the reason I've selected the subject of Tibetan Buddhism is that it has some
very remarkable aspects to it which exemplify
the coming together of the domains that we usually separate a spiritual and
material there is an aspect of Tibetan Buddhism which is called by the Sanskrit
word tantric that's the adjective the anglicized adjective of Tantra ta NT ra
the basic meaning of which is a web and
the secondary meaning is continuity because when you have weaving you notice
that there's a pattern and it appears that the parts of the weaving supposing
you've woven a bird on the one side of it
it looks as if the bird stands there all by itself but if you turn it over you
see that the threads which make up the bird of continuous with the whole thing
it runs underneath and so you get a total piece of weaving so in the same
way when in everyday life we perceive things we see them as if they were
disconnected as if they stood out alone in space and were things in a world
rattling around like these in a part or something like that but there is another
point of view from which looking at it as it were from the underside you will
discover the continuity of all individuals whatever kind of individual
you're thinking about whether you think about a human individual or a pebble or
an insect or a mountain there's a point of view from which you can see their
continuity a meaning of Tantra with the whole thing and there are many ways in
which the Buddhism of Tibet has exemplified this and so that's why I'm
going to talk about it but now having discussed a few things with you I see
we've got to begin on a rather fundamental level of what Buddhism is
about
first of all Buddhism differs radically from almost any form of religion you
will find in the West because it's not based on the principle of belief it
doesn't have any doctrines you're supposed to believe in the approach of
Buddhism is entirely experimental that is to say it is interested not in ideas
the ideas are quite incidental to Buddhism it interested in the
transformation of human consciousness so that the absolutely basic thing is
Buddhism is this how do you experience your own existence
if you experience your own existence as being an area of sensitivity a source of
action locked up inside your own skin the Buddhists would say you're a victim
of a hallucination this hallucination has come about through many many ways
but largely through a sort of social indoctrination that is in other words a
phony way of experiencing life your own life and so being a hallucination an
illusion one could wake up from it and
experience your existence as it truly is that is to say as being a
function of an activity of the entire universe so that the meaning of myself
is utterly changed ordinarily myself means a particular individual may be a
sort of soul or ego living inside the bag of skin but after the experience of
awakening myself comes to mean the ground of being the basic eternal
infinitely a fruitful reality so to be awakened is the concern of Buddhism and
of course therefore the word Buddha means a person who has woken up who is
no longer under the illusion of separateness what is called Sakaya
Drishti
the buddha as a historical character is therefore a representative of an entire
class of beings who appear in the world every so often or whom one grows into
being it's not a proper name it's a title the man who woke up who is no
longer hypnotized see when you put a beak of a chicken on a chalk line the
chicken stays stuck to the chalk line during the same way when you put the
nose of a baby on a certain track which is that what we call the ego it gets
stuck there and it's a form of hypnosis and to wake up from this is to be a
Buddha so the person we called the Buddha Gautama Siddhartha was the son of
a prince living close to Nepal in northern India
shortly after 600 BC is simply one of many many Buddha's but one who had who
taught in an extremely effective way as a result of which he founded a school an
order of disciples and this grew and grew and grew and grew until it expanded
all over the world but the principle of Buddhism is a transformation of your
sense of identity so it has as it were it delineates two states one it calls
samsara and the other calls Nirvana samsara means the round the appropriate
American translation is the rat race a vicious way of living in a vicious
circle so that for example the more you succeed in anything say you succeed
economically you get hung up on it the more you succeed the more you have to
succeed to keep the thing going you get full of anxiety you think that you're
going to solve your life problems by getting rich and you succeed that you
find that the game isn't worth the candle because
it's too much responsibility and you're worrying whether somebody's going to
take it away from you or if you if you solve the problem of finances you
suddenly get the problem of health and you start worrying whether you're gonna
get sick samsara is nothing fails like success and the samsara is divided into
six regions there are first of all the supremely successful beings they're
called angels devar in sanskrit there are opposite them below at the
bottom of the wheel the supremely unsuccessful beings and they're called
the narcos we would say they live in purgatory there are two Purgatory's
there's a hot one and a cold one they adjoin each other then we might say next
going from the top going clockwise around the wheel next to these
successful people the angels are the angry people
they're called Ashura and they represent they're represented as spirits of cosmic
violence giants who are as it were the embodiments of thunderstorms of
earthquakes and tornadoes next to them are the animals are all kinds of animals
whatsoever then again the narcos we're down to the bottom and coming up again
next with america's there are the the pressures and they are the tormented
fiends who are frustrated they have very large fellows and tiny mouths immense
appetite with very little means of satisfying the next to them going up
again are the humans and the humans occupy a more or less middle position
that is to say as middle as you can get in this kind of six fold configuration
and it's said that if you want to become a Buddha if you want to become awakened
you must start from the human position
so do you see what's happening the the state of Buddhahood is not in the 612
classification there are gods and angels in the six fold classification but
according to Buddhist ideas gods and angels are still within the samsara
they're still in the rat race they have succeeded but success implies failure if
you go as high as you can get you're going to come down again the Buddha is
one who is free from the wheel and you can represent that as being either at
the center of the wheel the still point of the turning world the eye of the
hurricane where it's calm or off the wheel altogether in Tibetan Buddhism
when you have drawings of the paintings of the wheel you'll find not only as
they're often a Buddha at the center but there is a Buddha in each domain as it
were in the center of each domain there is a Buddha appropriate to that part and
he represents the idea that you can be thoroughly involved in the wheel and yet
at the same time not involved you could be in the world but not of it in Tibetan
Buddhism when you have drawings of the paintings of the wheel you'll find not
only as they're often a Buddha at the center but there is a Buddha in each
domain as it were in the center of each domain there is a Buddha appropriate to
that part and he represents the idea that you can be thoroughly involved in
the wheel and yet at the same time not involved you could be in the world but
not of it so that would be saying in order to escape from vicious circles
from the samsara
the best way out of it is right into the middle of if you try to get out of if
you escape from it you always attach yourself more and more problematically
to what you try to escape from for example we know in our work with our
psychic states induced by drugs that if some very terrifying thing comes up it's
fatal to run away from it always head right into it find out why you're afraid
find out what in it bugs you so in the same way with helping people who have
pain instead of running away it's very educative it's difficult but
it is very very educated to accept pain and to try and experience it more and
more and more and more deeply so that you go as it were right down into it so
with the samsara to go deeply into it is to find out that the samsara
that is to say this ordinary everyday life in which you're involved is really
not different from Nirvana which means release the word Nirvana
means to blow out and that is to give a sigh of relief
if you try to hold your breath you will lose it and the breath of course is the
life but if you give your breath up and breathe out you'll get a new breath back
in so Nirvana means to cease to cling to oneself to one's possessions to one's
status to one's virtues to one's vices it makes no difference so if you pile up
virtues if you become a very good person with the expectation of going to heaven
you are bound to the wheel with golden chains if you become a very bad person
and you sink down into the Naraka domains we were bound to the wheel with
red-hot iron chains but either way you are bound and you will go round and
round and round and round always like a little mouse in one of those things
where it's trying to climb to the top of the wheel and the wheel just goes round
and round the mouse stays in the same place the Buddhists have a view of the
universe which is based of course on ancient Hindu ideas that the wheel is of
vast proportions there isn't only this solar system world it's so striking how
the Buddhists and the Hindus differed from medieval Christians who thought
that there was just this one little world and our planet was the center of
it and there were the various spheres outside but they've always thought in
terms of their being untold myriads of worlds not only vast outwardly in space
going on and on and on forever but also vast inwardly so that in every speck of
dust there are innumerable cosmoses full of beings of all kinds full of gods and
events and wars and even galaxies and things inside a grain of death in every
direction in every way they see myriads of universes
and they go on forever and ever and
although we think of the rhythm of the universe we are in in Hindu cosmology as
being based on the calper it manifests for a period called a Kalpa four million
three hundred and twenty thousand years and then it's withdrawn for an
equivalent period and then manifests again there are tiny CalPERS governing
the universes in a grain of dust which come and go with from our point of view
unbelievable rapidity and then also far beyond our conception there are immense
calibers where cosmos is unthinkable in dimensions come and go and so are always
the question about this view of the universe is I are you hooked on it or
aren't you are you doing it with delight or is it a drag are you surviving is
here you're going on living every day because you feel bound to or you're too
afraid to die or are you living every day because you really will - now they
see you see the universe as always playing a game with itself sometimes it
knows what it is
that there is nothing to be afraid of at all nothing nothing nothing that you are
it you are the indestructible Shunyata this word literally means voidness but
it doesn't mean voidness in the sense of nothing of just negative it means
voidness in the sense of ultimate consciousness
you can't you see if you would consider what would God what sort of an
impression of himself would he have he obviously wouldn't look at his hands
like we do and see he's an old man with a beard sitting on the throne he would
God as the kind of ultimate ultimate then which there is no witcher outside
which there is nothing which has no edges he wouldn't therefore look like a
ball he wouldn't look like a cube wouldn't look like a body there will be
no way at all of conceiving the final self of all selves so that's why it's
represented as voidance as total transparency as a kind of ultimate space
in which everything can happen that's what there is that's what we all are at
root only it plays that it's not that that it's all of our separate existences
and it goes in therefore and it gets into trouble on purpose but when you get
into real trouble on purpose and then you forget that you got there on purpose
and you can complain because you you're in a trap and then you want out you see
so then there's a way out but how exciting this goes on endlessly because
it's a game of now you see it now you don't hide-and-seek and that corresponds
to the basic impulse of life which as we know it physically is vibration it's a
wave system well there are crests of the waves and troughs
so if you take what we call sound and you listen to sound carefully sound is
not sound sound is sound silence it goes on and off on and off on and off on and
off and where you say you hear the noise that's the crest of the wave where you
don't hear the noise that's the trough but you won't get any sound at all
without both crest and trough pure sound doesn't exist
and so according to the basic ideas that underlie Hinduism Buddhism all being is
like that it is coming and going it is therefore not only life life is life
death what we call reality is not merely a solid it's solid space here it is here
it isn't it vibrates and the illusion that is involved in this is that it
looks as if you could have the one without the other
it looks sometimes as if we could have nothing without something that nothing
would triumph and that everything would disappear and it wouldn't happen anymore
at other times it looks as if the solid element were the only real one
but that alone is there so all beings or sentient beings as the Buddhist column
constantly scare themselves that it might stop and that there would be
nothing in other words that the dark side might win so they play a game which
is that the white side must win they play it against the dark and have an
extraordinary adventure doing just that and you can get involved in this and you
can get anxious and you can get all your hair raised and just terrifying but it's
a joke right right down to its funny heart and when you wake up and you find
out that there never was anything in the dark side to be afraid of nothing is
left but the law so that's what the that's what Buddhism is about it's a
method that's what the word Dharma means the method for bringing about a new
state of consciousness in which you discover that the opposites go together
therefore Buddhism is a dialogue or what we would call in the West a dialectic
primarily a dialogue carried on between teacher and student the Buddha and his
original disciple the descendants of those disciples and their disciples or
the teacher in Buddhism may not actually be another individual human being the
teacher may be life itself it might be anything could even be a book but there
is a the dialogue goes on and if you read the original Buddhist scriptures
there is a huge section of it simply called the dialogues of the Buddha
because he always worked like Socrates in terms of a conversation now that has
a very important meaning if you read the original Buddhist scriptures there is a
huge section of it simply called the dialogues of the Buddha because he
always worked like Socrates in terms of a conversation now that has a very
important meaning
you must be very careful when you read anything about Buddhism or what people
say about it to understand this principle of dialog because what appear
to be the teachings of Buddhism are actually no more than the opening
statements of the dialogue let's say people say Buddhism teaches that
everything is impermanent and that the universe is like a diaphanous film of
smoke there's nothing you can catch hold of in it now it's true Buddhism starts
out from that position but that's not where it ends it is taught that
everything is diaphanous and impermanent to bring about certain psychological
changes
and then when those have happened you pass on to a deeper understanding women
similarly it is taught that there is no real self
that's a gambit that's something the teacher throws out for you to experiment
with but that's not the final position strictly speaking the final position to
which one comes in Buddhism cannot be represented in words at all but it can
be experience although even that is not an accurate way of saying it when we say
something can be experienced that says that suggests that you are one thing in
the experience is another an experience is something you can get or have but to
come to the point which is the center of Buddhism the experience is the
experience there is no difference between the two so that's what it does
so it begins in this way then you have a problem which is I want out you see here
I'm involved in the samsara in the round and it's becoming extremely inconvenient
painful I feel threatened by disease and death and loss of possessions and
friends and so on and it's just all terrible is there anybody who knows what
to do well it looks as if there was some guys over there who don't seem worried
they are priests or monks or sages or whatever it may be and so people go and
say to those people look what are we going to do and those people turn back
and say all right isn't it clear that you suffer because you desire you always
want something else than what is and so you're always being disappointed
here you are made so that you wear out so you fall apart and you want not to be
that way but you see if you weren't falling apart all the time you wouldn't
be alive so there's a contradiction between what you say you say I would
like to have pleasure but I don't want pain but in order to be player to have
pleasure you must have a certain kind of sensitivity if you have that it can get
hurt as well as delighted so what do you want so the teacher gradually makes you
examine what you want and he points out the every time you think you know what
you want he points out that you're in contradiction with yourself you haven't
thought it through and later on you come to the limits of where you can think it
through and he takes you into another stage he then asked you who are you what
are you and you say well I've always been told that I was Alan Watts or
someone like that and he said well is that so
and so I have to go back and I have to look and find out whoever well I find
I'm a sort of onion I find that I have what I did present to him as myself was
a mask and I peel it off and he says to me haha now let's look at your new mask
what's underneath that so I peel that one off and I go peeling and suddenly I
find why I thought there would be a pit at the center but there isn't was just a
pile of skins and where am i and you know I hear some kind of droll laughter
because I wasn't inside the onion at all the onion was inside me I was the space
in which the onion was contained but I was thinking that I was something in the
middle of it all that I was the particular skin a particular surface the
teacher has many many ways of they're called upaya or skillful means for
getting people to find this out all he really does base is that what is it what
is reality what is existence and he makes you look at and you could do that
in heaven in many kinds of ways for example you can take the end of your
spectacles and bite and you can feel that on your teeth and you can
concentrate your whole mind on that bite and try and find out what is it that I'm
biting what is biting what is the effort I feel inside my muscles where does that
effort come from what is the source of the physical activity concentrate on
that what is that thing look there
that's the whole of yoga really it's finding out what it is
so very often you see a teacher in trying to get you to a certain point of
understanding as to what something is who gopac see just so at that moment
that noise might be the occasion through which you could find out what it is you
see you go on and on and on into this in eventually you come to the point where
you find out that what it is is you you are one thing and it another although
we're playing it that way because that's the hide-and-seek game you're it isn't
it funny how in the game of hide-and-seek we designate somebody to
be hit now that means then you see that you come to the point where you see
through the game
but it's very complicated to come to that point because the game is so well
done the illusion we are all so marvelously distinguished from each
other and these distinctions are fantastically complex when we look out
and see the pine needles on the trees we say well they're not really very
different from each other they're all pretty much the same I
wouldn't know one from another if I really looked at them they're all alike
and I suppose if somebody comes from Mars and looks at human beings and
hasn't seen human beings before they're always actually saying same way when
Japanese people saw Westerners for the first time they were all look the same
they all had red hair and long noses consequently when we for the first time
look at oriental peoples or Negro peoples we say oh they're all the same I
can't tell one from another but you look deeply and you get used to them and they
all start getting different so with the pine needles so you see in that way
we're involved in being human and therefore we all look incredibly
different from each other we all feel very different and we accentuate this
difference by having eight for each other or love for each other
and so it all grows the element of differentiation becomes more and more
and more and more emphasized and that's scary
because we think I'll lose me I'll lose what I love or I'll be overcome by the
enemy by the different the other thing
you see that that's because we are at a point in the development of
consciousness where we are at the extreme moment of differentiation when
you think when I die there will only exist what is other than me isn't that
spooky in other words the here will disappear and the there will remain or
if I go completely insane I will be possessed by something completely alien
if you've ever been close to going insane to feel the real horrors of this
thing coming over you where you have no control of it and it's going to take you
absolutely out of your mind you're going to go into a state of mind where
everything is unfamiliar in a threatening way you know how that can be
imagine for example of perfectly weird smell it doesn't remind you of anything
it isn't a good smell it isn't a bad smell it's utterly unclassifiable and it
spooks you it's so strange but imagine if everything became like that suddenly
everything in front of your eyes became unspeakably strange and odd and you feel
goo stay away from me see but that's very like some of the ways one goes into
insanity and the but you see it through the what is taking over is the principle
of strangeness as distinct from the plink principle of the familiar the
other so what if everything became strange or other or nothing I was nobody
home see so these threats lie in the game of playing that the two sides of
the world the black and the white the eye on the vow subject and the object
don't go together so what if everything became strange
or other or nothing I was nobody home see so these threats lie in the game of
playing that the two sides of the world the black and the white the eye on the
bow subject and the object don't go together now
we must therefore realize in studying Buddhism that it has this dialectical
nature and that the dialogue which the Buddha started by suggesting that you
try to eliminate suffering by eliminating desire he knew perfectly
well you can't eliminate desire because if you try that's already a desire to
eliminate desire but he wanted two people to try the experiment and see
what would happen they did and these this kind of experimentation went on
over hundreds of years and as it went on people began to record the various
stages through which their experiments went and as a consequence of this
Buddhism underwent changes it developed an aspect of itself which was quite
different from the first aspect and we broadly speak of the tune schools of
Buddhism as being Theravada which is closest to the original texts and
Mahayana which is a development Mahayana simply represents a deeper level of the
dialogue the Serra vardhan's do what people so often tend to do which is to
stay with the authority of the original teacher in other words you might say
that there are certain people who call themselves Bible Christians they don't
want any truck with the church let's stick with the simple teachings of Jesus
as they originally were formulated and not have anything added to that other
people would say well that's ridiculous because if the simple teachings of Jesus
are fruitful they'll make everybody else think of new things
they'll stimulate changes of consciousness changes of ideas and we'll
add that all on and it'll be like an acorn and is put into the ground it's no
more longer looks like an acorn it turns into a huge tree so that idea has been
fundamental to Buddhism that it it grows as a tree grows
and so that the materials the features of Mahayana Buddhism are contained in
scriptures and it said that the Buddha gave these scriptures but not in this
world these are the lectures he gave to the gods to all kinds of Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas in somewhere in some other kind of space now what happened
historically is I suppose this that the Mahayana scriptures were written by
Buddhist monks who had nothing much to do on long wet afternoons and they wrote
and wrote you know that the Mahayana Buddhist scriptures when put together
are a set of books larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica is simply
prodigious but they are all attributed to the Buddha or to the great
Bodhisattvas some of whom are as it were cosmological figures who don't incarnate
on this level at all so what happened those monks who wrote these things down
genuinely felt that they were expressing a wisdom which was not their own they
wouldn't have dreamed of signing their own names to the stuff they say this I
have understood from my deepest inner self and that's not
the stinky little nagarjuna or somebody it's the great cosmic buddha in me who
has revealed this so it's the teaching of the buddha and they did this in good
faith so although from one historical point of
view the there's the books of mahayana buddhism are much later than those of
Theravada or the pali scriptures you will often find Mahayana Stockwood that
their religion or ancient because they incorporate a fundamental and eternal
wisdom which is preached by the Buddha outside time so as we when we tell a
fairy story we say once upon a time there was a beautiful Prince and so on
no when was that long long ago yeah very long ago it means it's me this
is a timeless tale see there's always liable to be a beautiful prince but so
once upon a time has the same sense as the first word of syndromes gospel in
our he in the beginning was the word that's in the archetypal primordial
beginnings so that's where all those sutras come from they were they say well
that's what I heard at a certain occasion the Buddha was in lead sushi to
heaven and the surrounded with is than the other but that means this is
timeless but actually the Mahayana does represent a certain kind of historical
evolution the evolution resulting upon many many people making serious
experiments with the Buddha's original doctrine
they tried to transform their consciousness by eliminating desire they
tried in other words to overcome suffering by toughening themselves
and as a result of doing those experiments they found out certain
things about themselves
as a result of introspection they found out a lot about the nature of
consciousness and about the nature of just plain business existence in certain
directions they found out that they'd been fools the bed set themselves to
discover things that can't be discovered as if you tried to bite your own teeth
or find out what's around the back of the mirror and so as a result of finding
out that certain lines of development were dead ends they didn't follow them
anymore even though they might suggest to their students would they to
investigate those rogues that's the nature again of a pyah pyah is a clever
device to get somebody to realize something which cannot be explained to
him intellectually because he won't believe it mean it's easy enough I can
say well everybody here you know you're all Buddhas every one of you and I know
the hell you're doing around here except come in for lunch Oh what what do you
want to learn you got now I come to do a thing see you have it all you'll say
well that's all very well in theory but I don't feel it to be so so we have to
go through this big thing of making all these experiments so as to find out that
the theory is so and that you really are each one of you the
the foundation and ground of the universe only you're going to find it
out in a way where it shall we say won't go to your head where you'll be able to
play it cool that you are the ground of the universe and it's not something to
brag about on the other hand it's nothing to be
ashamed of and hide that's the middle way
Maggio Mika is the basic form of Mahayana Buddhism meaning the middle way
which was transmitted to Tibet and lies as ever at the foundation of of Tibetan
Buddhism so you see the sort of principles I'm sketching out the sort of
the way of synthesis I'll putting together the worldly life
from the spiritual life the bound life and the free life the hidden life and
the found life that's my eye on
dirty and because you see it ends up and what Frederic Spiegel Berg has called
the religion of no religion this is the the the end of all this you see is to
get rid of religion like a when you go to a doctor and he gives you medicine
and it kills you you throw away the bottle you don't keep
on the stuff so in this in Tibetan Buddhism the the aim of it really is to
transcend Buddhism so there are what are called the six precepts of talofa Manama
some matured Jing mu gamma sums wrong Bob Zod means no don't think ma some
have no mind matured Ching don't meditate
mu gamma somes don't contemplate don't discipline yourself keep your mind in
its natural state that's in sanskrit called sahaja naturalness but nobody in
the world can practice this there's nothing you could do like saying someone
not please be natural could you be natural by any imaginable effort or non
effort you couldn't possibly do it you have therefore you see before you can be
natural and you suddenly have a feeling that you're not natural that something's
wrong with you you have to do some very unnatural things
it says to find again that you you can't be unnatural even if you try very hard
to do so I can't separate myself from the divine unity by any stratagem
whatsoever but I won't know that that so unless I try very hard to do so so we
all try see very hard to be individuals and then to be perfect individuals to be
in charge to be God to rule ourselves and as a result in the end we find out
that that wasn't necessary it was like putting legs on a snake as they say in
Zen so one returns then to the natural state where religion vanishes and you
can't say when you look at the Bodhisattva who is the Buddhist ideal
very difficult to distinguish him from an ordinary kind of a secular person
you
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