The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness

by Chogyam Trungpa

  Maker of Situations and Inspiration

  In addition, the guru is the maker of all kinds of situations. In order to further a student’s relationship with the dharma, the guru creates situations and inspiration. From a mundane way of looking at this, it is quite futile and needless to create such unnecessary hassles, but the guru does not hesitate to do so, even though these hassles are seemingly bizarre or unnecessary. And interestingly, those situations bring enormous insight to the student’s mind.

  When we speak of the guru setting up a situation for the student, it is not so much an actual biological or physiological setup; it is more of a psychological world. That is, the guru creates a psychological situation in which you are paranoid, or highly inspired, or whatever it may be. This has nothing to do with your basic karma. If you are born with a lot of bad karma, for example, the guru’s role is to include that in the situation—and within that, they then create further situations, which are basically psychological. So the guru’s actions are a kind of play.

  The guru helps you to see things clearly, but before you can see things clearly, you might need to experience some kind of confusion. You might need some things to be turned upside down, to begin with—then you might turn things right-side up properly. Through the situations created by the guru, you are able to see this.

  The guru is a spokesperson for the teachings; the guru’s actions speak for the teachings and manifest the teachings for the student. The guru also has a direct relationship with the various energy principles or yidams that you are going to identify with. The guru can talk you out of the difficulties that come up on the path, and at the same time they can talk you into getting into those difficulties. The guru can use the power of the yidams, their wrathful or peaceful nature. The guru could shine brilliant hot sun on you or create a thunderstorm on you or freeze you to death or bake you into bread, because the guru has a relationship with every aspect of reality that there is, as far as your world is concerned.

  The vajrayana teacher manifests as much more powerful, direct, and extraordinary than the hinayana preceptor or the mahayana spiritual friend. The guru not only has the key, but the lock as well. In order to understand tantric empowerments, or abhishekas, and any other aspect of the vajrayana, it is necessary for you to understand the principle of the tantric guru or vajra master.

  It is important to appreciate how much power the guru has. Relating with the guru is like going directly to the bank manager, rather than just asking the teller to give you more money. If you really want to make friends with your bank account, you have to convince the bank manager that you are serious. Likewise, understanding the guru principle is a question of developing a certain attitude—one of awe and inspiration toward the guru and the vajrayana. When you are dealing with your guru, you begin to realize that you are dealing with the yidams and dharmapalas as well. In the tantric tradition, the vajra master is very important.

  1. For more on the life and teaching of Naropa, see Chögyam Trungpa, Illusion’s Game: The Life and Teaching of Naropa (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991). For more on Don Juan and Carlos Castaneda, see Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976).

  2. The sambhogakaya (bliss body) is the speech or energy manifestation of enlightenment. Sambhogakaya buddhas represent different styles of enlightened manifestation.

  3. The five buddha-family principles, or five styles of awakening, appear throughout vajrayana teachings and practice. Yidams are generally representative of one of the five families. For more on the buddha-families, see chapter 26, “The Mandala of the Five Buddha-Families.”

  4. Dharmapalas are usually portrayed in Tibetan iconography as fearsome, wrathful figures who are ruthless in protecting a practitioner’s awareness and uncovering and destroying ego fixation. Vajrayana practitioners invoke the protectors in order to support them in their practice and to clear away obstacles to realization.

  8

  The Root Guru as the Epitome of Freedom

  Sacred outlook is not only about thinking everything is good; it is the absence of imprisonment. You begin to experience freedom that is intrinsically good, almost unconditionally free. So the vajra world you are entering is basically good, unconditionally free, fundamentally glorious and splendid.

  SELF-EXISTING SACREDNESS

  In the vajrayana, we develop an understanding of what is called sacred outlook, or the awareness that all phenomena are sacred. This understanding stems from the experience of mindfulness-awareness practice, or shamatha-vipashyana. The popular theistic view of sacredness is that certain things are blessed or influenced by external holiness; therefore, we feel that they are sacred. According to this view, you cannot make anything sacred; somebody else has to do so. But in the vajrayana, sacredness is self-existing. Although the term self-existing sacredness, or sacred outlook, is used in the vajrayana, it does not seem to appear in the literature of the early schools of Buddhism.

  Sacredness is self-existing because in a healthy situation, if things are as they are, then there is no unwholesomeness involved—whether we are speaking of yourself, or your life, or whatever may exist. Sacredness means that situations are wholesome in the fullest sense. It means that experience is so sharp and penetrating, so powerful and direct, that it is like dealing with the naked elements; it is like holding a flame in your naked hand, or drinking pure water, or breathing air, or sitting on the earth. So sacredness is the psychological and spiritual one-hundred-percent wholeness of experience. There is nothing more than that. No external holiness has blessed or influenced this experience in any way at all.

  All situations have possibilities of sacred outlook. You develop an understanding of sacred outlook through your dealings with the phenomenal world, fundamentally. In dealing with your husband, wife, lover, father, mother, or enemy—in dealing with anything that occurs in your life or even in the cosmos—you begin to realize that all of these things are sacred. The dharmic atmosphere is the basic situation, and sacred outlook is the acknowledgment of that. For instance, while you are asleep, the sun might be shining all along—sacred outlook is opening your eyes and waking up to that sunlight. It is opening your curtains so that you can witness the sunshine that already exists.

  The guru is part of this sacredness because the guru is a one-hundred-percent guru and one-hundred-percent wholesome. The vajra master deals with you one hundred percent. Disobeying such a guru is the cause of all kinds of suffering. When you have violated the wholesomeness, you automatically catch a flu or sickness, or you have an accident, or whatever you can imagine. So from sacred outlook arises further and greater devotion to the teacher.

  In turn, you begin to identify with the yidams, or tantric deities. That is, the experience of sacred outlook is embodied or manifested in the forms of the various deities that are described in tantric literature and teachings. These deities are not theistic entities, but they are various expressions of your own state of constant sanity. Each deity captures a certain quality of strength and wakefulness, related to the particular type of experience that an individual is going through. These yidams or deities begin to expand into vast possibilities of all kinds.

  With an understanding of sacred outlook, and having developed unflinching, overwhelming devotion to the teacher, we request the teacher to include us even further in their world. We ask to be empowered so that we might be included completely and fully, as would-be kings and queens in the vajra world.

  THE ABSENCE OF STRUGGLE

  That idea of sacredness is based on the principle of your environment providing natural gentleness. Because the world provides natural gentleness in your surroundings, things do not become too heavy-handed, but instead they are an easy, natural process. Therefore, you learn how to relax with your phenomenal world. Because you have learned how to relax, you do not have to struggle; and because you do not have to struggle, you begin to experience that there is intrinsic goodness everywhere. It is not just tha
t your change of mind makes the world seem better, but the world in itself is better—it is intrinsically good.

  Then because of that goodness, you begin to feel that even greater goodness exists. That greater goodness is called blessings. The reason the world is holy or sacred is because it does not bring out any aggression or outright struggle. Therefore, because you can slip in and relax with it, there is tremendous freedom. The definition of freedom here is the absence of struggle. You are freed from your oppression, your imprisonment. There is a pliable easiness and freedom, which makes things much more sacred. So anything sacred or holy is based on the absence of struggle, on freedom. That freedom is experienced further and further and at a higher and higher level.

  MANIFESTING FREEDOM

  The product of such freedom, or the way in which such freedom manifests, depends on your particular temperament, your state of mind, your style of buddha nature. This freedom manifests and is presented to you in the form of deities. All tantric deities are manifestations of freedom. In tantra, that state of freedom is seen in terms of the feminine and masculine principles, the mother lineage and father lineage. The feminine principle is openness, and the masculine principle is application, or the pragmatic quality. The various levels of tantra are all expressions of total freedom.

  CONNECTING WITH FREEDOM

  You might understand the concept of freedom in your head, but how can you actually go about connecting properly with this kind of freedom, which sounds so great? The interesting thing is that you cannot connect directly with such freedom. You might have a general idea of it, but you are still not altogether free. Somebody has to introduce that freedom, or in fact, somebody has to manifest it—and only the root guru can do that. The root guru manifests as the symbol or epitome of freedom, as a deity as well as through being a teacher. So in the vajrayana, the one and only point—the key point—is to have one-pointed devotion to the root guru.

  SEEING THE PHENOMENAL WORLD AS A MANIFESTATION OF THE GURU

  Through devotion, you realize that the world you are entering into, that freedom, is your freedom as well as the teacher’s freedom and the freedom of the lineage. You experience a state of mind that is known as tagnang. Tag means “pure,” and nang means “perception”; so tagnang means “pure perception.” The best translation of tagnang my translators and I have come up with is “sacred outlook.” The phenomenal world is seen as sacred because it is a manifestation of the guru, and it is also a product of your practice.

  As far as this point is concerned, as students you do not have any other world. You might be visiting your parents or your rich uncle; nevertheless, those situations are all part of tagnang, or sacred outlook. They are a part of the vajra master’s world. Your parents may be heavy-handed and overpowering, but they are still a manifestation of the guru.

  The amazing point is that ego does not see, but the guru does see. Ego is regarded as blind, so if you really want to see properly, you have to see something other than what the blind see. But there is something other than the ego’s vision of the world—there is true vision. With true vision, you see that the phenomenal world is already self-existing purity; you see that it is sacred. So ego’s vision does not have very good credentials. The whole Buddhist path is like that: we try to shed any possibilities of ego’s vision, a vision that is usually colored or distorted or completely blacked out.

  The guru tells you the truth, and the truth can destroy anything untrue. That is the basic logic, or principle, of vajra nature. Somebody tells you the truth, and that truth is very powerful and penetrating. It creates a world of truth. Encountering the truth is like being in a dingy, dark room with a little hole in the window. First a little sunbeam comes through the window; then you decide to get up and get dressed; then you open your door and go outside and you discover there are sunbeams everywhere. Those sunbeams are an exaggeration of the first little sunbeam; it is the same thing, but it is everywhere. Likewise, seeing the phenomenal world as a manifestation of the guru is a further exaggeration of devotion, in a positive sense. One-pointed devotion is seeing the brightness of the sun through your peephole, and then multiplying that by hundreds of thousands as you step outside, where the sun is shining everywhere.

  THREE ASPECTS OF THE VAJRA WORLD

  Along with that understanding of sacred outlook, it is very important for you to understand that the world has three aspects: the yidams, or principal deities; the teacher, or vajra master; and yourself. Combined, that threefold situation provides what is known as the vajra world. Sacred outlook is not only about thinking that everything is good; it is the absence of imprisonment. You begin to experience freedom that is intrinsically good, almost unconditionally free. So the vajra world that you are entering is basically good, unconditionally free, fundamentally glorious and splendid.

  At the point at which you enter that world, there is bondage between your vajra master, your deity, and yourself; you are joined together. That provides a profound basis for vajrayana practice altogether. Without those three situations—without the vajra master or root guru, without yourself, and without the deities that you relate with, which are your own expression—you cannot practice vajrayana at all. That seems to be the basic idea of experiencing and understanding sacred outlook.

  FLASHING SACRED OUTLOOK

  Sacred outlook comes to individuals in the form of a sudden flash. It can be discussed in terms of three lojong, or mind-training, slogans,1 which are connected with vajra body, vajra speech, and vajra mind.

  Photo 6. Trungpa Rinpoche (ca. 1970–1971) at Tail of the Tiger (now Karmê Chöling) in Vermont.

  Vajra Body

  Vajra body is connected with how we relate to the phenomenal world. The lojong slogan that applies is: “When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi.” This slogan means that whenever you are attacked or there is a setback, instead of going along with it, you flash sacred outlook, which only takes a fraction of a second.

  The reason this slogan is connected with vajra body is that it talks about the environment. The environment threatens you all the time, and your own existence is dependent on it. But as a vajrayana student, you begin to feel that you are no longer undermined or intimidated by external obstacles. You are willing to relate with physical situations and obstacles. Therefore, you are able to transform mishaps into the path of bodhi. You are willing to do so because your shamatha-vipashyana practice has worked, and your lojong or slogan practice has also worked. So it is a linear situation, not an apple landing on your head.

  According to this slogan, when the external environment is full of mishaps and problems, you divert or transform them into the path of bodhi. For instance, you may be living in a dirty apartment full of cockroaches, or you may not be able to go outside because of the pollution. But even so, you can begin to develop sacred outlook of the body, so the environment is respected and worshipped in the vajrayana sense.

  As another example, if your house has caught fire all around you, you need to decide whether to sit in the middle of the house and let yourself be scorched, or step outside. Vajra body deals with questions like that, questions about how to relate with the environment. The idea is that when you are free from grasping and fixation, you can begin to handle your environment. In fact, by the power of bodhichitta, you could probably put out the fire in your house. That is the vajrayana twist. So when the external environment is full of mishaps and problems, you divert or transform them into the path of bodhi.

  Vajra Speech

  Speech is that which acts as a pulsation between mind and body; it is what joins mind and body together. It is what feels and joins together the solidness of the body and the flying quality of the mind. If your mind is cold and your body is hot, speech is what is going to communicate those two to each other. Vajra speech is connected with becoming aware of your subconscious chatter and gossip. The slogan that applies to speech is: “Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation.”

&nb
sp; The idea is that whatever you come across, you suddenly flash sacred outlook, without discursive or intellectual answers. When unexpected situations occur, or when expected situations have finally caught up with you, you join that with meditation, or sacred outlook. This applies not only to the evil situations you meet in the environment, but to whatever you may encounter. You are able to join any unexpected situations or sudden surprises with meditation.

  Vajra Mind

  Vajra mind means experiencing everything as shunyata protection. The related slogan is: “Seeing confusion as the four kayas is unsurpassable shunyata protection.”2 The idea is that whenever nonsacred possibilities occur in your mind and you begin to let yourself drown in them completely, you do not give in to that manipulation, but again you flash sacred outlook.

  THE PROBLEM OF RESENTMENT

  In relating to the idea of devotion to the teacher or to the vajra master, your resentment may begin to become problematic. When you have mishaps of any kind, you automatically cringe and pass the buck to somebody else, and the most immediate person that you can pass the buck to is the teacher. You think it is because you are in the guru’s environment that such things happen to you.