This article is the second of fifteen articles inspired by the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; and you can read the five verses here.
Padmasambhava – The Second Buddha
I have a great love of the Bardo Thodol, or ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’. It contains powerful truths about the nature of mind. I regard Padmasambhava, it’s author, as the second Buddha, as the Tibetan Buddhists do. I see the Bardo Thodol as a wonderful distillation of many of the essential elements of the Mahayana phase of Buddhism, at a crucial time when its Vajrayana phase was being born. While I love early Buddhism and the historical Buddha, my belief is that, if we are seeking radical transformation and self-realisation in this lifetime, our approach to meditation and insight practice benefits enormously from the incorporation of the key Mahayana and Vajrayana insights that can be found in the Bardo Thodol.
An important thing to understand about the Bardo Thodol is that we do not have to believe in it as a literal description of how rebirth takes place, to find it nevertheless, to be of the utmost value. The profound wisdom that it contains is in the form of an archetypal psychology. It speaks to us, in the language of imagery and symbolism, of things that can only be pointed to, and felt as a resonance in the fields of the body – not known objectively and conceptually.
The fact that the Bardo Thodol came to be called the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ is probably unfortunate. That was the name, given to it by early Western students of Tibetan Buddhism, of the collection of Padmasambhava’s teachings that includes verses to be read over the corpse after a person has died. It is nothing like the ‘Egyptian Book of the Dead’ with which comparison was made at that time. Bardo, or more correctly the two words bar do, are Tibetan for ‘intermediate state’; and Thodol, is also actually two Tibetan words – thos, which is Tibetan for ‘hearing’ as well as ‘philosophical studies’, and grol, which means ‘liberation’. Hence a better translation of Bardo Thodol would be Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State.
To understand the great value and importance to the Bardo Thodol, we need to understand that a bardo is more than just an intermediate state between lives – i.e. when we have died and are in the process of being reincarnated. Rather, a bardo is any moment of transition, any moment of choice – indeed any moment of Consciousness. To be truly conscious is to recognise that every moment of every life situation is a bardo – a moment of freedom and potentiality in which profound transformation is possible.
The territory of meditation is primarily somatic – although visual imagination is a great asset on the path, it is generally recognised that the transformation we seek is usually registered as bodily-felt experience, and only infrequently as visionary experience. On the inner journey of meditation, the bodily-felt journey of somatic transformation, we find ourselves encountering exactly the same spiritual forces and spiritual opportunities that the Bardo Thodol describes in terms of the visual imagery of the mandala of deities.
The Inspiration-Prayer – A Treasury of Dharmic Knowledge
If I were asked which are the most important verses in the whole set of texts that is the Bardo Thodol, I would have to point to the five central verses in the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’ – of which there is a translation below. In these five verses, the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala, the ‘Mandala of Peaceful Deities’ from the Bardo Thodol, are presented in the context of a prayerful request for the protection of these deities.
When, through spiritual ignorance, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of the Dharmadhātu Wisdom,
may Blessed Vairocana go before me,
and White Tara behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.
When, through hatred, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of the Mirror-like Wisdom,
may Blessed Vajrasattva go before me,
and Buddha-Locana behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.
When, through pride, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of the Wisdom of Equality,
may Blessed Ratnasambhava go before me,
and Mamaki behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.
When, through craving, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of Discriminating Wisdom,
may Blessed Amitabha go before me,
and Pandaravarsini behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.
When, through envy, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of All-Accomplishing Wisdom,
may Blessed Amoghasiddhi go before me,
and Samaya-Tara behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.
In these five crucial verses from the ‘Inspiration-Prayer’, the words highlighted in bold are the five kleshas – the five groups of egoic patterns, or ‘obscurations’, that I shall be exploring in detail in this series of articles. I have used the translation by Trungpa and Freemantle, for which I am very grateful, but have made a few changes, which I shall be explaining as we go along, and which I have also included as a separate webpage here. Please go to that page for my explanatory notes in the text, and for explanation of a few changes that I have made to the Trungpa-Freemantle translation.
Vajrayana Buddhism – Archetypal Forces and Life Energy
We could read these verses as a simple petitionary prayer asking for the support and guidance of deities that we take to be separate from ourselves. In Vajrayana Buddhism however, there is something for everyone, and there is always a dimension of its teachings that is ‘hidden’, or ‘esoteric’, or to put it more simply, only available through deeper enquiry. At this deeper level, the meditator is being offered a description of the transformational path from egoic identification with the five skandhas (the ancient Indian components of cognitive-perceptual awareness) to the freedom of the Five Wisdoms – a freedom in which the five skandhas are transformed into the five Wisdoms, and are recognised to be ’empty’ of self-nature. The five verses are therefore a guide to the ’empty’ non-dual state – a perspective which recognises the ten deities of the mandala as aspects of a transcendent reality that is present in all of us, but obscured by the five kleshas, which I shall be describing below.
There is another dimension to the Vajrayana – one that I shall not be shying away from. The Vajrayana is not only about a direct engagement with the non-dual reality, and with a visionary imaginal world of perfect Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, it is about life energy. It is about the intimate meeting of, and coexistence of, the perfect archetypal world of the mandala deities, and the unsatisfactoriness of the human world in which we live. It is about a transformation of our energetic reality through an acknowledgement of that interpenetration – which in modern psychological parlance means it is about engaging directly with archetypal forces and their somatic reflection in the fields of the body.
The Vajrayana understood that the spiritual journey requires the integration and resolution of deeply incongruous psychological and somatic forces that tend to be mutually exclusive in the egoic mind. It recognises that spiritual development requires a cleaning up of this messy tangle of energetic patterning, a re-ordering of our internal world, so that we can recover our wholeness and our natural state. The egoic patterns held in the somatic fields of the body are an enormous obstacle to our realisation, and if it is not engaged with in a systematic way, these energetic residues, which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas, will always remain – even after significant realisation – if they are not systematically rooted out through meditation practice.
Five Verses – Five ‘Buddha Couples’
I love the recurring invitation in these five verses, to feel the intimate, protective, holding presence of the female archetypal Buddhas behind us, like absolutely reliable rearguard protectors, always with us and supporting us, and nourishing us with their wisdom energy – always there when we turn our attention towards them. Readers are probably more familiar with the male archetypal Buddhas – often called the Five Jinas, or Five Conquerors. We can think of these male figures as archetypal (i.e. samboghakaya) aspects of the historical Buddha. Their appearance together with their female counterparts, makes it very clear to us that they exist in an entirely non-historical inner world, in the universal mind – in that collective soul of humanity, which Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious.
Conventionally, each of the five male-female ‘Buddha couples’ represent the inseparable union of Wisdom and Compassion, but there are even deeper ways of understanding the relationships between the male and female Buddhas in this context, which I shall be explaining in my next article. It is important not to obscure the meaning of these deities by expecting them to fit in with our gender expectations, or our stereotypical thoughts about heterosexual couples – or even our impulse to divide them into two groups, male and female. We are called upon to get much more sophisticated in our notions of the archetypal feminine and archetypal masculine, and of how these difficult to define qualities, firstly, find expression in the imagery of archetypal Buddha figures, and secondly, find energetic resonance in our somatic fields of our bodies.
We need to avoid the common tendency to overlook the female Buddhas. They are commonly regarded as mere ‘consorts’ of the male Buddhas, which is to completely misrepresent them. Further to this, we should take care not to allow our awareness of the female Buddhas as members of a male-female pair to obscure our awareness of them as individual spiritual principles with their own particular dynamic relationships with other spiritual principles in the mandala. I have chosen, in this series of articles, to give at least one whole article to each of the ten deities. While it is clear that the male and female Buddhas in each of the ‘Buddha couples’ can be seen as two ‘aspects’ of each of the Five Wisdoms, it will help us if we also learn to see them as distinct entities – each representing, embodying, and personifying, a particular Dharmic principle, or constellation of Dharmic principles.
Ten Universal Dharmic Principles
It is important that we allow ourselves to understand the verses in universal terms. They are addressing universal psycho-spiritual realities – experiences that are not confined to the experience of Buddhists and Buddhist practitioners, but are recognisable in all traditions, and recognisable to all who seek the ultimate truth. And while these verses especially apply to every moment of meditation practice – in meditation we can consciously and systematically open ourselves to the transformational power of these deities – they can potentially apply to any moment of our life. Any moment can be a bardo moment – a moment for resting as Consciousness and recognising our true nature.
So, in these articles, I hope to be presenting the ten deities, not exclusively as ten Buddhist meditation deities, but also as ten universal principles. As a Buddhist, I think of them as Dharmic principles – but this does not make them any less universal. They are ten universal principles that anyone interested in realising their potential, might wish to integrate and embody. Each one is a potential doorway to insight, but our goal, in my view, is more than insight. Our goal must be a comprehensive transformation, and a cleansing of every energetic nook and cranny of our being, so as to leave no room for the shadow of unconsciousness – no incongruities, no lack of integration, no vestige of the egoic minds obscuring kleshas to undermine our emotional positivity and our capacity to contribute.
So, following the guidance of Padmasambhava, and his ‘Inspiration-Prayer’, I am proposing a ‘ten-fold’ approach to meditation. In my next article I will be suggesting a way of dividing the ten deities onto two groups of five – a foundational group and a more advanced one – two different meditation cycles, each with its own emphasis, and where the second group builds upon the establishment of the first. Some may wish to combine these together into a single series – a double-cycle of ten. As always, in meditation there is a need to balance the need to be systematic, with the need to just be, and to respond spontaneously to our process as it unfolds. We need to ‘cover all the bases’ and actively pursue the goal of wholeness, while also simply ‘resting as Consciousness’ and being present to the healing that happens spontaneously as we do that.
Five Wisdoms – Five ‘Luminous Light-Paths’ to Enlightenment
In the Bardo Thodol, we find the curious and wonderful image of the Five Wisdoms as five parallel ‘luminous light-paths’ converging on Enlightenment. Each of these paths can take us to Enlightenment, but we can also take all of the five paths simultaneously: in order to be sure to embody Consciousness in all its aspects; in order to be sure not to leave any shadow, or unconsciousness, or unconscious parts of ourselves, behind; and in order to triangulate, so that we are unerring in our location of the goal, and in our progress towards it. Each of the light-paths are paths of psychological and spiritual healing. Each one takes us from a place of delusional egoic identification to a place of rest in which the egoic mind is released, and where we are sustained by the suprapersonal energies of Wisdom and Compassion.
The clearer our sense of these benevolent suprapersonal energies, the easier will be our journey – this recognition of, and receptivity to, the suprapersonal energies of the divine is essential to the Mahayana approach. The ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be a little overwhelming, when first encountered. How are we to understand this multiplicity of Buddha forms, and the seeming incongruity of these ‘Buddha couples’ within the predominantly monastic culture of Buddhism? You may feel that there is too much to learn before we can begin to sense the suprapersonal energies that they represent.
In these articles, I shall not be talking in too much detail about the visual iconography of these deities – rather, I shall be focusing on providing an overview of these Buddhas as archetypes, and providing some detailed reflection on the ‘Dharmic principles’ that they represent, and hopefully communicating a sense of how their energies can be felt in the fields of the body. To introduce this idea, I have included the corresponding subtle bodies and chakras in the diagram below. Please bear with me in regard to these – I will be explaining more as we go along.
There is much that can be explored in the five verses of the ‘Inspiration-Prayer’, not least by reflecting on the ten deities themselves, and on how their energies are experienced in the field of the body. I would like to talk about each of the ten deities, and to start to look at how we can see them as showing us ten foundational spiritual principles that can support us in meditation – but I need first to talk about those five words that I have highlighted in bold text in the five verses – the five kleshas of Buddhist tradition.
The Five Skandhas, the Five Kleshas, and the Five Realms
The kleshas, variously called the ‘obscurations’, the ‘poisons’, the ‘afflictive states’, or the ‘defilements’, are the various negative propensities that the egoic mind is prone to, and which cause us to suffer incessantly and unnecessarily – until, that is, we recognise them for what they are, and stop creating them in our experience. I find ‘obscurations’ to be the best translation, because it is important to remember that they are not inherent in us like some sort of ‘original sin’. Rather they accumulate in the mind when we fail to acknowledge the impersonal and ’empty’ nature of cognitive-perceptual skandhas, and illusory nature of the self that is assembled from them. It is the accumulation of the kleshas that obscures our true nature as embodied Consciousness. We are not our kleshas – far from it. Our true nature is better described by the Five Wisdoms, and by the four brahavihāras. The ‘Inspiration-Prayer’, in redirecting us towards the Five Wisdoms, is reminding us of the ’emptiness’ of these egoic ‘afflictive states’, which are the kleshas, and reminding us of their inseparability from the underlying reality of Consciousness – a fundamental understanding that we cannot afford to lose sight of.
There are various lists of kleshas in Buddhist tradition – some very short and some very long – the shortest being the ‘short and sweet’ list of three kleshas, which is very familiar to the English-speaking Buddhist world – greed, hatred and ignorance. In Sanskrit these are moha (ignorance, delusion, confusion), rāga (greed, craving, sensual attachment), and dvesha (hatred, judgement, aggression, aversion). In the context of the mandala wisdom however, this very basic list is expanded into a list of five which gives us far greater clarity, and is a far more meaningful formulation – because these five have direct correspondences with the five skandhas, the five Realms, the five Elements, the Five Wisdoms, and ultimately with the ten archetypal Buddhas (five female and five male), which we are shown in the Bardo Thodol.
In the diagram below, you may be able to see that this five-fold list, with its corresponding skandhas and Realms, allows us to gain a clearer sense of the meaning of rāga as ‘craving’ – a state of restless egoic Feeling, or of evaluative discrimination that is un-discerning and compulsive. In this list, the egoic volitional aspect, or neurotic desire aspect, of ‘greed’ in the three-fold list, now has its own category in irshya, or ‘envy’. This list also includes the important klesha of māna, which is variously rendered as ‘pride’, ‘conceit’, or ‘arrogance’. The notion of māna is subtle, and needs to be reflected on in connection with the vedanā skandha, if we are to understand it correctly. Because the five-fold kleshas list is both concise and comprehensive, it can be an extremely rich source of psychological reflection, especially when we examine each klesha in connection with their associated skandhas, Realms, and Wisdoms. I have shown these correspondences in the diagram below.
This five-fold list (spiritual ignorance, hatred, pride, craving, and envy) is more often presented without reference to skandhas and Realms and also without reference to the Wisdoms. This lack of context is very unfortunate. We begin to see the profound psychological clarity that is being offered in the five kleshas model, when we see them as phenomena that arise when we fall into five particular types of egoic unconsciousness – each caused by identification with one of the five cognitive-perceptual components, or skandhas. The five ‘Realms’ of Buddhist tradition (Deva Realm, Hell Realms, Human/Animal Realm, Preta Realm, Asura Realm) add yet another dimension to this valuable clarity, providing descriptions of how the kleshas are reflected in culture. By giving us archetypal images of the collective psychology that arises in connection with the skandhas and kleshas, the Buddhist tradition shows us how our egoic identifications and perceptions create our society and our world.
These important connections between the skandhas, the kleshas, and the Realms, are rarely made, even though they provide the foundation of the Buddhist teaching framework that Padmasambhava took to Tibet. One of my motivations in writing the articles in my ‘Meditation Guidance’ series was to make this rich and insightful Buddhist psychology more available to meditation practitioners. A core idea in the Buddha’s teaching was that we should investigate our experience and seek recognise the ’emptiness’, or impersonal nature of the skandhas, so that identification with the kleshas is also released. What we find when we engage in this enquiry however, is not an absolute existential emptiness, like a sort of void. Rather, what is revealed is our wise and compassionate true nature, vibrant with the energies of the ten archetypal buddhas. And in that revelation there is also a recognition that the kleshas were truly only ever ‘obscurations’ – that the transcendent energies were always present, and were informing our cognitions, perceptions and actions, even when we were unconscious of them and caught in the reactivity of egoic identification.
The Five Skandhas – Knowledge of the Cognitive-Perceptual ‘Matrix’
There are various translations of the five kleshas. Because it is so important that we understand them in context, and for us to see how they arise from the delusional mental construct of separate selfhood, I would like to address each one in turn in the course of this series of articles. Although each of the five kleshas is often translated using a single word, I find it helpful to think of them as five ‘baskets’ of egoic tendencies or energies, or as five groups of afflictive states that arise from egoic identification with the five corresponding cognitive-perceptual functions, which are the skandhas – just as the Five Wisdoms can be thought of as five ‘baskets’ of insights, or as five groups of beneficial energies that are only revealed and allowed to really animate our functioning when each of the corresponding skandhas is recognised as ’empty’ of self-nature.
It is helpful to recognise that the five skandhas and the five kleshas are in fact inseparable in this way. When there is egoic identification with the five skandhas, we are inevitably prone to find ourselves in the grip of the five kleshas. These two conceptualisations are in fact describing the same phenomena from different angles. It is important to remember that while our modern understanding of cognition and perception leads us to think of the skandhas as cognitive-perceptual ‘functions’, the word skandha actually means ‘heap’ or ‘aggregate’ and is intended as a building metaphor – the Buddha spoke of the illusory self as being ‘constructed’ by the mind, from these five ‘heaps’, just as a simple house would have been built in ancient India. An equivalent metaphor for modern times might be to think of the skandhas as five types of ‘data’ from which a digital simulacrum is created that is experienced as a self, as in the 1999 science-fiction action movie The Matrix.
Buddhist wisdom texts, like the Bardo Thodol verses, invite us to see that we, and the apparent persons and objects around us in our Matrix, the conditioned world, are only data; and that there is a transcendent reality that stands outside of our conditioned world, but which also interpenetrates it – and cannot be separated from it. The Mahayana world-view takes us to the heart of the paradox. We are being invited to live in both worlds simultaneously, recognising that the two are inseparable – or actually the same. We need to learn to live within the illusion while recognising it as ’empty’, relating creatively and compassionately to it, and acting within it as agents of the Unconditioned – knowing the transcendent reality to be our true nature. By recognising that each of the five skandhas from which we are constructed are ’empty’, we ‘take the red pill’, and enter the path of self-liberation, and subsequently become deeply motivated to liberate others.
William Roy Parker 2020
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