The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (58 page)

This situation is described in certain tantric texts as
sang thal
, which means in Tibetan “transparent,” or “simultaneously penetrating.” This does not mean transparent from somebody else’s point of view, as though someone is standing behind a glass window; but it is from the point of view of the glass window itself. That is the way it is transparent. It doesn’t need watcher anymore, because it is transparent by itself.

All these ideas of the basic mandala, the total mandala, that we have been discussing are on the whole from nobody’s point of view. The mandala is its own point of view. Therefore, it is free from birth and death as well as being the epitome of birth and death at the same time. It is that which sustains the whole universe, the whole of existence, as well as that which kills everything. In the tantric tradition, it is often referred to as the charnel ground. In the iconography of the charnel ground, there is the sage of the charnel ground, the river of the charnel ground, the tree of the charnel ground, and the pagoda of the charnel ground. This iconography is the expression that birth and death takes place there simultaneously. There are skeletons dancing and wild animals tearing apart bodies. Somebody else chases the animals and they drop the bodies. There are loose legs, loose arms, and loose heads. While one wild animal is chewing one part of a body, another more powerful animal comes and eats its tail. By trying to run away from death, it simultaneously creates it. It is very gloomy and terrifying—nothing pleasant, particularly. If you look at it from somebody else’s point of view, it becomes extraordinarily unpleasant. But from its own point of view it is self-existing, extremely rich and fertile.

Student:
Is the center of the wheel of life the charnel ground?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
No, I wouldn’t say that. That would be more Yama himself, who carries the wheel of life and is birth and death simultaneously.
²
It is the whole totality rather than the source of energy. It is the situation in which energy can exist rather than a particular point within that or a particular relational action.

Student:
Is it possible to have a vague experience of this totality? It seems as though there is some kind of feeling of this totality that exists all the time, but it is very vague because if you try to watch it or grab on to it, it dissolves away.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
That is so, because that sense of vagueness is a sense of insecurity. There is a sense that something is wrong, something is not quite right, because fundamentally there is no ground anymore. There’s no solidness to dwell on. That is the mystical experience of the ultimate meaning of duhkha, pain, suffering, discomfort. We begin to find the meaninglessness of materialistic pleasure and so on, but there’s something more than that: fundamentally, we can feel something and we can’t make up our minds whether it is something for us or against us, but there is something going on. That sense that something is cooking could also be described as the experience of Buddha nature, in fact.
³
But we can’t put our finger on it or create it.

S:
Does the insecurity disappear as you experience it more often?

TR:
If you try to make it into a basis for security, then it doesn’t exist anymore.

TR:
Is the idea to try to have an experience that is neutral with regard to samsara and nirvana?

TR:
Basically, any form of experience contains a sense of reference point which is the basis for rejecting or accepting. You cannot have experience without painful or pleasurable situations. You cannot just have neutral experience at all. The extreme or biased experiences that you have are part of the chaos. These kinds of chaotic experiences have been systematically arranged in a workable fashion by religious practitioners for the sake of their books, their holy books. They have categorized certain things as good and certain things as bad, associating them with God or Satan. But on the whole we are not discussing which experiences are valid and which are not. Rather we are saying that the whole thing has no substance in it.

S:
The comparison has no substance?

TR:
Right, because it is dependent on the other point of view.

S:
So the point of view is not important either. The vagueness is almost more important than the point of view.

TR:
Yes, from the point of view of spaciousness or totality.

S:
So it is better to remain vague than define things or take a point of view that needs to be expressed.

TR:
I wouldn’t say just purely remain vague. But if you remain vague on a very subtle level—not having a reference point—then that vagueness becomes very lively; it becomes luminous in fact. Instead of being vague and gray, it becomes dazzling. It also becomes somewhat definite, but not from the point of view of polarities. It becomes definite in its own innate nature, because there is no watcher involved.

Student:
When you talked about the hollow grass and the solid space and the grayness in between, I didn’t understand. Perhaps it has to do with this vagueness.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
No, that is not this kind of vagueness exactly. That is a kind of deceptive vagueness in which you can’t make up your mind. You have to maintain allegiance toward both ends. In other words, you depend on hope as well as on fear, and you want to keep a foot in both camps.

S:
You hope that the grass is there and—

TR:
And fear that it isn’t. But still there is some way of twisting the fear around. It’s a very cunning game.

S:
So the grayness comes from our own oscillation.

TR:
Yes, very much so. Or more likely from a deceptive sense of community, a deceptive attitude of cooperation, coexistence, rather than aloneness.

S:
Is that kind of midway between having solid grass and empty space?

TR:
Yes.

S:
And the third alternative?

TR:
A sense of allegiance to somewhere, something. But that is equally confused. The reason why it is gray is that watching yourself lubricates everything between the hollow space and solid grass—or the other way around, whatever. The commentator makes everything comfortable, so that you don’t have to make a sudden entrance into anything. It is like flying from one country that is cold to another one that is hot in an air-conditioned airplane. That makes the situation bearable so that you don’t have to go through sudden changes. Everything is made as hospitable as possible.

S:
Then the Buddha’s state of mind must be very uncomfortable.

TR:
Not at all, because there is no watcher. It is being itself.

S:
But you said that it’s watcher that makes things comfortable.

TR:
As well as paranoid at the same time. Watcher intends to make things comfortable.

S:
I see.

TR:
But the Buddha’s mind is not concerned with any of that, so a whole big area is taken away. Economically, it is very cheap.

Student:
How can we see the charnel ground in our own experience?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is the sense of threat that most people experience. You feel that you are on the verge of a freak-out and are losing your ground in terms of keeping a grip on who are your enemies and who are your friends. You want to make sure that they are enemies and friends and don’t want to confuse the two. You want to make the whole thing definite. That in itself becomes very painful and uninviting. As Buddhists, the whole thing that we are trying to do is to approach an area that nobody wants to get into. People try to run away from it all the time and in that way have created samsara. As long as we are on the path and practicing and developing, we are doing this impossible thing, approaching that thing that people have been rejecting for millions of years. We find it extremely discomfiting, and we are going toward it, exploring it. That is why it is so painful to give and open. That kind of unwanted place is like the charnel ground. It haunts us all over the place, not just one place.

S:
It seems to be the state where there’s the most possibility for transformation.

TR:
Precisely, yes. Needless to say.

Student:
Can you say something about the mandala just as a shape, a pattern, rather than as what it contains? I know this is very imprecise, but what makes it so extraordinary to see the whole thing as a mandala rather than as just statements of fact like any other religion or system does?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The point is that one sees the totality, the whole area. One begins to have an extraordinary panoramic vision with no boundaries. One can afford to associate with particular energies, particular directions then, because one’s working situation is not based on a sense of direction anymore. You have a directionless direction. It is an entirely new approach to time and space. You can approach time because it is timeless; you can approach space because it is spaceless. There is a direction because there are no directions at the same time. This opens up tremendous possibilities of another way of looking at the whole thing. At the same time, of course, there’s no reference point, therefore you can’t keep track of it. Wanting to keep track of it would be comparable to wanting to attend one’s own funeral.

S:
Rinpoche, would it be possible to view the totality of the situation like a field upon which there’s a football game. There’s this and that—it’s like a game between God and the devil, nirvana and samsara. And that panorama sort of has a pointless point of view from the ground position. It sort of shoots God and the devil out of the saddle at the same time.

TR:
That’s right, yes. That’s a good one.

S:
Is that prajna?

TR:
No, that’s jnana.
⁴
In prajna there’s still a watcher. Prajna would be like a panoramic television camera viewing the scene from the point of view of space. Jnana is the point of view of the ground itself.

Student:
Rinpoche, it seems to me that in the samsaric mandala, everything is so neatly divided and compartmentalized into five segments with lines or barriers between the segments. Do these barriers refer to anything in terms of the functioning of ego?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
They are connected with the watcher—with the sense of intellect or the sense of watcher. We constantly refer back to our central headquarters to make sure everything is functionally lubricated. This is connected with an attitude of being dependent on survival. Our motto is: “We have to survive.” In order to survive, we have to do these things, and there is a tremendous threat of death, yet we think that we are constantly creating life. Of course, from another point of view, we are creating death at the same time, so this approach defeats itself.

Student:
Rinpoche, you talked about orderly chaos. The orderly aspect was connected with discipline, and the chaos was the energy that is happening at a given point. Was that connected with the approach we are speaking of now, an approach to the total ground in which everything is happening? Is discipline being able to see birth and death simultaneously?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Being in a position to experience orderly chaos is itself the discipline. But then as far as the relationship to orderly chaos is concerned, it is something extraordinarily organic. There is a totality that takes care of the chaos, that puts things into a situation.

S:
Do you take care of the discipline or is the discipline already there?

TR:
The discipline is already there. On the whole, we could say that discipline is like a refrigerator. The chaos is all the chaotic things going on inside the refrigerator—there are so many things in the refrigerator. The orderliness is that the refrigerator breathes cold air on all of it.

SEVEN

The Mandala of Unconditioned Being

L
ET US CONTINUE OUR
discussion of totality, the total space of dharmata. There are different aspects of that basic total space, different aspects of the totality of the basic mandala of unconditioned being. There is an element of accommodation and there is also an element of vastness. Here accommodation becomes energetic, because accommodation is allowing a space to develop or allowing things to develop within a certain space. When trees grow and grass grows, space also takes part in that growth, that energy, at the same time. Without the basic space there cannot be trees or grass or any kind of energy developing.

Accommodation is the aspect of efficiency. The other aspect of the space is a kind of acceptance, the quality of letting things expand to their fullest extent.

In talking about the five buddha principles, we are not saying that they are five definite, individual entities. They are aspects of the basic totality that accommodates things and allows them to happen. So it is not so much a matter of five separate buddha qualities; rather there are five aspects of the totality. We are talking about one situation from five different angles.

So there are these two basic qualities to the totality: the energy or efficiency or accommodation aspect of the space and the expansiveness aspect of it. Those two function on a nondual—not-two—level. This nonduality is a third quality of the totality.

The nondual aspect of the totality is the buddha family, which is constantly accommodating in its own fullest way, unmoved by any particular events. It is symbolized in the traditional iconography by a wheel eternally revolving. It has a sense of timelessness, constant being.