The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (57 page)

TR:
It provides a slippery situation so you can sneak in and out without being caught.

S:
In other words, so we don’t have to deal with—

TR:
So you don’t have to deal with reality.

S:
When you were talking about respecting the monument, did you mean in the sense of respecting the power of an enemy? Since so many lives have fallen to this monumental tradition, it’s not something just to laugh off and dismiss frivolously, but should be respected as something that has taken many human lives?

TR:
Respecting it as an enemy or not as an enemy amounts to the same thing. It is both the irritatingly common enemy and a source of wisdom at the same time—because it is a landmark of that as opposed to this.

S:
Let us take the example of well-manicured lawns. I can see how the satirical response to that definitely leaves something unsaid. But on the other hand, if you’re respecting that situation, doesn’t that leave the scorn unsaid? Isn’t that appropriate also—your scorn or distaste for that?

TR:
I wouldn’t say that all of it is appropriate. There is unsaid space all over the situation which could be called stagnation from ego’s point of view. In terms of ego’s mandala, it is stagnation. There is stagnation as well as space within the stagnation, which is worth looking at. What I have been saying is that there is no solution, really, and there is no absence of a solution, really, either. The point is to find that area where both a solution and the solutionless situation can function simultaneously. Find that space. Space doesn’t provide either birth or death. There is something total, something happening as a totality. So the problems and the possibilities of the samsaric mandala can function simultaneously.

Student:
I would like to find some space in guilt. What is the position of guilt in the mandala?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That you feel terribly guilty that you have created the mandala. At the same time, you have created that guilt, which is itself space. That is to say, you never necessarily had to create the mandala; you needn’t have started the mandala at all. So guilt goes both ways. There is guilt related to having made mistakes and there is guilt as the working basis. From that point of view, nobody is punished and nobody is confirmed. I’m afraid the answer does not come out very straightforward. The answer is only food for your further understanding.

Student:
What part does fear play in all this?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Fear is the antilubricational aspect of the samsaric mandala as well as a lubricator at the same time. Fear is about how things might happen and also about how they might
not
not work. It goes both ways at the same time. It’s like the symbolism of the vajra. It has a ball in the middle, which joins the two ends. The ball in the middle represents space, and things going on at the two ends are the energy of fear. This end might work or possibly that end might work. But both ends are related to the central area in which we have to give up that particular trip altogether.

S:
What about somebody who completely believes in tradition and lives their whole life according to it? Still they have passion, aggression, ignorance, and fear going on, because they’re dead serious.

TR:
That is automatically antitraditional. That’s not realizing what tradition actually means.

Student:
Rinpoche, could you say something about the other two of the three lubricants you mentioned: entertainment and aggression?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I think there is no point in going into great detail on those. The whole point is that they create some kind of excuse, and the way of doing that is to create a link within the space—some kind of circulation. It is like the veins and arteries that keep up the circulation while the basic body is functioning. One can imagine how it works: all kinds of little discursive thoughts, little games going on constantly, either trying to grasp what is happening or trying to escape from it, or else trying to relax between the two. The point is that that kind of mind is going on all the time, and it is lubrication rather than a basic principle like, for example, the five basic principles that we discussed. It is intermediary in relation to all those situations. This is the case with frivolousness and a cynical attitude toward the world, toward life, toward poetry, art, and so on.

SIX

Totality

T
HE SAMSARIC MANDALA
provides energy beyond the samsaric level. When we say “beyond,” the idea is not of getting out of samsara, or even, for that matter, of transcending it in the ordinary sense. We are talking about getting to the source of the samsaric mandala, to the background of it. We are talking about a way in more than about a way out. This is because the nature of the samsaric mandala contains within it nonduality, absence of confusion, and freedom. In other words, being able to see the source, or background, of the samsaric mandala is the mandala of freedom.

In the beginning of the seminar, we talked about solid space and a spacious fringe. From our present point of view, neither the space nor the solidity are a part of the buddha mandala; rather it is the total situation in which those two polarities can exist and maintain themselves. The buddha mandala is a kind of environment or air in which the two polarities can maintain themselves. So we are not so much discussing liberation from samsaric confusion, but we are looking at the ground in which both liberation and confusion can maintain themselves and also dissolve.

Liberation and confusion are seen in terms of a mandala pattern, but in that mandala pattern, realization and confusion are still interdependent, still conditioned. Therefore, even freedom or spaciousness or goodness is also part of the samsaric mandala along with wickedness (or whatever you want to call it). So we are not discussing a war between samsara and nirvana and considering how one of them could defeat or overcome the other. We are discussing the environment in which the energy of those two can exist and maintain itself. We are talking about the energy that gives birth and brings death at the same time, that totality on its own absolute level, without watcher, without observer. This is the idea of
dharmata
, which means “that which is,” “being in itself,” or “constantly being.”

These ideas may seem quite abstract if we just look at them from this angle, but we can also look at them on the practical level of our day-today lives. For instance, we can see our aggression and passion or conventional goodness, piety, and love. We can see how all those things function in a kind of basic totality. We have the possibility of anger, of passion, and of ignorance—these emotions have to function somewhere. They draw energy out and redistribute it and draw it out again. A complete cycle, or circulation, takes place. That which provides the possibility for such a circulation to take place is the basic totality that we are talking about—dharmata.

This could hardly be said to be connected only with nirvana—that would be a one-sided view. In a totally awake situation, emotions arise and develop, but those emotions have unconditioned qualities in them. In that sense, the emotions have their polarities and dichotomies.

In actual practice, we might express our aggression, our anger, by hitting someone or destroying someone or by being verbally nasty. Such actions and frustrations coming out of our emotions are the result of failing to realize that there is a total space in which these energies are functioning. In other words, suppressing or acting out both produce substitute emotions rather than true emotions. Both are sedatives. Experiencing perfect, or true, emotions means realizing the background totality, realizing that the emotions are functioning or happening in the midst of a whole space. At that point, we begin to experience the flavors of the emotions, their textures, their temperatures. We begin to feel the living aspect of the emotions rather than the frustrated aspect.

What frustration means in this context is stagnation—we want to give birth but we cannot. Therefore, we scream, we try to push out, we try to burst out. We feel that though something is definitely happening, still something is not quite there. There is a sense of “unaccomplishment,” a sense of something being totally wrong on the emotional level. This is because we fail to see the totality, the whole, which is the mandala principle. We could call this the buddha mandala. I prefer not to use the term
mandala of nirvana
, because it has an element of dichotomy (the war between samsara and nirvana) in it.

This does not refer only to emotions but applies to our daily-life experience as a whole. Once we see the totality, we have the experience of seeing things as they are in their own fullest sense. The blueness of the sky and the greenness of the fields do not need confirmation, and they also do not need a sense of extraordinary appreciation. They are
so
, therefore we do not have to be reassured that they are so. When we realize the basic totality of the whole situation, then perceptions become extraordinarily vivid and precise. This is because they are not colored by the fundamental conventionality of believing in something. In other words, when there’s no dogma—when there’s no belief in the blueness of the sky and the greenness of the field—then we begin to see the totality. The reason why perceptions are much more spectacular and colorful then is that we do not transmit the message of duality between solidity and spaciousness. Such a message is transmitted when we fail to see the sharp edges of things precisely. If we experience solid space and hollow grass, at that very boundary where the space meets the grass, a faint message is interchanged. It is like the border guards of two countries exchanging cigarettes with each other. There is a fuzzy edge there. It is not black and white, not precise.

That same thing happens if we decide to give up samsara and try to associate ourselves with nirvana. The journey from samsara’s area automatically brings a sense of the past. There is the sense of making a journey into some other realm. In this case the other realm is nirvana, or goodness, or whatever you would like to call it. The sense of achieving this journey in itself becomes an expression of samsara or hang-up, because you are still involved with directions [still biased in favor of one of the two polarities]. That’s why there’s no black-and-white world. As far as the dualistic world of samsara and nirvana is concerned, until one is able to relate to the total basic mandala, faint exchanges continue to take place. Nothing is seen precisely and clearly. Before you see black as black and white as white, there is a grayness, a very faint and subtle grayness of communication across the borderline between black and white.

This is of courses what we were talking about earlier when we were discussing frivolousness and when we were discussing the sense of security and discursive thoughts or metaphysical, philosophical concepts. Here there are no definite metaphysical, philosophical concepts or definite emotions, but there is [still the sense of duality], something that is like the smell in a broken perfume bottle. It still contains some awareness that there was perfume in it, although there is nothing in it anymore.

From the point of view of the awakened state of mind, the basic mandala does not require transmission of any lineal messages in order to see things as they are.
¹
That is why the tantric tradition speaks of transmutation. The characteristic of transmutation is that lead is changed
completely
into gold, absolutely pure gold without a trace of lead. The lead is totally and completely changed. It is a black-and-white situation.

The idea of a leap, or jump, has been mentioned in this connection in the traditional books. But what is involved here is not really a leap or jump. If we use those terms, the whole principle might be misinterpreted once again in the sense of a journey forward. There is a particular Tibetan term that is appropriate here:
la da wa
or
la da. La
means the top of the ridge in a mountain pass;
da wa
means “gone beyond it.” You don’t just go beyond the ridge, you go beyond ridgeness itself. In other words, you don’t leap forward; rather, in making the necessary preparations for leaping, you realize that there is no need to leap forward, but you have already arrived by leaping backward. You find that the carpet has already been pulled out from under your feet, so at that point, the journey becomes unnecessary. The notion of leap itself becomes unnecessary. If you have a “leap,” that is an idea or concept. That is walking on solid space.

At this point, we might find the basic totality of the mandala extremely terrifying. There is no ground, there is no journey, there is not even any effort. We cannot even deny it, because we discover it. And we cannot put it into terms or ideas. The self-destructive situation of ego simultaneously finds its self-creative situation.

In that sense, the totality of the mandala brings basic unification. This unification comes in the five parts that we have already discussed in terms of the samsaric mandala—the four types of samsaric setups plus the one in the middle. But before we get into the details of those in terms of the buddha mandala, I would like to make sure that everybody knows, as far as words and concepts can convey, that what we are discussing is not so much structures or qualities or diagrams or interrelatedness at all. What we are discussing at this point is complete totality that does not depend on its expressions or manifestations or anything. It is
whole
, because the space and the boundary are always simultaneously there, everywhere. It does not need any journey or relationships. This acts as the sustainer of confusion, samsara, as well as of its counterpart nirvana with its inspiration. This process of the basic mandala is simultaneously death and birth. It is creative as well as destructive at the same time, in every single moment, fraction of a second, or whatever you would like to call it—beyond time and space. There is no time and space, because there is no polarity. If there is no polarity, then it happens at once. That is why there is no room for conceptualization. When you formulate concepts you give birth, and then that which you gave birth to undergoes old age and begins to die. But here, no such lineal journey is involved.