Buddhism

The Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo

I created this page in connection with the series of articles which I have called ‘The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala’, which can be accessed via the ’10 Buddhas’ menu above. The first article in the series can be accessed here, and summaries of the articles can be accessed here.

Below are the five central verses from the ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’. I regard these five verses as a presentation of the essential core of the profound collection of Padmasambhava’s teachings on the Dharmadhātu mandala, which have come down to us in a collection of texts called the Bardo Thodol, or bar do thos grol, or Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State (often referred to in the English speaking world as the ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’). These verses introduce us to the ten archetypal Buddhas of the mandala – five female and five male – and these are the subject of the ’10 Buddhas’ series. The words that I have highlighted in bold are the five kleshas – the five groups of bodily-felt egoic patterns, which are usually called ‘defilements’, or ‘obscurations’ – in the sense that they defile or obscure our true nature.

I have outlined the kleshas in many of my earlier articles, and in some detail in the ’10 Buddhas’ series. I believe that they are much more important than is commonly acknowledged. The more keen our familiarity is with these energies, the more able we are to deliver ourselves ‘from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’. The ‘Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’ refers to the dangerous journey through samsara that we are all undertaking – where, paradoxically, there is, in every moment, both the danger of deepening our bondage to our conditioning, or of liberation through insight.

Even when, though basic self-awareness and self-restraint, we no longer engage in grossly unethical acts of body, or speech – we will nevertheless, if we are conscious enough, be aware of the presence of these five kleshas, and of their incongruous and obscuring energetic momentum in the somatic fields of the body-mind. They give energetic substance to the illusion of separate self-hood, so we need to recognise them, and release them in a systematic way. In the text below, Padmasambhava shows us ten archetypal Buddhas, and ten corresponding Dharmic principles, which can do just that. My ’10 Buddhas’ series takes up Padmasambhava’s challenge and takes the reader on a mandala journey of meditative self-enquiry, with these ten Buddhas as our guides.

When, through spiritual ignorance, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of the Dharmadhātu Wisdom,
may Blessed Vairocana go before me,
and Ākāshadhāteshvari / White Tara behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.

When, through hatred, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of the Mirror-like Wisdom,
may Blessed Vajrasattva-Akshobhya go before me,
and Buddhalocana behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.

When, through pride, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of the Wisdom of Equality,
may Blessed Ratnasambhava go before me,
and Mamaki behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.

When, through craving, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of Discriminating Wisdom,
may Blessed Amitabha go before me,
and Pandaravarsini behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.

When, through envy, I wander in samsara,
on the luminous light-path of All-Accomplishing Wisdom,
may Blessed Amoghasiddhi go before me,
and Samaya-Tara behind me;
help me to cross the bardo’s dangerous pathway
and bring me to the perfect buddha state.

February 15, 2020

Overview Part 2 – Resting as Consciousness

This is the second of two articles that were written with the intention of providing an overview of the approach to meditation and self-enquiry, that I took in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. To access the first article, please click here.

I believe that the true practice of meditation, such as was taught by the Buddha, must be rooted in his psychology of non-dual wisdom. Hence my characterisation of meditation as resting as Consciousness. I have used these words frequently, to point to a core idea that is easy to miss. I have tried to explain them several times, but will take the time here to outline this principle once again. In the terms of the Buddhist ‘Five Skandhas‘ self-enquiry framework, what I am referring to as Consciousness (i.e. capitalised), is the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha – the non-personal, non-locatable, and indeed Transcendental principle that is at the centre of mandala of the five skandhas.

A Deeper Conceptual Framework for Mindfulness Practice

While the adoption of this sort of approach at the outset, as our entry point into meditation practice, is unfortunately currently relatively unusual, it is by no means without precedent in Buddhist tradition. Indeed it is, in my view, the approach that is now being adopted by all the best meditation teachers around the world. The modern audience of spiritual students is sophisticated, and is exposed, via the internet, to high-level non-duality teachings that only fifty years ago, would only have been available to dedicated ‘seekers’ – usually through prolonged periods of meditation and study in the East. For example, the traditional Buddhist dzogchen and mahamudra teachings, which express this idea of resting as Consciousness, are now available on YouTube in most languages.

The spiritual practitioners of the modern West (and the westernised East), as it begins to face into the psychological implications of the way that Quantum Physics describes reality, are I believe, ready for these so called ‘advanced’ or ‘high-level’ teachings – perspectives on practice that were previously only available to the most experienced and the most committed. Indeed, the whole idea that these are ‘advanced’ ‘high-level’ teachings seems erroneous – since they are just more sophisticated of talking about Mindfulness practice. Non-duality is a confusing notion to grasp however. This is partly because non-duality runs so strongly counter to everything that we generally assume about the nature of ourselves and our world. But we should not expect Mindfulness, the practice that the Buddha called ‘the Way to the Immortal’ to be unchallenging to the basic assumptions of the egoic mind.

There is perhaps, a failure on the part of many meditation teachers to engage with, and to effectively explain, the huge practical benefits of a non-dual approach to human psychology. There is a tendency to put non-duality, and the Buddha’s challenging anattā (no-self) doctrine in the ‘too hard’ basket, and to make it irrelevant by thinking of it as a difficult-to-understand feature of the distant goal, rather than a foundation for meditation practice – a perspective to embraced at the earliest possible stage. The Buddha’s ‘Noble Eightfold Path’ is best conceived a path made up of two stages or processes – an initial process of Vision, followed by a longer process of Transformation. Hence, the first limb of the Noble Eightfold Path, Perfect Vision, is the process of Vision, and the remaining seven limbs constitute the process of Transformation. This framing of the Buddha’s model gives great importance to the attainment the clearest possible vision of the goal, as a precondition for our effective practice of the subsequent stages.

It is not surprising that Buddhist non-duality teachings have tended to find themselves in the ‘too hard’ basket. Ultimately non-duality cannot be completely ‘understood’ in the ordinary way by the thinking mind. We can ‘point’ to it with concepts and with symbols, but ultimately we need to seek the actual experience of it within ourselves in meditation or meditative enquiry. The mandala is particularly valuable as a guide for those engaged in such an experiential exploration of non-dual wisdom, because it shows the multiple dimensions of our meditative experiencing in a very systematic and comprehensive way, and gives a great many pointers to the ultimate nature of mind – several pointers from each of the four directions of the mandala.

Resting as Consciousness – a brief explanation

In my ‘Meditation Guidance’ articles, on this website, I have been using the notion of resting as Consciousness as a shorthand for an approach to meditation that can tentatively be termed a ‘non-dual’ approach, and once you have experienced resting as Consciousness you will recognise that this phrase is very descriptive. I hope you find the explanation that follows in the paragraphs below to be helpful elucidation of this illusive idea.

January 16, 2020

Overview Part 1 – A Mandala Framework for Meditation and Self-Enquiry

The approach to meditation that I have adopted in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series of articles, is unusual because it brings together elements from philosophical, spiritual, and psychological traditions that do not usually cross-pollinate, and tend not to understand each other. My aim in this article is to provide an overview of my approach, and to show why I have found the relatively unknown brahmavihāras (Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy) to be so essential to my framework for meditation and self-enquiry.

My Psychological and Spiritual Influences

Although I was born into a nominally Christian family and a nominally Christian culture, my first real spiritual education, during my twenties, was in the context of the Triratna Buddhist Community, a Western Buddhist tradition that integrates Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana elements, with a special emphasis on re-creating something of the spirit of the lost Indian Mahayana in a Western cultural context – especially the spirit of the Bodhisattva Ideal. During that time I have a number of very strong and deeply affecting visionary experiences during meditation sessions. I also, in my mid-twenties, made a deep study of Padmasambhava’s Bardo Thodol texts, the so-called ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ – symbolic teachings that I continued to reflect on over the decades since.

In my thirties I became a Quaker for 10 years, and subsequently studied Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’, Marshal Rosenberg’s ‘Nonviolent Communication’ (NVC), with a few different non-Buddhist non-duality teachers, before returning to Buddhism in my early sixties.

I worked in General Psychiatry settings for many years, where I became an Occupational Therapist and made use of the very Buddhist ‘open system’ model of the person, developed by the Occupational Therapist, Gary Kielhofner. During those years, when my profession required me to speak the language of medical model psychiatry and the various models in use by Clinical Psychologists, but I maintained a keen sense that human experience cannot fully explained by merely humanistic or brain-based models. For me a comprehensive psychology has to include a transcendental dimension, so it was perhaps inevitable that I would return to Padmasambhava’s Buddhist non-dual psychology of the mandala.

January 2, 2020