The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (85 page)

S:
Would that have any relation to the different colors you spoke of in the last talk?

V:
Yes, they’re all connected with it.

S:
Is one’s physical sense of balance connected with guna—one’s bodily orientation, keeping your balance when you walk, not falling down?

V:
Very much so, yes. Anything real is associated with that, because the experience of situations as real and tangible is connected with it. But I think we should try to get on to the next subject, if we could.

T
HE
F
OUR
K
ARMAS

Pacifying

We are talking about karma, or action. Four types of karma, or action, have often been described in the tantric tradition and in the yogic traditions of teaching. The first karma is connected with pacifying, making things into a peaceful environment. But equally, at the same time, there is a shadow of that karma, which is called devaputra. Devaputra is the evil aspect, or the seductive quality of pacifying. Peacefulness has a seductive quality as well, which is very interesting. The particular pleasure connected with that is seductive, very seductive, either in a material sense or in terms of bodily pleasures, spiritual ecstasy or whatever it may be called.
Deva
means “gods”;
putra
means “son”; so
devaputra
is “son of gods.”

Devaputra doesn’t appear as negativity, but as a positive thing in the process of spiritual practice; and therefore it is called devaputra, “son of gods”—imitation gods, in other words, pseudo gods, pseudo devas. It’s pseudo, secondary; it’s not absolute. And this particular action, or karma, includes spiritual practices of any kind, provided that the spiritual practice is based on ego, ego’s benefit. An experience could be pleasant, beautiful, or creative, but at the same time it involves the bureaucracy of ego. Therefore it must be, and it is, a plot of some kind because whenever it is involved with this and that, it is involved with the duality of subject and object discrimination. It is not complete identification. And that could be said either in terms of meditative experiences or whatever it may be.

If you don’t understand, please ask questions at the end of our session. That would be very good and very helpful to a lot of other people as well. It’s not just that you ask a question but it will also help other people to understand. So please keep that in mind—in brackets. [
Laughter
]

Enriching

And then, getting back to the paragraphs, there is the second karma, which is increasing, enriching, developing an enriching quality. Pacifying, if we go back to the first one, is a quality that is direct and peaceful. It is connected purely with not raising any controversy of discriminating the experience of that as opposed to this, but instead accepting with the wisdom of spontaneity and working with that.

The next process is trying to enrich. Having already started by pacifying, the peaceful situation of not taking part in either party automatically leads us to the next situation of increasing wealth. That’s the second karma or act. It is connected with just being and producing. It is rather like a tree which stands constantly still, day and night, day and night, day and night; and finally it grows, it gradually grows and produces fruit. Very rich fruit comes out of it. So it’s the action of splendor, the action of tremendous dignity connected with wealth. Wealth is not accumulated by the frivolous quality of any particular action, but it just grows and develops. And that particular situation is developed by being still, peaceful.

It could be said, in regard to our everyday lifestyle, that we don’t strive for and manufacture our experiences, but we just be as what we are and just work with our situations of life as we go along. And situations just come along to us; they just happen by chance, and then they develop and bring fruition. So this is enrichment: gradually, spontaneously becoming rich. For instance, if we develop as what we are, we don’t have to search for a spiritual master, or spiritual friend, but a friend just presents himself in the situation. We don’t have to look for particular books to read, but if we are in that particular state of intelligence, we begin to see the right books by accident and they just happen to come into being. That kind of enrichment of things just happens, gradually develops. The world begins to grow, which is very exciting. We also should feel that we don’t have to strive. We don’t have to feel that we are starved for particular knowledge. But as we just be what we are, knowledge presents itself.

The mara connected with the second karma is skandha mara, or “the mara of accumulations.” This growing wealth, the abundance of wealth of spiritual situations, is connected with the accumulation of psychological problems, as well. That is why it is called the mara of accumulations, or skandha mara, the accumulation of a lot of things. If you accumulate a lot of wealth—equally and automatically, of course, you tend to accumulate a lot of junk, as well. That could be said in terms of our psychological state of being, which is far more terrifying: if you collect psychological junk, it is very difficult to get rid of and it is very much in the way of our working. That goes for the emotions, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness, and all sorts of styles of collection that take place.

Magnetizing

And then we get to the third karma, which is magnetizing. Magnetizing means drawing everything into our situation like a magnet. Having already enriched with spiritual knowledge, we then work with our understanding. We retain the dignity, but we don’t make any move outward. All the life situations begin to come to us, including the experience of meditation, as well. You do not have to make a journey toward it, but the journey comes to you. The situation comes to you automatically, spontaneously. In the experience of meditation, you don’t have to try to accumulate knowledge of everyday life; but if you remain what you are, knowledge just comes to you. You begin to discover and things begin to click one by one with your situation.

But that is also connected with a mara, klesha mara,
mara
being a Sanskrit word meaning “the evil one.” And that temptation, or mara, is connected with the kleshas, klesha mara.
Klesha
or
samskara
means “that which brings conflict.” In other words, it could be called hang-ups. Kleshas could be translated as hang-ups. That’s a good one. [
Laughter
] I must remember that. That is connected with ignorance, which is the basic inspiration of hang-ups altogether. And then, because of that, there will be anger, the possessiveness of passion, pride, envy, and the whole retinue. If we remain as what we are, if we let situations come to us side by side as we be what we are—then simultaneously, of course, there will be this temptation also to collect dreams and expectations and wishes and hopes of what we’d like to be. All that comes in as well; it’s an automatic process.

These are the details of karma, the application of karma. I’m afraid this doesn’t seem to be as simple as when we talked about the moon reflecting in a hundred bowls of water in the last talk. It doesn’t seem to be all that simple once we get into the details of it—which is true of a lot of things.

Destroying

And then there is the fourth karma, which is destruction—destroying instead of just being what is and trying to develop particular situations such as becoming enriched or involving oneself with magnetizing. These first three karmic processes somehow do not work with the subtleties of the situation that we are dealing with, because these three karmic processes of pacifying, enriching, and magnetizing are actually gentle compassion. And there’s a tendency which comes up, a hang-up or problem that we mentioned, that one might get fooled, that one might become completely involved in this kind of gentle compassion. There is quite a likelihood that we might fall asleep in this gentle compassion, regarding it as purely a resting place where we could relax and be kind and nice and gentle. This compassion could turn into idiot compassion quite easily, stupid compassion.

Therefore it is important to have the fourth karma, which is destruction, the quality of destruction, so that compassion doesn’t become idiot compassion, but it evolves into the process of destroying whenever destruction is necessary, creating whenever creation is necessary. That is a very important point: that the process of action or karma is connected with something real, the reality of the situation rather than some imaginary quality.

But again, there is a mara quality in this karma, which is Yama. Yama is death, which in this case could be that neurotic quality of idiot compassion again. Idiot compassion is roused and put into action, but it’s neurotic, unbalanced, a suicidal process.
Yama
means “death,” or “the god of death.” Therefore, there is a suicidal process or self-destructive quality involved with it.

The karma of destruction should be very much connected with the creative process. It is more like a pruning process than a chopping-out process. You destroy the dead leaves whenever destruction is needed, but you leave the basic branch as it is. That seems to be the destructive quality [of the fourth karma], destroying what is necessary to be destroyed. But in the case of the neurotic destruction of Yama, it is idiot destruction, a confused one. Instead of just destroying what needs to be destroyed, it destroys the whole thing—the whole branch and the whole tree and the whole root, everything. It begins to get inspired in the wrong way of uprooting whole trees and whole branches, the whole thing. And that is the karmic quality of destruction gone wild, unnecessarily. Similarly, the pacifying process could go to the extreme of becoming too gentle, not particularly having the quality of gentility but becoming purely the activity of being gentle in the external sense.

So the interesting point altogether, of getting beyond these four maras and activating our involvement in the four karmas, is to use situations as they are and not regard negativity as something bad, something that one should get rid of. Negativity is used completely as part of our makeup.

Strangely enough, an analogy just came to me at this moment. And strangely enough, the analogy in the scriptures for Buddha conquering the four maras is symbolized or represented by the particular image that you see on the mantelpiece here: Buddha sitting on a snake which is making a seat of its coil and a shelter with its head. That is a perfect example of using situations as they are, but at the same time becoming the conqueror of it.

It could be said that negativities are emotions and energies that could equally be used as part of one’s destructiveness or of one’s creativity. So we should not regard them as negative and something bad, but use them as hospitality in the ego realm, because without ego we cannot achieve enlightenment. Our ego seems to provide a particular stepping-stone, because the ego fools us and makes us convinced that there is such a thing as enlightenment. And if that is so, we have to use the ego process as part of the whole journey—first believing the lie of ego and going through it, and finally going through it completely so that the lie becomes completely inapplicable. You can’t apply it. Then the lie just drops away. The false just drops away.

As the false drops away, then the situation develops beyond it. Your energy leads beyond it, so finally the false brings us to the truth. In other words, you can’t have truth itself alone. Truth as opposed to what? Truth as opposed to false. So the false is as much true as lie; it is as true as the truth, in this case—which is a very strange conclusion to come to. And similarly, negativity is very much as positive as positives are positive. So the action of the four karmas of pacifying, enriching, magnetizing, and destroying plays an important part in this process of working with these materials and with the four types of temptations, or maras.

We could start questions or discussions now.

Student:
Would you go through the maras of enriching and magnetizing again?

Vidyadhara:
Well, the mara of enriching is skandha mara, or the collective constituents of ego, such as feeling, impulse, emotions, and consciousness. In other words, we are rich things. All these impulses and emotions are very rich things. But instead of working with enriching experience as it is, there is another dimension of enrichment, another aspect, which is fascination.

And then there’s the mara of magnetizing, or klesha mara. Instead of trying to draw everything into one’s experience, there could be a gap in which one’s awareness is not particularly being in the situation of openness. And whenever there’s a closedness of the awareness happening, then there’s a chance of the five kleshas coming into it, the hang-ups that we were talking about, in terms of hatred, desire, envy, or whatever. And also, it seems that these particular emotions are not really an outgoing process, but they are the claustrophobic situation of emotions coming in. Klesha mara could take the disguise of magnetizing, as in the temptation of Buddha, when the daughters of mara try to fill every gap by seducing you or by throwing all sorts of extra greasy things into it.

S:
You mentioned gentle compassion. I’d like to know if you could talk a little bit about a not-so-gentle compassion, or harsh compassion. For instance, I’ve heard that to master karate one must really understand compassion, and I don’t fully understand that.

V:
It’s a question of not being kind purely for the sake of being kind. You see, that whole idea comes from conceptualization. When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative to wake a person up. It is communicating properly rather than just purely being charitable and kind. So if you see that kindness is beginning to become addictive to the person, then you stop being kind. You strike them to wake them up.