The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (52 page)

The point is that certain things may be out of your reach. But if you have the discipline to listen to them, at a certain moment they become appropriate to you. They come back to you automatically, by themselves, rather than by your attempt to really tune in to them and work on them.

Question:
What you just touched on is something I have not been clear about for a long time, namely, using a form of conditioning in the service of becoming free of conditioning. My thinking has been that all it does is just stuff one up with more material, whereas I am really interested in being free of conditioning.

Rinpoche:
I suppose that’s largely dependent on the type of conditioning involved. For instance, the intense indoctrination taking place in China is very impressive at the moment because you can see what they have achieved by it. But as soon as you step out of China, the whole thing becomes irrelevant; the conditioning doesn’t apply once you step out of that environment. Whereas certain ideas that do apply to you personally may be particularly obvious at the time. But even if you step out of the learning situation, they are still applicable, even more so. In meditation practice you start by putting yourself into a conditioning process. But by doing that, the conditioning itself wears out. The process of conditioning begins to develop seeds, but the conditioning itself goes away. Then the seeds begin to ferment.

Question:
Don’t you get a little high on this fermentation?

Rinpoche:
You always get high.

Question:
What’s the difference between having these ideas coming back to you in daily life and the kind of extraneous commentary you have characterized as the “spiritual adviser”?

Rinpoche:
The idea of a spiritual adviser is more the pious attitude of trying to be good and spiritual all the time. Whereas in this case you have no idea of what you should be doing, you just go along doing your ordinary things. The ideas just pop up. Of course if you begin to hold on to them, it could turn into a spiritual adviser. We are talking about ideas breaking through spontaneously, which is quite different from the deliberate spiritual adviser of ego.

Question:
Then should one’s approach to the abhidharma scriptures be more like reading a novel than studying something so that you can use it in a particular way later? Should we approach it in a way which is more free of purpose, something like a chess game or a puzzle, and forget about trying to apply it to our meditation?

Rinpoche:
Yes and no. You can go too far. Finally you may find that you are not reading at all, because not reading is more appealing or you are sick of the whole boring subject. You have to have some discipline of applying your mind to it. You should think in terms of how you could apply it to yourself. But if you become too ambitious, trying to digest every little detail, you can’t do it.

The idea is to try to feel the general outline of the whole thing rather than being too faithful to every sentence, every word. That kind of attitude has become a big problem in the study of Buddhism. If you are too involved with details, you might lose the perspective as a whole. But if you are able to feel the whole pattern, the outline of the whole thing, you will find it much more applicable to your life. And once that has happened, the details begin to come up by themselves—spontaneously. For instance, if you have a basic understanding of the development of the five skandhas, you have a feeling for the whole process, so the details cease to become isolated, disconnected facts. Instead they are just part of that map.

Question:
Is there a point, if you learn these things more or less by rote, where they become a part of your feelings and your conceptions?

Rinpoche:
There seem to be two ways to approach it: the highly disciplined way of taking in everything without choice, or trying to work along with your interest. But if you take the second approach, that interest should bear on the overall context so that you don’t get carried away by fascination for one particular aspect of the subject.

Question:
Supposing that one is quite willing to give up any idea of choice and to take in anything that might eventually become a part of oneself.

Rinpoche:
Well, that suits one type of personality. It’s the kind of conditioning process that we have been talking about, like meditation. Whether you like it or not, you go on meditating. It may not be particularly pleasurable, in fact it could be extremely boring. Memorizing or reading doesn’t have to be directed only toward apparently profound or highfalutin subjects. It could be very ordinary and simple. From that simplicity you can learn a great deal. There was a tradition in Tibet that certain teachers were expert on particular short writings of various great teachers. Every year a camp was set up and these teachings were presented very simply. Hundreds of people attended these summer study groups, although the same thing was said every year in exactly the same way. But each year they went a little bit further in their understanding. Not only the students but the teachers themselves found that each year it was as though they had never read those particular sentences before.

Question:
When you said that the reading is to be applied to our meditation, you didn’t mean thinking about it during meditation, did you?

Rinpoche:
No, but by providing some sense of space and openness, meditation is good preparation for reading. If you allow yourself some gap or space to rest by sitting down and doing absolutely nothing, you recover from your speed. Then you are in the right state of being to read and absorb more.

Question:
When we first start noticing some of the things we have learned about in abhidharma in our own psychological processes, how can we see the interconnectedness of these processes and not just get hung up on identifying them: “Aha, I see this! It talks about it in the abhidharma.”

Rinpoche:
If you recognize something on the spot that way, it is automatically interconnected. That inspiration is based on the cause-and-effect pattern that is part of the whole. But I think the main point is that one shouldn’t get carried away with pride about finding something in your being that matches the abhidharma. The point is not to fit things into some system or to prove anything to yourself, but to see the pattern as it is. You just recognize it and go on. It is not a big deal.

Question:
I don’t understand the time scale that the twelve nidanas happen on. Do they happen in each moment, or does it take a whole lifetime or many lives?

Rinpoche:
They take place every moment. The twelve types of chain reaction have to take place in order to bring daily experience into action. They form a pattern. They are not independent; each of them depends on the previous one as well as the next one. But that whole development could happen in one fraction of a second. The abhidharma compares the twelve nidanas to a stack of paper. You could put a needle through it in one second. If that process were divided so that you could consider the point at which the needle penetrated the first piece of paper, then the next, then the next, there would be twelve of them. And those twelve could be divided into three parts each—touching, penetrating, coming through and touching the next one. This process, which constitutes ego mind, can be divided endlessly, which is why ego as a solid thing does not exist. It cannot be found in any part of this process. Things happen very momentarily, and there is no solid independent thing such as me and mine.

Question:
Does that mean that each moment is one of these cycles of twelve?

Rinpoche:
Yes.

Question:
Let’s say I was able to see each step in the process—

Rinpoche:
You wouldn’t be able to see each step in the process. It would be impossible.

Question:
What could you see?

Rinpoche:
You could perceive the whole pattern, perceive it rather than see it. Regardless how sharp your mind was, you couldn’t see them as long as you regarded each of the twelve as separate.

Question:
You mean you could perceive it by being part of it?

Rinpoche:
Yes, you could be part of it, and you could feel it that way.

Question:
What is the thread of continuity between those twelve steps?

Rinpoche:
The process begins with ignorance and ends with death and then death produces ignorance again. It goes on and on.

Question:
But there must be a thread of connection, otherwise there would be absolutely no continuity. I would see you one moment and the next moment I would be sitting in England seeing my mother.

Rinpoche:
The body is the connection. The mind/body, rather than the physical body, that is, the central headquarters of ego. You report back to your mind/body, your nest. If you ask a person, “How do you know that you are what you are?” the only simple way of explaining it is by saying “I see myself in the mirror. I am what I am. I have a body.” But if you try to go beyond that and find some further principle to base it on, you would not find anything. That’s why the
Heart Sutra
says, “There is no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body. . . .” Your eye is just an eye, it’s not your eye; your nose is a nose, but it’s not your nose. Nobody is you. Through the whole system of your body, every part has its own name, its own place. It is made out of a lot of things, but there is no such thing as you.

So one begins to transcend the mind/body, one’s version of the body as a solid thing, by seeing the individuality of each particle in the body. But you do not have to destroy the body. You learn through the body.

Question:
So your teaching is to try to show us how to transcend our attachments, which constitute the mind/body.

Rinpoche:
We are not exactly transcending the notion of a body altogether, but we are trying to step out of the tendency toward nesting in the body, that tremendous security notion we have that the body is a fortified place and that we can go back to our fort. Even if we get beyond that, continuity does not seem to be a big problem. We still have to have some basis for dealing with other people because, having got beyond ego, we develop compassion and a sense of compassionate communication. In order to communicate with other people, there has to be somebody who is communicating, and that kind of continuity goes on. That has nothing to do with ego at all. Ego is imagination of a centralized nest that gives secure protection. You are frightened of the world outside of your projections, so you just go back into your sitting room and make yourself comfortable.

There is a general misconception about Buddhism in relation to this point. People wonder who, if there is no ego, is attaining enlightenment, who is performing all one’s actions. If you have no ego, how can you eat, how can you sleep? In that case, ego is misunderstood to be the physical body rather than what it is—a paranoid insurance policy, the fortified nest of ego. Your being can continue without your being defensive about yourself. In fact you become more invincible if you are not defending yourself.

Well, this seems to be the end of the beginning of our learning process. So we will end our seminar and our seminar will continue.

G
LIMPSES OF
S
HUNYATA

E
DITED BY
J
UDITH
L. L
IEF

TALK ONE

Open Space of Shunyata

T
HIS SEMINAR
is on shunyata, although we are quite uncertain what shunyata actually is. It seems that shunyata means not that, not this. So we shouldn’t have a discussion at all. If it’s not that, not this—what else? We could sit around and scrounge up something to discuss, but it seems to be insignificant, totally irrelevant.

The expectation to hear about shunyata is an obstacle; the shunyata principle does not lie in the expectation. We might get into the idea of what shunyata means:
shunya
means “empty”;
ta
means “ness,” so
shunyata
means “emptiness.” It is vaguely connected with the idea of the attainment of enlightenment. The idea of the attainment of enlightenment is based on ignorance, which is the opposite of enlightenment. So if you accept shunyata, you have to accept ignorance and enlightenment simultaneously. Therefore the shunyata principle is accepting the language of samsara as the language of enlightenment. When we talk about aggression, passion, and confusion, that automatically is the language of shunyata: Aggression as opposed to what? Passion as opposed to what? Ignorance as opposed to what? That kind of open space is related to the shunyata principle.

What we are trying to achieve with this particular seminar is to understand shunyata as such—that does not exist because of this, this does not exist because of that. We expect some concrete answer, something definite, something solid, but solidity itself depends on frivolousness, so to speak. Shunyata as opposed to the natural situation, or things as they are, seems to be a very important point to work with. The idea of shunyata depends on what is not shunyata—which is based on ego’s manifestation.

We would like an ego manifestation of solidity: “I would like to understand that; I would like to comprehend that; I would like to attain enlightenment.” So the idea of shunyata is based on the ambition to understand what shunyata is. If you are willing to give away that basic ambition, then shunyata seems to be there already. Therefore the shunyata principle is not dependent on that or this; it is based on transcending dualistic perceptions—and at the same time dwelling on dualistic ideas. The mantra of shunyata is
OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA,
which means “Gone, gone, gone beyond, that which is related to basic enlightenment mind is the essence of everything.”