To study the vajrayana, your mind has to be clear and precise. You have to be extremely disciplined. The further you go in the discipline, the further you understand. When you are less involved in the discipline, you tend to dream about the colorfulness of vajrayana and become clouded over, misty, and more confused. So if you want to hear the vajrayana properly and fully, a good suggestion is to go back to square one, to when you first encountered the dharma. You might discover greater things in that way. You should maintain your hinayana style of practice as if you were a newcomer, which in a sense you are; you are a newcomer to the vajra world. If you think you can bypass that kind of hinayana training, it will not work, and it will violate the mahayana as well. If you have managed to avoid the hinayana and mahayana, then you will not have the vajrayana either.
SIDDHAS: VARIETIES OF TANTRIC LIFESTYLES
In the vajrayana, there are endless possibilities in terms of livelihood and lifestyle. For example, according to tradition, there were eighty-four mahasiddhas, who all had different occupations.3 Some siddhas were drunkards who spent their life drinking; some were sleepers who spent their entire life sleeping; some were craftspeople who produced art; some were kings who ruled countries; some were pandits who taught in the universities; and some were robbers who stole things. But they all still practiced advanced tantric teachings, or mahamudra.4
In tantra, there is a quality of intelligence that lets you relate with the phenomenal world directly and simply. You engage in Buddhist practice in order to work with your mental fixations. Like the siddhas, you can actually use whatever lifestyle you have as a practice and discipline. You do not just work in the factory for the hell of it; you do it because of your commitment to tantric practice. You do it fully and with dignity, so you become a good worker. Whatever you do, because your tantric involvement has brought you into that particular situation, and because you feel that it is your practice, you learn enormously from it. You are committed to it. So everything is a commitment; the whole thing is your practice. Otherwise, how would your actions be different from the ordinary aggression and passion that takes place all over the universe?
Once people are more realized, they tend to retire from the world. However, there is a need for familiarity with samsara, and according to the samsaric world you have to relate with a trade or profession. Siddhas did not necessarily want to be henchmen or pimps or whatever, but they were encouraged to do so as their practice. They did not particularly enjoy doing such work all that much. It was more of a pain in the neck than pleasurable. All the siddhas were willing to give up their jobs after a while, but the masters said, “Oh no, you’re not going to do that. You go back to weaving, and you go back to making arrows. You go back to hunting, and you go back to fishing.” So even people who were already realized continued to use those lifestyles rather than retiring from the world.
For tantric students, whether you are a good calligrapher or a good draftsperson, you are actually connecting with the world. And at that instant, there is some link to what you might eventually be, in terms of attaining spiritual power, or siddhi. That connection has to be made constantly. Whatever lifestyle you choose—if you decide to become a prostitute, a businessperson, or a thief—you cannot say later that you will not do it anymore. You have to stick with it for a long, long time. You need to have the strength and perseverance to do it properly, in an enlightened way, so that you can help people rather than harming them. That is a very big obligation, an enormous obligation, and it is not easy.
The siddhas of the past lived in the world in an ordinary way. They had jobs and they maintained their businesses, but they still found time to engage in vajrayana practice as well. Following that lifestyle is not so different from what we might do at this point. In the modern world, we could do more or less the same thing, alternating tantric practice and daily life. That may sound fun, but before you really get into it, it is a great deal of hassle. It is a pain. But the fact that you have physical or psychological pain is a sign of stimulation or circulation, a sign that your metabolism is functioning properly.
The inspiration in tantra comes from a vaster sense of things, larger or smaller. Small means large, if it is minute enough; and large means small, if it is large enough. You might ask what is the point, but there is no point and there are no expectations. You are not trying to make a profit, and it is not like the stock market. Instead, things begin to open and close simultaneously. They get wide and big and spacious, and they get minute and tiny constantly. That kind of pulsation goes on all the time in your life. As long as you do not label it as depression or excitement, when you have a minute experience, it is the largest vision that you could ever get, and when you have the largest experience you could ever have, it is microcosmic. So you cannot miss the boat; the boat is always there.
1. Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri depicted in inseparable union are the masculine and feminine embodiments of primordial buddhahood and the principle of fundamental goodness.
2. Indra’s vajra scepter is described as a magical and invincible weapon that, having destroyed the enemy, returns to Indra’s hand like a boomerang.
3. Siddhas are practitioners who have attained great spiritual power, or siddhi. Ordinary siddhis refer to various miraculous capabilities, and supreme siddhi is enlightenment. Mahasiddhas, or “great siddhas,” have attained especially great powers. For more on the eighty-four mahasiddhas, see Abhayadatta, Buddha’s Lions: The Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas, trans. James B. Robinson (Berkeley, Calif.: Dharma Publishing, 1979).
4. For a discussion of mahamudra (“great symbol”), see part 11, “The Tantric Journey: Mahamudra.”
5
The Multifaceted Diamond Path
Altogether the vajrayana brings concentrated possibilities of wisdom. Such wisdom is not dependent on any other factors; it is naked wisdom itself. This wisdom is very general, and at the same time, very precise.
IN SPEAKING of vajrayana, one cannot give a straight talk without making references to something else at the same time; it is a complete network. That is somewhat of a problem, but we try to do our best. There are many different ways of looking at the vajrayana, and a variety of traditional definitions exist. The vajrayana is referred to as tantra or tantrayana, mantrayana, vidyadharayana, fruition yana, upayayana, guhyayana, dharanayana, yana of luminosity, and imperial yana. These various categories are not particularly a hierarchy; they are simply different ways of looking at things for the sake of convenience.
VAJRAYANA
In Tibetan, the vajrayana is called dorje thekpa. In Sanskrit vajra, or dorje in Tibetan, is “diamond-like” or “indestructible,” and yana or thekpa is “vehicle”; so vajrayana, or dorje thekpa, means the “vajra vehicle” or “indestructible vehicle.”
The vajrayana is known as the quick path to enlightenment. Such a path cannot be hampered by our general tendency to edit the world or our perceptions in terms of what we like or dislike, or to wander around within our state of mind, which is called discursive thought.
Entering the vajrayana is quite similar to the early level of entering the Buddhist path. When you take the refuge vow, you vow to enter the Buddhist path without being sidetracked by any other disciplines. You make a decision to follow the nontheistic tradition of Buddhism alone. Similarly, the vajrayana is a discipline that does not allow sidetracks. Rather than following any other cultures or traditions, you simply maintain yourself in the vajrayana discipline alone.
In the vajrayana, skillful means and knowledge are not regarded as separate, but as working together inseparably. This takes place by understanding sacredness: sacredness of vision and form, sacredness of communication, sacredness of the world, and sacredness of consciousness and the mind. By joining knowledge and skillful means, your body, speech, and mind can be coordinated—mind with body, body with speech, and speech with mind—to create the threefold vajra principle of vajra body, vajra speech, and vajra mind. This threefold principle is comprised of indestruct
ibility, attributed to body; lucidness and a communicating or echoing quality, attributed to speech; and a penetrating, clear, concentrated, and shifty quality, attributed to the mind.
Vajrayana practice brings those three principles together, whether in formal visualization practice or in formless practice. Whatever it may be, they always come together. You see that solidness also speaks, that speech also thinks, that mind is also body, that body is also speech, that speech is also mind, and that mind is also speech. So there is a oneness to those three principles. The whole thing becomes very cohesive, workable, and intelligent, and at the same time somewhat efficient and enlightening. This way of working with the three principles together is only presented in the vajrayana tradition; that is where it is put into practice. So the three vajra principles are combined and made into a vehicle or working basis. That is why it is known as vajrayana.
TANTRA OR TANTRAYANA
The vajrayana is also known as tantra or tantrayana. In Sanskrit tantra means “continuity,” and yana, again, is “vehicle”; so tantrayana is the “vehicle of continuity.” In Tibetan, tantrayana is called gyü thekpa. Gyü means “thread” or “continuity,” and thekpa means “vehicle”; so gyü thekpa also means the “vehicle of continuity.” Tantra is also a term for vajrayana texts, so it is similar to the Sanskrit word sutra.
Vajradhara (“Vajra Holder”), the primordial Buddha.
Tantra is the thread that runs right through the hinayana, mahayana, and vajrayana simultaneously. You never break that continuity. Meeting the elder, meeting the spiritual friend, and meeting the vajra master are all the same. You are meeting the same person, and you have the same kind of devotion throughout. You also have the same kind of sympathy for others—the same sympathy and the same sanity. So vajrayana is an expansion and continuation of greater sanity and greater sympathy.
In order to experience or have a glimpse of the vajrayana, you usually need to refer back to your hinayana and mahayana practices. On top of that, you need to understand and appreciate the aftereffect or fruition of those yanas. Then you are naturally and fully following the teachings of the Buddha.
Tantra means that the stream of your existence—your body, speech, and mind—has been linked together by this particular teaching, so you find that from beginning to end, there is a unity and a continuity. There is always a follow-up: things are never choppy, and the subject never changes. You continue with what you have, and what you already have is good enough. Therefore, we can work with you—including your extreme neurosis, your seeming neurosis, and any other problems you might have. We can actually handle them and work with them.
Gyü is continuous, like the thread that runs through your mala beads or like the fishing line that runs from the fisher to the fish. It is a continual process. What is the continuity? Very simply, it is that you begin to realize that your basic being, the means to develop your goal, and the goal itself are connected. That is the meaning of tantra, that they are all connected. They do not come separately: your basic characteristics are not separate from your goal, and the goal cannot exist without the path and the origin.
On the ground level, gyü means that the habitual patterns of body, speech, and mind are included as one continuous whole, without being broken down into separate things. On the path level, gyü refers to the continuous application of methods and techniques in order to overcome basic ego. Once the first technique has been introduced, successive techniques follow one after another quite predictably in a linear style, and those techniques and methods are easy to practice and easy to understand. The fruition aspect of gyü is that it gives you the realization of who you are and what you are. This is called attaining the state of Vajradhara, the final realization of the highest level of vajrayana.1
So the ground is who you are and what you are; the path is what you can do about it, or how you can accomplish your inheritance; and the fruition is that these two are linked together. With the fruition aspect, you are not changing yourself into somebody else, but you are simply becoming what you are. You realize what you are and who you are, which is a delight. There is continuity in that, and there is also continuity on top of that final fruition. At that level, you can combine your body with the body of the tathagatas, or realized ones, your speech with the speech of the tathagatas, and your mind with the mind of the tathagatas. Therefore, there is continuity from the beginning to the end. It is a seamless web.
The idea of continuity is like our life. We could say that our infancy, teenage period, young adulthood, middle age, and old age are all related with each other, as one continual growing-up process. Similarly, in tantra there is continuity because consciousness or awareness cannot be broken down into different departments, but moments of consciousness are all connected with one other. Therefore, when you have your first glimpse of fruition, you cannot just regard that as a warning. As soon as you tread on the path, you occasionally have an idea of how the fruition might be. You cannot disregard that, and you cannot view it as not really being the fruition. Continual continuity takes place.
The basic quality of the vajrayana teachings altogether is that there is a link from the origin, or yourself, to the path; and from the path, there is also a link to what might be. If you are planting an orchard, you have at least seen a photograph or a movie of an apple orchard or orange trees, even if you have not had the pleasure of actually touching the fruits, eating them, and experiencing them. You have some idea of what having a good time in the orchard might be. Because you have this particular idea in your mind, that inspiration acts as the path. It is not materialistic or corny or stupid, but just a vision you have had.
So your first glimpse of tantra includes your impression of what tantra might actually be like. It is like the impression you might have of your becoming a corpse in a coffin. In thinking about being a corpse in a coffin, your identification with what that might be like is happening right here and now; so in that sense, you are a moving corpse. Likewise, although it is just a bud, a bud is still a real flower; it is still a part of the flowering process.
This sense of reality is always there, although you cannot really grasp at that reality as you would like. It is not like grabbing the railing on the fire escape when the house is on fire. In tantra, you have a real glimpse as to what it might be like to become an awakened person. There is a faint warning or faint glimpse of that taking place constantly, which is very interesting and very powerful.
In this way, tantra is unlike the other yanas, which talk about how fertile you are and how much potential you have. They can say good things about you; they can say that you have potential. But so what? In the vajrayana, we talk about what you are, not what you are not. Talking about what you actually are is a very direct and actually lethal suggestion—and at the same time, it is inspiring. This is why getting into vajrayana practice is symbolized by a snake getting into a bamboo pipe. When the snake enters the tube, it can either face upward or downward. That is, you either go directly down or you attain enlightenment all at once. There is no ambiguity. It is very direct, very simple, and very meaningful. Tantra means business, and there is power behind it to support you either way, whichever takes place. Tantra is continuous. It is real and direct and very personal.
MANTRAYANA
In the Tibetan tradition, when referring to the vajrayana, we usually use the term ngakkyi thekpa. Ngak means “mantra,” kyi means “of,” and thekpa means “yana”; so ngakkyi thekpa means “mantrayana.”
This term is actually much more widely used in traditional circles than gyü, or tantra. If you say you are practicing gyü, that means you are practicing the texts of tantra; but if you say you are practicing ngakkyi thekpa or mantrayana, that means you are actually practicing the yogic traditions of vajrayana, the vajrayana itself. In the Tibetan understanding of the Sanskrit term mantra, man means “mind,” and tra means “to protect”; so mantra means “protecting the mind.” So the idea of mantra is to protect one’s mind from obstacles; that is the ba
sic definition.
Sometimes the path moves under you rather than your vehicle moving, and sometimes the path stops and you have to move. The vajrayana vehicle has nine forward gears.2 It does not have a reverse gear and it does not have brakes; once you get in, your vehicle moves forward. It does have a steering wheel, thank heavens, and it doesn’t need gas. It is very tough, almost like a tank. Therefore, it is known as mind protection, or mantrayana.
Mind Protection
When we say “mind,” we are usually referring to the mind of emotions, the mind of subconscious gossip, the mind concerned with holding one’s own territory. We mean the mind connected with taking care of the usual kingdom of one’s ego and the subsidiary politics that revolve around it. So when we say that the mind is protected by mantra, it may sound as if what is being protected is an egomaniac, and what we would end up with is an egomaniac on a power trip, who does not know who they are. But the mind that mantra protects is not that mind of territoriality; what is protected is the intelligence alone.
When the mind is actually worked with and related to, what is protected is its intelligence and cohesiveness. So mind protection does not mean reinforcing the mind’s defensiveness, but protecting its basic understanding and intelligence. However, while mantra is referred to as protection, it is not really protection as such. The practitioner of the mantra and the mantra itself work together as a kind of shell that protects the mind. So mantra does not magically protect the mind, but the protection comes naturally.
The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness Page 10