The Chakrasamvara approach to tantric discipline is based on perfection and passion. The idea of perfection is the same principle as that of the VAM symbol, in that you are already purified. You have been cleansed by throwing yourself into the midst of an enormous eruption of passion. It is like getting into a huge, self-existing bathroom. While you are taking a shower, you can shit and piss and clean yourself all at the same time. It is like getting into a dishwasher where you get both washed and dried. It is very direct. It peels off your skin sometimes because it is so direct; but at the same time, it works.
Passion in this case is not purely lust. It is your soft spot. It is that which pleases you in your life. Your passion may be for anything; it could be for money or candy, books or music. In mother tantra, the approach to working with passion is not one of causing the passion to subside, but one of exaggerating it. By exaggerating the passion, the passion gets out of hand and takes you over completely, and you begin to panic. Because of your panic, you begin to freeze—because of that, enormous energy comes up. Suddenly there is a jolt, which loosens you up.
It has been said that cowardly soldiers in the battlefield get so frightened that they become paralyzed with fear, and the only way to deal with this is by threatening to kill them. When such a soldier hears the words, “If you do not walk, I am going to kill you,” that soldier actually panics more. A kind of union with the panic takes place. That heightened panic produces more rhythm in his body; the soldier begins to free himself from paralysis, and then he becomes a good fighter.
So being frozen in passion can only be freed by further passion, or a further threat of passion. In the same way, when water is caught in your ear, the only way to get it out is by putting in more water. The idea is to not take passion too seriously. If you take passion too seriously, you will be stuck with it. Instead, passion is taken as a kind of hang-up, and at the same time, as lubrication. So you never get stuck anywhere.
Mother tantra is also connected with the deity Mahamaya, although Mahamaya does not really belong to any order of tantra. Mahamaya is very shifty, like the play of the rainbow. He has a quality of looseness and transparency. Mahamaya is right here with us, dancing with us. He is not anybody, but he has a name, which is the fault of the previous siddhas. They gave him a label, which is unfortunate.
Mahamaya is symbolized by what is known as impersonating the mirage. With Mahamaya, things keep happening. Things begin to develop, and energies begin to move back and forth, but as soon as you start to use your net to catch a butterfly, the butterfly begins to dissolve in the net. You scoop water from the river of mirage and put it in your pot, but as soon as you put your pot on the stove, you find that your pot is empty. And so forth.
Mahamaya is not just hallucination, but it is actual experience, which seems to be real but unreal. There are a lot of things to be said about hallucinations and actual experience in tantra, but in fact we never talk about hallucinations. Talking about hallucinations is forbidden, because they do not exist; they are a complete lie. Instead, we talk in terms of actual experience. Actual experience has a shifty quality; it is changeable, but it is not really a hallucination.
Hallucinations are caused by sickness, by taking drugs, or by mental imbalance, whereas the kinds of things you experience in tantra come up because you are completely straight, square, and direct. You can relate with your cup of tea. You can experience things without labeling them as hallucinations. Labeling things as hallucinations seems to be a very dangerous thing for a tantric student to do. You could turn everything into a hallucination, but if you do so, when you come out of that hallucination you are back to square one, if not zero.
Hevajra is another mother tantra. In the word Hevajra, he is the sound of joy, and vajra is “indestructible”; so Hevajra is “indestructible joy.” He is joyful utterance, which is one of the four types of laughter of the herukas.1 Hevajra is like dancing with a certain amount of anger. You are pissed off at nowhere and nobody, but you are still pissed off. You are therefore so joyous, so joyful. You are very kind, because you are rather pissed off. It is a combination of sweet and sour.
Hevajra is like making love with a wounded penis or a wounded vagina. The pain and pleasure mixed together bring further joy. The solidity of the pleasure is because of the pain, and the texture of the pleasure comes from the pain. Pleasure actually brings things together.
FATHER TANTRA
Father tantra is connected with aggression, and with the practice of Guhyasamaja. Guhya means “secret,” and samaja means “union” or union with the secret; so Guhyasamaja means “secret union.”
According to legend, the Guhyasamaja was the first tantra taught by the Buddha. The story tells that Shakyamuni Buddha was once invited by King Indrabhuti to teach the dharma. The king said, “I would like to relate with my sense perceptions and my emotions. Could you give me some teachings so that I can work with them?”
The Buddha replied, “Oh, you want to hear tantra.” And the king answered, “Yes.”
Then the Buddha said, “If that is the case, let me excuse my arhats and my hinayana and mahayana disciples from the room.” So he asked his disciples to leave.
Once he had done so, the Buddha appeared to King Indrabhuti in royal costume and taught the Guhyasamaja tantra. That was the first presentation of tantra.
NONDUAL TANTRA
Nondual tantra is connected with Kalachakra practice. In nondual tantra, basic phenomena are seen as a complete world. But by basic phenomena, we do not mean phenomena that are particularly basic, although it is a very convenient phrase to use. We are saying that there are shortcomings and holes in our life. We are constantly trying to patch up our life with this and that, that and this, and we get terribly haunted and frustrated when we do not find any patches to put over whatever holes there are. The result is that our life before our death, our life up to now, is either an unfinished or a completely finished patchwork quilt. So life is a New England patchwork quilt, but the patchwork keeps changing. We thought we put a patch on one spot, but when we turn around, it seems to have changed. Maybe we were either wearing dark glasses or the wrong glasses, or we were doing it at the wrong time of day.
Situations are constantly changing, and the play of maya, or illusion, still continues. So life becomes a fragmentation of items or little atoms. But all those atoms that exist in our life are the basis of our mandala. This is symbolized by the colored-sand mandala, in which each grain of sand represents an atom of our life. To make a sand mandala, first we take white sand, boil it, dye it different colors, and dry it. Then we use the different colored grains of sand—red or blue or green or whatever color we choose—to make a mandala, a complete world. So in Kalachakra, shiftiness and continuity are brought together. This is symbolized by EVAM, by a meeting of the mother and the son, of E and VAM.
According to one of the commentaries, studying Kalachakra is said to be like holding a yak’s tail. A yak’s tail consists of little hairs that make up a big bunch, but when you hold a yak’s tail, you do not just hold the individual hairs, you hold the whole thing. Kalachakra is like the yak’s tail in that it is a lot of little things put together, which makes a big thing. That is usually what happens in our life. For instance, if you write a book, that book is made out of little letters, little pages, and little pictures.
Another example of Kalachakra symbolism is the symbolism of the calendar. According to this calendar, there are sixty-year cycles, and within that, each year has twelve months, and each month has thirty or thirty-one days, and each day has twenty-four hours, and each hour has sixty minutes, and so on. Kalachakra symbolism expands in that way. There are a billion pores on your body, and each pore forms a nest for a mandala.
So the intricate details that exist in the phenomenal world are completely saturated by the Kalachakra principle. There is no room to breathe, except for the breath of Kalachakra going in and out. It is the ultimate claustrophobia, which at first brings enormous panic, but then brin
gs a sense of trust—because if Kalachakra’s breath is what you are breathing, you are not breathing pollution. The idea is that every item is possessed by the divine principle of Kalachakra. Everything everywhere is included—and not only included, but everything is worked out perfectly. There is an overwhelming quality to the whole thing.
Anuttarayoga unites ma-gyü or mother tantra, pa-gyü or father tantra, and nyi-me gyü or nondual tantra. As such there is nothing higher.
1. The four types are threatening, joyful, enticing, and subjugating.
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Manifesting Mahamudra
All sorts of ritual hand gestures are prescribed in the vajrayana, but to understand such mudras you need to have a general idea of how to relate with objects altogether: how to hold things and how to manifest. . . . How to reach for such things is important; it is your first communication with reality. Likewise, how to place things properly is important.
TRANSFORMATION THROUGH DEVOTION AND PRACTICE
Mahamudra is a situation in which a person’s state of mind can be completely transformed by two factors: devotion and practice.
The second factor, the steadiness and awareness of practice, is similar to the experience of mindfulness that is exemplified by shamatha-vipashyana. When you go further with that kind of experience of mindfulness, your approach to reality begins to become much more vivid and extraordinarily real. But this is not because you have finally figured things out. It is not that you have figured out your psychological scheme or your case history, and it is not because your scholarship has proven to be great—it’s none of that. It happens because your basic existence is vajra nature. Vajra nature, which abides in you constantly, has been woken up, which provides immense power and strength, and at the same time, immense gentleness.
There is a combination of such devotion and insight in the practice of mahamudra that, although you are an ordinary human being, you are becoming Vajradhara on the spot. That is an extraordinary idea! It is unheard of. The theists believe that if you are a good boy or girl, you will be accepted by Christ. And if you are a good boy or girl, and you also believe in Christ, then you might have an introductory glimpse of Jehovah himself. But in mahamudra, everything is one shot: there is no separation between that and you at all. Although the mystical traditions of theism seem to be saying the same thing, it is not quite so; with the mystics, there is always a hierarchy of some kind taking place. But in the case of nontheism, there is direct communication and interpenetration. It is intercosmopolitan and international.
We could say that reality is a four-legged animal without much hair, but with a puffed-up head—that is mahamudra. How do you figure that out? We could say that the reality of mahamudra is like a four-legged person who can walk and talk at the same time. We can say that reality is a kind of ape who can manifest every possibility of ambidexterity with its hands, its arms, its legs, and even its tail. But at this point, we could stop fooling around with analogies and get right into the topic.
THE THREE ROOTS
Mahamudra has several classes of experience, or we could say several types of magical banks, pools, or dense situations. Traditionally, these banks are divided into three, which are called the three roots: the guru, the yidam, and the dharmapalas or protectors.
The Guru: The Source of Blessings
The first root is the guru. The guru is the bank of devotion. Out of the bank of devotion comes the sympathetic attitude, whereby you share the vision of the vajra master and their lineage. At that point you receive adhishthana, or blessing. The word blessing is not quite an accurate translation, but it is the closest English word possible. Chinlap, the Tibetan word for blessing, actually means “being engulfed by heat,” or chin.
Chin means “heat,” not in the sense of temperature, but in the sense of animals or human beings in heat, the kind of heat that produces an atmosphere. So chinlap means being enveloped in that kind of intense experience. People often people talk about being blissed-out, but that mentality is slightly different. Chinlap means being engulfed in the radiance of the root guru. The vajra master has radiated you in and out, thoroughly and completely, so your whole being is completely soaked in that particular radiance or profound brilliance. The vajra master is like a universal monarch: one who conquers the world, and one who rules the world and each citizen with the intense experience of being present, being involved, and being completely dissolved into the situation. That is the first bank, which contains adhishthana.
The Yidam: The Source of Magical Power
The second root of mahamudra is the yidam. Apart from the guru, the yidam is that which makes your mind tight, or that which makes your mind hold together. The Sanskrit word for yidam is ishtadevata, which can be translated as “personal deity.”
Yidams are divided into all sorts of categories, according to your particular being and the anxiety that is being transformed. The idea is that your particular anxiety is transformed into the yidam. This is very real. It is not a matter of what you want or what you do not want, but it is what actually happens. Your anxiety is transformed into the yidam, and having done such a thing, you find yourself belonging to a particular class of vajrayana deities or divinities.
In the vajrayana, we have endless varieties of deities: we have Vajrayogini, Chakrasamvara, Kalachakra, Hevajra, and Guhyasamaja. All of these deities are connections, whereby you can tune in to the principles of your own anxiety. The magical aspect of tantra is not so much in making you happy and peaceful and great, or for that matter, making you wrathful, wicked, and confused. Instead, the magic of the vajrayana—the siddhi or ultimate magic—is that all the practices and deities that are shown to you are working with your anxiety. They are working with your original primordial situation.
Anxiety is a very important word. It goes back to the first noble truth: the truth of suffering, or duhkha. This truth was taught right at the beginning, in the original presentation of Buddhism by the Lord Buddha himself. The Buddha picked up on peoples’ magical possibilities, and he cultivated those magical possibilities. But he saw that first you have to face the painful reality of suffering. Then you can see the reality of the mahayanists, the blissful reality of bodhichitta and the bodhisattvas. And finally, you can see that the magical possibility of anxiety still remains as the chökyi dak, or the ego of dharmas.
At that point, an understanding of symbolism begins to come into being. Because of your anxiety, you do not actually give up or give in to anything, but you go along with it. You go along with the samsaric magic, which is actually nirvanic magic, or vajrayana magic, which is fantastic and extraordinary.
With that possibility, we begin to develop symbolism in the mahayana, and particularly in the vajrayana. The symbolism of mudras, or hand gestures, has developed from that. Mudras at this point are simply the ways and means by which we could transform ordinary crudeness into divine vajra crudeness. Vajra crudeness does not just mean hanging out in your cowboy outfit and dripping cigarettes out of your mouth—we are talking about a special kind of crudeness, which is very painful. In fact, as a result of this approach of fundamental crudeness, we have offended a lot of rich people in America, a lot of Tibetified people and millionaires who would like to have goodies given to them. Vajra crudeness means that we are not particularly concerned with a happy, loose Americanization of the buddhadharma—we are talking about the buddhadharma-tization of the buddhadharma.
Ordinary crudeness means relaxation in one’s own neurosis, but when we speak of vajra crudeness, we are talking about energy being acknowledged. What kind of energy? All sorts of energies: the energy of lust, the energy of anger, the energy of ignorance. All the energies are included, and they are acknowledged. But at the same time, somehow there is a little twist, by which a dash of the dawn of Vajrasattva or the Great Eastern Sun comes in. From this point of view, crudeness is a kind of ruggedness. It is not buying or selling any possibilities of individuals asking for comfort so they could hang out or hang loose without zippin
g up their flies.
We are talking about looseness purely in the sense of its being very tight. At the same time, that looseness is exquisite, and that exquisiteness comes from reality. The vajrayana neurosis—which is not really neurosis, but crazy wisdom—is a sense of fearlessness. You are breaking boundaries, knocking down walls and territoriality. And in that fearlessness, there is also genuineness, which only comes from having compassion, or karuna.
This is why vajrayana iconography has two deities copulating together. The feminine principle and the masculine principle are copulating, with lots of arms and lots of faces, experiencing some kind of reality and openness. But at the same time, they are not being too crude. They are adorned with ornaments of victory, such as bone ornaments, jewel ornaments, and gold ornaments, and they wear tiger skins and leopard skins on their waists. They carry a variety of scepters that are fantastically made masterpieces. They wear crowns of skulls, which are also exquisitely done.
Everything is crudely originated, but even though the yidams are wearing very rugged things, such as your own skull, every visualization is exquisitely and beautifully done. You may wonder why there has to be all that crudeness, why they are wearing skulls on their heads, or why there are gold mountings to make those skulls into crowns. Every ornament has come from very crude beginnings, like death. Wearing human bones is particularly revolting, but those bones are mounted in beautifully designed gold, and adorned with all sorts of jewels and gems. How is it possible that you can wear jewelry made out of human bones, yet mounted in elegant, human-made jewelry? It is because the whole concept comes from the experience of one taste or one flavor.
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