Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework
for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by
the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads
This article is the second in my series on Buddhism and Focusing – you can read the previous article here. In it I am continuing to try to capture some of my reflections, as a Buddhist, not just on the practice of Focusing, but on the deepening of my engagement with the Buddhist path of Ethics, Meditation and Wisdom – a deepening engagement that I often find myself attributing to attitudes that I learned through my practice of Focusing.
Many of the reflections, that I find myself wanting to share here, are not obviously connected to the Focusing model. The connections that I am making here, in regard to the ‘mandala wisdom’ – the archetypal psychology of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism, that is attributed to the great Padmasambhava – are however, in large part due to my years practicing Focusing. The depth, and detailed nature of engagement that I am advocating here, is also something that I learned during my years of Focusing practice.
One of my overall goals in this series of articles, has been to try to establish the correct correspondences in the Buddhist reader’s mind, between the cognitive-perceptual components that the Buddhist tradition calls the ‘five skandhas’ and the four primordial positive emotions that the Indian tradition calls the brahmavihāras. These two sets of principles are foundational for meditation and Mindfulness practice, and for the Buddhist approach to wisdom – or insight into the ’empty’ nature of the self. These two sets of principles are difficult to grasp when approached in isolation. By studying them together, and studying their relationship however, both sets of Dharmic principles are revealed.
In order to establish the correct correspondences – correspondences that I have been characterising as archetypal, or ‘hermetic’ – I need to first explain the other sets of correspondences that have been put forward. I have taken time in this article to provide the rationale for all of the sets of correspondences that I am familiar with, so that readers can make their own assessment of what works best – what ‘feels’ right experientially, and what is most practically supportive in the context of meditation practice. While this process of finding the correct correspondences between the skandhas and the brahmavihāras may seem unrelated to my exploration of the commonalities between Buddhism and Focusing, I hope to illustrate in the course of this process, the fact that this pursuit of conceptual congruence – this pursuit of Dharmic conceptualisations that truly serve us – is an expression of one of the core skills of the Focusing method, and is one of the major benefits that Focusing can bring to Buddhist practice.
Part 2 – Opening to the Resonance of the dharmic Reality
The Middle Way beyond Eternalism and Nihilism
The early Buddhist tradition presented mind in terms of the dichotomies of samsāra and nirvāna. The later introduction of a third, intermediate level, into the way mind was conceptualised – the notion of a sambhogakāya as the middle level in a three-fold, or trikāya, model of mind – had the effect of opening up Buddhist philosophy and culture to the way the unknowable, and entirely unconditioned dharmakāya level of mind finds expression in the body-mind of the practitioner as archetypal imagery and non-egoic somatic experience. The ’empty’ sambhogakāya gives us a way of talking about encounters with archetypal personifications and suprapersonal forces, without personalising or reifying those experiences.
There is a common misunderstanding that arises from an incorrect conceptualisation of the Buddha’s description of his path of practice and philosophy as a Middle Way. While Gautama Buddha does indeed urge his students to avoid the extremes of ‘nihilism’ and ‘eternalism’, what he means by this invitation is subtle and nuanced. He is saying that we should avoid both the error of any view that holds that the self is permanent, unchanging, and everlasting; and the error of any view that sees the self and world as devoid of an eternal or unconditioned dimension. The Buddha was not denying the existence of that ’empty’, unconditioned, and unknowable dimension of mind which became known as the dharmakāya, and for which I have been using the epithet ‘eternal’.
This is why I like to use that word ‘eternal’ – it is a good word for expressing that ’empty’ unknowable reality that the Buddha was pointing to when he spoke of nirvāna. In the modern Westernised world, there is a very much greater danger of practitioners falling into forms of nihilism. Indeed a great many Western Buddhists are in fact nihilists, in terms of Buddhist philosophy. What I am saying is not as provocative as it seems. I am just saying that it is a feature of modernity that people find it difficult to believe in a transcendental reality, and Western Buddhists are often well-adapted, consciously or unconsciously, to the nihilism of the prevailing cultural world-view. So they may not believe in a dharmic, or transcendental reality – or at least they may not have adequate conceptualisations to point to that reality with conviction. They may not have a way of talking about the agency of that transcendental reality in their lives – fearing that this might imply a belief in some form of interventionist deity like the Christian ‘God’.
It is understandable that Westerners, heirs to the science, and the philosophical and political freedoms of that revolutionary cultural process that we call the European Enlightenment, might reject traditional Buddhist notions of a beneficent transcendental reality – even if that transcendental reality is ’empty’. I take the view that we need to guard against this nihilistic cultural conditioning in ourselves. I believe Western Buddhism can offer a way out of this dilemma – a world-view that has scientific rigour, while also offering a keen sense of the ever-present beneficial reality of a transcendental dharmic dimension.
The Buddhist tradition evolved because it was a tradition of meditators and mystics – meditators and mystics who were also thinkers and teachers, but were primarily meditators. They were meditators who took the Pali Canon as their starting point, but who were also always endeavouring to find fresh ways of describing their mystical experience – of describing the indescribable. The trikāya doctrine was a pragmatic development within this challenging project, and represents a huge step forward conceptually. So, the imagery and symbolism of the sambhogakāya mandala depicts for us the eternal benevolence of the dharmic reality; ever present, and felt in us as a somatic resonance – as bodily-felt experience.
The practical logic of Gendlin’s phenomenological approach to the body-mind, is profoundly affirming of this deeper view of the mandala, and of that Buddhist view which takes the ‘clear space’ of Consciousness, and the traditional four dimensions of Positive Emotion (the brahmavihāras) as a given – as inherent in the nature of mind at the level of the sambhogakāya. So, while the outer-inner pairing of Vairocana and Ākāshadhāteshvari provide us with an archetypal personification of Consciousness, the other four ‘Buddha couples’ provide similar archetypal personifications of the pairs of positive emotional ‘attitudes of Consciousness’ that we call the brahmavihāras.
One of the ways in which we rescue the sambhogakāya mandala from abstraction is by making the the correct associations between the archetypal Buddhas and the corresponding brahmavihāras – I have set these out in my previous article, and shall be explaining them further below. Far from being abstractions, the brahmavihāras are our guide on the path to the bodily-felt experience of Integration and Positive Emotion. They are, quite literally, the somatically-felt experience of the transcendental dharmic reality. They are foundational also, because they provide the key, in my view, to our development of that deep ethical sensibility that is the foundation of the Dharma life. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition the practice of the four brahmavihāras came to be regarded as absolutely foundational on the path of the bodhisattva – absolutely essential for our recognition of, and surrender to, the bodhicitta, the transcendental altruism that fills people with a wish to serve the wellbeing and spiritual upliftment of all beings.
If we undertake only a superficial study of Buddhism, we can be forgiven for seeing the Buddhist cultivation of an ethical sensibility as founded merely on adherence to the five traditional behavioural Precepts – non-harm; non-stealing; refraining from false and harmful speech; refraining from sexual misconduct; and refraining from intoxication. Clearly, this five-fold behavioural framework provides a necessary moral foundation, and serves to restrain the worst tendencies of the egoic mind – basic ethical principles that can be embraced by all, including non-meditators. Our focus on behavioural precepts, and on taking such precepts as the foundation for how we think about ethics, tends to lead to an emphasis in our presentation of Buddhist ethics that is external and behavioural rather than internal and spiritual – a worthy approach, but one based on rules and principles and external moral codes. The Buddhist approach to ethics is multidimensional, and is also one of meditation and self-enquiry.
Both brahmavihāras practice, and Focusing practice, take us much deeper into our ethics practice. The ethical perspective they bring, can be characterised in the terms of the Western philosophical tradition as close to the framing of ethics within the Platonic/Neoplatonic approach – which involves a recognition of the way that the ultimate nature of Goodness and Wisdom (which is very much akin to the dharmic reality of the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya in Buddhist tradition), naturally wants to finds a natural expression, or ’emanation’, in the human mind. Ultimately, Buddhism shares this view, asserting that ethical behaviour is a natural expression of our deepest true nature, and that to behave unethically is a sort of violation of our being – a violation in which we cut ourselves off from, or go against, who we ultimately are. Since the brahmavihāras are Buddhism’s description of the dimensions of love in the depth of the mind, they provide us with the basis for a deep and life-long process of ‘self-discovery’, and for a process in which we familiarise ourselves with the intangible and transcendental source of that ethical intelligence and love that exists within us, but entirely beyond the egoic mind’s tendencies towards greed, hatred, delusion, envy, and pride.
These five karmic areas of blunted or absent ethical sensibility are directly related to the five cognitive-perceptual skandhas (as I shall be explaining below), and are known in Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the five kleshas – variously translated as the ‘obscurations’ or the ‘defilements’. In early Buddhism there appears to been a focus on only three of the klesha categories – greed, hatred and ignorance – but in later centuries there were several longer lists. I regard the five-fold list above, that was presented to us by Padmasambhava in the Bardo Thodol, as by far the most useful. It has a profound logic through its close association with the Buddha’s five skandhas teaching.
This powerful and comprehensive five-fold system is a later development within Buddhist history, that is nevertheless rooted in the Buddhas teachings on the five skandhas; the five Spiritual Faculties; and the corresponding Foundations of Mindfulness. Theravada Buddhists are however, sometimes unaware of the correspondences between the five skandhas and the five kleshas, so I shall share them briefly here. The idea that the apparent emotional negativity and psychological inertia of the egoic mind is inherent in cognitive-perceptual structure of the body-mind is a foundational one for the Buddhist tradition.
The late Eugene Gendlin shared the Buddha’s wish that we should step out of this egoic stuckness and negativity through the practice of Mindfulness, by resting as the ‘clear space’ of Consciousness. Focusing, like meditation and Mindfulness practice, allows us to familiarise ourselves with a creative and open way of being, and with the brahmavihāra attitudes of mind that allow us to heal and evolve – to undergo personality change. I hope to show how skandhas, kleshas and brahmaviharas are archetypally (or ‘hermetically’) linked, but we should first establish some clarity about the way the cognitive-perceptual functions of Consciousness (skandhas) lead to contractive and defensive emotional patterns (kleshas), and to the associated negative group behaviours that are suggested by the corresponding Realms. These correspondences are set out particularly clearly in the rich and colourful imagery of the Bardo Thodol texts.
Here, very briefly, is what the tradition tells us about the connection between the skandhas, kleshas, and Realms:
Firstly, we are told that through our unconscious and undifferentiated identification with the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness), which the Buddhist tradition calls avidyā, we cut ourselves off from the instinctive altruism of the bodhicitta, and from the ultimate liberation of Enlightenment for the sake of all beings, even though we may have consistently attained access to those refined and positive dhyānic states of consciousness that Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of the Deva Realms. This is a very import distinction that the Buddhist tradition makes: that devas, the Gods of pre-Buddhist tradition, are are very different from the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, since they a caught in subtle but very fixed, and ultimately narcissistic, form of egoic identification that is said to have the character of ‘spiritual ignorance’ (avidyā).
Secondly, we are told that an unconscious and undifferentiated identification with the objectifying and form-creating rūpa skandha, through its creation of judgemental and divisive conceptualisations and narratives, leads to an accumulation of kleshas in the category of dvesha (hatred) – the klesha that characterises the Hell Realms.
Thirdly, we are told that an unconscious identification with the evaluative samjñā skandha, through its undifferentiated attention to subjective states related to emotional memory, leads to an accumulation of kleshas in the category of rāga (craving) – the klesha that characterises the Preta Realm.
Fourthly, we are told that an unconscious and undifferentiated identification with the intuitive and volitional samskāras skandha, leads us to be powerfully motivated by envious and imitative desires that are unrelated to our real needs, or the needs of others – and to an accumulation of what the Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas of irshya (envy), the klesha category that characterises the Asura Realm.
Fifthly, we are told that an unconscious and undifferentiated identification with the sensing and sensory vedanā skandha, though its preoccupation with, personal experience, with the personal aspects of the body, with person possessions, with personal identity, and with personal achievements and skills, leads to an accumulation of kleshas in the category of māna (pride) – the klesha that characterises the Human Realm.
These five categories of kleshas can be thought of as energetic layers in the way the egoic mind is somatically embodied. Focusing practice, because it invites us to attend to the actual complexity of our somatic experience, can help us to see the Buddhist notion of the kleshas in a way that is richer and much more phenomenologically true. While we may continue to recognise the skandhas and kleshas in our felt experience, we notice how they are usually combined into constellations of felt experience that have the character of ‘selves’ – selves, or sub-personalities, or ‘psychological parts’, which we are no longer identified with.
Each of these psychological parts, when investigated closely, is seen to have the characteristics of the skandhas and kleshas. The skandhas show themselves as the components, or attitudes, of each psychological part: Firstly there is its point of view and a description of what is happening (rūpa skandha), and its judgemental towards self or world (the klesha of dvesha). Secondly, there is its experience of sensory embodiment (vedanā skandha) that expresses separateness and personalisation (the klesha of māna). Thirdly, there is an evaluative reaction based on emotional history (samjñā skandha) that tends to locate the possibility of love and wellbeing in external persons and objects (the klesha of rāga). Fourthly, there is a volitional reaction of not wanting or wanting (samskāras skandha) that expresses impulses for control in order to manage the unconscious fear bred by envious desire (the klesha of irshya). When we engage with these psychological parts in the meditative self-enquiry of Focusing, all the skandhas and kleshas may be observed to be present in some form – but so also, if we are choosing to familiarise ourselves with Presence, are the brahmavihāras.
In future articles in this series, I shall be going deeper into the question of how the skandhas, kleshas and brahmavihāras are located in the body. There is a Tibetan Buddhist understanding in this regard that I have found very useful. This acknowledgement that personality change happens ‘in the body’, like a meditative process, as a bodily-felt energetic shift, is integral the Gendlin’s Focusing practice. The Buddhist tradition shares with Gendlin the wish to understand how the skandha and klesha components that give rise to the appearance of a self, are energetically accumulated and held in the body. Buddhism goes further however, because it seeks to understand how the dharmic reality is also embodied within. Just as the categories of kleshas can be imagined as energetic layers in the somatic field of the body, so too can we image the brahmavihāras as occupying the same layers – becoming revealed as identification with the egoic kleshas is progressively released.
From this Tibetan ‘self-discovery’ perspective, the cultivation of the brahmavihāras may be partly characterised as a process in which we learn to attend to the resonance of the mahabrahmavihāras (the ‘great’ brahmavihāras) – the energetic resonance of the sambhogakāya felt as vedanā (sensation) in layers of the body’s somatic anatomy. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition helps us in this endeavour, by inviting us to be aware of the chakras – the points on the centreline of the body where the resonance of mahabrahmavihāras may be most keenly felt. One of the curious, but perhaps not surprising, parallels between Buddhist meditation and Focusing, is this invitation to pay particular attention to felt experience on the centreline of the body. The felt processes that Focusing practitioners describe are often experienced to be happening at what Indian tradition would identify as the chakra locations – especially those in the trunk of the body up to the level of the heart.
In my experience the experiential locations of the resonances of mahabrahmavihāras may all be felt in the chakra locations set out in books on Tibetan Buddhism. A book that I found very useful on this subject, and may be useful to others who find themselves on a ‘self-discovery’ path, was Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (1957), by the German Buddhist scholar, Lama Anagarika Govinda. There are further clues in the Bardo Thodol. One of the main things that we learn from long-term meditation practice, from the practice of Focusing, and from the practice of Mindfulness, is that the nature of body-mind and of the process by which the brahmavihāras are embodied in us, is mysterious and cannot be easily explained. It is further complicated by the fact that men and women tend embody the kleshas and brahmavihāras in ways that are in some ways opposite to each other. This a complex subject, and I shall need to return to it in a future article in this series.
In the light of what I spoke about in the previous paragraph, I feel a need to emphasise that our practice on this ‘self-discovery’ path within Buddhism, or through Focusing, or through both together, has particular, very practical, aims and objectives. I hope to show in the course of this and subsequent articles, that because Focusing in particular, and ‘self-discovery’ practice in general, leads us to give importance to cultivating the brahmavihāras, it is also a profoundly ethical practice. It is a practice that, because it starts by building our familiarity with the brahmavihāra qualities of the ‘clear space’ and Presence, serves inherently to cultivate an ethical sensibility. Not only is the practice wise and compassionate, but also, inherently, it is deeply ethical – and like all true meditation practices, it facilitates the release of the obscuring kleshas that give the egoic mind its energetic and emotional momentum, and apparent substance.
It is of great importance, in my view, that we keep in mind this association between ‘self-discovery’ and ethics. I have come across rather odd understandings of Vajrayāna, where students (and teachers) get it into their heads that Vajrayāna is a perspective on practice where ordinary ethical considerations do not apply, or that ordinary human physical and psychological limitations do not apply. This is a very unfortunate and inaccurate view. For me, the ‘self-enquiry’, or ‘self-discovery’, path that I have been simply calling, for brevity, Vajrayāna, as just the logical next step after we have entered into Other Power (‘self-surrender’) practice.
In the Other Power frame of reference for practice we recognise the power of the dharmic reality – a reality that is felt to be beyond us and outside of us. We recognise its power to support us in our spiritual transformation, and therefore surrender to that reality in our meditation practice. In the Vajrayāna, or ‘self-discovery’, stage we take this attitude of meditative receptivity a step further – we entertain the possibility that the dharmic reality is not separate from us; that all existence is permeated by the dharmic reality; that it is within us but obscured by the kleshas, and by our tendency to fall into egoic identification. So in the ‘self-discovery’ perspective we take the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya seriously – as descriptions of the dharmic reality, and of who we are ultimately are.
The Five Skandhas and Five Wisdoms
Returning now to the ‘mandala wisdom’ of Tibetan Buddhism, those who are familiar with the way Buddhist philosophy and practice developed as it evolved into its Mahayāna and Vajrayāna phases, will recognise Buddhism’s five-fold model of the mind and of the dharmic reality – the teaching of the Five Wisdoms that emerged and flourished in those centuries. Indeed, the Dharmadhātu Mandala, the mandala of the ten Buddhas that we find in the Bardo Thodol texts, is often simply called the Five Wisdoms mandala. Clearly, the skandhas and the Wisdoms are inseparable expressions, at different levels of reality, of the same archetypal principle, since recognition of the ’emptiness’ of each of the five skandhas brings with it the revelation of the corresponding dimension of Wisdom.
Unfortunately however, students of Buddhism tend to study the three yānas (Hinayāna, Mahayāna, and Vajrayāna) in isolation, so they usually miss the fundamental connections between the skandhas, the brahmavihāras and the Wisdoms. They also miss another key set of correspondences – that between the five skandhas and the five categories of obscuring kleshas that I have mentioned above. To the extent that we identify with the skandhas and fail to recognise them as ’empty’, the egoic mind accumulates the corresponding kleshas. Indeed, without the dis-identification of deep Mindfulness practice (such as may also be cultivated through Focusing), the kleshas accumulate an energetic momentum that is hard to reverse – even when there is heroic and self-sacrificing moral idealism and an earnest commitment to ethics practice and compassionate activity in the spirit of the bodhisattva ideal.
It is perhaps understandable that the Buddhist tradition should fail to acknowledge the associations between the four brahmavihāras and the various sets of five Dharmic principles that we are presented with in the Bardo Thodol – the link between the set of four brahmavihāras, and the sets of five, is not at first apparent. There is always however, an implied fifth element in the brahmavihāras model, which is Consciousness – the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha. The brahmavihāras are, after all, not just profound ethical and relational principles that we can undertake to cultivate in a spirit of moral idealism. Ultimately we need to understand them as the inherently ethical and relational ‘attitudes’ of Consciousness that are inherently present in the collective depths of the mind.
Drawing on the language of Neoplatonism, the brahmavihāras that we experience in meditation and in our personal lives, as aspects of Positive Emotion, are emanations on the surface or nirmānakāya level of mind, of archetypal principles that a present at the dharmic level (the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya levels) – beyond the egoic mind, but nevertheless essential to who we are as human beings. These depths are revealed through deep Mindfulness practice, which in my view, inherently involves recognising that Consciousness is an expression of the dharmic level of the mind. By repeatedly ‘resting as’ the ‘clear space’ of Consciousness, we release the kleshas that are obscuring Presence, and deepen our experience of Mindfulness. I shall be returning to this theme later.
In the course of these articles, I shall be talking about the skandhas, kleshas, Realms, brahmavihāras, Wisdoms, and male and female archetypal Buddhas. I shall be addressing them as sets – something that is, unfortunately, fairly unusual. We need to address them together in this way because each group needs to be understood as constellation of Dharmic principles that share an archetypal root or theme. It is only be contemplating them together that we can recognise the logic of the correspondences between them. When we see the archetypal theme that runs through each of the five groups – finding a very different expression in each one – all of them are revealed in a new way, and the ten archetypal Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala also come to life for us. As a Buddhist student of Gendlin’s Focusing, I find the brahmavihāras and the kleshas to be crucial pieces of the spiritual development puzzle because they are both bodily-felt – because they both address the somatic, or body-mind nature of the process.
The correspondences between these sets of Dharmic principles are complex, because they allow us to understand how the same cognitive-perceptual function – the same skandha – can manifest either in a negative and dysfunctional way in the egoic mind, or in a positive and even sublime way (i.e. as one of the five Wisdoms), once our egoic identification with them is released. As a way of talking about the fact of the archetypal connection between the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ expressions, we can, using a term from Neoplatonism, say that the members of each set of Dharmic principles, while they appear very different (or even as opposites) are in fact ‘hermetically’ related. Below in this article, I shall endeavour to provide an introductory outline to these five sets of hermetically connected principles, taking the opportunity as we go, to highlight the ways in which Gendlin’s Focusing practice can serve to bring us to a discovery of the same five facets of wisdom that we find presented in Vajrayāna Buddhism.
I reference this notion of hermetic relationship, because it is very important to understand that our state of unconscious egoic identification with the skandhas and kleshas, on one side; and the corresponding states of sublime meditative receptivity that we call the brahmavihāras, on the other, are not opposites as we conventionally understand that idea. Indeed it is this understandable, but rather narrow conceptualisation that sees the skandhas (and kleshas) as opposites, or antidotes, to their corresponding brahmavihāras, that has lead to various different sets of correspondences being put forward.
A common confusion has arisen in regard to the way the brahmavihāras are placed within the set of mandala correspondences – indeed there appear to be at least three completely different sets of correspondences, and at least two completely different ways of approaching the whole issue. A common approach in the earliest periods of Buddhist history was to identify the brahmavihāras that best function as antidotes – opposites that serve to ‘overcome’ the predominant kleshas in each of the traditional Realms of the Buddhist ‘Six Realms’ cosmology. The bhāvachakra, or ‘Wheel of Life’, images that have come down to us from those early centuries depict a mythic Buddha figure in each of the Realms, each Buddha holding a symbolic object to indicate the antidote to the klesha that is the characteristic egoic trait of that particular Realm.
The fact that the antidotes, or opposites, symbolised in the ‘Wheel of Life’ imagery are often brahmavihāras has led to an approach to the brahmavihāra correspondences that is guided by this idea of identifying brahmavihāras that might function as antidotes, or opposites, to their associated skandhas and kleshas. My own approach is different, and follows the ‘hermetic’ or archetypal approach that we find in Vajrayāna Buddhism. I shall explain my approach further below, but essentially it is one in which the brahmavihāras are presented, not as opposites, but as the components of Positive Emotion that correspond to the Wisdoms. There are only four of these associations – those that are associated with the four cardinal points, or quadrants, of the mandala. The vijnāna skandha (Consciousness) in the centre of the mandala, has no associated brahmavihāra – rather it is intimately related to all of the brahmavihāras. We may even say that the brahmavihāras are the attitudes of Consciousness – the attitudes of truly Mindful Presence.
Because so much of the vast literature of early Buddhist history was erased by the burning of the Buddhist libraries by the Muslim invaders, it is not clear at what point the skandhas were specifically associated with five of the six Realms, but this is believed to have been an early development. The idea that there are five Wisdoms, being five Enlightened modes of cognition and perception, that arise when the five skandhas are ‘seen through’ and recognised as ’empty’, was an important development in the Mahayāna period – leading naturally to a mandala of, first five archetypal Buddhas, and then five ‘Buddha couples’, as embodiments of those five Wisdoms.
In later texts like the Bardo Thodol of Tibetan Buddhism, the correspondences between the skandhas, kleshas and Realms is well established – as is the idea that the five Wisdoms are inherent in the mind, and are naturally revealed as the practitioner releases his identification with the five skandhas, and recognises them as ’empty’. The associated idea of approaching the brahmavihāras as aspects of the Wisdoms, and as the mahabrahmavihāras (i.e. aspects of the dharmic reality, inherent in the depths of the mind), takes us to a somewhat different, and I would say deeper, place – as I shall explain below.
The approach that I have been taking to the associations between the skandhas and kleshas, on one side, and the corresponding brahmavihāras and Wisdoms, on the other, is one found in the Vajrayāna Buddhism of Tibet. This approach, or perspective, has usefully been distinguished from the earlier stages of the Buddhist tradition’s developmental process, by identifying it a ‘self-discovery’ perspective. This approach does not deny the value of the previous ‘self-development’ (Hinayāna) and ‘self-surrender’ (Mahayāna) stages – indeed ‘self-discovery’ (Vajrayāna) should be regarded as a three-fold view that is nested within those two previous perspectives. I shall be making use of this three-fold framing of Buddhist philosophy a number of times in this series of articles. It is a way of resolving the apparent differences, and even incongruities, that we see in Buddhist philosophy, and is known by many Buddhists as the ‘Three Myths’ model – after a 2004 paper by Dharmachari Subhuti, in which this terminology was introduced.
I am, in this article, giving emphasis to this ‘self-discovery’ approach, since there are so many elements in Gendlin’s Focusing model that appear to affirm it and correspond to it. Before moving on to a more detailed framing of my ‘self-discovery’ approach to the connection between the brahmavihāras and skandhas in my next article – an approach in which the brahmavihāras and skandhas (and Wisdoms) are archetypally, or ‘hermetically’, linked, I would like to briefly outline how the ‘self-development’ approach works in this context. I need to explain why the logic of a ‘self-development’ approach to practice brings us to a different set of correspondences from the ‘self-discovery’ approach.
If Buddhist students are thinking within the ‘self-development’ perspective, then they naturally think in terms of identifying antidotes and opposites to the skandhas and kleshas, rather than in terms of turning inwards towards an inherently present positive hermetic correspondence, on the sambhogakāya level of mind, of the egoic dysfunction that is present on the nirmānakāya level.
So, asking ourselves, within the ‘self-development’ perspective, what the ‘opposite’, or ‘antidote’ of the Hell Realm klesha of dvesha (‘hatred’), might be, we may, quite naturally and understandably, choose mettā/maitri (Loving Kindness). Love is after all, conventionally understood to be the opposite of, or antidote to, hatred. This is not the only positive opposite by which ‘hatred’ is overcome however. Another strand within the Buddhist tradition identifies the key antidote to the Hell Realms as karunā, or Compassion – a quality symbolised in the bhavachakra, or ‘Wheel of Life’ imagery, by a fire, or a water vessel.
Those in whom the rūpa skandha creates enemy-images and dehumanising narratives, and therefore generates dvesha, or hatred, might indeed do well to cultivate mettā/maitri. Within the ‘self-discovery’ perspective however, the positive, or sambhogakāya reflection of that judgmental mode of cognition that Buddhist tradition calls the rūpa skandha, is the Mirror-like Wisdom, which is that way of being which recognises, and rests ‘as’, the primordial purity and stillness of the ultimate reality. The corresponding brahmavihāra to this Mirror-Like Wisdom – the meditative path by which the Mirror-Like Wisdom is realised, is upekshā (Equanimity) – as I shall be explaining further below.
The male Buddha figure who traditionally represents the Mirror-Like Wisdom is the imperturbable and pure white figure of Vajrasattva-Akshobya – a figure who more powerfully embodies the receptive, ‘internal’, or ‘self-regarding’ aspect of the brahmavihāra of Equanimity (upekshā) than any other figure in the mandala. In its earliest form the eastern quadrant of the mandala was dark blue – the colour of the Buddha Akshobya. In more recent centuries, the colour of the eastern quadrant is more often white – the colour of Vajrasattva – because of the great importance given to this bodhisattva form of Akshobya, who is white in colour.
A second example of the application of the ‘self-development’ approach, and of our natural tendency to think in terms of opposites and antidotes, rather than in terms of ‘hermetic’ or archetypal relationships, is seen in the way the brahmavihāra of muditā (Appreciative Joy) is frequently seen as the brahmavihāra that ‘overcomes’ the klesha of irshya (envy), which is generated by the volitional samskāras skandha, and finds expression in the archetypal Asura Realms (which I will outline in more detail below, and in my next article). Elsewhere within the early Buddhist tradition the suggested key antidote to the Asura Realms is patience – a quality symbolised by a sword, or a vajra.
I am not wanting to fundamentally negate the ‘self-development’ strategies. I use them myself, and find them perfectly valid within a more external and relational context. When I have to work with people whose temperament expresses the traits of the asura archetype, I instinctively know to diffuse the conflictual tendency in the interaction by finding qualities of appreciation and patience in myself. The concern that is motivating me to offer different brahmavihāra correspondences, is regarding the inner dimension – the correct correspondences in the context of innerwork and meditation. While Appreciative Joy appears to offer a logical opposite, or antidote, to the klesha of irshya (the klesha of envy that characterises the Asura Realm), the approach of Tibetan Buddhism is the more psychologically sophisticated one that we call ‘self-discovery’. While the choice of Appreciative Joy has a logic within the ‘self-development’ approach and as antidote to envy (irshya), it does not work as way of helping us to familiarise ourselves with the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, and with the particular aspects of Enlightenment that are personified by green Buddhas of the northern quadrant – Amoghasiddhi and Green Tara.
Since the samskaras skandha denotes the volitional component of mind – and also points to the mind’s conscious or unconscious intuitive recognition of intangible volitional processes and dynamics – the corresponding Wisdom is the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, which is a mode of intuitive perception and of skilful psychological responsiveness that quite specifically goes beyond the cultivation of opposites and antidotes, and instead seeks a path of reconciliation in which opposition is avoided. The corresponding brahmavihāra – the meditative path by which we cultivate the All-Accomplishing Wisdom – is karunā (Compassion), which is the volitional component within the brahmavihāras model of Positive Emotion. While that in us that is psychologically asura-like does indeed need to learn the value of Appreciative Joy (muditā), the character of the positive emotion that naturally unfolds when that tendency is seen through, is Compassion (karunā).
So what I am pointing out here, is that just as the four skandhas of the quadrants of the mandala can usefully be regarded as sensory (vedanā), evaluative (samjñā), intuitive-volitional (samskāras), and describing-objectifying (rūpa) components of the mind; so too can the four corresponding brahmavihāras be regarded as the sensory (muditā – Appreciative Joy), evaluative (mettā/maitri – Loving Kindness), intuitive-volitional (karunā – Compassion), and describing-objectifying (upekshā – Equanimity) aspects of Positive Emotion. Both the ‘form-creating’ skandha of rūpa that objectifies through description and conceptualisation, and the associated brahmavihāra of Equanimity (upekshā) are easily misunderstood and neglected, but both play a key role.
As the mind’s mechanism of objectification, concretisation, and reification, the rūpa skandha is foundational to the egoic mind’s habitual denial of reality. In a similar but opposite way, the brahmavihāra of upekshā (Equanimity) provides a foundation of mental stillness and non-reactivity within the four brahmavihāra components of Positive Emotion. By bringing awareness to, and breaking our identification with, the mind’s mental descriptions and reifications, Equanimity can be characterised as opening the door to the world of Positive Emotion that is the brahmavihāras.
The female Buddha figure who represents the All-Accomplishing Wisdom is Green Tara – an extremely important and very popular figure in the Tibetan pantheon. She is believed to embody an intuition and empathy so infinitely powerful and expansive that it allows her to release beings from their unconsciousness across the universe just by the power of her meditation. While she extends herself intuitively and imaginatively through the mental activity of empathy, she is also depicted as concretely and externally active – as ‘stepping down’ into the strife of samsāra out of Compassion. While her Wisdom is that intuitive intelligence that is called the All-Accomplishing Wisdom – the Wisdom that can challenge and unravel the envious desire and power-drive of the asura mentality.
So Green Tara’s primary quality is Compassion. It is probably fair to say that all Buddhas embody Compassion in some way. Green Tara however, is regarded as a representation of the very essence of the active and ‘other-regarding’ aspect of karunā (Compassion). To understand her connection with the asuras, we need to think of empathy as a form of intuition that overcomes the self-other dichotomy and therefore leads directly to a the volitional response of Compassion. Intuition is also a characteristic of the asuras, but theirs is a self-serving intuition – an intuition that is without empathy, and that leads to violence and intimidation and all manner of self-serving manipulations.
A third example of the application of an opposition, or antidote, approach (i.e. ‘self-development’) to the correspondences between the skandhas, kleshas and Realms and the brahmavihāras, is the association that is made between the great red Buddha Amitabha and karunā (Compassion). While Amitabha and Pandaravarsini, the male and female Buddhas of the red, western quadrant of the mandala, are clearly abundantly compassionate, karunā does not, in my view, show us their quintessential characteristics as well as does mettā/maitri (Loving Kindness). The Realm associated with the emotional and evaluative samjñā skandha is the Preta Realm – a domain characterised by the klesha of rāga, or craving, that generated by the samjñā skandha. This is another instance of a choice of correspondence that is based on our assessment of what brahmavihāra quality that the pretas might need, rather than the distinctive brahmavihāra quality that is archetypally or hermetically associated with the Discriminating Wisdom and embodied in the figures of Amitabha and Pandaravarsini.
To understand why the Vajrayāna tradition would associate mettā/maitri with the Discriminating Wisdom, we need to understand how the evaluative function of mind that we call the samjñā skandha, is transformed when we release our identification with it. Through the detailed and sustained practice of Mindfulness, such as we may gain through the practice of Gendlin’s Focusing, we step out of that egoic identification into an entirely different way of being, that is nevertheless archetypally related. In place of the rāga (craving) that is generated by our identification with the samjñā skandha – a state in which all satisfaction is felt to be outside of us, we find ourselves resting ‘in’ and ‘as’ the uncaused happiness that arises from the unconditional love that Buddhist tradition calls mettā/maitri. Our perception of the world from this place of mettā/maitri (Loving Kindness) is completely transformed. Mettā/maitri brings not just a sense of emotional nourishment and emotional completeness, but of a capacity for discernment through feeling – a new sense of fine judgement in the emotional and relational realm. It is this exquisite discernment based on the unconditional love of mettā/maitri that Buddhist tradition came to call the Discriminating Wisdom.
It is deeply instructive to recognise how the lens of the more conventional ‘self-development’ view takes us to different Dharmic understandings of these fundamental questions than does the ‘self-discovery’ approach. Another quality of Enlightenment that we find conventionally associated with the Preta Realm in the Buddhist ‘Wheel of Life’ is generosity. Once again, this has a certain logic to it within the ‘self-development’ frame. A person who habitually uses the evaluative samjñā skandha in a way that is self-referencing while also being undiscriminating and unconscious – always seeking a personal feel-good experience to comfort themselves – may indeed benefit from cultivating a more generous approach to life, in which they are truly interested in the wellbeing of others.
In the later historical development and Dharmic clarifications that we find set out in the Bardo Thodol texts attributed to Padmasambhava, we find Generosity associated with the figure of Ratnasambhava, and presented, along with Appreciative Joy (muditā), as one the key healing principles for the Human Realm. The gift that Ratnasambhava instinctively gives is not just the gift of the Dharma – it is the gift of a Dharmic culture informed by muditā (Appreciative Joy). So it is the gift of the Dharma, richly, beautifully and artfully expressed in a variety of concrete cultural forms. The culture of Buddhism, the culture of the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha), is inherently a culture of Appreciative Joy (muditā) – a celebration of the boundless spiritual potentially that all human beings are blessed with, and a celebration of the great contributions and achievements of Dharma practitioners past and present.
So Generosity and Appreciative Joy both give concrete and sensory expression to mettā/maitri. In my experience, the ultimate healing of that aspect of our karma that we might associate with the Preta Realm, comes through an Other Power relationship with the mettā/maitri that is inherent in the dharmic reality. The sense of faith and emotional stability that we gain when we gain real confidence in benevolent and beneficial nature of the dharmic reality is quite remarkable. This quality of confident receptive relationship to mettā/maitri is personified in Tibetan Vajrayāna tradition by the beautiful blissful figure of the female Buddha Pandaravarsini. On a basic level we can take her as an embodiment of self-mettā, but at a deeper level she represents that aspect of the Discriminating Wisdom that is the Uncaused Happiness of those who rest in wide-open receptivity to the Loving Kindness of the dharmic reality, and know that they are loved.
There is a fourth brahmavihāra association that we commonly find – one that once again gives expression to a different logic, though also not a hermetic one. This is the association of the sensing and sensory vedanā skandha (and the klesha of māna, and Human Realm, and of the yellow, southern-quadrant Buddhas, Ratnasambhava and Māmaki) with the brahmavihāra of Equanimity. This association arises, it would seem, because the particular reactivity that characterises the Human Realm is felt by some to need the quality of upekshā (Equanimity). This brahmavihāra does not appear to be our best fit for the Human Realm however. This association appears to have been made because the Wisdom associated with this yellow southern quadrant of the mandala is the Equalising Wisdom.
While the words Equanimity and Equalising have a superficial verbal similarity in the English language, I do not believe that this, on its own, provides sufficient evidence of the deeper connection that we are looking for if we are seeking to practise in the spirit of the ‘self-discovery’ perspective of the Vajrayāna. Practising the brahmavihāra of Equanimity will not necessarily help us to open to the Equalising Wisdom in particular. The Equalising Wisdom is the recognition that all beings rest equally and evenly in the dharmic reality. While some of us are more conscious of this blessing than others, and we may construct a hierarchy of those who have realised their potentiality more fully and those who have not, the implication of the Equalising Wisdom is that, whatever our differing degrees of realisation, and capability, and value, on the outside, or in the world’s terms; on the inside, the blessings of the dharmic reality are equally available to us, if we can only remove the obscuring kleshas.
There is a clear connection between the Equalising Wisdom and muditā (Appreciative Joy). While muditā is absolutely foundational to our relationships in the external world, it plays a different, and perhaps even more foundational role in our inner life – in our relationship with the dharmic reality. It was the group of insights that came to be called the Equalising Wisdom, that came together with other strands in Buddhist thought to give us the Tathāgatagarbha teaching – the Buddhist conceptualisation that gets translated into English as ‘Buddha Nature’. Tathāgata was one of the epithets of the Buddha in the Pali Canon – a word that means ‘thus-gone’ (tathā, thus; gata, gone). The word garbha means womb, or embryo, or essence, so Tathāgatagarbha is a word with associations of vulnerability and fragility, and of maternal care and nurture, which came to refer the innate potentiality for Enlightenment in all beings including the un-Enlightened. This notion of the tathāgatagarbha became a key conceptualisation in Vajrayāna Buddhism.
When, as we transition into an Other Power (‘self-surrender’) approach to practice, and our meditation takes on a more devotional-receptive character, the receptive aspect of muditā (Appreciative Joy) plays a very significant part in that new perspective. And when we transition again into the three-fold, or ‘self-discovery’, perspective of the Vajrayāna, we open even more fully to the somatic resonance within the body, of the muditā that exists on the sambhogakāya level of mind – experiencing ourselves as a channel for this aspect of dharmic reality.
So the trikāya doctrine is another expression of the same sort of conceptualisation as we find in the tathāgatagarbha doctrine. By acknowledging the reality of the sambhogakāya, we are essentially entertaining the possibility that there are archetypal dimensions of Enlightenment in the depth of the mind that we can experience as visions and imagery, or as somatic states. Similarly, the dharmakāya connotes a level of the mind that is entirely non-personal and, in a manner of speaking already ‘gone’, free, liberated. In reality, we cannot even say that this dharmakāya level of the mind is ‘liberated’ – it just never was not-liberated. In contemporary Tibetan Buddhism, the dharmakāya is usually personified by Vajrasattva. It is primordially pure, and while it blesses us, it is unaffected by anything we do. It is entirely ’empty’, but can be experienced – as Longchenpa’s ‘basic space of timeless awareness’, and as Gendlin’s ‘clear space’.
Gendlin’s Focusing teaches us to see the unfoldment that we call spiritual development in a very particular and very refined way that corresponds to the ‘self-discovery’ view. This three-fold framing of the Dharma challenges us to go beyond those forms of Dharmic conceptualisation that confine us to thinking in terms of finding opposites to our ‘negative mental states’. Indeed it challenges even the notion of ‘negative mental states’ – asserting that what we might call ‘negative mental states’ are, in actuality, never separate from the all-pervading dharmic reality. A ‘negative mental state’ when framed within the ‘self-discovery’ view, is just mental state that is out of alignment with our Buddha Nature – out of alignment with our innate potentiality and deeper true nature on the level of the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya.
So the experience of ‘negative mental states’ is the experience of being tragically lost in the relatively superficial conditions of the egoic mind – alienated from the dharmic dimension of mind; and from the sources of Integration and Positive Emotion, which are the brahmavihāras and Wisdoms. In its model of how personality change happens, Focusing would frame our task as simply one of bringing the various energetic potentials that we carry within, into Consciousness, and resolving the conflicts between them. The ‘negative mental states’, in this view, are just constellations of skandhas. By nature ’empty’, they dissolve when they are brought into the light of Consciousness.
I find myself needing to highlight the stark difference between the predominant ‘self-development’ model, on one side, and the more poorly understood ‘self-discovery model, on the other. To distinguishing these two conceptualisations and highlight the ‘self-development’ approach, we need to prevent the introduction of ‘self-development’ thinking into the domain of ‘self-discovery’. Since the ‘mandala wisdom’ is really a ‘hermetic’ framework for understanding the nature of mind, the approach by which we identify the brahmavihāras that correspond to the skandhas, kleshas and Realms, Wisdoms and Buddhas in the Bardo Thodol, really must be an archetypal one. We need an approach that is in the spirit of the Vajrayāna, or ‘self-discovery’ perspective, and seeks to find a ‘fit’ between the principles that really works, not just intellectually, but experientially – as felt-experience within the field of the body. This ‘spirit of the Vajrayāna’ that I am speaking of here, is the approach that sees these ‘mandala wisdom’ relationships in terms of the common archetypal, or cognitive-perceptual theme within each quadrant of the mandala.
The correspondence that best provides an experiential doorway into the Equalising Wisdom and into the spiritual character of Ratnasambhava and Māmaki, is muditā (Appreciative Joy). We need to remember that identification with the sensing and sensory vedanā skandha serves, within the dynamic structure of the egoic body-mind, to strongly confirm our sense of separateness from our fellow human beings – we feel physically separate even though we are, at the level of the dharmakāya, not separate at all. For me, it is this notion of ‘separateness’, that best expresses the klesha of māna, which characterises the Human Realm, and gets translated as ‘pride’.
What characterises the Human Realm, when we see it from a spiritual perspective, is the preoccupation with personal identity, personal possessions, personal difference, personal skill and knowledge, and personal achievement. This is the ‘pride’ of māna – an affirmation of separateness and difference that find expression in both our individual psychology and our group processes in society. In reality, this physical world of separation is pervaded equally and evenly by the dharmic reality, and the Equalising Wisdom is that archetypal healing principle within the sambhogakāya that transforms all this self-obsession into a sense of connection, solidarity, commonality, and a sense of shared humanity – a sense of wonder at human achievement, and at the beauty of this manifest world. Of the four brahmavihāras, the one that naturally corresponds to the Equalising Wisdom is muditā (Appreciative Joy), because it best expresses the sense of abundance and blessedness that naturally arises when we learn to rest out of identification with māna (pride), and set our experience of the sensory (vedanā) in a higher context.
William Parker 2025
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