The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion

by Chogyam Trungpa

46

  The Second through Tenth Bhumis

  The details of the ten bhumis are definite, but the journey is guesswork. Supposedly, some people stay in a certain bhumi longer and others pass through quickly. . . . But for most people, the experience of the bhumis is an extremely gradual process. Nonetheless, enlightenment is possible, and traditionally one tends to get certain warnings of that possibility.

  SPOTLESSNESS: THE SECOND BHUMI

  The second bhumi is trima mepa. Trima means “spot,” or “dirt,” and mepa means “not”; so trima mepa means “purity,” or “spotlessness.” On this path, passive sitting and active awareness in everyday life become one. In terms of the five paths, the second through the tenth bhumis are connected with the fourth path, the path of meditation.

  The Paramita of Discipline

  Although the bodhisattva practices all ten paramitas, the emphasis in the second bhumi is predominately on shila paramita, or discipline. Usually the idea of discipline or morality is based on rules and regulations, and not following the rules inflicts guilt. But in this case, discipline is self-existent, and there is no guilt. So discipline becomes pure rather than a threat.

  The practice of generosity could be tainted by a belief in the self and a quality of self-indulgence. You may feel that you are resourceful already, so you don’t have anything to purify. So along with generosity, discipline is necessary. Discipline brings out and cleanses any germs you have collected. With discipline, you do not indulge in the sense pleasures. You are interested in understanding the meaning of dharma, and you are interested in how the world functions. You are working for the benefit of sentient beings, but you do not have a particular scheme, and you don’t keep a diary of how many people you have saved or how great a social worker you are. Instead, there is a quality of simplicity. That simplicity is the key to helping other people as well as yourself.

  Transcending the Realm of the Gods

  The purpose of developing the second to the tenth bhumis is to completely transcend the realm of the gods. At this point you have already transcended the world of passion, or desire, which includes the hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm, human realm, jealous god realm, and a lower portion of the realm of the gods, called the realm of Indra. But there are higher form and formless god realms, connected with the realm of Brahma.

  On the path of meditation, you are not only transcending the karmic cause of being reborn in one of the six realms, but you are also transcending the highest experience of the god realm. You are transcending the absorptions, or jhana states.

  The absorption states of the god realm are largely based on a sense of ego-oriented joy. The blissfulness of the god realms is connected with a state of being high and losing contact with reality. You are losing contact with your energy, your emotions, and your body. It is a realm of intoxication and vague pleasure, and with each of the four jhanas, you get higher and higher. From the bodhisattva’s point of view, it is a kind of indulgence, a sort of jhana opium den. As you go through the bhumis, you transcend such god-realm experiences. That is what distinguishes the remaining bhumis from the first bhumi, which still has a faint connection with the god realm. In the first bhumi, experiences are very festive. However, your discriminating awareness is still functioning, and there is a pervasive quality of earthiness. So the feeling of joy and appreciation is still coming from a view of basic sanity, whereas there is actually very little joy in the blissful god realms.

  The purpose of the path of meditation is to transcend the three worlds—the world of desire, the world of form, and the formless world—totally and completely. On this path, you examine the mental attitude in such meditative absorptions. You examine the degree of the watcher. By doing so, you see that although you might experience a state of absorption or bliss, it is not joy, but pleasure.

  The Eightfold Path

  Bodhisattvas are able to keep away from the absorptions of the god realm and develop sanity because they practice the eightfold path: (1) right view, (2) right understanding, (3) right speech, (4) right action, (5) right livelihood, (6) right effort, (7) right recollection, or mindfulness, and (8) right meditation. The eightfold path plays an extremely important part throughout the ten bhumis of a bodhisattva’s experience.

  The right view of dharma is passionlessness. The purpose of dharma is not to fulfill one’s desire, but to transcend one’s desire.

  Right understanding is not intellectual understanding alone, but intuitive precision. The phenomenal world can be regarded as a guideline to the bodhisattva’s path.

  Right speech means that a bodhisattva’s approach to communication is gentle. Speech is no longer self-centered, and is true rather than false. A bodhisattva’s speech is an expression of the needlessness of aggression. You have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. The path is open and you act freely, in accordance with your wisdom.

  With right action, discipline or morality is not an attachment or an accessory, but an integral part of your whole body.

  With right livelihood, you are not hassled by lack of money, too much money, or looking for a job. There is a feeling of confidence. Bodhisattvas may not always find good jobs or have lots of money, but they not hassled by a lack of balance in their daily existence.

  With right effort, you are not tied to living in this world, but you are still constantly open to it. The world demands a lot of your attention and responsibility. There could be millions of things happening at once in your life, or in one moment of your life, but you are not hassled and there is a desire to exert yourself further. It is transcendental efficiency.

  With right recollection or right mindfulness, the practice of awareness is not self-centered or paranoid. Awareness is spontaneous; it just happens. When a bodhisattva is absentminded, or forgets to give their bare attention to what they are doing, the forgetfulness itself acts as a reminder.

  With right meditation, the bodhisattva is able to cut through the three worlds—the world of desire, the world of form, and the formless world—and is completely freed.

  Overcoming Fear

  The bodhisattva’s attitude toward life at the second bhumi level is one of enormous power and energy. You are not afraid of taking responsibility. You also begin to comprehend the meaning of dharmadhatu, the space of dharma. You understand the meaning of it, and you see such a discovery as worthy of respect. It is a deepening of the shunyata experience of the first bhumi, in which you see emptiness and fullness simultaneously existent in the experience of the phenomenal world. You see the formlessness and fullness of reality. Both the spaciousness and active manifestation happening in the realm of experience are clearly comprehended, and doubts as to the nature of reality are cleared. That is the experience of dharmadhatu, and that is why this bhumi is called spotless.

  It is said in the scriptures that a bodhisattva of the second bhumi will become a king or queen, a leader, or a wise person. You begin to regard yourself as a dharmaraja, a righteous sovereign of dharma. The joyful experience of the first bhumi leads to a sense of relaxation, and you understand completely the needlessness of fear. There are no dark corners. Your discipline is spotless, and your experience becomes open, powerful, and immaculate.

  ILLUMINATING: THE THIRD BHUMI

  The third bhumi is called öjepa in Tibetan. Ö means “light,” and jepa means “creating,” or “activating”; so öjepa means “illuminating.” It is creating a quality of awakening. With each new level of the bodhisattva path, you have a sense that you are leaving the frontier, where things are not all that sophisticated, and approaching the capital, where the highest civilization exists. There is a feeling that as you get closer to the capital, that much more sophistication is taking place. Just as when rivers get closer to the ocean, a slow expansion takes place and they become bigger.

  On the third bhumi, you begin to demonstrate your understanding and discipline without tiring and without aggression. You identify with the teachings. You are tremendously eager to comprehend the meaning
of dharmadhatu, the nature of reality, and shunyata. In order to hear even four lines of dharma and transmit it to others, you would sacrifice your body. You are falling in love with the dharma and eager to learn it all.

  The Paramita of Patience

  The paramita for the third bhumi is patience, or söpa. You are patient with yourself, with the various practices required, and with the study and understanding of the dharma. Patience is a form of bravery: you are willing to jump in and let yourself be soaked in the dharma. You are willing to take a leap.

  Patience is being without anger. It is the absence of a short temper. If you are teaching, you do not tire of relating the meaning of dharma to others. You are not bothered by students, but you are generous with the teachings. You are not bored by repeating the same verse or the same idea over and over again. You are also not discouraged by your own ignorance, but you keep wanting to learn more. You are able to prolong the threat of dissatisfaction in order to seek further dharma.

  Experiencing the Truth of the Dharma

  Dharma is a very personal experience. Sometimes what you learn from the teachers or the teachings makes sense to you, and sometimes you disbelieve the teachings, so you begin to play with the dharma, testing whether it is true or not. It is like you are a little child who has been told not to put your finger on the electric burner. When you quietly turn it on and touch it, sure enough you get burned. Likewise, by personally testing the teachings, a kind of transmission takes place. The bodhisattva experiences the truth of the dharma.

  At the bodhisattva level, discursive thoughts regarding such concepts as nonduality or egolessness are considered to be valid, and even encouraged. Your whole being is beginning to become dharma. You begin to catch dharma fever, to be obsessed with dharma, even in your dreams. You are so much into it that everything becomes teaching. Ordinary things like going to a movie, watching people talk to each other, or seeing hot water boiling, all mean something to you. When we say that whatever you hear is the voice of dharma, it does not mean that somebody is reciting sutras. It means that you are learning from what is happening around you. You are obsessed with that, which seems to be fine.

  RADIATING LIGHT: THE FOURTH BHUMI

  The fourth bhumi is called ötrowa, which means “radiating light.” Ö means “light” and trowa means “radiate,” so ötrowa means “radiating light.” It is like rays of fire, like a flame or a beam of light that destroys any desire for further achievement and further indulgence in spiritual development. At this point, the bodhisattva becomes highly competent, so they are willing to disregard their desire for the dharma. They begin to see through that. Even devotion to the Buddha is seen as desire and is disregarded.

  The Paramita of Exertion

  The paramita that goes with the fourth bhumi is exertion, or tsöndrü. It is energy, working hard. There is no hesitation in cutting your own spiritual materialism. You no longer regard yourself as a leader or an important person, and you are willing to mingle with simple people. You no longer preach the dharma, but just simply teach.

  The patience of the third bhumi provides a lot of energy and power, and on the fourth bhumi, you develop sharpness and penetration. You know how to handle your laziness and you are willing to work. At the same time, you have a desire for simplicity. There is still the drive to teach others, but there is also the desire to be alone. Due to the element of cutting and destroying spiritual materialism, even the bodhisattva’s desire to save all sentient beings is seen as self-aggrandizement. You want to pull back from that, and you are almost willing to retire.

  When you work very hard, you cannot help feeling that you have achieved something. You feel proud, so there is a need for humbleness. Humbleness is important not only for your own development, but also to demonstrate that a bodhisattva of the fourth bhumi is not athletic in their bodhisattvahood. Exertion can be very harsh. But if there is no egolessness, no humility, and no softness, it is very difficult to practice the paramita of exertion. You need to be both communicative and humble.

  In the paramita of exertion, hard work comes from joy. You have the right situation psychologically, physically, and environmentally, and you are not afraid of anything. You are not seduced into indulging the emotions or using them as a form of entertainment. You aren’t thrown by sudden changes in your situation, such as your husband being killed in a car crash, or inheriting a billion dollars. You remain steady.

  DIFFICULT TO ACCOMPLISH: THE FIFTH BHUMI

  The fifth bhumi is called shintu jangkawa, which means “very difficult to accomplish.”1 Shintu means “very,” jong means “to accomplish” or in this context “to conquer,” and kawa means “difficult”; so shintu jangkawa means “very difficult to accomplish or to conquer.” This bhumi provides a lot of challenges. You need to work with people who do you a disservice—even those who are your enemies. No one is excluded. You need to develop the quality of never being tired of working with fellow sentient beings.

  The fifth bhumi combines practice and action, which is why it is difficult. You do not separate wisdom and experience, but realize that they are one. Dharmadhatu becomes completely one with your basic being.

  On the fifth bhumi, you have to shift your mind in a slightly different angle than you were used to in the first four bhumis. Things become so powerful that it is like holding a thunderbolt in your hand and not knowing what to do. It is completely bewildering. You need more compassion and more shunyata to bring things together. There is a need for coordination. In the earlier bhumis, it was somewhat lopsided because different aspects of yourself were working on different paramitas. It was like training your right arm and leg separately from your left arm and leg, with no thought of putting them together and walking. But you need to coordinate your right and left sides as you walk. Likewise, you need the paramita of meditation to bring together the other paramitas.

  The Paramita of Meditation

  With the paramita of meditation, or samten paramita, there is a sense of comfort. You feel at home with shamatha and vipashyana. Your meditation becomes completely identified with your own experience, to the level of welcoming the quality of cool boredom.2 Having made yourself at home, you continue to cultivate knowledge and to work on the experience of shunyata, and you sharpen the meditation-in-action aspect as well. You need both shunyata and compassion. There is a kind of coexistence: you work with other people, you meditate, you work with other people, you meditate. It is as natural as breathing in and breathing out.

  Unbiased Commitment to Others

  On the fifth bhumi, you are beginning to turn around: you change your direction toward working with others, seeing that they really are more important than you. Until this point, although you have taken the bodhisattva vow, there is still self-orientation. You have been working with other people, but it is not really one hundred percent. You keep to yourself, or hope that others will be able to learn from you, rather than actually committing yourself to them. Up to this point, that kind of commitment has been very difficult to develop because you have been so preoccupied with what you were doing.

  But at the fifth bhumi, you can work with sentient beings without bias. When you teach others, you don’t act like a veteran who has come back from a war and is trying to tell everyone what it was like. That is a very heavy-handed approach. You still have not recovered from your own experiences, so you cannot really communicate them to somebody else. In teaching others, rather than being heavy-handed, the idea is that you should provide a space or a gap.

  BECOMING MANIFEST: THE SIXTH BHUMI

  The sixth bhumi is called ngöndu kyurpa, which means “something that becomes real, or manifest.” Ngön means “visible,” “complete,” or “real,” and kyurpa means “becoming”; so ngöndu kyurpa means that the first five paramita practices or the first five bhumis become real. You are less blind, and there is a more personal—or more impersonal—experience of prajna.

  On this bhumi, you realize more and more that the idea of abandoning sa
msara and achieving nirvana is meaningless. Your prajna begins to cut through that dualistic notion and all other dualistic discriminations thoroughly and completely. Finally you end up nowhere, and from there you can develop a real approach to comprehending the dharma. You can sharpen your intellect at the highest level of prajna. So at this stage, the paramita practice of the bodhisattva is prajna, or transcendent knowledge.

  Prajna Paramita

  It has been said in the sutras that without the eye of prajna, the first five paramitas are blind. They cannot touch the bodhi mind. Prajna prepares you for all the remaining bhumis; it is a very essential practice and experience. With mundane prajna, you have been educated in the ordinary sense, so you have a way of linking yourself with other people. With supreme prajna, or prajna paramita, you transcend the ego of self and the ego of dharmas. You can relate with the phenomenal world intelligently, without ego orientation.

  Prajna paramita is the mother who bore the buddhas of the past, present, and future. With prajna, you begin to find the origin of your basic being, at the same time knowing that you have no beginning, no end, and no middle. You discover shunyata. Nowness and endlessness are one in the perspective of prajna. In the discovery of shunyata, there is openness and endlessness. A million becomes zero. Because of the nonexistence of relative reference, the nonexistence of both this and that, the bodhisattva has very clear perception.

  In the first five bhumis, you tried this way and that way, and you achieved a certain state of accomplishment. But with the sixth bhumi and prajna paramita, you finally discover the real way to view the dharma. It is like the acquisition of a good microscope: clear, precise, and penetrating. You are able to separate false dharma from true dharma. Your meditation is in the state of prajna, which is a very interesting state. In the previous bhumis, your experience of dharmadhatu had an element of peacefulness, but at this point your experience of dharmadhatu becomes a state of action. Meditative absorption is no longer passive, but it is very active and sharp, like the sword of Manjushri.