Writing about the Dharma is, for me, a contemplative and exploratory process. I see myself as engaged in a ‘self-discovery’ process, in which I am engaged in deep ‘self-enquiry’ in order to reveal the actual experiential truths behind the Dharmic formulations. While I also try to be faithful to the tradition’s accumulation of commentaries on the Dharma that I have been taught, the greater imperative for me is to be true to this contemplative process and to be true to my own knowing – something that the Buddha always emphasised. So, it is not sufficient from my point of view, to reduce the Dharma down to conceptual definitions that have only a superficial logic. Rather, my aim is to reflect deeply on these formulations and to unpack them and expand them, and investigate their deeper meaning and implications. So, as often happens, this article became complex and more seemingly ambitious in the course of my writing of it. Indeed, I have now re-edited it as one of the introductory chapters of a book whose provisional title is ‘Mandala of Love – A Tantric Buddhist Psychology of Mind and Meditation Practice’.

So, this piece of writing will be one of the introductory chapters in a series of about twelve chapters, which take Sangharakshita’s original four-fold ‘System of Practice’ – Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death, and Spiritual Rebirth – as a framework for a psychology of spiritual transformation. I will not be getting into much detail on those four stages in this chapter – this is just an introductory preamble. In my subsequent chapters however, I shall provide a full explanation of each of the four stages, and my focus, as with much of my Buddhist writing, will be on the Dharmadhātu Mandala of the ten Buddhas (five male and five female) that we find in Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I want to show how Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ may be viewed as a model that takes us on an ever-deepening spiritual journey into the meaning and transformative power of the archetypal principles that are symbolised in that mandala. I also want to show why that mandala is so important – such a valuable guide for the spiritual practitioner.

I use my understanding of the four-fold version of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ every day in my approach to meditation and in my approach to life, and I find it enormously valuable. I want to acknowledge at the outset however, that the understanding that I am presenting in this book is almost certainly a somewhat unorthodox one, and does not conform to any of the other interpretations that I have come across. While I hope that it will resonate with the experience of many, it certainly does not claim to represent the current consensus among Sangharakshita’s students in the Triratna Buddhist Community. Indeed, I am not aware if such a consensus exists – the model has been explained and elaborated in a variety of ways. So, please understand that I am merely sharing a perspective here – albeit with the conviction that I feel – in the hope that my readers will be stimulated to engage in their own experiential enquiry. As always, I am also trusting that my readers will apply their own discernment to anything I say.

 

In the course of the first millennium of the Buddhist tradition, a three-level model of mind evolved, which came to be called the Trikāya Doctrine. This model of the self presents the same perspective on the nature of spiritual development that Gautama Buddha had originally framed in terms of a Middle Way, but here it is presented as a more sophisticated and detailed conceptualisation.

In the Buddha’s original Middle Way teaching, he presents his spiritual path as a reconciliation of the seeming dichotomy of an unconditioned and eternal reality, with the conditioned and time-bound reality of our concrete world. In the trikāya, the unconditioned and eternal dimension is called the dharmakāya, and the conditioned and time-bound dimension is called the nirmānakāya. The path of reconciliation, or Middle Way, is presented to us in the trikāya as an intermediate level called the sambhogakāya, which over time, came to be represented symbolically by the mandala of the five, and subsequently ten, archetypal Buddhas. That archetypal mandala, often called the Dharmadhātu Mandala, is most comprehensively described in the Bardo Thodol texts (Tibetan Book of the Dead), which are ascribed to Padmasambhava, but its roots are to be found in several of Gautama Buddha’s teachings – especially his teachings on the ‘emptiness’, or non-personal nature, of the ancient Indian skandhas (which I shall be talking about in detail in a future chapter).

The Buddha’s ‘Four Noble Truths’ – a formulation that he presented shortly after his Enlightenment – is yet another conceptualisation that challenges us to transcend the dichotomy of the mundane and the eternal – a dichotomy that is resolved in both the Middle Way and in the trikāya doctrine. Here we see the Buddha presenting two pairs – one pair describing the suffering nirmānakāya world of conditioning and constraint, and the causal processes that sustain that suffering (i.e. dukkha and the causes of dukkha); and a second pair describing the possibility of liberation from that conditioning through a systematic engagement with the beneficent transcendental reality that became known as the dharmakāya. He spoke of this second pair in terms of nirvana: the extinction of the emotional momentum of the self-illusion by our coming to rest ‘as’ the dharmakāya; and the Dharmic path of transformation that leads to that realisation.

The Middle Way teaching is often characterised simply as an admonition to avoid the extremes of ‘nihilism’ and ‘eternalism’ that were current in ancient Indian spiritual thought of the Buddha’s time. We can see parallels in contemporary thought – the nihilism of the scientific materialist atheism, and the various forms of fundamentalist belief in an objectively existing God and an eternally existing personal soul, such as we find in Christianity. While the avoidance of these extremes may be a good place to start in our understanding, we need to be careful to not to end up avoiding the poles in this dichotomy to such an extent that we fail to engage with the reconciliation of the two fundamental realities of the mundane and the eternal.

Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’, provides a framework for just such a systematic engagement with the transcendental. It is an engagement that in my view is well characterised, not simply as a process that facilitates a transformative evolution of the body-mind, but as a process of coming into relationship with the benevolent objective and collective reality of the dharmakāya and its reflection in the visionary and bodily-felt world of the sambhogakāya. The dharmakāya is a reality that I often like to make more accessible by calling it by its most important associated characteristic – Consciousness. I shall be refining this conceptualisation, but provisionally I am proposing that that there is an explicitly non-personal quality of the dharmakāya that, for the sake of brevity, we can call Consciousness. This is the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha that the Buddha spoke of, and which is placed at the centre of the Buddhist mandala of cognition and perception. I like to speak of Consciousness in this way, and make this explicit connection between Consciousness and the dharmakāya, because we need to acknowledge that the apparently personal experience of human Consciousness – the crucial experience of being aware of being aware – is the most obviously unconditioned aspect of our experience, and is the means of our return to wholeness, and the source of our realisation.

At the core of the Buddhist experience, and of all non-duality teachings, is the realisation that Consciousness, when we examine it carefully, is recognised to be non-personal – to be ’empty’ of self-nature. We therefore need a way of talking about Consciousness that reflects and highlights this core insight. Those who are familiar with my writing, will know that I try to avoid using the important word ‘consciousness’ as it is commonly used – that is, merely as a synonym for the overall qualitative state of the body-mind. Rather, I reserve the word Consciousness, and use it capitalised, as equivalent to the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha, and as a conceptual label for the primary feature of the dharmakāya – for the bright spacious field in which all existence rests, and which gives rise to our apparently personal experience of Consciousness. You may wonder why I appear to be using the word Consciousness for both the field of the dharmakāya, and for the apparently personal experience of our awareness of being aware. I am doing this deliberately and consciously, as a way of highlighting the fact that these two things cannot be separated. The apparently personal experience of Consciousness is not in fact personal. Rather, it is an infinitely spacious phenomenon, which cannot be located, although it is always found to be present whenever we look for it in our experience.

So, as a starting point in our engagement with the phenomenon of Consciousness, I am proposing that it is helpful to acknowledge that it cannot be distinguished from the traditional Buddhist notion of the transcendental dharmakāya. Some may find it helpful to think of the dharmakāya as a field of ‘Consciousness-potential’, or ‘proto-Consciousness’. Clearly, it is only in connection with the world of the nirmānkāya that Consciousness manifests as the phenomenon of Consciousness in living beings – but the nirmānakāya is never present without the all-pervading dharmakāya also being present, so Consciousness is always present in some form. Although the dharmakāya is, in a sense, unknowable, it is also the most absolutely reliable and omnipresent aspect of our experience as humans – and the absolute stability of Consciousness is highlighted by its absolute contrast with the changeability of the nirmānakāya.

The conscious experience of Consciousness is the distinguishing feature of Homo Sapiens, the hominid that, through natural selection, became optimised for Consciousness. The more we attend to the experience of Consciousness through Mindfulness, the more we recognise it as more than personal – as an impersonal phenomenon of the ever-present dharmakāya. It is never ‘not there’ when we turn our attention towards it – while absolutely everything else in our experience is subject to change. I am not saying that all humans show the complete and absolutely comprehensive embodied Consciousness of perfect Buddhahood. Indeed, that is the problem that humans face – they do embody Consciousness, but in an incomplete way that is deeply dysfunctional because of that incompleteness. In the Human domain of the nirmānakāya, the blessing of Consciousness is only partially received and partially embodied, and to practice the Dharma is to choose to turn towards Consciousness in a devotional-receptive way so that we more fully receive, and more fully embody, that blessing.

I am still oversimplifying the phenomena of Consciousness at this stage, but I am aligning with the Buddha and the Buddhist tradition in asserting its non-personal nature. Clearly, the experience of Consciousness on the mundane nirmānakāya level involves neurological mechanisms and brain structures. These biological structures however, have progressively evolved since the beginning of life on Earth, as a response to the dharmic reality. As scientifically-educated Westerners, we are usually culturally conditioned to see Consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon of the brain – a result of evolution rather than the driver of evolution. So, the cognitive-perceptual mechanisms of the human brain and nervous system, need to be recognised as a reflection in the nirmānakāya level of mind, of archetypal structures that are inherent in Consciousness on the level of the dharmakāya. This is what the trikāya is saying to the modern Western Buddhist – that the reality of Consciousness, although it is unknowable on the dharmakāya level, has an archetypal structure that is made known to us in the mandala form of the sambhogakāya. We are also being reminded that the whole of the human evolutionary process was made possible by the prior existence of the eternal dharmakāya.

This acknowledgement of the non-personal and unknowable source of the phenomenon of Consciousness, demands that we conceptualise an interface between the apparently personal biological machinery of cognition and perception, on one side, and the suprapersonal reality of the dharmakāya on the other. Luckily, Buddhists are not alone in trying to discern and understand this interface. This is exactly the challenge that Quantum Biologists are grappling with – and they are making very good progress with their theories and experimental evidence. It is my belief that the leaders in this field are Stuart Hameroff (a Quantum Physicist and Anaesthesiologist) and Roger Penrose (a Mathematical Physicist). I find their arguments compelling. A summary of their explanation of the Quantum Physics of Consciousness is, I am afraid, somewhat beyond me, but I strongly recommend the work of these two men, to anyone who is interested in these questions. These questions were of no concern to the Buddha, but for the modern Buddhist practitioner in a scientifically-educated Western cultural setting they are foundational. If we are not actively engaging with a transcendental understanding of the nature of Consciousness, then we inevitably find ourselves defaulting back into a limiting and essentially ‘scientific materialist’ view.

So, the word ‘Consciousness’, as I use it, refers to two phenomena that are intrinsically linked and cannot be separated. Firstly, there is the Consciousness which is the universal, eternal, and objective field of what we may call ‘proto-Consciousness’ – the underlying and all-pervading reality of the dharmakāya that animates the sambhogakāya and nirmānakāya. Secondly, there is the partial consciousness of living beings. So, talking provisionally, and somewhat dualistically and reductively, we could say that the field of Consciousness, by its presence, makes a subjective and secondary experience of personal consciousness possible. In reality, there is no separation – they are objective and subjective aspects of a single phenomena. The Quantum mechanical interface within the micro-tubules in the nerve-cells of the brain is biological evolution’s response to the dharmic reality’s drive towards embodiment. The eternally-existing reality pure Consciousness – a phenomena that is necessary for the scientific description of reality to work – is the driver of evolution within biological life, just as much as it is the driver of the evolution of spiritual aspirants.

To understand the meaning of the word vijñāna, we need to recognise that it is made up of to words: vi and jñāna. Jñāna is a word that means ‘knowing’ and is associated with spiritual knowledge and realisation. The prefix vi means something like ‘divided’. So, in the context of the mandala of the skandhas, vijñāna could be translated as the divided or ‘egoic’ consciousness in the centre, since it implies the flawed and personalised knowing that is generated by our habitual identification with Consciousness – with a collective field of knowing that is not in fact personal. So, while the implication is that vijñāna functions as a divided, subject-object knowing, within the egoic mind, it is also the key to our return to jñāna – key to the non-dual knowing of recognising and resting as Consciousness in the practice of Mindfulness. We need to be careful not to be caught up in lexical semantics here, and must reach for the meaning behind the words – acknowledging that the word vijnāna means different things in different contexts, and indeed functions entirely differently in the Enlightened mind than it does in the egoic mind.

What we call ‘mind’ is always actually a relationship between Consciousness and the functions and objects of Consciousness, but until we engage with the practices of meditation, self-enquiry and Mindfulness, we will generally remain unfamiliar with Consciousness – with the subjective pole in the cognitive-perceptual relationship. While conventional psychologies are preoccupied with the functions and contents of the mind, a spiritual psychology like Buddhism is concerned to also give attention to that which is looking – with that which is witnessing the thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting functions of the mind. This is what the Buddha was trying to communicate in his advocacy of the practice of Mindfulness.

The word sat – from which we get the Pali word sati, which is translated as Mindfulness – is a powerful word in the ancient Indian spiritual traditions, and we need to be willing to absorb something of its richness of meaning to understand what the word Mindfulness (sati) is pointing to. Sat has associations with the ultimate source of being and with the eternal. It can be taken to mean essential, pure, and godly. The related word satya means wise, good, true, virtuous, actual, real, genuine, trustworthy, valid and enduring. So, in the context of spiritual practice, sat and sati are associated with absolute objectively and absolute truth. To practice sati is to take short moments of resting back into the unchanging reality of the field of Consciousness. So, in Mindfulness we allow ourselves moments of acknowledgement of that mystery, while also acknowledging our cognitive-perceptual processes – our contact with our experience through the processes of the body-mind system.

I seems that a good deal of the nuance and subtlety of this way of talking about the vijñāna skandha was inevitably lost in the process that gave us the Pali texts, and in their subsequent translation into English, but when the Buddha describes the mind as impersonal and luminous and pure like pure gold, it is the dharmakāya aspect of mind that he is referring to. He makes it very clear that we need to recognise that this infinite, primordially pure and eternal dimension of mind is always undefiled – undefiled even by the ‘adventitious obscurations’ of the nirmānakāya level of mind that appear to contaminate it. So, the trikāya, properly understood, is an invitation to us to find that Middle Way in which both the non-dual and the dualistic perspective are fully embraced and reconciled – it is an approach and a perspective in which these two views are reconciled.

This is a repeating theme in Buddhist teaching. While we may, when we first encounter Buddhism, take on a dualistic framing of our experience – a view that focuses on wrestling with the egoic mind’s obscurations – in reality the Buddha is always challenging us to see beyond this nirmānakāya view. Although he did not use this terminology, he was inviting us to rest back into sat, into sati, and into the ultimate and unknowable ground of being – to recognise the primordial dharmakāya, the pure Consciousness in which we rest. I shall be returning to this theme. While it is useful and necessary to talk about and familiarise ourselves with those aspects of the nirmānakāya level of mind that obscure Consciousness – that which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas – there is a more direct path for those that can find it. This is the path of Vajrayāna – a path to realisation that lies in recognising that ultimately the kleshas rest in, and are not separate from, the primordial purity of the dharmakāya.

So, while the nirmānakāya level of mind is what we are most keenly aware of, we must give attention to the sambhogakāya and the dharmakāya. These two are closely related. We can think of the sambhogakāya as a knowable reflection of the unknowable dharmakāya. The sambhogakāya is the means by which we can intuit what it beyond the sambhogakāya – can glimpse the eternal. It is useful to have a term to refer to the samboghakāya and dharmakāya collectively, and the word Transcendental serves this purpose to a degree – although it is not ideal. There is a term that I find useful in this context – the word dharmic (lower case and italicised). So, in this book, when I speak of ‘the dharmic reality’, I am referring to the two transcendental levels of mind in the trikāya collectively – the eternal dharmakāya and the archetypal sambhogakāya.

So, I have started using the italicised word dharmic, as in the notion of ‘the dharmic reality’, or ‘the dharmic dimension’, to denote both the eternal, unknowable spiritual reality of the dharmakāya, and its resonance in the body-mind as bodily-felt experience and visionary imagery, which is the sambhogakāya. When I use the word ‘Dharmic’ (capitalised and not italicised), I am referring to that which pertains to the Dharma, in the sense of that which pertains to the historical teachings, practices, and cultural traditions of Buddhism. This is a useful distinction to be able to make in the course of our exploration of Buddhism, and it is certainly a distinction that the Buddha and the other great teachers in the tradition have repeatedly made in different ways. We need to find ways to bring a keen sense of the transcendental reality into our limited scientific materialist worldview. Our naming of it is a good place to start – hence my sense of the value of speaking in terms of ‘the dharmic reality’.

Some Buddhists are reticent about conceptualisations of this sort, so I need to clarify further. When I am talking about the absolute and objective dharmic reality, I am talking about a reality that is ’empty’ – that has the character of shunyatā, or ’emptiness’, to use the Buddha’s term. In other words it is without self-nature. Observing the spiritual philosophy of his time the Buddha was keenly aware of the way metaphysical ideas were reified, concretised, and given a substantiality that did not belong to them. He could also see very clearly, the negative effects of these incorrect understandings, on spiritual practice and on the wider culture of ancient India. Seeing this tendency of the mind to reify spiritual concepts to the point where they become an obstacle to realisation, the Buddha’s instinct was to avoid metaphysical abstractions that held this danger. The Buddha also had the difficult task of distinguishing his own teachings from the Vedantic and Brahminical thought that prevailed when he was alive. In many of his teachings, the Buddha adopted and adapted the established Vedantic terminology, presenting a corrected and more refined version of the current Vedantic conceptualisations – much older spiritual teachings that were either inherently incorrect or had become reified over time.

Most significant, perhaps, of these adopted and adapted teachings are the Five Skandhas, the Four Brahmavihāras. I shall be examining Five Skandhas closely in a future chapter. Perhaps even more interesting was the Buddha’s adoption of the Four Brahmavihāras – a reference to the ancient Indian creator-god Brahma. What the Buddha is doing here is acknowledging the gods of Vedic tradition as archetypal principles, while not acknowledging them to be beings or persons. This way of talking is very revealing and illustrates an important aspect of what The Buddha meant be shunyatā, or ’emptiness’. It tells us a great deal about his wish to acknowledge the non-egoic reality of the archetypal principles that had become reified within Indian religious culture, and personalised through their projection onto the literal ‘gods’.

The Buddha’s archetypal way of thinking has parallels in the way the Greek and Roman gods came to be viewed within the Christian world (even to this day), especially from the Renaissance onwards, where we see that Greek and Roman mythology being studied deeply and being taken very seriously as a source of psychological and spiritual truth, even though the deities were no longer related to in a religious way. The Buddha’s adoption of Vedic religious and metaphysical references can be seen as a form of archetypal psychology – a psychology which allowed him to acknowledge the ‘archetypal’ truths in Indian religious tradition while simultaneously challenging the reification of those truths into metaphysical absolutes.

In regard to the great four-faced, four-armed creator-god Brahma, it is as if the Buddha was acknowledging Brahma not as a god by at as an archetypal reality, an archetypal personification within Indian religious tradition, of the creative principle, of Consciousness. He was inviting his students to take back the projection by recognising that Brahma is ’empty’ (shunyatā) – an expression of the collective archetypal realm, and non-personal, along with everything else. So, the Buddha was saying that the sublime aspects of love and creativity called the brahmavihāras, that were projected onto Brahma in Vedic tradition, do exist – but they exist as eternal archetypal principles, as mahabrahmavihāras (‘great’ brahmavihāras), and as aspects of a divine Other Power that cannot, and should not, be personalised or reified in any way. Indeed, this is how experienced meditators experience the brahmavihāras – as archetypal principles, or ‘attitudes’ of the non-personal field of Consciousness, present in germinal form in the depths of the the mind, but beyond the ego.

There is a key idea that I need to unpack here. Most of the key Dharmic principles, that we may know by their Pali and Sanskrit labels, are perhaps best understood as archetypes. Each of these Dharmic terms, or dharmas, is loaded with layers of meaning and has a rich multiplicity of associations, and while we may sometimes simply translate them with a single English word, there an inevitable a loss of meaning if we do so. Ideally, each Dharmic word is recognised as a pointer to a rich archetypal reality beyond itself. The more whole-heartedly we enter into the system of correspondences within the ‘mandala wisdom’ of the Vajrayāna, the more this depth and interconnectedness of meaning becomes clear.

The brahmavihāras provide a good illustration of this richness and complexity. Not only do they need to be understood as a four-fold whole, they also need to be seen as aspects of the four corresponding Wisdoms (the four associated prajñās in that set of five); as related to the four corresponding indriyas; and in relationship to the skandhas, kleshas, and Realms – the patterning of the egoic mind that they bring healing to. The tradition’s explanation that the archetypal mahabrahmavihāras are eternally present archetypal realities of which the mundane and personal brahmavihāras that we experience in meditation are a sort of reflection or resonance, provides us with insight into the way the Buddhist tradition views all the Dharmic principles – as archetypal principles, or dharmas. By allowing ourselves to see them as universal principles, as archetypes, we come much closer to also allowing ourselves to see that all Dharmic principles are ’empty’ of self-nature – that all dharmas are of the nature of sunyatā.

Reading the Pali Canon as Western students who are unfamiliar with ancient Indian culture, language and literature, we can miss the rich archetypal resonances in each one of the Dharmic terms. We so easily reify these profound archetypal principles – reducing them to mere concepts and ‘things’ in the process of isolating them labelling them. While the individual mental states and experiences that these Dharmic terms point to, can be viewed in a way which removes their archetypal power by personalising them, it is more ultimately true to acknowledge them as archetypal principles that can never be completely personalised. We may at first not realise that our attempt to objectify and define, causes us to lose the depth of meaning in these Dharmic words, but these words, or dharmas, are like the stars in starry zodiac of the sambhogakāya. A scientific analysis of the Pali texts might take a hermeneutic approach – a deep and comprehensive analysis of the language in the original historical texts, and of other texts of the same type and historical period. While that is a worthy and important approach, there is another application of Greek god Hermes’ divine gifts that can perhaps take us deeper still. Taking a hermetic approach, we see each Dharmic term as a symbol – each one a well of meaning within a sambhogakāya landscape of archetypal associations, and each a source of life-giving wisdom, by which we can nourish ourselves – once we access the layers of meaning that lie below the dry nirmānakāya surface of life.

I shall be saying more about this notion of hermetic relationship in future chapters, but for now let me just reiterate this understanding that Indian languages are woven through with archetypal meanings and associations that can cause the meanings of the words to be lost for the Westerner. An important example of this, which is doubly valuable to acknowledge here, is the use of the word dharmas in the context if the Buddha’s Four Foundations of Mindfulness teaching. Interpreted by the more rationalist translators, Mindfulness of dharmas can be taken as the Buddha advice to his disciples to make use of his teaching frameworks to engage in a moment-to-moment identification of, and analysis of, the phenomena of mind and world. In my opinion, this interpretation is a reduction of the practice of Mindfulness of dharmas however – or at least holds a significant danger of this. I might even characterise it as a nirmānakāya view of Mindfulness of dharmas – a view that fails to see the components in the Buddha’s teaching framework as having an archetypal dimension.

We are alerted to this energetic and archetypal perspective on Mindfulness of dharmas when we acknowledge the corresponding samskāras skandha – the component of perception by which we are intuitively aware of motivation, of ‘energy’ or ‘power’, and of the energetic purpose or impact of particular values and ideas. This is a  correspondence that Tibetan Buddhists may be familiar with, but Theravadins probably are not – but when we engage with the Four Foundations of Mindfulness and the Five Skandhas side by side, both are illuminated – made much more meaningful and useful as frameworks for self-enquiry. The missing fifth element in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness framework is, our course, Mindfulness itself – the component of Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha), which sits at the centre of the mandala.

A more complete approach to Mindfulness of dharmas, takes full account of the sambhogakāya level of mind – and therefore of the dharmakāya level of mind as well. The dharmic level of mind is an ever present reality, that is always affecting us energetically – and profoundly effects us if we consciously align with it and make ourself receptive to it. So, Mindfulness of dharmas invites us to recognise that Dharmic principles, to the extent that they are true, carry an energetic resonance of the dharmic dimension. Mindfulness of dharmas takes seriously the eternal and archetypal levels of mind, recognising them as integral to our perception of reality. Ultimately, the practice of Mindfulness of dharmas invites us to live immersed in a trikāya view of life – recognising the ever-present dharmic reality informing our perception of our concrete and sensory nirmānakāya world, and our bodily-felt experience. So, Mindfulness of dharmas is a focus of attention that lights up our world, leading our awareness back to the intangible dharmic reality that pervades this concrete world, and in doing so heightens, and indeed transforms, our perception of meaning. Mindfulness of dharmas, viewed in this way is not a mental and analytical exercise, but a mode of perception that awakens us to a keen sense of the meaning and purpose of life. This recognition that our nirmānakāya experience of self and world is woven through with meaning and purpose – and with the ever-present possibility of synchronicity, magic, and the mysterious suprapersonal agency of the dharmic level of mind – is characteristic of the Vajrayāna world-view.

The English translation of the Five Indriyas as the Five Spiritual Faculties, obscures the Buddha’s mythic reference to Indra, the ‘king of the gods’. When we use the term that the Buddha used however, the archetypal perspective in his thinking becomes clear. By approaching these Dharmic principles, as he did, they are revealed to be archetypal powers. Mindfulness (Pali: sati; Sanskrit: smrti); Faith (shraddha); Energy (viriya); Meditation (samādhi); and Wisdom (prajñā) – however concrete they may seem, when we view them together and arrange that as a mandala, they are also recognised as manifestations the dharmic reality. Thinking about them in this way, we recognise them as aspects of the sambhogakāya mandala, and indeed as one of the main roots (along with the skandhas and brahmavihāras) in the Buddha’s teaching that gave rise to historical evolution of the sambhogakāya mandala in Buddhist thought. When we are familiar with all the correspondences, it becomes clear that Mindfulness of dharmas, included this recognition that Dharmic principles are usually dharmic principles – archetypal powers that have an objective and collective existence in these higher level of mind beyond the egoic mind and beyond history and culture. So, the Five Spiritual Faculties, while they are reflected in human personality and Buddhist history on the nirmānakaya level, they are, in their essence, archetypal principles and may be seen represented in the symbolism of the samboghakāya mandala.

So, an ‘archetypal’ way of thinking is clearly present in the Buddha’s teaching. His identification of the key principles of the Dharma as archetypal principles – as associated with the divine order in the ancient Indian world-view that he had inherited – he was presenting these principles as transcendental powers, beyond history and beyond the egoic mind. They are principles that by their nature are ’empty’, and can never be completely personalised and reified – at least not without losing their depth of meaning and significance. When the Buddha states that all dharmas are ’empty’, he is reminding us that every component of the body-mind and every mental state arising within it, is an archetype – manifesting in the mysterious systemic phenomenon of the human personality, but ultimately irreducible and ’empty’ self-nature. The refinement and subtlety that the Buddha is bringing to Indian spiritual thought in making this assertion, changes everything. He is once again offering a Middle Way – he profoundly affirming the objective and collective reality of his Dharmic principles, while reminding us that all dharmas are ’empty’ – that they are archetypes and therefore ultimately unknowable, and beyond the reach of the reifying mind.

One of the points that I am trying to make here, is that the Buddhist intellectual position of reticence regarding the eternal and metaphysical, can itself become reified into a conceptual rigidity that becomes an obstacle to truth. The Buddha’s notion of shunyatā is intended as double negation – it is both a ‘not’ and ‘not-not’. In this way the more obvious negation of ‘not’ (as in the notion of anatman, for example) is not reified into a form of nihilism. The Buddha’s eternalism-nihilism dichotomy does not only present us with two obvious extremes to be avoided, it presents us with a polarity to be reconciled. The idea of avoiding the extremes of eternalism and nihilism can easily become itself an erroneous conceptual reification. The Buddha’s Middle Way is a much more subtle and open idea. Indeed, for me, the Middle Way is better thought of as a practical path of non-duality in which the extremes of eternalism and nihilism are embraced and the tension between them held until a resolution is found. While the dharmakāya is a non-dual reality, about which little or nothing can be said, the trikāya model taken as a whole, invites us to hold the tension between the non-duality of the dharmakāya and duality of the nirmānakāya. Both of these aspects of reality must ultimately be fully embraced.

In each of my chapters on the four stages of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’, what I aim to present is a way of entering experientially into the trikāya model of mind, and of entering into the meditative enquiry process of the Middle Way. We generally begin our spiritual journey identified with the mundane reality of the nirmānakāya, and with the mind’s obscuring kleshas, and from that perspective the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya are experienced only very tentatively and vaguely as a sense of the transcendental Other Power. Spiritual study and meditation practice take us on a journey however, in which we progressively familiarise ourselves with that transcendental other – so much so, that we eventually come to the realisation that the transcendental other is not ultimately ‘other’ at all. I personally believe that this release of egoic identification, via a process of recognition of the Other Power of the dharmic reality, is the essence of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ process. There are other interpretations, but this is the one that makes sense to me.

As we become experientially familiar with the trikāya – increasingly recognising it as a description of our experience – we are also keenly aware that mind is inherently relational, and relational in a different way than we might think. We may start out, as I have described above, with a sense of identification with a mundane egoic mind (nirmānakāya) that is ‘relating to’ an indefinable divine other (dharmakāya and sambhogakāya), but sooner or later we find ourselves switching our identification within this relational self. We recognise, in effect, that even though we keep defaulting back to our egoic identification with the seemingly personal psychological processes of the nirmānakāya as we engage with life’s challenges, the dharmakāya better describes who we are, ultimately. The closer we get to the dharmakāya perspective, the more the nirmānakāya self is recognised as ‘empty’ – as merely a vehicle for, and an expression of, the dharmakāya, within the nirmānakāya world.

 

 

So, through meditation practice, we develop a relationship with the dharmic reality – a relationship in which we recognise it both as a benevolent spiritual resource beyond ourselves, and as the core and essence of our being. Somewhat confusingly, many use the word ‘non-duality’ to describe a recognition of this both-and relationship. Personally, I find that the relational approach that is implicit in the trikāya, helps to approach this non-dual reality with less confusion. The ‘relational’ frame of reference nevertheless takes us to a deep level of experience in meditation where subject and object are no longer distinguishable. So, our path to that place where the term ‘non-duality’ is an appropriate one, is an essentially relational one – one in which there is a keenly relational sense of becoming both a grateful receiver of, and an open channel for, the beneficial potency of the dharmic reality. The deeply relational and explicitly dualistic stage of ‘devotional-receptive’ surrender to the transcendental other leads, seemingly inevitably, to an experience that we can talk of in terms of union or unity – even though the relational quality of that unity is always present.

There is a humility in this relational framing of our path to the non-dual goal of Enlightenment that is provided by this trikāya model. Indeed it is not just humbling, but comforting and spiritually useful, to recognise that on the nirmānakāya level of mind, embodiment of Consciousness and the other spiritual virtues is difficult to achieve. Even Gautama Buddha was conditioned by his historical and social context – and presumably by other aspects of the nirmānakāya. What was significant was his freedom from identification with that conditioned level of mind. As ordinary un-Enlightened practitioners we are, to the extent that we are identified with the nirmānakāya, profoundly conditioned by that level.

As we open inwardly to the dharmic reality, we do not just leave the nirmānakāya behind and enter a non-dual world of blessedness. Rather, we straddle the two realities, with one foot in each world – momentarily recognising ourselves as embodied Consciousness, or even creating concrete reflections of the dharmic reality in our ordinary personalities and lives; but always returning to a humbling awareness of our nirmānakāya conditioning and our limitedness. When we speak in terms of non-duality, we a led to imagine that the reconciliation of nirmānakāya and the dharmic reality might be so complete that the two realities are no longer discernible. Clearly, this is not the case – or at least it is not a helpful idea. Rather, we need to simply learn to hold both realities in awareness – entering into a devotional-receptive and healing relationship with the Other Power of the dharmic reality, and only occasionally and momentarily recognising the dharmic reality as ourselves.

So, the term non-duality can be taken, in part at least, as referring to our recognition, fleetingly at first, that our conditioned nirmānakāya world is entirely interpenetrated by the dharmic reality. Our mind and our world are not immediately transformed by this, but as our relationship of faith and confidence in the dharmic reality grows, and if we are willing to allow the the process, our transformation naturally accelerates. So, ultimately our task is not the heroic and effortful one that we might have imagined – but the more subtle work of staying in relationship of trust and surrender to the dharmic reality. Once we reach this level, the practices of samādhi (meditation), and pūja (worship), both give expression to this attitude of self-surrender, and to this meditative receptivity to the dharmic reality.

There is a very real sense in which all significant spiritual transformation is best thought of as an act of grace – an act of the beneficent Other Power of the dharmic reality – and we grow in our awareness of this as we go deeper in the spiritual life. We may make great personal effort to make changes to our minds and behaviours, and to the circumstances of our lives; but we will often come to the realisation, especially as we get older, that our personality and our life is so inextricably entangled in the various dimensions of the conditions of our nirmānakāya world, that our only possibility of transformation is through our receptivity to the Other Power of the dharmic reality. I shall be talking in much more detail in my next two chapters, about the apparent dichotomy of self-power and Other Power and about the need for us to find a reconciliation of these two principles in our approach to practice. While Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ process is often over-simplified and presented as if it can be encompassed within a self-power frame of reference, I am of the opinion that, all four stages, including the foundational Integration and Positive Emotion stages, cannot be completed, or even fully understood, without a recognition of Other Power.

So, while this is a theme that I shall be returning to and exploring in more detail, I would like at the outset to present my own perspective on the very subtle way in which the Buddha understood ‘effort’. One of ‘limbs’ of the Buddha’s Nobel Eight-fold Path is Right Effort (samyak padhāna), and it was via this teaching that the Buddha communicated crucial details about what he meant by the Middle Way approach to spiritual practice – details which were no longer available to be recorded when the oral transmission was committed to writing. This foundational understanding is, unfortunately, quite subtle, and often misunderstood within Buddhist tradition – perhaps especially among Western practitioners, but also, I believe, in the East. I feel a need to outline this Right Effort teaching before we go any further, because it will allow my readers to understand why I give such importance to establishing clarity about the dichotomy of self-power and Other Power. My experience has been that Western practitioners can lose their way in the spiritual life, if they fail to address this dichotomy and come to an understanding of how it is resolved in practice.

We can think of the Buddha’s Enlightenment as a state of both insight and energetic integration that allowed him to rest as Consciousness – to rest in a state in which the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya levels of his being were reconciled. Resting in this state of reconciliation, he was aware of four dimensions of effort, or four dimensions of motivation, that were spontaneously present in his being. He described these four categories of positive desire as the Four Right Efforts. While the Buddha embodied a state in which the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya levels of his being were reconciled, in our own rather different experience, as un-Enlightened beings, these two levels are held in tension – and felt to be deeply incongruous.

Indeed, the sambhogakāya mandala can be thought of as a graphic description of the way we hold the tension between our ultimate true nature (dharmakāya) on one side, and the mundane and concrete reality of our embodied being (nirmānakāya) on the other. It is only by our willingness to hold this tension – opening inwardly to aspects of the dharmic reality and allowing these to effect us – that the Four Right Efforts can do their transformative work. So Effort, is more subtle than we might imagine, because it includes holding a deep receptivity to the essence of the qualities that we are seeking to develop. So, Effort in Buddhism refers to both our intentionality and our receptivity. It is by this combination of factors that the dharmic reality begins to find embodiment in the nirmānakāya and we can achieve significant changes in both our mental and emotional energy, and our personality.

As Westerners, we tend to frame the spiritual life as the activity of a moral will – a moral will that, having discerned what is ethically positive, or skilful, and what is ethically negative, or unskilful, takes action to cultivate the positive and renounce the negative. The Buddha’s view was much more subtle however. He explained that the will is not personal and not single, but a phenomena arising from our identification with a broad constellation of volitional energies, which, in coming together create the appearance of a personal will. Borrowing from the earlier Vedic teaching of the five skandhas, the Buddha called the volitional energies the samskāras. He analysed the cognitive processes which guide, or fail to guide, our ethical discernment using the same five skandhas model. I shall be returning to this in a future chapter, but briefly we can say that the two skandhas involved in our assessment, or failure to assess, the benefit of a course of action are the evaluative samjñā skandha, and the conceptually describing, concretising, and therefore ‘form-creating’ rūpa skandha.

In the paragraphs below, I shall briefly outline each of the Buddha’s Four Right Efforts – and I shall be attempting to explain how each one relates to the Buddha’s notion of the Middle Way, and the later teaching of the trikāya. Translated into English the Four Right Efforts are usually rendered as Restraint (the Effort to Avoid), Abandonment (the Effort to Overcome), Cultivation (the Effort to Develop), and Preservation (the Effort to Maintain), but the four-fold framework is best grasped if we break it into two pairs. The first of these pairs, Restraint and Abandonment, is concerned with how, as practitioners, we inhibit and eliminate negative, or unskilful states; and the second pair, Cultivation, and Preservation, is concerned with how we cultivate and maintain positive, or skilful states. So, all four are concerned with how we evolve beyond the state of being ‘reactive’ beings, helplessly caught in our harmful conditioning; and become ‘creative’ and evolving beings who have mastered the art of self-transcendence – or moving beyond our conditioned limitations and cultivating the good.

I shall take Restraint and Abandonment first. When, as practitioners of Mindfulness, or resting as Consciousness, having noticed currents of thought, feeling, and volition arising in the mind that are unskilful, we naturally desire to inhibit such processes so that they do not grow and become deeply established in us. Unfortunately, we may not always recognise that unskilful mental states are unskilful, but to the extent that we do, we also notice a natural desire to prevent them from arising. These Right Efforts are closely related to the arising of Compassion towards ourselves and others, since to the extent that we connect deeply with ourselves and others, and really recognise the harm that our unskilful actions are causing to ourselves and others, we naturally wish to release our identification from these conditioned states and to return instead to the mental and emotional positivity of resting as Consciousness.

When we become conscious of the natural impulse to prevent the arising of unskilful mental states by resting as Consciousness, and adopt this as a ‘practice’, we can speak of this as the practice of the first Right Effort of Restraint (saṃvara). Similarly, when we become conscious of the natural impulse to prevent unskilful mental states that have already arisen, we can speak of this as the practice of the second Right Effort of Abandonment (pahāna). It is helpful to acknowledge however, that these impulses of restraint and abandonment arise spontaneously from Mindfulness. Once we recognise the internal relationship between Consciousness and the cognitive-perceptual objects, or contents, of Consciousness, we recognise that we always have the choice to dis-identify from unskilful mental states, and can, in so doing, break the momentum of these unskillful aspects of our conditioning.

The recognition that we always have the option to dis-identify, is essential to the practice of Mindfulness – but is often not recognised. It is also often not recognised that Compassion (and Loving Kindness, and Equanimity and Appreciative Joy – the other three brahmavihāras) – is always inherent in Consciousness. When we learn the discipline of resting as Consciousness and allow ourselves to become familiar with our deepest true nature as Consciousness (i.e. as the dharmakāya), then Restraint and Abandonment become, not efforts in the conventional sense, but choice-less volition – choices that arise naturally from our empathy towards others and our self-empathy towards ourselves.

To the extent that we are Mindful, we recognise the potential for harm in our unskilful states, and recognise them as kleshas – as energetic states of the body-mind that defile or obscure the true nature of the mind as Consciousness. Restraint then, is the impulse by which we refuse to give expression to such states, by releasing our identification with them, and just letting them be as they are; and Abandonment is releasing them entirely, so that they do not continue, and no longer obscure the mind. While those who are practicing within the self-power perspective might be more likely to see this practice as involving identification with a moral understanding, moral values, and the agency of a moral will; those for whom the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya are objective and collective Other Power realities within the mind, are more likely to see the Right Efforts of Restraint and Abandonment as choosing to entrust ourselves to the dharmic reality through the practice of Mindfulness (resting as Consciousness), in order to prevent the arising of unskilful states, and release the karmic momentum that is generating them.

The second pair of Right Efforts is Cultivation, and Preservation. Conventionally these are understood, especially in the West, as expressions of Buddhist idealism – as the volitional activity of a moral will directed towards the cultivation of positive mental states like the brahmavihāras that are an expression of the ethical and compassionate ideals of Buddhism, and held to be mental states that reflect the state of Enlightenment. When we go more deeply into the practice of Mindfulness however, we recognise that these desires to cultivate and maintain the positive arise naturally once we become familiar with the dharmic reality. Because Compassion, Loving Kindness, Equanimity and Appreciative Joy, are inherent in Consciousness, the act of regularly resting as Consciousness and becoming familiar with its qualities, leads us inevitably to a process in which we begin to integrate and increasingly embody these qualities.

As with the first pair of Right Efforts, the recognition of Other Power profoundly changes the way we practice, and changes the way we conceptualise our practice. It is not that we give up effort – indeed a true recognition of Other Power makes us more motivated than ever. To recognise Other Power is to recognise that the brahmavihāras (Loving Kindness, Compassion, Equanimity and Appreciative Joy) all exist objectively and collectively ‘within’, but beyond the egoic mind. They exist primarily as the mahabrahmavihāras – archetypal forces, woven into the fabric of an objective and collective dharmic reality, and therefore appearing as if they are ‘out there’ in the universe. When we rest as Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha), and familiarise ourselves with that objective and collective reality, we recognise that the brahmavihāras are also ‘in here’ as attitudes of Consciousness.

The realisation of Other Power highlights and heightens our perception of the tension between, on one side, the dharmic reality of the dharmakāya and sambhogakaya, and on the other side, our embodied nirmānakāya experience of a very conditioned, limited, and separate self – an apparent self that is nevertheless attempting to become an embodied reflection of its ultimate true nature in the dharmakāya and sambhogakaya. So, the four brahmavihāras (Compassion, Loving Kindness, Equanimity and Appreciative Joy) are examples of qualities which may be viewed either as Buddhist ideals, as they are seen within a self-power approach, or as inherently present suprapersonal forces with the field of Consciousness that are revealed as such, when we practice within the framework of Other Power.

I could have used other Buddhist virtues – of which there are obviously a great many. The self-regarding and other-regarding aspects of the four brahmavihāras (hence eight brahmavihāras in all), do however have an especially great importance, both within the Buddhist tradition in general, and in the context of the the trikāya doctrine. This is because the four brahmavihāra pairs are the primary characteristics of the four male and four female Buddhas of the cardinal quadrants in the sambhogakāya mandala. Indeed, this connection is so close that it might be more accurate to express this the other way round, and to say that the ‘Buddha couples’ in the four quadrants of the sambhogakāya mandala are embodiments of the four brahmavihāra pairs.

While it is possible to separate out the four Right Efforts in this way, in reality all four require the application of a Middle Way approach – a synthesis of self-power and Other Power. I have already pointed out the fact that the first two Right Efforts – the Restraint and Abandonment of negative mental states by choosing not to give expression to them and releasing our identification with them – are associated with Compassion. While the development of the needs-based awareness of Compassion is a primary factor leading to Restraint and Abandonment, the brahmavihāras of Equanimity (upekshā) and Loving Kindness (maitri) are also foundational.

When we recognise that Equanimity is inherent in Consciousness and endeavour to cultivate a reflection of that by making ourselves profoundly receptive to it, we naturally begin to embody that quality, and become more able to rest as Consciousness in stressful situations – therefore becoming less reactive, and gaining a capacity for Restraint and Abandonment. Equally important is Loving Kindness. When we recognise that Loving Kindness is objectively and collectively present at the sambhogakāya level of the mind, and indeed may be recognised as an attitude of Consciousness, and begin to cultivate a reflection of this in the nirmānakāya level of our own being. By making ourselves receptive to those brahmavihāra aspects of the dharmic Other Power that we call the mahabrahmavihāras, we facilitate a powerful transformation of the mind – a transformation that allows us to be warmly and unconditionally present both with ourselves and others. And by progressively embodying Loving Kindness, we learn to evaluate our experience in a way that is no longer subjective, and we gain a much finer ability to discern what is skilful and unskilful.

In regard to Cultivation and Preservation – the effort to develop and maintain positive or ‘skillful’ mental states – the brahmavihāra of Appreciative Joy (muditā) plays an especially important role. When we rest as Consciousness and recognise that Appreciative Joy is an inherent quality of the mind at the sambhogakāya level, we then become deeply attuned to the immanent presence of the dharmic reality – sensing a resonance of the transcendental within our bodies and within this mundane world. The ability to sense a resonance of the beneficent dharmic reality within ourselves is the ‘internal’, or ‘self-regarding’ aspect of Appreciative Joy (muditā); and the recognition of the beneficent dharmic reality at work in others, and in our world, is the ‘external’, or ‘other-regarding’ aspect of Appreciative Joy. So, Appreciative Joy plays a key part as our faith in the dharmic reality grows, since it is the most concretely sensory of the brahmavihāras. While all the brahmavihāras can be thought of as somatic or embodied resonances of the dharmic reality, muditā is our appreciative recognition of that mystery – of that ongoing and always available embodiment process.

The Appreciative Joy that drives Cultivation and Preservation, is of course, closely related to Equanimity and Loving Kindness. As we learn to rest as Consciousness, we appreciate the Equanimity that this brings, and this appreciative familiarity (i.e. muditā) with that objective source of stillness is what drives the Cultivation and Preservation process and brings an integration of, and a deepening of Equanimity. Cultivation and Preservation of course also requires Loving Kindness (maitri),since, as maitri develops, there is a similar positive feedback process. Maitri recognises what is truely of value to us, what truly meets our deepest needs, and what gently and organically supports our authentic spiritual unfoldment. It is this recognition of what we truly love and value that motivates us to return with ever more faith and conviction to our practice. While we may be more familiar with maitri as the Loving Kindness that brings an emotional warmth and a natural care and sensitivity to our relationships with ourselves and others, it is also the foundation of our Faith (shraddhā), and of the supreme value that we begin to place upon our relationship with the dharmic reality.

It is crucial to our understanding of the ‘System of Practice’ that we gain a depth of understanding in regard to the nature of Effort – there can be no consistent and effective cultivation of Integration and Positive Emotion without this Middle Way understanding, which integrates self-power and Other Power. In this book I shall be highlighting the fact that Buddhist tradition appears to have become more and more sophisticated over the centuries in the way it speaks about Effort and the corresponding virtue of virya – which is usually taken to have connotations of heroism, determination and personal will-power, but is probably better translated as ‘energy’, or even ‘enthusiasm’. When we study the Pali Canon, while also taking in the whole sweep of Buddhist tradition, we become keenly aware that there were nuances and details in the Buddha’s teaching that, because of their subtle nature could not be preserved by the four hundred years of oral tradition that preserved the Buddha’s teaching by reducing it to chant-able, and somewhat repetitive formulations. The formulations that were eventually set down in the Pali Canon are nevertheless, of course, absolutely remarkable – extraordinarily vast in number and extremely detailed.

We need to de-personalise the way we think about Effort – remembering that the samskaras are ’empty’ of self nature. By acknowledging that the arises from a constellation of multiple factors – factors that are often in conflict – we come appreciate why our energy and motivation might fluctuate. The more we can acknowledge, and make conscious all the motivations that are at work within us, the more likely we are to achieve integration. I would even suggest that we need to reverse the way we think about Effort – rather than thinking simply of applying Effort to cultivate Integration and Positive Emotion, we need perhaps to think instead of practicing Integration and Positive Emotion in order to become a person in which the Four Right Efforts arise increasingly spontaneously. Inevitably, we embark on the Buddhist path with the idea that Effort is an entirely personal phenomenon, and we project that assumption onto Gautama Buddha’s teachings. When we do this however, we miss the radicality of the Buddha’s assertion that his path is a Middle Way – a reconciliation of self-power and Other Power.

We need to be aware that Effort is complex. We do not cultivate a capacity for Right Effort simply by ‘making an effort’ in an ordinary egoic way. This idea was at the core of the Buddha’s approach. He was telling us that the Right Effort that is needed to release egoic identification, is a different sort of effort – that it must express the wisdom of the Middle Way. Effort applied with insufficient awareness and discernment can cause the opposite of our intention – and can even cause physical or psychological harm. We may apply Effort to a particular spiritual practice, or take action to shape our lives according to particular spiritual values and principles, and then, somewhat confusingly, find ourselves less and less able to make that Effort, or realising that our effort was misplaced. We may find that we have less and less energy and enthusiasm – and may even find ourselves just collapsing into a sense of helplessness, hopelessness, disillusionment and regret. If this happens, we can be sure that we have not been practicing Right Effort, or that are guidance has been incomplete, or something is wrong with the Sangha culture in which we have been practicing.

I shall be talking a lot in my next two chapters about this question of what Effort is, from a true spiritual perspective, and what it is not. Later in the book, I shall be talking much more about the brahmavihāras and their corresponding Wisdoms – since these are the experiential spiritual principles that, in effect, give the sambhogakāya mandala its structure. My spiritual journey has shown me very clearly, that it is by finding these spiritual principles in our experience that we transcend superficial heroic conceptualisations of the meaning of Right Effort and discover the Buddha’s Middle Way.

I hope this digression, in order to reflect on the Four Right Efforts from the Other Power perspective that is suggested by the trikāya, has served to communicate something of the practical subtlety of the Buddha’s Middle Way approach to practice. The presentation above is not at all typical of Buddhist expositions on this theme. The Four Right Efforts are usually presented entirely within the framework of the assumed personal moral will, which the Buddha told us was an illusion. This is why I regard the trikāya model of mind as so foundational. By forcing us to include the archetypal (sambhogakāya) and eternal (dharmakāya) levels of mind in our Buddhist psychology, the trikāya ensures that our psychological conceptualisations are much more true to the totality of Buddhist wisdom. We should never dumb-down the Dharma – we should never sacrifice the Dharma’s profound and challenging truths out of a condescending impulse to make it more ‘accessible’.

What I am presenting in this book is, similarly, very much my own very personal, and perhaps rather idiosyncratic understanding, of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ model. Although it seems to me to be implicit that the ‘System of Practice’ is a guide to the trikāya journey of self-transcendence through a familiarisation with the dharmic reality – this is not how it is usually presented. Equally unusually, I shall be using the ‘System of Practice’ to highlight my conviction that the sambhogakāya mandala provides us with a graphic description of both our goal and our process of integration and reconciliation – an idea which to me seems to be implicit in the trikāya model, though I have not seen an explanation of this sort being explored in detail.

The version of the ‘System of Practice’ model that I am engaging with, is Sangharakshita’s original four-fold one that he presented in his 1978 talk on the subject. Aware that various different five-fold versions of the model have been presented by his students, I find that Sangharakshita’s original four-stage one is more true for me. The two pairs of Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death, and Spiritual Rebirth have a beautiful conceptual symmetry for me; and they powerfully describe our progressively deepening relationship with, and embodiment of, the spiritual principles that the sambhogakāya mandala symbolically presents to us. The fifth component, Receptivity, which is often added is of course essential – but it is not a stage. Whereas the other four are clearly stages, Receptivity is a principle that, in my view, informs the whole four-stage process. It has been proposed that Receptivity should be placed in the sequence as a stage, either as a third stage or as a final stage. This later placement has a logic, since it is usually later in our development as a practitioner that we gain a clear understanding of the foundational importance of Receptivity.

There is value in staying focused on the four principles that form the core of the model. What Sangharakshita showed us in his ‘System of Practice’ was a set of four key spiritual principals that can be viewed in many ways. Most importantly, they can be seen as: four unfolding aspects of Enlightenment; as four aspects of the spiritual life; or as four progressive stages in a process of energetic transformation – or, as I prefer, as all of these things, either simultaneously, or in different contexts. For me, these principles are, first and foremost, the stages in the career of the bodhisattva – or stages in the process by which we all might eventually become a bodhisattva. The bodhisattva principle is central to Sangharakshita’s thought – and it is my belief that we cannot understand his ‘System of Practice’ without reference to this archetype.

It was Gautama Buddha himself, who first used the term bodhisattva – he used it to describe himself in his previous lives. So, one way of thinking of the bodhisattva, is to imagine him, or her, as a sort of ‘apprentice Buddha’, or a ‘Buddha-in-training’. The Buddhist tradition moved on however, so that the idea of the bodhisattva became a very much larger one – it became the profound idea that both the path and the goal are inherently altruistic. As Mahayana Buddhism emerged, Enlightenment was no longer understood as a merely individual pursuit. Rather it became a collective and therefore cultural endeavour – a process whose aim was the upliftment of the whole of humanity.

The Mahayāna was also a historical phase in which there was a keen sense of the need for Buddhism to bare witness in a cultural way, to the transcendental dharmic reality, and to point to that reality through powerful stories and Buddhist myths. The Mahayanists were distinguished by their recognition that the goal of practice was not just personal liberation, but the Enlightenment of all beings. They understood that their spiritual task would not be complete until all beings had attained liberation. The Mahayānists created a Buddhist culture that was explicitly designed to be a Buddhism for everyone – not just for the monk and the scholar, but for everyone. While Buddhist monasticism remained important, the Mahayāna’s lay practitioners were often equally engaged in the pursuit of wisdom and profound personal transformation.

So, in the Mahayāna, the path to realisation took on a new emphasis – one of devotional-receptive self-surrender. Our impression as we look back at this historical transition it is clear that Buddhism was more explicitly taking on a clear Other Power dimension – a dimension that was present in Gautama Buddha’s teachings, but had played a less important role in the early centuries of the tradition. While the Buddha was still alive, or still alive in the collective memory of the tradition, it seems that one of the ways in which the Other Power aspect found expression was in the practice of visualising the Buddha and his qualities. It is easy to see how this sort of meditative visualisation led to a recognition that Buddha was not just a person, but also the archetypal reality that came to be depicted in the sambhogakāya mandala.

It was during the early centuries of the Mahayāna phase of Buddhist history that the imagery of the sambhogakāya mandala first emerged. It was a process in which the archetypal level of the dharmic reality was, over time, more and more adequately described and symbolised. I think of it a crystallising out into a concrete cultural nirmānakāya expression, of an archetypal samboghakāya reflection of the eternal dharmakāya. As soon as the archetypal Buddhas began to emerge in the collective imagination of the tradition, they were used to evoke a sense of a benign, transcendental dharmic reality – something that they did with great power. By bringing in an increasingly tangible sense of a transcendental dharmic reality, the archetypal Buddhas provided a concrete sense of Other Power within the lives of monks and lay-Buddhists alike – a sense of divine benevolence and spiritual support.

The altruistic motivation to engage with this collective evolution of humanity was a motivation that we see clearly in Gautama Buddha – and the Mahayana recognised this to be inherent in the Enlightenment experience. More than that, the bodhicitta – the universal and non-personal compassionate intention in the heart of the bodhisattva – was also recognised to be the driving force of the Enlightenment process from the beginning. Indeed, the bodhicitta, or the bodhisattva motivation, came to be recognised as an eternal and archetypal principle – and as the most fundamental and defining quality of all three levels of the Buddha’s being. So, the bodhisattva became an archetypal personification of the bodhicitta – the spiritual principle that drives evolution, and motivates all spiritual aspirants on their path of insight and transformation. For me, and I believe for Sangharakshita also, it is the bodhicitta, or bodisattva principle, that animates, and gives meaning to, the ‘System of Practice’.

While I prefer to speak of the bodhicitta in this way, and to speak of it as a collective, or archetypal, bodhisattva ‘principle’, it is common to speak rather of the bodhisattva ‘ideal’. While it is not entirely invalid to speak of the ‘bodhisattva ideal’, I need to highlight at the outset, the way in which this conceptual framing can be limiting. The egoic mind of the Mahayāna Buddhist practitioner can indeed adopt the bodhisattva as an over-arching value, and can conceptually construct the idea of the bodhisattva as a personification of his or her ideal, and of his or her idealised future state of being. For the Buddhist tradition however, the bodhisattva is not merely something constructed as an ideal in the individual human heart and mind. Rather, it exists collectively and eternally – prior to, and even independent of, human existence. It is the presence of the eternally beneficent bodhisattva principle that makes possible the phenomenon of the human – not the other way round. The bodhisattva principle, in the view that I am advocating here, is woven into the fabric of the universe on the level of the dharmakāya, and therefore into the fabric of Consciousness – indeed, it is the archetype that in some way animates all human aspiration.

This is why the archetypal perspective, and the perspective of the trikāya doctrine, is so important. The ‘System of Practice’, properly understood, is a framework by which we can become oriented initially ‘towards’, and ultimately ‘by’, the eternal bodhisattva principle. The constellation of values, ideas, images, and bodily-felt knowings, that we sometimes call the ‘bodhisattva ideal’ is, in reality, a manifestation within us of the archetypal sambhogakāya level of the mind; and a reflection in the body-mind of an unknowable mystery that is woven into the fabric of the universe, and primordially present in that level of mind which is the eternal dharmakāya.

Before moving on, I would like to say a little more about the nature of the transformation by which the ordinary human being becomes a bodhisattva. The Buddhist tradition sees the transformation as having two closely related components:

Firstly, there is a transformation of the bodily-felt emotional energies of the egoic mind. This is a process that is felt in the body in the course of meditation practice, and may be conceptualised in terms of the kleshas and the brahmavihāras – the kleshas being the categories of somatic experience that are negative, or egoic, in character; and the brahmavihāras being the categories of somatic experience that are positive, and even transcendental, and closely associated with the five Wisdoms. In future chapters, I shall be talking about the kleshas in detail – in the Tibetan tradition there are five categories of them. So, the somatic, or bodily-felt dimension of our transformation requires the release of the kleshas, and our discovery in their place of the sublime brahmavihāras of Loving Kindness, Equanimity, Compassion and Appreciative Joy. When we gain a deep understanding of Right Effort and the Middle Way however, we understand that if we wish to remove the negative, or afflictive states (kleshas) that give momentum to the egoic mind, we must give our attention to the brahmavihāras – recognising that they are always simultaneously present beyond the ego in the depths of the mind, and entering into a devotional-receptive relationship with them as aspects of the dharmic reality.

Secondly, there is a transformation of our cognition and perception, and of our ethical and relational awareness – which involves an attainment of insight into the ’empty’, or non-personal, or systemic, nature of the components of cognition and perception, or skandhas. When the skandhas are recognised as ‘empty’ of self-nature, they no longer generate the obscuring kleshas of egoic thought and emotion – and no longer function as obstacles to empathy and loving connection. This ‘insight’ component of our transformation is often characterised as a penetrating recognition of the three characteristics (lakshanas) of our nirmānakāya self and world – its inherent unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), its impermanence (anitya), and its ’emptiness’ (shunyatā). What is not always appreciated is the fact that a true recognition of dukkha and anitya go hand-in-hand with a recognition of that dharmic reality which is capable of bringing true satisfaction, and which is in some impossible-to-define sense absolutely permanent, trustworthy, and eternal.

So, of the three ‘Marks of Conditioned Existence’ (lakshanas), two of them, dukkha (suffering; unsatisfactoriness) and anitya (impermanence), are the characteristics of the nirmānakāya, but not of the dharmic reality. The third, and perhaps most important characteristic, shunyatā, (’emptiness’), is different however, in that it is a characteristic of the whole trikāya. Indeed shunyatā is an idea that underwent a profound evolution in the course of Buddhist history, and became in increasing important idea in the centuries after the Buddha’s death, until it came to be given a central and pre-eminent position within the philosophy and practice of Mahayāna and Vajrayāna Buddhism. Significantly, the use of the word shunyatā in Buddhist discourse changed. It evolved from being used primarily as an adjective, or ‘characteristic’, of mind and world, to being used as a noun – a conceptual label for, or ‘pointer’ to, the dharmic reality of the Unconditioned. Shunyatā, the idea that reality, at every level, is ’empty’ and non-personal, even though it is completely filled and overflowing with and compassionate and intelligent evolutionary purpose, became the primary doorway into insight practice for Buddhist practitioners. So, shunyatā was both a way of giving a name to the beneficent dharmic reality in which we rest, and a way of identifying its most fundamental and mysterious characteristic.

These two dimensions of transformation – the somatic transformation and the insight into the nature of mind and reality – are intimately linked and indeed cannot be separated. Neither can we say definitively which comes first. At the beginning of the path, the emotional and energetic transformation is usually given priority and the insight process is postponed – and sometimes viewed somewhat passively as something that will arise when we have achieved sufficient energetic transformation. Some teachers appear to reverse this order, however. Indeed Mindfulness can be viewed as a practice in which we take short moments of rest from egoic identification – momentarily breaking our identification with the self-illusion and glimpsing the spacious perspective of shunyatā, that takes us beyond the limiting habits of the egoic mind.

While this focus on insight into the ‘emptiness’ of the self-illusion is more direct, and its effect over time is very powerful, it is important not to neglect the energetic transformation process – not just the foundational processes of energetic transformation that are a precondition for the deep establishment of insight, but the complex social and psychological processes by which such insight may find integrated expression within the personality. To rest as Consciousness is to turn in meditative receptivity towards the dharmic reality, so it leads to a transformation of the nirmānakāya level of mind. If this transformation of the body-mind is not happening, we probably need to go deeper in our meditative surrender to the dharmic reality. As a conceptual map of this process, I find that the way in which the cognitive-perceptual and energetic processes are set out in the ‘mandala wisdom’ of Tibetan Buddhist tradition to be comprehensive and powerfully explanatory. The mandala, through its associations, references the five categories of egoic kleshas, which inherently arise from egoic identification with five corresponding cognitive-perceptual activities – five skandhas – each of which have an ‘internal’ and an ‘external’ aspect (so that there are in fact ten cognitive-perceptual components in all). By also pairing the skandhas and kleshas with their corresponding brahmavihāras and Wisdoms, the Tibetan ‘mandala wisdom’ provides us with a set of hermetic keys which unlock the Buddha’s Middle Way, and allow us to work systematically towards a reconciliation of the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya within ourselves.

In the Tibetan Buddhist system of analysis of the emotional energies of the egoic mind – the five kleshas – there are five categories. These are listed as: hatred (dvesha), craving (rāga), pride (māna), envy (irshya) and ignorance (avidya). It is important to understand these as categories of energies rather that discrete emotional states. The single-word English translations are inherently limited and limiting, and can only function as labels for the broad categories. The first key to understanding the five categories, is to understand them as arising from our personalising and therefore distorted experience of the corresponding skandhas.

The dvesha (hatred) category of kleshas arises from the way our identification with the conceptualising rūpa function of the mind leads us to create judgmental narratives that divide the people we encounter into those who are ‘right’, and those who are ‘wrong’ and therefore deserving of our hatred. So, the tradition is telling us that the rūpa skandha because it tends to generate a continuous stream highly personalised and therefore distorted conceptual descriptions of reality, also tends to generates the judgemental, punishing, and the generally aversive klesha impulses of the dvesha (hatred) category. Our failure to recognise that the rūpa dimension of our mind is creating our reality naturally leads to this projection of negative qualities on to others.

The rāga (craving) category of kleshas arises from the subjective and emotional character of the evaluating samjñā skandha function of the mind. When our identification with samjñā is crude and undifferentiated, we find ourselves blindly subject to its compulsive character. It worst we seemingly in the grip of emotional patterning that was established in past – making evaluations based on past experience, that do not serve us in the present. This sense of subjection to the momentum of our emotional life, is what the Buddhist tradition speaks of as rāga, or craving. The word samjñā is often translated as ‘perception’ because our general subjective perception of life is so profoundly coloured by the samjñā skandha – by the mind’s endless stream of subjective evaluations based on past emotional experience.

 

The sensory (vedanā), and volitional (samskāras) functions of mind; and of Consciousness (vijñāna) itself.

 

The word klesha is usually translated as defilement, or obscuration. So, the five kleshas can be thought of as providing a comprehensive psychological categorisation of the emotional energies of the egoic body-mind – somatic energies that, because of our identification with them, tend to prevent our recognition our true nature.

A core idea in Buddhist psychology, and an idea that we find clearly articulated in the spiritual psychology of the sambhogakāya mandala, is the idea that that which binds those in unawareness, liberates those with comprehensive knowledge. The skandhas therefore, are not inherently negative – rather they are just cognitive-perceptual components of mind, and ultimately entirely neutral. What makes them negative is the nature of our egoic identification with them. When we start to release that identification and start to see that the skandhas are ‘empty’ of self-nature, and instead start to see them merely as systemic and relational functions of mind, then they are recognised as profoundly positive and beneficial – as the Five Wisdoms.

When the skandhas and their corresponding klesha categories are truly recognised and deeply understood, we no longer judge the egoic mind – and no longer engage in a battle with it. Instead, we recognise that the egoic mind – and the whole world of the nirmānakāya – rests inseparably in, and is contained by, the dharmakāya. In this way we release the internal spiritual conflict that has hitherto been wasting our time and energy, and we enter into a profound process of integration. So, the word ‘Integration’, which Sangharakshita uses for the first stage of his ‘System of Practice’, points to a very profound spiritual idea, and to a very profound spiritual process – one that is very difficult to fully describe. I believe that Sangharakshita is quite correct in identifying it as the foundation stage of our transformation, but we should not forget that it informs all the subsequent stages as well. The four stages of the ‘System of Practice’ form a nested series – each new stage building on the stages before.

Those who know my writing, will know that I believe that our transformation of these emotional energies (kleshas) and cognitive-perceptual components (skandhas), is best achieved through an approach to meditation that the Buddha adopted from ancient Indian tradition – the four brahmavihāras. The four brahmavihāras are the four aspects of love (Loving Kindness, Compassion, Equanimity and Appreciative Joy) that correspond to four of the cognitive-perceptual functions of the mind (skandhas) and to the four associated categories of somatic energies (kleshas) within the egoic body-mind. While Buddhist mandalas can appear to be extremely abstract – Enlightenment represented as an iconographic arrangement of male and female Buddhas – they are actually very practical. For each of the Buddhas, there are corresponding sets of Dharmic principles to guide a systematic process of meditative contemplation and self-enquiry – most importantly, the ’empty’ skandhas, the equally ’empty’ kleshas, and the brahmavihāras. These are always implicitly represented by the four quadrants of the Buddhist mandalas – and they provide the conceptual key by which the archetypal figures can be understood. So, the symbols and archetypal Buddha figures within the four quadrants of these mandalas serve as pointers to a profound system of spiritual psychology – an archetypal psychology that I hope to present more and more fully as we progress through the four stages of the ‘System of Practice’.

I hope to outline, in the course of this series of chapters, the way that the sambhogakāya mandala describes the Buddha’s Middle Way – the progressive integration process and internal change of perspective that eventually allows a reconciliation of the fundamental opposites that are represented by the nirmānakāya and dharmakāya. A repeating theme of this book is going to be the way the polarity of dharmakāya and nirmānakāya is represented within the sambhogakāya mandala as the polarity between the white centre of the mandala and the blue, red, green and yellow quadrants of the cardinal directions.

It is because the white centre of the sambhogakāya mandala represents the dharmakāya (and more specifically, Consciousness – the ‘empty’ vijñāna skandha) that we often call it the Dharmadhātu Mandala. Returning to that core idea in Buddhist psychology that I referred to above – that the same archetypal principle that binds those in unawareness, also liberates those with comprehensive knowledge – we are invited to see a quintessential expression of this in the skandha and klesha associated with the centre of the sambhogakāya mandala. Here, the Buddhist tradition shows us that the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness), which, in the egoic mind we are identified with in a ‘personalising’ way, leads to the ‘spiritual ignorance’ of avidya – the habitual assumption, and perhaps even absolute conviction, that the ‘self’ is personal and separate. In the Enlightened mind however, it leads to the very opposite – to the Dharmadhātu Wisdom, which recognises that the dharmakāya as the beneficial and unitary transcendental reality of the infinite field of Consciousness, in which the multiplicity of our mundane nirmānakāya world nevertheless rests inseparably.

It helps us to understand the trikāya in general, and to understand the particular integrating and reconciling function of the sambhogakāya, if we recognise that the polarity between the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) and the other four skandhas, reflects the fundamental polarity between the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya. These other four skandhas – the ones that are represented by the quadrants of the mandala – are crucial to our understanding. Best understood as cognitive-perceptual ‘functions of Consciousness’, or as the cognitive-perceptual data flows that create the appearance of self and world, they are the source of both our bondage and our liberation – depending on whether we experience them in a ‘personalising’ way; or are able to dis-identify from them and recognise them as ’empty’.

I shall be talking in much more detail about the skandhas in a future chapter. Briefly however, the skandhas are Consciousness (vijñāna) and the four functions of Consciousness. They are very difficult to talk about because they function completely differently in a person who is aware, or comprehensively aware like a Buddha, than they do in a person who is unconscious. It is helpful as a starting point, to think of these four functions of Consciousness as cognitive and perceptual ‘activities’ of mind that, while they are a reflection of the primordial structure of the objective and collective field of Consciousness, they create the illusion of personal consciousness and personal selfhood through their conceptualising (rūpa), evaluating (samjñā), sensory (vedanā), and volitional (samskāras) activities.

While I would like to emphasise that the five-fold structure of the Buddhist mandalas derives from the archetypal structure of Consciousness and it’s cognitive-perceptual functions, I need to acknowledge that for most of us, our first encounter with the Five Wisdoms, and with the sambhogakāya mandala, is in the fairly familiar images of the five male Buddhas. Those that have gone further in their study, will be aware that the five male archetypal Buddhas are only half of the story – that there are also five female Buddhas. When we explore even further still, especially in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, we start to think of the mandala as an image of five male-female pairs of Buddhas, and start to see these ten Buddhas as a symbolic description of the completeness and wholeness of the Enlightened mind. Each of these male-female pairs are however, a reflection of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of each of the skandhas that the Buddha spoke of, and which we shall be starting to explore in a future chapter.

When we start to see the Five Buddha mandala as the sambhogakāya mandala that reconciles the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya dimensions of reality, we are challenged to go much deeper in our exploration of the Five Wisdoms. We recognise that the mandala describes a comprehensive ten-fold state of cognition and perception – and start to understand why such comprehensive awareness eludes the egoic mind. I believe the ‘System of Practice’ as I shall be outlining it, provides us with a systematic process by which we can begin, in a modest way, to transcend these limitations – limitations that are inherent in the structure of Consciousness. Key to this process of exploration will be the brahmavihāras – in their self-regarding and other-regarding aspects. It is through familiarising ourselves with these ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of love that, I believe, we can best begin melting the egoic constraints of the mind, and releasing the five dimensions of the mind’s innate wisdom.

I shall be talking in detail about the brahmavihāras, and coming back to them again and again. They provide our most direct way, in my view, of transformational engagement with both the kleshas and the skandhas. One way of understanding the approach to Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ that I am taking here, would be to say that I am taking the ‘System of Practice’ as a four-stage framework for an ever-deepening practice of the four brahmavihāras. Because these things are so deeply connected, the ‘System of Practice’ presents, at the same time, a four-stage approach to the release of the five categories of kleshas; and a four-stage program for differentiating, and releasing our identification with, the five skandhas – so that the corresponding Five Wisdoms are revealed. I hope to show the way in which these four frameworks – the kleshas, the skandhas, the brahmavihāras and the Wisdoms – are so inextricably linked that it is impossible to understand them in isolation. Indeed, each of these four corresponding Dharmic formulations are so illusive that we cannot grasp any particular element of the model without continually cross-referencing them with the other elements to which they correspond.

The Bardo Thodol texts tell us that our identification with each of the five skandhas leads to an accumulation of the associated category of kleshas. Because the brahmavihāras, skandhas, kleshas and Wisdoms each have ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects, the body-mind is a little more complicated. When we get into the detail, there are not five, but ten categories of emotional, or ‘somatic’, klesha energies giving the egoic mind it’s apparent substance – and the somatic patterning of the egoic mind that we are seeking to release are not only related to the ten principles themselves. Rather our egoic patterning is related to the multiple energetic relationships within the mandala. The polarity relationships within the mandala represent the egoic polarities of consciousness and unconsciousness within the mind – the polarities that we are seeking to reconcile. Especially important are the polarities across the axes of the mandala, and the relationships between the centre (Consciousness) and the peripheral elements (the cognitive-perceptual functions). I hope to show how the four-fold ‘System of Practice’ can provide us with some logical structure and a coherent process, as we approach this inherent complexity.

Our philosophical framework for spiritual practice, necessarily goes through an evolution and a deepening, along with our practice itself. In general, we progress from an initial attitude of heroic idealism (a ‘self-power’ emphasis – the so-called ‘self-development’ perspective); to a devotional-receptive attitude (an ‘other-power’ emphasis – the so-called ‘self-surrender’ perspective); to a ‘self-discovery’ or ‘self-enquiry’ attitude in which the dichotomy of these two previous stages is transcended. I find this ‘Three Myths’ model, suggested by Dharmachari Subhuti (one of Sangharakshita’s senior students) in 2003, to be powerfully explanatory. It explains the connection between our own evolving practice, and the three yānas – Hinayāna; Mahayāna; Vajrayāna – the three-stage historical evolution, or shift of emphasis, within the philosophy and practice framework, that occurred as the Buddhist tradition developed.

I would like to give time in my next two chapters, to reflecting on Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model, because it serves to further highlight the process of the reconciliation that we see articulated, in general terms, in the Buddha’s Middle Way teaching, and more specifically in the Trikāya Doctrine. The ‘Three Myths’ model, by distinguishing three progressive stages, also shows us a staged process of integration of the three seemingly very different approaches that we find in Buddhist philosophy and practice. The third ‘myth’ – ‘self-discovery’ – can be thought of as the most complete perspective, and as the view which integrates the previous two partial understandings into a single fully comprehensive three-fold understanding.

This third perspective is most clearly seen in Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism, and for me is very specifically articulated in the figures and symbols of the sambhogakāya mandala. While the Vajrayāna, the third great historical stage of Buddhist tradition, implicitly contains elements of the previous two stages, it is here that the Middle Way between the ‘self-power’ of the egoic will, which we can associate with the nirmānakāya, and the ‘other-power’ of the transcendental dharmakāya, is most clearly seen. So, it is this three-fold perspective, and this reconciliation, which we find in Tibetan Vajrayāna, that I am seeking to express – the view that Subhuti speaks of as the ‘self-discovery’ approach to practice.

For want of a better term, I will be using the term Vajrayāna to refer to this comprehensive three-view that offers a synthesis and a transcendence of the dichotomy of self-power and Other Power. I am therefore using this term, not only to refer to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, but to refer to this broad and comprehensive three-fold perspective wherever it is found in Buddhist tradition – in the historical Buddha’s teachings; in Zen; and the Pure Land traditions (Jodo Shinhu); and elsewhere. It is my conviction that wherever realisation of Enlightenment is happening, or there is deep and authentic practice of the Buddha’s Middle Way, this reconciliation of self-power and Other Power will be found.

In his ‘Three Myths’ model, Subhuti was offering an archetypal perspective. He has inviting us to be aware of the myth that we are ‘in’ when we are practicing the Dharma. This is a powerful mode of psychological enquiry, and it provokes a lot of challenging reflections for me – which I shall be sharing in my next two chapters.

To read the next chapter – Part 1 of ‘Self-Power’, ‘Other-Power’ and Beyond click here.

 

William Parker 2024

If you wish to share this article you can do so by clicking the buttons below.