The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (51 page)

Question:
You seem to be talking about the discovery of wisdom. Could you say more about that?

Rinpoche:
The discovery of wisdom has nothing to do with the centralized quality of ego. It is not actually a discovery at all because
you
cannot see that you are discovering. You become part of wisdom. You transcend the transcendental knowledge of prajna and you reach to the level of the jnana, real wisdom. This is actually very disappointing because we would like to watch ourselves being enlightened. But that is impossible. That rewarding experience of confirmation, that finally you have made it, here you are, is impossible. That would never happen.

Question:
When you make choices you don’t seem to have to think about it, but something spontaneous leaps up and makes the choice before you think about it. Before you can choose, something else makes the choice for you.

Rinpoche:
It all depends on how much of a big deal you make out of the choice itself. If you do not make a big deal about the choice, you cannot be conned or seduced by anything on the sidetrack. By the time those seductions arise, you are going on anyway. So you go ahead, you go straight.

Question:
Is this straightforward choice the same as intuition?

Rinpoche:
It is spacious intuition, intuition which is not based on the animal level of instinct. It is the kind of true intuition that is not connected with the survival of ego.

Question:
In this context of making choices, where does “crazy wisdom” come in?

Rinpoche:
Crazy wisdom is the sort of basic impetus behind the whole process of working with the situation. In order to make a decision that is straightforward but not particularly pleasurable, one has to have some power behind one. That is the element of crazy wisdom, that basic power behind the situation. But this does not mean that you should just find the most painful alternative and make your decisions according to that. The tendency here does not have to be suicidal, masochistic. You would not get into that either.

Question:
Again in relation to choice, I was thinking about the forms of divination that you mention in
Born in Tibet
. Is a technique of divination used in a situation where there is a vagueness about going straight ahead?

Rinpoche:
Divination is generally used when you are somewhat trapped by the situation. You really have no alternative, but you are too cowardly to commit yourself to your actual intuition of the straightforwardness. So you turn to the pretense of divination. And what happens in divination is that, even though you may be highly biased in your view of the situation, you pretend not to be. You step out of the situation altogether and then you open your mind and allow yourself to make a decision in accordance with the divination practice. Or, more precisely, once you are there in no-man’s-land, the answer is there already. Then you come back to your own territory and make a decision.

Question:
So it is not that divination has the answer, but rather that it is a vehicle for stepping out?

Rinpoche:
Yes. Divination is like a sword. So you take the step and you use it. You cut the doubt.

Question:
I find a certain seductive and fascinating quality in getting into and submitting to the teaching. There is a feeling of something very strange and novel and open, and one is pulled along quite willingly. But at the same time I am suspicious of the fascination aspect of it.

Rinpoche:
We have to allow ourselves some stepping-stones. It is not necessary to be so severe. You see, that is the wonderful thing about the four noble truths—they begin from duhkha, pain. They start from the bottom where the most important things are, rather than from the top where the most refined things are—the cream and all. It starts from the spices and minerals and everything that floats down to the bottom. You begin with the dirty work, but that in itself becomes a stepping-stone. And then gradually, more and more, you discover the top layer. And since you discover it gradually, it comes as no surprise. Whereas if one starts with the beautiful and rich things in the top layer, then one does not want to come down because there is the possibility of finding other things underneath. One does not want to associate with that. One begins to discover that there is something fishy. You do not want to go down to the bottom because you fear you will discover something unpleasant. So we begin from underneath, with the most gross part. That is our starting point. One does not have to start perfect or beautiful. Starting from the bottom, the whole structure is fundamentally sound. Since you have already dealt with the worst things, what worse could happen?

In our style of teaching, we could start from the cream. But then a person would not be satisfied with the cream because he has not been given any impression of the value of it. Therefore we have to go through the whole evaluation process. We have to start from the bottom and then come up. That could be called a useless game from the point of view of enlightenment itself, but from the point of view of the unpeeling, the unmasking process, it is necessary. It is a game, the practice is a game, but one has to go through it.

There is a story of a mother and child living together. And the child asks the mother, “Where is my father?” And the mother says, “He is a wonderful person, but you cannot find him.” The child gets very curious about his father and the mother keeps telling him stories about how wonderful his father is. The child’s expectations get more and more built up until finally the situation reaches a point where the mother actually has to take him to see the father. So the mother takes her son out the front door of the house, and the two go up into the mountains. They climb steep slopes and cross streams and labor over all kinds of obstacles. Finally they reach a ridge from where they can look down. They look down and see a valley with a house in it. The mother says, “That house down there is where your father lives.” Then they climb down to the house and enter at the back door. In the room, they find a man, and the mother tells her son, “This is your father.” After the tremendous effort of the journey, climbing and walking a long way, the child is tremendously excited and very pleased to find his wonderful father. Then the child discovers a door on the other side of the room that leads into the very same house where he had always lived with his mother. The mother could have taken her son directly through the door to see the father, but the child would not have appreciated him unless they had made this journey. If the mother just took the child from one room to the other, it would not have been anything.

Practice and Intellect

I
T SEEMS THAT
in this seminar we have been able only to undertake a simplified synopsis of abhidharma and to provide some impression of the fundamental principles underlying the abhidharma descriptions. To study abhidharma in detail would require a lot more time. Still I think we have gotten an idea of the general outlines of abhidharma as a sort of psychological map. I think our exchange has been quite rich, and I hope this seminar will sow the seed of further study on this material.

The main thing that we have been trying to do is to make the study of this particular subject experiential. Some attempt has been made toward an approach that would permit a practitioner to become a scholar and a scholar to become a practitioner. This can be done if we work closely enough with our basic psychology and with our basic process of intellectual understanding. So our approach has been quite unique. No perfect scholar would study this way and no perfect practitioner would look at the subject as we have. On the other hand, an open scholar and an open practitioner might both find it quite appropriate.

Looking at abhidharma this way, nothing is terribly abstract. A lot of the ideas might be abstract if isolated as ideas; but actually they are not abstract because they have real bearing on our personal experience. The psychology of one’s own being shows the operation of the five skandhas and the whole pattern that they are part of.

Most studies of abhidharma tend to regard the five skandhas as separate entities. As we have seen, this is not the case; rather they constitute an overall pattern of natural growth or evolution. This fact alone could bring a lot of understanding. Without seeing that the five are part of an overall pattern that has been clearly understood, one might want to ask, “Why five skandhas? Why not ten? Why not one?” If five were just a random number, if the basic approach were arbitrary, there would be no end to the collections and classifications that we could concoct. But the way of looking at abhidharma that we have attempted makes it possible to see that the idea of five stages is not just random. It makes it possible to see that there is a general pattern which has five fundamental aspects. Of course, it is not absolutely necessary to talk about five aspects in order to see that evolutionary pattern. The understanding of that pattern is also reflected in a number of other sets of classifications that we have not had a chance to discuss. The fundamental point of abhidharma is to see the overall psychological pattern rather than, necessarily, the five thises and the ten thats. This kind of primary insight can be achieved by combining the approaches of the scholar and the practitioner.

There is an immense wealth of teachings that, hopefully in the future, we will be able to study in this manner. It is not necessary to look at the subject matter in just a simpleminded, emotional way, nor in just a cold analytical way. Scholarship and direct insight can work together. Teaching in this way is, in a sense, more of a matter of stimulating interest than purely conveying information. And therefore it applies to students no matter what stage of sophistication they have achieved. That is why it is said, “The dharma is good at the beginning, the dharma is good in the middle, and the dharma is good at the end.” Each presentation of the dharma has its own unique qualities, for advanced students as well as beginners. One thing continues right through the stages, which is what is called “the secret doctrine.” The secret teaching goes on throughout. Discussing abhidharma, somehow we have covered more than abhidharma. We have touched a great deal on some of the tantric possibilities involved in a further odyssey into the teaching. All this is what is known as “self-secret.” There is no copyright and nothing is being hidden. Everything is presented, as much as could possibly be understood. But a great deal could be secret from the audience’s point of view. If one is not ready to hear the advanced aspects of the subject, one hears it purely from a beginner’s point of view. Whereas if one is ready to hear in a semi-grown-up style, one hears in that way.

So the responsibility for understanding a seminar is not based solely on the speaker nor solely on the audience. We manufacture it together. It is our child that we produce; it is our dance. And as the dance takes place, the music happens by itself. When things happen in this way, they have a living quality. This is not purely experimental. At the same time as being alive, there is something established and familiar about it. Even though exchange happens spontaneously, the subjects that arise in our talks and discussions are not arising for the first time. This has happened before, many times over again. Generations and generations of people have thought this way and found out and understood this way, spontaneously, as we have. And the ideas have been handed down and presented. It is like a good baker handing down his knowledge of baking. The knowledge is, in a sense, old, but each time the bread is baked, it is hot and fresh. There is no cold bread. Still there is that knowledge of baking which is very established, even though the bread is baked on the spot. This can be very inspiring. Once one is committed to the teachings, this living and inspiring quality is there continuously.

We could have discussion.

Question:
I am still not sure about the relation between practice and the intellect. Do we have to keep them separate, or is there some way that we can use intellect in our practice?

Rinpoche:
Let me tell you something about my own training. In Tibet we not only attended talks but also memorized the texts; every day we had to memorize about six pages. The following day someone would be chosen by lottery to present what he had heard the day before, with the commentary and everything. And he would be asked questions about what he had heard the day before. There was no way of getting out of it. At the beginning it was quite a good discipline. But at a certain stage the whole thing became very monotonous. It felt like we were being programmed into this structure of scholarly learning. We couldn’t hear things anymore; we just memorized the words. We could even discuss the subject from an intellectual point of view, but we didn’t really understand it. We couldn’t properly hear ourselves, let alone what other people were saying. Usually such a course would take about six months. We would learn the abhidharma text itself and the Indian commentary, and then the Tibetan commentary on that commentary. There were also various theses written on particular abhidharma subjects from the point of view of the Gelukpas, the Kagyüpas, the Sakyapas, the Nyingmapas, and so on. So we would try to bring everything together. But it was just too much material. Somehow it had the hypnotic effect of hearing something over and over and over. The teachings echoed in our heads continuously; we even dreamt about them. When we would get up in the morning, certain quotations would pop into our heads. Finally the six-month course of study was finished. We were told that we had learned abhidharma, but we thought we really had not heard anything. We were just happy to get rid of the whole thing so we could relax, go off for a summer holiday or something. But somehow we couldn’t really take a complete vacation; the discipline kept coming back to us constantly. We realized afterward that we were really involved with the teaching. Whatever we were doing, talking to people, walking in the mountains, riding a horse, or camping on the mountainside, abhidharma would come back constantly to haunt us like a ghost. Then we would begin to understand a few things, maybe just one or two ideas at the beginning, but as we got into it more and more, we began to get curious about the whole thing. Just out of curiosity, we would open the book and read a few little passages. And they began to mean something.