreciate the landscape as they float down.
The Power of Fear
You are an idiot if you do not feel terrified in the vajrayana. Likewise, if you feel okay about jumping into midair with a parachute, then you do not know what is going on. Anybody without wings—which is all human beings—who jumps out into midair in a parachute without fear is a bit of an idiot. But there is a need for idiocy! Once you jump, your fearfulness creates—aah!—first thought. This is a very important point; you catch yourself before the first moment. You catch yourself at that zero situation where you have some kind of wakefulness.
In this process of vajra parachuting, you are bound by your conviction and by the discipline, which is the open parachute. You are inspired by the wind of the vajra master’s acceptance of you. If there is the slightest doubt that the vajra master is accepting you into the vajra world, the wind will never inflate the canopy of the parachute. Even though you are committed, and you are willing to get into the vajrayana teaching, you could still puncture holes in your parachute. In turn, your parachute could be torn apart by the wind of the vajra master and become shredded; and since there would then be no canopy to hold you up, you would go down—plop!
Turning Your Back on Your Commitment
Your total commitment to the vajrayana teachings is what provides you with a parachute. Without that parachute, you would have nothing to hang on to. You are completely dependent on the chute, the cord, and yourself, which are all very vulnerable. That seems to be basically what you should understand about the principle of tamtsik, or samaya.
With that understanding, the details of how to be in the vajra world, to be inspired by the vajra master, and to be accepted as a member of the vajra sangha seem to be very simple and delightful. The only problem is when there is no faith in the vajra master, who represents the lineage, the sanity, and the teachings of twenty-six hundred years of Buddhism. When that trust and faith begins to break down, you develop doubts about the structure of the yanas altogether. You become like a student sitting with their back to the shrine.
When you become a student of tantra, you are acknowledging the Buddha’s ultimate and fullest enlightenment, which resulted in the vajrayana. As a tantrika, you cannot have allegiance to hinayana if there is no allegiance to vajrayana. If you think that you can get some wisdom out of Buddhism without acknowledging the whole path, or by completely giving up on the possibilities of the vajrayana teachings, you will find yourself like that student, sitting with your back to the shrine.
If you cannot stand the dangerous path of tantra, you may prefer to think that Buddha was simply a hinayana chap who made everything okay; you may prefer to stay on a safer path. You may find that you actually agree enormously with the hinayana. You find the hinayana understandable and the mahayana very sensible, but when you come to the vajrayana, you say to yourself, “Oh, boy! How could I get away from this? How could I find something else to do? Maybe I could become the best hinayanist or the best mahayanist. Then I would not have to go through this whole ordeal.” That is, again, like the student sitting with their back to the shrine. Once you hav
e entered the vajrayana, it is too late for that kind of approach, and it does not help. You have to face your mind; that is the basic point.
Landing in the Vajra World
The samaya principle binds together you and your vajra master, who is your lover and who loves you, and the teachings, which strike so much at your heart. For a long time, you have felt so lonely. You have been lonely, without a love affair, lonely with yourself, and at last you have a chance not to be lonely. You have a chance to get into the vajrayana teachings and be included in some kind of bigger world. So it is time for you to pull up your socks or your trousers—or as we say in Tibet, “It is time to hitch up your chuba.”
With the samaya principle, we are bound together in the vajra parachute. If you ask where we are trying to land, the answer is that we are trying to land in the vajra world. To come to the vajra world, you cannot use any other form of transportation, none whatsoever. The only way you can land in the metropolis of the vajra world is by parachuting, and each parachutist has to navigate their own canopy and cord and self. In turn, we can begin to create an enlightened society. In this enlightened society, all the citizens enter by that same process; and because they never crawl in, but instead use their parachute, they become good citizens.
23
Enlightenment and Its Opposite
Enlightenment and vajra hell are like the two ends of a vajra: when you hold a vajra, prongs go up and prongs go down.
BREAKING SAMAYA
Once you have taken samaya, you are not allowed to leave the vajra castle. There are big pits and holes around it. If you try to escape, you find that there is no bridge, and if you try to swim across the moat, you drown because there are crocodiles who pull you down into the water. If you break your own commitment, it is devastating, suicidal. If you decide to abandon the vajrayana, you will be roasted alive, unable even to die on the spot. You will find yourself in what is called vajra hell, or vajra naraka, where you attain a perverted version of enlightenment in which there is the ever-present experience of pain. That pain is without a gap. It is nondual pain, coemergent pain. You are in so much pain that you cannot even experience pain, and you cannot get out of it.
Vajra hell does not refer to literally being boiled in water or roasted in fire. Rather, it is that one’s mind is so completely consumed by kleshas that there is no possibility of escape. In English, this is known as claustrophobia. So vajra hell is the individual’s mind being trapped in pain. Once you are trapped in pain, neither the guru nor anyone else can extract you from that monolithic situation. No one can save you.
THE SNAKE IN THE TUBE
It has been said in the scriptures that a person entering the vajrayana path is like a snake entering a bamboo pipe. Once the snake has entered the tube, it will either face up or down; it all depends on how the snake enters the tube. So entering into samaya is a question of motivation, to begin with. If you want to snuggle into your old habits, you go down; if you want to play a more adventurous game, you go up. It is a question of giving up territory or not giving up territory. If you want to give up your ego, or if some ventilation is possible in your ego situation, you go up; if not, you go down. It is not a negotiable situation; it is a dictatorial situation.
VAJRA HELL
If your approach to the vajrayana is wrong, you are going to be like that upside-down snake and end up in vajra naraka. In vajra naraka, you will have no saviors; neither the generous bodhisattvas nor the good hinayanists can save you. The big secret about vajra hell is that there is no end to it: once you enter vajra hell, there is no way out, no escape from the karmic consequences. Vajra hell is an experience that constantly perpetuates itself. In that way, it is almost comparable to the experience of enlightenment, which also perpetuates itself. Enlightenment becomes greater vision in the realm of the three kayas, and in vajra hell an equivalent three kayas perpetuate themselves.
There is no way out of vajra hell. You are stuck because your vision, which is actually your neurosis, seems to be constantly growing stronger. Therefore, you perpetuate being in that particular realm. You have a notion of sanity, but you have no notion of neurosis, and that perpetuates the pain enormously. The pain you experience in vajra naraka is said to be the opposite, but equivalent, of what a person who attains buddhahood would experience. People attaining buddhahood experience spontaneity and openness—and to an equal degree, people in vajra hell experience claustrophobia and imprisonment.
Vajra hell is a devastating poison that you cannot use as medicine. It is total poison. Vajra hell is the other end of the stick from enlightenment. It is the opposite experience in almost a mystical way, a fantastic super-samsara. The experience of pain is so complete that you do not even have the relative reference point that you are the one experiencing your pain. You are stuck there completely. There is not even a buddha teaching there. Vajra hell is so impenetrable that it even walls off the buddhas. The vajra quality usually refers to cutting off ego, but in this case it is the opposite: the ego cuts off enlightenment. It walls off everything completely. Even the teaching that all the constituents of being are transitory would not apply to vajra hell. That is why it is called vajra hell, and why it is extraordinary.
The pain that ordinary samsaric people experience has gaps of buddha mind, or the meditative state. But in the case of vajra naraka, it is all black. There is no hope of even a glimpse of enlightenment. It is as if you are covered all over with tar, and you have no breathing space. You might wonder how something can stay black, if there is no reference to white. But that is the whole point; that is why you remain. In vajra hell, there is no reference to anything else, which is why the whole thing is so painful.
Vajra hell is a consequence that we enter into when we die. It is something that we end up in for millennia or for millions of years, without even a reference point of how long we are there.
That is the very definite understanding of vajra hell. It is what I understood myself, and I do not want to alter it to make it presentable to Americans. Vajra hell is too touchy a subject to make it presentable. I just have to lay it out flat: a person might be a candidate for vajra hell. As long as the idea of enlightenment is eternal, the opposite is also true. Vajra hell is not just samsara; it transcends samsara. In the realm of vajra hell, as in the realm of enlightenment, the truth of samsara and nirvana being the same still applies. Enlightenment and vajra hell are like the two ends of a vajra: when you hold a vajra, prongs go up and prongs go down.
In terms of discipline, vajra hell and enlightenment are completely different. Enlightenment is the result of the discipline that you have developed and applied. Because of that discipline, you have a sense of achievement, creativity, and openness, and you have sentient beings to work with. But vajra hell comes about because you have no dedication to anything. It gives ego the opposite result: there is a feeling of being completely down, completely and thoroughly in blackness, with no breathing space. It is total imprisonment.
We could say that in the state of enlightenment, there is total pleasure and total freedom. There is pleasure without any reference point, there is total spaciousness and openness. You could display all kinds of sambhogakaya manifestations. But in the case of vajra hell, there is a feeling of complete imprisonment and utter suffocation. And because there is no reference point, it is not that you still see black as opposed to white, but you are in blackness.
All dharmas are like mirrors, and on those mirrors anything can be reflected: vajra hell can be reflected, and vajrayana buddha fields can be reflected. You begin the path on the ground of your individual merit, and what happens after that depends on your exertion. When your merit and exertion are joined together, complete liberation is possible. Such liberation is not dependent on hope and fear, so it is possible for the guru and you to share ground.
REASONS FOR GOING TO VAJRA HELL
The reason you get into vajra hell is because you ignore the warnings that you receive from the phenomenal world. You begin to be en
ormously self-righteous and very selfish. You feel that you are correct, so any warnings are regarded as unnecessary and insignificant. You think it is just your thinking process and your fear that prevents you from doing something. So you override those strong messages and warnings, thinking, “Oh, that’s nothing. I’m still going to do it.” With that approach, you are actually disrespecting the phenomenal world.
That is precisely what ego means: disrespecting the messages of the phenomenal world. You are centralized in yourself, just doing what you want to do, what you feel like doing, and you do not pay attention to anything around you. That is the definition of aggression, passion, and ignorance all lumped together.
But you have to be a powerful person to end up in vajra hell, some kind of VIP. You are a candidate for vajra hell if the powerful statement you make with your life is distorted. You may have a fair amount of information and experience and ideas, but all of them are based on ego. When that happens, there is a possibility that if you have an incompetent guru, that guru will not be powerful or awake enough to give you a warning. It is also possible that you will leave your teacher and develop your own cult. You may begin to interpret things your own way, based on what you would like to hear from yourself. In that case, you may end up in vajra hell and find your guru down there with you, saying “Fancy meeting you here!”
Slipping up or making mistakes is not regarded as problematic, because you still have good intentions. It is the general sense of losing heart and disregarding any possibility of truth in the vajrayana that seems to make one a candidate for this particular region. If you violate samaya deliberately, then you go downhill altogether. However, if you do something that violates samaya out of ignorance, there is room for that, because if you are just ignorant, that can be corrected.
The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness Page 31
