The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (63 page)

Trust in the Heart

S:
Can it become dangerous to believe that one has had a glimpse of buddha nature? At what point does trust in the heart become dangerous?

CTR:
It could become dangerous if you begin to use it as a credential, as a way of expanding your power over either yourself or others. The same thing applies to any kind of practice. If your practice is just pure, direct practice, that seems to be very simple. But if your practice becomes somewhat heroic, or connected with finding definite proof, it is dangerous.

Impulse and Spontaneity

S:
Rinpoche, you said that the impulsive afterthought is ego, while the immediate thought is buddha nature. How do you distinguish between impulsiveness and spontaneity?

CTR:
To begin with, impulse is not spontaneous. It may
seem
spontaneous, but it doesn’t have the relaxed quality of spontaneity. Impulse comes out like a sneeze, as the result of pressure; whereas spontaneity is like yawning, it has less pressure and it takes its time. A glimpse of buddha nature is not violent; whereas impulse is very violent, desperate. Spontaneity is buddha nature, and impulse is ego. Impulse never reaches the first stage; impulse always trails behind. Impulse is never up to date; it is the rebound. First you see, then you react. Impulse never comes firsthand; it is a reaction.

Continuity of Buddha Nature

S:
It sounds as though buddha nature is intermittent.

CTR:
The restlessness is the sharpest and most immediate situation we experience, whereas buddha nature itself is something we can’t catch hold of and put in a container. That is why it is associated with light. Buddha nature is happening constantly, but ego doesn’t have a chance to register it. Buddha nature is constantly ahead of you, you being ego at this point. It is constantly ahead of you.

S:
So you are continually dissatisfied?

CTR:
Yes. The intelligence is always shining through.

Buddha Nature and Groundlessness

S:
Could you relate buddha nature with the image of falling, of having no ground at all?

CTR:
That seems to be the whole point: buddha nature brings the realization that there is no ground.

S:
But it doesn’t seem as if you are seeing anything.

CTR:
It isn’t
seeing
, really, in terms of reporting back to your brain or anything like that. I don’t know what word you could use. The usual word for this is jnana, or knowing—but you don’t even
know
. I suppose we could make a distinction between looking and seeing. You see first; you look afterward.

S:
Could you say that buddha nature sees that there is no ground because it sees the ego coming up over and over again?

CTR:
Buddha nature is not regarded as another kind of cognitive mind functioning. It is part of our cognitive mind, but it supersedes cognitive mind. It naturally sees the fruitlessness of struggle—as well as encouraging struggle in order to prove its fruitlessness. The whole thing is sort of an automatic, inbuilt, natural mechanism which is trying to wear itself out. In other words, without buddha nature, ego cannot exist. Ego is constantly teased by buddha nature into activating itself, so either it is perpetuating itself or wearing itself out.

S:
Rinpoche, when you talk about having no ground, it seems to imply that there are no rules about what to do, or about whether what you are doing at a certain moment is good or bad. That seems very confusing. It leaves you hanging on a cliff.

CTR:
That seems to be the whole point, that you don’t have any reference point to hold on to. And the fear is the fear of losing ego. But losing ego doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t know how to brush your teeth or make a cup of tea. In fact, you would probably do those things better. However, it is quite fearful, even in theory—and the
experience
is going to be even heavier.

Why Discuss Buddha Nature?

S:
Why do we have to concern ourselves with this? It seems to happen spontaneously as we go along. If we are practicing and learning and becoming more aware of our groundlessness, why do we have to discuss buddha nature?

CTR:
I don’t know why, but we find ourselves questioning ourselves. You could ask why we question at all, but that in itself is a question.

Buddha Nature in America

S:
Rinpoche, if an individual is not into Buddhism, or a spiritual path, if he’s a businessman, restless and ambitious to make more money, to make his life better, if he is not aware of ego or of duality—is his restlessness still considered a spark of intelligence, or buddha nature?

CTR:
Yes, I think so, in the long run. This seems to have been happening in this country already. Your father, your great-grandfathers, and your great-great-great-grandfathers were all preoccupied with building a brand-new world—so they built it. Then the whole thing turned around, and now we are talking about buddha nature. Without missionaries, or people proselytizing these ideas in this country, the country itself is awakening to this idea of buddha nature. It might take a long time for people to realize their buddha nature, and businessmen might have to freak out. Nevertheless, the effort is not wasted, although it might take several lifetimes to come about. In fact, this whole question has come up as a result of that restlessness and as a result of those people putting in their effort.

Traditional Societies

S:
Rinpoche, how about the case of traditional societies that seem to go along their leisured way and don’t change very much, societies in which people seem content to do things the way their forefathers did them?

CTR:
Generally, you can’t have an ideal solid society operating for thousands of years, although I suppose you could say that Tibet was close to it. When I left my country recently, it was still a medieval society, but then a force from the outside thrust us out. Since we didn’t make any new discoveries, somebody else made a new discovery for us. We were pushed out. So there can be no such thing as a permanent traditional society as long as people desire to be comfortable and happy. But I suppose the more speed there is, the more buddha nature is coming through. We could say that.

Security and Insecurity

S:
If we are aware of buddha nature, isn’t that a type of security in itself?

CTR:
It could go either way. If we are aware that we have a buddha nature, that is security—but we are also aware that we might lose our ego by being involved with buddha nature, and that is not security. Knowing that you cannot witness your own burial is quite uncomfortable.

S:
You said that ego tries to use buddha nature to ensure its own security.

CTR:
Ego tries anything it can lay its hands on.

S:
But ego itself is buddha nature, right?

CTR:
Yes. That is why it can be used up. Otherwise it would become a war between buddha nature and ego.

S:
It seems confusing that buddha nature as ego would try to use buddha nature.

CTR:
Yes, isn’t that absurd?

S:
Ego and buddha nature in this case are almost the same. Isn’t that a paradox, the notion that buddha nature and ego are interchangeable?

CTR:
It is like a healing wound. When your wound is healed, the scab falls away; but at the same time, the scab is part of the wound. The fundamental idea is something like that.

THREE

Awakening Buddha Nature

I
N REGARD TO
buddha nature, the question seems to be: How can we provoke or awaken that basic potential? Traditionally, the aspiration to develop compassion comes from experiencing the misery and pain that we and our fellow beings are going through; from allegiance toward the spiritual friend; and from a sense of dedication, in that we are not afraid to apply our experience in working with sentient beings.

Buddha nature is not regarded as a peaceful state of mind or, for that matter, as a disturbed one either. It is a state of intelligence that questions our life and the meaning of life. It is the foundation of a search. A lot of things haven’t been answered in our life—and we are still searching for the questions. That questioning is buddha nature. It is a state of potential. The more dissatisfaction, more questions, and more doubts there are, the healthier it is, for we are no longer sucked into ego-oriented situations, but we are constantly woken up. We may feel that we are able to relax, let go, and take pleasure out of our life—but that becomes more and more momentary. We are woken up constantly by that unrest. Whether we are in a greater dramatic situation or a smaller petty situation, that same pattern goes on.

The beginning point of buddha nature seems to be the development of
maitri
, which could be translated as “love,” “kindness,” or “a friendly attitude.” Having a friendly attitude means that when you make friends with someone, you accept the neurosis of that friend as well as the sanity of that friend. You accept both extremes of your friend’s basic makeup as resources for friendship. If you make friends with someone because you only like certain parts of that friend, then it is not complete friendship, but partial friendship. So maitri is
all-encompassing
friendship, friendship which relates with the creativity as well as the destructiveness of nature.

Maitri is not only maitri toward others, but it is also maitri toward ourselves. In fact, the first step of awakening buddha nature is friendship with ourselves. This tends to help a great deal. We don’t have alternatives or sidetracks anymore, because we are satisfied with ourselves. We don’t try to imitate anyone else because we hate ourselves and we would like to be like somebody else instead. We are on our own ground and we are our own resources. We might be fantasizing that there is a divine force or higher spiritual energy that might save us, but even that depends on our recognition that such a thing exists. Finally we end up just relating with ourselves. So friendship, or maitri, means the complete acceptance of our being.

The agitation of buddha nature coming through, questioning and dissatisfied, at the same time produces all kinds of insightful discoveries. We begin to settle down to our situation—not looking for alternatives at all, but just being with that. So the first step of the process of awakening buddha nature, embryonic enlightened mind, is trust in the heart, trust in ourselves. Such trust can only come about if there is no categorizing, no philosophizing, no moralizing, and no judgments. Instead there is a simple, direct relationship with our being.

One reason our being becomes workable is that we are constant people. We are completely, all the time, constant and predictable. We are predictable in the sense that there is a continual upsurge of energy and a continual upsurge of wanting: wanting to change, wanting to grasp, wanting to find out the details of life, wanting to seek pleasure. That happens constantly, and that constant unrest and energy could be regarded as a stepping-stone. We could work with that.

We might feel that we go through ups and downs: we feel highly excited and good and then we feel terribly depressed and shaky. But whatever we might be going through, we are still in the same situation all the time. We are constantly questioning, doubting, looking from this angle, looking from that angle, looking from a slight distance or from completely close up. All those games that go on are not regarded as bad, particularly, at all. Rather, they are expressions of our agitated enlightened mind trying to foment a revolution. Our agitated enlightened mind is trying to throw off the seeming expressions of ego. As long as we are able to relate with that as workable—and very real, in fact—then there is tremendous potential in us. We could make friends with ourselves. We could develop maitri.

Having managed to do such a thing, we could begin to relate with others. We could relate with our father and our mother, the people who taught us how to walk, how to talk, how to behave. We could relate with our friends and we could relate with our enemies. We could relate with people who taught us the unpleasantness of life as well as the people who taught us how pleasant life is. We feel that we have inherited so much from the people around us right from childhood.

If we develop friendliness to ourselves, we could extend that friendliness to others—in a sense it is others; nevertheless, it is
us
at the same time. It is a very dubious relationship: it is not exactly the
other
other, but the
seemingly
other, which constantly bounces back on us. So extending to others is predominantly and basically a way of making friends with ourselves. Obviously, our father, mother, brother, sister, friends, and enemies have done their best to relate with us. We have become their product in some sense. But their product,
their
other, means
us
at the same time.

Expanding maitri cuts the neurosis of wishful thinking, the idea that you should be a good person only. Maitri is
intelligent
friendliness that allows acceptance of your whole being. It doesn’t exclude friend or enemy, father or mother. It does not matter whether you regard your father as a friend and your mother as an enemy, your brother as a friend and your sister as an enemy, your friend as a friend, your friend as an enemy, or your enemy as a friend. The whole situation becomes extraordinarily spacious and is suddenly workable. Maybe there is hope after all.