The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (31 page)

When we talk about merit, we are not talking about collecting something for your ego but about the basic twist of how to punish your ego. The logic is that you always want pleasure, but what you get is always pain. Why does that happen? It happens because the very act of seeking pleasure brings pain. You always get a bad deal—all the time. You get a bad deal because you started at the wrong end of the stick.

The point of this practice or application is that you have to sacrifice something rather than purely yearning for pleasure. You have to start at the right end of the stick from the very beginning. In order to do that, you have to refrain from evil actions and cultivate virtuous actions. In order to do that, you have to block out hope and fear altogether so you do not hope to gain anything from your practice and you are not particularly fearful of bad results.

Whatever happens, let it happen—you are not particularly looking for pleasure or pain. As the supplications that go along with this particular practice say: “If it is better for me to be dead, let me be dead; if it is better for me to be alive, let me be alive. If it is better for me to have pleasure, let me have pleasure; if it is better for me to have pain, let me have pain.” It is a very direct approach, like diving into an ice-cold swimming pool in the middle of winter. If that is what is best for your constitution, go ahead and do it. It is the idea of having a direct link with reality, very simple, without any scheming at all. In particular, if there is any desire or any fear, you act in the opposite way: you jump into your fear and you refrain from your desire. It is the same approach as taking on other people’s pain and giving your pleasure to them. It should no longer be any surprise to you that we have such a strange way of dealing with the whole thing—but it usually works. We could almost say that it works 100 percent, but I’m not sure about 200 percent.

Laying Down Evil Deeds

The second of the four practices is laying down your evil deeds or neurotic crimes. As a result of accumulating merit, because you have learned to block out hope and fear altogether, you have developed a sense of gentleness and sanity. Having done so, the basic idea of laying down evil actions is psychological: you look back and you say, “Good heavens! I have been so stupid, and I didn’t even realize it!” Such an attitude develops because you have already, at least somewhat, reached a certain level of sophistication. When you look back, you begin to see how sloppy and how embarrassing you have been. The reason you didn’t notice it before is because of stupidity of some kind. So the point is to look back and realize what you have been doing and not make the same mistake all over again. I think that is quite straightforward.

We have translated the Tibetan term
dikpa
as “evil deeds” or “neurotic crimes” rather than “sin.”
⁴
The word
sin
has all kinds of connotations. Particularly in the world of dead or living Christendom, and in theistic traditions generally, it is all-pervasive.
Dikpa
literally means “sin,” but not in the same way as we refer to it in the Christian or Judaic traditions. “Neurotic crimes” has psychological implications rather than being purely ethical. When neurosis begins to surge up, you begin to go along with that process and you begin to do something funny. It may seem fantastic and far out, but it results in frivolity from that point of view. So neurosis is the backbone and frivolity is the activities.

The crime itself can end up as all kinds of crimes and destruction. What we are discussing is that basic principle of neurosis which creates all kinds of frivolous activities. We are confessing that. We are not talking about confession as going to a priest in a little box saying, “Father, I did a terrible thing yesterday, what should I do for that?” And the father would say, “Say this twenty times and we could let you go.” Then you can come back next time saying the same thing, and he might say, “You have been bad in the past, so this time you should say it fifty times, your father is keeping a record of you.” Everything depends on red tape from that point of view. But in this case it is a more personal situation. In the Buddhist style of confession, shall we say, there is no church or particular building to go into to confess your evil deeds or neurotic crimes. There is a fourfold style of doing the whole thing, which is not so much confession as relieving the sin or the neurotic crimes.

The first step is getting tired of one’s own neurosis. That is the first important thing. If you were not tired of doing the same thing again and again—all the time—if you were thriving on it, you probably would not have a chance to do anything with it. But once you begin to get tired of it, you say, “I shouldn’t have done that” or “Here I go again” or “I should have known better” or “I don’t feel so good.” These are the sort of remarks you make, particularly when you wake up in the morning with a heavy hangover. That’s good, that is the sign that you can actually confess your neurotic crimes. You come back and tell what you did last night or yesterday or what you’ve done previously. All these things are so embarrassing, it’s terrible. You feel like not getting out of your bed. You don’t want to go outside the door or face the world.

That real feeling of total embarrassment, that totally shitty feeling, for lack of a better word, that sense that your whole gut is rotten, is the first step. That sense of regret is not purely social regret—it is personal regret. And that shameful feeling begins to creep through our marrow into our bones and our hairs. The sunshine coming through the windows begins to mock us too. It is that kind of thing. That is the first step. And having it is regarded as a very healthy direction toward the second.

The second step is to refrain from that or to repent. “From this time onward I am not going to do it. I am going to hold off on what I have been doing.” Repentance usually takes place in us when we begin to feel that we have done such a shitty job previously: “Do I still want to do it? Maybe it is fun, but it is still better not to do it.” As we think more and more about it, it does not seem to be a hot idea to do it again. So there is a sense of refraining from it, preventing doing it again. That is the second step to confessing or relieving our evil deeds or neurotic crimes.

The third step is taking refuge. We realize that having done such things already, they are not particularly subject to one person’s forgiveness. This is a difference from the Christian tradition, seemingly. Nobody can wipe out your neurosis by saying, “I forgive you.” Quite possibly the person you forgave would not attack
you
again, but he or she might kill somebody else. From that point of view, unless the whole crime has completely subsided, forgiving does not help. It not only does not help, it may even encourage you to do more sinning. From the Buddhist approach, the fact that a person has already wiped out your neurotic crimes, has created a good relationship with you, and understands and forgives you inspires you to commit further crimes. So in this case, forgiveness means that one has to give oneself up altogether. The criminal has to give up altogether rather than the crime being forgiven.

Actions alone are not particularly a big deal; the basic factors which a person puts into the act of committing a crime are more important. People have begun to realize this, even in the modern world. We have begun to realize that we have to reform people in the jails and give them further training so that they do not go back to their crimes. Often people simply get free board and lodging, and once their sentences are over they could have a good time because they have served their sentence, they are forgiven, and everything is fine. If they are hungry again and without any food, money, or shelter, they could come back. So the idea of reformation is very tricky. According to history, apparently Buddhists never had jails, not even Emperor Ashoka. He was the first person who denounced having jails.

The idea of taking refuge is completely surrendering. Complete surrendering is based on the notion that you have to give up the criminal rather than that the crime should be forgiven. That is the idea of taking refuge in the Buddha as the example, in the dharma as the path, and in the sangha as companionship—giving up oneself, giving up one’s stronghold.

The fourth step is a further completing of that surrendering process. At this point a person is surrendering, giving, and opening completely. A person should actually engage in a supplication of preventing hope and fear. That is very important. “If hope is too hopeful, may I not be too hopeful. If fear is too fearful, may I not be too fearful.” Transcending both hope and fear, you begin to develop a sense of confidence that you could go through the whole thing. That is the power of activity to relieve one’s evil deeds.

So the first step is a sense of disgust with what you have done. The second one is refraining from it. The third is that, understanding that, you begin to take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha—offering your neurosis. Having offered your neurosis or taken refuge, you begin to commit yourself as a traveler on the path rather than as any big deal or moneymaker on the path. All those processes somehow connect together. And finally there is no hope and no fear: “If there is hope, let our hope subside; if there is any fear, may our fear subside as well.” That is the fourth step.

Offering to the Döns

Number three is traditionally called “feeding the ghosts.” It refers to those ghosts who create sickness, misfortune, or anything like that, called
döns
in Tibetan. The idea is to tell them, “I feel so grateful that you have caused me harm in the past, and I would like to invite you to come back again and again to do the same thing to me. I feel so grateful that you have woken me up from my sleepiness, my slothfulness. At least when I had my attack of flu, I felt much different from my usual laziness and stupidity, my usual wallowing in pleasure.” You ask them to wake you up as much as they can. Whenever any difficult situation comes along, you begin to feel grateful. At this point you regard anything that can wake you up as best. You regard anything that provides you with the opportunity for mindfulness or awareness, anything that shocks you, as best, rather than always trying to ward off any problems.

Traditionally one offers the ghosts torma, or food.
Torma
is a Tibetan word meaning “offering cake.” If you have watched a Tibetan ceremony, you may have seen funny little cakes carved out of butter and dough. Those are called torma. They represent the idea of a gift or token. A similar concept in the West is the birthday cake, which is designed and planned in a certain way, with artwork on it and completely decorated. So we give offerings to those who create harm to us, which literally means those who are creating an evil influence on us.

The first practice, the confession of sins, is just natural tiredness of one’s continual neurosis. One’s neurosis is not particularly a landmark, it is just a natural thing which comes up, not a big attack. But a dön is a big attack or sudden earth-shaking situation which makes you think twice. A sudden incident hits you and suddenly things begin to happen to you. So something remarkable is taking place. The first one is just sort of a camel’s hump rather than a sheer drop. It is simply relating with ups and downs, pains. The second application talks about getting tired of your particular problems. You have a sense of your neurosis going on all the time. It is like somebody with a migraine headache: it keeps coming up, again and again. You are tired of that. You are tired of doing the same things again and again. The third practice or application says that we should give torma to those who harm us, the döns.

Döns are very abrupt, very direct. Everything is going smoothly, and suddenly an attack takes place: your grandmother has disinherited you, or there is a shift of luck. Döns usually attack much more suddenly; they possess you immediately.
Possession
is actually the closest word for dön. Döns are equated with possession because they attack you suddenly and they attack you by surprise. Suddenly you are in a terribly bad mood even though everything is okay.

This subject is a very complicated one, actually. We are not just talking about trying to feed somebody who spooks us, those little fairies who might turn against us: “Let us feed them some little thingies and they might go away.” It is connected with the whole Tibetan concept of dön, which comes from the Bön tradition
⁵
but also seems to be applicable to the Buddhist tradition. The word
dön
means a sense or experience of something existing around us that suddenly makes us unreasonably fearful, unreasonably angry and aggressive, unreasonably horny and passionate, or unreasonably mean. Situations of that kind occur to us throughout our life. There is some kind of flu or fever that goes on all the time in our life, that possesses us. Without any reason, we are suddenly terrified. Without any reason, we are so angry and uptight. Without any reason, we are so lustful. Without any reason, we are suddenly so proud. It is a neurotic attack of some kind, which is called a dön. If we approach that from an external point of view, certain phenomena make us do that. To extend that logic, we could say that such spirits exist outside us: “The ghost of Washington hit us, so we are inspired to run for the presidency,” or whatever.

That feeling of some hidden neurosis which keeps popping up all the time is called dön. It happens to us all the time. Suddenly we break into tears, for absolutely no reason. We cry and cry and cry and break down completely. And at a certain point we would like to destroy the whole world and kick everybody out. We would like to destroy our house. If we have a wife or children, we could knock them out as well. We go to extremes, of course. And sometimes the dön doesn’t go along with that. As we go along with what we have started, the dön doesn’t want to be a complaint, so it pulls back. We go ahead with our fists extended in midair on the way to our wife’s eyes—and suddenly there is nobody to encourage us, so our hands just drop down.