#BardoThodol

The Trikāya – The Sambhogakāya Mandala as the Middle Way

The Buddha’s Images of Samādhi – Part 1

The Trikāya – The Sambhogakāya Mandala as the Middle Way

The Buddha used the language of imagery to describe subtle experiences and philosophical principles – and the Buddhist tradition continued to do the same down through the centuries. The impulse for this series of shorter articles began with a wish in me to present the beautiful images that the Buddha used to describe the four rūpa dhyānas – the first four states of integration and meditative absorption that are familiar to experienced meditators. I would like to begin however with another image – the three-level model of reality that came to called the Trikāya Doctrine. This is an image that emerged in the Mahayāna period and finds expression in the ‘Refuge Tree’ visualisation practices of Vajrayāna Buddhism. This conceptual image provides us, I believe, with a contextual framework for our study of the Buddha’s Middle Way – a framework which reveals the profound depth and subtlety of his spiritual teachings.

I have illustrated this article with various artistic renderings of the Refuge Tree used in the Triratna Buddhist Community, and have made reference to Urgyen Sangharakshita, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, so need to make it clear, as I often do, that the reflections that I share in this article, while they are based on my Buddhist study in the context of the Triratna Buddhist Community, are my own – and should not be taken as representing any sort of consensus view within that organisation.

Trikāya means literally ‘three-body’, but it can be thought of a presenting the three layers, or levels, of the reality of Enlightenment – or three levels of the Buddha’s being. In the ‘Refuge Tree’ visualisation practices of Tibetan Buddhism, the trikāya is usually imagined as a great tree in which there are giant lotus flowers on three levels. At the topmost level there is always a single figure, usually either Vairocana or Vajrasattva, representing the dharmakāya – the transcendental absolute.

Below that, there is a layer of the tree’s structure that supports a horizontally arranged mandala of five archetypal Buddhas – blue, yellow, red, green and white – a simplified representation of the sambhogakāya mandala. A more complete description of the samboghakāya is the so called Dharmadhātu Mandala (whose name I shall explain below), that we find in the Bardo Thodol – the so-called ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’. So, a more complete depiction of the sambhogakāya mandala would show not just the five male Buddhas, but their female Buddha counterparts, and other figures from the five families of archetypal Buddhas.

Below that, there are usually several further branches which create several platforms of lotuses at right, left and centre. On this level of the tree are depicted all the historical figures in the tradition’s lineage – a representation of the nirmānakāya. Gautama Buddha is usually prominently placed in the centre, with the more contemporary teachers within the lineage arranged around and below him. Somewhat confusingly, we sometimes find mythic-historical figures also depicted on the nirmānakāya level of the tree – important mythic figures which either do not appear to fit into the samboghakāya mandala, or who, in the course of the mythological and imaginative flowering of Mahayana Buddhist tradition, have been assumed to have been historical figures, or even contemporaries of the Buddha.

The Buddha spoke of his path to Enlightenment as a Middle Way – a path in which the tension between the eternal and the mundane is held and reconciled. So, the Buddhist path is a third way – a philosophical path and a path of practice that avoids extremes, and in which this fundamental dichotomy is resolved. Over the centuries this idea of the Buddhist path as a Middle Way, and as a third way between these existential opposites, came to be expressed in this three-fold model of mind called the trikāya. By the 4^th century CE, the conceptualisation that we now know as the Trikāya Doctrine, had been established. The idea being expressed, was that it is helpful as a way of reconciling the eternal, unconditioned, and divine reality of the Buddha, with his physical, historical, and human reality, to acknowledge a third and intermediate, archetypal level of mind, and therefore to speak in terms of the ‘three bodies’ of the Buddha.

I am of the view, and this is a view shared by many students of Buddhism, that the Middle Way does not only refer to this one instance. I regard the Middle Way as a much bigger and more general conceptual construct and description of reality. Indeed, I regard the Middle Way as the Buddha’s method of enquiry – as his way of approaching, not just these existential fundamentals, but all the phenomena of the body-mind, and all social phenomena as well. At every level of reality, the Buddha applied an analysis that recognises opposites; that separates and reconciles; that creates integration; that is relational and harmonising – even to the point of entirely overcoming the cognitive-perceptual dichotomy of self and other. The Dharmadhātu Mandala from later Buddhist tradition, which has been the focus of much of my writing, is a Middle Way symbol – a representation of the sambhogakāya level within the trikāya, and a symbol of the ‘separation and reconciliation of opposites’ as a guiding principle within any spiritual psychology, and on the path to wisdom.

The use of the term Dharmadhātu Mandala for the sambhogakāya mandala is a little confusing. It was given this name because the centre of this five Buddha mandala of the sambhogakāya is occupied by the white Buddha, Vairocana, who personifies the Dharmadhātu Wisdom. One of the five Wisdoms that are personified by the five sambhogakāya Buddhas, the Dharmadhātu Wisdom is the wisdom that is most rooted in the dharmakāya level of mind, since it is associated with realisation of the ’emptiness’ of the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) – and therefore with the recognition that Consciousness is not personal. Hence Vairocana, the central samboghakāya Buddha, is sometimes seen at the top of Refuge Tree images, as a personification of the dharmakāya (as mentioned above) – although later Buddhist tradition most often places a form of Vajrasattva in this position.

The Middle Way also expresses an idea that, in the West, we often associate with the Taoist philosophy of ancient China. It suggests that progress is ultimately achieved not by going to extremes, but by the paradoxical approach of identifying the opposite of our current position – often an unconscious opposite – and fully acknowledging it. The greatest obstacle to integration, to real spiritual progress, and to the deep moral sensibility of Buddhist ethics, is the unconsciousness that arises from our unwillingness to acknowledge opposites in this way. The Middle Way principle on the other hand, is a subtle, wise and counter-intuitive one, that holds the tension between the opposites and therefore has great transformative power. If we can bring a balanced attention, recognising value in the opposite truth, or position, or direction of progress, and can learn to apply this principle in all aspects of our lives, we are led seemly inevitably to self-knowledge, psychological integration, skilled communication, and harmonious relationships. So, the Buddha’s Middle Way principle is woven through every aspect of his teaching – but is expressed particularly clearly in the development of the Trikāya Doctrine.

The impulse behind this development, was not only to provide a more complete description of who the Buddha was – it was also to provide a better understanding of ourselves; of what it is to be a human being. This is my motivation also in sharing these reflections. The Buddha’s Noble Eight-fold Path begins with Right Vision, or Right View. This launching off point for our journey of transformation, often takes the form of a deeply affecting insight or recognition, which propels us on our way. Right Vision also refers to our embrace of a description of reality that cuts through the bonds of the egoic self-illusion, and lifts us out of our mundane preoccupations and self-limiting conceptualisations. For me, the Trikāya Doctrine is just such an initiatory vision of reality. It contains a view of the person that frees us – that changes us forever when we grasp it.

August 10, 2023

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 8: Māmaki

This article is the eighth of fifteen articles inspired by the central five verses of Padmasambhava’s ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; you can read the previous article in the series here; and you can read the five verses here.

In these articles, I am choosing once again to use a partly non-traditional terminology for talking about the process of transformation that the Dharmadhātu Mandala invites us to engage in. Those who have read the previous articles on this series may recognise Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth as the stages of a system of meditative practice that was suggested by Sangharakshita in the 1970s. This being the case, I need to point out once again, that while I find that these four general stages fit my experience very well indeed, the detail of my own approach to these stages of meditation practice is not based on any detailed exposition by Sangharakshita, but on my own explorations.

I should also make it clear that what I am presenting here does not necessarily represent the consensus within the global Triratna Buddhist Community regarding Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’. My intention is only to share my own experience, and to share my own somewhat personal and perhaps idiosyncratic reflections. My hope is that others will find my exploration of that four-fold conceptual frame of reference to be meaningful and useful, and will be stimulated to engage in there own meditative enquiry into the profound spiritual psychology of the Dharmadhātu Mandala.

This article began as a longer piece of writing, which I subsequently decided to split into two sections – the first section being an introduction to this one, and in part a recapitulation of themes from earlier in this series. I gave the introductory section the title: Part 7: Somatic Body-Mind. If you have not already read it, you may want to consider reading the previous article first – by clicking here.

Vajrayāna Meditation – A Somatic Approach to Practice

The Buddhist tradition unfolded through three great historical and spiritual stages – usually called the Hinayāna, Mahayāna and Vajrayāna. While it can be shown that the Mahayāna, and Vajrayāna stages where implicit in the historical Buddha’s teaching (nominally Hinayāna), the Mahayāna and Vajrayāna teachings of later centuries gave even richer cultural expression to ways of thinking about realisation, about meditation, and about Mindfulness – ways which, while they were not completely new to the tradition, had not been fully expressed either in Gautama Buddha’s teaching, or in the earlier centuries. While the Mahayāna could be characterised as emphasising the seeming ‘otherness’ of the suprapersonal spiritual forces of Consciousness and the importance of an attitude of devotional receptivity towards those forces; the Vajrayāna goes a step further, by acknowledging that our personal experience of embodied Consciousness cannot ultimately be separated from the Transcendental – that all of human experience is pervaded by the transcendental dharmadhātu, or dharmic dimension, and that all beings, without exception, are subject to its evolutionary energy.

So the Vajrayana can be characterised as advocating, not just a fierce determination to become more conscious (the Hinayana emphasis); and not just a profound receptivity to benevolent spiritual forces that are beyond the egoic mind but inherent in Consciousness (the Mahayāna emphasis); but also a recognition that realisation is already present in the experience of embodied Consciousness – albeit very profoundly obscured by the egoic kleshas that have seized the body-mind. The Vajrayāna Buddhism of Tibet therefore sees psychological development as involving, not only a broadening and deepening of cognitive-perceptual awareness, and a differentiation of every human function and skill, but, through meditation practice, a direct transformation and profound expansion of the way we embody Consciousness somatically. So, the Vajrayāna sees meditation practice as a bodily, or somatic, process – one in which the accumulated kleshas are systematically driven out by our consistent return to states of alignment with our ultimate true nature.

Recognising Embodied Consciousness

This approach holds the possibility of rapidly accelerating our process of healing, personal development, and realisation. Those meditation and Mindfulness practitioners within the Buddhist tradition, who engage with this level of practice, achieve this acceleration of their process by resting ‘as’ Consciousness, and recognising that the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha of Consciousness, is itself a phenomenon of the transcendent dharmic order of conditionality within the universe. When we practice in the spirit of the Vajrayāna, we set out to systematically familiarise ourselves with all aspects of our experience of embodied Consciousness – using the mandala and its archetypal Buddhas as our guide. While I have no wish to denigrate other approaches as ‘lower’, or to identify my own approach as ‘higher’, it is this more comprehensive approach to Mindfulness and meditation, such as we find in the Tibetan Vajrayana, that I have been seeking to present in these Mandala of Love articles.

This integration of the ‘self-discovery’ perspective of the Vajrayāna, into the way we think about meditation practice, allows us to see both the earlier ‘self-development’ perspective of the Hinayāna, and the subsequent devotional-receptive ‘self-surrender’ perspective of the Mahayāna, much more clearly. As I have been explaining in previous articles, the meditation practices of Buddhist tradition can be thought of as methods for releasing the energetic residue of our egoic patterning – which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas – from the somatic body-mind. As this releasing takes place, we reveal the somatic energies of embodied Consciousness that were always present, but were previously obscured by the energetic residue that is accumulated through egoic identification – we reveal the dharmic order of conditionality to be the most fundamental and reliable aspect of mind, even as it is clearly non-personal.

While many Buddhist teachers claim that any act of intense concentration will help us develop Mindfulness and samādhi this is not necessarily true. The practice of samādhi, or meditation, is unfortunately usually understood merely as ‘meditative absorption’, or ‘concentration’. ‘Concentration’ is an especially limited and limiting conceptualisation. I find it much more helpful to think of samādhi as a process in which we endeavour to integrate and embody the suprapersonal forces of Consciousness. It is an active process, but that activity is the subtle one of an active and systematic ‘meditative receptivity’. So, Mindfulness is not a merely mental process, or a neurological ‘executive function’ skill of the brain, and it is certainly not about developing awareness in a single narrow areas – like body position in space; sensations; feeling states, etc. If we study the Buddha’s ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ with an imagination informed by the mandala wisdom of later Buddhist tradition, we recognise that Mindfulness requires the cultivation of a broad, multidimensional, and comprehensive embodiment of Consciousness, and requires our willingness to enter into the non-conceptual inner-world of somatic energy and of indefinable bodily-felt experience. All this is implied by the idea of Mindfulness of vedanā. We cannot engage with either Mindfulness practice, or samādhi practice, without entering this non-rational somatic realm of ‘internal’ vedanā , since it here, in our bodily-felt experience that the psychological opposites are most concretely confronted, held and reconciled, so that the invisible forces that have held us back can at last be released. Continue reading

July 21, 2023

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 3: The Body

This is Article No. 7 in the ‘5 Wisdoms’ series, and is Part 3 of the Rūpa Skandha mini series.

The aim of this Rūpa Skandha mini series is to outline what is meant by the ’emptiness’, or non-personal nature, of the ‘concretising’, form-creating’, ‘conceptualising’, or ‘conceptual form’, aspect of our cognitive-perceptual experiencing process, which Buddhist tradition calls the rūpa skandha – usually translated simply as ‘Form’. Together these articles make up a single exploration over several articles, which are best read in order. When all these articles are published, you will be able to click on the titles below to access the other parts.

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 1: Thinking and Wisdom

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 2: The Mirror-Like Wisdom

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 4: Mindfulness and Emptiness

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 5: Dharma and Truth

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 6: Consciousness and Qualia

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 7: The Heart Sutra

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 8: Perfect Speech

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 9: Equanimity and Being

Bringing Awareness ‘Into the Body’

I find the notion of Being, which I introduced in my last article (here) to be an extremely useful notion for making a deeper connection with the practice of Mindfulness of ‘the Form of the Body’ (kaya), which is the first of the ‘ Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ and corresponds with the rūpa skandha. In that article, I also pointed out the way the Buddha, not only took the existing ancient Indian ‘Five Skandhas’ teaching and gave his own interpretation of it – but adapted the same five-fold enquiry framework in the creation of his ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ model. The diagram below shows the correspondences between the skandhas and ‘Foundations’.

The implicit choice on the part of the Buddha, to address the rūpa skandha, or ‘Form’, or Thinking aspect of the mind, by the advice to bring awareness into the ‘Form of the Body’ (Kaya) is deeply significant, and has, for me, a wonderfully contemporary feel about it. Many modern psychotherapists, heirs to the various traditions within psychoanalysis and humanistic psychotherapy, would say the same. We could even think of this first ‘Foundation of Mindfulness’ as the first ‘exercise’ at the Buddha’s Mindfulness workshop. The first step in his ’embodied Consciousness’ training – in the Buddha’s systematic and comprehensive program of personal, transpersonal and spiritual healing – was to ‘bring awareness into the body’ by being aware of our body’s position in space as we go about our lives.

‘Bringing awareness into the body’ does not stop there however – with the rūpa skandha and the first ‘Foundation of Mindfulness’, which is kaya, or Mindfulness of ‘the Form of the Body’. It is important to understand, that what the Buddha is addressing in his ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ framework, is not a model in which the first ‘Foundation’, and first skandha, relates to the ‘body’ and all the rest are aspects of ‘mind’. On the contrary, all the Foundations, and all the skandhas, are aspects of an integrated ‘body-mind’ experience. Moreover, the whole four-fold process is one of deepening into the experience of embodied Consciousness, at successively deeper levels – starting with Mindfulness of ‘the Form of the Body’ (kaya), and then working round the mandala in a clockwise direction.

This notion of embodied Consciousness is fundamental to our understanding – there is no Mind / Body split in the Buddha’s model, and it would be a terrible mistake for us to introduce one. This is why it is so important that we do not mistake the rūpa skandha for ‘body’, and do not take Mindfulness of Kaya literally and narrowly as somehow denoting the totality of bodily experience. We would do well perhaps, to think of ‘the form of the body’ (rūpa / kaya), not as ‘the body’ but as our doorway into the body-mind – our doorway into that deeper and fuller experience of ourselves which can be spoken of in terms of ‘ the somatic’, or of ’embodiment’. The form of the body is the venue for, and the starting point for, our exploration – and while as the apparent container of our somatic process, it is, more importantly, itself contained by Consciousness.

June 6, 2020

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 2: The Mirror-Like Wisdom

This is Article No. 6 in the ‘5 Wisdoms’ series, and is Part 2 of the Rūpa Skandha mini series.

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 1: Thinking and Wisdom

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 2: The Mirror-Like Wisdom

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 3: The Body

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 4: Mindfulness and Emptiness

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 5: Dharma and Truth

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 6: Consciousness and Qualia

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 7: The Heart Sutra

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 8: Perfect Speech

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 9: Equanimity and Being

Objectivity, Clarity, Equanimity and Being

In the previous article in this series I began to explore what is meant in Buddhist tradition by a recognition of the ’emptiness’ of the rūpa skandha. This recognition is also called the Mirror-Like Wisdom, and in the mandalas of Indian Mahayana Buddhist tradition and early Tibetan Buddhist tradition, it is represented by the blue eastern quadrant. In later versions of the Tibetan meditation mandalas we see the blue eastern quadrant replaced by a white one – I shall be endeavouring to explain this in a later article in this series. In the Tibetan Bardo Thodol teachings, which were given to us by the great Padmasambhava, we are given the wonderful image of the ‘luminous light-path’ of the Mirror-Like Wisdom. This notion of a light-path can also be thought of a transformational journey, or a purification process, that we undergo as we move from our habitual and unconscious identification with the rūpa skandha to a state of mental objectivity, clarity, and equanimity.

I have suggested that rūpa, which is conventionally translated as ‘Form’, is perhaps best thought of in terms of its association with the Thinking function of the mind. ‘Form’ is that aspect of our experience that can be conceptually described by thoughts, and thoughts are always thought-forms – conceptual forms of various degrees of subtlety. So, rūpa is that aspect of the mind which creates conceptual forms, or works with conceptual forms, and manages our experience, and makes our decisions using conceptual forms.

The rūpa skandha is that aspect of mind that names and manipulates concepts using words, language and various forms of verbal communication – sometimes very crudely, sometimes with great sophistication, and often very dishonestly. Mirror-Like Wisdom, on the other hand, involves a different order of thinking – a different quality of intelligence, which arises directly from the experience of Being, and which creatively addresses the central questions of the nature of mind and its implications for human suffering, human development and human freedom.

We are also told, as I explained in the previous article, that our identification with the rūpa skandha, generates and sustains an energetic residue in the mind – the kleshas of dvesha, or hatred. Dvesha, or hatred, is the characteristic mental state of the Hell Realms, and it is our identification with the rūpa skandha that leads to the Hell Realms – and it is only by releasing that identification that we can finally and completely free ourselves from the mental tendency towards the particularly extreme forms of mental suffering that the Hell Realms represent. We need to cleanse ourselves of the judgemental, hostile and aggressive kleshas in the dvesha category, in order to return to rest in the experience of Being, and to the Mirror-Like Wisdom.

Vajrasattva-Akshobhya and Buddhalocanā

If we are lucky enough to have the Bardo Thodol teachings recited over our body in the hours and days after our death, we may hear our spirit being invited to recognise the emptiness of the rūpa skandha, so that we are released into the Mirrror-Like Wisdom. The ‘hearing in the bardo’ teachings coach us through the experience of being newly deceased but not yet re-born, systematically warning us about each of the Realms of Conditioned Existence, and reminding us that the intermediate state is precious opportunity for complete liberation. For example, we are told to be aware of the great danger that our accumulated kleshas of dvesha, or hatred, may cause us to be drawn to the dull blue light of the Hell Realms. At the same time we are urged to allow ourselves to be drawn to the beautiful blue-white light of the Buddha Vajrasattva-Akshobhya and his female Buddha partner Buddhalocanā (pronounced buddha-loach-anar). Buddhalocanā’s name means ‘She of the Buddha Eye’, or ‘Eye of Awakening’ – I shall be reflecting on this name later in this article.

May 21, 2020

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 1: Thinking and Wisdom

This is Article No. 5 in the ‘5 Wisdoms’ series, and is Part 1 of the Rūpa Skandha mini- series.

The aim of this Rūpa Skandha mini-series is to outline what is meant by the ’emptiness’, or non-personal nature, of the ‘concretising’, form-creating’, ‘conceptualising’, or ‘conceptual form’, aspect of our cognitive-perceptual experiencing process, which Buddhist tradition calls the rūpa skandha – usually translated simply as ‘Form’. Together these articles make up a single exploration over several articles, which are best read in order. When all these articles are published, you will be able to click on the titles below to access the other parts.

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 1: Thinking and Wisdom

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 2: The Mirror-Like Wisdom

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 3: The Body

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 4: Mindfulness and Emptiness

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 5: Dharma and Truth

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 6: Consciousness and Qualia

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 7: The Heart Sutra

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 8: Perfect Speech

The Rūpa Skandha – Part 9: Equanimity and Being

In my last article (here), I attempted a broad outline of the Buddha’s ‘Five Skandhas‘ teaching as I have come to understand it. I recommend that you read that article first if you have not done so already. Those who have been reading the previous articles in this series, know that I have been drawing on the larger body of Mahayana Buddhist mandala wisdom, of which the skandhas form the basis – and receiving quite a bit of assistance from Carl Jung. We are very blessed, as modern students of Buddhism, to be able to draw on the whole of the Buddhist tradition – its Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana stages – when we wish to be able to understand any particular aspect of it. This is particularly valuable in the case of the ‘Emptiness (Skt: shunyatā) of the Five Skandhas‘ teaching, because the Pali Canon does not give us enough of the detail of the Buddha’s analysis, and much of the meaning appears to have been lost. By drawing on the wisdom of the later enlightened teachers in the Buddhist tradition – especially Padmasambhava’s teachings in the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) – we are better able to understand the meaning of what the Buddha was saying.

In this enquiry we are also blessed to have the perspective of Carl Jung (1875 – 1961), who was a keen student of Buddhism, and whose scholarship and wisdom is unfortunately poorly understood, but was an extraordinary gift to humanity. Jung’s views are particularly valuable in this context, because he took the skandhas and incorporated them into the heart of his mandala model of the psyche, and into his very profound psychological typology framework.

The Rūpa Skandha and the Mirror-Like Wisdom

Traditionally the first skandha is rūpa, and it is usually translated as ‘Form’. When a Buddhist practitioner sits in meditation before a carved image of a Buddha, that image is often called a ‘rūpa’, yet many interpreters associate the word rūpa with ‘the body’, without adequately explaining that rūpa refers to the ‘form of the body’, and not to the sensory experience of the body, which is associated with the vedanā skandha. This error is in part because ‘the body’ is often conceptualised in a narrow way – one that fails to acknowledge the subtle, interior, and energetic dimensions of bodily felt experience that come under the broad heading of the somatic. I have explained this distinction in some detail in my previous article (here), and shall be explaining further below.

To avoid the multiple misunderstandings that arise when we confuse ‘Form’ with the physical, sensory body, I have been suggesting that ‘conceptual form’ is a better translation. By adding the word ‘conceptual’ we are making it more clear that rūpa includes the all-important thinking, judging, and conceptualising function of the mind. Padmasambhava’s teachings in the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), make it very clear that this was the Buddha’s intention, because they show us the rūpa skandha as an egoic reflection of that ultimate degree of mental clarity and objectivity that is described as the Mirror-Like Wisdom – the ‘Thinking’ aspect of the enlightened mind that emerges when all conceptualisations and points of view are recognised as ’empty’.

May 7, 2020

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 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

Empathy and Self-Empathy – Communication and Self-Enquiry

This is Post 31 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

In interpersonal relationships, when we are reflecting silently about someone, especially someone we are concerned about, it is natural to engage empathetically using the the four perceptual components, or functions of Consciousness, in the following way:

‘How do they understand this situation?’ (Thinking); ‘How do they feel about this?’ (Feeling); ‘What is the need in them that is causing them to feel that way?’ (Intuition / Volition); ‘What solution would concretely fulfil that need in a practical way? (Sensation).

So, the mandala of the functions of Consciousness is not only an analysis of the process of perception – it is a framework to guide empathetic connection, communication and action. Those on the path of the inner life can also ask the same questions inside. In the intra-personal relationship between Consciousness and our psychological parts that I have been exploring in the last two posts (here and here), we have been acknowledging the enormous value of connecting self-empathetically in this way. When we do this work of inner empathy, it is the same four perceptual components, or functions of Consciousness, that provide us with a guiding framework.

Self-Empathy with a Companion

In self-empathy the whole process place takes place inwardly and does not have to be externally verbalised. If we were however, to bear witness to our internal self-empathetic connection by describing our experience to a spiritual companion who is ‘holding space’ for us, there are several ways we might approach it – but usually it feels best to silently connect with the part and then speak for the part as we describe our internal dialogue to our friend.

We might for example ask ourselves inwardly: ‘How is this part of me thinking about this situation? What is its point of view?’ (Thinking); ‘What does this part of me feel about this? What is the emotional history of this part, that it should feel this way?’ (Feeling); ‘What is the need that leads this part of me to feel that way?’ (Intuition / Volition); ‘What solution or strategy would concretely fulfil this part’s needs / my needs in a practical way? (Sensation).

April 18, 2018

The Mandala as the Landscape of the Soul

This is Post 5 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

The Sanskrit word mandala is comprised of two words: manda, which means ‘essence’; and la, which means ‘container’. Hence we have the wider association of the word mandala with the idea of a ‘sacred space’, but also the deeper idea of mandalas as visual presentations of the archetypal essences that govern of our lives; of a collection of visual images depicting the essential qualities of the Divine – the essential qualities of Consciousness.

The Mandala as Sacred Container

Importantly, the mandala that I am presenting in this book blog series – the universal mandala that I like to call the Mandala of Love – does not exclude anything from the container. It contains not just the essence of the Divine, but also, since the Divine interpenetrates all things, it contains imagery of the ways in which the same archetypal principles can also manifest their mirror opposite – as egoic patterns, as psychological shadow, and even as the appearance of evil. The psychological possibilities, which might, in religious language, be called ‘Grace’ and the ‘fall from Grace’, are both ever-present – and if we better understand the nature of the choice between these two, a choice that we are making in every moment, the greater is our power to chose between them. Continue reading

May 4, 2017

Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Archetypes

This is Post 4 in the ‘Mandala of Love’ book blog series.

Carl Jung was a psychiatrist, and he started his professional life working in large psychiatric institutions. He was a student of the neurologist Sigmund Freud who was developing his psychoanalytic method of treatment at that time. Jung had a close friendship with Freud, but his voracious appetite for understanding lead him to his own distinctive style of psychological thinking, which is of great importance for the modern world. His Analytical Psychology was distinguished two powerful concepts: the archetypes; and the collective unconscious.

Because of his pragmatism and alignment with the emerging scientific materialism in medicine, Freud’s more reductive approach was subsequently more widely adopted during the 20th Century. Jung was altogether more ambitious. It is as if he was writing for the 21st Century – and specifically setting himself against both the scientific materialism and religious fundamentalism of the 20th Century. His perspective was, I believe, aiming to be much more comprehensive and – despite his careful efforts to avoid metaphysical speculation – more spiritual.

Jung the Scientist of the Inner World

While Jung was in some ways actually more rigorously scientific and forward looking than Freud, he was also looking back to the roots of psychology in the literature, mythology and psychological reflections of the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods. His archetypes can be thought of as the eternal principles at work in human psychology, and also as the collective psychological forces at work in nations and human groups – forces that the ancients projected onto their gods. Continue reading

April 28, 2017