The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (77 page)

I wish we could talk to people who have committed suicide. I wish we could bring them back here and ask them what happened in their bardo states. They must have had a tremendous disappointment. They must have realized they couldn’t just kill the whole thing by one little “pop.”

So you need to develop some sense of appreciation, and you need to reduce your demands and stick to the point, or realize the need for very good toilet training. Please forgive me—I’m not insulting anybody here by saying that you are not toilet trained. It could be seen as a compliment that you need a higher level of toilet training; that is something you should look for. There is tremendous cause for celebration if you could be toilet trained at a higher level.

These guys [
points to the shrine
], these lineage fathers, including my own teacher, were fully toilet trained. We are just at the point of deciding whether we should apply some kind of diaper or just let it drool on the carpet. That is the basic hinayana approach—very much so.

I think we can do it; we can pull that off and actually relate with ourselves fully and properly. We could be fully toilet trained, with smiles on our faces.

Questions, if you like?

Q:
Rinpoche, when you were talking about taming oneself, you differentiated behaving and acting. Could you elaborate on that, please?

V:
I think it’s quite straightforward, actually. Acting is not behaving. Acting is trying to manifest yourself for the sake of display, and behaving is how you feel. Do you see what I mean? Acting is connected with the way you dance, and behaving is connected with the way you sneeze or hiccup.

Q:
When you were talking about acting and behaving, the point seemed to be that one could be a genuine person. But how can I really tell whether or not I am being genuine?

V:
That’s purely up to you, sweetheart. You know it; you are the first person who knows it. Beyond that, you have various channels to release that particular news to the public. When you are acting, you are more concerned with other people’s possible reactions to you; but when you are behaving, you are just behaving
yourself
. It’s like sitting on the toilet seat and doing your duty on it; nobody’s watching how many pieces of toilet tissue you use. It’s your private concern, so there is some sense of genuineness and of putting out. Your guess is as good as mine, sweetheart.

Dharmas without Blame

A
S IS SAID
in all Buddhist teachings, the mind constantly lives in bewilderment and ignorance. Dharmas are the living teachings of clarity appearing spontaneously in all sorts of life situations. But dharmas are not only the means toward clarity; they are also the sense of clarity already existing in the aspirant. In the primitive approach to spirituality, there is a confusion between the means and the one who is applying them.

According to the
Samadhiraja Sutra
, living in the dharmas rather than as the dharmas is a mistaken approach. In an approach in which there is a sense of separation between the teachings and the practitioner, there is no delight; only earnestness, struggle, search. Ego-oriented mind, always seeking some sort of satisfaction, teaches us to act as hungry crows. Even the spiritual search takes the form of a hungry crow. Some belief has been adopted, either from reading sacred writings or taking to heart the example of some master. Taking on this belief might produce delight or conviction, but at the same time there is the sense of your covered, embarrassed parts.

In this view, spirituality is allied with goodness, a goodness which will surely destroy the evil it faces. But you feel that if you don’t maintain your allegiance to this goodness, you are subject to destruction. On the whole, this primitive approach is based on a sense of security, the feeling that you belong to the right teaching, the right club. Because you relate to the teachings as a means or a goal or an atmosphere separate from yourself, their impact is dulled.

P
RAISING TO
C
ONFIRM

Perhaps the magic that you expected does not present itself. The sense of the monotony of your practice grows. You secretly suspect that you are losing the faith. You may try to start a new campaign to regain your faith. On the other hand, perhaps you find getting sucked into the divine will of this teaching frightening in the beginning. But then the magic does present itself and you become a true believer in it and transmit your discovery to others. In either case, there is a sense of great security, and you praise the mysterious perfection of your teaching. This leads to a certain calm or a certain energy which is not entirely sound. You find you have constantly to communicate to others about the teaching in order to sustain your beaming smile or constant sternness.

C
OUNTERFEITING THE
T
EACHINGS

In the process that could be called counterfeiting the teachings, you still have the fever, the fervor of the true believer, but you haven’t set up your livelihood in the teachings quite yet. You still have to develop your style and create your establishment. At this point, you lose your sense of friendship, personal contact. Meeting an old friend is very awkward. You regard the whole world as your prey. Whether friends or relatives, all are subject to your consumption. You have become strange to yourself. Your only reference point, the only way you can have of reassuring yourself, is constant checking with the appropriate holy scriptures or the great master who converted you originally. You regard your strangeness as some miraculous gift of progress. Public speaking and conducting intensive rituals become a means of perpetuating it and surviving its threat.

Having completely committed yourself to the teachings, you now feel free to put forward your own version. You might well break away from your first master at this point, because he fails to acknowledge your growth. Your teaching style now becomes royal command—either obey or get out. You have no sense of friendship with life at all.

At this point genuine insight is impossible. You are constantly fed by the world you are projecting. Sometimes administrative work in the organization, as some form of sanity, might bring you down to earth. But even that is dressed up as a mode of development. As you go further and further into the texture of this drama, your sanity becomes precarious. The sense of wretchedness becomes overwhelming—should you declare yourself a teacher or somehow get out of the whole thing? Further confirmation in your spiritual role now might bring you to the point of complete insensitivity. You would no longer question yourself. You might feel reassured, but you would have merely returned to the original bewilderment of trying to achieve egohood. You might then appear to others to be quite calm, poised, highly accomplished, but really you are just being thick. The whole thing is an act of cowardice.

T
HE
L
ION
’
S
R
OAR

Buddha’s message that there is such a thing as cutting through bewilderment and confusion is the Lion’s Roar. In the Madhyamaka teachings, Nagarjuna speaks of severing the aorta of heresy. Faith is the readiness to expose whatever is concealed. You don’t have to conceal doubts by putting on patches of self-confirmation. This readiness to be exposed seems to make the difference between ego’s approach to spirituality and an enlightened one.

Cutting through confusion is an easy matter if we know what to cut. In tantric philosophy, it is said that the destruction of ego is the spontaneous action of enlightened energy. Here, the Lion’s Roar is not a roar of victory, but a roar that mocks ego’s deception. There is no room for the further confirmation of concealing, for the Lion’s Roar is constant cutting through, constant exposing of one deception after another. Therefore cutting through need not be strategized. On the contrary, what is needed is the constant unmasking of ego’s strategy. The spirituality of a bodhisattva or a tantric vidyadhara is a continual unmasking rather than a manufacturing of anything. In the case of the bodhisattva, this unmasking is gentle. Understanding the depth of ego produces depth of knowledge (prajna). Prajna is the understanding that cuts through ego’s game. but possession of this understanding still offers a sense of confirmation.

In the case of the tantric vidyadhara, unmasking is a violent eruption. As the unmasking process brings a certain form of confirmation, the tantric approach is to unreasonably uproot it.

In Buddhism, there is no magic, but there is a mystical approach. This has nothing to do with divinity. In this case, mysticism is realizing the true nature of ego.

D
HARMAS
A
RE WITHOUT
B
LAME

Dharmas are without blame because there was no manufacturer of dharmas. Dharmas are simply what is. Blame comes from an attitude of security, identifying with certain reservations as to how things are. Having this attitude, if a spiritual teaching does not supply us with enough patches, we are in trouble. The Buddhist teaching not only does not supply us with any patches, it destroys them.

As ego’s patches are destroyed, there comes a point where relating with the teaching means the continual death of ego. But ego always wants to witness and appreciate its own death. As long as there is a business of being without patches, there is still a reason for new patches to be created. The affirmation of patchlessness is a new patch, therefore there is a continual need for death. As scientific logic tells us, if there is death, then that automatically means the birth of something else, unless there is no mind to experience either. This vicious circle continues until at some point it becomes such an accurate dance that a sense of refreshing delight begins to pervade each moment. Succumbing to the dance, delight in nonmindness is the way of stepping out of the vicious circle of ego.

Therefore the teaching of dharmas without blame should be regarded as good news. It seems that it is good news, utterly good news, because there is no choice. Praise and blame are conditioned experiences of beautiful patchwork. There is no choice but to accept things as they are. Now suppose you are cornered and have no choice—you begin to realize there is another alternative of alternativelessness. This opens a new dimension of space, but this is not a space of security. The philosophy of Zen might say that the choicelessness of sitting in zazen is the only choice.

It is you who instigated the idea of security in the first place, and it is you who asked for the patches. You are the inventor of the whole process.

There is an approach in which the idea of patches has never occurred. If you ask for a patch, since the idea has never occurred, it couldn’t be communicated. From that point of view, blame doesn’t exist, because there is no praise.

In the Buddhist approach to spirituality, unmasking is the only way. If you ask for an artificial mask so that you can enjoy the ceremony of being unmasked, it is still ego’s devious game. So we cannot blame the unmasker for not doing a complete job. Unmasking, or unfacing for that matter, must be found in ourselves.

Buddhadharma without Credentials

L
ET US PRESENT THE
definition of buddhadharma. In the sutras,
dharma
is referred to as the “path” and “that which is knowable.” It is “passionlessness.” Passion in this case refers to the dualistic fixations of the ego, which has two aspects. The first aspect is the ego of conceptualized confusion—the notion of other, that form exists. The second is the ego of personality—if form exists, then there must be a perceiver of the form, an individual knower. These two aspects of ego are mutually dependent and constitute the samsaric mind. The seeming existence of other is a continually repeated proof of the existence of I, which is actually another other. I does not exist but takes the seeming existence of form as its credentials. The existence of form, credentials, is what maintains the illusion of I. Thus, if a person is self-righteously claiming to practice the buddhadharma, is using his practice as credentials, then he is simply playing ego’s game. If a group of people do this together, then they reinforce each other in the same game. Inevitably they will pick a leader. Then the leader will have as his credentials the title “head of the flock.” The members of the flock will have as their credentials the title “member of such-and-such organization.” The leader and his flock reinforce each other’s identities. As is said in the
Sutra of the Treasury of Buddha
, “If someone teaches with ignorance, it is worse than if he took the lives of the inhabitants of three universes, because his ability to teach the dharma is impure.” Inevitably this organization, this collective ego, will look for further confirmation of its health and existence. It may even take as its credentials the transmission of the lineage, the teachings of the great masters, but it will be a prostitution of those teachings. It will involve itself in the ever-escalating game of one-upmanship in order to enlarge its congregation. This one-upmanship may take the form of collecting endorsements and diplomas, as well as the form of ambitious practice and adherence to the teachings. It will also see the success of rivals as a threat. The Buddha said that his teachings, like a lion, would never be destroyed by outsiders; it could only be destroyed from within like a lion’s corpse consumed by maggots. This is the perversion of sangha. It is the dark-age style of spirituality, the operation of spiritual materialism. Regarding the dharma as the path, great buddhadharma institutions, such as Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Samye, were founded on the basis of three types of evolution or “wheels.” The first is the wheel of meditation, the second is the wheel of learning, and the third is the wheel of action. Meditation is the practice of stepping out of ego’s game of constantly reaffirming its own existence. Study is the critical intellectual examination of ego’s mode of operation. Action is the application of the other two in everyday life situations. From this point of view, maintenance of the organization, reliance on credentials, becomes irrelevant. Nothing external is needed; things-as-they-are are their own proof, self-existing. As Shantideva describes in the
Bodhicharyavatara
, “Listening to the buddhadharma is joyous and inviting, because it does not need further ambition.” There is no drive to accumulate credentials. The Dharma does not demand rigidity, adherence to external ideals. If a teacher understand this, he needs no confirmation from his students. The turning of the wheel of dharma will be a mutual creation on the part of student and teacher.