The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (22 page)

TR:
You don’t stop the anger, you just
are
the anger. Anger just hangs out as it is. That is relating with the anger. Then the anger becomes vivid and directionless, and it diffuses into energy. The idea of relating with it has nothing to do with expressing yourself to the other person. The Tibetan expression for that is
rang sar shak,
which means “leave it in its own place.” Let anger be in its own place.

Student:
I still don’t understand what we should try to communicate to a dying person.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You see, death is a very
real
experience. Usually, we do not connect with a sense of reality. If we have an accident—or whatever happens in our lives—we do not regard it as a real experience, even though it may hurt us. It is real to us as far as pain and physical damages are concerned, but still it’s not real for us because we immediately look at it in terms of how it could be otherwise. There’s always the idea of first aid or some other redeeming aspect of the situation. If you are talking to a dying friend or relative, you should transmit the idea that death is a real experience, rather than that it’s just a joke and the person could get better. Often people tell the dying person things like, “Life is really a joke altogether. The great saints say it’s not real. Life is unreal. What is death, anyway?” When we try to take this kind of approach, we become jumpy ourselves; and that jumpiness is what we end up communicating to the dying person. We should help them to understand that death is real.

FIVE

The Lion’s Roar

W
E HAVE LOOKED INTO THE IDEA
of timelessness, or eternity. It might be necessary for us now to look a bit further. Conquering or transcending the sense of experience brings us to something completely nondualistic. We might call it sanity. The aspect of Padmasambhava known as Nyima Öser displayed sanity in relating to the concept of time and to ideas or experience connected with spiritual achievement. Having looked briefly into his example, we might now go ahead and discuss another aspect of Padmasambhava: Shakya Senge, Padmasambhava as buddha.

The principle connected with this aspect of Padmasambhava is that, once one has already conquered any sense of gaining anything in the relative world, one has to go ahead and make a relationship with complete and total sanity, the awakened state of mind. Shakya Senge, Padmasambhava as buddha, is concerned with this. Shakya Senge is not buddha in the hinayana sense but in the mahayana sense. The mahayana style of Padmasambhava has to do with utterance of the lion’s roar, which in the mahayana teaching refers to proclaiming the teaching of shunyata, the ultimate sanity. So, this aspect of Padmasambhava is connected with the expression of the ultimate sanity.

You might ask, “How could this ultimate sanity go further than conquering conceptuality and the sense of experience? Is there something more than that? Isn’t that enough?” At this point, there is something more subtle than that. Conquering conceptuality and the sense of experience is a step toward proclamation. First you have to conquer the enemy, then you can proclaim that you have gained victory over him. In making the proclamation referred to as the lion’s roar, Padmasambhava as buddha further emphasizes that sanity. The lion’s roar is not regarded as a challenge, but as an adornment. It is not a challenge concerning whether the conquering process has been accomplished or not. Rather, when you have already achieved victory, then the victory brings a sense of good news. Proclamation of this good news is the lion’s roar.

In connection with Padmasambhava’s life, good news is ultimate good news. It is the good news that the spiritual journey need never have been made. The journey has already been completed; therefore, there’s no point in searching or trying to gain further insights. The needlessness of making the spiritual journey is the good news. That is the lion’s roar. This is something much more than what the mahayana sutras talk about. The mahayana sutras talk about attainment of perfect sanity through realizing that form is emptiness and emptiness is form, and so forth. But the lion’s roar that we are talking about here is something much more than that. It goes further in that the ultimate good news is independent of any victory. It is ultimate.

What is Padmasambhava’s style of manifesting crazy wisdom in this context? He is the universal monarch who looks down over the yanas of the teachings rather than up to them.

According to the story, Padmasambhava studied with Ananda, the attendant and disciple of the Buddha. He was ordained by Ananda as a bhikshu, and he attained understanding of the message of the Buddha. Padmasambhava regarded Ananda, the Buddha’s disciple, more as a guru than as a preceptor. That is an important distinction. He regarded him as a guru rather than as a master of discipline, an informant, a professor, or a teacher in the ordinary sense, because Ananda was in the direct lineage of transmission from the Buddha. This meant that working with him involved a living relationship with the teachings.

Padmasambhava’s realization here is something we can relate to as well. The sense of dignity that speaks out and expresses that the journey need never have been made is true. The idea that the spiritual journey needs to be made is a deception. From that point of view, even the ten bhumis of the bodhisattva path are a sophistry. Since there are no bhumis at all, how could there be ten of them?

Seeing things in this way is a part of the crazy wisdom of directness, complete directness. It involves directly relating with sanity, or bodhi mind, with the experience of the Buddha when he attained vajra-like samadhi sitting in the shade of the bodhi tree. It is also a further step toward trusting in buddha nature. At this point, we cannot even call it buddha
nature,
because “nature” automatically implies something embryonic. But in this case, we are not talking about something embryonic but about the living Buddha. Padmasambhava associated himself with the Buddha and discovered sanity. He related with Ananda as the messenger who awakened his inspiration.

A guru does not really transmit spiritual entities into us or through us. A guru just reminds us that there is sanity already in us. So Ananda only provided—or for that matter, Padmasambhava only provides—a reminder that things are so in this way.

We might find it difficult to follow what this experience is about or to identify ourselves with it. We might find hearing about this like listening to a story in which such-and-such a thing happened and then after that everybody lived happily ever after. But the story of Padmasambhava should be something more than that. If we actually relate with what happens in the life of Padmasambhava, we will find that it is quite realistic and personal. We acknowledge sanity, and then sanity comes about by itself.

Acknowledging sanity is a discipline or a pretense: you pretend to be the Buddha; you believe you
are
the Buddha. Again, we are not talking about buddha nature as an embryonic state, but of the living situation of buddhahood having already happened. We adopt such a pretense at the beginning, or maybe we should call it a belief. It is a belief in the sense that our buddhahood is seemingly not real, but we take it as a reality. Some element of mind’s trickery is necessary. And then we find ourselves having been tricked into enlightenment.

There are all kinds of tricks that exist as part of the teaching process. They are known as skillful means. That seems to be something of a euphemism.

Skillful means are part of the spiritual tradition. The lineage gurus’ conduct in relating with students is a traditional discipline. Skillful means are necessary, because there is a tendency to run away from sanity of this nature. Students might find sanity too spacious, too irritating. We would prefer a little claustrophobic insanity, snug and comforting insanity. Getting into that is like crawling back into a marsupial’s pouch. That’s the usual tendency, because acknowledging precision and sanity is too crispy, too cool, too cold. It’s too early to wake up; we’d rather go back to bed. Going back to bed is relating to the mind’s deceptions, which in fact we prefer. We like to get a little bit confused and set up our homes in that. We don’t prefer sanity or enlightenment in fact. That seems to be the problem rather than that we don’t have it or can’t get it. If we really prefer basic sanity or enlightenment, it’s irritatingly possible to get into it.

That seems to have been the approach of Padmasambhava’s Shakya Senge aspect: he preferred to become like the Buddha. He went to see Ananda and talked to him about the Buddha. He studied with Ananda, worked with him, and he became buddha. You might say, “That’s too quick,” but nevertheless, it happened.

Then we have another aspect of Padmasambhava, called Senge Dradrok, which again is connected with the lion’s roar. The name actually means “lion’s roar” or, more literally, “making a noise like a lion.” In this aspect, Padmasambhava manifests as a defender of the faith, a great magician.

At that time in India, there were major incursions of heretics, or tirthikas, as they are called in Sanskrit. They were Hindus. They are referred to as heretics because of their belief in duality—in the existence of an external divine being and in the existence of atman as the recipient of that divine being.

Of course, you might criticize this approach, saying that we all should have high regard for the sacred writings of Hinduism, especially the mystical teachings of Hinduism such as the Vedanta. And actually, the vedantic writings themselves do not quite express things dualistically; they are not quite in the dualistic style of spirituality. But the heretics that Padmasambhava was dealing with were believers in the literal truth of dualism. They misunderstood the real depth of the mystic teachings and believed in an external god and an internal ego. Strangely enough, believing in this kind of separateness can bring about very powerful psychic powers. Miracles of all kinds can be performed, and some technical and intellectual understanding of the teachings can be developed.

In relation to these heretics, Padmasambhava acted as an organic agent, an agent of the natural action of the elements. If you mistreat the fire in your fireplace, your house will catch fire. If you don’t pay enough attention while cutting your carrots, you might cut your finger. It is this mindlessness and mistreatment of the natural situation that is the heretical quality. Rather than regarding existing situations of nonduality as they are, you try to interpret them a bit so that they help to maintain your existence. For example, believing in God is a way of making sure that
you
exist. Singing a song of praise to God makes
you
happier, because
you
are singing the song about him. Since there is a good audience, a good recipient, therefore God exists. That kind of approach is heretical from the Buddhist point of view.

At that time, the great Buddhist monasteries in a certain part of India were being challenged by Hindu pandits. The Hindu pandits were coming to the monasteries and teaching, and the monks were rapidly turning into Hindus. It was a tremendous catastrophe. So Padmasambhava was asked to come. Those who invited him said, “We can’t seem to match those Hindu pandits intellectually, so please save us by performing some magic for us. Maybe that is the only solution.”

Padmasambhava came to live in one of the monasteries. One day, he produced an earthquake by pointing his trident in the direction of the Hindu pandits. There were landslides, and five hundred Hindu pandits were destroyed.

What do you make of that?

When somebody becomes unreasonable, they create their own destruction. By putting it that way, I am not trying to make sure that you are not put off by Padmasambhava and his activities. I am not acting as his spokesman and saying, “He’s good anyway, in spite of those actions of his.” It is simply that with him acting as the agent of the elements, of the organic process, the unreasonable and man-made element had to be diminished.

People in Bhutan were recently trying to build a road from India to Bhutan, called the Bhutan National Highway. They were building and building. They had bulldozers and they had Indian road-making experts. They spent millions and millions of rupees, and they built a beautiful road. But when the rainy season came, the whole road was swept away by tremendous landslides. By building a road, you interfere with the mountain, with the structure of the rock. As the only possible reaction of nature to that disturbance, landslides develop. Then once again there is another project requiring millions of rupees, and this process goes on and on.

The last time it happened was when the president of India was paying a state visit to Bhutan. The airplane that was carrying India’s gifts to the Bhutanese king and government got lost in the mist and crashed in the Bhutanese mountains. And as the Indian president was preparing to return to India, sudden landslides took place as a farewell gesture to him.

I’m not saying that the president of India is a heretic, but the definition of heresy here is very delicate. If you are not in tune with the nature of reality, you are making yourself into a target, an extra satellite. And there’s no one to feed you. There’s no fuel for you except your own resources, and you are bound to die because you can’t keep regenerating without further resources. That is what happened to the pandits whom Padmasambhava killed. This is very uncompassionate or outrageous, but Padmasambhava in this case is representing the nature of reality rather than acting as a black magician or white magician.

It seems that we cannot be instructed how to perform acts such as the destruction of the pandits. Although the teachings have been handed down through generations and generations without interruption or perversion, so that even now we possess the complete teachings of Padmasambhava, none of those teachings talk about how to kill heretics. There are no such teachings. But the teachings do talk about how to work with practice and your attitude toward it organically. You do that, and the perverters of the teachings destroy themselves. That seems to be the basic message here. That seems to be the aspect of Padmasambhava called “Lion’s Roar,” or Senge Dradrok.