The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (52 page)

6
. Herbert V. Guenther (trans.),
The Life and Teaching of Naropa
(Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1986). Cf. also
Naropa
in Glossary.

7
. See
Nagarjuna
in Glossary.

8
. Herukas are male, and dakinis female, deities visualized in tantric practice as embodiments of various aspects of awakened mind. On dharmakaya, see note 1 for part one, chapter 5.

9
. Guhyasamaja is one of the principal herukas of the anuttarayoga tantra.

Chapter 6. Introduction to Tantra

1
. “Seed syllable” is
bija mantrar
in Sanskrit: a single syllable, usually Sanskrit, that represents the essential reality of a particular deity.

2
. The Nyingma is one of the four main orders of Buddhism in Tibet. It follows the earliest tradition of vajrayana Buddhism in Tibet, that of the Old Translation school. The other three orders are Kagyü, Sakya, and Geluk, which follow the New Translation school. See part two, chapter 9, “Mahamudra and Maha Ati.”

3
. See
Vajrasattva
in Glossary.

4
. Atisha Dipankara (980/90–1055 CE), a Buddhist scholar of royal family, was a teacher at the great Indian monastic university of Vikramashila. He spent the last twelve years of his life in Tibet and founded the Kadampa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, which later merged with the Kagyü and Geluk traditions.

5
. A person becoming a Buddhist takes refuge in the “three jewels,” the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha (the community of Buddhist practitioners). This means surrendering all other sources of refuge, such as prestige, wealth, or other doctrines.

6
. Shamatha and vipashyana are the two main modes of meditation common to all forms of Buddhism. For shamatha (Tib.
shi-ne
), see part one, chapter 2, “Hopelessness.” The Sanskrit term
vipashyana
(Pali
vipassana;
Tib.
lhakthong
) means “insight” or “clear seeing.” Vipashyana meditation emphasizes broad or panoramic awareness rather than focused mindfulness as in shamatha.
Trempa nyewar jokpa
is a Tibetan phrase that literally means “mindfulness or awareness that is resting closely.” It refers to ongoing bare attention to every detail of the mind’s activity through resting undistractedly in awareness. While this is, properly speaking, an aspect of shi-ne, it is also indispensable for the development of lhakthong.

7
. See note 1 for chapter 5.

Chapter 7. The Five Buddha Families and Mahamudra

1
. This comment sounds a bit odd nowadays, but it accurately reflects tendencies of the early seventies, primarily associated with hippies but also cropping up in people of other sociological descriptions.

2
. The jnanakaya is more usually referred to in this context as the
jnanasattva
, a Sanskrit term meaning “wisdom being.” In the early tantric yanas, a distinction is made between the practitioner’s visualization of the deity, which is known as the
samayasattva
(Skt., “commitment being”), and the janaasattva. Whereas the samayasattva is regarded as the mere product of the practitioner’s psychology, the jnanasattva, which descends upon the samayasattva and empowers it, is considered to be the very reality of the deity.

3
. Yogi Bhajan is a Sikh spiritual teacher who has a large following in America.

4
. A yidam is a deity that a practitioner especially practices visualizing and identifying with, one that corresponds to his or her psychological makeup or basic nature.

Chapter 8. Anuttarayoga

1
. The word
vajra
has more than one meaning. Its principal sense is “indestructible” or “adamantine,” as in the terms
vajrayana, vajra hell, vajra pride
. It is also used in this sense as an adjective in terms that are not fixed, such as here, in “vajra truth.” Something is indestructible in this sense because it is self-existing; that is, it exists (and nonexists) beyond the play of duality. In the next talk, the Vidyadhara contrasts this sense of the word with the notion of “divine.” In another sense that we encounter in this book, the term is applied as the name of one of the five buddha families.

2
.
Samaya shila
is a Sanskrit term.
Samaya
refers to a sworn bond of mutual commitment between guru and disciple. The disciple is solemnly committed to the discipline (
shila
) of maintaining and further cultivating this bond with the guru, who represents the principle of totally awakened mind, or enlightenment.

3
. Hevajra is one of the major heruka principles in the anuttarayoga tantra.

Chapter 9. Mahamudra and Maha Ati

1
. According to the later tradition of Buddhism in Tibet, the tradition of the New Translation school, only four yanas make up the vajrayana. According to the older tradition, that of the Old Translation school, there are six yanas making up the vajrayana.

In the latter view, the anuttarayogayana does not strictly count as a yana. The first three yanas are kriyayogayana, upayogayana, and yogayana. These are referred to as the lower tantras. The last three yanas are mahayogayana, anuyogayana, and atiyogayana (or maha ati, as Vidyadhara Trungpa Rinpoche preferred to call it). These are referred to as the higher tantras.

Sometimes also, in the older tradition, these last three higher tantras are collectively called the anuttarayogayana. This use of the same name does not, however, make the content of the higher tantras the same as that of the anuttarayogayana, according to the New Translation school. The anuttarayogayana in the tradition of the New Translation school contains, among others, the great tantras of
Kalachakra, Vajrayogini, Hevajra, Mahamaya, Chakrasamvara, Guhyasamaja
. It is most especially these that the Vidyadhara has in mind when he associates the tantras of the New Translation school with mahamudra.

The Vidyadhara’s exposition, although favoring the total of nine yanas and laying great weight on the final three, approaches a fusion of the older and later traditions.

2
. For Naropa and Marpa, see Glossary. Virupa was one of the eighty-four Indian mahasiddhas, “great possessors of powers,” famous for his miracles, including consuming immense quantities of wine.

3
. Kalachakra (Skt., “wheel of time”) is one of the main herukas of the anuttarayogayana tantra.

T
HE
D
AWN OF
T
ANTRA

H
ERBERT
V. G
UENTHER
and
C
HÖGYAM
T
RUNGPA

Edited by
S
HERAB
C
HÖDZIN
K
OHN

Illustrated by
G
LEN
E
DDY
and
T
ERRIS
T
EMPLE

Introduction

W
ESTERNERS WANTING
to know about tantra, particularly the Buddhist tantra of Tibet, have had to work with speculation and fancy. Tibet has been shrouded in mystery; “tantra” has been called upon to name every kind of esoteric fantasy; Buddhism has been left either vague or inaccessible. Academic treatments have been of little help, being in the main inaccurate or remote, failing either to comprehend or to convey.

In
The Dawn of Tantra
the reader meets a Tibetan and a Westerner whose grasp of Buddhist tantra is real and unquestionable. Dr. Guenther holds Ph.D. degrees from the Universities of Munich and Vienna. In 1950, he went to India to teach at Lucknow University and, in 1958, became Head of the Department of Comparative Philosophy and Buddhist Studies at the Sanskrit University in Varanasi. Since 1964, he has been Head of the Department of Far Eastern Studies at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Because of his tremendous intellectual energy and scholarly discipline, knowledge of Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese, and his years of collaboration with native Tibetans, he has become one of the few Westerners to penetrate to a deeper understanding of Tibetan tantric texts. His books, such as
The Life and Teaching of Naropa
and the
Tantric View of Life
, bring us nearly the only accurate translations and commentaries from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Chögyam Trungpa was born in the heart of the Buddhist tantra tradition. As the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa line of spiritual teachers, he was enthroned at the age of eighteen months as abbot of a group of monasteries in eastern Tibet. Beginning at three, he underwent intensive training in the intellectual and meditative disciplines of Buddhism. He had completely assumed his responsibilities, both spiritual and temporal, by the age of fourteen and went on to become a master of tantric Buddhist meditation. His journey toward the West began in 1959 when he fled the Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet. He first experienced the modern world in India, where he spent four years studying English. Since then he has traversed the West. He studied comparative religion at Oxford and founded a meditation center in Scotland. He arrived in the United States in 1970, where he has published several books, among them
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
, founded a number of meditation centers, a community working in art and theater, and another for helping the mentally disturbed, based on tantric principles. He has not remained cloistered, but has fully and frankly encountered the Western mind on the learned and gut levels. He has mastered English to the level of poetry.

Having worked toward each other, so to speak, for years, Dr. Guenther and Chögyam Trungpa met in Berkeley, California, in 1972, where together they gave a public seminar on Buddhist tantra.
Dawn of Tantra
is the edited record of that seminar, including part of the general discussion. The “Visualization” chapter is from a seminar given by Trungpa in San Francisco in 1973. The “Empowerment and Initiation” chapter is from a talk given by Dr. Guenther when he visited Trungpa’s meditation center in Boulder, Colorado, in 1973. Dr. Guenther has also since lectured at Naropa Institute, a university founded by Trungpa in Boulder, Colorado.

Guenther and Trungpa are an interface very much alive to the Tibetan tradition of Buddhist tantra and very much alive to the current everyday world of America. They communicate warmly and freely in both directions and give no quarter to wishful thinking.

S
HERAB
C
HÖDZIN
K
OHN

ONE

Tantra

I
TS
O
RIGIN AND
P
RESENTATION

T
HE TERM
TANTRA
, from the time of its first appearance in the West up to the present day, has been subject to serious misunderstandings. The term was introduced into the English language in 1799 when tantric works were discovered by missionaries in India. These were not Buddhist works. In fact at that time it was hardly known in the West that such a thing as Buddhism existed. The term
tantra
was then known only as the title of these works, the contents of which were quite different from what people expected in books dealing with philosophy and religion. The missionaries were for the most part quite shocked that other people had religious and philosophical ideas so different from their own. To them the word
tantra
meant no more than these expanded treatises; but since the subject matter dealt with in these treatises was so unusual from their point of view, the term began to acquire quite a peculiar connotation, a connotation which proper study of the texts has not borne out. Unfortunately, in this case as in so many others, once a false conception has been formed, a nearly superhuman effort is required to root out and set right all the wrong ideas and odd connotations that have grown up around it. I am going to try to tell you what the term
tantra
actually means in a technical sense.

First of all, one must distinguish between the tantra of the Hinduist tradition and the tantra of the Buddhist tradition. These two traditions, both indigenous to India, for a long period of time used the same language—Sanskrit. But each tradition stipulated particular uses for its terms. What one tradition understood by a specific term was not necessarily what the other tradition understood by it. When Buddhist studies originated in the West, which was only comparatively recently, it was assumed by the first investigators that since the Buddhists used the same Sanskrit terms as the Hindus, they would mean the same thing by them. This was the first of many wrong conclusions that they drew.