You might also apply this setting-sun approach to your children and your grandchildren. You hope your children could all go through the same process. You want them to get a good education so that they could get a good job. Hopefully, they could be disciplined, so that they do not get fired, and if they are successful enough, they too might have a chance to go to the beach and lie in the dirt. Your grandchildren and your greatgrandchildren could do absolutely the same thing. Maybe they could go to the moon eventually, and lie in the dirt on the moon. They could eat lots of food, drink lots of booze, and consume lots of Alka-Seltzer.
The other side of the coin, heads rather than tails, is Great Eastern Sun loyalty, which is more fundamental. Great Eastern Sun loyalty is a question of what you are, rather than what you are doing. Someone might ask, “What are you doing?” But when someone asks, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” it is a more fundamental question. What you are is what you are, and what you are not is what you are not. By testing your setting-sun approach and the territoriality of your ego, you have a chance to look at those situations and find out who and what you are.
The Buddhist path is good, extraordinarily good. When I am on the streets and I see somebody walking along, I can always tell if that person is a practitioner from their walk and the way they hold their head and shoulders. Sometimes other people walk that way, too. We could say that such people have enlightened genes in them in a much more powerful way than simply as an undercurrent.
You could be cheerful, raise your head and your shoulders, and look straight ahead. You could be disciplined and compact at the hinayana level; you could be disciplined, gentle, and loving at the mahayana level; and at the vajrayana level, you could just be there.
Once you have understood, once you have studied and practiced, you might actually have to do something. Together we might need to wake up the whole world from its sleep, and create an enlightened society in accordance with Great Eastern Sun vision. So we should appreciate one another. We should appreciate that we are going to create a wakeful world.
1. Although loneliness is commonly viewed as a negative quality, Trungpa Rinpoche consistently points out the positive role of loneliness on the vajrayana path.
2. In his text the Bodhicharyavatara, or The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shantideva refers to this essence as bodhichitta, which in this context Trungpa Rinpoche is equating with tathagatagarbha. See Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1997).
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The Transition to Vajrayana
The vajrayana is indestructible for the very fact that just like all the rivers go to the ocean, and you cannot drain the ocean, all dharmas go into the vajrayana. It is the truth of all truth. When you tell the ultimate truth, and even without telling the truth, that truth is so true that there is no reference point of falsity. It is real truth, like the ocean.
THE VAJRAYANA path can actually present to you the realization of buddhahood. According to the vajrayana, you are already buddha, and you have to understand that and realize it. In the mahayana, you have inklings of buddha nature, inklings of being enlightened; but in the vajrayana, you are already buddha. That seems to be the difference between the two approaches. But if you have not understood the hinayana and the mahayana, you cannot understand the vajrayana. You will either trip out on your own expectations, or you will become completely confused, and consequently desecrate the dharma altogether. So in discussing the vajrayana, it is important to see its link with the mahayana.
The vajrayana is an extension of the mahayana, so before going on, it is essential that you are adequately prepared. Tantric texts say that first you should become accomplished on the hinayana level by realizing the truth of suffering; having realized that, you should begin to understand innate buddha nature; and at that point, you will be qualified to listen to the teachings of the ultimate result in the vajrayana.
In the mahayana, you develop a sympathetic attitude toward others and you are willing to work with them; you learn to overcome selfishness. As well as learning how to treat others better, you also learn how to treat yourself better. You establish a relationship with a spiritual friend, and you develop prajna and compassion. It has been said that once you attain prajna and compassion, you will have no problem understanding your basic nature, or alaya. Through prajna, you begin to realize that your mind is luminous and free from ego. Therefore, you are able to work with your kleshas. With all that as your basis, you begin to be softened enough to receive the vajrayana teachings. On the ground of hinayana and mahayana, you are ready to hear the vajrayana.
FULLNESS AND MAGIC
Mahayana is concerned with emptiness, or shunyata, with experience without a reference point. But according to the vajrayana, that nonreference point has to be workable. That nonreference point has to be an energizing situation, rather than energy being purely dependent on compassion. And if compassion arises, that compassion also has to be magical. From those conclusions, the word siddhi came to be. Siddhi means “complete achievement.” It refers to power over your state of mind, as well as the power to order the phenomenal world in the way that you would like to see it, within the good intention of nonduality, of course.
So tantra exists from the viewpoint that shunyata has fullness or a magical quality; otherwise, it could not be empty. That fullness has never been explored completely in the lower yanas, but in the vajrayana we are surveying the contents of that fullness and asking what it means to us. Therefore, in order to fulfill sanity properly, it is necessary to get into vajrayana. Without vajrayana, there is no way to understand the fullness of enlightenment.
The closest the basic yanas have come to such fullness is the idea of compassion and the idea of exchanging yourself for others. In the mahayana, you are working with both sentient beings and enlightened beings equally, but according to the vajrayana, that is not quite enough. According to the vajrayana, in the samsaric world, sanity or enlightenment has the upper hand. In order to encounter such a chauvinistic view of enlightenment, it is absolutely necessary to study vajrayana. Otherwise, you will still be involved with the level of idiot democracy.
GREAT EQUILIBRIUM
In the vajrayana, there is an emphasis on upaya, or skillful means. In fact, one of the definitions of vajrayana is that it is composed of teachings based on a particular state of mind or mental approach, in which shunyata and prajna are put together and are regarded as upaya. So the combination of the emptiness nature of the phenomenal world and clear seeing is regarded as great compassion, which is considered to be a skillful means.
One of the differences between the vajrayana and the mahayana is that the vajrayana teachings understand that even the relative truth is workable and insightful. On the level of relative truth, or the kündzop level, all dharmas are seen as equally important and in equilibrium. Kündzop is not regarded as a pick-and-choose situation; rather, everything taking place there is regarded as the real world. By equilibrium, we mean comprehensive evenness. If there is black, that is not particularly great, nor is white particularly great, nor yellow, nor green. Everything is seen as equal. In terms of the sense perceptions, what you are perceiving is never regarded as being on a higher level or a lower level. Everything is on just the basic phenomenal level that takes place constantly.
The nature of vajrayana is to see that quality of evenness. It is to relate much more with the phenomenal world, and with the absolute truth, or töndam, as a by-product of that. In the mahayana, we have a problem, in that the absolute truth is regarded as higher, much more chic. So we tend to cultivate that level more, and see the regular physical world as just completely ordinary. But at the vajrayana stage, that approach becomes a problem. In the vajrayana, we develop an understanding of the ordinary world and how it actually happens. We know how a sunny-side-up egg is cooked, how our tires go psssss, how we can be insulted at a cocktail party, how we could go bankrupt, how there can be somebody who hates us all our life
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VAJRAYANA DELTA
The vajrayana is like a river delta: the place where the river meets the ocean is where the vajrayana actually occurs. In order to realize that, you have to appreciate the little brooks that rush from the mountains thousands of miles away. You have to appreciate how much hard work these brooks have done in order to get to the ocean. Hinayana discipline is like the little brooks that flow into the ocean; without the hinayana, there would be no continuity. Hinayana is the source of vajrayana: it is the source of mantra, of visualizing deities, of relating with the vajra master, of everything.
The vajrayana is indestructible for the very fact that just like all the rivers go to the ocean, and you cannot drain the ocean, all dharmas go into the vajrayana. It is the truth of all truth. When you tell the ultimate truth, and even without telling the truth, that truth is so true that there is no reference point of falsity. It is real truth, like the ocean. You cannot even think of lying; it does not make sense. It is true true, too true, real true. Truth is finally spelled out on the ultimate level.
The truth is big truth, very big. It is big like the sky. It is true. Fire burns—true. There is one truth, even on the relative level; it is just reflected in different ways. It is like the story of the ten blind men and the elephant. One blind man says the elephant is like a tree trunk, one says it is like a leaf, and so on, but really it is just one elephant. Likewise, truth is not relative truth, but it is one truth, which includes different discoveries.
We may come to tantra with doubt about whether there is a real connection between our projection and reality. That doubt may go all the way back to our understanding of the four noble truths: the truths of suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path of liberation. But the more doubt there is, the better. When you have no doubt, that is the truth; and when you have doubt, that is also the truth. So doubt is very fertile ground.
Fundamentally, there is only one truth, although its expressions could be different. You might say that the sun is shiny and bright; you might say it is hot; you might say it dispels darkness. You could talk about the different attributes of the sun, but you are still talking about one particular sun. Sometimes you become too clever and try to get around the relative aspect of truth. But if you dig a hole under a tree, you always find the same root, no matter how many holes you might dig.
The truth is very interesting. It is painful. You could even call it dictatorial, because when you are hurt, you are hurt, and when you feel relaxed, you are relaxed. You cannot manipulate the truth. You cannot hold an election on your truth. You cannot change your truth. It is one truth; it is always one truth. According to vajrayana, it is one single syllable. It is just one word, one syllable. So truth could be quite painful, or it could be delightful.
People are afraid of the truth, so they come up with all sorts of techniques and tricks instead. And people try to find the truth in many different ways. This is the twenty-first century, and it has been many years since the earth was created. We no longer hunt for our food and live in caves, but instead we buy our food. We are no longer savages, but instead we have tailored suits and hairdos, and we have even learned how to wear glasses, if we cannot see far enough or near enough. Society has changed, and it has become more sophisticated; nonetheless, we are still doing the same thing. We are still always trying to find the truth in indirect ways, rather than directly. We have been trying to avoid the direct truth for a long time.
I am not particularly scolding anybody, but it is ironic how we have been able to cheat ourselves in spite of our sophistication. In fact, the more sophisticated we are, the more we come up with philosophies to avoid the truth and substitute something else. That is known as spiritual materialism.
Traditions based on spiritual materialism may be like lakes, or even like the Great Lakes, but they do not reach the ocean. The reason for this is because they do not see that the mind is at once fundamentally luminous and egoless. Vajrayana experience is luminous and bright, because you relate with the phenomenal world without cheating or giving anything up. It is luminous because you have a genuine sympathy and passion for helping others, even beyond the mahayana level. You also begin to have an element of craziness at the highest level of wisdom. You do not believe in the usual conventions that have developed throughout history, and you are willing to go beyond historical or sociological conventionality.
Because you feel free, your teaching techniques and your practice techniques are not stagnant or imprisoned. But being free from social norms does not make you crazy. Instead, you become reasonable, daring, and bright. Here, reasonable means that you are free from social norms; daring means that you are free from concepts; and bright means that you become a source of inspiration to others. With those three qualities, you can actually defeat the habitual patterns of samsara, and at the same time you can proclaim yourself elegantly and beautifully.
SHOCK AND DANGER
The discovery that greater elegance and beauty is possible will shock a lot of people. Beyond that, they will realize that the vajrayana way of relating with pleasure is also greater, something nobody ever thought of in such a way before. Obviously, there are new ski slopes, new dishes, and new fashions every season. One year everybody has a thin tie, and the next year everybody has a thick tie; one year there are short skirts, and the next year there are long skirts. People want to alternate everything all the time, but they actually keep doing the same things. However, they would be shocked to discover that a different value can be put on society and experience altogether. When a fresh, new, beautiful mind comes into their world, that world is completely transformed. This is the definition of enlightened society. Enlightened society is not based on a gimmick; it is based on the beyond-mind concept of vajrayana. So if you ask why there is vajrayana, it is because it is necessary—always.
When you learn about the elements of the vajrayana path, it seems to be very easy. You think that you can tune in very fast, right away, right off the street. It is possible that if you started right off the sidewalk, you could be zapped in your ordinary mind, in some way. But it is also possible that if you do not know how to relate with the ocean, you could be pulled under the water. We do not want to take that kind of chance with anybody. The path and the work that has been done by our ancestors is very important, and we have to respect that. The ocean is very dangerous.
If you watch parachutists jumping so nicely, pulling their cords, opening their chutes, and landing gracefully, it looks very easy, very nice and pleasurable. But if you try to do it yourself and you don’t pull the cord, you go straight down. Likewise, if you watch a master calligrapher doing brushstrokes, it looks very simple. The brush and the ink go along with the paper so nicely. But if you try to do it yourself, you find that you come out with a black hand, and the ink will not come off even if you use soap.
The vajrayana is that same kind of situation. It could be dangerous for you, because you might end up doing everything the wrong way. If someone said that you should develop egolessness, and you developed your ego instead, you could become an egomaniac. If you were told to express your emotions and develop compassion, and you misunderstood that instruction, you might think that expressing your hatred was the same as expressing your love; so you might decide to massacre a few people. If you heard that at the advanced level of vajrayana there is no need to meditate, you might take that literally and just hang around with no awareness and mindfulness.
Those kinds of misunderstandings could be very dangerous, so it is important to relate what you learn about the vajrayana path to the hinayana and mahayana. In order not to abuse the teachings or to view the vajrayana as a kind of Disneyland, it is necessary to continue the disciplines of the hinayana and mahayana. A Tibetan proverb says that if a fox tries to swim, his tail will get wet and he will lose his arrogance. He will end up with a big spongy bundle hanging behind him that he cannot even curl.
STUDYING THE VAJRAYANA
Studying
the vajrayana is not like studying in an ordinary education system where everything is presented on a silver platter. In this form of education, you are presented with choices and with trials and tribulations. As you pick up little things about the hinayana and mahayana, you might feel compelled to look into the vajrayana at the same time. And by being involved with all three perspectives, all three yanas, you might develop greater vision. But it also might make no sense to you at all, especially if you do not have a proper sitting practice or proper commitment. That could be a big problem. So I would like to invite you to study the vajrayana with genuine participation and openness.
At the same time, you should be cautious of people trying to teach you tantra, and you should look very critically at what they are doing. You should see if what a teacher is doing seems to be good, real, and legitimate. You should see if their teaching is according to the books, and has a quality of wisdom and insightfulness. If you get involved with some form of Buddhist tantric trip, it could be very dangerous.
When you study the vajrayana, self-deception is always possible. If you are learning about vajrayana purely by reading books, you have a problem, because you are not synchronizing your learning with your practice. But as long as you are on guard, and as long as you practice as well as study, you have safeguards. So you have to synchronize your learning with your sitting meditation practice, or shamatha-vipashyana. Even if you are a vajrayana student or a would-be vajrayana student, it is still necessary to do that. Then you will be able to understand.
The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness Page 6