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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

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 referred to as 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 both their underlying unity, and the completeness of the model that they present. 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 can be regarded, ultimately, as going beyond the Buddhist tradition. The Three Jewels are three universal human values; values that ennoble humanity; values by which humanity may reach its potential.

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 the good and for truth appear to be failing. This is a time in which the forces of evil and untruth and have drawn powerful new resources to themselves. By contrast, 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 liberating wisdom and a natural compassion at the heart of all three of these principles, without which human civilisation will not survive.

While this 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, when we are completely identified with them, give structure to the egoic mind and appear as a fixed and separate self. When, however, we begin to recognise, as the Buddha did, that the skandhas are universal and non-personal cognitive-perceptual components, they 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’. It 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, and 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.

May 14, 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 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

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

The Five Skandhas – Dakini Wisdom

This is Article No 3 in the ‘5 Wisdoms’ series. It is one of three introductory articles to a longer series of articles in which I shall be exploring each the five ’empty’ skandhas of Buddhist tradition – the five non-personal cognitive-perceptual components, which come together to create the illusion of a separate self.

The Dharmādhatu Wisdom, the central Wisdom in the Five Wisdoms mandala, refers to the non-dual understanding that the historical Buddha referred to in terms of Emptiness (Pali – suññatā; Sanskrit – shūnyatā) – the absence of any separate self-nature in all beings and in all things. So the Dharmādhatu Wisdom can be thought of as the ability to rest as Consciousness knowing that the root of that experience is entirely impersonal. It can also be characterised as the knowledge that Consciousness is like a single universal light; or an all-pervading expanse of benevolent intelligence; or as a infinite compassionate space in which we, and everything else, are held and loved.

The Dharmādhatu Wisdom is also the wisdom of Mindfulness, the wisdom of Balance, the wisdom of Humility – but especially, it is the wisdom of Emptiness. Importantly, Buddhist tradition tells us that if we manage to acheive a degree of spiritual development without endeavouring to also recognise Emptiness, we will personalise our experience of Consciousness, and will be trapped in the spiritual delusion and refined narcissism that are the culture and consciousness of the Deva Lokas, or God Realms – which I briefly described in my previous article (here).

Consciousness, Mindfulness, and ‘Remembering’

Mindfulness and Consciousness are very closely related, but not synonymous. The objective and collective space of Consciousness does not need to be cultivated, but Mindfulness does. To be Mindful is to be choosing to rest as Consciousness in the midst of life. We cultivate Mindfulness by a process of more fully ‘embodying’ Consciousness in various ways. The Buddha talked about this process of embodying Consciousness in a variety of ways – often using four-fold mandala formulations like the brahmavihāras, or five-fold mandala formulations like the ‘Five Skandhas‘ and the ‘Five Spiritual Faculties’ (indriyas). One of the Buddha’s most important formulations however, was the four ‘Foundations of Mindfulness’ (satipatthāna – Pali; smrtyupasthāna – Sanskrit) – yet another expression of the mandala archetype. I shall be exploring these four categories in detail in future articles, but have listed them in the table below, and in the second of the two mandala diagrams below that.

While we might at first think that we become conscious, or realise Consciousness, by a heroic effort of personal will power, this is an inadequate way of describing the process. Rather, we become conscious by acknowledging that Consciousness is who we are – in essence. The path therefore is better characterised as one in which we ‘rest’, and allow Consciousness to pervade all our activities. This allowing, this surrender to our true nature, this ‘letting go’ process, by which the light and space of Consciousness is received into every fibre of our being, and pervades every nook and cranny of our lives, is Mindfulness. This process of the embodiment of Consciousness via an attitude of receptivity, relaxation, surrender, and ‘resting’, can be characterised as feminine, relative to the intentional, purposeful, willful attitude, which is more often associated with Mindfulness, and which can be characterised as masculine. The validation of this more neglected attitude, which we can think of as archetypally feminine, is one of the main themes of this article.

October 6, 2019

Akashadhateshvari / White Tara – Luminous Space

This article was written as Post 43 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series, but like the previous one (here) it also serves as part of a series of introductory articles in the ‘5 Wisdoms’ series, in which my intention is to guide my readers even deeper into some focused reflection on what the Buddha meant when he spoke of the ’emptiness of the five skandhas’, and of the illusory nature of the self.

Following on from my last article (here), there is much more that we need to explore in regard to the Dharmadhātu Wisdom. This is the Wisdom which is associated with the recognition of Consciousness, and with the centre of the mandala, and may be regarded as representing the source of the other four Wisdoms. Metaphorically, we can think of the relationship between the white centre of the Buddhist mandalas and its associated Dharmadhātu Wisdom, and the four colours of the quadrants – the other four Wisdoms – in a somewhat similar way to the way we might think of a source of pure white sunlight being split into the colours of the rainbow.

The Dharmadhātu Wisdom is the Wisdom that Buddhist tradition personifies in the figure of the archetypal Buddha Vairocana, the ‘Illuminator’, or more accurately in his female Buddha partner, the mysterious and powerful figure of Akashadhatvishvari (please see my note at the end of this article on the two different spellings of this name). Strictly speaking the male Buddha Vairocana represents the compassionate activities of wisdom teaching that arise from the experience or the Dharmadhātu Wisdom, whereas the female buddha Akashadhatvishvari personifies the Dharmadhātu Wisdom itself. The Sanskrit word ākāsha has a ring of profound mystery about it. It is akin to the quintessence, or ether, in western alchemical thought – the subtle, intelligent substance that pervades all space, and from which the other four elements are created. Perhaps the best modern equivalent would be something like ‘Quantum Space’ or ‘the Quantum Field’. Vibrant with energy and information, ākāsha is the primordial space of Consciousness that is the basis of everything. A reasonable English translation therefore, of Akashadhatvishvari, would be something like ‘Sovereign Lady of Infinite Space’.

Consciousness: Presence and Connection; Light and Space

I have previously talked of the Buddha couple in the centre of the mandala as personifications of Presence and Connection (here), which are the principles at the centre of my ‘NVC mandala’ (the four components in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication model – more on that here), but these archetypal Buddhas are multidimensional figures, and are much more than this – indeed all conceptualisations in regard to them are only ways of drawing a little closer to an indefinable mystery. My first response personally, when I reflect on this central ‘divine marriage’ image and its traditional names and associations, is to think of them as representing the metaphorical union of Light and Space in the experience of Consciousness.

The experience of Consciousness, or awareness of being aware, is difficult to describe. The words and images that various spiritual traditions have used to approach that experience are often misleading – being religious projections rather than attempts at objective description. Buddhist tradition, especially that of the Indian Mahayana, whose libraries and culture were unfortunately destroyed by Moslem invasions, is clearly distinguishable from other religions by both its commitment to objectivity in its intellectual analysis, and by the subtlety of the myths, images and metaphors by which it points to the unconditioned reality of Consciousness. Central among these metaphorical pointers were Light and Space.

It is as if Consciousness is an ever-present light within – a bright inner luminosity that never fails us, but is rarely acknowledged or examined. It is the diamond in our pocket that we do not know about; the beautiful gift that has been delivered to us, never to be actually received and unwrapped. It is not surprising perhaps, that in general, humanity fails to recognise Consciousness. While Consciousness is an objective reality, it is not an object like any other, and neither is it the subjective personal self that we often take it to be. The Buddha described it as ’empty’ – empty of self. As the Buddhist tradition established itself over the centuries, it increasingly acknowledged that this impersonal emptiness was also luminous and spacious – still difficult metaphors, but they bring us closer to the experience. And the word shunyata, Sanskrit for Emptiness, came to have these extremely positive associations of luminosity and spaciousness – connoting an infinitely abundant collective source of all truth, goodness, healing and positive transformation.

June 15, 2019