The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness

by Chogyam Trungpa

  Supreme yoga. The fourth step is final or supreme yoga. You develop a feeling of the complete presence of the deity and a tremendous understanding of the mantras. Your whole being is completely steeped in the presence of the visualization. However, being steeped in the visualization does not mean that you are visualizing a particular deity all the time. It means that the form and the speech of the deity are very much present. In other words, your subconscious mind is tuned in to a very powerful living experience, as if you were visualizing all the time.

  With supreme yoga, there is a feeling of the continual presence of the deity. This kind of awareness has been described as being like falling in love. When you are in love, you don’t have to think of your lover’s name, because you are completely involved with that person. You feel their presence constantly, so your lover is with you all the time. Any expression in your life, like the sound of a closing door, or the sound of somebody’s coughing, or any little sights you might experience—all of those things become the expression of your lover. Your lover almost becomes nameless: a form without name, but with enormous presence; a form without direct self-conscious awareness, but completely absorbing.

  This same quality is also included in the realm of visualization. It is very important to understand that visualization practice is quite different from imagining an image. Simply picturing a deity sitting on your head or imagining deities in front of you as mental images is completely different from visualization practice. Visualization is the sensation of being positively haunted.

  FIVEFOLD BODHI APPROACH TO VISUALIZATION. The technique of visualization in yogayana is what is known as the fivefold bodhi approach. First, you visualize a lotus seat, a solar disk, and a lunar disk, which represent transcending passion, aggression, and ignorance. Second, on top of that you visualize the form or image. Third, you visualize the scepters or attributes that this particular visualization figure is holding. Fourth, you visualize the totality of the whole thing that you made up out of your imagination. And fifth, you visualize placing seed syllables in the appropriate energy centers of the body, such as the forehead center, throat center, heart center, genital center, navel center, and so forth.1

  This fivefold process has the potential of creating a spiritual atomic bomb. You don’t measure outer space to figure out how this bomb might explode, but purely inner space. This bomb must be equipped with its fuse, its intensity, and its explosiveness within yourself. There is the possibility of an internal explosion, and naturally this is connected with the possibility of an external explosion as well.

  From yogayana onward, you are also relating your thinking to space. In yogayana, the practice of visualization, the recitation of mantras, and yourself are regarded as three different aspects of the sky or space. That is to say, there is no distinction between the deity and yourself. They are seen as completely united. But there is still a stain, in that you see the deities as special in some sense. So they are not exactly part of you, and they are not exactly other than you. There is some ambiguity. But the end product or afterthought is that they are like the sky; they are different aspects of the sky or space. The deities are seen as part of the manifestation of the mahasukha prince, which is you or within you.

  In sadhana practice, you begin to concentrate not only on visualizing the central deity, but you expand to entertaining yourself through your sense perceptions. For instance, having invoked the main deity, you also begin to visualize deities called offering devis, who present you with objects of sense pleasure, like sounds, musical instruments, lights, food, flowers, and incense. The idea of being presented with offerings is that you are not afraid to indulge in the sense perceptions. Such indulgence is not regarded as embarrassing or nonvirtuous.

  In terms of mantra recitation, in yogayana and all the lower tantric yanas, unless mantra is chanted as a devotional practice or invocation, mantra practice is usually done in silence. This is referred to as “mind recitation” or “mental recitation.” You just think the sound rather than say it.

  RELATING TO THE DEITIES. The deities in yogayana are largely the same type of deities as you find in kriyayoga. The deities are dressed as sambhogakaya buddhas, and they have the scepters of the five buddha principles. These deities could be provoked to faint anger, but they could not be provoked to complete wrathfulness. They are also not heavily involved with passion or, for that matter, with ignorance.

  Yogayana deities are peaceful, with various semiwrathful deities surrounding them. The idea is that you are still keeping the basic principles of bodhichitta and prajna. So in a sense, these deities are still at the level of exaggerated bodhisattvas or mildly crazy buddhas. But in yogayana, your attitude toward the deities changes. You begin to develop visualizations of yourself as a deity; and in front of you, like a mirror reflection, another set of complete mandalas is visualized on the shrine. So when the jnanasattva descends on you, it descends on the visualization in front of you as well. At this point, you are more than just purely friends; there is a sense of indivisibility with your deity.

  Your attitude toward the samayasattva is that it is yourself. Whatever is seen in the phenomenal world is part of your own understanding or basic nature, and physical forms are part of the setup of the mandala. Your attitude toward the jnanasattva is that the jnanasattva is neither good nor bad. The jnanasattva is also yourself, to some extent. Since you and your jnanasattva are equals, you can ask for favors, and that creates a further vacuum within your own mind.

  Formless Practice

  The second yoga, tsen-me, is formless meditation. In formless practice, the joy or bliss that you experience is not centralized in any particular part of your being, but it is all-pervasive. If you have difficulty in doing formless practice, the traditional instruction is that you visualize the Tibetan syllable A coming into your mouth and penetrating your body—penetrating through your eyes, your nose, your innards, your navel, and your genitals—so that you are constantly bombarded with A’s penetrating and cutting through your body.

  A feeling of formlessness and nonattachment begins to develop once you experience that you are completely machine-gunned by A’s. You have nothing left to hide, and nothing to run away from. You are just lying there or sitting there. Making use of that penetrating power of A is the primitive way of developing tsen-me, the actual formless meditation practice. It is a primitive way of developing joy instead of pain. Any place in yourself that you hold as ego identity is cut down, so joy is part of the environment, and you are part of the environment, and no “you” as an individual entity exists. There is a quality of freedom and complete joy.

  With tsen-me, you feel that you are a nonentity, but at the same time as you are experiencing that realm of nonentity, you could also visualize the deities. You could have the awareness of tsen-che and the four yogas of visualization practice as well. You could have that kind of awareness without any reference to come back to. That is one of the points of this tantra: you cannot come back to any place at all. If you have somewhere to come back to, you are not experiencing complete bliss properly. But if you have nowhere to come back to, nothing to return to, that is complete total experience, the real experience of oneness. So oneness is groundless at the same time. It is not groundless in the sense that you have been deprived of ground, in which case you still have a kind of ground. Instead, it is groundless in that ground does not exist—it is unknown to you.

  THE PRACTICE OF FIRE OFFERING

  The pattern of sadhana practice in yogayana is also very similar to upayoga, except that at this point a new practice is added, which is known as the fire offering. The practice of fire offering starts in this particular tantra, and continues into the later yanas.

  In this practice, you offer various substances such as food, fabrics, minerals, herbs, and so forth to the fire. The fire is visualized as a mandala, and the flame is the deity, or the consuming aspect of the deity. So you are offering various things to the deity. And again, since this yana is connected with the
idea of union, offering and dissolving seem to be one.

  A fire offering depends on the need for various types of energy, called the four karmas: pacifying, enriching, magnetizing, and destroying. In this practice, you visualize the flame in different ways, and you make different offerings for each karma. Herbs are offered to the peaceful or pacifying flame. Jewelry and various minerals are offered to the enriching flame. Clothes and fabrics and various herbs may be offered to the magnetizing flame. And metals, hardwoods, hot spices, flesh and blood, and things like that are offered to the destroying flame.

  In a fire offering, you are experiencing different ways of relating with fire, as the first and closest way of using the energy of the phenomenal world. You are relating to the five elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and space, and you are relating with the four karmas as different aspects that exist within the fire. Pacifying is like bathing in a cool flame; enriching is a lukewarm flame; magnetizing is a somewhat sharp flame; and destruction is a very precise burning quality. You visualize the vajra or pacifying flame as white; the ratna or enriching flame as yellow; the padma or magnetizing flame as red; and the karma or destroying flame as green.

  In terms of what is being pacified, enriched, magnetized, or destroyed, I think this is left to the student. When students have been doing a complete sadhana for some time, they begin to get a sense of what particular practice they need to conduct. At this point, such offerings would not be related to a specific practical situation, like wanting to magnetize your landlord and destroy the rival for your girlfriend. You might be able to do that later on, once you are completely free from all those entrapments, but at this level working with the four karmas is not as immediate as that. It is more psychological and subtle. And an interesting point about the vajrayana is that although you can do such things once you are up to it, when you are up to it, such problems no longer seem to exist.

  YOGAYANA AS A BRIDGE TO ANUTTARAYOGA AND THE HIGHER TANTRAS

  Groundlessness is a bridge to the complete experience of the four orders of tantra. It is a bridge to anuttarayoga, or mahamudra and to the three higher tantric yanas of maha ati or dzokchen.

  The point when you find that there is no ground left, but there is still joy and pleasure, is the starting point of the experience of nirmanakaya. Because there is no ground, there is no basic being that you can hold on to. At the same time, there is a feeling of enormous expansion. You are filled with the whole universe, and you fill the whole universe. You feel that you are one with everything, that you are one with all. That “all” quality is the experience of sambhogakaya. Finally, you have dharmakaya, which is that such “all-ness” does not have any limitations, none whatsoever. Limits do not exist, and the pulsation of joy does not exist. Joy is just one. It is big, all-pervasive, and boundless. That boundlessness is the experience of dharmakaya.

  That quality of boundlessness allows you to go on to relate with such anuttarayoga deities as Guhyasamaja, Kalachakra, or Chakrasamvara. The essence of mahamudra is connected with that sense of no reference point. It is because there is no reference point that you can visualize the enormous number of details on the carvings on the bone ornaments of a particular heruka, and however many hands or faces there are, and whatever scepters that heruka holds. These details become very vivid because you have no boundary and no reference point. Therefore, it becomes a one-shot vision without the need to focus.

  1. These five aspects of awakening, or in Tibetan ngönjang nga (Tib.: mngon byang lnga; Skt.: abhisambodhi), are often explained as the stages of (1) resting in emptiness, (2) visualizing the deity’s seat, (3) seed syllable, (4) scepters, and (5) the deity’s complete body or form.

  Part Eleven

  THE TANTRIC JOURNEY: MAHAMUDRA

  ANUTTARAYOGA: HIGHEST YOGA

  49

  The Great Symbol

  The technique or practice of anuttarayoga goes against people’s cultural, philosophical, and religious frameworks. That is why this tantra is regarded as outlaw. Practitioners of anuttarayoga were outlawed in India as being dangerous and extraordinary. It is said that nobody should get into anuttarayoga, and if anybody does get into it, they should get into it properly.

  ANUTTARAYOGA AND MAHAMUDRA

  Anuttarayoga is known as the highest yoga tantra: a, or an, is negation, and uttara is “above”; so anuttara means “none above.” In Tibetan it is called la-me: la means “above,” and me means “not”; so la-me means “nothing above.” From the point of view of the New Translation school of Tibetan Buddhism, there is nothing above anuttarayoga. You feel that you are on top of the Empire State Building. Consequently, you forget that there are airplanes hovering over you or birds flying over your head.

  The idea that there is something above anuttarayoga comes up in the Old Translation school. From the point of view of the lower tantras, anuttarayoga is like a fourth and most important yana. But according to the higher tantras, anuttarayoga is not exactly a yana, but more like a bridge from the mahamudra-type lower yanas to the three higher yanas of mahayoga, anuyoga, and atiyoga.

  In India, there was no such thing as a New Translation or Old Translation school. Instead, the tantric yanas were simply divided by whether they were connected with the maha ati approach or with the mahamudra approach. So according to Indian tradition, anuttarayoga is simply called mahamudra. Maha means “great,” “large,” or “vast,” as in mahayana, and mudra means “basic symbolism”; so mahamudra means “great symbol.”

  The Tibetan term for mahamudra is chaggya chenpo. Chaggya means “symbol,” and chenpo means “great”; so chaggya chenpo is “great symbol.” Chaggya chenpo is comprised of three aspects. Chak is traditionally interpreted as meaning “empty,” as in the shunyata experience; gya is interpreted to mean “going beyond samsaric possibilities”; and chenpo, which literally means “big,” is interpreted to mean “unifying.” So with chak, gya, and chenpo together, or mahamudra, you have the union of nonexistence and freedom from conceptualization. According to the Mahamudra-tilaka (Mahamudra Drop Tantra):

  Chak means the wisdom of emptiness.

  Gya means liberation from the dharmas of samsara.

  Chenpo means union.

  Therefore, it is known as chaggya chenpo.

  In mahamudra, the wisdom body, or ku yeshe, becomes visible, and it also becomes empty. Ku, or body, is connected with the idea of cutting the fetters of the samsaric net, and yeshe, or wisdom, is spaciousness; so in mahamudra, ku and yeshe are combined. Being empty and free from samsaric confusion is the greatest symbol of all. With mahamudra, that symbol can dawn on a situation, rather than being manufactured out of an LSD trip or anything like that.

  THREE LEVELS OF ANUTTARAYOGA

  There are three levels of anuttarayoga: root tantra, skillful-means tantra, and fruition tantra.

  Root Tantra

  The root or essence tantra is study. You should begin by hearing and studying about tantra so that you are able to understand the practice intellectually. That such a statement is recommended in the tantric literature may be surprising, because people tend to view tantra as a breaking away from society, getting wild, and dropping out. But the actual teachings do not recommend that.

  Skillful-Means Tantra

  With skillful-means tantra, you are actually practicing the techniques and traditions that are given to you.

  Fruition Tantra

  Fruition tantra means that with each journey, a sense of accomplishment takes place constantly.

  MAHAMUDRA IN COMPARISON WITH HINAYANA AND MAHAYANA

  The difference between hinayana or mahayana practice and mahamudra is that mahamudra practice does not believe in the earth, and a practice like shamatha does. Your relationship to earth has been like that of a fly attracted to excrement. There are a lot of pungent things happening on the earth, and you are constantly drawn back to that smell. The idea of not believing in the earth is that you are no longer attracted to the pungency of samsara, which is your pungency at the same ti
me. Instead of being attracted to dirt, you are attracted to genuine freshness, which is real.

  Mahamudra experience is an eye-level situation, whereas the shamatha approach is still from ground to heaven, looking up. So a moralistic attitude still exists in shamatha; you are still trying to be good. But in mahamudra, there is evenness, and because the whole thing is so even, you have greater command of the situation. Mahamudra is simple and direct. Having had that experience, you do not want to dwell in the past, present, and future anymore. You do not want to have a cozy home of any kind. Anything that is rationalized, such as dwelling in a cozy mahayana home or a cozy hinayana home, does not work with mahamudra.

  In mahamudra, the emptiness of twofold ego (the ego of self and the ego of dharmas), which you have experienced rationally, has to be worked with to the point that it becomes very personal and genuine, beyond calculation of any kind. Without that, you are unable to experience real mahamudra. In mahamudra, you are going beyond the reasonability of the egolessness of dharmas to a very subtle and completely personal experience of the egolessness of dharmas. Combining that subtle understanding of the egolessness of dharmas with the understanding of the nonexistence of oneself, which has already been experienced at the mahayana level, brings about mahamudra.