The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (12 page)

The king, Mandarava’s father, soon heard something of this. A cowherd reported that he had heard an unusual male voice coming from the nunnery, preaching and shouting. The king had thought that Mandarava was an absolutely perfect nun and had no relations of any kind with men. He got quite upset at the cowherd’s news and sent his ministers to find out what was happening at the nunnery. The ministers were not allowed into the nunnery compound but suspected that something funny was going on there. They reported back to the king, who decided to have the army destroy the nunnery gate, march in, and arrest this rascal posing as a teacher. This they did. They captured Padmasambhava and put him on a pyre of sandalwood and set it afire (this was the style of execution that had developed in that particular kingdom). The princess was thrown into some pitch containing thorns and lice and fleas. This was the king’s idea of religion.

The fire in which Padmasambhava had been placed burned on and on for seven days. Usually when they executed someone, the fire lasted only for a day or two. In this case, however, it burned on and on. Very unusual. The king began to think that perhaps there was also something unusual about this man wandering about pretending to be a guru. He sent his men to investigate, and they found that the fire had disappeared and that the whole area where the fire had been had turned into a huge lake. In the middle of the lake was Padmasambhava, once again sitting on a lotus. When the king heard this, he decided to find out more about this person. He decided not to trust the matter to a messenger, but went himself to see Padmasambhava. When he arrived at the scene, he was overwhelmed by the presence of this person sitting on a lotus in the middle of a lake where a charnel ground and a place to burn criminals had been. The king confessed his wrongdoings and foolish actions to Padmasambhava and invited him back to the palace. Padmasambhava refused to go, saying he would not enter the palace of a sinner—the palace of a wicked king who had condemned someone who was the spiritual essence of both king and guru, who had ignored the true essence of spirituality. The king repeated his request and finally Padmasambhava accepted his invitation. The king himself pulled the car in which Padmasambhava sat. Padmasambhava became the rajguru, the king’s guru, and Mandarava was rescued from the pitch.

During this phase of his life, Padmasambhava’s approach to reality was one of accuracy, but within this realm of accuracy he was ready to allow people room to make mistakes on the spiritual path. He was even ready to go so far as to let the king try to burn him alive and put his student, the princess, into the pitch. He felt he should let those things happen. This is an important point that already shows the pattern of his teaching.

There had to be room for the king’s realization of his neurosis—his whole way of acting and thinking—to come through by itself. His realization had to be allowed to come through by itself, rather than by Padmasambhava’s performing some miraculous act of magical power (which he was quite capable of) before he was arrested. Padmasambhava could have said, “I am the world’s greatest teacher; you cannot touch me. Now you will see the greatness of my spiritual power.” But he didn’t do that. Instead, he let himself be arrested.

This is a very important indication of Padmasambhava’s way of relating with samsaric, or confused, mind: let the confusion come through, and then let the confusion correct itself. It is like the story about a particular Zen master who had a woman student. The woman became pregnant and bore a child. Her parents came to the Zen master, bringing the child, and complained to him, saying, “This is your child; you should take care of it.” The Zen master replied, “Is that so?” and he took the child and cared for it. A few years later, the woman was no longer able to bear the lie she had told—the father of the child was not the teacher but someone else altogether. She went to her parents and said, “My teacher was not the father of the child; it was someone else.” Then the parents became worried and felt they had better rescue the child from the hands of the teacher, who was meditating in the mountains. They found him and said, “We have discovered that this is not your child. Now we are going to rescue it from you; we are going to take it away from you. You are not the real father.” And the Zen master just said, “Is that so?”

So let the phenomena play. Let the phenomena make fools of themselves by themselves. This is the approach. There is no point in saying, “Let me have a word with you. I would like to explain the whole situation inside-out.” By itself, just saying something is inadequate—not to mention the difficulty of finding the right thing to say. It simply does not work. The phenomenal world cannot be conned with words, with logic, petty logic. The phenomenal world can only be dealt with in terms of what happens within it, in terms of its own logic. This is a larger version of the logic, the totality of the logicalness of the situation. So an important feature of Padmasambhava’s style is letting the phenomena play themselves through rather than trying to prove or explain something.

In the next situation, the next aspect, Padmasambhava was faced with five hundred heretics, or
tirthikas
in Sanskrit. In this case, the heretics were the theists, the Brahmanists; they could also have been Jehovists—or whatever you would like to call the approach that is the opposite of the nontheistic approach of the buddhadharma. A logical debate took place: A huge crowd surrounded two pandits, facing each other. The theistic pandit and the nontheistic pandit were debating each other on the nature of spirituality. Both of them were on a spiritual trip. (It does not matter whether you are a theist or a nontheist—you can still be on a spiritual trip.) Both were trying to establish their territory, to prove that they had grounds for having the spiritual path their way. In this case, the theists won and the Buddhists, who were completely overwhelmed by logical intelligence, lost. Then Padmasambhava was asked to perform a ceremony of destruction, to destroy the theists and their whole setup. He performed the ceremony and caused a huge landslide, which killed the five hundred pandits and destroyed their whole ashram.

In this aspect, Padmasambhava is known as Senge Dradrok, which is “Lion’s Roar.” The lion’s roar destroys the dualistic psychology in which value and validity are attributed to things
because there is the other thing happening
—the Brahma, or God, or whatever you like to call it. The dualistic approach says that because “that” happened, therefore “this” also is a solid and real thing. In order to become Him or Her, whichever it may be, we should be receptive to that higher thing, that objective thing. This approach is always problematic. And the only way to destroy that dualistic setup is to arouse Padmasambhava’s crazy-wisdom aspect to destroy it.

From the point of view of crazy wisdom, “that” does not exist; and the reason “that” does not exist is because “this,” the self, no longer exists. In some sense, you could say that here the destruction is mutual destruction. But at the same time, this destruction is favorable from the nontheistic point of view. If Jehovah or Brahma exists, then the perceiver has to exist in order to acknowledge that existence. But the crazy-wisdom approach is that the acknowledger does not exist; it is no longer there, or at least it is questionable. And if “this” does not exist, then “that” is out of the question altogether. It is purely a phantom, imaginary. And even for an imagination to exist, you need an imagin
er.
So the destruction of the centralized notion of a self brings with it the nonexistence of “that.”

This is the approach of Padmasambhava as Senge Dradrok, Lion’s Roar. The lion’s roar is heard, because the lion is not afraid of “that”; the lion is willing to go into, to overwhelm, whatever there is, because “this” does not exist to be destroyed anymore. In this sense, the lion’s roar can be connected with the development of
vajra pride.

The next aspect is Dorje Trolö, which came about when Padmasambhava went to Tibet. The Tibetans were not involved in foreign—that is, external—worship. They did not have the Hindu realm of the gods. They did not even know the word
Brahma.
What they had was
yeshen,
which is the equivalent word in the Bön tradition to “absoluteness.”
¹
Ye
means “primordial”;
shen
means “ancestralness” or “great friend.” In coming to Tibet, the buddhadharma was now encountering an entirely new angle, a new approach.

Up until that time, Padmasambhava had been dealing with Hindus, Brahmanists. What he encountered in Tibet was entirely different from that. The classical Tibetan word
yeshen
has a sense that is something like “ancestral” or “ancient” or even “celestial.” It is similar to the Japanese word
shin,
which means “heaven,” or to the Chinese word
ta,
which means “that which is above.” All three terms relate to something greater, something above. There is an upward process involved, which could be associated with dragons, thunderstorms, clouds, the sun and moon, stars, and so forth. They relate to that “above” thing, to that higher, greater cosmic pattern.

This was extremely difficult for Padmasambhava to deal with. It was impossible to deal with it through logic, because the wisdom of the Bön tradition was very profound, extremely profound. If Padmasambhava had had to challenge the Bönists with logic, the only approach he could have taken would have been to say that earth and heaven are a unity, that heaven as such does not exist because heaven and earth are interdependent. But that is very shaky logic, because everyone knows that there is earth and there is heaven, that there are mountains and stars and suns and moons. You could not challenge these people by saying that there is no earth, no mountains; there is no sun, no moon, no sky, no stars.

The basic Bön philosophy is very powerful; it is much like the American Indian, Shinto, or Taoist approach to cosmic sanity. The whole thing is an extraordinarily sane approach. But there is a problem. It is also a very anthropocentric approach. The world is created for human beings; animals are human beings’ next meal or their skins are human beings’ next clothes. This anthropocentric approach is actually lacking in basic sanity; it is not able to respect the basic continuity of consciousness. Consequently, the Bön religion prescribes animal sacrifice to the yeshen, or great god. Here again, we find a similarity with the American Indian and Shinto outlook, with man as the center of the universe. According to that outlook, the grasses and trees, the wild animals, and the sun and the moon are there for human entertainment. The whole system is based on human existence. That is the big problem.

Buddhism is not a national religious approach. National religions tend to be theistic. Let us remember that Christianity inherited its theistic approach from Judaism; Judaism, Shintoism, Hinduism, and many other religions like them are national religions that are also theistic. They have their particular sense of the relationship between “this” and “that,” earth and heaven. The nontheistic approach is extremely difficult to present in a primitive country that already has a belief in a theistic religion. The way the people of such a country relate to their basic survival already contains a sense of the earth in relation to the magnificence of heaven. Their sense of worship is already developed.

Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries have recently developed a method in which they tell primitive peoples, “Yes, your gods do exist, it is true, but my god is much wiser than your god, because it is omnipresent and so forth—ambidextrous and all the rest.” But Buddhism faces an entirely different problem. There is no question of your god and my god. You have your god, but I don’t have a god, so I am left just sort of suspended there. I have nothing to substitute. Where is the greatness and power of my approach? I have nothing to substitute. The only thing there is to substitute is crazy wisdom—
mind
is very powerful. We all have mind, including animals. Everybody has mind. It does not matter about Him or Them, or Them and Him, or whatever.

One’s state of mind is very powerful. It can imagine destroying something, and it destroys it. It can imagine creating something, and it creates it. Whatever you intend in the realm of mind, it happens. Imagine your enemy. You want to destroy your enemy, and you have developed all kinds of tactics for doing so. You have infinite imaginations about how to handle the destruction of that enemy. Imagine your friend. You have infinite inspirations about how to relate with your friend, how to make him or her feel good or better or richer.

That is why we have built these houses and roads, manufactured these beds and blankets. That is why we have provided this food, thought up all kinds of dishes. We have done all this to prove to ourselves that we do exist. This is a kind of humanistic approach. Man does exist, his intelligence does exist. This is entirely nontheistic.

Padmasambhava’s approach to magic was on this nontheistic level. Lightning happens because it does happen, rather than because there is any further why or who or what involved. It does happen. Flowers blossom because it happens, it is so. We cannot argue that there are no flowers. We cannot argue that no snow falls. It is so. It happens. It came from up there, from the sky, but so what!? What do you want to manufacture there?

Everything happens on this plane, on this really earthy plane. Everything happens on a very straight and down-to-earth level. Therefore, the crazy wisdom of Dorje Trolö begins to develop. It is extraordinarily powerful. It is powerful on the kitchen-sink level—that is what is so irritating. In fact, that is what is so powerful. It haunts everywhere—it really
is
there.

Dorje Trolö arrives in Tibet riding a pregnant tigress. The tigress is electric. She is pregnant electricity. She is somewhat domesticated, but at the same time has the potential of running wild. Dorje Trolö knows no logic. As far as Dorje Trolö is concerned, the only conventional logic there is, is relating with heaven and earth. Because the sky forms itself into its particular shape, the horizon exists. There is the vastness of space, the sky; and there is the vastness of the earth. They are vast, but okay—so what? Do you want to make a big deal out of the vastness? Who are you trying to compete with? There is this vastness, but why not consider the smallest things that are happening as well? Aren’t they more threatening? The grain of sand is more threatening than the vastness of space or of the desert; because of its concentratedness, it is extremely explosive. There is a huge cosmic joke here, a gigantic cosmic joke, a very powerful one.