The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (23 page)

Student:
Will the elements also organically protect those who don’t pervert the teachings?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Maybe.

Student:
Is Padmasambhava’s organic action in connection with the elements the same as the action of the dharmapalas, the protectors of the teachings?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Somewhat, yes. But it is also more than the action of the dharmapalas. The dharmapalas are just sort of reminders. But in this case, there is a complete message.

S:
Isn’t what you are calling the “action of the elements” or “a complete message” in a sense just karmic action?

TR:
It is karmic action in the sense that there is an organic thing happening, but there’s also something specially organic, which has the quality of being deliberate. There seem to be two patterns. There is a difference between a landslide occurring in the area of a coal mine and the landslide that happened in the heretics’ home.

Student:
This business of tricking yourself into being buddha is not at all clear to me. It sounds so un-Buddhist to use your mind to trick yourself. Is that different from what you talk about as deception, as conning yourself, conning experience?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s quite different. The deception of conning yourself has to be based on elaborate strategies. Tricking yourself into becoming buddha is immediate. It happens on the spot.

S:
But if I say to myself, “I am buddha,” when I don’t really know what buddha is—

TR:
It doesn’t really matter. That’s the whole point—we don’t know what buddha is. And maybe not knowing what buddha is, is buddha.

S:
Well, it doesn’t seem like you actually do anything then. Do you do something?

TR:
It’s up to you. You have to develop your own system.

S:
Does it differ from just confidence?

TR:
Yes. It’s a quick switch, as if the carpet were being pulled out from under your feet. Or your feet were being pulled over the carpet. It’s true. It can be done.

S:
It’s like tripping out then?

TR:
Tripping out takes a lot of preparation. But if you are tricked, it takes you by surprise, as though nothing had happened.

S:
Is that connected with visualizations and mantra practice?

TR:
It’s something much more immediate than that. It’s just a change of attitude. Instead of trying to become buddha, you suddenly realize that buddha is trying to become you.

S:
Does this have anything to do with an abhisheka, an empowerment?

TR:
I think so, yes. That’s what’s called the fourth abhisheka, the sudden introduction of nowness.

S:
It seems that there’s a whole process of preparation that’s necessary for this shift in perspective to take place.

TR:
You have to be willing to do that. That’s liberation. Apart from that, there is nothing more. It’s a question of your being willing to do it; that’s the important point. You have to be willing to commit yourself to going through the discomforts that might occur after you are buddha.

Student:
Earlier you talked about eternity and Padmasambhava being turned into a
HUM.
Would being turned into a
HUM
be like a death experience? Would you have to dissolve in order to penetrate experience? Would you have to die?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Penetration is not particularly connected with death. Being turned into a
HUM
is becoming an intense person. You become a capsulized being. You are reduced to a capsule, a very concentrated sense of being yourself. You are just a grain of sand. It is not dissolving but being intensified into one dot.

S:
When Shri Simha swallowed Padmasambhava and shat him out, was that still him?

TR:
Naturally. The analogy is swallowing a diamond. When you shit it out, it’s still a genuine diamond.

Student:
Penetration seems to involve a sense of sharpness. You’re in the midst of an egoistic manipulation, and then something wakes you up with a kind of sharpness.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The sharpness that cuts through neurotic mind seems to be like a two-edged razor that cuts in both directions simultaneously, so the only thing that exists is the sharpness itself. It’s not like a needle, not like an ax. It cuts both the projection and the projector at the same time. That is why there is a craziness aspect: the user gets cut by that razor as does what he is using it on. That makes it humorous, too. Nobody wins the battle. The enemy gets destroyed and the defender gets destroyed as well—simultaneously—so it’s very crazy. Usually, if you’re fighting against something, you’re supposed to win, but in this case you don’t. Both sides get destroyed. Nobody wins. In other words, both win.

Student:
This seems to be connected with shunyata. There could be a gap at any instant, and then there seems to be another kind of sharpness—

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s quite different. When there’s a sense of gap, there’s no blade to cut anything. It’s self-perpetuating in the sense of
HUM.
From that point of view, the shunyata experience and crazy wisdom are different. Compared to crazy wisdom, shunyata provides a home, a mutual home, a comfortable home, whereas crazy wisdom provides a constant cutting process. The tantric approach is related with energy; the shunyata experience is just wisdom alone, wisdom without energy. It’s a discovery, an experience, a nest of some kind.

Student:
What was Padmasambhava’s motivation in wanting to become buddha? I’m thinking of what you said earlier: we don’t want that uncomfortable state; we want the comfort of claustrophobia and insanity.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. I suppose as far as samsaric mind is concerned, it’s a perverted motivation. It is going against that tendency of wanting a home. It goes against the grain of what our parents always say to us: “Don’t you want to get married and have a job and a comfortable home instead of just sitting and meditating?”

S:
But is there some motivation that is not from the samsaric point of view but that exists in its own right?

TR:
Outlandishness. Being uncivilized.

S:
Is that a part of ourselves that we could discover or cultivate in some way?

TR:
That’s what we have to see. That’s what we have to find out. There’s no prescription.

S:
Is this outlandishness something that we already experience occasionally as part of our lives or something we haven’t experienced yet?

TR:
I don’t know. Let’s find out.

Student:
Is what you said before about buddha trying to become you—is that the motivating factor?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, there is something very strange going on. You are absolutely comfortable and happy the way you are, yet at the same time, you find it excruciatingly painful. You are not certain whether you want to stay the way you are, which is very pleasurable, or not stay the way you are, because it is very painful at the same time. That kind of pushing and pulling happens all the time. That seems to be the motivation. You want to keep your habitual patterns, but at the same time, you find them too monotonous—that’s the kind of motivation. I mean, we cannot define that as being something special. We cannot say you are making a journey in some particular direction. The directions are confused. You are
not
confused about whether you are coming or going, but you
still
want to do something about the situation. That is the contagious quality of buddha nature, which is trying to shine through all the time, seemingly.

SIX

Intellect and Working with Negativity

T
HE NEXT ASPECT
of Padmasambhava is actually called Padmasambhava. For some strange reason, “Padmasambhava” became popular as the general name for all the iconographical aspects of this figure. Maybe a certain Gelukpa influence crept into the naming process. Followers of Padmasambhava in Tibet usually refer to him as Guru Rinpoche or Pema Jungne, “the Lotus-Born,” which is Padmakara in Sanskrit. Padmasambhava is then the name of only one of the aspects. It seems this has something to do with a sectarian squabble in which one party holds that Padmasambhava is not a cosmic principle, but just a pandit named Padmasambhava.

In any case, the particular aspect known as Padmasambhava was a pandit, a scholar. He entered Nalanda University and studied what is known as the threefold discipline: meditation; morality; and knowledge, or learning. Those three disciplines correspond to the three sections of the Buddhist scripture called the Tripitaka. One section of the Tripitaka discusses monastic discipline, another the basic teachings of the sutras, and the third the psychological structure of beings.

People frequently ask, “Wouldn’t it be possible on the spiritual path not to do any studying at all? Can’t we just meditate a lot and learn everything from our experiences?” Many people believe that if you sit and meditate a lot, you don’t have to read scriptures or study anything at all. They say that just by meditating everything will come to you. That approach seems to be one-sided. It leaves no room for sharpening the intellect or for disciplining the mind. It also does not take into account the knowledge that protects us from indulging in states of absorption, knowledge that tells us that it is necessary to let go of particular states and bring ourselves into another frame of mind. Study and scholastic learning play an extremely important part for us. This is what is demonstrated by Padmasambhava in his pandit aspect.

Loden Choksi.

One of the problems connected with intellect and intellectual understanding is that if we look for and come up with answers, conclusions, logical deductions, we tend to end up with a high opinion of our understanding. If we develop that, then we may no longer be able to experience things properly or learn anything more from the teachings at all. We become hardened scholars and bookworms. We might begin to feel that practices are unsafe if we do not know what they are, so we have to study them scholastically first. This attitude might go as far as saying that if you really want to study the Buddhist teachings, first you have to learn Sanskrit as well as Japanese or Tibetan. You can’t even begin to practice meditation until you have learned those languages and studied the appropriate texts.

This attitude suggests that the student should become a superscholar. When the student has become an extremely perfect scholar, he has attained buddhahood. He has all the answers; he knows everything inside out. This kind of omniscience, according to this view, makes one a buddha.

This view that the enlightened being is a learned person, a great scholar, is a misunderstanding, another extreme. Enlightenment is not purely a matter of collecting information. If a buddha didn’t know how to change his snow tires, for example, a person with this view might begin to have doubts about him. After all, he is supposed to be the omniscient one; how could he be a buddha if he doesn’t know how to do that? The perfect buddha would be able to surprise you with his knowledge in every area. He would be a good cook, a good mechanic, a good scientist, a good poet, a good musician—he would be good at everything. That is a diluted and diffused idea of buddha, to say the least. He is not that kind of universal expert nor a superprofessor.

But if the proper idea of intellectual understanding and sharpening the intellect is not feeding oneself millions of bits of information and making oneself into a walking library, then what is it? It is connected with developing sharpness and precision in relating with the nature of reality. This has nothing to do with dwelling on logical conclusions or concepts. One has to have a neutral attitude in one’s intellectual study of the teaching, one that is neither purely critical nor purely devotional. One doesn’t try to come to conclusions. The purpose of study, rather than to come to conclusions, is to experience things logically and sensibly. This seems to be the middle way [between the two extremes of rejecting the intellect and emphasizing it exclusively].

Becoming accomplished in intellectual study usually means forming strong opinions. If you are a scholar, your name becomes worth mentioning if you have made some intellectual discovery. But what we are talking about here is not exactly discovery in the professorial sense, but rather discovery on the level of examining and dealing with personal experience. Through such a process, your personal experience is worked through—it is beaten, burned, and hammered as in working with gold, to use a scriptural analogy. In dealing with your experience, you eat, you chew, and you finally swallow and digest. In this way, the
whole thing
becomes workable; your focus is not purely on highlights, such as developing your personality into that of a great learned person—a Buddhologist or a Tibetologist or something like that.