Post Vajrayana in Kampuchea

Friends entering Vajrayana Buddhism have told me they don’t want to give up too much of their ordinary, worldly life in order to surrender the causes of their confusion and bewilderment. They’re thinking to use certain experiences [memories] and achievements [habits] to increase their realization, and also, to benefit the doctrine. In other words, while changing their mind, they’re thinking not to change their lifestyle or behavior .  The path of Vajrayana Buddhism is said to be lightning-quick, one of changing the three Vajra spheres of Body, Voice, and Mind, but unless it comes suddenly, in a stable fashion, to one while hearing the pith of the actual, fully Enlightened experience, then it must be achieved through a precise, gradual change of behavior, accompanied by the right meditation and right view. This is practiced until one’s experience of all phenomena is changed from the ordinary to the extraordinary through a purified, transformed perception . To actually accompli...

So who was Siddhartha? And what was Saranath, nested in the Gangetic plains of North India, like when the Buddha taught there circa 528 BCE? It was no doubt predominantly Vedic in religion, and the Brahmins were just beginning to cement their powers through the caste system. Tricycle Magazine for Beginners states , “ Traditional narratives describe the future Buddha as the son of a king. Scholars say the clans were actually headed by chieftains who were chosen by consensus rather than by birth.” Further, it postulates, “This gave him [the Buddha] insight that the caste system of the brahmins–the highest, priestly caste–was not the only way for society to be organized.” If one appreciates Karl Jasper’s concept of an ’Axial Age,’ roughly from 800 to 300 BCE (or perhaps as early as Zarathustra, and as late as Nietzsche’s resurrection of him), then during that time, “the mind of this world’s peoples was figuratively turned on its axis, away from localized, trivial concerns, and became conc...

The thing in the beginning that impressed me most about my Guru (Deshung Rinpoche Kunga Tenpay Nyima—were I to actually say his name) is the thing that came back to me this morning wrapped in the utmost profundity. I would enter the shrine room up on 125th St. and Broadway, Spanish Harlem, do prostrations, and observe Rinpoche holding his mala high in the air as he recited OM MANI PADME HUNG, near breathlessly to himself. I was twenty-seven then and had only been a Buddhist, regularly meditating for a couple of years. While I had little realization of the meditative stages, somehow I knew what he was experiencing. Head tilted up, he was seeing in the space before his eyes a palelucent, twilit sky filled with the mandalas of all the deities to which he prayed and recited countless mantras to everyday.  So this morning, up with the sun, after doing Lord Birwapa’s yoga, I started saying my Mani’s like my teacher did, attempting each day to fill the same five thousand quota. Soon I fel...

We arrived at precisely the wrong and right time in the ancient, sacred city of Varanasi, the most holy of India’s seven holiest. Thick and chugged with rush hour traffic, through streets that reminded one of the older parts of Bangkok, that then progressively narrowed into what I remembered as the older looking India, early eighties, as we followed Chaalak’s (an alias that means ‘driver’ in Hindi) GPS. It took us an hour to even get near the ‘Benares Guest House’ at Hathi Phatak Pandey Ghat—one of the more popular, and sonorously named, ghats for locals and tourists—and to secure parking. Then it was a backpack and rolling luggage trek through even worse traffic for another ten or fifteen minutes. The word hermetic comes to mind to parse this leg of the journey, as we were siphoned toward our destination through the narrowest of streets, some parts worrisome to negotiate when as a stuff-burdened pedestrian we met oncoming motorbikes. Not remembering hardly anything from the 1981 visit...

’Michael from Austria,’ as I have him my contacts on Telegram, wrote back after I told him we could get together after my Saga Dawa retreat and he replied: “Have a present retreat.” Probably because that’s an unconventional construction, I thought it a typo (spell correct error) for ‘have a pleasant retreat.’ Deductively I figured out it was not as Michael not only knows retreats are not ‘pleasant,’ but had mentioned that what he gained out of a recent  Vipasana retreat was ‘present mindedness.’ This, and writing in the Vajra Diaries #3, Vol.1 about Vulture Peak caves, got me thinking about the possible difference in practicing Zen and Indian Buddhism—specifically Vajrayana. Let me explain. I missed going to the ‘Zen Site’ cave, which I didn’t know existed until yesterday, while writing in Vol. 1 about where we went after Vulture Peak. It’s said at Zen Site that one can easily slip into Samadhi. The Mahasiddha Saraha, in his Dohas speaks of ‘self-awareness’ as none other than the ...

Immediately after my first trip to Cambodia, July of 2015, I began giving generous gifts to my new found partner and her family, because they were, as my father used to say, dirt poor. Jewelry, motorbikes, and cellphones were distributed throughout the extended family. It was a mixed benevolence on my part, as I felt they too were giving me so much by way of a basic reconnection to both this ailing earth and its needy humanity. By the end of 2017, the balance of my assets from America had been transferred to Siem Reap through the acquisition of property leases and building construction. Around 2019, as a full time resident, I formerly started studying the K’mai language, and since then, I’ve had three or four main teachers. Because of their language facility, they had been my only   intellectual lifeline among the nationals until I started talking with Chinta. Yesterday, I had my second serious conversation with my new friend at his ‘higher end’ cell phone shop not far from my roo...

In relation to the observation of interlinked causes of all phenomena, the nature of numbers is that they accrue in succession at a speed tethered to that of one’s realizing the dependent, simultaneous and complementarily, arising nature of all phenomena. Likened to a magic show, all appearance is the illusion of synced causes and conditions. Know as dependent origination, there is no ‘first cause’ but rather endless causes and effects dependent upon each other just as linguistic opposites, like wrong and right, depend upon each other for their relative existence. Related to this, there is no real happy home to which one can ever return. There is always just a gray one where the problems of self involvement—having given residence to the notion of a permanent self, as well family members, and perhaps pets, struggle for hegemonies over and above mannered politeness—that is, unless there are house rules, akin to the Vinaya for monastics that put others before oneself. A happy home then s...

Was it Guru Rinpoche who said, “Next life, next breath’? Certainly time is not to be wasted, as this constitutes the thirteen Branch Downfall of the  Bodhisattvas’ vows, concerning idle gossip and amusements that steal time from Dharma practice. Further, neutral or even deeds and thoughts can be turbocharged. When thoughts or images of the Guru arise, instantly transform it into Clear Light Mahamudra result. Same with the other jewels, Buddha, Sangha, and Dharma. Don’t say your mantras walking around, saying hello to people, mumbling more mantras and the like. Say them purposely while steeped in their appropriate visualization in front of a shrine or other holy support. The people you do meet while walking see as your chosen, oath deity at  one with the Body, Speech, and Mind support manifesting simultaneously. Then instantly experience them as the Clear Light dawning. Why nurse the desire of doing Vajrayana with its result of nonduality, when it can be realized instantly with...

Here are three observations and recommendations about advanced Vajrayana practice once one has completed their yidam retreat or retreats. 1) Continue practicing a large number of mantras, each day, especially from the practices one knows by heart. Mantrayana functions at different levels for those of high, middling, and low ability at difference stages in the lifetime of one’s practice. It becomes increasing productive of good results, as one diligently repeats them, and encourages the   effortless Mahamudra experience. 2) Recognize there is sharp drop-off from one’s wellbeing and mental stability if you damage your samayas. The admonition that one will experience suffering, and turned downward, one will experience the hells, should be taken as an absolute due to the infallibility of deeds and their results. 3) Become versed in doing drup chods (longer sadhanas facilitating pujas with self-initiation, torma and feast offerings) to complement and stabilize one’s more ambitious accum...

I’ve been observing the holy career of my Vajra Master, Vajradhara Kyabgon Gongma Trichen Sakya Rinpoche (H.H. Sakya Trichen 41st), somewhat close-up since December of 1977. At that time he had just come to New York for his first time, where he bestowed numerous initiations, among them, Hevajra and Sapan Manjushri. I believe he made his first trip to America, a year or two earlier, where he flew to Los Angeles. At that time, and for decades earlier, it had been a magnet for ‘the black saints’ or gurus of India and their self-realization techniques, such as Yogananda’s, while Tibetan gurus, pre-diaspora, were still ensconced in their ‘Tibetan Lamaseries.’ There he was visited by one such patron, who happened to be, most auspicious and coincidently, my family’s photographer, Arthur Blakley. Or  ‘Mr. Blakley,’ as I remember him being called in a rather respectful tone. Some of his portraits of my family are of that staid, formal variety the same as one I have of His Holiness. So there...

This morning I had a rare Clear Light wake-up. That is, a pure awareness arising from an undisturbed, primordial consciousness, synced with the accumulation of daylight. Its single-pointedness is hard, clear, and solidly blissful. It could be that after last night’s meditation in which my mind went blank, my head bent, and over an hour passed in a seeming few minutes, that this was a post-meditation restoration of awareness within a mindful setting. After Birwapa’s yoga, much writing followed, as witnessed above, and in truth these two experiences of arising of Clear Light Primordial Wisdom and the Vajra activity of diary keeping are one—except when disturbed ( not Akshobya ) by ‘a little bit of thinking’ which is both the experience of samsara and the fear while dying. This kind of writing action comes not too much from one’s preferences and conventional self, but from one’s three sets of Dharma vows. At the time it seems as if someone else were present, composing effortlessly—well,...