According to the mahayana, everything we confront has those four levels. We could relate them to whatever we do.
THREE LEVELS OF ACCOMPLISHMENT
In awakening enlightened genes, there are three levels of accomplishment: the four brahmaviharas, the four limitless ones, and twofold egolessness. The first level, that of the four brahmaviharas, is based simply on doing good. This level is common to both theists and nontheists.
On the second level, your experience of the four limitless ones is based on one-and-a-half-fold egolessness: the egolessness of self, and half of the egolessness of dharmas. This is the level of shravakas and pratyekabuddhas.
On the third level, you have a hint of twofold egolessness. You begin to experience nondwelling and complete nontheistic vision. Egolessness of self, which comes first, is quite victorious, but it is still very close to theism. With the egolessness of dharmas, you leave theism completely behind. You have achieved two-hundred-percent nontheistic enlightenment.
1. Trungpa Rinpoche uses the phrase setting sun to refer to a degraded and small-minded outlook on life, one without vision, dignity, or upliftedness.
2. In the Hindu kriyayoga tradition, sattvic food refers to food that is pure, clean, and wholesome.
3. This is a reference to the type of vow a bodhisattva makes, as found in the Bodhicharyavatara, or The Way of the Bodhisattva. See Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, chapter 3, “Commitment,” translated by the Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1997).
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The Spiritual Friend
When we discover the spiritual friend, we begin to realize that our endeavors to discover the mahayana path must be completely genuine. There is no way to cheat, to short-circuit, or to pretend. Everything has to be very genuine and straightforward. That is the duty of the spiritual friend.
RESTORING GENUINENESS
Once we have realized the need to give up aggression and ego, we can give birth to gentleness and a kind attitude toward others. We can wake up our enlightened genes. But the question then is, how are we going to continue further? It is like discovering that we have good soil and good seeds, and wondering what we need to do next. The answer is that we need a good farmer, someone who knows how to plant the seeds in the soil. That farmer is the spiritual friend. We are the soil and we have the seeds, and the farmer knows how to plow and how to plant those seeds properly in us. So discovering a good spiritual friend is one of the best ways to develop bodhisattvahood.
The discovery and development of your buddha nature depends on the spiritual friend. You need a good friend who will point these things out to you. That person is the kalyanamitra, or in Tibetan, the ge-we shenyen. Ge-we is a form of ge-wa, which means “virtue,” or “that which is fine,” she means “companionship,” and nyen means “friend”; so the ge-we shenyen, or spiritual friend, is a virtuous and very close friend or companion.1
THE ROLE OF THE SPIRITUAL FRIEND
The role of the spiritual friend is to tell you how bad, how wretched, and how miserable the samsaric world is, and how fortunate you are to be able to see this and attempt to come out of that world. Because you have discovered how the pain and neurosis of samsara brings constant torment, you feel compassionate and try to help others. The role of the spiritual friend is to show you how you can help yourself and others, but the actual helping itself has to be done by you. The role of the teacher is to bring up trouble for you, and your role is to have to deal with it. In that way, the teacher-student relationship is workable and becomes a delightful dance. The teacher might play the music, and you might dance to the rhythm. That is the principle of the spiritual friend.
At the mahayana level, there is a greater need for leadership than in hinayana. What is needed is not heavy-handed leadership, but leadership by example. You need personal communication with someone who is actually practicing the bodhisattva path. The spiritual friend serves as a reference point of somebody who has done it and succeeded. He or she is someone who has actually attained some level of buddhahood, although such a person does not have to be a completely realized Buddha.
Your first reaction on meeting the spiritual friend is feeling welcomed, so a strong connection is established. You need that kind of connection to begin with—and after that you have to get into the nitty-gritty of the situation. You need to look into what needs to be solved, what should be dropped, and what should be cultivated. In fact, one of the functions of a spiritual friend is to interrupt your life. For example, if you are about to kill yourself, your friend will come along and say, “You idiot! Stop it!” and save your life. That’s what real friends do—only fake friends like to indulge you.
Relating with a spiritual friend is not particularly therapeutic. You have to watch very carefully for that attitude. It is not therapeutic, but practical, absolutely pragmatic—and in the mahayana, when things become very pragmatic, they can become very heavy. But in fact, it is not something heavy coming at you—it is your own fixation that is being revealed. There are so many things you don’t make friends with in your life, even such simple things as brushing your teeth, but you cannot blame mahayana doctrine for your own fixations. You are actually tripping yourself. Spiritual friends are very earthy and ordinary, and at the same time they are very practical and powerful. They may tell you to cut out certain things, but over time you will begin to understand their logic and why they are telling you to do that. It is quite straightforward and basic.
The role of the spiritual friend is not to advertise or to talk students into anything, and it is not to convince students to join the Buddhist tradition. It is not a missionary approach. I myself encountered that kind of missionary approach when I was a refugee in Kalimpong in northern India. The Presbyterian missionaries there used to give powdered milk to all the Tibetans every Wednesday morning. The Tibetans came because they liked the milk, but they were given religious literature at the same time, which they couldn’t care less about.
When we discover the spiritual friend, we begin to realize that our endeavors to discover the mahayana path must be completely genuine. There is no way to cheat, to short-circuit, or to pretend. Everything has to be very genuine and straightforward. That is the duty of the spiritual friend. Discovering a spiritual friend is a tremendous help to us in restoring reality and genuineness and in dispelling hypocrisy, such as the hypocrisy of thinking that we could get away with hiding our habitual patterns, or with secrecy of any kind. There is no secrecy on the mahayana path at all. When we discover the spiritual friend, our path becomes much more straightforward and basic.
A good spiritual friend allows us to maintain our bodhisattva path by helping us to refrain from previous habitual patterns that may not be wholesome or necessary. The spiritual friend allows us to refrain from the bad habitual patterns and obstacles we have developed from birth, through our upbringing, and in the way we relate with our world altogether.
Photo 1. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in simple Zen teaching robes. Photographer Ray Ellis.
When we meet the spiritual friend, we realize that we ourselves can give birth to both absolute and relative bodhichitta by our own effort, but we cannot do this without their example. By means of the spiritual friend’s example, we can actually take a step forward—and the first step we take is to develop kindness to ourselves.
ATTITUDES TOWARD THE SPIRITUAL FRIEND
Once you have discovered the spiritual friend, there are several attitudes that you can develop toward him or her. You could view the spiritual friend as a guide or a scout. When you have no idea how to journey on the path, the spiritual friend is the good scout who leads you on.
You could view the spiritual friend as an escort. When you are traveling on a dangerous road and all sorts of obstacles come up, the spiritual friend acts as your protection so that you do not get frightened or fall into any problems.
You could view the spiritual friend as a good ferryman. A ferryman will cross the river with you and for you.
If the river is so big that you can’t swim across it and you are stuck on one side, it is not very pleasant. You long to cross over to the other side, and you are looking for someone who can take you. The spiritual friend is the best ferryman to take you across the river. The river might be quite turbulent, but this ferryman is willing to sacrifice their life for your benefit, and is willing to share the danger.
LEARNING TO BE GENUINE
By relating with the spiritual friend, you are learning how to work with genuineness. If you hope somebody will give you an easy time so that you can build up your own hypocrisy, then you will have no way to connect with the genuineness and goodness of enlightened mind. But having already been individually salvationed in the hinayana, having already sorted yourself out in your own right, you then can meet with a spiritual friend. That friend will work with you in terms of your own particular genuineness and capability. At the same time, that spiritual friend will never miss an inch of anything that you might miss. They will work with you inch by inch, step-by-step, stitch by stitch.
We have to work to overcome the basic habitual tendencies that we might have developed early on, long before we entered the bodhisattva path. Such habitual tendencies are obstacles to realizing enlightenment. They are what we use to hide ourselves, to cheat ourselves, and to short-circuit our discipline. The problem of habitual tendencies is an ageless problem, a timeless problem. It existed in medieval times and runs right up to the present century. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the manual world of medieval times or the automatic-machinery world of today: ordinary human beings still use the same excuses and complain in the same way. I’m sure that people in medieval times also used to say, “I feel so sick. Can I excuse myself from sitting practice?” That has been going on for a long time. It is an old story; it is even written about in the sutras. And we are still doing it today, right now, this very minute.
The habitual tendency of short-circuiting your discipline is seemingly done for your own benefit, but strangely it seems that you want to hurt yourself, which is quite shocking. You prefer to remain an invalid and you don’t want to be cured. If you look at it from the enlightened point of view, it is utterly shocking. You prefer to be like an Egyptian mummy, with bandages all over your body. You prefer to sleep on like that. You don’t want to completely recover from your wounds and be ready and willing to work; instead, you want to go back to your bandages. Isn’t that strange? Many of us tend to do that. It is quite shocking and may be quite natural. Sometimes it is surprising and sometimes it is obvious—it is shocking when somebody else does it, and it is obvious when you do it.
Beyond that, when you realize what you have been doing, you become willing to be a truly genuine person. You are genuinely willing to listen to the dharma. You do not just come and listen to the dharma because of your credentials or your connections, but you come in your own right, with your own neuroses and your own problems.
LISTENING TO THE DHARMA
Once you are willing to listen to the dharma, there are instructions on how to listen to, or receive, the dharma. Generally speaking, students are referred to as receivers, or containers, into which the dharma is poured. Such containers may be upright, upside down, leaky, or poisonous.
An Upright Container
A good student is a pure vessel, into which the dharma, the elixir of life, the truth, can be poured. If you are free from the concept of “me” and “mine,” you can develop discriminating awareness, or soso rangrik. Soso means “separateness,” rang means “self,” and rik means “perceiving or seeing properly”; so soso rankrik means “individually seeing things as they are as separate entities.” It is general common sense that allows you to see that red is different from green.
Perceiving things as they are allows you to fully experience the teachings. Your sense of hearing allows you to hear the teachings; your sense of smell allows you to perceive the fragrant scent of discipline; your sense of taste allows you to experience the flavor of dharma. Your meditation practice allows you to experience the soothing quality of the dharma, not as a euphoric state, but as an organic gentleness. An understanding of wisdom arises out of all that. It may be very faint, but it is still quite deep. You see that wisdom is like a crystal, which possesses the property of sending out light, but nonetheless maintains an embryonic brilliance within itself.
An Upside-Down Container
There are other vessels that are not suitable for receiving the dharma. They represent how not to listen to the dharma, and you should try not to be one of those vessels.
Number one is an upside-down container. You cannot pour the dharma, the elixir of life, into such a container. You become an upside-down container when you are completely turned off to the dharma, or so preoccupied with something else that your preoccupation is more important to you than listening to the dharma. If you are thinking about your love affair or your economy or something else at the same time that you are listening to the dharma, you are like a container that is turned upside down.
A Leaky Container
Number two is a container with a hole in the bottom. Because this container is leaky, it cannot hold whatever amrita, or elixir of life, is poured into it. You are naive and willing to listen, but you are not willing to memorize what you have heard and to regard it as your own practice. You just let the dharma go by, as if you were a container with a hole in the bottom. The more dharma that is poured in, the more leaks out. What you have heard is completely lost; it just makes a mess on the carpet.
A Poisonous Container
Number three is a container that is unclean, or poisonous. Anything poured into such a container becomes tainted. While you are receiving the dharma, your mind is preoccupied with your own personal egotism. You are trying to make sure that what you hear coincides with what you would like to hear. You would like the dharma to fit in with your own particular point of view, which you would like to continue. Therefore the dharma that is poured into this container turns into poison instead of being medicine.
Those are the three aspects of what to avoid when you listen to the dharma. We don’t regard these three as examples of bad students, exactly. Such students are somewhat sweet; they are not quite capable of hearing the dharma, but we would not call them bad. If somebody comes along very sweetly and sits down on a meditation cushion with bad posture, we wouldn’t say they were a bad sitter. We would be appreciative that they came to meditate at all. In addition, a container could be upside down one day, and proper the next. It might have a hole in it one day, and poison in it the next. So it is a changeable situation, but it is still problematic.
The way to relate with teaching situations and to listen to the spiritual friend is not to be an upside-down pot, a pot with a hole in the bottom, or a pot with poison in it. Rather, you should be a pure vessel. Instead of being closed off, you could cultivate complete openness. Instead of being a leaky container, you could learn to memorize and be able to comprehend the teachings. Instead of being a poisonous vessel, you could free your mind from kleshas.
You should listen, receive, and understand as much as you can from the spiritual friend and their teachings, as naturally and directly as possible.
You should learn about the mahayana and how to go about it, and you should develop know-how. You should study the techniques of the bodhisattva path, the stages of the path, and everything else about the mahayana. You should learn manually by discussing these teachings with your spiritual friend, and comparing what you hear with your own personal experience and how you feel about what you have been taught.
Working with a teacher is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for journeying on the bodhisattva path. Once you have discovered your enlightened gene, you need something to cause it to grow, and that cause is the spiritual friend. So working with the spiritual friend is like sowing a seed and pouring water over it. In that way the seed will sprout, begin to develop young green shoots, and blossom. Then you can be quite certain that what you h
ave done is right, that it is the best possibility.
As a student, you should begin by being prepared. You should not jump in right away. If you do want to jump in, you should begin by developing a personal practice. That way you are not jumping the gun, so to speak. It is very natural. Before you jump into a swimming pool, you should know the depth of the water. Likewise, as a student, you should know what you are doing, and you should have basic hinayana training. In working with a spiritual friend, personal training is absolutely important.
1. In Trungpa Rinpoche’s discussion of the mahayana, the phrase spiritual friend refers specifically to one’s spiritual teacher or guide. More generally, spiritual friends can refer to sangha friends who support you in your practice.
Part Four
MAKING A COMMITMENT
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Indestructible Wakefulness
With bodhichitta, your heart is “gentle-awake.” You feel very homey about your world. Your world is workable, people are workable, and your senses are workable. Therefore, you feel very tender toward everything. Everything you touch, everything you experience, is tender. Because there is more tenderness, because there is no irritation, you feel very cheerful and very awake.
THE UNCOMPROMISING GROUND OF ULTIMATE BODHICHITTA
It is necessary to realize that there is a basic ground that is not bound by passion, aggression, and ignorance. There is a state of existence that is invincible, tough, and monumental. That state remains very solid and inspired, but it is not regarded as ego, which has a quality of defending and collecting. In this particular monumental state of existence, the ground has become very tough and uncompromising. It could be said to be the black and blueness of wakefulness, which nobody can hamper or interfere with. That state of being is bodhichitta. It is the confidence, pride, and heroism of the bodhisattva path.
The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion Page 10