Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework
for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by
the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads
I have been reflecting for some time that, in the Buddhist tradition, the notion of self-enquiry (in Sanskrit: dharma vicaya – pronounced ‘vichaya’) – sometimes spoken of in terms of ‘self-discovery’ – generally tends to be thought of as a solitary practice. To support and develop a culture of dharma vicaya within Western Buddhism, there is perhaps a need however, for us to explore effective forms of meditative self-enquiry dyad practice – collaborative spiritual practice in which Buddhist friends sit together and take it in turns to ‘hold space’ for each other, so that each practitioner is supported to go deeper in their self-enquiry. Having studied and practiced Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ dyad practice for many years, I have come to see it as a model that Western Buddhists might wish to draw upon – while staying firmly rooted in Buddhist philosophical principles, and using aspects of the ‘Focusing’ method to engage in direct experiential enquiry into the bodily-felt experience of those principles. Western Buddhists, not being constrained to traditional forms, have the freedom, after all, to adopt any practice that is an expression of the core values, principles and insights of their tradition. I know I am not alone in this conviction about the value of the insights that ‘Focusing’ can bring to Buddhist self-enquiry, so I would like to share some reflections in this series of articles. This is partly for my own clarity, but I hope that others will find it stimulating also.
The notion of ‘self-discovery’ is one that I have taken from the 2004 ‘Three Myths’ article by Dharmachari Subhuti. The Three-Myths model (which I have written about in detail elsewhere – including here) presents a fresh framing of the way our practice naturally moves through a three-fold deepening process – ‘self-development’ (self-power); ‘self-surrender’ (Other Power); and ‘self-discovery’ (Vajrayāna)– a staged process that can be said to reflect, at least to some degree, the three cultural and historical phases of the Buddhist tradition as a whole (Hinayāna, Mahayāna and Vajrayāna).
Utilising this ‘Three Myths’ frame of reference, I hope to show that Gendlin’s Focusing dyad practice may be of significant value for practitioners who find themselves wanting to embrace a three-fold mode of practice in which ‘self-discovery’ is fully integrated. When, as Buddhists, we reflect deeply on the ‘Three Myths’ model we begin to recognise that every aspect of our practice moves through stages that can be characterised in terms of ‘self-development’ (self-power); ‘self-surrender’ (Other Power); and ‘self-discovery’ (Vajrayāna). I hope to touch in this essay, on the way our approaches to meditation practice, Mindfulness practice, and Buddhist study and contemplation, each go through this three-fold refinement process, and this expansion of our frame of reference.
I have taken these themes as a starting point for a very deep exploration of the connections between two very fundamental Dharmic frameworks – the Buddha’s ’empty’ skandhas and the ancient Indian brahmavihāras. I regard these as the most powerful and foundational self-enquiry frameworks that the Buddha has given us – a precious gift for those who find themselves on the path of ‘self-discovery’.
While I shall be drawing on Dharmic frameworks that have been generated within the Triratna Buddhist Community, the interpretation and integration of these ideas, that I am presenting here, are mostly my own. As always, please understand that this essay is not in any way pretending to be representative of the consensus of opinion within Triratna. I am merely sharing my own conceptual explorations as a contribution to the discussion – albeit with the conviction that I feel.
Part 1 – Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Clear Space’ and the Brahmavihāras
A Phenomenological Approach to the Nature of Mind
Eugene Gendlin was a Philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, and his primary area of scholarly expertise was Phenomenology – which, in the context of modern philosophy, is that approach which values the actual reality of human experience over any abstract conceptualisation of that experience. It is an approach that rigorously applies the principle that concepts must serve to deepen our experiencing and not take us away from our experience – as conceptualisation so often does. Focusing practice may be seen as a training in this phenomenological attitude that was also central to the Buddha’s approach to Mindfulness and self-enquiry practice. Buddhists who are familiar with Eugene Gendlin’s work, and with his Focusing dyad practice, will understand that this training in the phenomenological attitude, inevitably tends to develop a deeper and more experiential understanding of the nature of mind than those whose engagement is more intellectual and philosophical.
The Buddha, it can certainly be argued, shared Gendlin’s phenomenological focus, and the Buddha’s ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ teaching can be thought of as an example of him taking an established ancient Indian conceptualisation of the nature of mind, and subjecting it to a rigorous phenomenological analysis. He appears to have reframed the teaching completely – highlighting its erroneous concretisation, or reification, of the functions and data of our cognitive and perceptual processes. Indeed, he presents the ancient Indian five-fold framework in an entirely fresh way. He presents it as what, in modern terminology, we might call a dynamic ‘open system’ model of mind and experience – one in which everything is process, and nothing is fixed, or personal, or separate.
Buddhists studying Gendlin’s work, recognise that he was engaged in what may be called the ‘very Buddhist’ activity of investigating his experience in a penetrating and objective way. If we define meditation broadly, as direct engagement with the body-mind in order to achieve its transformation and recognise its ultimate nature – then Gendlin was certainly a meditator. But, because of his background in both Philosophy and Humanistic Psychology (and his deep engagement with the research of his University of Chicago colleague, the Psychologist Carl Rogers) he brings attitudes to his approach that Buddhists may sometimes miss. Indeed, it is common for even passionately engaged Buddhist meditators not to see meditation in terms of self-enquiry; or ‘self-discovery’; or self-empathy; or ‘resting as Consciousness’; or as gaining familiarity with the relational nature of the body-mind. While all these attitudes or approaches are implicit in Buddhist approaches to meditation, Gendlin’s Focusing makes them explicit.
A Relational Understanding of the Body-Mind
Gendlin’s rigorous phenomenological approach led him to a relational understanding of the body-mind – by which I mean that he came to the recognition that Consciousness exists in relationship with the cognitive-perceptual functions and processes of the body-mind. This relational approach is entirely intrinsic to Gendlin’s approach to the body-mind – as it is to Buddhist meditation and self-enquiry – but this way of thinking is much less well-known to many Buddhists. Indeed, Buddhist philosophy and practice in the West is deeply affected by the cruder, less experientially true models of mind that prevail in the West – models that fail to clearly establish the all-important relational distinction between, on one side, the mental, emotional, volitional, and sensory content of the mind, and, on the other, the Consciousness which is the witness of that content.
It is my conviction that Buddhists, while they may find the ‘relational’ emphasis initially unfamiliar, have a great deal to learn from exploring the practice of Focusing. This is especially so of those Buddhists who are seriously engaged with the task of locating the central Buddhist philosophical principles in their bodily-felt experience. The potential for Focusing practitioners to learn from Buddhism, may be even more significant however. Gendlin established the practice of Focusing only a few decades ago, in the 1960s, whereas there has been deep engagement with self-enquiry and meditation practice within the Buddhist tradition for twenty-five centuries.
Despite the obvious common ground between the two, and a common motivation, the dialogue between Buddhism and Focusing can easily fail before it gets started. Focusing practitioners may reject Buddhism as too conceptual and philosophical – and as too ‘heroic’ and ascetic in psychological terms; too disinterested in the mind’s contents. Similarly, Buddhists can reject Focusing, regarding Gendlin’s philosophical framework as a narrow one, relative to that of Buddhism. Also, while the logic of Buddhist wisdom warns us against this, many Buddhists, because they have a great need to affirm their Buddhist identity, will absolutely limit themselves to practices that are expressions of their chosen strand of Buddhist culture and history – and will maintain an attitude of disdain towards anything outside of that purview. So, there are several obstacles preventing modern Buddhists connecting with Gendlin’s Focusing. To miss the many direct parallels however, between the philosophy and practice of Gendlin’s Focusing and the philosophy and practice of self-enquiry and meditation within the Buddhist tradition, would be a missed opportunity for both traditions, in my view.
Focusing and Buddhist Wisdom
It could be argued that Buddhists who explore Focusing have an advantage over other practitioners of the discipline, because they are open to the idea that both that which is observing, and that which is observed, are ’empty’, or non-personal, and that it is our personalising identification with both of these poles in the subject-object relationship of our experiencing, that is the cause of our egoic dysfunction. This sort of understanding is implied in Gendlin’s approach, and experienced in the course of Focusing practice, but not highlighted. This ’emptiness’ of both subject and object however, is spelt out much more explicitly in the Buddha’s teachings – especially in his ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ teaching.
Many modern Buddhists, it needs to be acknowledged, do however find the five skandhas formulation impenetrable, and find themselves discouraged from engaging with it – which is a tragedy, given the absolute centrality of this teaching for the Buddha, and for the Buddhist tradition. One of my main aims in my various writings on the ‘Mandala of Love’ website, and indeed in this article, is to support a deeper engagement with the Buddha’s teachings on the ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ among modern Buddhist practitioners.
The five skandhas teaching is very complex. It is probably not surprising that we should find it so often placed in the ‘too hard’ basket. There are many established confusions and mistranslations that get in our way. In Buddhist tradition, the cognitive-perceptual relationship between that which is observing and that which is observed, is described very comprehensively by the ‘five skandhas’ formulation, but because this is what may be called a ‘process model’ it does not make a clear distinction between the cognitive-perceptual ‘functions’ of Consciousness and the cognitive-perceptual ‘data’ of Consciousness. Additional confusion is introduced by the fact that each of the five skandhas was described by the Buddha as functioning in two ways – ‘internal’ and ‘external’ (as are each of the ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ incidentally). This is a very important detail of the teaching that is only very rarely acknowledged – but it is an aspect of the skandhas model that I personally find not only fascinating and deeply engaging, but essential to our understanding.
Most fundamentally, it is vitally important that we understand that in his frequent discourses on the ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘, the Buddha is taking an erroneous ancient Indian model of the self, and critiquing it – deconstructing it – not merely repeating it in its pre-Buddhist form, as many modern teachers do. In this teaching, the Buddha is fundamentally distinguishing his own more radical understanding from the five-fold model of mind that went before, and demonstrating that each of the five components of the previous model are ’empty’ of self-nature. In more modern language he is saying that each skandha is better understood to be of the nature of a cognitive or perceptual process rather than as a fixed ‘heap’ (skandha literally means heap) – like the heaps, or aggregates (sand, clay, gravel, etc.), from which a house was constructed in ancient India. In the modern idiom we would say that what appears as a solid and permanent phenomena is in fact a moment-to-moment creation of cognitive-perceptual data-flows that have no inherent substance.
There is much that needs to be said about the ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ teaching and the various common errors that have come into our modern understanding of it. The insight that comes most forcefully as we study both Gendlin and the Buddha, is that the five skandhas teaching describes the relationship between Consciousness and the four cognitive-perceptual functions of Consciousness. This perspective is clearly borne out by the mandala psychology that we see in Padmasambhava’s Bardo Thodol texts – where the the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) is placed in the centre of the mandala.
If, as many modern commentators do, we place the ’empty’ rūpa skandha in the centre of the skandhas model, as a physical component relating to four mental components (including Consciousness), we immediately run into problems – we depart from the Buddha’s core assertion that mind is primary, and end up with a model which fails to challenge the Western scientific materialist paradigm that we so desperately need to get away from. Also, the ’empty’ rūpa skandha in the context of the Buddha’s critical analysis, does not denote an objective and material component of self and world. Rather the ’empty’ rūpa skandha is the objectifying, or ‘form-creating’ activity of mind. It is that ’empty’ cognitive process, that creates, concretises, and reifies the ‘form’ of our identity and of everything in our world, by its erroneous and reifying description of it. The apparent characteristic of ‘objectivity’ in our experience of self and world is part of the egoic delusion that results from this mental ‘form-creation’ process.
While the Buddha’s core critique may be well-described as one that challenges the thinking mind’s tendency to reify our experience, the power and relevance of the concept of reification is not generally understood. I would therefore like to provide a brief explanation of this concept before moving on.
In essence, reification is the process of treating something abstract, or of the nature of a process as if it were a concrete object, or a real, independent entity. The rūpa skandha function of the mind, by tending to treat abstract concepts as concrete things, distorts our understanding of reality. The language by which we describe reality, leads us to believe that concepts exist independently of our minds and have a fixed, objective reality. This reification process oversimplifies our understanding, hindering our ability to see the process nature of reality – its dynamics and complexities. Buddhists are not immune to this concretising tendency of the thinking mind, especially those practicing in a modern Western context. It is unfortunately of the nature of the mind, especially in the domain of psychology and spirituality, to take the subtle, nuanced, and inherently-indefinable conceptual ‘pointers’, like those of the Buddha, and treat them literalistically – to reduce the ’empty’ component processes of a subtle systemic conceptualisation like the skandhas model, to the appearance of fixed and concrete entities.
When the Buddha stated that the rūpa skandha is ’empty’ of self nature, he was saying that reification is a fundamental obstacle to Enlightenment; that it prevents us from seeing the actual impermanence and interdependence of things. The reification of rūpa prevents us from seeing the archetypal patterns; the processes and dynamics that organise our world and give structure to our minds. We might even say that, at worst, the domination of the mind by the rūpa skandha, or thinking function, has the effect of closing down the intuitive function of the mind by which we recognise the intangible dharmic reality, and by which we recognise the subtlety and nuance in the Buddha’s Dharmic conceptualisations.
Even Buddhists can take their assumptions about reality to be reality itself. Gendlin’s Focusing practice can help us observe our experience more carefully – to recognise the minds fluid and dynamic nature, and to pay attention to the complexities of our internal sensation. It can teach us to use words and concepts much more sparingly, carefully, and accurately, especially in the domain of feeling – so that they really describe our reality, rather than distorting it. It can help us see how underlying beliefs and personal biases are shaping our perceptions.
Buddhist wisdom requires the discipline of de-literalising and de-reifying the way we think. Our use of language in the context of Dharma study, and especially in the context of the ancient texts of the Buddhist tradition – unlike that of modern Western Psychology and Philosophy – is more akin to the subtle engagement with language that we see in the great poets. The key Dharmic concepts in Pali and Sanskrit cannot be translated with a single equivalent word in English. Each concept carries a depth of meaning – a rich constellation of cultural and mythic associations. This commitment to entering into the multidimensional layers of meaning in ancient Indian words – words that are deeply foreign to our culture – is essential if we are to distil the wisdom from the Buddha’s words. We need to engage in a sort of archeology of words. We need also, to learn to use the words of our own culture with same attention to the way our choice of words serves either to constrain, or to expand the spiritual clarity and depth of meaning, in our communication.
In this regard, the great Swiss Psychologist, Carl Jung, went so far as to speak of the ‘poetic basis of mind’, by which he meant that our understanding of ourselves and our world is fundamentally shaped by symbols, myths, and archetypes, rather than solely by logic and reason. The implication of this for Buddhists, is that we should aspire to use Dharmic words with the care of a poet, understanding that each word carries life-energy. Our choice of words holds emotional power, and can either open us to universals, and to depths of meaning, or can close us to that domain of experience, because we are using words in reifying and literalistic ways.
Gendlin’s understanding was very similar, and he taught his Focusing students to see both the nature of mind and the nature of language – and he provided a deep appreciation of how these two domains are intimately related. I shall be talking more later, about the specifics of the the use of words to describe the actual complexity and metaphorical nature of felt-experience in Gendlin’s Focusing practice. I should however say here, that a key part of the Focusing discipline is to slow down our mental commentary on our experience, so that we can check that our words adequately or fully describe the actual subtlety, richness and complexity – the actual phenomenon – of our experience. If our words do not quite ‘fit’ we acknowledge this, and find better words – and we learn to continuously ask ourselves if there is ‘more’; some change, or something newly emerging, that needs to be described. Buddhists who practice Focusing come to understand that this discipline in the way we use words to describe our felt-experience during innerwork, is one that we need to also apply in our contemplative engagement with Dharmic principles.
Buddhism and Gendlin’s Focusing both give importance to the intuition, the imagination, and the non-rational aspects of the mind. Focusing is especially good at teaching us to attend to the bodily-felt metaphors that the mind spontaneously generates – teaching us to recognise these as keys to the un-folding the ‘life-forward’ direction of our process. Gautama Buddha can be regarded as taking this a step further, by suggested that a true understanding of the nature of mind, and true alignment with the ultimate reality, comes through entering deeply into certain Dharmic metaphors – particular archetypal pointers to the nature of reality. Later centuries of Buddhist tradition expanded upon this, inviting us to recognise the beneficial forces that are inherently present in the universe – and to recognise how these archetypal forces personify themselves in the collective mind as the primordial images of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The implication of this historical development, is that the profound intelligence and emotional depth that the Buddhist tradition invites us into, can best be integrated through a poetic, imaginative, and devotional engagement with the tradition’s archetypal symbols and myths.
So we create and concretise the apparently fixed ‘form’ of our world by our description of it, and the rūpa skandha is that describing, objectifying function of the mind. While rūpa is only one of four cognitive-perceptual functions that assemble the illusion of self and world; as the describing and ‘objectifying’ function of the mind, it plays a particularly important part. Because our experience is entirely subject to our conceptual description of it, and we are unconscious of the multiple factors that come together in that description process, things are never what we think they are. So the Buddha’s invitation to recognise that the rūpa skandha is ’empty’ is in part an invitation to notice the form-creation, or narrative-creation, or descriptive, processes of the mind – to notice the subjectivity, distortion, and personalisation that informs those processes.
I find it helpful to use the word Consciousness (i.e. in this capitalised form) to refer to the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha – that in us which ‘knows’ our experience. Consciousness – the capacity for self-reflexive knowing that is at the centre of our experience – is, paradoxically, usually not fully conscious. It is overlooked – because it is personalised it is not recognised, and not seen clearly. To make Consciousness more conscious, at least in our reflections upon it, I find that it helps to use the capital ‘C’ form – distinguishing the mystery of conscious recognition of the ’empty’ vijnāna skandha, from mere sentience, and from mind in general, and from the personalised core of the egoic illusion.
It is very significant that Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha) is acknowledged, by the Buddha, to have both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ dimensions. There is great value in our making a serious effort to identify and find accurate English words for the reality that this conceptualisation is pointing to. For me, the ‘external’ aspect of vijñāna appears to be that aspect of knowing that is directed outwardly towards our perception and cognition of the self and the experienced world; while the ‘internal’ aspect of vijñāna is that which is directed inwardly – that which recognises the ’empty’ ‘clear space’ which appears at the centre of the self-illusion when we turn our attention inwards. The importance and attention that Gendlin’s gives to this ‘clear space’ is a great help to Buddhists practitioners who are seeking to identify this ‘internal’ aspect of the vijñāna skandha in their experience.
So the insight expressed in Gendlin’s notion of the ‘clear space’ is classic Buddhist wisdom – the assumed solid centre of the ‘self’ cannot be found, and in its place we find a clear space. I am of the opinion that probably our best word in English for pointing to the ‘external’ aspect of the vijñāna skandha is presence – a word that I like to capitalise (i.e. Presence) – a textual form used by Focusing teacher, Ann Weiser Cornell, and by many Buddhist practitioners when they are talking about the particular quality of embodied Consciousness that is associated with truly Mindful attention. Gendlin’s invitation to become aware of this witnessing Presence was essentially the same as that of the Buddha when he advocated the practice of Mindfulness. Gendlin was bearing witness to the same universal experience of the ‘external’ aspect of vijñāna, but usefully gave emphasis to the way that this ‘external’ aspect – our capacity for Presence, or Mindfulness in relationship to self and world – springs from the ‘internal’ aspect of knowing (vijñāna), which he spoke of in terms of the ‘clear space’.
The practice that English-speaking Buddhists call Mindfulness involves the balance, and combination in our experience, of these ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of vijñāna. There is great value, I believe, in giving more priority to the ‘internal’ aspect of vijñāna, and in understanding how the ‘internal’ aspect of vijñāna – in Gendlin’s terms this is awareness of the ‘clear space’ – serves to support the ‘external’ aspect of vijñāna. This insight of Gendlin’s, is for me directly equivalent to the core insights of the Buddhist tradition, that we find our capacity for that truly objective and externally-directed quality of Consciousness that we call Presence via an ‘inward’ or ‘internal’ recognition of the space of consciousness in which we rest. This idea that the Presence – the apparent ‘knower’ at the core of our experiencing – embodies that capacity to know only because it rests in an ’empty’, impersonal, indefinable, and internally reflexive field of knowing, is a core Buddhist insight, and is beautifully expressed and made accessible by Gendlin and the Focusing tradition.
Like Gendlin’s Focusing model, the Buddha’s skandhas model invites us to engage in a fundamental reconciliation of these subjective and objective dimensions of Consciousness. We are being invited, it would seem, to notice that there are subjective and objective aspects of ’emptiness’, inseparably present at the core of our experience. The ’emptiness’ of the ‘external’ aspect of Consciousness that is ‘looking’ and is the apparent ‘knower’ of an apparently objective world, is difficult to recognise if we have not first recognised the ‘internal’ aspect – the vast and ’empty’ ‘clear space’ within. Together these two aspect of Consciousness may be regarded as the ultimate psychological container in which the processes of cognition and perception appear.
The distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ skandhas is clearly very important and necessary if we are seeking to understand the skandhas model. As Focusing practitioners know well, the clear separation of subject and object, and the awareness of the internal relationship between Consciousness and experience – indeed an awareness of the inherently relational nature of the mind – is a necessary and foundational step, and a stage we need to familiarise ourselves with, before a transcendence of that dichotomy can become a possibility. I would even suggest that, if and when we do come to recognise a truly non-dual unity in our experience, that experience is also recognised to be a relational one – a relational unity.
On the path to non-dual realisation, we must first learn to recognise Consciousness – the Buddha’s ’empty’ vijñāna skandha, and Gendlin’s ‘clear space’ – and then learn to first ‘rest receptively in’, and later ‘rest receptively as’, that ‘clear space’. As I have mentioned above, familiarity with this vijñāna skandha, this Consciousness, this ’empty’ centre of our experiencing, is cultivated through the practice that the Buddhist tradition calls Mindfulness. Simply by ‘resting as’ Consciousness, we bring about a subtle transformation of the somatic body-mind, which provides a sense of embodied Consciousness – a place of mental and emotional stability from which we can relate to the flow of our experience. Only then, can we begin to recognise that everything that is arising in Consciousness is also ’empty’ and never actually separate from Consciousness – that everything is cognitive-perceptual process, and without self-nature.
So, looking at the Focusing experience through a Buddhist philosophical lens, we can begin to see the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ five skandhas as a ‘relational’ description of the cognitive-perceptual processes – a description in which that which is observing or ‘knowing’, is relating to that which is observed or ‘known’. We can symbolise, this cognitive-perceptual process as a vajra with five points at each end. The vajra, being the Buddhist symbol of non-dual wisdom, and a symbol of the relationship between, and ultimate inseparability of, the relative and the absolute, it is a perfect image of the way in which the tension of this subject-object dichotomy is held and ultimately transcended.
Exploring this symbol further, we can see that Consciousness is symbolised by the axis that runs through the centre of the vajra. At the ‘internal’ end, we have Consciousness, the ’empty’ and spacious subject of cognition and perception – Gendlin’s ‘clear space’. This is the ‘Basic Space of Timeless Awareness’ that Longchenpa described. Indeed all the great Buddhist masters have made this observation – that the vijñāna skandha, conventionally assumed to be personal, is actually non-locatable and impersonal. At the ‘external’ end of the vajra, we have Consciousness as the ‘knowing’ Presence, which relates to the apparent objects of cognition and perception – and which could easily be taken to be an experience of an objective ‘self’, if we did not also recognise its ‘internal’ dimension – its ’empty’ and spacious subjective source. The points at the two ends of the vajra then, can be taken as symbolising the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha. As Buddhist practitioners of Focusing, we can find ourselves learning to recognise that Consciousness is both subject and object in this way – that it has the dual character that is described via the twin terms, Presence and ‘clear space’.
Of the eighteen sub-schools of early Buddhism that preserved the Buddha’s teaching via oral tradition for 400 years – by chanting and oral transmission of the teachings – the only version that survived the Moslem invasions was the Theravada – a school that gave expression to a particular point of view on the Buddha’s teachings. We know from the 7th century account of the Chinese Buddhist traveller and scholar Xuanzang (also known as Hiuen Tsang), that there was a rich diversity of philosophical views among Buddhist practitioners during that early medieval flowering of Indian Buddhism. A dominant view on the interpretation of the Buddha’s anatman doctrine at that time, was that of the Pudgalavāda school within early Buddhism. Pudgala is generally translated as ‘person’, or ‘being’.
So the Pudgalavādins are understood to have asserted a subtle Middle Way position that some form of impossible-to-define ‘person’ or ‘being’ (pudgala) exists – one that a literalistic interpretation of the ’emptiness’ of the five skandhas does not adequately describe. The pudgala is ’empty’ of self-nature, and beyond conceptualisation so, not surprisingly, there is no single, universally accepted interpretation of the Pudgalavadin view among scholars, but this whole question of how Western practitioners are to understand the anatman doctrine should be regarded as a wide open one – and one that we need to approach through experiential contemplation, taking care not to fall into the heroic reifications of Christian self-denial as we attempt to translate and interpret the Theravada texts of the Pali Canon. I cannot help feeling that Gendlin’s Focusing can serve to support Buddhists who engaging in this perennial enquiry into the ’empty’ nature of the self. He never presents a reified model of mind with some sort of ego at the centre. Like the Buddha and the Buddhist tradition, his approach is to simply describe the ’empty’ phenomena of Consciousness, and to bring our awareness to the component processes of the phenomena that we take to be a self.
I shall be returning to this theme later in this article, but I want to touch on the textual evidence, within the Buddhist tradition, for a ‘clear space’ in the depth of the mind. While textual references to this way of thinking about the nature of mind are very abundant in the Tibetan tradition, they are less common in the Theravada Pali Canon. An important text that we need to be aware of in the Pali Canon however, and should perhaps contemplate, is the Pabhassara Sutta. Pabhassara means luminosity or radiance. It comes from the root bhās, which means to shine or gleam. In the discourse that is recorded in the Paphassara Sutta, the Buddha appears to have used the word pabhassara to describe an unconditioned luminosity – a bright clear space in the depth of the mind. Clearly this is both deeply resonant with the experience of Focusing practitioners, and highly relevant for Buddhist practice. The Buddha seems to be saying, in this sutta, that it is our ability to recognise this primordial place of objective stability, purity and clarity within ourselves, that is the key to the radical transformation and wisdom that he was inviting his students to engage in.
The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala
As Buddhists engaging with the reality that Gendlin called the ‘clear space’, we can also see direct parallels with the Buddhist notion of the Dharmadhātu Wisdom, which is associated with the ‘Element’ of Space and the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha; and personified by the male Buddha Vairocana (‘The Illuminator’) the embodiment of Consciousness, and his female Buddha counterpart Ākāshadhāteshvari (‘Sovereign Lady of the Primordial Space’). These two Buddha figures are found in the white centre of Padmasambhava’s Dharmadhātu Mandala in the Bardo Thodol (the collection of texts that came to be called the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Ever since I was introduced to them in my twenties, I have had a great love for these archetypal figures – and for the whole mandala pantheon of the ten archetypal Buddhas that are presented to us in the Dharmadhātu Mandala.
Vairocana and Ākāshadhāteshvari are clearly the most important figures in the Dharmadhātu mandala – since they correspond to the ‘external and ‘internal’ aspects of the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha (Consciousness itself). The other eight Buddhas (four male and four female) also have very great significance however. Although this connection is only infrequently made, for me they correspond to the all-important brahmavihāras (Equanimity; Loving Kindness; Appreciative Joy; and Compassion – in their ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspects), which are such important pointers to the nature of Consciousness; such important features of our practice on the Bodhisattva path; and such a wonderful guide to the inner landscape of the Enlightened mind.
I shall be unpacking this in much more detail later in this article, but the correspondences are as follows:
The ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspects of the brahmavihāra of Equanimity (upekshā) correspond to the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the descriptive and ‘form-creating’ function of mind that Buddhist tradition calls the rūpa skandha, and to the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of the Mirror-Like Wisdom in the context of the Enlightened mind. They are personified by the figures of Vajrasattva-Akshobya and Buddhalocana.
The ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspects of the brahmavihāra of Loving Kindness (mettā/maitri), correspond to the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the evaluative samjñā skandha, and to the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of the Discriminating Wisdom in the context of the Enlightened mind They are personified by the figures of Pandaravarsini and Amitābha.
The ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspects of the brahmavihāra of Compassion (karunā), correspond to the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the intuitive and volitional samskāras skandha, and to the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom in the context of the Enlightened mind. They are personified by the figures of Amoghasiddhi and Green Tara.
The ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspects of the brahmavihāra of Appreciative Joy (muditā), correspond to the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the sensing vedanā skandha in the egoic mind, and to the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ aspects of the Equalising Wisdom in the context of the Enlightened mind. They are personified by the figures of Māmaki and Ratnasambhava.
I shall be giving some time in this article, to outlining the model of the nature of mind that is implied by the sets of correspondences that I outlined above. I want to give particular attention to the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of each of the five skandhas; and to the corresponding ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras. In my experience, it is by deeply contemplating and distinguishing the eight components of Positive Emotion that we call the brahmavihāras, that we can begin to recognise the corresponding components of the Buddha’s ’empty’ skandhas model. Buddhists can certainly gain value from practicing Gendlin’s Focusing model just as it is usually taught within the Focusing tradition – without making connections this Dharmic psychology of the skandhas and brahmavihāras. For those that a seeking to set their Focusing practice within the comprehensive spiritual psychology that we find in Tibetan Buddhism, I hope my explanations will serve to open up this profound avenue of self-enquiry.
The vision of the ten archetypal Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala provides us with our best single image of that knowable aspect of the transcendental dharmic reality that came to be known, in the context of Buddhism’s trikāya doctrine, as the sambhogakāya. These ten Buddhas are our primary mythic symbols of the dimensions of the Transcendental. By calling them mythic, or archetypal, we are acknowledging them as universal and collective dimensions of mind – symbolic representations, and somatically-experienced realities that, since they are beyond the egoic mind, are almost impossible to encompass in any other way.
The importance of this sambhogakāya, or archetypal level of mind, cannot be overestimated. The imagery of the ten archetypal Buddhas of the sambhogakāya, with all their correspondences and archetypal associations, constitute what we can to call the ‘mandala wisdom’. The sambohogakāya is that intermediate level of mind in which we a shown how the dichotomy between the eternal and unknowable dharmakāya, and the concrete and limited nirmānakāya, is resolved. It is here, in the sambhogakāya, that the nature of the unknowable dharmakāya aspect of the transcendental dharmic reality is made known to us via symbolic forms and somatic experience within the mind.
The Buddhist practitioner’s relationship with the mandala of sambhogakāya deities is both devotional and philosophical. So, while they are felt to be sublime and beyond the limits of the conceptualising mind, they are also of very great practical psychological value – they form a beautifully logical diagram of the higher mind. Importantly, they show us how every dimension of the conditioned mind (the skandhas, kleshas and Realms) can be recognised as an egoic distortion of archetypal principles that find their most ideal, complete and conscious expression in the sambhogakāya level of mind, as the brahmavihāras, Wisdoms, and Buddha couples that are listed above. Properly understood, the sambhogakāya deities point us to the way in which a resonance of the Transcendental is ever-present in our actual bodily-felt experience in meditation practice, and they provide us with a clear map of that somatic territory.
For some Buddhist practitioners, those who have an exclusive preference for Theravada Buddhism, the mandalas of the archetypal Buddhas that we find in Tibetan Buddhism are often felt to be an abstraction and even as a mere cultural construction – a falling away from the essential teachings expressed by Gautama Buddha, into unnecessary cultural complexity. Our scientific materialist mindset tends to reduce the mandala to contrived images of man-made ideals, rather than recognising them as truly archetypal symbols which describe the way the objective reality of the dharmakāya – the eternal, unknowable and transcendental dimension – pervades this mundane, time-bound nirmānakaya world in a profoundly beneficial way.
I should probably add a note here about the way I use the word ‘eternal’ – a word that has great power and value in the English language, in my view, but needs to be used carefully in the Buddhist context. Some English speaking Buddhist translators, writers and thinkers prefer to avoid the word ‘eternal’ completely. While this is understandable – the Buddha did, after all, did give great importance to our acknowledgement of impermanence as one of the characteristics of conditioned existence. The Buddha however, was not asserting that the Unconditioned was impermanent in the same way – quite the opposite. He was pointing to it in various ways, implying that, in contrast with the deeply unreliable, unsatisfactory and time-bound nature of samsāra, the state of nirvāna is absolutely reliable and eternal. While not trying to describe what cannot be described, he was distinguishing his position on the nature of the Transcendental from that of other spiritual teachers of his time.
The Pali Canon texts present the Buddha as having used the word amata (Sanskrit: amrta) as an epithet for the state of nirvāna – a word that gets translated into English as ‘the Immortal’, and ‘the Deathless’. This linguistic device in which an adjective is used as a noun is characteristic of wisdom texts and an appropriate use of rhetoric. It avoids describing a reality that cannot be described, while communicating something of its nature. When we use such words, we are not so much attributing a quality to a spiritual state, as trying to find an appropriate poetic association for something that cannot ultimately be known and described. It is in this spirit that I use the word ‘eternal’. I am merely attempting to make a descriptive distinction between the dharmakāya and the sambhogakāya – using the word ‘eternal’ poetically, to make an association, rather attempting to define the dharmakāya in any way.
As a way of illustrating the point I made earlier about our need to enter into the deeper layers of meaning that we find in Dharmic words, I should point out that amata shares a common etymological origin with the Greek word ambrosia – the divine nectar that confers immortality. So, amata, as a word for the state of liberation from the suffering of egoic identification, and from the endless cycle of birth and death, connotes much more even than ‘the Immortal’ and ‘the Deathless’ – it carries within it this mythic association with that which ultimately nourishes. So a more inclusive and poetic understanding of amata, and of Enlightenment, is an ultimate state of nourishment; a state complete emotional fulfilment; a complete release from the egoic tangle of mental and emotional identifications and desire that is the skandhas.
The Buddha was continuously reminding his students to acknowledge the limitations of words. While the Buddhist tradition speaks of a dharmic order within the world and within the mind – a dimension that is beyond all physical, biological, psychological, and karmic conditioning – this is very difficult to talk about. The trikāya doctrine is helpful because it distinguishes the ultimately unknowable dharmic reality, or dharmakāya, from its reflection in the body-mind as imagery and somatic experience, which we can call the sambhogakāya. As I explained above, I distinguish the absolutely unconditioned character of the dharmakāya (and provide a poetic reference to parallels in Western metaphysical thought like that of Neoplatonism), I refer to the dharmakāya as the ‘eternal’ dimension of the dharmic order, to distinguish it from the sambhogakāya, which can be referred to as the experienced reflection, or ‘archetypal’ level of the dharmic reality.
William Parker 2024
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