WHEN WE ARE CLOSE to the threshold of the sacred, we may encounter guardians at the gate. They will ask of us that we relinquish our dearly cherished identity before we can step through. Only those prepared can enter the sacred ground, and to do so without preparation can be psychologically hazardous. It is with good reason that fierce creatures usually guard temples and sacred places. These are not inviting figures. They are there to make us stop and reflect. Do we truly wish to cross this threshold? Are we doing so consciously? Are we ready for the consequences of our rite of passage? As Joseph Campbell writes, “The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.”32
In my travels to the Far East, India, and Nepal, I have seen these guardians time and again at the entrances to temples and holy places. Often they are demonic-looking mythical creatures. Sometimes they are powerful warrior-like figures who look down at us with terrifying ferocity. They may cause the fainthearted to pause and turn back, and may repel those with malicious intent by reflecting back that malice. They are a call to wake up and have integrity so that we do not act with ignorance and frivolousness as we enter the sacred ground. They mark a threshold and seem to say that what lies within or beyond is not for everyone.
In 1973 I visited the island of Bali in Indonesia and stayed for a while in a village called Ubud. Close to the village, a river had carved a deep ravine filled with lush vegetation. In the forest that surrounded this ravine was a Hindu temple that I often passed on my way down to the river, where there was another, smaller temple. I passed this forest temple and never went inside, so I have no idea what it was like within the high, elaborately carved walls. This was partly because a group of aggressive monkeys lived around the temple and I did not like getting too close to them. More significantly, however, I did not enter because standing to either side of the entrance were two imposing statues of a Hindu goddess the Balinese call Rangda. She stands with fierce, bulging eyes and a long tongue extending to the ground. In her mouth and hands she holds babies that she devours with huge fangs. This is a temple to the dark, devouring mother goddess, a powerful and very frightening figure that I felt extremely reluctant to offend. I felt instinctively that I should keep out.
In myths and folk tales there are often such figures that stand at crucial thresholds. They stand at the entrances of sacred places such as churches and temples. They may take the form of sphinxes, lions, dragons, monstrous demons, giants, and other creatures. Their function is to guard a point of transition from those who are not ready to cross. They often protect a sacred object or treasure, and only those who have the right qualifications may pass. This may require answering a specific riddle, as with the sphinx. Placating them may mean having a certain gift to offer, or that we are willing to give up some aspect of ourselves and surrender. They may require that we have a particular knowledge or attitude of mind such as fearlessness or loving kindness. Occasionally, the guardian may need to be slain or overcome by force.
In the Buddhist world these guardians are also present, and an understanding of their meaning comes particularly from the practice of Tantra. One may ask, however, where does this archetypal expression of guardians arise from, and what is their relevance to us? A psychological understanding of such figures may be important. What is the point of this threshold that is so closely guarded? To make sense of these questions, it may be useful to consider the psychological significance of the threshold within the psyche between consciousness and the unconscious.
Our early years as children were full of imaginative fantasy that did not separate the outer world from the inner life. We may have talked to the trees and flowers and had invisible friends around who formed part of the magic of childhood reality. Adults may not have been able to enter this realm, but it felt very real to us. There seemed to be no delineation between the inner world of imagination and the outer world of material objects. Rather, we experienced the inner world as if it existed out there. There was no need to consider it as a projection because inner and outer had not yet become differentiated.
With time, we learned to differentiate our inner life from outer reality. Many aspects of our inner life, including much of the imaginal fantasy aspect of childhood, gradually sank into the unconscious. According to Barbara Somers, at a point in childhood, often around seven or eight years of age, a threshold will develop that separates the inner life from the outer. There may be a marked increase in fearful dreams and in thoughts about creatures of the night that frighten us. The psyche is beginning to close off aspects of the inner world and create a domain that is increasingly shadowy and contains mystery and unknown, dark contents. There is a growing threshold between consciousness and the unconscious. This mechanism gradually becomes a necessary protection so that consciousness and a stable ego-identity is able to form and emerge from the amorphous world of the unconscious with its magic, gods, demons, monsters, and fairies.
Were we not to develop this threshold it could eventually lead to psychosis, a state in which consciousness becomes flooded with unconscious life and we potentially lose all sense of conscious reality and self-identity. As the threshold develops and strengthens, so too does our sense of self. When the threshold is poorly formed or very permeable, as in those who do not have a strong sense of self, there may often be fears of the loss of self or feelings of disappearing or drowning, as if one is being sucked into a sea of annihilation. For others, the lack of threshold may provide a welcome retreat into a dreamy fantasy world that feels safe, out of touch as it is with the real pains of life.
The consequences of abusing or ignoring threshold warnings can be psychological problems, including psychosis. However, there is in the psyche a natural mechanism, of which guardians and protectors are a symbolic expression, that protects us from the dangers of having no defined threshold between different states of awareness. I recall an occasion in retreat when I was paying a lot of attention to my dreams, always noting them down and becoming fascinated by their content almost to the point of obsession. This was having an increasingly disorienting effect on my relationship to the normal, daily world. My dreams were becoming almost too powerful for me to cope with. One night I had a dream of a huge bear standing in the window of my retreat hut and then trying to get through the door. On another night I dreamed that the face of a black witch appeared at my window saying, “If you are not careful, I will destroy you.” It was a tremendous jolt to my psyche, and I suddenly realized I had to close down the threshold for a while or be flooded by the unconscious. I stopped my obsessive dream watching and began to feel more stable again.
These guardians at the threshold, therefore, function in three different ways. Firstly, they enable a differentiation of what is inner and outer in our own psyche. They symbolize the creation of a necessary threshold between consciousness and the unconscious—between one state of awareness and another. This distinction is necessary for the cultivation of a sense of identity and the capacity for conscious focus. Without it, we would have serious psychological problems.
Secondly, the guardian marks a point of transition in the journey where we may encounter a rite of passage necessary to go forward. There are various times in life when we pass through periods of transition. Puberty, the “Saturn return” at around thirty, mid-life, and so on are all times of transition. To pass through them and go forward, we may find we must let go of some aspect of the past and change our view of ourselves.
Thirdly, the guardian is there to protect the threshold to what is ultimately a sacred truth or insight that has great significance and power. This is often symbolized by some sacred object, which in the wrong hands becomes a source of destruction and “evil.” Symbolically, this sacred object may be held in a sacred place protected by guardians. The guardian is there to ensure that nothing crosses the threshold that will violate the inner sanctuary or the world beyond.
In Tibetan Buddhism particularly, the principle of the guardian has been developed to an extraordinary degree. The protectors of the Dharma are evoked and propitiated to maintain, preserve, and guard the sacred. On a psychological level, they can be understood as protecting the psyche from what is without or within. The Dharma protector may protect the practitioner from outer negative and chaotic forces he or she may encounter which might invade or violate. This could be understood as the literal invasion of the psyche by interfering entities. Equally, it could be understood as the potential invasion of particularly powerful negative collective energy, the kind of energy that can be generated in parts of cities. In some tantric practices, guardians can be used as an aid to protect from the potentially destructive polluting energy that is in our environment.
Dharma protectors can also be understood as a means to protect us from inner interferences. These are aspects of our own unconscious lives that may erupt from time to time and hinder our state of mind, and may include harmful doubts, depression, and negativity that prevent us from being able to remain with clarity and awareness. Inner hindrances may also be mental instability, or disturbed and unhealthy energy within our psychophysical nervous system. They may additionally be understood to be karmic obstacles that would make Buddhist practice difficult. Perhaps the most damaging inner hindrance, therefore, is the fundamental veil of ignorance that obscures our minds.
Dharma protectors ensure that only those who are prepared for particular spiritual experiences are able to go beyond the veil of ignorance and to step into an utterly radical view of reality. The realization of emptiness, or shunyata shakes our reality. It will take us to a way of being from which we cannot return, like Adam after he has eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and we must be prepared to accept the consequences. When our wisdom eye is opened we cannot blind ourselves to the truth. As is indicated in the bodhisattva precepts, one should not teach the profound view of emptiness to those who are not ready.
In Tantra, to enter the sacred space of the deity also requires that we be prepared psychologically. At the threshold of this experience stand the guardians of protection. Many of the guardian forms that are used in the Buddhist traditions have a semi-mythical/historical origin. They may have been harmful demons that have been subdued and transformed into what are called “oath-bound protectors” sworn to guard sacred places, practitioners, or the teachings. Others are direct manifestations of enlightened activity as deities specifically intended to protect practitioners from harmful interferences, to guard the inner sanctity of the mandala in tantric practice, or to protect external sacred places.
Guardians and protectors may reflect to us the way we deal with boundaries. Sometimes we are very bad at creating or defining our boundaries. Some of us are too afraid to say no. We may have a tendency to be over-influenced and infected by the energy of others around us. We may simply have no ability to protect ourselves from the demands of others. Because we are in a spiritual tradition, we may develop the attitude that to be selfless means to be formless and without boundaries, always giving up our own self for others. This kind of posture is very dangerous, and we can confuse living with an open, giving attitude with a complete inability to clearly define our boundaries and thereby maintain a sense of self-identity. In practice, however, we cannot go beyond boundaries until we are clear about them. We cannot go beyond self until we have a clearer sense of self.
The principle of the protector in this case really represents a very practical willingness to stand firm in defining our boundaries. The quality of the protector or guardian is to define the point beyond which others may not pass and infringe upon our personal space. We may need to become much clearer with others about what we will allow, before our sense of self is violated. Many of us find asserting our needs very difficult and thus do not create clear boundaries. It is most often this lack of assertiveness and the resentment that builds up as a result that is a cause of so much anger. This in turn causes us to develop rigid defensive strategies that shield us from hurt in a totally unhealthy and unbalanced way. If we can be clearer about and protect our boundaries, this need not happen. There is a vast difference between defensiveness and having clear boundaries.
A further area of protection that we need to consider is in the area of our life that is most sacred to us. At times in our journey, some new experience may grow that is both fragile and vulnerable. It may then be vital to protect ourselves from the opinions, judgments, or criticisms of others, even those closest to us. They may ridicule or denigrate our deepening inner life in a way that can be extremely damaging. We may need to create a sense of protected space, which can require some degree of secrecy. I have observed the need for such protected space in workshops I lead where participants have taken part in deep guided imagery exercises. These exercises may bring to the surface things that are extremely vulnerable and sensitive. Sometimes this material needs to be kept relatively private so that it is not violated. Occasionally participants have gone home and discussed this material with someone like a partner only to find it misunderstood, dismissed, or devalued. The resulting sense of violation can be hard to heal. This might not have occurred if there had been greater awareness and sensitivity to the need for our inner life to be held sacred and protected.
The sacred space in which we meditate can be another place that needs to be kept safe from inappropriate eyes and intrusion. When we are stronger it may be less necessary to protect ourselves in this way, but the early sprouts of inner awakening may require careful protection. The culture in which we live has little respect for or understanding of the sacred. What we may do in our sacred space can be easily misinterpreted or misunderstood.
Secrecy and an understanding of the need to value and respect the sacred are supported by the presence of guardians. In this respect, the Buddhist Dharma protectors such as Palden Lhamo a wrathful emanation of Tara, and Mahakala, a wrathful aspect of Chenrezig, act as a vital means to protect our inner experience of the sacred in our lives, particularly when there are people and circumstances in the world who will disregard or demean it. They are also there to remind us that the path is not to be taken frivolously but requires that we prepare ourselves skillfully. Once we learn to respect the nature of the guardian’s intention in protecting our own evolution from the hazards present in the path, we can face them with honesty and confidence. When we prepare ourselves for the step across the threshold, we will have nothing to fear, and the guardians will be no obstacle. What they will ask of us as we cross over, however, is that we let go and surrender those aspects of ourselves that prevent awakening.
