A recent visit to Buddha Gaya to ‘check-in’ with this era’s ur-guru, Shakyamuni, I realized how important is one’s current running narrative. The narrative there of course is straight to the point: liberation from ‘cycling in the cycling,’ the endless rounds of Samsara, which became the ruling, meditative thought, guiding the Shakya Prince to find a solution not only for himself but all sentient beings.
So after many austerities that catalogue Indic yogic techniques of his time—the Axial Age—he doubled-down in a White Mahakala cave at Dungeshwari Cave Temples, not far from the Niranjan River, for six months of fasting. Coming out as a walking skeleton, the Princess Sujata fed him rice and milk, weening him away from austerity. Staring at the river’s water, he learned the correct way was in the middle away from all extremes, and so tuned his senses like a fine instrument in order to ‘play’ them. Then the Prince Siddhartha made a firm resolve he would not get up until he was fully enlightened. That ‘meditated’ resolution was successful because of an unwavering desire and steadfast mind for liberation. And with great effort in his practice, and a clear understanding of that practice, he sat for forty-nine days under a nearby Bodhi tree growing atop a legendary iron ore crossed-thunderbolt that lay far below the surface and he didn’t budge until that universal problem, now a steeled determination, was figured out.
While modern day Bihar, in ancient time the seat of the Pala, Mauryan, Gupta, and many more empires, is now at times the butt end of a poverty joke, its narrative is still supreme: Ultimate Enlightenment. Of course, one has to believe it to enjoy its umbrella-like peace and fully purposed path.
Mescaline and LSD, psychedelic experiments in Mexico, in the mid-1960’s conducted by two Harvard psychology professors, Timothy Leary and Richard Alperts (who later became the outspoken Baba Ram Das) taught me many things. While most of my ‘research’ was from the popular news coverage in ‘Look’ and ‘Time Magazine,’ it offered a fantastically more hopeful, ontologically compelling narrative than the materialistic, “Air-conditioned American nightmare,” as characterized by expat novelist Henry Miller. A ‘counter culture’ that our parents, and eventually the US government, became dead-set against.
My personal interest in Leary and Alpert’s altered consciousness movement was to achieve the perfect state of being. To experience, if only for a few moments, what I imagined to be the pinnacle of worldly existence; a physical and mental unimpededness, all knowing and powerful. I actually had no other ambitions. Needless to say, I was greatly dissatisfied in my ordinary existence, and still traumatized from being a child of a schizophrenic, I had a large interest and appetite for drugs and other escapisms. My first lysergic acid trip was lyrically ushered-in by the Door’s psychedelic hit single, ‘Break On Through,’ a trigger song inducing the listener’s ego to allow the ‘Acid’(lysergic-acid-diametral—LSD) to open new pathways both neurological and spiritual—a brain chemistry fact recently validated by AI facilitated insights.
While my first ten trips or so were mostly very pleasing, I noted with alackaday that I had yet to have an independent hallucination. One that was independent of my thinking and entirely out of my control. Like seeing and interacting with other imaginary entities. I also had not yet experienced completely leaving my body behind to realize my ambition of attaining an unimpeded state of psychological freedom.
These were rude parameters, ‘independent hallucinations’ and ‘psychological perfection,’ only to be outdone by even less helpful slang terms like trippin’, spacing-out, flashing, bumming, flash-backs, and peaking, which referred to the most intense part of a psychedelic experience. The more sophisticated terms like "visuals" or "synesthesia," describing enhanced sensory perception, a purview of this article, I also didn’t understand at that time even though I had experienced them.
Leary and Alperts at least were giving guided Acid trips in a mansion upstate New York where they read their young ‘patients’ the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They later had a Magic Bus, donated by novelist Ken Kesey and driven by arch beatnik hero Neil Cassidy, serenaded by the ‘Grateful Dead,’ their name itself a quote from the above mentioned Tibetan text of the bar do thos grol—or, "Liberation through hearing during the intermediate state." Such references then would be my first Buddhist teachings from those Himalaya sequestered ‘mystics’ who saved much of Vajrayana Buddhism from extinction. How far Western civilization has come—and gone—since then when very little was known, and not much more translated, from the Tibetan ‘wisdom and compassion’ library into English.
There was however a vast amount of Western Literature based on the experiences of altering one’s consciousness and experiences in synesthesia, the psychological state mentioned above which is often referred to more bluntly as ‘a derangement of the senses.’ Since I was a literature major, specializing in poetry, and a practicing poet as well, I read in translation and became interested in Arthur Rimbaud — French Symbolist poet who declared in his Letters of the Seer (1871) that the poet must make himself a “seer” by a “long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” Also Charles Baudelaire, older than Rimbaud, a fellow symbolist Rimbaud called "the king of poets, a true God" who wrote in Les Fleurs du Mal of intoxication, synesthesia, and “correspondences” between senses.
In English literature, I had a strong affinity with William Blake, premier Romantic poet-artist who described visions where sensory and conceptual categories broke down into imaginal unity. For example, a sense faculty ‘giant form’ named ‘Urizen.’ These creations of Blake’s ‘Poetic Genius,’ which he believed was ‘the source of all forms and the true essence of humanity,’ he claimed came directly out of his ‘Imagination’ and not ‘Fancy,’ are so primordial and basic to us all, that while taking refuge in the stacks of our College library, I would start to hallucinate reading his epics, such as the ‘Four Zoas,’ ‘Milton,’ and ‘The New Jerusalem.’
About Blake, it’s interesting to note that Samuel Taylor Coleridge described his work as the "production of insane genius." Coleridge wrote the classic poem "Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment" after (it’s rumored) he smoked opium, fell asleep, and then suddenly awoke. He used as the basis for his fictional ‘Xanadu’ the real-life city of Shangdu which was built in 1259 and served as the summer capital for the Yuan dynasty. In 1244, The Sakya master Sakya Pandita (Kunga Gyeltsen) was invited to the court of Godan Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, in Liangzhou (present-day Gansu, China). He arrived in 1247 and became an important religious teacher to the Prince. In 1253, Sakya Pandita's nephew, Drogön Chögyal Phagpa (Phagpa Lama), succeeded him at the Mongol court and was summoned by Kublai Khan to give him Vajrayana teachings. At that time, it’s reported he performed miracles like decapitating his own head and holding it under his arm until he was begged by the court to put it back. Coleridge’s poem begins, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure dome decree…” this too is reported to have been magically created by Chögyal Phagpa out of thin air.
James Joyce, as many might know, is a modern English literary figure whose Epic Novel ‘Ulysses’ was banned in the early 1920’s by most countries for allegedly being pornographic. He used poetic imagery meshing the senses, with the most memorable instance being the ‘sea-green foam’ passages where the protagonist Stephen Daedalus lyrically observes the birth of the ocean goddess Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and desire). Other literary techniques of his destabilized conventional meanings as in his stream-of-consciousness, linguistically playful, ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ Here’s a good example: “The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder by the fingermiddle of the finfigger.” (Finnegans Wake, p. 353) Conventionally speaking, his hero Finnegan is just ‘flipping someone off.’
Antonin Artaud, a Theater theorist called for a “Theater of Cruelty,” bringing to mind the ‘ultra-violence’ of ‘Hamlet’ in its final Act V. Hamlet's soliloquy of Act 3, Sc. 2, where he says he could "drink hot blood," fearing his rage might turn him into a monster, closely aligns with Artaud and the motion of "ultra-violence" from Kubrick’s movie ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet grapples with the overwhelming power of his own emotions and the potential for his own savagery, mirroring the gratuitous and destructive violence of Alex and his gang. Artaud advocated precisely this: shocking and disorienting the senses into the rawest states of experience.
Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Poets, whom I met and studied with at Naropa Institute, advocated breaking habitual thought and sensory patterns through drugs, chanting, and spontaneous writing. Among his hip poet followers, he was famously known for saying, “First thought, best thought.” This was perhaps first uttered by his Tibetan Guru, Trungpa Rinpoche (known for: ‘The Myth of Freedom,’ ‘Spiritual Materialism,’ and ‘Glimpses of Abhidharma’) was an emanation of Milarepa and a meditation master as well. Concerning ‘First thought, best thought,’ I would later learn that one’s best ideas and inspirations—as well the arising of poetic phrases—come while doing one’s sadhana. The Tibetan abbots (khenpos) say, ‘if you need to remember something, just sit down and start your sadhana.’
As far as visual artists go, I was drawn in college to Wassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract painting, who wrote ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ (1912), linking painting to music and promoting synesthetic seeing / hearing as spiritual perception. During one of my last ‘psychedelic trips,’ a fateful misadventure in Isle Vista on ‘Black Synthetic Mescaline,’ I experienced a perfect seeing / hearing / tasting synthesis, which then expressed itself ‘verbally’ as ‘pasmackity.’ This, while observing legendary lead guitarist, Jesse Ed Davis at an epic Taj Mahal concert, accomplishing a most disorientating sensual derangement and premier example of synesthesia.
Salvador Dalí: “Dali is heavy” as my friend ‘Smythe’ in college, who was well-read and took acid regularly, would say about any Impressionist, Expressionist, Surrealist or Dadaist artist. Dali, the most famous Surrealist painter—who looked like a carnival showman—used dream-like juxtapositions to deliberately disorient perception. He was an instant favorite of mine after becoming ‘experienced’ (as Jimmy Hendrix called it) by taking psychedelics. Immediately after high school graduation, while taking ‘The Grand Tour’ of European fine arts museums, castles and cathedrals, I visited the Dali museum in the village of Cadaqués near Costa Brava.
But while enthralled with landscapes of melting watches draped over incongruent furniture on desolate seashores, as in ‘The Persistence of Memory,’ a radical dis-ease, reminiscent of the man’s expression on Sartre’s novel ‘La Nausée’ book cover, my childhood trauma was increasing, expressing itself once I ‘went away’ to College, in episodes of existential panic and hysteria, assuaged only by alcohol.
Dharmically Interesting, however, is the fact I was just becoming aware of my first experiences of what’s termed in Buddhist philosophy as ‘direct perception.’ I remember having hitched-hiked to Colorado with a drinking buddy (who later committed suicide after “failing his goddess”) and observing a Christmas tree in a home far away from my own as ‘The Christmas Tree.’ As in an archetypal, Platonic form, or ‘Universal’ which expressed itself as ‘the one and only tree,’ while at Christmas or not. After all, what’s ‘Christmas’ to a teenager, self-medicated and half-crazed, senses all previously deranged and now in an unfamiliar American state, but a painful lesson in how we perceive and then think we ‘know’ something.
Half a century later I would read in Gorampa Sonam Senge (1429–1489), a Sakya philosopher of Tibetan Buddhism renowned for his rigorous synthesis of logic (pramāṇa) and Madhyamaka. He wrote in his ‘Light of Samanthabadra’ that we experienced all things first through a consciousness of volition, then as an object of a sense organ, and finally “somewhat later” as a memory. Thus had Dali’s surrealist painting, ‘The Persistence of Memory,’ attracted me as an introduction to Buddhist epistemic logic. Because I was absolutely desperate for any glimpses at what the Roman philosopher Lucretius termed D’natura—the truth, or nature, of all things.
While still an undergraduate, I remember writing a commentary decoding William S. Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ mentioned above. His “cut-up technique” was explicitly meant to fracture ordinary sensory and conceptual processing. He was a hardcore drug-taker on a mission to experience every ‘high’ possible, taking every pharmaceutical or illegal concoction he could get his hands on. He was also brilliant in the way the Marquee de Sade was and was scion to the well-heeled Burroughs adding machine family. I became friendly with his son, ten years older than me, while attending Trungpa’s Naropa. Ginsberg and friends had prayed him back to life after a failing liver transplant. He lived just long enough to give me a teaching about spontaneity in writing. He died not too long after we’d talked at length.
I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil,’ as a college Sophomore, and then some years later after taking Buddhist refuge caught up with ‘The Anti Christ,’ ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ and sometime in between ‘Twilight Of The Idols,’ ‘Ecce Homo,’ and most of his other seminal works. He spoke of intoxication (Rausch) as a condition of creativity, saying art requires the excess and breakdown of ordinary perception. Not too many years ago I remember Zongsar Khentze Rinpoche said he was reading Nietzche and I thought how difficult it must be for a Tibetan reared on Buddhas doctrine of reincarnation to grasp his recursion, eternal recurrence theory. That is, that we come back as ourselves and live this very same life over and over again. ‘The Strange Life of Ivan Osakan’ also came to mind, as its protagonist visits a fortuneteller-guru who points out to him his own recursive ontology. I wondered if Rinpoche had read that, too. It was written by Gurdjief’s Fourth Way partner, O. D. Ouspensky, whom Gurdjief’s later cult followers claimed ‘missed the boat.’ I also had my own run-in with them. Our weekly meetings were recorded and the tape sent to Sabastapool, Sonoma County. When I claimed to have experienced their vaunted ‘Simultaneity’ experience, they sent back a tape saying, “and when you say you experienced Simultaneity, well…you didn’t.”
But within all this drug taking by Western artists, or writers calling to alter or cleanse the ‘doors of perception’ (as Huxley quoted Blake on experiencing the Primordial state), it’s Marcel Proust (1871–1922), who takes the cake, or rather Madeline, in his À la recherche du temps perdu, Swann’s Way vol., “Combray,” where he explores the involuntary recovery of memory through sensory experience.
Proust describes how a single, apparently insignificant gustatory event — a small piece of madeleine dipped into lime-flower tea — suddenly and involuntarily unlocks an entire, richly detailed past. The narrator bites the madeleine, the precise mixture of taste and smell instantaneously evokes not only the memory of his aunt’s house at Combray but a whole panorama: rooms, streets, light, and the psychological atmosphere of childhood. This awakening is immediate, non-discursive, and overwhelming: the present sensation does not merely remind him in a sequential way, it seems to reconstruct the past in full vividness, giving him a felt certainty about those earlier moments in a certainty that surpasses ordinary, deliberate recollection. The narrative lingers on how this present mouth-event both contains and communicates a continuity between now and then: the taste functions as a nexus that gathers an entire temporal scene into the present instant.
Here’s the famous Proust quote: “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.” In this moment, Proust’s present taste acts precisely as what Gorampa Sonam Senge calls a reasoning by way of result: from the present taste one infers—non-conceptually yet with certainty—the prior capable occasion that gave rise to it and, through that causal link, the simultaneously existing forms of Combray. The madeleine thus performs an epistemic reconstitution of the past in the mode Gorampa describes, where “without the engaged capability of a previous taste, the present taste would not exist … and that previous taste itself is the cause of form that is other than that taste.”
Where Proust treats memory’s return as a lyrical revelation of self and time, Gorampa frames the same event as a demonstrative cognition—memory as valid inference rather than mere reverie. Gorampa’s reasoning by way of result models precisely the epistemic architecture of Proust’s madeleine. Proust gives the lived datum — a present gustatory token that instantaneously “re-presents” a complex past whereas Gorampa describes how a present result (a taste) can legitimately establish both a prior occasion (a past taste) and the simultaneously present forms associated with it. The present taste is treated as evidence because its existence depends upon a prior, competent causal circumstance that was itself tied to those forms. Thus Proust’s involuntary memory behaves like a non-discursive instance of Gorampa’s inference-by-result: the taste points back to the past occasion (the prior taste that had the power to produce form), and through that causal link the past scene is epistemically reconstituted — provided, as Gorampa requires, that the “engaged capability” relation is real and non-deceptive“engaged capability” (i.e., a real, operative causal power that genuinely links the present effect to its past cause). 1.
Proust’s prose insists that a single present sensation can gather the manifold of past places and their particulars into an intelligible unity; Gorampa’s task is more analytic but compatible: he shows how valid cognition and inferential/mnemonic relations justify claims about earlier states (and thereby allow the past to be treated as epistemically available). Where Proust gives the lived phenomenology — an immediacy by which past, present (and by implication the continuity toward future selfhood) cohere — Gorampa offers the pramāṇic account of how such coherence can be grounded and defended rationally. 2.
The kind of sensory derangements, or amplification, I experienced during my seminal psychedelic experience—enduring a so called ‘bad trip’ I now cavalierly refer to as my ‘Ayahuasca moment’—led six years later to a to Buddhism conversion that’s lasted fifty-years. When asked what I’d experienced, the quickest answer is that I experienced the Buddha’s teachings. More specifically, those related to the after death state without the benefit of having died. According to those teachings one’s senses, composed of the four elements, dissolve one into another, earth into water, water into fire, fire into air and out of that smoke arises a subtle entity that carries one’s karmic propensities. But in my case this didn’t happened, because I was still very much alive, and instead a detached psychophysical body arose, experienced visuals, synesthesia, and hallucinations in a heightened sensory state from the purely biological one that remained behind, sick and frightened at a noisy concert, with my spaced-out mind snapped back and forth between the two.
At the ‘outer limits’ of this snapping back and forth was a mounting ecstasy whose environment was a sea of luminosity. A kind of lattice work of geometric forms, more rarified than anything Kandinsky ever painted, flashed in and out. There were no walls, no impediments whatsoever, just the increase of bliss into an ever unfolding ecstasy that was limitless. There was absolutely no reference points to anything resembling a self. I didn’t meet any limbed beings in this nirvanic state, either. This is consistent with the Buddha’s words that he didn’t meet any sentient beings in Nirvana. But then, alternately snapping back to my psychophysical body there were unwanted presences, some inviting and some frightening. Suppressing this, I would return to my biological body seated next to my older brother, also tripping, who, seeing I was freaking out, counseled, “You have to do it in your own head.”
So I practiced a kind of rudimentary mindfulness and detachment that felt like I was mentally holding a mountain above my head that was threatening to crush me at any moment. This was my first serious experience of ‘forbearance,’ a term used in the Abhidharma to describe the primary practice of (khanti / kṣānti: patience, forbearance and forgiveness) in a path most explicitly tied to the kṣānti-mārga (“path of forbearance”) in the Sarvāstivāda-Yogācāra system. It’s the phase immediately before the “path of seeing” (darśana-mārga). One must be able to bear — without rejection or aversion — the profound insight into impermanence, suffering, and non-self. In the Theravāda insight stages (vipassanā-ñāṇa), this corresponds to the sixth stage of Jnana, Anuloma-ñāṇa, where the meditator’s mind patiently conforms to the truths as they really are, just before entering the seventh and last jnana, magga-ñāṇa (path knowledge). At this juncture of authentic praxis the mind has to endure without wavering or recoiling from the radical shift about to occur: the realization of the void or empty, Shunyata nature of self and phenomena.
This then is the stock commentarial Abhidharma explanation in three traditions of what a committed disciple, lay or monastic, upon a graduated path of certain development might’ve spent an entire lifetime in preparing for so that at least at the time of death, especially for Vajrayana practitioners who’ve been given a dakama practice, the Path of Seeing is attained. Dākamā and related clear lightpractices at death are advanced methods for transforming the dissolution of consciousness into the Path of Seeing—a direct realization of cessation. This in essence is what Leary, with relatively little or no Vajrayana background, was administering to his LSD trippers during their simulation of dying while under the influence of heavy doses of D-lysergic acid diethyl-amide. While this practice of hearing the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead while stoned on Acid may have had some calming effect—and led to the Grateful Dead finding their band’s legendary name—it’s hardly Buddhism, as preliminary or ‘liberation vows’ (pratimoksha) bans intoxicants. (There is however a tantric dispensation for taking datura ((jimsonweed)), found in a least one tantra, the hallucinations of which can help to point out the illusory nature of conventional reality.)
But Abhidharma teachings suggest the death moment can only yield darśanamārga if prior practice has purified obscurations and the yogin is ready to recognize the mind’s unconditioned nature when ordinary perception ceases. Without that foundation, which in Vajrayana are called Foundation Practices, the same un-ameliorated conditions will simply propel another rebirth. Or, in the case of Leary’s trippers, either a good or bad ‘other-worldly experience’ they would never forget. Whereas, for the ‘non-returners’ of the earlier Sarvāstivāda school, the Vaibhāṣika of the Abhidharmakośa system, a similar insight to darśanamārga arises when death—or perhaps its simulation—is met with unwavering mindfulness and knowledge of impermanence, which cuts the chain of craving before another rebirth takes place.
While the word ‘guru’ means “heavy” in Sanskrit, deriving from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *gʷerə-, this literal meaning extends to a figurative sense of being ‘heavy with knowledge and wisdom.’ My college friend Smythe, with beard, beads, and reeking of Patchouli oil, used the hippy slang word ‘heavy’ in exactly this regard. About ten years ago, when the demands of my career eased up, and with retirement just a few years off, I began to feel a general heaviness when I returned to more sadhana practice and pilgrimages. Not too long ago, I identified this heaviness with an automatic or subliminal recognition of my root Gurus sitting on my head. I still think that now, because of the vows I hold. But I also feel it’s ostensibly the weight of the above discussed forbearance, the ingrained discipline of holding a correct Buddhist view, including the doctrine of Shunyata, requiring a higher ‘second’ patience.
Here are some of those paths that lead to a strengthening of forbearance in order to sustain the weight of Shunyata should it arise.
For the Abhidharma early or lower school, Sarvāstivāda, there’s 1) Accumulation (saṃbhāra-mārga)Gathering causes and merit, 2) Preparation (prayoga-mārga) Sharpening insight toward truth, 3) Forbearance (kṣānti-mārga) Enduring near-realization stage, 4) Vision (darśana-mārga) Directly seeing the truths, 5) Cultivation (bhāvanā-mārga) Perfecting insight and removal, 6) No more learning (aśaikṣa-mārga) Consummate wisdom attained, and then one’s skilled 7) Placement of Forbearance, with the kṣānti-mārga being the moment before direct realization of the Four Noble Truths. Kṣānti then is the poised stillness before the lightning flash of enlightenment. This is precisely the psychological and mythic position of the Buddha facing Māra the night before his Awakening.
Picture this: The Bodhi Tree. Twilight deepens. Siddhārtha’s vow is firm: “Let my blood dry up, my flesh wither away — I will not rise until Enlightenment is attained.” Then Māra, the Lord of Delusion, arrives — the personification of every latent defilement (kleśa) and every worldly enticement (kāma). Māra’s armies are not just demons — they are the mental formations that resist the seeing of the Four Noble Truths: Craving cries out, “Live, and enjoy!” Aversion hurls the storm and weapons of fear. Ignorancecloaks the sky. Siddhārtha does not retaliate; he endures. This endurance is kṣānti itself — the perfect patience and forbearance that neither grasps nor rejects the waves of illusion. At the peak of this ordeal, Māra challenges: “Who witnesses your right to this seat?” Siddhārtha touches the earth. The earth bears witness. That touch marks the transition from kṣānti-mārga (the patient endurance of truth) to darśana-mārga (the direct seeing of it).
Here, the practitioner can “forbear to accept” the reality of dharmas as impermanent, painful, and non-self without recoiling. Forbearance here is preparatory and transitional: endurance in the face of Buddha’s doctrine of Emptiness. It’s a radical truth that uproots the ego’s false perception of both being and phenomena having a compounded, impermanent self nature that exists in three times. But the question remains, in relation to the later or upper Abhidharma schools whether all the roots—the existential marks of impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and non-self (anatta), which are fundamental characteristics of all conditioned phenomena—were dug up and the tree of worldly habits completely destroyed.
If not, it becomes like the unfortunate playground of my childhood elementary school where corrupt or inept contractors cut down all the walnut trees and simply rolled asphalt over the surface-leveled stumps. A hideous eruption fallowed my next school year interrupting our physical education for years. Similarly, upon the playground of our karmic continuum, Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism posited Eight Buddhist Consciousnesses: the five sense consciousnesses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch), the sixth mind consciousness (cognition), the seventh defiled mind (manas), and the eighth storehouse consciousness (alaya). This model explains the mind's workings by including a root storehouse consciousness that holds the "seeds" of past experiences and karma, influencing the other seven consciousnesses and the cycle of rebirth. The eighth, all-base-cause-consciousness, the Alyavignana, has a self-promoting double, the seventh, defiled mind (manas), where all the adventitious stains ‘reside’ from karmic habituation, leaving latent canker-like propensities (kleśa), and it’s these kleśa that must be uprooted.
Of that Yogācāra (Mahāyāna Abhidharma system) the path sequence is structurally the same as Sarvāstivāda (five paths). Forbearance (kṣānti) is expanded as Yogācāra distinguishes ‘dharma-forbearance’ (dharmakṣānti) where the yogin tolerates and accepts that dharmas are empty, unborn, and without essence. In bodhisattva practice, this is elaborated as anuttarā dharmakṣānti (“supreme forbearance regarding the unborn nature of dharmas”), a deep Mahāyāna attainment as taught in the Maitreya Sutras, informed by the Prajnaparamita teachings.
Thus forbearance occurs in the same pre-vision (seeing) stage, but is broadened to cover the bodhisattva’s realization of śūnyatā.
Across early Abhidharma, Yogācāra, and later Vajrayāna systems, the moment of dying is viewed as a unique opportunity because the gross levels of mind dissolves. This leaves subtle consciousness, with the three emptiness’s emerging in colored lights of white, red, and then black, illustrating the mind’s intrinsic luminosity, increase of the ecstatic Communication Body, and the near primordial nature attainment of Vajradhara. Clear light (prabhāsvara-citta) emerges, like a son looking for his mother to embrace in a ‘permanent’ transcendence. Ordinary karmic activities momentarily pause and thus direct insight (vipassanā or prajñā) may arise if mindfulness and right view remain unbroken. This moment can therefore serve as a threshold between conditioned and unconditioned awareness—a last chance to “see the truth as it is,” which is the essence of the path of seeing.
In certain Tibetan and Northern Buddhist sources, Dākamā (Skt. ḍākinī / ḍākama, Tib. mkha’-‘gro ma) practices are invoked at death.
They often function as transformative meditations linking the wisdom aspect (prajñā, personified as ḍākinī or dharmakāya awareness) the mind’s clear light, and the practitioner’s recognition of this state as their own Buddha-nature (tathatā). When correctly recognized, this recognition of mind’s nature corresponds to what Abhidharma would call darśanamārga — the first direct seeing of the unconditioned (nirvāṇa). So Dākamā practice at death, achieving an authentic irreversibility, is the tantric method for manifesting the Path of Seeing.
We see Early Canonical Parallel in the Sotāpanna and Anāgāmi Death Realizations
in early Buddhist sources (Theravāda Visuddhimagga; Sarvāstivāda Kośa) where a well-trained meditator can reach higher paths even as they die, provided the mind is concentrated in jhāna or brahmavihāra a ‘place’ where Insight knowledge (vipassanā-ñāṇa) arises into impermanence. Here there is no distraction or clinging to rebirth objects. Thus, if one penetrates the Four Noble Truths in that instant, they attain the path of seeing and may become a stream-enterer or non-returner before death. Theravāda commentaries call this the “path attained at the death-moment” (maraṇakāla-magga)—a valid and final liberation.
The ‘death moment,’ perhaps even if only simulated, as I can attest from my drug induced near-death experience, can yield darśanamārga. But only if prior practice has purified obscurations and the yogin is ready to recognize the mind’s unconditioned nature when ordinary perception ceases. Without that foundation, the same conditions simply propel one back into cyclic rebirth.
Dākamā and related clear light practices at death are advanced methods for transforming the dissolution of consciousness into the Path of Seeing—a direct realization of cessation. For non-returners in early schools, similar insight arises when death is met with unwavering mindfulness and knowledge of impermanence, cutting the chain of craving before rebirth. But it should be noted that Sakya Pandita pronounced without the higher consecration practices of annutara yoga purification practices only emotive and not cognitive obscurations are uprooted. In A Clear Differentiation of the Three Codes, he explains that the Śrāvaka and Pratyekabuddha paths “remove the afflictive obscurations which bind beings to cyclic existence” yet “do not eliminate the subtler cognitive obscurations that veil omniscience.” Only the bodhisattva path, he continues, “purifies both kinds of obscurations and thus attains complete Buddhahood.” 3.
Practically speaking, for Sakya Pandita the implication is doctrinal and soteriological: practitioners who restrict themselves to ‘lower‘ Abhidharma practices may attain liberation from samsāra but will not, by those means alone, realize the all-encompassing wisdom and compassionate capacity of a Buddha. That’s why he calls such practice “limited,” to situate it within a larger advanced (Maitreya-Asanga sutric) Mahāyāna context that places bodhicitta wed to prajñā at the center of complete awakening.
So the answer to my search for achieving a perfect moment was not well-served by taking mind-altering drugs—even as Proust didn’t need to in order to penetrate the secrets of his own consciousness. Rather, the answer lay in changing my mind on the conventional level by embracing an authentic, graduated path to full Buddhist enlightenment. The first step of which is not necessarily to take refuge in altering or cleaning the doors of perception with an assortment of substances—nor by doing my friend Smythe’s favorite: sex, drugs, and rock n’roll. But rather, by sanely taking refuge in the Buddha-Dharma.
So fortunately, in 1977, I met my root teacher, Deshung Rinpoche III, Lungri Chokdul Champa Kunga Denpe Nyima, who out of great kindness then taught for three years a dozen or so of us New Yorkers an extensive—perhaps the most extensive ever recorded—nong sum teaching. This is the preliminary, Mahayana or sutric, exoteric portion of the Lam dre. Those teachings started very wisely with how to receive them: “To prepare your own mind for the proper reception of these teachings, reflect as follows on the difficulty of obtaining such an opportunity: (1) it is difficult to obtain human birth; (2) even after you have obtained it, it is difficult to be born in a time and place where the Buddhist teachings of enlightenment are available; (3) even in such a time and place, it is difficult to find a qualified teacher willing and able to guide you in the practice of those teachings; and (4) even if you meet such a teacher, it is rare to obtain all the necessary conditions for proper practice.” 4.
Later, in a teaching given in Taiwan, he taught that “Contained in the Refuge Prayer are the seven parts of Refuge: 1) the person taking refuge 2) the cause of Refuge (84,000 articles) 3) the time of Refuge 4) the object of Refuge
5) the way of taking Refuge “…thinking that the Guru is the leader of the Path, the Buddhas are the guides, the Dharma is the real Path and the Sangha is the companions on the Path...” 6) the purpose of taking Refuge “…to gain Enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings...this is all contained in the Refuge Prayer…” and 7) “…absorbed into the Refuge Shrine, the aspect of attaining Siddhi or attainments of the Triple Gem.” 5.
He goes on in this Hevajra commentary to give an amazing pith teaching on Buddhist Refuge: “The result of Refuge is understanding that the impure refuge and the pure Refuge is the same. They are both created by your own mind. It is a misconception of your mind. It is an impure vision of this mind and purification of this same mind. When we understand that it is the mind itself that is the true Refuge or pure Refuge because it is the mind itself which is the non-differentiation of cause and result. It is the mind itself which is the ultimate Triple Gem. The ultimate Triple Gem is the mind itself. Understanding the mind is the real non-differentiation of samsara and nirvana, the real non-differentiation of cause and result, it is only a question of [not having this incorrect] perception [but rather having a correct] understanding of our own mind. Our own mind is ultimately the Triple Gem because it is the ultimate truth itself when we see its true nature. When we see the mind as the non-differentiation of samsara and nirvana, we then have the ultimate Refuge.” 6.
Footnotes:
- See verse 9-10; p 87–88 of Gorampa Sönam Sengé ‘Light of Samantabhadra: An Explanation of Dharmakīrti’s Commentary on Valid Cognition’, (translator Gavin Kilty, Wisdom / Simon & Schuster Khenpo Appey Collection of Sakya Classics, 2023.
- See Light of Samantabhadra, p 264–269, index: purification of obscurations
- In A Clear Differentiation of the Three Codes (Rhoton, SUNY 2002).
- Deshung Rinpoche III, The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception,1995, p4.
- Deshung Rinpoche III, Tharlam Sasang Namgyal Ling, 1997, p7.
- Deshung Rinpoche III, 1997, p9.
Comments
Post a Comment