The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 4 (8 page)

The term
vajra
in Sanskrit, or
dorje
(
rdo rje
) in Tibetan, means “having the qualities of a diamond.” Like a diamond, vajra is tough and at the same time extremely precious. Unless we understand this basic vajra quality of tantra, or of the tantrika—this almost bullheaded quality of not yielding to any kind of seductions, to any little tricks or plays on words—we cannot understand vajrayana Buddhism at all.

Fundamentally speaking, indestructibility, or vajra nature, is basic sanity. It is the total experience of tantra, the experience of the enlightened state of being. This sanity is based on the experience of clarity, which comes from the practice of meditation. Through the meditation practice of the three yanas we discover a sense of clarity, unconditional clarity. Such clarity is ostentatious and has immense brilliance. It is very joyful and it has potentialities of everything. It is a real experience. Once we have experienced this brilliance, this farseeing, ostentatious, colorful, opulent quality of clarity, then there is no problem. That
is
vajra nature. It is indestructible. Because of its opulence and its richness, it radiates constantly, and immense, unconditional appreciation takes place. That combination of indestructibility and clarity is the basic premise of tantra Buddhist teachings.

We should understand how the vajrayana notion of brilliance differs from the notion of clear light as described in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
and how it differs from the mahayana notion of luminosity. Clear light, according to the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
, is purely a phenomenological experience. You see whiteness as you die or as your consciousness begins to sink. Because the physical data of your body’s habitual patterns are beginning to dissolve, you begin to enter another realm. You feel whitewashed, as if you were swimming in milk, or drowning in milk. You feel suffocated with whiteness, which is known as clear light. That is purely a phenomenological experience, not the true experience of clarity. On the other hand, the mahayana Buddhists talk about luminosity, called
prabhasvara
in Sanskrit, or
ösel
(
’od gsal
) in Tibetan. Ösel means seeing things very precisely, clearly, logically, and skillfully. Everything is seen very directly; things are seen as they are. Nevertheless, neither prabhasvara nor the notion of clear light match the tantric notion of vajra clarity.

Vajrayana clarity has more humor. It also has more subtlety and dignity. Moreover, it is utterly, totally outrageous. Things are seen as they are, precisely; but at the same time things are also seeing us precisely. Because we are totally exposed and open and not afraid to be seen, a meeting point occurs. Something makes us realize that we cannot chicken out and say that our life is just a rehearsal. Something makes us realize that it is real. That state of being is not merely a phenomenological experience. It is a real state of being, a true state of being that is full and complete. That indestructibility and clarity are vajra nature, which is superior to any other approach to spirituality, even within the Buddhist tradition.

The Mandala of Kalachakra. A two-dimensional representation of the mandalas of body, speech, and mind of the
Kalachakra Tantra.

THREE

Mandala

T
HERE ARE THREE WORLDS
presented in the tantric tradition: the world of perceptions, the world of the body, and the world of emotions. Our relationship with the world of perceptions is called the outer mandala; our relationship with the world of the body is called the inner mandala; and our relationship with the world of emotions is called the secret mandala.

O
UTER
M
ANDALA

We are constantly engaged in relationships with the ordinary world, that is, the world of ayatanas or the six sense perceptions: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and thinking, the process which coordinates the other five. In Buddhism thinking is considered to be one of the senses. Our different perceptions are constantly being coordinated into a mandala. By mandala we mean interlocking relationships rather than an extraordinary magical circle. Mandala is simply the coordination of one point with another. For instance, in filmmaking the visual material is edited, and the sound has to be edited as well, so that the two work together.

The same thing happens in everyday life. When we enter a restaurant, we hear the clattering of pots and pans, and we begin to smell the food. At that point we may either get turned on or turned off by the restaurant’s mandala. Or someone may introduce a friend to us: “This is a good friend of mine. I would like you to meet him.” We say, “How are you?” and we sit down to talk with that person. That person speaks and behaves in a certain way, and we begin to feel that we like him, either on the grounds of our friend’s recommendation or because we feel it is worthwhile to associate with such a person.

Perhaps our car is breaking down and we stop at a gas station. One of the passengers decides to step out and ask the attendant how far it is to the next motel. From the way that person behaves when he brings back the message, we can tell whether the answer is going to be favorable or disappointing. In that way, we always have a feeling about what is taking place.

According to tantra, that feeling, or intuitive setup, is a part of the external world. It is part of an actual relationship. Something is happening, or for that matter, something is not happening. Nevertheless, there is an actual relationship taking place constantly. Our experience of that relationship is not particularly based on superstition. We simply have a personal experience of the whole situation, a sense of the reality of mandala.

The outer mandala principle is the possibility of relating with a situation as a cohesive structure. Some setups are unpleasant, destructive, and unworkable; other setups are creative, workable, and pleasant. Mandalas are the general patterns, whether pleasant or unpleasant, that link us to the rest of the world, which is our world or our creation in any case.

When we begin to work with reality properly, an enormous relationship, a rapport, takes place between us and the external world. That rapport is taking place constantly, some kind of network or system of relations. It is as if something were circulating. For instance, when we are just about to catch the flu, we feel that the world is not particularly favorable to us. Whatever we experience and whatever we feel is somewhat strange. We feel that something is not quite clicking. We feel numb and unhealthy already. The world outside seems too solid, and we cannot relate that solidity to the softness or vulnerability in ourselves. The world seems hardened and heavy, and we cannot seem to make any connection with it. Those are the signs of a fever, an approaching flu. Although they seem to signal a discrepancy in our relationship with the world, that experience itself is an example of mandala principle.

According to the tantric tradition, the outer mandala principle is the external world and how we relate with it. However, the emphasis on relationship does not mean that the world is regarded as an intuitive or purely subjective world. It is simply the external world. For instance, the outer mandala is connected with how we relate with hot and cold. If we are outdoors in a hot climate and we walk into a highly air-conditioned building, we may get sick because we are not able to handle hot and cold properly. Our coordination with the world may not be quite right.

Usually, we experience such problems when we ignore the relationship between the world outside and our own world, our body. If we do not acknowledge our sense perceptions properly and thoroughly, we find ourselves in trouble—not because
what
we perceive is poisonous, but because
how
we perceive has become incompetent, haphazard, or confused, and therefore it has turned into poison. From that point of view, we cannot say that the phenomenal world we are living in—the traffic jams and the pollution and the inflation—is bad and devilish. We cannot condemn the world or put it into those kinds of conceptual packages. That approach does not work, because it means that we are fighting with our own phenomena.

Phenomena are ours: it is our country, our air, our earth, our food, our water, our electricity, our policemen. When we talk about the mandala setup we are speaking of an organic reality. We are not saying that we should reorganize the world, or that we should fight for it. We are talking about how we could look at it in an organic, natural way. The world could evolve
itself
according to our enlightenment—naturally. If you were a political activist, you might have difficulty in understanding this seemingly wishy-washy philosophy. You might say, “Don’t we have to speak up? Don’t we have to do something?” But when we talk about the tantric level of perception, we are not talking about concocting something. The outer mandala principle purely refers to actual, immediate relationships, visual, auditory, and conceptual relationships, with the so-called “world outside.”

When we relate directly to the world, we can see that there is a thread of continuity. We can see the setup as a whole, rather than having only a partial view. According to the Buddhist path, there is nothing
other
than that whole world; therefore we could say that the tantric attitude toward reality is nontheistic. In the nontheistic approach to reality, the world is not divided between God and the Devil. The world is a totality in itself. It has its own muscles, its own brain, its own limbs, and its own circulation. The world has its own water system, electrical system, and sewage system automatically built in. They are already there. The problem we face is that we do not see that totality; we do not acknowledge it. We do not even get close to it, to see that it is actually true.

We are not talking about the totality of the world in the sense that everything should be good and perfect and fantastic, and nobody should acknowledge anything bad. We are talking about reality, in which good is made out of bad and bad is made out of good. Therefore, the world can exist in its own good/bad level, its self-existing level of dark and light, black and white, constantly. We are not fighting for either of those sides. Whatever there is, favorable or unfavorable, it is workable; it is the universe. That is why in the tantric tradition we talk about the world, or the cosmos, in terms of mandala.

Mandala is a totality; it has a universal quality. That totality is not a compromise, as if someone were to say, “If you tone down your badness and I tone down my goodness we will have a happy medium, with both good and bad toned down to a grey level.” That kind of compromise is not a totality; it is just gray and depressing. In fact, that is one of the depressing aspects of some of the ecumenical movements taking place in this country and the rest of the world. They seem to be based on the feeling that everything should be okay and that everything is good. Badness should come up to the level of goodness, and goodness should come down to the level of badness, so that we can have some kind of happy medium. In that approach, there could be communist Buddhists or Nazi tantric practitioners. But somehow that does not work; it is too silly.

I
NNER
M
ANDALA

We have been talking about the external world, or the world of perceptions, as a mandala that we are able to work with. The second type of world is the body, which is known as the inner mandala. This mandala is connected with how we handle our bodies in terms of our awareness, or sense of reality.

Developing awareness is quite deliberate. In the beginning we might feel that working deliberately with the body is too exaggerated a form of behavior. However, it seems to be necessary. We have never regarded our bodies as sacred property. The attitude of sacredness has been neglected, particularly in the Western world. Instead, life is regarded as a hassle. We were born, breast-fed or bottle-fed, and put into diapers. Those were our unpleasant facts of life. Now we can go to the toilet and drink our cup of tea—how victorious we are! We view it as a victory that we have survived all that. But we have not actually developed any art in our lives. We do not know how to care for our bodies.

Taking care of ourselves is regarded as an enormous hassle: getting up at a certain time, writing checks, going to the bank, going to a restaurant are all done humorlessly. Perhaps our only delight is to get drunk at a party. We have a fantastic time dancing with our partner, whoever it may be, and then we peacefully pass out. That is a very crude way of handling our bodies. There is no dignity in that, none whatsoever.

We may have been taught sophisticated table manners by our aristocratic parents. They may have taught us how to drink, how to use forks and knives, and how to sit properly and make good conversation. Still, there is some fundamental crudeness involved, because we have been taught a facade, rather than what should be felt. We could be extremely well mannered and able to pass through diplomatic circles immaculately and impeccably. Nevertheless, there could still be a crudeness of fundamentally not knowing how to relate with our cup of tea, our plate, our table, or our chair.