WISDOM OF
THE MOUNTAINS

CHAPTER FIVE

This chapter concerns a subject somewhat alien to anything we understand in the West. Certain forms of Mahayana Buddhism—when seen from the outside—seem to us totally irrational and superstitious. This applies particularly to a subschool of Mahayana Buddhism that has several names: Vajrayana, Tantrayana, or Mantrayana.

The word yana means a way or a vehicle. As I mentioned earlier, Buddhism is frequently likened to a raft that is used for crossing a river, or a brick used to knock on a door. The brick is a yana, and so is the raft. They are instruments, expedients, means, techniques, methods. The Buddha’s doctrine is called in Sanskrit the dharma, and dharma has a whole multiplicity of meanings, but one of them is “method.” It is sometimes translated “law” in English, but this is not an adequate translation.

The whole idea of a yana is related to the idea of upayas, which are “skillful means.” We would call them pedagogical devices or tricks, depending on the purpose for which they are being used. In politics upaya means cunning, but in religion or philosophy it means the skill of a teacher at conveying a lesson to a student. The essence of upaya is surprise. When you have hiccups, it is indeed surprising, because you did not intend it. Upaya and surprise are deeply connected with the whole inner meaning of Buddhism. Life has to surprise itself, because if it didn’t you wouldn’t know of your own existence. You only know existence to the degree that there is a balance between knowing and not knowing. So there must always be something in you that is like spiritual hiccups, that happens unbeknownst to you, and takes you by surprise.

An upaya is the teacher’s method of arousing the surprise of enlightenment in the student, and he uses a yana, that is to say, a vehicle or a course. We say we give a course in philosophy or semantics or chemistry. The great course in Buddhism is the Mahayana, which includes ever so many different upayas or methods ^of instruction. By contrast, the Hinayana, the little course, has only a few upayas because they are very tough-minded in the Hinayana. They stick to the notion that all enlightenment depends on each individual’s effort. The Buddha is supposed to have said, just before he died, “Be you lamps unto yourselves; be you a refuge unto yourselves. Take to yourselves no other refuge.”

In one Japanese system of classification, Buddhist schools are called either jiriki or tariki. Ji means “self.” Riki means “power.” There are ways of salvation or liberation by your own power—jiriki—and ways by the power of another: tariki. Tariki is liberation through what Christians would call grace rather than works. It is fascinating to see how the problem of faith and works, or grace and works, turns up in Buddhism just as it does in Christianity.

In the history of Christianity there was a huge argument around 400 A.D. between a Welshman or Celt named Pelagius and Saint Augustine of Hippo. Pelagius was an optimistic Britisher, the type who believes in muddling through, playing the game, and putting your nose to the grindstone. He believed that one could, by one’s own will and effort, obey the commandments of God. He argued that God would not have given us any commandments we could not obey. But Saint Augustine said that Pelagius had missed the point entirely. If he had read Saint Paul properly—especially the Epistle to the Romans—he would have found that God did not give us commandments in order that we should obey them, but rather to prove that we could not. As Saint Paul put it, God gave us impossible commandments in order to convict us of sin. The law, in other words, was a gimmick, an upaya. Nobody was ever expected to obey a law such as—from the Ten Commandments—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Nobody can do that. Therefore even the greatest saints are always beating their breasts and confessing that they are abysmal sinners because they cannot live up to the commandments. This is why Saint Paul taught that the law is a pedagogue designed to lead us to Christ. Pedagogue has the same meaning as upaya.

The Buddhists had come to a similar conclusion. In his original teaching the Buddha was apparently tough-minded. He said, “Listen, you had better discipline yourselves. Get to work and cut out women, drink, and possessions, and start meditating and controlling your minds.” Everybody tried this, and of course most of them failed. A few people succeeded, but then they dried up. They found that their success was a kind of Pyrrhic victory. What you gain by stopping your humanity and stopping your emotions is not worth the price you pay. It is like cutting off your head to cure a headache. They realized that will and obedience weren’t the way to liberation and that the Buddha had suggested they were only so that they could discover that fact.

The new schools of Buddhism said that you must be liberated by tariki, or grace, the power of something in you that is not your ego. It is the same power that makes your heart beat. Your heart does not beat at the will of your ego. To use Jungian language to talk about grace, we say that when the unconscious is worked on, watered and nourished, eventually it—not the ego—will integrate the two aspects or powers of the self, and you will acknowledge that both the conscious and the unconscious—the power of the ego joined with the power of the natural organism or the psyche—are part of you.

Similarly, in every art one may experience artistic exhaustion, the exhaustion of the will, where everything has been tried and nothing will work. To achieve the perfection or completion of the art, something that cannot be willed has to happen of itself. We variously call this something grace or inspiration. It is tariki. Everybody always wants to know how to make it happen, but if we knew how to make it happen, it wouldn’t be grace. It’s because we don’t know how to make it happen that it can transcend the limits of the will. Just because we can’t know how to make it happen doesn’t mean we should give up and go home and forget the whole thing, though. There is another alternative. We can cultivate our faith.

Faith means that we know grace will happen, only we don’t know when, and we’ve got to wait. But we mustn’t work too hard at waiting, because that will be ego effort, and the ego will stop the grace from happening. The thing is to learn to wait softly, in a state of openness. How does one do that? There are all sorts of upayas or means that help one to do this, and one of them is this practice variously called the Vajrayana, which means the diamond vehicle, the Tantrayana, which means the web vehicle, and the Mantrayana, which means the sound vehicle, in the sense of the vehicle of incantation.

The last of these—Mantrayana—is the most perplexing from our point of view. There is an age-old belief in the idea that certain formulas or spells, said in the right way, will produce results. All of this descends, philosophically—so far as Asia is concerned—from the Hindu Upanishadic idea that the world is the creation of sound. The Hindus say that in the beginning was vac, which is exactly the same thing as saying, “In the beginning was the word,” as in the Gospel of John. But vac doesn’t mean logos as it does in Saint John, it means vibration. It is fundamentally the Sanskrit word om. When you say om you begin at the back of your throat with O, and you finish at your lips, so you take in the whole range of world-creating sound. Om is the holiest of all names. You can chant om, you know, and really stir things up.

All Hindus and Buddhists alike use this word to induce a meditative state. It is very easy to concentrate on sound. It is much more difficult to keep your eyes still. But sound is very easy to concentrate on, and that is the whole point of a mantra: it is a method for digging sound. I hope you know what I mean by “to dig.” It means to get right down into. When you dig sound you realize that the flow or vibration of sound is a way in which you experience basic existence, being here. You can learn everything from sound, because it is not a constant. It comes and goes. It is on and off. You only hear it because it is vibrating. The lesson is that life is on and off, black and white, life and death, inside and outside, knowing and not knowing: they’re all vibrations. It’s easy to explain that in words, but to feel and understand it in your bones you have to learn how to listen to a sound. It was to teach that skill that this system of chanting sounds was invented.

Vajrayana Buddhism sprang up in about the ninth century A.D. It spread from north India into Tibet, Mongolia, China, and Japan, but it is especially characteristic of Tibetan Buddhism.

There are various ways of understanding the words and formulas used for mantras. They are understood by the ignorant as being shortcuts. Instead of having to say a whole sutra, the sutra can be summed up in formulas such as “om mani padme hum.” That’s one way of understanding mantras. You are poor and ignorant, and out of infinite compassion the bodhisattvas have arranged to get you to nirvana. Instead of going through all the heroic efforts and meditation practices of those saints and sages, you can just say “om mani padme hum.” In fact, you do not even need to say it. You can have it printed on paper and enclosed in a silver box on the end of a stick, and all you have to do is swing the thing around. So the popular idea of the vehicle of sound—the Mantrayana—is that it is a shortcut.

The next highest idea of Mantrayana is the one I have been emphasizing, that you use these formulas and sounds as concentration objects, and through that concentration learn the lessons of life. But there’s also a third interpretation, which might be called the esoteric interpretation. I believe it was originated by Vasubandhu, who lived sometime around 400 A.D. He said the whole point of mantras is that they do not mean anything at all. The word om is completely meaningless, and all the various kinds of incantations are totally senseless. The purpose of repeating such nonsense is to liberate oneself from the notion that the universe means anything at all.

So much for the path to grace called the Mantrayana. We turn now to the Tantra.

All the forms of Buddhism that are associated with the Vajrayana are called Tantric. The word Tantra means “web structure,” warp and woof. Tantra, in the Hindu context, is a discipline that is sometimes called the fifth Veda. There are four Vedas that are basic holy scriptures of Hinduism. The fifth Veda is the esoteric one. According to the four Vedas, in order to be liberated you have to give up physical life. You must not eat meat. You must not have sexual intercourse. You must not take alcohol or any kind of consciousness-changing substance. There are various other things; I forget them all. But in Tantra the whole idea is that liberation comes through contact with forbidden things. It comes through belonging to the world, participating in it. Sometimes this is called the left-hand path.

In a Hindu story, Brahma was asked, “Who will gain to communion with you first, he who loves you or he who hates you?” And Brahma replied, “He who hates me, because he will think of me more often.”

In other words, you can attain to liberation by complete altruism, and also by total selfishness. If you are completely and consistently selfish—if you push selfishness to an extreme—you will discover that your self is the other, that you do not really experience yourself at all except in terms of others. That is the point of the left-hand path, to push oneself to an extreme. However, the left-hand path is a very dangerous way of going about things, because nobody approves of it.

In my distant past my father and I once witnessed a stage comedy. A man was asleep in a highly Victorian bedroom filled with all kinds of fancy furniture. The alarm clock went off and he woke up in a total rage. He immediately picked up his shoe and smashed the alarm clock. He got out of bed in a fury. He ripped the sheets to pieces, overturned the bed, found a hammer somewhere and started breaking up all the crockery and the windows until the place was totally demolished, except that in one corner there remained one of those enormous stand-up lamps. It’s the only unbroken thing in the room. The man becomes furious when he sees it just standing there innocently. He rushes across the room and picks it up over his head and flings it to the floor. And it bounces. It doesn’t break. It was made of rubber.

That’s the surprise I was talking about earlier. Satori. Sudden awakening. It bounced. This is the whole thing about Buddhism. We all think we are going to crash. We must think that, because otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise when we bounce.

In other words, if you press your selfishness, follow that left-hand path, explore all the sensations you can imagine—all the delights of pleasure, all the ecstasies, all the drunks, all the orgasms—what will you want, finally, after all that? You will say, “I want to bounce. I want to be let out of myself.” When you are selfish and you are let out of yourself, that selfishness becomes altruism. “He that would save his life shall lose it. He that loses his life”—or loosens it—“shall find it.” Whether we take the right-hand path or the other, we all arrive at the same destination.

In the same way, the painful path of meditative discipline or concentration—where the disciple is being watched over and threatened by somebody with a stick—will lead to the same goal. There are certain kinds of people who ought to take that path. They do not know they exist unless they hurt, and therefore the painful path is the right way for them. We should not condemn them or the path.

On the opposite extreme from the painful path is the mantra game. People who play this game say, “It’s so simple to do. It’s a shortcut.” And they get into it, singing “om mani padme hum,” for instance. Or, like the Pure Land Buddhists in Japan, they chant, “Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu,” until it eventually becomes, “Namanda, namanda, namanda, namanda, namanda,” and suddenly the chant is chanting them. What is the difference between chant and chanter, self and other, self-power and other-power, jiriki and tariki? It is all one. You pretend that it isn’t because you have to. I say “have to,” but really you do it in order to create the sensation of existence.

Very vivid Tibetan paintings have a curious way of creating a state of mind, if you really start looking at them, that I can only call psychedelic. As you get into the detail, you will find there is nothing else quite like them. If you look closely at one, instead of its becoming fuzzy and fading out, it becomes clearer and more alive. You suddenly discover that what you thought was a blur was sixteen thousand maggots with bright eyes, and every eye a deep jewel. Go down into those jewels, and you will find inside them cross-legged buddhas with aureoles around them and necklaces of human heads. And when you start looking at those heads, by Jove, you see another buddha sitting there in every eye.

The state of consciousness these artists are trying to represent with their myriad details is the dharma-dhatu, the realm of dharma or reality, which is also described as Indra’s net, which I discussed previously. Again, this is the net of jewels in which every jewel reflects all the other jewels, and therefore naturally contains the reflections of the reflections of all the other jewels, and so on, forever. This is an image of the interrelatedness, or “mutual penetration,” of everything in the universe. Tibetan paintings are designed to get you into the mood to understand this interrelatedness. They are totally fascinating.

The possibility of seeing down into something goes on forever and ever. When you work with mantras, you can learn to hear similar infinite depths in sound. Just as you could say that a visual field is rich in detail like these paintings are—like a piece of beautiful Hindu silk weaving that is rich with gold and flowers that you see detail in—you can hear sound in the same way. That is what Hindu music is playing with, and when you get down into that, I would truly call it listening in to the universe. And if you listen to sound, or look at form that way, you discover its secrets.

This technique is another way of investigating life. It is comparable to our scientific investigation with microscopes and chemical analysis, and so on, which looks out into matter, and the physical world. The method of investigating sound and paintings goes in the opposite direction, into the nature of feeling, into the center of awareness, into the self. These Tibetan drawings are representations of the interior world from various points of view. They are drawings of our common interior world, looked at under the influence of the traditions of a culture that is not ours, which, therefore, strikes us as being a little strange. They are showing us a vision of the universe that we haven’t seen before. Indeed we haven’t, because the way we see is influenced and limited by the views of our culture. What you call ordinary is what you are used to. Therefore, by studying other people’s art forms, we are taught to see things that we do not ordinarily notice. When you become used to Chinese or Tibetan painting, for instance, you will say, “Of course. That is also the way the world is.”

A thing looks exotic when you look at it from somebody else’s point of view, but eventually you get used to it. If you move into a state of consciousness such as I’ve been trying to describe, that is not your usual state of consciousness, you will say, “It’s kind of weird.” If you are not prepared for that you might become frightened and say, “Am I going mad? Am I going out of my mind?” Well, yes, you are. You are going out of your ordinary mind-set into another aspect of mind, and that always feels strange at first. That’s why people have difficulty in meditation. When they start progressing they often say, “I’m going to go out of my mind.” There are famous stories about people who thought about the nature of thought and were never heard from again. There is a certain fear of a loss of one’s own ego, and of one’s regular world, where familiar gestures make you feel at home. We all have in us levels of vibration that we are not familiar with, which we are therefore afraid of, and it is these levels we reach when we get out of our ordinary state of mind.

Vajrayana Buddhism is a rather adventurous, not to say dangerous, exploration of man’s inner consciousness. The results of that exploration are depicted artistically in an elaborate system of symbols. To a Westerner accustomed to Christian symbolism, these symbolic representations of innerness will look like representations of heaven, with potentates on thrones receiving homage and all that sort of politics.

Let us suppose that we look through a microscope at the cross section of a spinal column, or at an area of the brain. We would see certain designs and patterns, and they would be based on the physical body. These patterns are equivalent to the symbols to be found in Tibetan paintings and drawings. But they are each moving in a different direction. One is based on the material or formal body, and the other is based on the subtle body.

The word rupa in Sanskrit means the formal body. It is applied to the material world, the world of form, the world seen in the way in which we are accustomed to seeing it. You have a formal body, which is how you appear to any other objective observer, and you have a subtle body, which is the way you feel you are to yourself. If you’ve been on a drinking spree and you wake up with a headache, and your head feels as big as a room, that is the shape of your subtle body at that moment.

There is a wonderful cartoon in which a comic-book character is watching a plane doing stunts, and his neck grows longer and longer as his head follows the plane, until his neck is tied in knots. That is an illustration of the shape of that character’s subtle body.

So when you look through a microscope at a cross section of the spine, you will see a design that refers to the gross body. And when you look in the other direction and trace the senses back until you get to the manovijnana—the central sense behind each separate sense—you find that that process will produce an incredibly detailed experience. And then, if you drew pictures to represent what you had found, you would end up with a cross section or design of the subtle body. We in the West would draw pictures that were different from the pictures drawn by the Tibetans, if we genuinely made this inquiry ourselves, because we have different traditions. Goodness only knows what we would draw. Probably we would make things like the stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral, and crucifixes, too, because if you investigate sensation and go down into it and feel it getting more and more intense—more, more, more, until you don’t think you can endure any longer—that’s Jesus on the cross. So cover it with jewels and make it gorgeous.

All these activities are investigations into the basic sensation of being alive. People are curious about the basic questions that come from being alive: Where are we; what’s it all about? One of the only ways to answer these questions—to find out what you mean by meaning, by asking a question, by being conscious, by being here—is to meditate. However, meditation does not mean thinking out an answer in an intellectual way. It means to look more closely at the subject of your question. You could do that with a microscope, with chemical analysis, and so on. That way is valid. But it has to be balanced by the internal way of going down into one’s own sensation, one’s own consciousness. Now this is not something you are “supposed to do.” It is not a chore or your solemn duty. It is simply delightful to look with total fascination and joy and love at whatever it is that you and everybody else are made of.

Yet this “looking” is a different spirit of religion from that to which we are normally accustomed. It is not a patriarchal attitude, which says, “Go read your Bible! Get down on your knees and repent.” Instead, it says, “Psst. I’ve got something to show you. Look in here. Watch. Take a look.” This is the attitude, and I don’t know how to suggest it except by contrasting the two different approaches.

This is as near as I can get to describing the inner meaning of Tantra. It is an attitude that is common to both Hinduism and Buddhism. It means the web, the warp and woof, the yes and the no. It is the comprehension of the unity of opposites, of good and bad, of life and death, of love and hate, of all extremes in the whole spectrum of our emotions and our sensations.

This is not a teaching for children. You must have some maturity to understand this lesson. A child hearing this teaching would cease paying respect to rules or constraints because a child would see only that anything goes. There is no way of doing wrong if you are everything there is, forever and ever. You can die, forget everything altogether; what would it matter? There is always light on the other side of the darkness. You can always begin anew. This would be a child’s reaction to this teaching. But the adult would understand that even after everything was new again, the same patterns would unfold. Everything would be once again exactly as it was before, just as the physical forces in things repeat their fundamental laws and patterns. As it is in the outer world, so it is in the inner.

Buddhist enlightenment consists simply in knowing the secret of the unity of opposites—the unity of the inner and outer worlds—and in understanding that secret as an adult rather than as a child. It means, really, to finally grow up. To misunderstand this teaching is to fall into a trap. Just as in our own culture there is an attitude among many of our religious people of being against life, there is in Buddhism the trap of following the teachings without understanding them. As Saraha, a Tantric teacher who lived about 1000 A.D., said in critique of both the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy, “The Brahmans who do not know the truth recite the four Vedas in vain. With earth and water and kusha grass they make preparations. Seated at home they kindle fire. From the senseless offerings they make they burn their eyes with the pungent smoke. In lordly garb, with one staff or three, they think themselves wise with their Brahmanical law. Vainly is the world enslaved by their vanity. They do not know that the dharma is the same as the non-dharma. With ashes these masters smear their bodies. On their heads they wear matted hair. Seated within the house they kindle lamps. Seated in the corner they tinkle bells. They adopt a posture and fix their eyes, whispering in ears and deceiving folk, teaching widows and bald-headed nuns, and taking their fees.

“The Jain monks mock the way with their appearance, with their long nails and their filthy clothes. Or else naked and with disheveled hair they enslave themselves with their doctrine of liberation. If by nakedness one is released, then dogs and jackals must be so. If from absence of hair there comes perfection, then the hips of maidens must be so. If from having a tail there comes release, then for the peacock and yak it must be so. If wisdom consists in eating just what one finds, then for elephants and horses it must be so. For these Jain monks there is no release. Deprived of the truth of happiness, they do but afflict their own bodies.”

Saraha continues, “Then there are the novices and bhikshus”—meaning Buddhist monks—“following the teachings of the old school of Theravada Buddhism, renouncing the world to be monks. Some can be seen reading the scriptures. Some are withering away while concentrating on thought. Others have recourse to the Mahayana, the doctrine which expounds the original text, they say. Others just meditate on mandala circles. Others strive to define the fourth stage of bliss. With such investigating they fall from the way. Some would envisage it as space, others endow it with the nature of voidness, and thus they are generally in disagreement. But whoever seeks nirvana while deprived of the innate by attachment to any of these vehicles, these methods, can in no way acquire the absolute truth. Whoever is intent on method, how may he gain release? Will one gain release abiding in meditation? What is the use of lamps or offerings? What is to be done by reliance on mantras? What is the use of austerities or of going on pilgrimages? Is release achieved by bathing in water? No. Abandon such false attachments and renounce such illusions:”

And that is the wisdom of the mountains.