The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness

by Chogyam Trungpa

  THE THREE NEIGHS. The three neighs are waking the world to the fact that samsara and nirvana are unoriginated, offering the whole world, and demanding obedience.

  Waking the world to the fact that samsara and nirvana are unoriginated. The first neigh is to wake the world to the fact that samsara and nirvana are both unoriginated. They exist on a simple level that provides immense space, so you do not have to be biased. Here we are talking about samsara and nirvana in the vajrayana sense, which is much more highly intensified than in the hinayana or even the mahayana. Samsara in this case is much more in turmoil and confused, a much more screwed-up world, and nirvana is highly enlightened and highly transformed into the greater world of vajrayana. And both those worlds are regarded as equal. Nobody created that world of samsara and nirvana; it is a self-existing world.

  The function of the first neigh is to blank people’s minds. It is to confuse and at the same time to cut your mind. The first neigh cuts your thoughts. Blank! Samsara and nirvana are one! They are unmade, unoriginated, and self-existing! The point is to make you realize that you are gullible, but at the same time you are not gullible. Your gullibility is a part of your existence; it is not just that you are looking for excitement. The general pattern of samsara seems to be that people are looking for kicks of all kinds based on aggression, passion, and ignorance, but fundamentally this gullibility is just a way of being.

  There is a sense of absurdity involved with this first neigh. In blanking people’s minds, the realization that samsara and nirvana are one, and that they are unmade, unoriginated, and self-existing, occurs as a spontaneously existing understanding.

  Offering the whole world. The second neigh is to offer the animate and inanimate world as a gigantic feast offering. You offer the energy of the animate and inanimate world for the sake of paying off karmic debts. The animate and inanimate world could be made into a gigantic ocean of soup made of flesh and blood and crushed bone, and cooked in a huge cauldron to be offered to the dakinis of the world. It is not offered to the gurus or to the herukas; instead it is purely offered to the dakinis, because they are also gullible and mischievous.

  That you are feeding gullible food to gullible beings is a cosmic joke. You are not presenting good, beautiful, sweet things, but just bones and flesh in a big soup cauldron. That is the provocative aspect of this horse’s neigh.

  Demanding obedience. With the third neigh, having satisfied all those to whom you made that offering, you can now proclaim that they must do what you want, that they must become obedient to you. With the third neigh, the deities who are protectors of the teaching, who remind you of your basic awareness, could also be woken up and made to obey your command for protection.

  The three neighs are connected with traditional bugle calls. The first call of the bugle is to let everybody and everything know that you exist and that your administration exists. The second bugle call announces the fact that you have already made yourself comfortable. The third bugle call proclaims that all who hear it must obey and act upon what is told therein. The three neighs are another way of working with the phenomenal world.

  Chemchok: The Supreme Heruka

  The fourth logos is Chemchok, who is deep red or mahogany in color. Che means “giant,” and chok means “supreme.” In Tibetan terms, he is just called the Great Heruka, or Vajra Heruka, but that seems to be rather generalized. Chemchok is connected with the center of the mandala, and with turning the five ingredients of flesh, blood, piss, shit, and semen into the anti-death potion, or amrita. Overall, the idea is that your existing life experience could be turned into amrita.

  According to tantric discipline, you are not supposed to refer to those five ingredients by their usual names. For instance, you do not call shit “shit”; you call shit “Vairochana,” and you refer to piss as “Akshobhya.” So one aspect of tantric discipline is that all kinds of synonyms are used to remind you of those basic qualities. Another aspect, naturally, is that each of the five ingredients is connected with a particular buddha-family. Bodhichitta, or semen, is connected with the ratna family, piss with the vajra family, and shit with the buddha family. Meat, referred to as bhala in what is called the dakini’s language, is connected with the padma family, and blood, or rakta in Sanskrit, is connected with the karma family.5

  The idea is to collect those elements physically as well as psychologically. However, you are not encouraged to literally collect shit and piss and make them into an anti-death potion. Somehow, that does not work. What you are actually collecting is your attitude toward such things; you are collecting the attitude of being sickened. Shit, piss, and the other ingredients are sickening. They are not particularly pleasant. They are so raw that you do not even want to talk about them; you would rather change the conversation to something else.

  In this practice, you are subtracting the shittiness out of the shit itself: you are subtracting your revulsion and your feeling of yuckiness. That fear and unpleasant feeling is the basic point. I suppose it could be said that throughout the teachings of tantra, there is the feeling of not being able to deal with such teachings, the feeling that the whole thing is unpleasant. That embarrassment and hesitation as to whether you can hang on or whether you will be kicked out of the whole thing is the starting point. It is the inspiration, the teacher, and the teachings.

  In the fourth logos, you are making all those ingredients into amrita. The traditional ceremony or ritual for this is based on brewing amrita from eight basic herbs and a thousand lesser herbs. You collect them together, put in yeast, and brew them in order to make what is called dharma medicine, or dütsi chömen. The idea of doing all this is to intoxicate those hesitations by providing greater medicine than hesitation.

  What is happening in the fourth logos is that you are engaged in the gigantic scheme of intoxicating the whole universe with its own dharmic anti-death potion. With that magical, vajra anti-death potion, the phenomenal world and its container, which is mind, can be intoxicated completely. The idea is to develop a cosmic brewing system and churn out all kinds of intoxicating drinks in order to feed the world of phenomena, and to allow phenomena to transcend feeding and get completely drunk. In this logos, the world is finally seen as a very powerful and real world, where neurosis can be intoxicated into wisdom, where rightness and wrongness can be intoxicated into nothingness, and where all six realms can be intoxicated into the mandala of the five buddha-families.

  Dorje Phurba or Vajrakilaya: The Dagger Wielder

  The fifth logos is Dorje Phurba, or Vajrakilaya, who is blue in color, and connected with the northern direction of the mandala. In Tibetan, phurba (or kila in Sanskrit) is the word for “dagger,” specifically a three-bladed dagger. According to Indian mythology, which Buddhism shares, phurbas are the weapons of the gods. In Tibet, the three-bladed dagger was used for executing criminals. When a criminal was caught, their hands and legs were tied up, and the executioner stabbed a kila through their heart. The Incas may have used a similar approach. I don’t know exactly, but this kind of ritual stabbing seems to be a very ancient, sacrificial technique.

  In this case, the criminal is Rudra, the embodiment of ego, and the execution is a ritual one. In this ritual, there is a little box, and inside the box there is an effigy of Rudra made out of dough, and you stab the dough. The idea is to penetrate through, not just stab and stop. You penetrate all the way through so the phurba comes out the other side like a bullet.

  THE FOUR PENETRATIONS. Altogether there are four types of penetration: the wisdom dagger, the bodhichitta dagger, the limitless compassion dagger, and the physical dagger, which is the point at which one physically stabs the effigy of Rudra.

  Wisdom dagger. The first penetration is the dagger of wisdom and insight. In this penetration, basic insight or intelligence penetrates confusion. At this level, confusion is magical or tantric confusion. An ordinary person experiencing tantric confusion would regard it as fantastic insight. But there is further, greater wisdom beyond that, whic
h can actually cut through that type of confusion. Insightful wisdom, the meditative experience of a sudden glimpse, can be used to penetrate that confused mind.

  Bodhichitta dagger. The second penetration is the greater bodhichitta mind, or bodhichitta dagger. It is used on uninspired mind, cutting through spiritual materialism precisely. Bodhichitta is inspired toward enlightenment, and spiritual materialism is prejudiced against the idea of enlightenment or of giving up ego. This penetration is also connected with karma yoga practice. The idea is to subjugate your partner, and then plant bodhi mind in him or her. This is called supreme bodhi penetration.

  Limitless compassion dagger. The third penetration is the limitless compassion dagger, which pierces through the heart of those who are angry or resentful. Anger in this case is fundamental anger. It is resentment over not wanting to surrender and give, which involves enormous arrogance. With this dagger, having felt longing, openness, and workability in relation to the world of human beings and all sentient beings, you cannot be put off anymore. You are going to penetrate on and on, again and again. Even if beings do not want your services, you are still going to mind their business completely, and you are still going to penetrate through constantly.

  Physical dagger. The fourth penetration is the physical dagger used to ritually pierce through an effigy of Rudra. You create an effigy of Rudra and you pierce him through his heart, while at the same time appreciating the meaning of the symbolism and recollecting the previous three daggers. By stabbing the phurba through the effigy of Rudra, both Rudra and the perverters of the teachings can be penetrated by magical power and stopped. They can be destroyed completely by that magical process.

  The fifth logos is unlike other tantric practices. It is unique in that it has very little to do with pleasure. The bodhichitta dagger has a connection with sexual union and the idea of sexual penetration, but that seems to be the only pleasure. This logos is very aggressive. The penis as dagger is penetrating or cutting through expectations of fulfilling desire, and is achieving a state of shunyata. It is cutting through cheap desires and achieving the mahasukha experience of greater joy. And as you penetrate, the dagger actually gets sharpened.

  The fifth logos is extremely powerful. It stands out in the tantric tradition of Buddhism due to its emphasis on conquering, penetrating, and destroying. Padmasambhava supposedly used this logos constantly, as in the destruction of the five hundred heretics. When he was appearing as the Lion’s Roar, the wrathful figure Senge Dradrok, he threw a teakwood symbol of a dagger into the jungle where the heretics lived, and it caught fire and killed five hundred of them. In his journey to Tibet, Padmasambhava also used the destructive approach that is connected with this particular yidam.

  Mamo: The Mother Principle

  The sixth logos is the mamo mandala. A mamo is a kind of mother principle: it is a twofold mother principle. There is the grandmother quality of the ma, somebody who presides over the space of your heritage. And then there is mo, who is more like a wife, someone who puts intelligence into your life situation, someone who cooks for you.

  Mamo, ironically, is the familiar word for dakinis. Instead of calling them dakinis, people call them mamo, which is like referring to your mother as “mommy.” Mamo could be a corruption of the Tibetan word mama, which means “I” or “myself,” reflecting that idea back on somebody else as the feminine principle.

  The mystical interpretation of ma is dharmata, or dharmadhatu, quite strangely, which is beyond even the dharmakaya level. Dharmakaya is an abbreviation of jnanadharmakaya, which means “greater wisdom body of dharma.” On the dharmakaya level, you are still a dharmakaya buddha, so dharmakaya is still path oriented, but in fact there are several layers of space beyond that. In this case, we are talking about something beyond any path orientation. It is just personal existence. We are talking about dharmadhatu. Dharmadhatu is the greatest space. It is beyond Buddhism, beyond language, beyond dharma, and beyond truth.

  Mo is connected with the insightfulness coming out of that space of dharmadhatu. That insightfulness is still very spacious, and it is still the feminine principle, but more like a lover or a daughter. It is like an outspoken maid or a critical sister. It is an insightful, powerfully penetrating principle.

  Mamo is the basic feminine principle that governs the whole universe. The universe is conquered by the feminine principle whether we like it or not. I think that people who have a lot of feelings about food and motherhood and relatives, such as Jews and Tibetans and Italians, still have this kind of feminine principle. When young people get together and decide to get married, they may be horrified by their parents’ and grandparents’ traditional ways. They think that they are going to be different and create a new society. But although they do not mean to, they cannot help being the same way. They re-create the same food-oriented world or the same feminine world again and again. That seems to be the natural process of how the world grows and how the world learns to relate with reality properly.

  If there were no mother principle, we could not learn anything. We could not even wipe our bottoms if there had been no mother. Things would become completely wild and savage. Mothers brought us civilization. I am not about to compose a national anthem to mothers, but that seems to be the way things usually happen. You might think that you are a great powerful man, free from this whole woman or mother or grandmother trip, but you are not quite there. When you say that you are no longer affected by that, you are even more into it, you are even more involved. You might be living without your mother’s cooking, just living on canned food or pizza, but you are still subject to the mother hang-up.

  THE MOTHER’S CURSE. The practice of this logos is called the mother’s curse, and the way to rouse this is to work along with the dakini principles in creating enormous chaos for others or for yourself. It is to create fundamental chaos for ego. The mamo mandala brings prana, nadi, and bindu together, which means that there can be experience that combines the essence of life, the moving life energy, and the channels that accommodate that movement. That is the only way you could generate the mother’s curse on others.

  The ritual object for this logos is a little silk bag filled with poison, which is tied to an ordinary dagger. My tutor used to tell me to be careful not to breathe in too close to that bag or I might get the flu. The mother’s curse creates a working basis by means of little physical things that happen. That is why it is called the mother’s curse: it is like the curse in the ordinary sense of menstruation, where a woman is repeatedly reminded that she is not pregnant because she has her period.

  The idea of mother’s curse is similar to what we call black air. The student-teacher relationship at the vajrayana level is very sensitive, very special. As a student, you get hit much more than anybody else if the guru creates black air. I remember Jamgön Kongtrül of Shechen doing it, and it was really horrible. You could not even eat or have casual conversations with people because everything was so bad and black and down. The sound of your own footsteps was part of the terror and horror.

  That kind of black air is only perceptible to a student who is actually committed to the path or the teacher. It means that some connection is being made. It may be negative at that moment, but in the long run it works as part of the lessons through which you are progressing. If someone completely misses the pattern of the whole thing, it means that no connections are being made, and there is no chance of even getting into the environment.

  Once Jamgön Kongtrül of Shechen lost his temper and threw his hand drum during an abhisheka ceremony. He was just about to do the handdrum ritual, and suddenly he stopped and threw his drum. It landed on the head of a khenpo who was bald, and it made a little slit in his skin. The khenpo was actually the intended target, although it seemed as if Jamgön Kongtrül just threw the drum and it landed on the khenpo’s head by accident. Jamgön Kongtrül was amazingly accurate.

  You could regard doubting the guru as a mother’s curse. Having doubt in the guru means that you not
only have doubt in the guru alone, but you also think that you yourself might have made a mistake. You think that what the guru told you about yourself may not be valid, and that therefore your entire universe is not valid. The whole thing falls apart, and there is no vajra world; instead, the whole world is shaky, and dissolves into doubt and confusion.

  So the guru is like the catalyst or the fuse. If you have doubt in the guru, this means that at the same time, you also begin to doubt yourself and the teaching and what you are doing. You begin to think that the whole thing is completely wasteful, which brings tremendous panic. But you could relate with that confusion as food for more inspiration. You could work with it. There is no doubt about that at all. In that case, the more confusion the better, because it sharpens your prajna. When your doubt reaches to the teaching itself, you are in trouble. But if you have power, if you have experience, I do not think you can fall away, because each time there is doubt, that in itself becomes fuel for the path. Doubt and confusion become fuel to further the journey.

  I remember one time when I went to visit Jamgön Kongtrül of Shechen in his bedroom. It was in my early days when I had first met him, and I did not know that he was very informal. I thought he was a very formal person, or that he ought to be. He was sitting reclining on his bed and drinking tea, and I heard or picked up some kind of vibe from the tone of his voice that he was talking about me negatively. When I picked up on that little thing, I decided not to stay, because it would be too painful and embarrassing. His talking about me made it sound like I was excluded. There was a repelling vibration, which was rather unpleasant.