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.

 

The translation of the five verses that I have used above is based on that of Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche and Francesca Freemantle, for which I am very grateful. In the verses above I have however, made a few changes to their text which I shall explain below.

Notes on my changes:

Ākāshadhātvishvari / Ākāshadhāteshvari / White Tara

The Trungpa and Freemantle translation gives the female Buddha counterpart of the Vairocana as ‘Queen of Vajra Space’ which is a rendering of Ākāshadhātvishvari. Although Ākāshadhātvishvari, more often called Ākāshadhāteshvari, appears to have been the name that Padmasambhava used for this deity, the name changed over time, and modern Tibetan Buddhist tradition regards the popular figure of White Tara as the female Buddha counterpart of Vairocana. I have therefore swapped in the name of White Tara for those that have a stronger connection with her. Although there are small differences in the two deities, notably the five extra eyes of White Tara (two in each palm, two more in the soles of the feet, and one at the brow centre) I have come to regard them as expressions of the same archetype. In some ways I actually prefer the older name, and the older manifestation of the same archetype in Ākāshadhātvishvari, whose name has a very rich etymology. I have explored the meaning of her name in a previous article here.

Spiritual Ignorance

I prefer ‘spiritual ignorance’ to the more general term ‘ignorance’ that is used in the Trungpa and Freemantle translation. The Sanskrit word being translated here is the klesha of avidyā, which is clearly more than ordinary ignorance in this context, because it refers to our habitual personalisation of the experience of Consciousness – our failure to recognise that the vijñāna skandha, or Consciousness, is ’empty’, or non-personal.

Hatred

The Trungpa and Freemantle translation uses ‘aggression’ where I have used ‘hatred’ for the klesha of dvesha. ‘Hatred’ is also somewhat limited in this context. In the articles (here and here) in which I explore the meaning of this verse, I point out that in this context, dvesha is that egoic tendency which manifests externally as judgement, negative criticism, condemnation, punishment, verbal attack, etc., and manifests internally as negative self-criticism, self-hatred, irrational guilt, anxiety, etc. All of this arises from our egoic identification with the thinking, judging, conceptualising mind – the concretising, form-creating function of the mind, which Buddhism calls the rūpa skandha.

Craving

In the Trungpa and Freemantle translation, the word ‘desire’ is used where I have used ‘craving’ for the klesha of rāga. We have in the English word ‘desire’, an important word that creates great confusion because it can be associated with both evaluation and volition – two rather different, but closely related, aspects of mind, which we need to distinguish. For me, ‘desire’ is much better associated simply with strong non-personal volition (samskaras skandha), positive or negative. I see ‘craving’, on the other hand, as a better word to denote the restless and compulsive quality of rāga, or egoic evaluation through feeling or ‘subjective discrimination’ function of the body-mind. This word ‘craving’, taken to denote our subjective, often deceptive, and emotionally driven evaluative discernment, gives us a better sense of the nature of the samjñā skandha.

Vajrasattva

Vajrasattva is the bodhisattva form of the dark blue Buddha of Wisdom – Akshobhya, the Impertubable – that emerged in the Indian Mahayana period. As Tibetan Buddhism developed, this lightly-built youthful figure, pure white in colour, came increasingly to replace the more solidly-built and mature male figure of Akshobhya, so much so that in the later mandalas of Tibet we usually see the dark blue eastern quadrant replaced by a white one. Both figures are associated with the Mirror-Like Wisdom and with the ’empty’ rūpa skandha, but Vajrasattva much better exemplifies the curious and counter-intuitive ‘yin’, or ‘receptive’ quality of the Mental Body and the Hara chakra in men. This appears to be the reason for the popularity of Vajrasattva over Akshobhya in Tibetan Buddhism, and is the reason for my choice of Vajrasattva over Akshobhya (or Vajrasattva-Akshobhya) in the verses above. I have written in more detail about this here.

The ‘Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala’ Series

In the ‘Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala’ series of articles, I endeavour to take each of the ten Buddhas in turn, together with all the corresponding skandhas, brahmavihāras, kleshas, Wisdoms, Realms and Spiritual Faculties. In my experience, it is by coming to an understanding of how these layers of meaning relate to each other, and then also understanding how the ten principles and their corresponding male or female Buddhas relate to each other, that we start to grasp what is being pointed to.

Several of the articles in this series are very long – I have felt a need to bring together a lot of information and make a lot of connections. While I am concerned about overwhelming my readers with too much information, I cannot help but feel that it would be a greater error on my part if I were to present these sublime archetypal figures in a superficial and formulaic way.

 

William Roy Parker 2020

To read the first article in the ‘Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala’ series click here, or on the ‘Next’ button below.

For summaries of all of the articles in the ‘Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala’ series, click here.