The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion

by Chogyam Trungpa

  Basic wakefulness, or sugatagarbha, is beyond alaya. It is pre-alaya, but at the same time encompasses alaya. Alaya has basic goodness, but sugatagarbha has greater goodness—it is wakefulness itself. From that point of view, even basic alaya could be said to be a consciousness of some kind. Although it is not an official category of consciousness, it is a kind of awareness, and maybe even a form of samsaric mind. Sugatagarbha is beyond that. It is indestructible; it is the ancestor or parent of alaya.

  We could describe the process of perception with the analogy of a film projector. First you have the screen, the phenomenal world. Then you project yourself onto that phenomenal world. You have the film—the fickleness of mind, which constantly changes frames—so you have a moving object projected onto the screen by the machinery of the projector. There are lots of teeth to catch the film, and mechanisms to make sure that the projection is continuous. This is precisely the same situation as the sense organs: you look and you listen, and as you listen, you look. You connect things together, although they are shifting completely every moment by means of time.

  Behind the whole setup is a bulb, which projects everything onto the screen. That bulb is the cause of the whole thing. Resting in the nature of alaya is like resting in the nature of that bulb. Alaya is brilliant and shining; it does not give in to the fickleness of the rest of the machine. That bulb has no concern with the screen or how the image is coming through. Resting in alaya is the actual practice of ultimate bodhichitta. It is what happens during sitting practice. Ultimate bodhichitta is the realization that phenomena cannot be regarded as solid, but at the same time, phenomena have a self-luminous quality. So alaya refers to experience, not simply to the structural, mechanical process of projection.

  In the analogy of the film projector, the bulb can be taken out and put into a flashlight. If you have a flashlight with a beam of light coming out of it, you have to hold it properly in order to use the light. The flashlight is like relative bodhichitta; holding it properly and making it work for you is absolute bodhichitta. You need absolute bodhichitta so that the light will shine everywhere, wherever you need it. Resting your mind in alaya produces absolute bodhichitta constantly.

  By resting your mind in the alaya consciousness, in clear and nondiscriminating mind, you are trying to free yourself from sevenfold mind, or the first seven consciousnesses. But before you can transcend sevenfold mind, you have to work with the bulb. Instead of monkeying with the projector, you could just take the bulb out of your projector, screw it into your regular old-fashioned lamp, and look at it. So there is just the bare minimum of you and your mind, very simply. That is the self-liberating alaya. That good old bulb is the real thing. You have your light or you don’t—you switch off or you switch on.

  Even in ordinary situations, if you actually trace back to find out where everything comes from, you will find a primitive resting level. You could rest in that quality of basic existence, or alaya. However, you should not cultivate alaya as an end in itself, which would be dangerous, but you should use it as a stepping-stone. In this case, we are talking about alaya as a clear mind—as simplicity, clarity, and nondiscursive thought—as alaya consciousness. We have to be very clear on this. We are not trying to grasp the buddha nature immediately, but we are trying to work on our basic premises. For the first time, we are learning to slow down.

  Alaya is described in the text as naturally good, as basic goodness. That quality of basic goodness applies to personal wholesomeness as well as to dedication to others. It is like saying you are a good person who can take care of your family and friends. Basic goodness is related to both alaya and bodhichitta. However, bodhichitta is more active and illuminating, while alaya is a resting quality with no grudge against anything, just satisfaction.

  With the third slogan, “Examine the nature of unborn awareness,” you look at your mind and trace back where your perceptions are coming from. With the fifth slogan, “Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence,” instead of getting caught up in your visual and auditory perceptions, you come back home. You return to “home sweet home,” which is your alaya. The alaya is where everything began, so you are returning to central headquarters. You see that all your activities—sight, smell, sound, and everything else that happens—are a production of that home ground. Having recognized that, you come back to where they began to manifest, and you rest in the needlessness of those productions. Alaya is a starting point and a returning point. It is internalizing. Resting in the nature of alaya takes for granted that you trust yourself already. It assumes that you don’t have to run away from yourself all the time in order to get something from outside. You can just come home and relax.

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  In postmeditation, be a child of illusion.

  Becoming a child of illusion means that you continue in postmeditation what you have experienced in your sitting practice. During postmeditation, you take the bulb out of your projector. You might not have the screen or the film at this point, but you still carry a flashlight. You transfer the bulb into your flashlight, and you carry it with you all the time.

  Illusion does not mean haziness, confusion, or mirage. You realize that after you finish sitting practice, you do not have to solidify phenomena, but you can continue your practice. If things become heavy and solid, you can flash mindfulness and awareness into them. In that way, you begin to see that everything is workable. Your attitude is that the phenomenal world is not evil—that “they” are not going to attack you, or destroy you, or kill you. Everything is workable and soothing. You swim along in your phenomenal world. You can’t just float; you have to use your limbs and swim with the basic stroke of mindfulness-awareness. So you are swimming constantly in postmeditation—and during meditation, you just sit and realize the nature of your alaya very simply.

  In the postmeditation experience, you sense that everything you perceive is a creation of your own preconceptions. If you cut through that and interject awareness, you begin to see that the games going on are not big games, but simply illusory games. It requires a lot of mindfulness and awareness working together to realize that—a lot of meditation in action.

  Being a child of illusion means that you look at the phenomenal world and see its padded-wall quality. That’s the illusion: padded walls everywhere. You think you are just about to strike against something very sharp, and you find that things bounce back on you. There is not much sharp contrast, but everything is part of your mindfulness and awareness. Everything bounces back, like a ball in a video game. When that ball returns, you might hit it back again, but it comes back again with a beep. So once again, you become a child of illusion. When you look at things, you find that they are soft, that they bounce back at you all the time. It’s not particularly intellectual. It is first thought, best thought. You can actually experience that things are workable, that there is room. The basic idea of a child of illusion is that you do not feel claustrophobic. There is lots of space.

  After your sitting practice, you might think, “Oh no, now I have to do postmeditation practice.” But you don’t have to feel so closed in. Instead, you can feel that as a child of illusion, you are dancing and clicking with those little beeps all the time. It is fresh and simple and very effective. The point, once again, is to treat yourself better. If you want to take a vacation from your practice, you can do so and still remain a child of illusion. Things just keep beeping at you all the time. It is very lucid, almost whimsical. Being a child of illusion is being willing to realize the simplicity of the phenomenal play, and to use that simplicity as part of your awareness and mindfulness practice.

  1. The word not implies an object, whereas the word no stands alone, and thus no is free of any dualistic implications.

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  Point Two: Training in Relative Bodhichitta

  Relative bodhichitta practice is very action oriented. We give as much as we can give, and we expand as much as we can expand. We have a lot to offer because we have basic goodness, which is an ine
xhaustible treasure—and because of that, we can receive more as well. We can be shock absorbers of other people’s pain.

  THE DEVELOPMENT of relative bodhichitta is connected with the paramita of discipline. It has been said that if you do not have discipline, it is like trying to walk on a road without any legs. Without discipline, you cannot attain liberation. The process of discipline begins by realizing that you have a soft spot and that you can work with it. You can project it out and work with other sentient beings. The idea of relative bodhichitta may seem primitive, but it is also very enlightening, as bodhichitta should be.

  The starting point of relative bodhichitta practice is realizing that others could actually be more important than yourself. You should feel that you are less important, and that others—any others—are more important. When you do so, you begin to feel as though a tremendous burden has been taken off your shoulders. You realize that there is room to give love and affection to more than just this thing called “me” all the time. Even though other people might provide you with constant problems, you could still be kind to them. In the same way that a mother cares for her child, you could put others before yourself. You could be patient enough to develop selfless service to others.

  In order to develop the essence of buddha or enlightenment in yourself, you begin by developing basic decency. Your practice should be very straightforward, based on the principle of not deceiving yourself or others. You might have all sorts of ego-centered notions of what you would like to be—a great guru, great psychiatrist, great leader, great businessperson, great family person, and so on—but you do not need to go along with such worldly or mundane visions. Instead, you could discipline yourself thoroughly, and you could practice in accordance with the classical methods that have been transmitted through the lineage, from generation to generation. You could keep your discipline as pure and ideal as possible.

  Pure discipline does not reflect a particular cultural or philosophical view. It does not speak for or against capitalism or communism, democracy or dictatorship. It is based simply on human existence. Such discipline has been handed down from the time of the Buddha himself, and in spite of the social changes that have taken place since then, it is still being carried on today. We too could maintain such pure, clean discipline.

  Bodhichitta is based on prajna and on compassion for others. Instead of simply trying to be comfortable and thinking of yourself alone, you think of the suffering of other sentient beings. You think of someone who is in pain, and you use them as a catalyst or ignition point to light things up, to sharpen your prajna. Basically, the further you go toward the mahayana and vajrayana, the more compassion and benevolence you have. In fact, the level of your compassion determines how far you can go.

  Relative bodhichitta practice is quite simple and ordinary; it is an extension of shamatha discipline. In shamatha, we do not dwell on anything. We are not only trying to hold our mind completely steady, but we are working with the fickleness of our mental process by following our breath and looking at our subconscious thought process. In bodhichitta practice, instead of simply working with the movement of subconscious mind or discursive thoughts, we include the content of our thoughts, which are based on anger, lust, or stupidity. By including the content of our thoughts, we are going slightly beyond the shamatha technique. Having realized that we are not as dangerous as we had thought, we return to the most practical level. We develop loving-kindness—and having developed loving-kindness, we begin to switch into compassion.

  SENDING AND TAKING

  The first relative bodhichitta slogan is related to the central mahayana contemplative practice of tonglen, or sending and taking.

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  Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath.

  Exchanging oneself for others is one of the leading mahayana disciplines, and a very important one indeed. It is central to the mahayana outlook on reality. Without it, you cannot understand Buddhism at all. You can find the basis of tonglen practice in the realization of relative and absolute bodhichitta and in the understanding of alaya.

  In the practice of exchange, you take on the pain and misery of others, and you give away your own pleasure and luxury. In Tibetan this practice is known as tonglen: tong means “let go” and len means “take on,” so tonglen means “sending and taking.” Sending and taking is the main practice in the development of relative bodhichitta. Tonglen is the actual act of giving and receiving; it is a very specific practice. The more general term lojong refers to the approach of mind training altogether.

  Exchanging oneself for others means that you become the other and the other becomes you. But in order to exchange yourself for others, you first have to understand shamatha and vipashyana and the notions of maitri and karuna. With that juxtaposition, you begin to have a taste of your own innate goodness. You realize that you possess enlightened genes. In slogan practice, you communicate to the rest of the world with your softness, not on the basis of aggression. So with all of these practices, you have to begin by liking yourself. Then you can do things for others.

  Tonglen is not a religious practice; you are simply training yourself to be a decent human being. It is a form of maitri practice, based on the principle of warmth or loving-kindness. While shamatha-vipashyana is considered to be a meditative practice, tonglen is referred to as a contemplative practice because it is not blank mindfulness, but mindfulness with contents.

  Prior to practicing tonglen, you need to establish your awareness and mindfulness practice. So you should start with shamatha and vipashyana, and that should continue to be your main practice. The ideal setup would be to base your meditation on shamatha-vipashyana followed by tong-len, and to base your postmeditation practice on the slogans. You could practice these slogans all the time. That would make you a two-hundred-percent good Buddhist, almost to the point of becoming a buddha.

  The Practice of Tonglen

  RIDING THE BREATH. In tonglen, as in shamatha practice, we use the breath because it is constant and very natural to us. But with tonglen, when our breath goes out, we let go of any goodness, positivity, or achievement that we have accomplished and give it to others; and as we breathe in, we breathe in the pain, suffering, and misery of others. So the alternation of sending out and receiving is placed on the medium of the breath. The idea is that we take all the negativity upon ourselves and we breathe out all the positivity to others.

  On the out-breath, we breathe out anything gentle and kind. We breathe out feeling good about anything at all, even feeling good about eating chocolate cake or drinking cool water or warming ourselves by the fire. Whatever goodness exists in us, whatever we feel good about, we breathe out to others. We must feel good sometimes about something, whether it lasts a minute or even a second.

  On the in-breath, we breathe in whatever is bad, terrible, gross, or obnoxious. We try to breathe such thought-provoking negativities into ourselves. In doing so, we do not have to go through the doctrinal definition of what is good and what is bad and we don’t need to philosophize. We just breathe in any old bad and breathe out any old good, anything vaguely undesirable or desirable.

  When you practice tonglen, you have to be very literal and straightforward. When you breathe out, you really breathe out good; when you breathe in, you really breathe in bad. It does not matter what that implies, and you cannot be faking. You do not have to go through every form of suffering as if it were a psychiatrist’s list, but you can start with what is most immediate.

  Sometimes you feel terrible. You feel that you are breathing in poison, which might kill you or exhaust you, and breathing out whatever goodness you have. It seems to be completely impractical. That is just the first flash. Once you break through, you realize that you have more goodness in you to breathe out, and you have more badness to breathe in, and the whole thing becomes somewhat balanced. That kind of balance always happens, but it takes long training. The more negativity you take in, the more goodness you c
an send out, so there is no problem. It is like breathing in cold air and throwing out warm air—it is the same current. So there is nothing to lose. You could do this all the time.

  In tonglen practice, you should feel that everything is loose, that nothing is really attached or anchored to you. You should feel that everything is detachable, so when you let go, it is all gone, and when things come back to you, they too are unanchored. They come to you, and you go out to them. It is a very exciting experience, actually. You feel tremendous space. When you let go, it is like cutting a kite from its cord; but even without its cord, the kite still comes back. You feel a quality of fluidity and things begin to circulate so wonderfully. Nothing is being dealt with in the form of innuendo or undercurrents. There is no feeling of someone working the politics behind the scene. Everything is completely free flowing; it is wonderful. That is precisely what is meant by genuineness. You can be absolutely, blatantly good at sending and taking.

  You have to be a fool to practice tonglen. But you can begin to take pride in being a fool and jump in further until you begin to experience the reality of tonglen practice. At first you may be rigid or tense. However, as you apply more tonglen practice to your system, you begin to develop a teensy-weensy smile. You begin to relax and smile a little more, and you become almost addicted to tonglen practice.