#Ethics

Buddha; Dharma; Sangha, and the Five Wisdoms Mandala – Preface

The text below is the Preface to a book that I am currently working on – Buddha; Dharma; Sangha, and the Five Wisdoms Mandala – the first chapter of which I will be giving away free to ‘Mandala of Love’ subscribers.

Preface

There are three archetypal ideas that have guided Buddhist tradition for twenty-five centuries – Buddha; Dharma; and Sangha. This triad of archetypal principles is often called the ‘Three Jewels’ (triratna) and also the ‘Three Refuges’. In each of the three long essays that are the chapters of this book, I have taken one of these three principles, and in the course of the book, I have set out to weave them together in way that reveals their underlying unity. Most of my readers will have some familiarity with the Three Jewels, but my intention with this book is to challenge myself, and to challenge my readers also, to go deeper into this familiar formulation. I feel a desire to bear witness to the universality of these three principles – to reveal them as universal spiritual principles – principles that go beyond the Buddhist tradition.

I believe that we live in a time of great moral, and indeed mortal, danger – a time in which, even when humanity’s potential for peace and prosperity is at its height, key institutions and cultural forces for good in the world appear to be failing. Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are, in essence, three powerful universal truths that are much needed by humanity at this time of global crisis. There is a wisdom and a natural compassion at the heart of all three of these archetypal principles, without which human civilisation will not survive.

While this idea of framing the Three Refuges as universal and absolutely necessary spiritual principles may seem ambitious, to approach the Three Jewels in a lesser way would be to reduce them, in my view – to reduce them to a merely historical, cultural and religious phenomena. This awareness of Buddhist principles as universal, or archetypal, principles, is easily lost within the dominant post-modern worldview that we are educated into in the West. Although the Buddhist tradition has, historically, seen itself as naming the universal principles at play in our psychology and in our world, I feel grateful to have also gained a particularly keen sense of this sensibility through my reading in the area of archetypal psychology (predominantly through the work of Carl Jung and his students) – which I studied concurrently with Buddhism, in my twenties.

In addition to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, there are several other major themes that I have set out to weave through these three essays. Most obviously, there is the theme of the Five Wisdoms Mandala. When I speak of the Five Wisdoms Mandala, I am speaking of the universal mandala structure of the body-mind, which the Buddha spoke of in terms of the five cognitive-perceptual skandhas – a model which we find particularly well elucidated in the psychology of Carl Jung. These skandhas give structure to the egoic mind, and when we are completely identified with them, they appear as the components of a fixed and separate ‘self’. When, however, we start to recognise the skandhas as universal and non-personal cognitive-perceptual components, they begin to show us the structure of the Enlightened mind – the Five Wisdoms.

It is one of my most important aims in this book to communicate this dual and reconciliatory function of the ‘mandala wisdom’, The mandala wisdom provides us with both a powerful description of the various dimensions our egoic dysfunction, our suffering, our ignorance, our empathy failure and our cruelty, on one side; and a beautiful description of our sublime potentiality, on the other. The spiritual psychology of the mandala that we find in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, is extremely rich and profound, so I can only provide the barest introduction to this richness and profundity in this short book – but I hope to at least provide an overview of this vast and multidimensional inner terrain.

Not least among the themes of this book, are the closely related themes of the Trikāya Doctrine and the Middle Way. These are two important teachings through which the Buddhist tradition approaches the often-bewildering notion of non-duality. Like many Buddhist teachings it is common for these very practical teachings to be reduced to intellectual abstractions, but they each express, in slightly different conceptually useful ways, a core principle that guided the Buddha and has guided the Buddhist tradition – the principle of reconciliation by which the fundamental dichotomies between the egoic mind on one side; and the non-personal Consciousness out of which the egoic mind arises, on the other, find resolution. For me, the Trikāya Doctrine and the Middle Way have become experiential guides, in meditation and in life, and I would love to help to rescue them from their relative obscurity – especially as they are so valuable to us as we seek to relate to the multiple dichotomies of Ignorance and Wisdom that are presented to us by the mandala wisdom of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

This book is concerned with universal spiritual truths, so it is my hope that it is a book can be enjoyed by both Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike – and that no previous knowledge of Buddhism will be necessary for you to find it useful. Those with some knowledge of Buddhism, who may be trying to identify my philosophical and cultural affinities within the Buddhist tradition, will notice that I am coming from a perspective that is most clearly articulated in the context of the Tibetan Vajrayāna. I shall be approaching Tibetan Buddhism in a somewhat unconventional way however – so I shall try to briefly explain myself.

The three historical phases of the Buddhist tradition – the three yānas – are confusing because early Buddhism appears so different, philosophically and culturally, from the later Buddhism of the Tibetan Vajrayāna. Some observers, seeing these incongruities, even regard the development of Buddhism as a decent into confusion from an original clarity. I see an opposite process. I see a refinement process in which the core of the original inspiration of Buddhism in the Wisdom and Compassion of the Gautama Buddha has been re-articulated through successive stages of cultural adaptation, and with ever increasing philosophical clarity and sophistication. I would even venture to identify myself with this process. Like many writers and practitioners within Western Buddhism, I am, in my writing, endeavouring to contribute to the ongoing work of cultural adaptation and philosophical clarification which is the Buddhist tradition.

This question of the three-fold (or perhaps four-fold) nature of Buddhism, as a system of psychological and spiritual philosophy, is foundational. We cannot deeply embrace Buddhism without engaging with the deep incongruities that are inherent in it. This is why I give such importance to the Buddha’s foundational principle of inclusiveness and philosophical reconciliation that he called the ‘Middle Way’. I regard the Buddha’s ‘Middle Way’ as essential, both as a guide to spiritual practice, and as a method of enquiry. Without the Middle Way perspective we fall into disastrous oversimplifications and actual falsifications of the Buddha’s teachings. With the Middle Way, we can progress without falling into those polarising and dichotomous views that would inevitably exclude some aspect of the truth. The Middle Way, allows us to embrace Buddhism in its totality – and to embrace reality in its totality.

As a way of trying to conceptually grasp the historical development of Buddhism, it has been said that early Buddhism appears to present a path of ‘self-development’- or ‘self-power’; that the middle (Mahayāna) phase presents a path of devotional-receptive ‘self-surrender’ – or ‘other-power’; and the Vajrayāna presents a path of ‘self-discovery’ – in which the ‘self-power’ and ‘other-power’ principles are subtly combined and reconciled. In this way we can understand Buddhism as a three-fold and ‘nested’ philosophical system in which three apparently quite different archetypal perspectives are being blended slightly differently in Buddhism’s various cultural forms – but with each of these three elements present, at least to some degree, in every strand of the tradition.

We can therefore – perhaps over-simplifying a little – observe three main groups of practitioners within contemporary Buddhism. The first group – the ‘self-development’, or ‘self-transcendence’ group – are those whose predominant frame of reference could be characterised as a form of idealism. I am talking here of a refined and paradoxical idealism in which the Buddha is adopted as a personification of a transcendental ideal – an ideal to be striven towards by an egoic will which, on achieving the goal, will have been transcended.

While this group of practitioners may recognise that the ultimate goal involves a transcendence of the egoic dichotomy of self and other, there is humanistic faith in the power of the egoic will to achieve this transformation, and a faith in the power of egoic mind’s intelligence to guide the process. Many Westerners are drawn to this humanistic ‘self-development’ perspective, which is seen as a primary feature in the culture of the Hinayāna / Theravāda tradition – since it appears to present a view that is a natural extension of the psychological heroism of Western culture and of Judeo-Christian tradition.

The main distinguishing feature of the second group of practitioners within Buddhism – the ‘self-surrender’ group – is their incorporation of devotional practices, and their identification with the culture of the Mahayāna phase of Buddhist tradition. There are two subgroups within this group. The most obvious of these two subgroups are the ethnic Buddhists of the Mahayāna Buddhist countries of the East – those who feel a natural devotion to the Buddha; towards other Buddhist deities; and towards the revered teachers within those traditions. Within this group there is a cultural attitude that can be characterised in terms of ‘other-power’ or ‘devotional receptivity’.

In the modern West, we can distinguish a second sub-group within the Mahayānist ‘self-surrender’ group. This group, rather than practising in the pre-modern ethnic-Buddhist cultural frame of reference, tend to see ‘self-surrender’ as an extension of the ‘self-development’, or ‘self-transcendence’ perspective. For this group therefore, the ‘self-surrender’ perspective represents a stage of practice, which, at least initially, is probably better characterised as ‘devotional-heroic’, than ‘devotional-receptive’.

Whether this heroic and self-willed approach to devotional practice evolves into a more truly ‘devotional-receptive’ approach depends on the individual’s openness, or not, to recognising a bodily-felt resonance in the body-mind of the transcendental dharmic reality – the benevolent archetypal, or ‘suprapersonal’, forces within Consciousness that ultimately guide and facilitate the process of realisation. I find this notion of a transition from a devotional-heroic to a devotional-receptive perspective, to be fundamental to a deepening of practice for the Western practitioner. The egoic perspective of ‘self-power’, even if it aspires to a ‘self-transcendence’ (Hinayāna) or ‘self-surrender’ (Mahayāna) approach, can, by definition, only bring us to the threshold of realisation. It is our surrender of the hubris of the egoic mind that ultimately carries us over that threshold.

The ultimate purpose of the Mahayānist ‘self-surrender’ perspective finds expression in the ‘self-discovery’ perspective that we find most clearly articulate in the Vajrayāna Buddhism of Tibet and the Himalayan countries. I am not saying that Tibetan Buddhism is the only place where we find this complete, three-fold Buddhist vision – only that these strands within the tradition provide our best historical examples and our best sources of inspiration, within Buddhist culture, of this more comprehensive level of practice.

I hope this brief elucidation of the three archetypal perspectives with Buddhism – sometimes called the ‘three myths’ within Buddhism – helps my readers to understand where I am coming from psychologically and philosophically. While I am embracing key elements of the philosophy and archetypal psychology of the Tibetan Vajrayāna – and doing so with a deep sense of gratitude, appreciation, and devotion – I have not necessarily, in so doing, entered into the cultural identity of ‘being a Tibetan Buddhist’.

Tibetan Buddhist culture is so rich and beautiful and compelling, that Western students can find themselves ‘unable to see the wood for the trees’. I have endeavoured to avoid this pitfall. What I have sought, found, and treasured in Tibetan Buddhism are its universal elements. I hope however, that my readers will come to recognise, like myself, and like Carl Jung, that there is a vast resource of universal spiritual truths – truths that are of great importance for humanity – that are better expressed in Tibetan Buddhism than anywhere else in the history of human spirituality.

I am aware that this book presents, not a standard Buddhist view that you could read elsewhere, but a unique synthesis – the unique synthesis that my spiritual journey has brought me to. Indeed, it has been my conscious wish and intention not to inhibit the idiosyncrasies in my perspective, but to present Buddhism in a fresh and stimulating way. It is my hope that, by presenting information that has been neglected elsewhere, I have contributed to a new and clearer perspective on philosophy and practice within the tradition – a perspective which may challenge some commonly held preconceptions.

This book is not for everyone. Some will say it lacks academic rigour. Others will have preferred more anecdotes from the Pali Canon. Others will say that I am addressing the profound wisdom of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism without having received any of these teachings formally in the context of a lineage – and that I therefore have no authority to say anything. What I have however, and what I am offering, is 40 years of passionate engagement with these key themes within Buddhist philosophy and practice, during which I have rigorously tested them in my experience.

Some will say that the approach that I am presenting is too eclectic – that I draw on too wide a range of psychological wisdom from beyond the Buddhist tradition (like that of Carl Jung) and that I give too much weight to those sources of understanding. This, however, is precisely what the ‘Mandala of Love’ approach is. It is my wish to contribute to a modern and Western approach to Buddhist wisdom – an approach that draws on numerous strands of knowledge, both within Buddhism, and outside of the tradition, in order to triangulate upon, and discern, the essence of the precious world treasure which is the universal ‘mandala wisdom’ that the Tibetan masters have given us.

Readers may want to think of me as someone who has been meditating in an isolated mountain cave for several decades – and is now returning to share the fruits of his contemplation. I apologise if some of my assertions, seem bold and insufficiently evidenced, but as meditators we are addressing a domain of experience in which our actual experience is the most valuable thing we can share. Please know that I am keenly aware that the spiritual path is different for everyone, and always needs to be tested in our own experience and adapted to individual needs. I feel bound however, to share what I know with the conviction that I feel. I need to share what is true for me. I am trusting that in doing this I will serve you best – and that you will apply whatever discernment you need to, to what I am saying.

The subtitle of this book is ‘An Introduction to the Mandala of Love – Part One’. So, it is my intention that it will be the first of at least two books, which will together provide a form of introduction or overview of the approach that I have adopted, and which I have found myself advocating on my website. Until the second book is published, you will find much more of my writing available for free on my website at https://mandala-of-love.com.

When I started publishing articles in 2017, I chose ‘Mandala of Love’ as the name of my website. While the most obvious reason for this name is my focus on the ‘mandala wisdom’ that we find in Buddhism and in the tradition of Carl Jung; no less important is my wish to make Love the focus of my writing. It has been said that, while the pursuit of Wisdom may not lead to Love, Love is most certainly the path to Wisdom. While I understand this sentiment, and have, to a large extent, been guided by it, it is not entirely true. Rather, there is a reciprocal relationship to be recognised here, and our approach requires a Middle Way – a path of integration and reconciliation.

Indeed, our lack of understanding in regard to Love, or wisdom in regard to Love, is perhaps the greatest problem facing humanity – even to the point where the world has witnessed a series of ever more violent wars, each one justified by bogus humanitarianism and the supposed goal of protection against violence. We may think we are living in a time when the weak and vulnerable are protected from gangs and psychopaths, but in reality the dynamics of violence and psychopathy are just more hidden from view. They are operating on a larger scale as dynamics within international capitalism, or have simply moved to the international arena. The apparent democracy of nation states fails to create rationality and justice in the foreign policy arena, and since our international institutions are so easily subverted, there has, for some three decades now, been no effective restraint on the violent military and economic hegemony of the US-centred unipolar world order.

I notice that even Buddhism sometimes fails in regard to this need for Wisdom in regard to Love, but this is a wider problem – one that is behind the failure of Christianity, and behind the failure of the Western liberalism that has largely taken Christianity’s place. The Buddha’s understanding of Love was very comprehensive and sophisticated however, and has much to teach us. He adopted the ancient Indian framework of the four brahmavihāras (Compassion, Loving Kindness, Appreciative Joy and Equanimity) and made it his own. Having practiced these meditations myself and found them deeply transformative, I have become a passionate advocate of them, and one of my main aims in this book is to share what they have taught me.

In pursuit of this much-needed reconciliation of Love and Wisdom, I shall be outlining in this book, the correspondences between the brahmavihāras and the skandhas – the brahmavihāras being the Buddha’s primary framework for talking about Love, and the skandhas being his primary framework for talking about Wisdom. This connection between the brahmavihāras and the skandhas is rarely made – and when it is, the correspondences made are often incorrect – but it is of enormous value for meditators, and for those intent on liberation from the constraints and inherent negativity of the self-illusion.

I very much hope that you enjoy this book, and that it will support you on your journey.

William Roy Parker

Brunswick Heads, New South Wales, Australia

May 14, 2023

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 7: The Somatic Body-Mind

This article is the seventh 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 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 represent the consensus within the global Triratna Buddhist Community regarding Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ – far from it. 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 their own meditative enquiry into the profound spiritual psychology of the Dharmadhātu mandala.

This article was originally written as the first part of a longer article on the female Buddha Māmaki, but I have chosen to present it as a separate article, and as one which will hopefully serve as an introduction to that article. In it, I hope to provide a recapitulation of key understandings from previous articles in the series, and to further introduce the notion of the somatic, and the idea that meditation is an experience of, not mind, but body-mind – these being foundational conceptualisations for the article on Māmaki that follows. By talking of mind as body-mind, I mean, not an integration of two separate elements – mind and body – but an acknowledgement of the extent to which mind and body must be regarded as inherently integrated in the practice of meditation. So, while meditation can usefully be thought of, at least in the beginning stages, as an integration of mind and body – of ‘bringing the mind home to the body’, as Thich Nhat Hahn used to say – I am interested in a deeper integration, in the sense of a bringing into full awareness, of the five already integrated body-mind components, which Buddhist tradition calls the five skandhas. By way of introduction to the article on Māmaki, I shall, in this article, be reflecting on the vedanā skandha in particular – the skandha of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ Sensing, Sensation and Embodiment.

A Comprehensive Non-Dual Archetypal Psychology

In this series of articles, I have set out to describe the ten archetypal Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala – the mandala of the Five Wisdoms – and to present them as personifications of an interrelated constellation of Dharmic principles that together form a comprehensive non-dual psychology. These Dharmic principles can be viewed as stages in a transformation process – a transformation process that leads not just to Insight, and to the release of self-view (which we can call Spiritual Death); but to our embodiment of the transcendent Bodhisattva principle (a stage which we can call Spiritual Rebirth), through the release of the energetic residues of the egoic mind, which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas.

We can characterise the process of realisation that we call Enlightenment as having four stages – Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth – and we can approach each of these four stages through five meditative contemplations, using the Five Wisdoms Mandala as our guide. Each of the four stages engages with the Five Wisdoms at a higher level than the last. They are are like four octaves – the subsequent stages resonating with the earlier ones, and each expressing a higher and more comprehensive level of transformation and wisdom than the last. While it is true to say that embodiment of Consciousness characterised by Positive Emotion requires the foundation of mental and emotional stability such as is developed in the Integration stage, there is also however, a sense in which these two different familiarisation processes can progress in parallel. I shall be talking more about this below.

The most obvious division of the four stages is into the first two and the last two. There is however, a particularly strong resonance between the Integration and Spiritual Death stages (first and third), and between the Positive Emotion and Spiritual Rebirth stages (second and fourth). This means that our practice in the Integration stage, and our deepening connection with the five receptive ‘Integration’ Buddhas (that we we are currently studying), is likely to also produce significant insights into the impersonal nature of mind (Spiritual Death). Similarly, a deep practice of the Positive Emotion stage, and our deepening connection with the five expansive ‘Positive Emotion’ Buddhas, is likely to propel us into that profoundly and naturally altruistic way of living our embodiment of Consciousness, which the Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of the Bodhicitta – the emergence of the Bodhisattva archetype as the guiding principle of our being (Spiritual Rebirth).

What I am presenting here is clearly not an ego-psychology – in which an heroic and narcissistic egoic self makes vain attempts at transcendence by trying to appropriate divine powers to itself. Rather it is a Buddhist archetypal psychology, in which the humble and reverent egoic self of the Mahayana Buddhist practitioner seeks to know, familiarise themselves with, and surrender to, the benevolent forces of the Transcendental – the archetypal powers that are inherent in Consciousness and organised as a mandala of Five Wisdoms.

The Brahmavihāras – Self-Regarding and Other-Regarding

The egoic mind has tendencies which we can characterised in terms of energetic dis-integration and energetic contraction, and the practice of meditation, or resting as Consciousness, leads to the opposite tendencies – Integration being the opposite of energetic dis-integration, and Positive Emotion being the opposite of energetic contraction. One way in which this distinction that I am making, between Integration and Positive Emotion can be understood, is in terms of the brahmavihāras (Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Compassion, and Appreciative Joy) which can be either self-regarding or other-regarding – either energetically receptive or energetically expansive.

June 18, 2022

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 Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 1: Three Yānas / Three Myths

This article is the first of fifteen articles inspired by the central five verses of the ‘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. Brief summaries of all the articles can be found here and you can read the five verses here.

As I begin this new series of articles, I would like to express gratitude to Dharmachari Subhuti, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order. It was Subhuti who set me on the five-fold light-path of the Five Wisdoms, when I attended a seminar on the Bardo Thodol with him in the1980s. Having said that, I should however make it very clear, that the perspective that I am presenting here is entirely my own, and is not intended to reflect any current consensus of thinking that may exist within the Triratna Buddhist Order. All I am doing here is sharing the fruits of my own enquiry – and hoping that this may stimulate others to engage in their own.

I also need to thank Subhuti for the central idea in this introductory article – the notion that the three yānas, the three phases of development of the Buddhist tradition, are like three ‘myths’, or defining frames of reference, within Buddhism – an idea which comes from a talk that he gave in 2003 (and later published online here in 2004). Once again however, I need to make it clear that I have reframed this conceptualisation somewhat, and elaborated it in my own way.

Three Ways of Relating to the Archetypal Buddhas

There is a foundational conceptual framework, which I would like to share as we embark on this exploration of the Dharmadhātu Mandala – the great Five Wisdoms mandala of Mahayāna and Vajrayāna Buddhism, with its five pairs of Buddhas. This is the three-fold conceptual framework of the three yānas. While most Buddhists will be aware of the three yānas – the three great historical phases of the development of the Buddhist tradition: Hinayāna; Mahayāna; and Vajrayāna – it is less common to see these three yānas associated with the three stages of our progressively deepening engagement with the archetypal Buddhas. This however, is a conceptualisation that I find very useful, and I would like to share it at the outset, because it not only guides us in our evolving relationship with the mandala deities; it also guides us in our deepening familiarity with mind and Consciousness, as we progress in our meditation practice.

Essentially there are three ways of relating to the mandala deities. Firstly, we can think of them as personifications of the various extremely positive characteristics of Enlightenment – as personifications of the various aspects of Enlightenment, which we aspire to, and would like to cultivate in ourselves. This perspective, we can say, is an expression of the attitudes of striving and idealism that we associate with early Buddhism – with the stage that the later Mahayāna (the Greater Vehicle) came to call the Hinayāna (the Lesser Vehicle). I do not really like this pejorative and somewhat disdainful characterisation – especially as the spirit of the Mahayāna and Vajrayāna phases are clearly discernible in the Pali records of the Buddha’s life and teachings. The term Hinayāna does however, allow us to make an important distinction. It denotes a set of more limited cultural attitudes and psychological frames of reference in which the later elements of Buddhist tradition (i.e, the Mahayāna and Vajrayāna elements) although they are present in a germinal form, are not yet so fully explored and articulated.

In the second, Mahayāna, phase, we can think of the archetypal Buddhas as existing objectively ‘out there’ in the universe – in a very real but non-material world beyond this material one in which we exist. The popular Mahayāna world-view of many ethnic Buddhists in the east, appears to see the archetypal Buddhas in a personalising way – as if they are divine persons. The more accurate and more sophisticated understanding within Mahayāna tradition however, sees them as ’empty’ and non-personal. In the terminology of modern psychology, we can say that the Buddhist deities exist as archetypes within the collective psyche. Although we encounter them subjectively and inwardly, the more we familiarise ourselves with them, the more we naturally come to think of them as objectively existing archetypal realities. When we say that they are archetypal, we mean that they are beyond the egoic mind but at the same time are not separate from us at all. Indeed they are personifications of our most essential nature.

Through the Buddha’s invitation to recognise that all things are insubstantial and ’empty’, we come full circle. The idealisation of the Hinayāna and the projection of the Mahayāna are resolved as we recognise that all things are ‘appearances’. The Vajrayāna perspective, deeply rooted as it is in the recognition of Emptiness (shunyatā), acknowledges that while these archetypes appear as objectively existing beings ‘out there’ in an objectively existing imaginal realm, they also show us, in the language of imagery and symbolism – in the language of archetypes – of a profound universal psychology. Indeed, as I am hoping to outline in the course of this series of articles, the mandala arrangement of archetypal Buddhas that we find in Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism describes the way Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha) unfolds into four cognitive-perceptual functions, whose relationship with each other has a mandala structure. Further to this, the mandala deities lead us into the mystery of how those archetypal energies find somatic embodiment in us as bodily-felt experience.

Just as the Mahayāna perspective is a natural extension of the Hinayana one, so the Vajrayāna is a natural extension of the Mahayāna view. I shall be trying to characterise it in more detail below, but very briefly we can think of the Vajrayāna as a perspective that sees the archetypal Buddhas as personifications of energies of Enlightenment that already exist in some way, embodied within ourselves – albeit obscured by the energies of the egoic mind. The Vajrayāna is concerned above all with deep transformation, and with the energetic and bodily-felt processes by which we come to know our true nature – the Buddha within – and begin to recognise that the play of the Transcendental is ever-present, and indeed immanently present, in Consciousness, and in this world.

The Three Yānas as Aspects of the Bodhisattva Archetype

So, the Buddhist tradition presents three somewhat different perspectives on meditation practice and on the spiritual life – and there is great value in taking the Buddhist tradition in its totality, and therefore developing the ability to move easily between these three perspectives, understanding the way they fit together into a whole. It is also important for us to be fully cognisant of which conceptual perspective we are thinking from, or thinking within, at any one time – and to recognise that each of those perspectives lacks comprehensiveness and objectivity when taken on its own.

March 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

Compassion and the All-Accomplishing Wisdom

This is Post 41 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

Making use of the rich mandala-form analysis of the dynamics of cognition and perception that Carl Jung called the ‘Four Functions of Consciousness’ (which parallels the ancient Indian skandhas), we recognise that the green Northern Quadrant in the Buddhist meditation mandalas, is related to the perceptual function of Intuition-Volition. Carl Jung, who identified himself as an Introverted Intuitive type, was writing in the face of great intellectual resistance from the scientific materialist consensus, when he presented his mandala-form psychological model – a model that is distinguished not just by its inclusion of the function of Intuition, but by its embrace of the archetypal and energetic dimensions of psychological reality.

All Life Energies are Compassionate and Life-Serving

In my last two articles (here and here) I have also been drawing heavily on the psychological model of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) which was developed by Marshall Rosenberg, as a way of illuminating the non-dual wisdom of the green Northern Quadrant, which the Buddhist tradition calls the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. The NVC model stands out as another mandala-form psychological framework, which not only includes the Intuition-Volition component, but includes this dimension in the most practical and powerful way in relation to the practice of self-empathy.

NVC does this by recognising that what we experience as a situation of need or apparent lack, is arising not only from an objective Current Reality in the world of Sensation (Southern Quadrant), but from volitional Life Energies (Northern Quadrant), which are apprehended by the function of Intuition in those who are observing the situation. We can say therefore, that it is our internal relationship to the Life Energies of desire, longing and aspiration, that gives us our perception of a Need – and is the key to the creative and self-empathetic attitude that will bring healing to our psychological parts on the inside, and the communication style that will ‘get our needs met’ on the outside.

December 16, 2018

Life Energies of Presence and Connection

This is Post 40 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

Consciousness is a phenomenon of the interface, the boundary, and the discontinuity, between the knowable world of Classical Physics, and the unknowable world of Quantum Mechanics. This interface pervades the universe as an infinite pure space that is an eternal present moment, and is equal and everywhere the same. It is also, at the same time, single – a unity. Mathematically it is a single point – a one point field.

The Classical world of matter is, quite literally, a beautiful illusion. Space and time are just relative phenomena, and matter is also just an appearance – an appearance on the surface of a universe that is mostly unknowable energy and information. Thankfully, the ephemeral perception that is our universe, is pervaded by the absolute reality of Consciousness. It is this animating power that makes it knowable, and makes it so beautiful. Without Consciousness, there would be no life, no meaning, no possibility of evolution, and no human self-conscious experience, with all its richness and relational complexity.

Consciousness and the present moment are inseparable phenomena. When we look out through the dense, ‘milky’ band of stars that is our own galaxy and glimpse the galaxies beyond, we are seeing the universe as it was many millions of years ago. The light by which we perceive some of those distant stars left them long before our own planet was even formed, and has been traversing the vast expanse of space for billions of years. It is a little disturbing to perceive that everything in the Classical world appears fundamentally disconnected and separated by time and space. In the simple human experience of Consciousness however, and in the experience of the present moment, the whole vast expanse is completely connected and unified – as Quantum Physics has also now shown us.

While these sorts of reflections may at first appear somewhat abstract, I hope to be able to show that they also have extremely practical implications. For those of us that aspire to express our deepest human potential – in ourselves, our relationships and our communities – there is enormous value in familiarising ourselves experientially with the more fundamental, non-dual level of reality in which we all rest, because it is such a rich source of psychological insights and personal transformation.

While this exploration of the Present Moment, Connectedness, and Consciousness, is associated with the intrapersonal path of meditation, it is also deeply relevant to our interpersonal lives. We need a high degree of familiarity with Presence, Connection and Consciousness if we are to communicate effectively in our relationships and communities. If we fail to acknowledge, and acknowledge deeply, the present moment of Consciousness in which we are already connected, we will be frustrated in our efforts to relate empathetically and collaborate effectively.

Living ‘in’ and ‘as’ the Life Energy of Consciousness

Knowing that the Classical world is just an appearance of subject-object perception, and that the Quantum world is unknowable, gives great importance to the mysterious boundary phenomenon that is Consciousness. Consciousness is the only thing that exists absolutely for us – that is reliable and ultimately trustworthy in our experience. Consciousness, to borrow a phase from the apostle Paul, is that in which we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and resting as Consciousness, through the practice of meditation and mindfulness, is our surest path to authenticity, integrity, and to knowing whatever may actually be known. Continue reading

October 5, 2018

The Beneficial Life Energy of Needs

This is Post 39 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The four-fold archetypal psychology of the mandala invites us to distinguish the intuitive and volitional function, which Carl Jung called Intuition, and which I have been calling Intuition-Volition, from the evaluative function of Feeling. This distinction is enormously important, but is in general much neglected in modern psychology. The Cognitive Behavioural psychology that has been predominant in the last few decades, has usually chosen to reduce the person to the interaction of three components: thinking, behaviour and physiology – with each of these three components often rather narrowly understood.

Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow

Even the great Carl Rogers, who caused a revolution in the world of psychology, when he abandoned Psychoanalysis and created his Person-Centred model for therapeutic counselling, failed to adequately distinguish between the evaluative and volitional dimensions of our emotional life.

September 10, 2018

The Mandala of the Four Brahmavihāras

This is Post 37 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

The overall framework for the articles in this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series has been provided by the mandala of the four brahmavihāras: Equanimity (upekshā), Appreciative Joy (muditā), Loving Kindness (mettā), and Compassion (karunā). In order to make these four ‘attitudes of Consciousness’ more accessible, and in order to help people recognise them in their experience, I have, in recent articles, been exploring to the Four Qualia – a formulation of my own, which I have found to be very useful.

The qualia are difficult-to-define, difficult-to-describe, difficult-to-account-for experiences, and there a four of them that together provide a helpful experiential framework for meditation practice: Embodiment; Being; Uncaused Happiness; and Life Energy. Deepening into our experience of resting as Consciousness using this ‘Four Qualia’ formulation as our guide, is essentially an easier, more modest, and more experiential way of approaching the sublime brahmavihāras.

In the next article in this series, I shall be presenting some more detailed reflections on each of the Four Qualia and their corresponding brahmavihāras, for those wishing to experiment with them in their meditation practice, but first, in this article, I would like to reflect on the importance of these practices, and also on why, given their great value, they appear to have been relatively neglected.

Why are the brahmavihāras not better known?

The brahmavihāras are literally the vihāras or ‘dwelling places’ of the great four-faced creator god Brahma – they are the states in which Brahma was believed to abide. Importantly the word vihāra does not denote a permanent home, but a lodging or retreat, like the accommodation for travellers to rest overnight while on a pilgrimage. So the term immediately suggests a staged form of meditation, in which the practitioner moves systematically through a series of four stages corresponding to the brahmavihāras, in order perhaps to achieve a fifth stage, the state of balance, wholeness and internal energetic coherence that Indian tradition calls samadhi. We are being invited, in the brahmavihāras meditation-cycle, to ‘rest’ for a period of time in each vihāra – to rest and find refreshment and renewal in our true nature, both in our meditation practice, and on the journey of life. Continue reading

August 22, 2018

The Somatic Anatomy of the Energy Bodies

This is Post 36 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

While meditation can initially be thought of as an exploration of our felt experience, or Sensation, in the field of the body, the wisdom of Intuition-Volition and of the green Northern Quadrant, is telling us that we need more than a medical anatomy textbook as our guide. Rather, we need self-enquiry frameworks that can guide our exploration down into the subtle, multidimensional, and energetic territory of Consciousness, and into the energetic reflection, or resonance, of Consciousness, in the energy fields of the body.

A Nested Hierarchy of Subtle Bodies

These maps to navigate by, are provided firstly the mandala, which has been my main frame of reference in these articles, but also by the stupa, which is a symbolic structure that reflects the nested hierarchy of the subtle bodies, and the subtle energy anatomy of the human body.

In my last article (here), I wrote about this subtle anatomy in three main ways: (1) in relation to non-duality; (2) as a way of locating the brahmavihāras in the fields of the body; and (3) as a way of understanding and systematically cultivating the experience of samādhi – the meditative state of integration and effortless concentration that arises as we learn to know our wholeness, and embrace the deeper and more subtle levels of our somatic experience.

Although our focus in this article is still the green Northern Quadrant and the Volitional, or energetic, dimension of experience, and the perceptual function of Intuition by which we know that dimension, I need now to continue further in addressing the important but paradoxical fact that the energetic reflection of Consciousness in the fields of the body appears to be available to sensory experience – in other words they are also aspects of Sensation, or vedanā, in the ancient Indian languages.

August 8, 2018