The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (43 page)

S:
So these ideas that you’re throwing out are not so much the real study—

TR:
I think it’s a matter of getting the perspective and seeing the consequences of the practices. Our goal is to work with tantra. Eventually you’re going to do that. But as far as the individual meditation practice of the group here is concerned, everybody is working purely on the hinayana level to begin with. But there are possibilities beyond that, so let us not make a militant vow that what we are doing is good [and we’re not going to do anything else]. That seems to be one of the problems the Zen tradition is faced with. You sit and meditate—this is the only thing, and everybody becomes highly militant and fierce and aggressive about it, saying that there are no other directions and this is the only thing you have. If I may say so.

Student:
Rinpoche, don’t we run the risk of not fully relating to any of the various stages? You know, we have one leg over here in hinayana and another leg over there in tantra—that sort of thing?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I don’t think so. In any case, we can see what happens as we go along.

Student:
It seems like this tantric approach is going to fill me with false pride and cause me to relate to something that’s not real. How do I keep relating to the hinayana?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Your pain in your life is real enough, so that will take care of you. Maybe we could say that your pain is on the hinayana level, and that will take care of you. But when your pain has developed to the vajrayana level, that will be another matter. We can discuss that later.

Student:
It’s not clear to me how tantric visualization practice relates to the way you described tantra as coming back to the world, getting back into the energy of samsara.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s relating to your ambition to become a powerful king, a cosmic ruler. That is possible. At least you can become the ruler of a household. And tantric visualization is visualizing yourself as the ruler, the exalted one, a sambhogakaya buddha, wearing a crown, being powerful, holding a scepter. Which is coming back to samsara, with the inspiration of nirvana. The original [hinayana] idea was to abandon everything, be a beggar, own nothing. Shouldn’t we visualize ourselves as beggars, wearing ragged clothes, eating no food, being hungry? Shouldn’t we try to accomplish beggarhood? No, in tantra, it’s just the opposite. You’re rich, you’re the universal monarch. You wear a crown, jewelry, you hold a scepter, and are the conqueror of the whole universe. From that point of view, you have come back to samsara.

S:
But the practice itself of visualizing seems very unworldly. There is a big difference between visualizing and actually being a king, an absolute monarch.

TR:
Visualization is the middle part of a sandwich. To begin with, you have formless meditation, and you end with formless meditation. In between the two, you have visualization happening. And this is also supposedly conditioned by the shunyata experience. So it is transformed samsara rather than samsara as neurosis.

Student:
You have sometimes spoken of meditation as a process that grows on its own, starting with the initial form of shamatha meditation. Are these visualizations a continuation of that in the sense that they develop on their own, or are there points where there is outside instruction from a teacher?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
As far as you basic formless meditation is concerned, that goes along through natural growth. Therefore you can afford to encompass visualization as well. But visualization is a new technique that is taught to you.

S:
So it’s something that comes from the outside, isn’t it?

TR:
Yes. It’s similar to when your teacher says, “Go into retreat” or “Take a job” or “Get married.”

Student:
When you are this pride in visualization, is that like in the
Heart Sutra
where it says, “Emptiness is emptiness?”

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. Emptiness is emptiness, therefore it has form—in the image of the eight-year-old emperor.

Student:
Are these symbols of royalty—the crown and the scepter and so on—symbolic of taking responsibility toward beings?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. That is an extension of the bodhisattva’s way. As a bodhisattva, you were going to take care of sentient beings. Now you are going to be the ruler of all sentient beings, because you are not discreet anymore. You know what you’re doing. Now what you’re doing is a greater responsibility—arranging a cosmic energy structure as though you are a king.

Student:
There is something I don’t understand. You just said that your desire is to be the king. Earlier you said that you considered it cowardly and stupid to try to pull yourself up to be the gods. I don’t see how those two things reconcile.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s the whole point. If you don’t have the basic framework of shunyata and egoless practice of meditation, then it would be a pathetic gesture to try to appoint yourself king but not quite make it. Whereas if you have the basic training behind you connected with egolessness and awareness of suffering and impermanence, you don’t even have to say it—you just become one.

Student:
There seems to be a cultural situation involved here. Having been brought up to see everything in terms of democracy or anarchy or even communism, I can’t imagine a king being anything other than a high-paid crook. Being that is desirable in some way, but—

Student:
It strikes me that what we would like to be is president.

Student:
We can’t see a king as something positive.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That’s a problem.

Student:
I don’t see the point of being king. Why take on that position?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
What else would you suggest? Don’t you want to have control of yourself, be king of yourself? That’s it [that’s what it amounts to]. You could visualize yourself as king of yourself. It doesn’t have to be a king who is running a whole nation. You are the nation. You are the king. It’s the same thing. Gesundheit.

Student:
Along the same lines, do you see tantric visualizations in America taking a different form than they did in Tibet?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That has occurred to me, actually. But there is a big conflict about that among tantric masters. Very practically, should Americans be allowed to visualize seed syllables in Roman letters? Or should they memorize the Sanskrit or Tibetan? It is questionable, and I hope one day to sort that question out and put the whole thing on a real footing. That would seem to call for getting Shingon masters from Japan, Mongolian tantric masters, and Tibetans all to meet together. [They could discuss these questions and come to a definite conclusion.] Is there any magic in visualizing Sanskrit? The Tibetans didn’t visualize in Sanskrit, but instead in Tibetan. At the time Buddhism was introduced into Tibet, Tibet was regarded as a land of savages. In fact it was called the land of the pretas, hungry ghosts, because Tibetans were so poor. They also were not as culturally rich as the Indians with their Brahmanistic culture. Still, they read the letters of the seed syllables in their Tibetan form. But certain practitioners would have a reaction against using Roman letters, because Tibetan calligraphy is more aesthetically appealing. They might think Roman letters look very flat, ordinary, silly. We have to work on those areas. I think that’s our next project, to try and find a solution to these problems. Personally, I am more for nativizing—for making American tantra American tantra rather than imported tantra, as the Tibetans made tantra into Tibetan tantra. I’m all for it.

Student:
The only thing I can think of that is like the tantric approach in the Western tradition is alchemy. The visualizations are not just the same, but in alchemy there’s the visualization of a king. There are visualizations of a whole pantheon of aspects of the self—kings, queens, the coming together of the brother and the sister. I don’t see these as too different from the symbolism presented in tantra.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Sure. Automatically the Western equivalent of tantra has been happening. There is another link of similarity: Christ is referred to as a king. The Christ principle is regarded as that of a conqueror or king. But what is the practical application for how Buddhist students should visualize and work with this symbolism? Should we visualize Mahavairochana in medieval Indian costume, or should we visualize him in medieval Western costume?

S:
Alchemy would use a Roman king. You know, these are very powerful images. There is something in the West—

TR:
I think there is. But you see the problem is that it gets more complicated when we begin to visualize wrathful deities with so many arms, so many eyes, so many heads. Western culture hasn’t been outrageous enough to visualize a person with so many arms, so many eyes, who eats you up on the spot. The whole thing becomes so generous and kind, so cultured.

Student:
There are deities like those in Bosch and Brueghel.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I hope so.

Student:
Rinpoche, could you explain how this kind of practice involving the conception of oneself as king of oneself relates to the bodhisattva’s aim of working for the benefit of all sentient beings?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It’s going further with the same thing. The bodhisattva works for all sentient beings as a servant. Now that servant begins to take over and run the whole show as a revolutionary government, which is an entirely different twist. That’s why there’s a big gap between the bodhisattva path and tantra. A lot of people complain about that. Practitioners of the bodhisattva path really do not understand the implications of the power, the vajra power. I think I already mentioned Dr. Conze, who is in fact terrified by the idea of tantra, because of such principles as the king principle. How could such a king principle be introduced as Buddhist idea, he wonders, because Buddhists are so kind and sociologically oriented. They are kind people who would never think of ruling a country. But that point of view is problematic.

Student:
You mentioned the other day that at some point the guru is going to mess around with your life. Does that idea come from tantra?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
No, that’s a mahayana idea. That’s the saving grace. In fact, if you were a tantric logician trying to refute the mahayanists, you could pick up that point. You could say that the mahayana teacher also minds the student’s business. Then that approach could be elevated to that of a ruler rather than just a nosy friend. That is one of the links that exist between the mahayana and the vajrayana. We should tell Dr. Conze about that.

Student:
Does one kill Rudra with a sword, or does one let him die a natural death?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Both. By the sword
is
a natural death.

Student:
Do you see Castaneda’s Don Juan as an expression of Western tantra?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I see Don Juan as Western tantra on the Yogachara level.

Student:
Suzuki Roshi, who wrote
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
, says that any single method has its limitations, its techniques. He said if you do not realize the limitations of the particular method you are involved in, someday you’re going to sink into a deep depression. The ground is going to fall out from underneath you. What do you see as the limitations of the tantric Buddhist viewpoint? And do you think there’s another path that arrives at the same place as tantra?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The tantric viewpoint is not one solid thing. It has six steps, six levels, ending up at the maha ati level, which looks down on the whole thing as being confused. Maha ati cannot be attacked or challenged, because it doesn’t advocate anything or criticize anything. By being itself, it realizes that the lower yanas are simple-minded. After that, I think there’s nothing. Tantra is not regarded as one block. There are several stages to tantra anyway.

Student:
That stage that you call ati, at the point where you’re looking at everything as confused—you have a particular term for that, and you call that ati. You call it something because of the perspective you’re looking at. That’s a space. Now, obviously that space doesn’t have a name. Do you think that you have to go through a Buddhist perspective, where you call various spaces various yanas, to arrive at that stage?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Not necessarily. But if you transcend ati, then you are criticizing ati from a samsaric point of view, rather than seeing it with its own perspective of the highest enlightenment. You begin to regress. It is like you have climbed up to a ridge, and then you begin to slide down. That’s for sure. Of course, there don’t have to be doctrinal names or ideas.

SEVEN

The Five Buddha Families and Mahamudra

O
N THE BASIS
of our discussion of the kriyayogayana, we can say that basically what is happening in the tantric approach at this point is trying to build a relationship between yourself and your projection. We are still working with the projection and the projector. A relationship between those two can come about because of the tremendous emphasis on precision in kriyayoga. That precision relates to our working base, which is the basic tendency to reshape the world according to your particular nature. The purity of the kriyayogayana allows us a lot of space, a lot of room to explore the functioning of phenomena on the energy level.

The next yana is upayogayana, which means the yana of action or application. That has the sense of relating with our basic nature, our innate nature. The innate nature of different individuals can be described in terms of the five buddha families.