The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (17 page)

The basic point of abhisheka is not to zap us with magical power but to bring us up slowly and gently so that we can experience and relate with ourselves simply. Because we exist and we have a body, therefore we can bathe ourselves. Having bathed, we can put our clothes on. Having dressed, we can put on our crown. Then we have something to hold in our hand and something to say. We can make a statement about why we are doing all this. And we have a name as well. This is the basic process of graduating from the ordinary world into the world of continuity, the tantric world. We finally become a real person. That is the basic meaning of abhisheka.

The ceremony of abhisheka is actually based on the example of the Buddha. It is said that Shakyamuni Buddha was once invited by King Indrabhuti to teach the dharma. The king said, “I would like to relate with my sense perceptions and my emotions. Could you give me some teachings so that I can work with them?” The Buddha said, “Oh, you want to hear tantra.” And the king said, “Yes.” Then the Buddha replied, “If that is the case, let me excuse my arhats and my hinayana and mahayana disciples from the room.” So he asked his disciples to leave. Then the Buddha appeared to the king in royal costume and taught the first tantra, the
Guhyasamaja
. That was the first presentation of tantra.

So the Buddha is seen in different ways at different levels of practice. Unlike hinayana and mahayana, at the vajrayana level the Buddha is dressed as a king: He has a crown, he has a scepter in his hand, he has a royal gaze, and he behaves like a king. This is quite a different approach than the traditional hinayana or mahayana view. In fact, the vajrayana approach could be quite shocking to practitioners of the lower yanas. That is why the Buddha excused all his other disciples from the room before he introduced the tantric teachings.

Abhisheka, or empowerment, plays an extremely important part in tantric literature, tantric ceremony, and the tantric tradition altogether. One of the reasons that tantra is so rich is because it actually relates with human experience as a physical situation rather than as a lofty idea. In the hinayana we are struggling to maintain our awareness, and in the mahayana we are trying to be kind to our neighbors. Vajrayana Buddhism respects those disciplines, but it also transcends them and becomes the greatest idea of all.

Vajrayana deals much more directly with ego than the previous two yanas. In the abhisheka of form, we actually bathe ego, coronate ego, and give ego a scepter. Finally, when ego finds itself with everything it wants, it begins to flop. It begins to be so embarrassed that it becomes nonexistent. Then we can begin to build a new kingdom of egolessness. That is the tantric way. Sometimes I wonder who thought up tantra. It constantly amazes me. But it happened; it exists. Somebody actually thought up such an idea and transmitted it to people—and it actually works. It is very amazing. I suppose we could call it magic.

In going through the landscape of the tantric tradition, I have been very careful not to introduce the juicy tidbits at the beginning. I am being very faithful and orthodox and presenting the tradition in the same way that it was presented to me. To begin with, we need panic. We need that sense of nervousness or uncertainty. It is absolutely necessary. And then, having gone through such a period already, we arrive at the point at which we are capable of receiving abhisheka. Then we are much more at home, and we are complimented by our teacher and our world. I experienced this myself in my training in Tibet.

In my education, I was constantly criticized. If I leaned back I was criticized and told that I should sit up. I was told that I should always make pleasant conversation with visiting dignitaries and that I should be hospitable to them. At that level, the training was very simple and not particularly tantric. Every time I did something right—or I thought I was doing something right—I was criticized even more heavily. I was cut down constantly by my tutor. He slept in the corridor outside my door, so I could not even get out. He was always there, always watching me. He would be serving me and watching me at the same time. My other teachers would all work through him so that they themselves did not have to put embarrassing pressure on me. Instead, they could pressure my tutor, and in turn my tutor would pressure me—which I thought was very clever. It was also very claustrophobic and somewhat painful.

I was constantly cut down. I had been brought up strictly since infancy, from the age of eighteen months, so that I had no other reference point such as the idea of freedom or being loose. I had no idea what it was like to be an ordinary child playing in the dirt or playing with toys or chewing on rusted metal or whatever. Since I did not have any other reference point, I thought that was just the way the world was. I felt somewhat at home, but at the same time I felt extraordinarily hassled and claustrophobic. It did not feel so good.

At the same time I knew that there were little breaks, like going to the bathroom—which was an enormous relief. The only time I was not being watched was when I went to the bathroom. It was my one free time. Usually I would feel an enormous rush of fresh air, because bathrooms were built overhanging cliffs and had big holes in the floor. I would feel the fresh air coming up, and at the same time I would know that nobody was watching me, telling me how to defecate properly. Apart from that, I was always watched. Even when I ate, I was watched and told how to eat properly, how to extend my arm, how to watch the cup, how to bring it to my mouth. If I made a big noise while swallowing, I was criticized for eating “crocodile style.” I was told that rinpoches, or other important tulkus, were not supposed to swallow crocodile style. Everything was very personal from that point of view—to say the least.

Then, very interestingly, I stopped struggling with the authorities, so to speak, and began to develop. I just went on and on and on. Finally that whole world began to become my reference point rather than being a hassle—although the world was full of hassles. At that point, my tutor seemed to become afraid of me; he began to say less. And my teachers began to teach me less because I was asking them too many questions. I was interested in what they had to say and I pursued them for more and more, so that they began to have a more relaxed approach than even I wanted.

My tutor was frightened because he did not know exactly how to handle me. I thought that maybe this was all some kind of joke, and that my teachers would leave me alone for ten days and then catch me again. But ten days went by, and a month went by, and finally six months—and nothing changed. The situation just went on and on. Something was actually working. Something was finally beginning to click. The discipline had become part of my system. My tutors and my teachers were pushed by me instead of my being pushed by them. I wanted to know more and more about what was happening, and they began to run out of answers. They were hassled by me because I was so wholehearted. They became afraid that they could not keep up with me anymore.

I’m telling you this because there are parallels between my own experience and that of other tantra students. It is a question of interest. Once you are really into something, you become part of that experience, or it becomes part of you. When you become part of the teachings, you are no longer hassled. You are no longer an entity separate from the teachings. You are an embodiment of them. That is the basic point.

ELEVEN

Being and Manifesting

T
HE TANTRIC APPROACH
is not mystical experience alone, but it is concerned with how we can perceive reality in a simple and direct way. In our normal confused, or samsaric, way of perceiving and handling the world, we perceive reality on the level of body, on the level of emotions, and on the level of mindlessness, which is traditionally known as basic ignorance. Body refers to basic self-consciousness, which includes the various sense perceptions: thought, vision, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Emotion includes aggression, passion, ignorance, jealousy, pride, and all other emotions and feelings. Mindlessness, or basic ignorance, refers to a state of total bewilderment: Fundamentally we have no idea what we are doing or what we are experiencing, and we are completely missing the point all the time. Those three major principles—body, emotions, and mindlessness—are how we experience our life.

By “body,” to begin with, we mean an actual physical body. Bodies may be well shaped, fat or thin, functional or nonfunctional. Some bodies see but cannot hear. Some bodies hear but cannot see. Some bodies feel but cannot see or hear. Some bodies hear and see but cannot feel, and some bodies can do the whole thing. There are all kinds of bodies, and there are all kinds of physical experiences, depending on whether we are lame or deaf or dumb or completely healthy. Still, we all have the same basic experience, that is, the experience of the body, the experience of reality at that very simple level.

In the sutras, the Buddhist scriptures, Buddha once said to Ananda: “Ananda, if there is no body, there is no dharma. If there is no food, there is no dharma. If there are no clothes, there is no dharma. Take care of your body, for the sake of the dharma.” Relating with the body is extremely important in the tantric tradition. However, we don’t make a personal “trip” out of it. We could become a vegetarian and sneer at meat eaters. We could wear pure cotton clothing and renounce wearing any leather. Or we could decide to search for a country to live in that is free from pollution. But any of those approaches could be going too far. When someone becomes a vegetarian, he stops eating meat, but he still might take a bloodthirsty delight in peeling bananas and crunching his teeth into peaches and cooking eggplants as meat substitutes. So our attempts to relate with the body can become very complicated.

Vajradhara. The dharmakaya buddha. A tantric manifestation of the Buddha, Vajradhara is depicted as dark blue
.

PAINTING BY SHERAPALDEN BERU. PHOTO BY GEORGE HOLMES AND BLAIR HANSEN.

I’m not particularly advocating eating meat or otherwise at this point. Rather, I am pointing out that we do not accept our body as it is, and we do not accept our world. We are always searching for some way to have an easy ride. When we feel unhappy or uncomfortable, we think that we would like to go somewhere else, up or down or wherever. Some people call it hell, some people call it heaven, but whatever it is, we would like to have an easy ride somewhere.

It is actually quite humorous how we view the cosmos, our world. We view it as if it were not a real world at all, but a world we could control. Sometimes we treat the world as a problem child who is trying to suggest all kinds of evil things to us. Sometimes we treat our world as a priest or master who is telling us that everything is good, that whatever we do is fine: There are flowers, there are meadows, there is wildlife, and the world is a fantastic place. But fundamentally, we haven’t really made up our mind what this world is all about. Sometimes we think we have, but there is still a flicker of doubt. Whenever a temptation comes up, we regard it as fantastically evil or challenging and we jump sideways, like a temperamental horse. There is a big problem with that: we have not accepted our world thoroughly, properly, and fully.

The world we are talking about is a very simple world, an extremely simple world which is made out of concrete, plastic, wood, stones, greenery, pollution, and thin air. Actually, every one of us is sitting or standing on that world. Shall we say this is the real world or should we pretend that the world is something else? You and I are both here. If we feel guilty, it’s too late. This is our world, here, right now. We could say, “Hey, that’s not true. I can go out in my car and drive up in the mountains. I can camp out in the mountains in my sleeping bag.” But sleeping in our sleeping bag is the same as sitting on a rug or carpet. Somehow we cannot get away from the world. This world is the real world, the actual world, the world we experience, the world in which we are thriving. This is the world that communicates to our sense perceptions. We can smell incense or tobacco or food cooking; we can see and hear what is around us. This is our world.

Wherever we are, we carry this world with us. If we go out to a lecture, we see the stage, the backdrop, the podium, the speaker; we smell the musty air in the hall; and we hear the seat creaking under us. When we go home, we take this world with us. We look back again and again, remembering where we have been, so we can’t get away from this world. By the time we look back, of course, “this world” has become “that world,” which is the world of the past. But our memory is still of this world, nevertheless. Otherwise we could not have a memory. So we are still in this world, this real world made out of thisness, in fact, made out of us. If somebody asks what this world is made out of, what the substance of it is, it is 75 percent “I” and 25 percent “am.” So this is our world: “I am” is our world, and we cannot get away from it.

The next level is the world of emotions. It is not exactly a different world, but it is a different perspective, seeing things from a different angle. There are many ways that emotions color our experience. When we are depressed and angry, we begin to feel a grudge and to grind our teeth. We find our world fantastically aggressive: Everything is irritating, including fence posts in the countryside that have harmlessly placed themselves there with barbed wire or electric wire going across them. We feel that we have been invaded, raped. We feel so bad about this world.