The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (40 page)

Similarly we could say that the teaching of the three marks of existence is a very samsaric statement. Life is pain, miserable. Impermanence—it’s obvious: People are dying, we are all dying, constantly. Egolessness means that we have no substance whatsoever to hang on to. These are samsaric statements, obviously—the portrait of samsara. But embodying them in vajrayanic language makes them extremely powerful, tremendously powerful.

If you read Guenther’s book on Naropa, you will probably find those three described as the three gates of liberation—in one of his footnotes, I think. That would be worth looking up.
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The whole point here is that tantric philosophy—we call it philosophy for lack of a better word—speaks the language of samsara. Tantra is the language of samsara—the redefined language of samsara. After one has gone through all the spiritual trips of the hinayana and the mahayana, tantra is coming to the world. But in a somewhat, we could say, reformed way. It is more intelligent than the samsara-samsara approach. The tantric approach is samsara plus samsara rather than purely samsarasamsara. It is super-samsara, very intelligent samsara.

That is why tantra has been looked down upon by a lot of the hinayana schools and certain mahayana schools. And even in the twentieth century we have scholars who look down on tantra as being samsaric.

Dr. Edward Conze, a noted Buddhist scholar, is highly resentful of the existence of tantra. He would like to make the mahayana the glorious peak of Buddhism, make that the highest idea we could connect with. But then he finds there is another pyramid rising above that, and he says, “Oh, those tantric people are just freaks who just want to make love and drink. It’s purely samsara, no good.” Which is quite right from his point of view.

It is like Nagarjuna at an early age.
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When he was a young man, he was an impressive, handsome logician of a mahayana school. At that stage, he would have defended Buddhism from tantra. But as he grew older and more experienced and began to think about himself twice, he became a tantric siddha. And that’s the process Naropa went through as well. Why didn’t he just stay at Nalanda University, remain a scholar? He couldn’t do it. When people get older and more mature and begin to think twice about life, they always come back to tantra. That’s true. It always happens that way. You may not call yourself a tantric practitioner as such, but you find yourself being one anyway.

The basic idea of tantra from this point of view is the sameness of samsara and nirvana. The samsaric experience with its chaos and problems is obviously neurosis. Neurotic problems should be related to with detachment and openness, from an entirely new angle.

Why should we be too polite to samsara or to nirvana? Why should we be to cultured, polite, and reasonable? Let us turn the world upside down! Let us! Let us see the spacious quality of the earth and the earthly quality of space. That’s what we will see if we turn the world upside down. That is the tantric approach to life. Space is solid, earth is spacious. And by no means can you call this perverted, because there is no one to judge what is perverted and what is not. There’s no reason. Who is the perverter? There’s no one to watch. You just become either the earth or the space anyway. Nobody judges that. That is called crazy wisdom. There’s no watcher to moderate, to gauge moral obligations of any kind. You are doing it yourself.

So I would like you to understand before we continue: The basic point in tantra at this point is a further approach to reality. Reality could be regarded as unreal, and unreality could be regarded as reality. That’s the logic of tantra, fundamentally speaking. That’s why samsara is regarded as nirvana and nirvana is regarded as samsara. And we do not have any obligation to stick to one doctrine or another. We are free from all dogma.

Student:
Is the metaphor “stopping the world” [used by Carlos Castaneda] a tantric term from your point of view?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t think so. “Stopping the world” sounds too idealistic. Tantra creates more worlds. You have hundreds of millions of deities happening.

Student:
Some time ago, when people used to ask you about LSD and other drugs, you described the drug experience as super-samsara. I feel confused, because at that time you used the term in a negative sense, and now you’re using it in a positive sense.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s very interesting. It is precisely a tantric statement in either case. When you think something is super-samsara, it is turned upside down and made super-nirvana. When you think of something as super-nirvana, it is turned upside down and made into super-samsara. LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs could be regarded as an adolescent level of nirvana. Therefore, it is super-samsara. I still maintain that. People speak about all kinds of inspirations they have gotten out of those experiences. They think it’s nirvana, but it’s still a little samsaric version of super-samsara.

Student:
Could you describe how a student’s relation to his teacher is affected by these various stages on the path. What is the importance of the teacher at different points?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That is very important at any point. You need someone who will perform operations on you and will guide you and challenge you—a physical guru who lives on this planet. And speaks your language, preferably. And behaves like you, preferably. Someone like that is necessary, absolutely necessary at all points. There’s no doubt that you would try to get away into your imagination of a cosmic guru. You can’t do that. You need guidance all the time. Even if you realize cosmic guruhood or achieve cosmic consciousness, you still need someone to bring those down to the level of “I do exist.” The guru is absolutely necessary; there’s no doubt about that.

Student:
Is the interpreter to be ignored or actively thrown out?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Actively thrown out. If necessary, call the police.

S:
Who throws the interpreter out?

TR:
You. Who else?

Student:
Could you say something about children and shunyata?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Children and shunyata? Children and shunyata? I don’t know. Well, they have a potential for shunyata, but they already have their karmic debts developed within themselves, which we really can’t do very much about.

People have lots of trips, thinking their children can be scared or manipulated into a good psychological state of being. There are a lot of ideas about that. But it seems that you can’t do that. When the children have developed to at least eighteen years of age, at which point the parents are able to see what the child’s basic psychological functioning is like, then you can work with it. But I don’t think you can regard children as fundamentally innocent persons. That ignores their whole karmic debt. If you think you are born pure and get fucked up by your life as you grow, that also suggests you could commit suicide to cut off karmic debts. Why don’t you stop your life, kill yourself? Then you will be free. That seems to be one of the problems with that point of view.

In any case, children have their own hidden neuroses. At least as I watch my own children, I see it happens that way. Children have their own style of neurosis, and when they get to a certain age, like eighteen or maybe thirteen, they begin to speak out their demands, make their demands in their own style, which could be quite different from the style of the parents. And then, if the parents are well versed in working with people other than their children, then at that point they could work with them, relate with their style, and teach them.

S:
But it seems that when children look at a table, they have a very simple version of it.

TR:
Yes, naturally, they do, they do. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a pure version. It’s just that they haven’t grown up, they haven’t seen the viciousness of the world very much; therefore their ideas may be very innocent. But by no means are they particularly pure. [Thinking] that would be a big problem. In that case, there would be no reincarnation.

I suspect that all kinds of dangerous things may be coming up in my children. [Those things] haven’t woken up, you know, but later they’re going to come out. There may be Rudrahood of all kinds that hasn’t come out so far. But we do not know.

Student:
Rinpoche, you talked about the attitude toward suffering in the hinayana, and then that complete sort of flip that’s done in tantra with regard to suffering—taking it as energy or food. But I’m not clear what the mahayana relationship to suffering is.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The mahayana relates to suffering just as a working base. It’s a question of discipline. Whenever you feel pain, you are supposed to work harder. It’s like when your tire gets a puncture, you have to work harder—fix the tire—to keep driving along.

Student:
According to the theory of dependent origination, when there is cessation of desire and attachment, you also have cessation of karma, of the life-and-death cycle. How does that relate to tantric philosophy?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
In think it’s the same thing. If you transmute karmic relational action into energy rather than dualistic fixation, it becomes energy rather than karmic debts. It’s a matter of attitude, a matter of having a sense of confidence that those neurotic hang-ups are meaningless and you have to transmute them.

Student:
Are they still there, though?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The energy is there, but the neurosis is not there. That’s the difference.

Student:
Is it possible to deal with emotions using that principle? And if so, how do you develop enough detachment to do that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Detachment, did you say? I don’t see why you would become detached, particularly. In fact, you would be more loving toward your energy and emotions. They’re a working situation, a workable situation, in any case. And if you begin to realize they are workable situations, then they begin to give
you
some kind of guidelines as well. The whole thing becomes a mutual project, rather than you just trying to get something out of it, to win something else over [for yourself].

Student:
Could you say something more about working with the neurosis in emotions?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Emotions
are
neurosis, as we said earlier, but they’re not regarded as bad or good. You try to find the nature of the neurosis, of the emotions, rather than relate with the manifestations of them. Manifestations would be, say, killing somebody, making love to somebody, or throwing somebody out of your house.

S:
You seem to say, follow it down to the root.

TR:
The root, yes.

S:
How do you do that?

TR:
You just do it. When you ask how to do it, you are asking for sedatives or gloves or hammers or pliers. “How do I do that so that I don’t have to get my hands greasy?” It’s like you’re saying, “I have to unscrew this thing on my car. Should I use gloves?” There’s no how. You just do it. It’s also a matter of trust in buddha nature, trust that you are going to pick up intelligent guidelines within yourself. If you have enough trust, you’re going to do it. That’s the whole point. Everybody is able to do anything. Everybody is able to act out of basic sanity, in an enlightened fashion, in any case. But nobody has trusted them to be able to do it. That’s the problem. There’s a lot of hypocrisy going on—self-destructive things happening—based on self-condemnation. People feel basically condemned. That’s the problem. I’m sure we can do it. I’ve seen that people can do it. I did it myself.

Student:
What does the ever-present energy or force you were talking about have to do with crazy wisdom?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Ever-present force is the basic field, the ground that crazy wisdom dances on. The wisdom is there, and crazy wisdom is the action of it. In tantric iconography we find pictures of the shakta and shakti, the principal figure and his consort. The consort activates the energy of the principal figure.

Student:
You said that the three marks of existence are used for inspiration in tantra. I was wondering whether the six paramitas of the bodhisattva are used to do a similar thing.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. We could discuss that as we discuss more about tantra. Yes, the virtuousness of the mahayana path, of the six paramitas, transforms into an entirely different area. They are no longer virtuous alone. They become crazy-wisdom expressions.

Student:
Does Zen practice have anything to do with tantra?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Zen practice is a Yogachara meditative practice that developed in China and Japan. Beyond that, there is the Madhyamaka philosophy, which goes beyond the Zen tradition and Zen philosophy based on the Yogachara. But the craziness of the Zen tradition leads toward the Madhyamaka path. A lot of Zen masters have managed to get into that as well: for instance, when they did things like burning the image of the Buddha or tearing up their textbooks. Those actions are expressions of crazy wisdom. Strictly in the Madhyamaka style, however, rather than in the tantric style. So the Zen tradition brings crazy wisdom to the sutra teachings, the mahayana, rather than leading to tantra itself. You cannot say Zen is tantra. That’s impossible. Zen is Zen, and tantra is tantra. You cannot say Zen is tantra, because there’s never enough tantrum in it to begin with tantra.

Student:
In hinayana and mahayana, they talk about the middle way. Is tantra also on the middle way, or does it turn that upside down?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Tantra is regarded as an extreme way rather than the middle way.

S:
You talked about a kind of reverse.