"I'm just going up into the loft before breakfast" I announced assertively to the long-suffering lady who has chosen to live with me over the years. She looked up from the bits of mango she was in the process of cutting up, a barely-concealed quizzical look on her face. "I'm looking for something connected with Buddhism" I volunteered not altogether helpfully. She shook her head slowly, before returning to the fruit.
Single-minded passion. Focussed enthusiasm. The King of Wands in person. Some people might call it obsession, but I know better. Whatever. It was this energy that drove me to get out the ladder and crawl around amongst the bags and boxes (mainly my wife's, in my defence) before breakfast time."It's not there" I pronounced, as I retreated, dusted myself down and sat down to yogurt and fruit.
A few days later, a thought appeared. The garage! Rusty lock is prised open, wobbly black door swings creakily wide, and I enter. Barring the way is the never-used bicycle. Having negotiated its immensity, I look at the array of boxes, containers, and cartons stacked up before me. That large one's full of decorating and repairing materials that I hope won't be needed before I die. The enormous green plastic thing from Poundstretcher is chockerblock with photos and miscellaneous other stuff of my wife's from the time she lived in France twenty-five years ago. Ah, that's the one. The damp, musty box with the dodgy bottom contains file upon file of notes on lectures, seminars, and study groups on Buddhism. Plus a few books from the era: Protestant Buddhism. Ah yes. The Duties of Brotherhood in Islam. Hmmmm. Everything except what I am looking for. As the box is put back in its rightful spot, the bottom falls out, and years of lectures go tumbling over the floor. "I must get one of those nice new boxes I saw in the loft to replace it" I muse as I slowly close the garage door again.
Dorje Chang. The first time I made a personal connection with any Buddha-type figure was with Dorje Chang. I had a poster, black and white, of a beautiful Dorje Chang while I was still living in Oxford, well before I got 'properly involved in proper Buddhism'. Where it came from I cannot recall, in the same way that I cannot remember why it is not to be found in the loft or the garage - I suppose it was yet one more unwitting victim of my occasional fits of renunciation, always a cause of eventual regret.I surmise that my meeting with Dorje Chang was not an 'accident'. The encounter was a receptacle of meaning which, even today, continues to unravel. Dorje Chang (or Vajradhara in Sanskrit) is the Primordial Buddha, or Adi Buddha. He embodies the naked essence of reality (naked literally in his equivalent in other systems of Tibetan Buddhism, Samantabhadra). Various types of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism enumerate three 'bodies', kayas, of Buddha. The first, which manifests through the form of Dorje Chang, is the Dharmakaya, the pure unified experienced essence of reality. Then there is the Sambhogakaya, the archetypal manifestation. Then there is Nirmanakaya, reality manifested on the plane of flesh-and-blood: Buddhamind Jimmy Smith queuing up at checkout in the supermarket in Huddersfield.
It has always made me laugh. Dharmakaya, the scholars and Madhyamika purists tell us, is beyond description, representation. Cue cosmic, abstract, 'wow'. Yet the meditators, the imagination-saturated artists, can't resist. So there is Dorje Chang, there is Samantabhadra, embodied manifestations in their indescribable magnificence. And they appear either alone or, quite frequently, in yab-yum, ie with female consort in full sexual embrace.
So why did I feel the sudden urge to look for Dorje Chang in the attic and the garage? And, for that matter, what on earth is he doing turning up here at all? The answer, in brief, is that Dorje Chang seems the closest that the Buddhist traditions have come up with to what I was trying to get at in my most recent post: the sense of the God that is not at all like the counterfeit God who appears in the mainstream God-based religions. The source of all emanation, the ground of being. Dorje Chang bridges the gap. Maybe.
Part Two
Like a number of other Buddha archetypes, Dorje Chang manifests wielding a vajra (dorje in Tibetan) and a bell. These are his implements of magical transformation, his spiritual/existential weapons, even. What is special about Dorje Chang is the way he holds them. The bell (his love, compassion, the water element, chalices in Tarot), and the vajra (wisdom, seeing through and into, air, the sword of the Tarot) are held at total ease and in complete equipoise across his heart. There is no fluff around the edges, no qualifying, no theorising the likes of 'you develop the wisdom and the emotions come along for the ride later'. Nope. In Dorje Chang the two rest together, in total harmony. They are, in truth, part and parcel of one and the same experience. Twin aspects which manifest simultaneously, undifferentiated. It's a bit like a balloon bursting. You may experience it as a sudden, loud noise, or as a piece of rubbery stuff suddenly shrinking. Either way, it's the same thing, experienced differently yet simultaneously.
At the same time, they are the primal differentiation, the first splitting, of the undivided primordial wisdom as it breaks up en route to eventual everyday humdrum experience. Bell and vajra; heart and
mind; feeling and mentation; action and reflection; love and seeing. The basic oppositional moment. In tarot it's the twos. The aces manifest the primordial beingness of Dorje Chang; if they turn up, there's not a lot you can do with them. But one step 'down' you have the twos. basic polarity. Most of us fail to live in Dorje Chang world very much, so the essential opposition of the twos, of the bell and vajra, is where our work begins to effectively take place.
Vajra without a bell is a bit useless; likewise, bell sans vajra. I wrote enough about mind with a deficit of heart back in August and September, in my own 'liberation is no liberation' series. But heart without mind is pretty useless too. Dangerous, even. Bell needs vajra. The problem with stand-alone feelings is that they are extremely vulnerable to dirty influences. The person based on emotion is easily manipulated; easy prey for those who would prey. Appeal to their feelings and you've got them! This, sadly, is what I appear to see all around me: well-meaning, good-hearted people who are continually being 'had' by dint of their bells without vajras. Blind - blinded by feelings - and constantly and relentlessly taken in by tales, often tall. Stories in the mainstream media, for example. People's feelings perverted into weird confections through appeals to their sense of Justice, maybe (Crowley wisely replaced 'Justice' card in the Thoth Tarot with 'Adjustment'), or Equality (what does that mean, precisely?).
Vajra does not suggest forming opinions, however intelligent or articulate they might appear to be. Most 'thinking' is just this: points of view based upon frequently unconscious feelings. The people who are 'had' the worst are just these, the articulate, typically 'well-educated' ones, who pride themselves in their clarity of thought. I know, because many of my acquaintances fall into this camp. Vajra denotes more - far, far more - than this. It is original thought, an emanation from the primordial, deceived and deluded by nothing and nobody. It is looking at the warped, distorted mirrors held up to us by religion, politics, culture, science, history, and the rest, chucking the vajra at them full-force, and watching them shatter into a million splintered pieces. More disturbing, world-and-ego destroying, than any revelations of 'inner realities' is the realisation that the world-as-presented is a fiction, a made-up story, in good part specifically designed to deceive. To realise that you've been led up the garden path by the school, the BBC, the newspapers, the stupid bishops, silly Brian Cox and the rest - that's really uncomfortable. No wonder few people still go there. It's part of the esoteric aspect of vajra work. And at a moment like this the vajra needs to be passed on from peaceful Dorje Chang to a raging wrathful deity. Maybe Vajrapani himself, Wielder of the Vajra. I occasionally get it as I'm lying in bed early in the morning. A fury begins to rise up from near the solar plexus centre. It's a total rage, destructive and indestructible, a power that's unshakeable. Its aim: to burn up and smash through all the crap, the nonsense, the lies told my myself and by others. After a while it dies down. But I remember.
Images: Dorje Chang (Keith Dowman)
Two of Swords from Wild Unknown Tarot
Vajrapani
