Monthly Archive: February 2020

I created this page in connection with the series of articles which I have called ‘The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala’, which can be accessed via the ’10 Buddhas’ menu above. The first article in the series can be accessed here, and summaries of the articles can be accessed here.

Below are the five central verses from the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’. I regard these five verses as a presentation of the essential core of the profound collection of Padmasambhava’s teachings on the Dharmadhātu mandala, which have come down to us in a collection of texts called the Bardo Thodol, or bar do thos grol, or Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State (often referred to in the English speaking world as the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’). These verses introduce us to the ten archetypal Buddhas of the mandala – five female and five male – and these are the subject of the ’10 Buddhas’ series. The words that I have highlighted in bold are the five kleshas – the five groups of bodily-felt egoic patterns, which are usually called ‘defilements’, or ‘obscurations’ – in the sense that they defile or obscure our true nature.

I have outlined the kleshas in many of my earlier articles, and in some detail in the ’10 Buddhas’ series. I believe that they are much more important than is commonly acknowledged. The more keen our familiarity is with these energies, the more able we are to deliver ourselves ‘from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’. The ‘Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’ refers to the dangerous journey through samsara that we are all undertaking – where, paradoxically, there is, in every moment, both the danger of deepening our bondage to our conditioning, or of liberation through insight.

Even when, though basic self-awareness and self-restraint, we no longer engage in grossly unethical acts of body, or speech – we will nevertheless, if we are conscious enough, be aware of the presence of these five kleshas, and of their incongruous and obscuring energetic momentum in the somatic fields of the body-mind. They give energetic substance to the illusion of separate self-hood, so we need to recognise them, and release them in a systematic way. In the text below, Padmasambhava shows us ten archetypal Buddhas, and ten corresponding Dharmic principles, which can do just that. My ’10 Buddhas’ series takes up Padmasambhava’s challenge and takes the reader on a mandala journey of meditative self-enquiry, with these ten Buddhas as our guides.

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