The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Five (41 page)

Student:
It seems Naropa disarms himself with his motivation. He doesn’t have any rebuttal for the insults to his intelligence because he’s committed to pursuing Tilopa.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
He doesn’t even think in terms of insults. He doesn’t particularly think of discovery either at a certain point. Halfway through the search, before the “tomorrow” messages start coming, he has become dull and dumb and numb. That’s the reason for the lines about “Tomorrow you’ll see thus-and-such.” They’re to wake him up more. You don’t want just to reduce him into a piece of lead. So the intention that runs through the messages is to keep him up, make him work harder.

Student:
Do those messages also tell him that although he’s more confused than he was yesterday, he’s making progress?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Progress in terms of time and space but not in the amount of his understanding particularly.

S:
At least he’s getting another message.

TR:
Yes, yes.

Student:
Is this by way of preparing a kind of a new ground for the meeting of Tilopa? Are all these temptations or confusions setting up a new ground to work with?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Absolutely. Otherwise there’s no point. You know, every one of these experiences provides fantastic ground to reflect back on and work on. It’s a very ingenious strategy. And it doesn’t particularly seem to be Tilopa personally who’s doing it. Nobody knows who’s doing it. If it had to be done in the ordinary way, the planning of how to handle Naropa would have taken ten years. It would be a million-dollar project in a university laboratory. And all the psychologists in the world would have to get together.

Student:
Is shunyata related to form being emptiness, and then is what’s happening to Naropa in this later stage going back to the other side of emptiness being form?
¹

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes.

Student:
Does this mean experiencing pain again in relationship with reality?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Very much so. You get blissed out, so to speak, when you first discover shunyata. At that point, Naropa got a message that he had a teacher, he had a guru. Now he’s promised to seek his guru, and in that way he loses his ground. He’s no longer walking on earth, he’s walking on clouds. And those eleven experiences after the ugly woman bring him down and bring more pain, definitely. That’s a kind of vajrayana pain that we’ve just barely discussed. And I think there’s further pain just about to come.

Student:
You made the point several times that the sequence of situations is extremely apt and has been created by just the situations themselves. In terms of the personal application of this for any individual, is this a certain course that everyone on the path goes through? Is it that at a certain point in your development—after going through prajna and maybe having some first intuition of shunyata—situations will start having this confusing effect on people? Just from the situation, in a way that can’t be duplicated, can’t be made up? The effect does happen?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes. You seem to have got the feeling of the whole thing we have been discussing tonight. Sure.

Student:
In that sense, is Naropa sort of like an everyman?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
By all means. If there weren’t a sense of general application, we might be discussing this in some department of ethnic culture or some place like that. But we have decided to make it part of our study of American karma, which means that it does have some bearing on us, naturally. In fact, since you people decided to take part in this seminar, you have already inherited Naropa’s sanity as well as his insanity, without any further choices. Welcome.

Student:
Is that a kind of confirmation?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, what we’re doing is a very minor confirmation.

S:
No, I mean isn’t the fact that the aptness of the message comes out of the situation itself a confirmation of some kind?

TR:
I think so, yes.

Student:
Is the meeting with Vajrayogini a kind of archetypal meeting that’s universal, that happens to all human beings at the first moment of giving up and letting go? Does that vision happen to most human beings at such a moment?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so. It could happen in all kinds of ways. You might have an argument with your landlady or your mother-in-law. Every event like that is meeting the ugly woman. In this case, the ugly woman has nothing to do with male chauvinism. It’s a cosmic thing. It’s the cosmic principle of womanness. It would have to be a mother who cooks you food, or a girlfriend who bosses you around, or a secretary who minds your business. And every one of them is a cosmic principle and has nothing to do with male chauvinism at all. It’s basic womanness in the highest sense.

Student:
Could you say something abut Naropa noticing all the woman’s marks of ugliness? Is it sort of another mockery of Naropa that he would catalog all that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think so, yes. Naropa hasn’t reached the tenth bhumi. He’s on the level of the sixth bhumi—prajna—and because his vision is not very clear, the woman is ugly. The less clear his vision, the more ugly the woman. Further on, his vision becomes more refined. He has potential when he decides to seek Tilopa, but still his vision is very dull, so the ugly woman sharpens herself into further grotesque images like that of the leper woman and so forth.

S:
What’s the significance of her having all the ugly characteristics at that point?

TR:
Those are the characteristics of samsara. Complete confusion, being trapped, being exploited, having your body torn apart, having parts of yourself eaten up, being stabbed, being dumped in shit, being run over by a railroad train, being poisoned to death, being stomped on, and all kinds of images. Those are the images of samsara. They say that the worst thing that could happen to you is being in samsara, that you will be completely annihilated in all kinds of ways—intellectually, spiritually, and socially; that you are the lowest of the lowest of the low. That’s samsara. There’s no fun in it.

Student:
Is Vajrayogini an aspect of Tilopa and vice versa?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Vajrayogini is Tilopa’s sister. She’s a saleswoman who awakens Naropa. It’s like in Mexico you might find a boy who shines your shoes, and as he does it, he says, “Would you like to come and visit my sister’s shop?”

FIVE

Mahamudra

B
EFORE WE DISCUSS
Naropa’s experiences with Tilopa further, we have to understand the meaning of mahamudra properly. So far, we have only a very rough sketch of that experience. In our earlier discussion of continuity, we discussed it as starting from the level of the hinayana realization of pain and then going on to the shunyata experience. Then from the shunyata experience of emptiness, we are led to mahamudra. The sense of continuity there is rediscovering one’s basic ground; the mahamudra experience could be described that way. Having had all the illusions and hallucinations removed by the experience of shunyata, there is a sense of extraordinary clarity. That clarity is called mahamudra.

Mahamudra
is a Sanskrit word.
Maha
means “big, great,” and
mudra
means “symbol.” But
maha
doesn’t mean “big” in a comparative sense: something bigger compared to something smaller. It is not based on a dichotomy. It is simply that such clarity as this is beyond measure. There is no other clarity like this. It is fullness; it is without association in the sense that this experience is full in itself. And the sense in which
mudra
means symbol again has nothing to do with analysis or examples; rather the thing itself is its own symbol. Everybody represents themselves and everybody is a caricature of themselves. There is that sense of a humorous aspect, a caricature aspect, as well as everything having its own basic fullness. You represent yourself not by name but by being. So there is a sense of completion.

The mahamudra experience has been compared to the experience of a young child visiting a colorful temple. He sees all kinds of magnificent decorations, displays, rich colors, vividness of all kinds. But this child has no preconception or any concept whatsoever about where to begin to analyze. Everything is overwhelming, quite in its own right. So the child does not become frightened by this vivid scenery and at the same time does not know how to appreciate it. It is quite different from a child walking into a playroom full of toys, where his attention is caught by a particular toy and he runs right over and starts playing with it. A temple—a highly decorated, colorful temple—is so harmonious in its own right that the child has no way of introducing his fascination from one particular standpoint. The experience is all-pervasive. At the same time, it is perhaps somewhat overwhelmingly pleasurable.

So the mahamudra experience is vividness, vividness to such an extent that it does not require a watcher or commentator; or for that matter, it does not require meditative absorption. In the case of shunyata, there is still a sense of needing a nursing process for that experience; it is not only that the sitting practice of meditation is required, but there is a sense of needing a registrar to record your experience in a memory bank. The very idea of emptiness is an experience, even though you may not have an experienc
er
as such, since the whole thing is totally open and nondualistic. But even the very sense of nonduality is a faint stain, a very subtle, transparent stain. On the shunyata level, that stain is regarded as an adornment, like putting a varnish over well-finished wood. It is supposed to protect the wood from further stains of dirt or grease, to keep it looking fresh and new, to preserve the newness of this well-finished wood. But in the long run, that clear varnish becomes a factor that ages the new look of this fresh wood. It turns yellow and slowly begins to crumble, and scratches begin to show much more in it than they would in the original wood. So the nonduality becomes a problem in the shunyata experience.

In the experience of mahamudra, even the notion of nonduality is not applied or is not necessary. Therefore, it has been said in the scriptures that the only definition of mahamudra you can use is “unborn” or “unoriginated.” Or again, often the mahamudra experience is described in terms of coemergent wisdom—that is, born simultaneously rather than born with the delays of process. This refers to confusion and realization existing simultaneously, as opposed to confusion coming first and then realization taking over and cleaning out the confusion. In the mahamudra, confusion and realization are simultaneous, coemergent.

The eternally youthful quality of the mahamudra experience is one of its outstanding qualities. It is eternally youthful because there is no sense of repetition, no sense of wearing out of interest because of familiarity. Every experience is a new, fresh experience. So it is childlike, innocent and childlike. The child has never even seen its body—such a brandnew world.

Another term for mahamudra, used by Rangjung Dorje and other great teachers, is “ordinary consciousness.” Experience ceases to be extraordinary. It is so ordinary—so clear and precise and obvious. The only thing that confuses us and prevents us from realizing this experience is its ordinariness. The ordinary quality becomes a kind of barrier, because when you look for something, you don’t look for the ordinary. Even in the case of losing a pair of glasses that you are completely used to. When you lose them, the glasses become a very interesting object. They immediately become an extraordinary thing, because you’ve lost them. You begin to imagine: “Could they be here? Could they be there?” You shake all the cushions, you move all the chairs and tables, and you look underneath the rugs. It becomes an extraordinary case. But the glasses are an ordinary thing.

In that way, mahamudra is self-secret because of its ordinariness. Ordinariness becomes its own camouflage, so to speak. It has also been said that mahamudra cannot be expressed, that even the Buddha’s tongue is numb when it comes to describing mahamudra. And it’s true. How much can you say about ordinary things? And the more you see that it is very ordinary, the more that becomes an extraordinary case, which creates a further veil.

The experience of mahamudra is also somewhat irritating, or even highly irritating, because of its sharpness and precision. The energies around you—textures, colors, different states of mind, relationships—are very vivid and precise. They are all so naked and so much right in front of you, without any padding, without any walls between you and “that.” That nakedness is overwhelming. Although it is your own experience, we often find that even when you have only a small glimpse of mahamudra experience, you want to run away from yourself. You look for privacy of some kind—privacy from yourself. The world is so true and naked and sharp and precise and colorful that it’s extraordinarily irritating—let alone when other
people
approach you. You think you can avoid them, run away from them physically, put a notice on your door, or take a trip to an unknown corner of the world. You might try to dissociate yourself from the familiar world, run away from your home ground, disconnect your telephone. You can do all kinds of things of that nature, but when the world begins to become
you
and all these preceptions are
yours
and are very precise and very obviously right in front of you, you can’t run away from it. The process of running away creates further sharpness, and if you really try to run away from these phenomena, they begin to mock you, laugh at you. The chairs and tables and rugs and paintings on the wall and your books, the sounds you hear in your head, begin to mock you. Even if you try to tear your body apart, still something follows you. You can’t get away from it. That is why it is called the ultimate nakedness. You begin to feel you are just a live brain with no tissue around it, exposed on a winter morning to the cold air. It’s
so
penetrating, so irritating, and so sharp.