The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (11 page)

Such teachers regard Westerners as an extraordinary species, as if they came from the planet Mars: “Well, why don’t we teach them, since we have a captive audience of living Martians here?” That misunderstanding is an expression of limited vision, of failing to see that the world is one world made up of human beings. A person who lives on this earth needs food, shelter, clothing, a love affair, and so on. We are all alike in that regard. Westerners do not need any special treatment because they invented the airplane or electronics. All human beings have the same psychology: They think in the same way, and they have the same requirements as students. The question is simply how one can teach students no matter where they come from.

In that respect we can follow the example of the Buddha, who presented the teachings to the Indians of his time in a universal fashion. It is much more enlightened to view the world as one global situation. Everybody is united: We are all samsaric people, and we all have the potential to become enlightened as well. We do not have to be particularly kind toward one part of the world or another, or for that matter, aggressive toward one part of the world or another. We are one world; we share one earth, one water, one fire, and one sun.

Wherever a student comes from, his or her attitude is very important. To receive transmission, a student should be humble and open but not wretched. Being humble in this case is being like a teacup. If we are pouring a cup of tea, the cup could be said to be humble. The cup has a sense of being in its own place. When we pour tea into a cup, the cup is at a lower level and the pot is at a higher level. This has nothing to do with spiritual trips, higher consciousness, lower consciousness, or anything like that. We are talking pragmatically. If we are going to pour tea into a cup, the cup obviously should be lower than the pot. Otherwise we would be unable to pour anything into it.

Water obviously has to flow down. It is very simple. Like a humble cup, the student should feel fertile and at the same time open. Because tea is going to be poured into this particular cup, the cup has a sense of open expectation. Why not? We are no longer wretched people who are not up to the level of receiving teaching. We are simply students who want to know, who want to learn and receive instructions. Also, one cup is not necessarily better or more valuable than another. It could be made out of many things—ordinary clay, porcelain, gold, or silver—but it is still a cup as long as it can hold water or tea.

To be a proper cup, we should be free from spiritual materialism, thoroughly ripened, and brought to spiritual maturity so that transmission can take place. Then, in our basic being, we feel the quality of “cupness”; we feel our whole existence thirsting to receive teaching. We are open to the teachings. That is the first step in transmission: Like the cup, we are on a certain level of experience that is not absolutely wretched or full of holes. We don’t feel that we are deprived.

In fact, being a cup is an absolutely powerful thing: There is a sense of pride. Because our cup has such a strong quality of cupness, the teapot cannot help but fill it with knowledge or teachings. The teacher cannot wait to pour into us. We are seducing the teapot with our cupness: our pride, our self-existence, and our sanity. Two magnetic processes are taking place: The cup is magnetized by the teapot, and the teapot is equally magnetized by the cup. A love affair takes place; a fascination takes place.

Transmission means the extension of spiritual wakefulness from one person to someone else. Wakefulness is extended rather than transferred. The teacher, or the transmitter, extends his own inspiration rather than giving his experience away to somebody else and becoming an empty balloon. The teacher is generating wakefulness and inspiration constantly, without ever being depleted. So for the student, transmission is like being charged with electricity.

Transmission also requires the dynamic expression of the student’s own emotions. As students, our aggression, our lust, and our stupidity are all included. According to vajrayana, everything we can think of, including the emotions, is workable. In fact, transmission cannot take place without emotions, because they are part of the food of transmutation. And since they are so energetic and powerful, we do not want to exclude any of them. As long as we separate our philosophy and our concepts of morality from our emotions, there is no problem. This does not mean that we should be completely loose, seemingly free from philosophy, morality, and ethics, but that self-existing ethics take place constantly. To receive transmission it is absolutely necessary to be an ordinary human being: confused, stupid, lustful, and angry. Without those emotional qualities, we cannot receive transmission. They are absolutely necessary. I do not think this is a particularly difficult requirement to fulfill. Everybody seems to have a pretty juicy helping of them.

Our emotions are regarded as the wiring or electrical circuit that receives transmission. We could say that we have three wires—one for passion, one for aggression, and one for naiveté, ignorance, or slothfulness. These three form a very busy electrical device that would like to receive transmission. We are hungry for it; we are dying for it. And on the other side, there is the electrical generator, which is somewhat smug, knowing that it is ready to transmit at any time.

So we have a good machine and we are beautifully wired: now we are just waiting for the generator to convey its charge—which in Sanskrit is called abhisheka.
Abhisheka
literally means “sprinkling,” or “bathing,” or “anointment.” It is a formal ceremony of empowerment, a formal transmission from teacher to student. Abhisheka cannot take place unless the necessary wiring has already been set up, and to change our analogy slightly, abhisheka cannot take place without a good electrician, the teacher, or guru, who will know when to switch on the current.

In an abhisheka there is a sense of destruction, a sense of flow, and a sense of fulfillment. Those three principles of abhisheka are analogous to electricity in many ways: When we turn on a switch, the first thing that happens is that the resistance to the current is destroyed. Then, the current can flow through the circuit; and finally, the electricity can fulfill its purpose. If we turn on a lamp, first the electrical resistance is destroyed by turning on the switch, then the electricity flows, and finally the lamp is lit. In the same way, in receiving abhisheka, destruction comes first, right at the beginning. Anything that is disorganized or confused, and any misconceptions about receiving abhisheka, get destroyed on the spot—immediately.

According to the tantric tradition, it is better not to get into tantra, but if we must get into it, we had better surrender. Having surrendered, we must give up the idea of survival. Survival means that we can still play our games, play our little tricks on the world. We have our usual routines, the little gadgets that we play with, the little colors that we pull out of our personality to make sure that we exist. But in tantra, it is not possible to play any games. So at the beginning it is necessary to give in completely. We have to surrender to groundlessness: There is no ground for us to develop security. As well we surrender to the fact that we cannot hold on to our ego, which by innuendo means that we surrender to the enlightened state of being. Then, actually, we do not have to do anything. Once we open, we just open.

All that is part of the first principle of abhisheka: destruction. When that first level of abhisheka takes place, it kills any unnecessary germs in our system. At that point, we have no hopes of manipulating anything at all. Then the flow of energy can take place. And after that, there is fulfillment: we finally begin to see the reality of what is possible in tantric experience. It is necessary for anyone involved with the discipline of vajrayana to understand the three principles of destruction, flow, and fulfillment. I am glad we could discuss these principles publicly, so that you will have a chance either to prepare yourselves or to run away. That creates a very open situation.

The student always has a chance to run away. We seem to have the concept that tantric discipline imposes itself on us, but what we are discussing is entirely self-imposed. The student might freak out at any time; he might feel weighted down, overclean, and overfilled. But in order to receive transmission, he has to stay in his own place, which is not particularly pleasurable.

To conclude, the role of guru in transmission is to electrify the student’s vessel, so that it becomes clean and clear, free of all kinds of materialistic germs, and then to pour the essence into it. And if he is to be electrified at all, to be cleaned out and filled up, the student must be waiting and ready. He has to be willing to be made into a good vessel. As a good vessel, the student feels that he is opening and taking part constantly. And as a good vessel, he could hold all sorts of heavy-handed liquids. In a good vessel, we could drink alcoholic beverages; that is, we could drink up dualistic thoughts. We could drink the blood of ego, which is killed on the spot.

SIX

The Vajra Master

M
ANY PEOPLE
have heard fascinating facts and figures about tantra, exciting stories about the “sudden path.” Tantra may seem seductive and appealing, particularly when it seems to coincide with modern notions of efficiency and automation. If we ask people whether they prefer to walk up the stairs or ride in an elevator, most people, if they are not used to working hard, will say they prefer to ride in the elevator. But that attitude is a problem in relating to tantra. If students believe that tantra is supposed to be the quick path, then they think they should get quick results. They do not want to waste their time. Instead they want to get their money’s worth, so to speak, and quickly become buddhas. They become impatient, and not only that, they become cowardly. They do not want to face pain or problems, because then they won’t get quick results. With that attitude, students have very little willingness to expose themselves and to face the state of panic of the tantric practitioner.

The student of tantra should be in a constant state of panic. That panic is electric and should be regarded as worthwhile. Panic serves two purposes: It overcomes our sense of smugness and self-satisfaction, and it sharpens our clarity enormously. It has been said by Padma Karpo and other great tantric teachers that studying tantra is like riding on a razor blade. Should we try to slide down the razor blade or should we just try to sit still? If we know how to slide down the razor blade, we might do it as easily as a child slides down a banister; whereas if we do not know the nature of the blade and we are just trying to prove our chauvinism, we might find ourselves cut in two. So the more warnings that are given about tantra, the more the student of tantra benefits. If the tantric master does not give enough warnings, the student cannot develop any real understanding of tantra at all, because he is not riding on the razor’s edge.

Panic is the source of openness and the source of questions. Panic is the source of open heart and open ground. Sudden panic creates an enormous sense of fresh air, and that quality of openness is exactly what tantra should create. If we are good tantra students, we open ourselves each moment. We panic a thousand times a day, 108 times an hour. We open constantly and we panic constantly. That ongoing panic points to the seriousness of the tantric path, which is so overwhelmingly powerful and demanding that it is better
not
to commit ourselves to it. But if we
must
get into it, we should take it seriously—absolutely seriously.

It is possible that by following the tantric path we could develop vajra indestructibility and a sudden realization of enlightenment. But it is equally possible that we could develop an indestructible ego and find ourselves burnt up, as if we were an overcooked steak. We might find that we have become a little piece of charcoal. So there are two different possibilities: We could discover our inherent vajra nature, or we could become a piece of charcoal.

There is also a price on the head of the teacher. Those masters and teachers of tantra who teach students at the wrong time, who choose the wrong moment or say the wrong thing, or who are not able to experience accurately what is taking place may be condemned. They too may be reduced into pieces of charcoal. Such mistakes in teaching are called the offense of
sang drok
(
gsang sgrogs
), which means declaring the secret at the wrong time. So there is a type of security system that has been set up in the vajrayana world.

If teachers feel that they can go outside the law, so to speak, outside the boundaries, or if they feel that they no longer need to commit themselves to the practice, they can be punished along with their students. It is because of this security system that the lineage of great tantric teachers has continued without interruption up to the present day. Everyone in the tantric lineage has panicked: The teachers have panicked and the students have panicked. Because of that healthy situation of panic, the tantric lineage has developed beautifully, smoothly, and healthily. Nobody has made mistakes. If anybody did make a mistake, he just vanished and became a piece of charcoal. Those who survived, both students and teachers, are those who developed vajra nature. Because of that they survived.

We might wonder why the vajrayana is kept secret at all. What is this famous tantric secret? The secret is not particularly exotic. It is not anything special. It simply refers to what we discover when we begin to play with the cosmos, the energy of the universe. As children we know that if we touch a naked wire we get a shock; we learn that by playing with our world. If we speed in our motorcar we will crash. We know that much. Here we are talking about the spiritual equivalent of that knowledge, which is a hundred times worse or a hundred times more powerful, depending upon how we would like to put it. We are talking about the energy that exists in the world. We first have a glimpse of that energy, we get completely fascinated by it, and then we begin to play with it. We are asking for trouble, as any sensible person would tell us.