The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness

by Chogyam Trungpa

  In the vajrayana, you are transcending those three mundane states through your discipline and through your connection with the vajra master, so that everything is regarded as sacred. Your body, your speech, and your mind are regarded as a sacred and holy environment. Bringing about such an atmosphere or holy environment is dependent on each of you individually. But to begin with, evoking that quality of sacredness depends on someone who can actually initiate that possibility. This initial provocation is provided by the deities of vajrayana. These various vajrayana principles or deities are basically natural reflections of your own vajra nature, but they manifest as the power source at the beginning.

  Secondly, there is the need for a teacher, or vajra master, who pushes you into the situation. And, thirdly, there is you yourself, the student who can be provoked into that sacredness altogether.

  To understand this better, let’s use an analogy: If you are going to jump off a cliff very ceremoniously, very properly, very deliberately (supposing such a situation exists), you yourself, as the person who is going to jump, walk toward the cliff. You also have a person who will help you jump off the cliff, someone who encourages you and maybe has to give you an extra push. That person is the vajra master. We could say that the cliff itself and the space beyond it represent the deities.

  These three principles could also be exemplified by the analogy of someone committing hara-kiri, or ritual suicide. In this analogy, you are the person who is going to commit hara-kiri; the sword is like the deities; and the court or audience that encourages you, watches you, and expects that you could actually do so, is the vajra master.

  OPENING THE DOOR TO THE VAJRAYANA TEACHINGS

  It is completely impossible for a beginning student to relate with any of the vajrayana teachings without the vajra master opening the door of vajrayana to that student. So the vajra master plays a very important part: the vajra master opens the experience of vajrayana to you.

  The reason the vajra master is so important is that your existence is still wrapped up in the mahayana realization of the egolessness of dharmas. You have soaked yourself in the benevolence of the mahayana, but you are unable to go beyond mahayana saviorship. Although you may be perfect on a mahayana level, there is an extraordinary magical power—in other words, ultimate enlightenment—that you are still not accepting. That is precisely the reason why you are held back; it is why you are not a completely enlightened person.

  You may be a good mahayanist, but that does not mean very much at this point. You are willing to clean a lot of diapers for sentient beings, you are willing to work in a lot of social situations, and you are kind to others—but from the point of view of vajrayana, so what? You are missing the point unless you are able to click further, and to give up such territory altogether and join the vajrayana band, or the vajrayana hordes. But if you can just dive in, the heroic aspect of mahayana could become vajra-like and monolithic.

  Mahayanists might begin to feel that their realization is not diamond-like enough, not vajra-like enough. They may have heard about or experienced vajra samadhi, but a furthering of that adamantine quality has not been made available to them, so they are still hungry. It is as if the hinayanists had a good breakfast, and the mahayanists had a great lunch, but now they are looking for a fantastic dinner party. They are not completely fulfilled. Things have been executed heroically, but still something is lacking. You can never quite be in the world if you are always regarding samsara as something to be gotten beyond. The idea of transmutation has not yet taken place.

  SURRENDERING

  In order to enter the vajrayana, it is necessary to have a vajra master. Moreover, self-indulgence has to be cut through by means of vajrayana discipline. In other words, in order to wake up, in order to wake the human mind of hinayana and mahayana, it is absolutely necessary to have an object of surrender beyond logic and beyond any philosophy, even beyond a measure of kindness. At this point, you are surrendering everything. Everything is included—all your reservations, including poetic license, which everybody has. That total surrender is actually seeing things as they are.

  For that to happen, for that to actually take place, the illogical master begins to come into your life. At that point, there are a lot of possibilities for you to cut the samsaric logic altogether. In other words, if there is no vajra master, it is impossible for students to click into the vajrayana path, because they are still involved in reasoning. Although the hinayana and mahayana are trying their best to cut through the student’s reasoning mind, that cutting-through process has itself become reasonable.

  The vajra master becomes the unreasonable figure who does not buy any of your trips, not even the holiest of the holiest of your trips. But at the same time, your mind—your vajra-essence mind—is protected by the vajra master. That is why vajrayana is referred to as mantrayana, because your mind is protected. That protection has two sides: your clicking to the vajra master, and the vajra master clicking to you. That makes a definite bond.

  Your unreasonable mind—or reasonable mind, for that matter—would have lots of expectations as to what vajrayana might be. But in order to actually get into vajrayana, it is necessary to give up those expectations. A lot of giving up is involved. Therefore, your mind is protected from expectations that would interfere with the actual surrendering process. By protecting the student’s mind, the vajra master also acts as an agent for the deities. These various tantric deities, which come from nontheistic vision, provide a great deal of miracle and power.

  If you do not have enough faith in the vajra master, but you are still trying to con your teacher, it can be dangerous. The vajra master’s view is a totality, and your view is another totality. You might try to say: “Who’s who and what’s what? What do you know?” Or you might think: “Who’s cheating whom? I’m cheating him, and he knows I’m cheating him; therefore, he is cheating me. So I cheat him, then he cheats me, blah, blah, blah.” Your same old logic could go on and on. If you cannot get away from that, it will be disastrous for you in the vajrayana. You will end up in a realm where there is no reference point of pleasure and pain; you will end up in a realm of utter pain and claustrophobia.

  So the role of the vajra master is crucial and much larger than that of the spiritual friend at the mahayana level. The vajra master does not try to do a good job or interpret the teachings. The approach of being your psychologist or therapist, or trying to do good things for you, does not apply to the vajra master. The vajra master is also not using vajrayana to get a credential. Trying to use vajrayana to establish your credentials or create possibilities for yourself is disastrous. Trying to make yourself into a homemade teacher, let alone a homemade student, does not work.

  The whole relationship between vajra master and student has to be professional, by the book, a business deal. It is a businesslike attitude, a business approach, because very simply, everything involved in your life is your concern. You have to relate directly with your suit and tie or your skirt and blouse, because the world we have is the world that is: the world of vajrayana. It is the vajra world, so everything in your life is part of your business. You cannot say that this portion is my business, and that portion is somebody else’s problem. You take everything on yourself—all the energies of the world—and that involves tremendous responsibility, daring, and heroism.

  STICKING WITH TRUE DHARMA

  Vajrayana is a very bold statement and a bold experience. What has been said was said because it is real. Nothing is left up to interpretation. If you try to do that, it means you are in bad shape. You should not try to rationalize the vajrayana. You cannot afford to interpret and reinterpret and re-reinterpret the world of vajrayana at all, whether philosophically, psychologically, poetically, or however you might do it. You have to stick with the true dharma. There is no choice. You should remember that.

  I do not want anyone to become my interpretive spokesperson, editing what has been said. In presenting the vajrayana, I am trying to be as genuine as possibl
e, according to the teachings. You should not create obstacles to hearing that by saying, “Well, he said that, but he didn’t mean that. He meant something more delicate, something more poetic or psychological.” You should not pervert the teachings. If you do, you will be eaten up.

  When you are studying the vajrayana teachings, and especially when you are preparing to become a vajrayana student yourself, you can question or investigate anything you want, as long as you are not reinterpreting to make yourself comfortable. Everybody brings along their wishes as to what the teachings should mean, which is a problem. But if you just consider what is being presented, that is okay. In other words, what I am saying is: Don’t bring your past into it, but bring your present. Don’t say: “I have been a psychologist, I have been heroic, I have been a poet, and I have been a bartender.” Trying to use whatever you may have been to give validity to the teachings in your own way is not the way—it is your own distorted way, which is not so good. In that case, you are perverting the teachings.

  At this point, you should just try to understand what is being said—that’s all. Just study. Study, and discuss what you study with others. Relate to how you feel, rather than how you have been decorated by your background. When you are receiving the vajrayana teachings, no one has any background. Everybody is just a student, a gray dot, and everyone’s past has been forgotten for a while. You are just studying the dharma, nothing more. So do not try to play one-upmanship or prove that you are smarter than others. When you study the vajrayana, keep it simple. You are just a student of the dharma, that is all.

  10

  The Power of Devotion

  Devotion is somewhat like a spiritual love affair. You are longing to learn from a learned and enlightened person, like a schoolchild. Without devotion, there is no possibility of learning or studying vajrayana teachings of any kind. Devotion is what leads to transmission.

  VIEW OF OURSELVES IN THE THREE YANAS

  Devotion is an important topic in the vajrayana, but in order to relate with devotion, we first need to look at ourselves as the recipients of the teaching. It is necessary for us to realize who we are and what we are, particularly when we begin to practice and study the vajrayana.

  In the hinayana, we know who we are: we are an abundance of pain and an abundance of heaps that do not coordinate with each other, except in a neurotic way.1

  In the mahayana, we find that we are an abundance of fixations. We find that we are holding on to ourselves and that we could be liberated by realizing and transplanting bodhichitta into ourselves. We see that working with bodhichitta loosens everything up, and we begin to become loosened up as well.

  In the vajrayana, we also regard ourselves as an abundance of neurotic fixations, and we find that we are constantly uptight and self-conscious. However, we also find that we are more than that. In particular, when we begin to listen to the vajrayana teachings, we find ourselves terrified and fearful. We develop tremendous fear of the profound meaning and profound subjects that are taught in the vajrayana.

  FEAR AS THE GROUND OF DISCOVERING SACREDNESS

  The experience of sacredness begins with fear. It begins with your resentment, fear, uncertainty, and your feeling of being unable to understand—but then you give in to that. There is both fear of fear, and fear of walking into the sacredness. First you experience fear of the profound meaning; then we tell you to jump in because of your fear. And when you jump in, you experience fear of the sacredness. In the vajrayana, we begin with experience, not logic. We only use logic after you have understood the experience, after it has actually come to seem logical to you.

  Fear is an obstacle when you do not give in to it; but after you have given in, fear becomes kindling, an encouragement, and a pilot light. Once you have given in, you develop so much reverence for the vajra master, the one who actually created that particular situation and the whole experience. If the sacred world is the world as it is, the world as it has always been, you might ask, “In what sense does the vajra master create it?” But who actually knows the world as it is? Tom, Dick, and Harry do not really know the world as it is. The one who does know is the vajra master.

  So in order to become devoted students, we have to start out with terror and awe. It seems that this is the only way we can begin. We have to start with the kind of fear that people develop when they begin to have an idea of what the vajrayana actually means. When people have studied the hinayana and mahayana, they begin to develop respect for the vajrayana as being a very special case. People who have studied something about the vajrayana, and particularly those who are contemplating becoming vajrayana practitioners, begin to feel terrified. It is not that the presentation of the vajrayana teachings is terrifying; it is that the consequences of embarking on the whole tantric journey become terrifying. It is on the basis of that terror and fear, that unwillingness or uncertainty about giving in, that we begin our practice.

  So fear is our starting point. And from that initial terror and fear, we begin to discover what we are terrified of. If we look into the depths of our mind, into that mind of terror and fear, we find that we are afraid of the sacredness of vajrayana. It is as if we were dressed in T-shirts and jeans, and suddenly we were invited to Buckingham Palace. We feel as if the teachings are beginning to mock us. More precisely, we are exposed as sloppy, unwholesome individuals who are still carrying our handbags of habitual patterns and neuroses with us. We are like kangaroos carrying our little pouches of resources, our little neuroses, in case we need further reinforcement to hold on to all our stuff. We are unwashed, smelly, shaky, nervous, untidy, and unwholesome; and when we begin to walk into the vajrayana world in that style, we obviously feel both dirty and unpresentable.

  AWE AND REVERENCE

  At this point, however, instead of placing too much emphasis on your dirtiness and unpresentableness, you could shift to a different state of mind: one of awe and reverence. When you look around at your world and see that everything is sacred, holy, wonderful, colorful, dignified, and powerful, you experience the contrast between yourself and the vajrayana world. Because of that contrast, you begin to be awe-inspired. You pick up on the awe-inspiring and fearsome nature of the world, and you develop a feeling of reverence for it. So the perception of sacredness comes from the mind’s experience of contrast.

  In terms of fear, fear of oneself is self-consciousness, and fear of sacredness is other-consciousness. When you first enter the vajrayana world, you should not necessarily just feel your own self-consciousness. You should use your self-consciousness to review the rest of the environment, so that this self-consciousness is imposed on the whole perspective rather than purely on yourself. Out of that, you might pick up some reverence for the sacredness of the vajrayana world and the sacredness of your experience itself.

  In the example of Buckingham Palace, walking into that palace creates fear of oneself, or self-consciousness. But actually you are both self-conscious and other-conscious. You are conscious of the surroundings, so altogether it is a fear of sacredness, which implies oneself and other at the same time. It is like being in a plane. If you are flying in an airplane, simultaneously you are self-conscious of being in the plane and being in space. You look down and you realize that there is a big drop, and at the same time you also realize that you are flying in the airplane. It is a similar experience here.

  The sense of sacredness is the key to how you can get further and further into the vajrayana. This particular vajra Buckingham Palace, this sacred world that we are talking about, is created by the vajra master and by the lineage of the vajra master. When you develop faith or trust in that sacred world and in the teacher, who is the creator of that world, you realize that you do not have to stick to your jeans and T-shirts, which is a joy.

  At this point, since you have not run back to your former home, quite possibly the best thing to do is to take off your T-shirt and jeans, take a shower in the compound of the palace, and present yourself, naked and clean. That is how you enter t
he vajra Buckingham Palace. And as you enter, you still feel as if you are yourself—as if. So devotion in this case is the fearlessness of coming as you are, properly showered and cleaned up, without your T-shirt and jeans. Once you enter, the king or queen and the occupants of the palace appreciate you and recognize you as a brave guest. They acknowledge that entering this space takes courage and conviction. So devotion in the vajrayana sense is not just trust and worship, but it is having a wholesome attitude toward yourself.

  AAH! THE SPACE BEFORE FIRST THOUGHT

  In the vajrayana, the expression of that wholesome attitude of devotion comes from the space before the first thought; it happens before the first thought. When you have a thought—for instance, “column” or “ceiling”—that thought is already fully formed. But before you have the thought “column” or “ceiling,” you have openness—aah! So there is openness—aah!—then “column” or “ceiling.” As long as there is a gap of openness—aah!—there is no problem. As practitioners, you are supposed to pay attention to that aah!; you are supposed to look at it. After that, this aah! might become “column” and “ceiling,” which at that point is: So what?!

  Photo 7. Trungpa Rinpoche opening a Japanese fan. Aah!

  Experiencing the openness of aah! leads to reverence for the vajra master who created your awareness of this situation. Your experience of aah! could be sparked by anything. It could be like the opening of a Japanese fan. The first stage of seeing the fan is just—aah! Then you see the fan as a “fan,” which is the second stage. And the first experience of devotion occurs just like that. It is not about bureaucracy, or loyalty, or territory. But having started out with fear of the profundity, with being awe-inspired, you then go aah!—and after that you click into the situation.