The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (32 page)

Student:
I have a question about inspiration or motivation. It seems that in the hinayana, the motivation is suffering. In mahayana at some point this is transformed into compassion, so that one continues because one has a sense of working, not for oneself, but for all beings. But, going beyond that, I don’t understand the motivation or inspiration for vajrayana. Why would one go further?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
One of the interesting points about vajrayana is that it does not need to be nursed. It just happens that once you have developed the fullest level of compassion as an accomplished mahayanist, you find yourself being a vajrayanist. That’s the general pattern that applies. There’s no particular motivation as such. The only thing is a sense of transcendental fascination with the universe and the play of its energy, its emotions, and so on. Everything is such a magnificent display of the mandala pattern, and you can’t keep yourself from looking at it.

Student:
If mahayana is “gone-beyond” wisdom, the wisdom of the paramitas, then would going beyond that, beyond the paramitas, be vajrayana?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
You could say that, yes.

S:
So in some sense, it’s the natural conclusion of the mahayana.

TR:
You could say that too, yes.

S:
Thank you.

TR:
Anything you say.

Student:
Rinpoche, where is the spirituality in tantra? It feels like tantra could be very materialistic?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
How is that?

S:
One thing is relating to one’s sense perceptions as real. Couldn’t that just be spiritual materialism, perhaps? It just seems to me that after mahayana, the spirituality becomes vague.

TR:
If we just started with tantra, we might end up cultivating Rudra, which is very dangerous. Tantra can only develop by going through the other yanas first, destroying all kinds of spiritual materialism.

It’s very interesting: You can’t say tantra is a spiritual thing exactly, nor is it a worldly thing. That’s why tantra is said to transcend both samsara and nirvana. There is a term in Tibetan that Herbert Guenther translates “coemergent wisdom.” The idea of coemergence here is that you are on neither side; you are not on the side of ignorance nor on the side of wisdom. Because of that, a lot of hinayanists and mahayanists panicked about tantra—because it’s completely unspiritual. On the other hand, they can’t say tantra is worldly, because there is nothing worldly about tantra either—because of the craziness.

Student:
What advice would you give for dealing with somebody who is in vajra hell?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Let me go over the idea of vajra hell once again, if I may. Having heard the vajrayana teachings, instead of becoming awakened, you become deaf and dumb to the teachings. The medicine turns into poison. And there’s nothing one can do for such a person. The only thing is to imprison them in a vajra den, which is vajra hell. It’s like you have a prison cell made out of books about the vajrayana all around you. They imprison you. But you might be interested some time or other just in pulling one out, and maybe you might read it. Sheer claustrophobia brings some kind of hope. It is a rather horrific place to be.

S:
Would an ordinary prison be any kind of comparison to vajra hell?

TR:
I don’t think so. It’s much more than that. It’s a total experience, like having cancer throughout your whole body. But you can’t even die out of it. You’re fed by the disease.

Student:
Does it have an eternal quality? You said there’s no escape from it.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Claustrophobia is eternity in this case. There’s no windows and no doors. You can’t even exist, but this threat of nonexistence becomes the food that keeps you alive.

S:
There’s no possibility of a future way out in terms of a bardo?

TR:
The
Tibetan Book of the Dead
describes two types of advanced rebirth that can take place. Either you go up to the level of dharmakaya without a bardo experience or else you go down to vajra hell, also without a bardo experience. Because a bardo is some kind of chance or opportunity you have.

Student:
Would it be beneficial to try to help somebody in vajra hell?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Helping doesn’t particularly change the karma of that person.

S:
So it’s best to avoid such people?

TR:
Best to leave them as they are.

S:
But how does that relate to the bodhisattva vow?

TR:
In taking the bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings, you could add “except those who are in vajra hell.” Even bodhisattvas can’t reach the helpless.

Student:
Can a person in vajra hell ever get out by becoming aware of himself, say, by reading those books that make up his prison?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes, that’s the only possibility. Through sheer claustrophobia, you might be able to squeeze something out of yourself.

Student:
You said that at the end of this journey, there is the realization that there was never a need to make this journey at all. But at the same time, isn’t the journey absolutely necessary?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is necessary in order to realize that your journey was futile. It is called a path, but it is not really a path, because you are really neither coming nor going. But still there is an illusion of a journey. That’s why the various levels are called
yanas
, which means “vehicles.” You think you are moving. But maybe it is the landscape that is moving.

Student:
Doesn’t the analogy of vehicles also contain the idea that you are being carried by the energy of the path rather than you yourself making any progress?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That is also possible. That depends on how much you are identified with the teachings personally. Once you are identified with the teachings personally, then development is sort of like wine fermenting. It ferments by itself.

Student:
You used the analogy of an electric fence around a cow pasture. If the cow tries to go beyond the fence, it gets a shock. There’s some kind of painful situation. I take that to mean that once a person is on the path, there is some kind of safeguard that the guru, through his insight, provides. Then, in order to flip out and go to vajra hell, it is necessary to make some sort of egoistic assertion to the effect that the guru is no longer able to discriminate properly what is right and what is wrong for us. Is that what this vajra hell thing is about? And then you are left to go off on your own?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Are you asking if that kind of a development is the cause of vajra hell?

S:
Yes.

TR:
I think so. Some sort of alienation takes place between the teacher and the student. There is the story of Rudra, one of the first persons to go to vajra hell. He and a fellow student, a dharma brother, were studying with the same master. They had a disagreement about how to interpret the master’s instructions. They were taking opposite extremes in carrying out their practice, and each of them was sure that he was right. They decided to go to the teacher and ask for his comment. When the teacher told Rudra that he was wrong, Rudra became so angry that he drew his sword and killed his teacher on the spot. Then he ended up in vajra hell. It is that kind of alienation.

Student:
Is going to vajra hell the equivalent of attaining egohood, or are they two different things?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Vajra hell is not quite complete egohood. It’s still part of the journey. But when you come out of vajra hell without any realization, then you attain the real egohood, which is the state of Rudra. You turn yourself into a demon.

S:
So you’re not in vajra hell when you attain egohood.

TR:
No, egohood seems to be quite difficult to attain. As difficult as enlightenment. Doing a really good job on it is very difficult.

Student:
It seems to me that some act of surrendering is definitely necessary. But is that something you can try to do, or do you just have to wait and let it happen? Is it something you have to stop trying to do?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The general policy seems to be that you have to surrender artificially to begin with. You have high ideals, some inspiration about what the possibilities might be, but you can’t quite click into those possibilities spontaneously at the beginning. So you have to start by creating artificial openness, by surrendering artificially. This is precisely what taking the refuge vow or the bodhisattva vow is. It is artificial actually—you are not up to it. But the commitment involved begins to have an effect on your state of being, for the very reason that you cannot wipe out your past. That artificial gesture becomes part of the landscape of your life; then something there begins to ferment, begins to work.

Part Two

NINE YANAS SEMINAR

SAN FRANCISCO

MAY 1973

ONE

Suffering, Impermanence, Egolessness

T
HE NINE YANAS
of the Buddha’s way were developed to enable people—psychologically, personally, physically—to surrender themselves to the Buddha’s teaching. The nine yanas seem to be an absolute necessity. If we did not have the first yana, nothing could be achieved at all. We have to start with the first step, which is the shravakayana, in which everything is looked at in terms of a human situation, a physical situation. Here the Buddha is regarded as son of man who still had a physical obligation to this earth. He was also wise. He saw everything in our life situation as consisting of pain. But at the same time the nature of pain is characterized by impermanence, and the experiencer of the pain is regarded as nonexistent. So there are these three points: The nature of life is pain; the nature of pain is impermanent; and the experiencer of pain is nonexistent.
¹

You might ask, if the experiencer of pain is nonexistent, how come there are situations in which we feel that we do experience pain and pleasure, very solid situations? How do we know that this nonexistence is the case? If the Buddha said that being is nonexistent, how do we experience pain and how do we experience impermanence?

We simply say, “I don’t know about everything else, but I still feel pain. I do feel pain. I do feel frustrated. I do feel unhappy, I really do. I don’t know about the impermanence or nonexistence of my being, but I simply do experience pain, I sure do.” Well, in some sense, that’s great. At least you have found some relationship with the teaching. If you really do experience pain and suffering in its own way, that’s wonderful, fantastic.

Are you sure, though, that you are really experiencing pain, experiencing it in the fullest way? “Well, I’m not even certain of that, but I do feel some kind of discomfort. I do experience pain when I’m pushed into a corner, but during the rest of my life, I’m not so certain whether I actually experience pain or not. I do experience pain when somebody hits me, cheats me, or insults me. Then I do feel extreme pain, discomfort, anger, and so forth. But the rest of the time I’m not so sure whether I feel pain as a continual thing happening to me. All the same, I feel that there’s something hanging out that’s bugging me; and I don’t feel absolutely free either. Particularly when I check up on what’s happening with me, I feel funny. I feel some sense of being trapped, but I don’t know what it’s all about. Maybe this is happening, but maybe also I’m just imagining it. I can’t say. Something is happening. Sometimes I feel haunted, and sometimes I feel I’m just being silly—I should forget the whole thing. I should just go out and enjoy myself and do my own thing, whatever I want. But even if I try to do that, I can’t really do it, because I still stop and look back at myself and what I’m doing. And once I begin to check what I’m doing, I feel uncomfortable. Something is bugging me somewhere. Something is happening behind my back, as if I had a huge burden that I’m carrying all the time. But I’m not sure if this is the thing that’s happening to me or I’m just imagining it. Maybe I should stop thinking altogether. But I already thought of that and tried it. The more I try to shake off the watcher, the more I feel I have to make sure that I have shaken him off. I couldn’t shake him off because I was being watched all the time by my shaking-off project that was happening to me.”

Maybe Buddha had similar experiences, even identical ones. There was a sense of ambition to become a spiritual or religious person. Buddha went so far as to leave home. He left his parents and his wife and infant child. He fled from his palace and plunged into the world of yogic teachers, Hindu masters. But still something didn’t work, because in some sense he was trying too hard, trying to become great, the greatest spiritual warrior of the century. He was trying to achieve something; he was concerned with achieving and with saving himself.

That seems to be the problem that we encounter all the time. We feel uncertain because, though we feel we know what direction we should go in, when we try to follow that direction, that itself seems to become a source of ignorance. The direction we were following seems to turn into clouds and clouds of darkness. Finally we begin to lose our sense of direction. But that seems to be the basic point: In relation to that, we discover pain, duhkha. That pain is a self-existing thing that we cannot escape. Beyond the pain, we try to find the source of the pain, the origin of the pain, but we don’t find it. We find bewilderment and fogginess, uncertainty of all kinds. But that
is
the discovery of the origin of pain, which is a very important discovery indeed.

Discovering the origin of pain does not necessarily mean that we should give up hope, or that we should give up fear, for that matter. Giving up means disregarding the whole thing rather than working with it.