(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - So yeah, I'm just gonna say a few things about Microsoft. Some of you may be very familiar with the symbol of address that for others of you may be not. So we often have a address that for the day before Paranavana day, which is tomorrow. So if you would like to come to the festival tomorrow, Paranavana day is a day when we remember those close to us who's died. And address that for has a connection from this death which I'll talk about later. So often we proceed to Paranavana day with a day devoted to address that. So address that for is the animantime being. So Vajra is the diamond-thundibolt into that Buddhism and diamond is a substance which can cut through everything and not because itself. So it becomes a symbol into that Buddhism but it itself for reality. Reality is whole, unadulterated, complete, cannot be affected. So the Vajra becomes a symbol for reality, for shunya-ta, for emptiness, for truth. And Vajrasatva means beings. So Vajrasatva, which is the figure we have on the shrine here, is a being whose consciousness is totally provided with truth or reality. He's very strongly associated with purity because truth or reality is something transcendent, something that transcends our normal thought processes, our normal emotions, all our conditionals. So he's very strongly associated with purity and purification. He's also sometimes called the confounder of hell. So I'll come back to you also. And he's associated with death. So he is the embodiment of purity. Vajrasatva is a symbol. He's the embodiment of purity. And sometimes he's called the prince of purity. So he's a slightly esoteric and enigmatic figure. He appears in Tibetan Buddhism. He doesn't appear in earlier Buddhism. And he's a Buddha who appears in Bodhisattva form. So sometimes he's referred to as the Adi Buddha. This is a rather mysterious quality of Vajrasatva. He's the Adi Buddha because the Adi Buddha is a Buddha of the sixth dimension, another dimension entirely from the land of the five biddhas, which you might be familiar with. So again, it's just symbolizing that he's completely outside time and space. He's completely from another dimension signal. So I can say these things, but it's really beyond the rational mind. He's a symbol in the way. You have to be open to the symbols over the symbol speaks to you. So he's pure white in color. We hope you have a metal group here, but when he's depicted in a tanker, he's brilliant white, really white. And often does a new white, often made of crystals. He said to be white like the early morning sun shining upon freshly formed cells. So that's something that you've had a bit more experience of this winter, if you wake up early and there's been a snow for you, you have to get there really early, don't you, people tread on it, those are kind of slushy, but if you see freshly formed snow, no one's walked on it, it's really beautiful, a beach actually, by the sea it snows, it's very beautiful. And it happens to be a sunny day and the sun is shining on the snow. So the sunlight is reflected after snow. That's the kind of quality of his light. So he's made of light, he's like a crystal. And he sits on a full white lattice, a pure white lattice, and all meaning that, so you know, a lot of whiteness. His long black head has a compassionate smiling face. So he wears the five dual crown of the, the five jinnies on his head, because he sees it modern into all their wisdom. So often, if you see it better with his tankers and you see this land of the five wooders of the five guns, that just happens, is above in the center. So he encompasses all their qualities in their wisdom. So he holds to his heart in his right hand, with his palm up with a golden vagina, it's the symbol of diamond, the Badger thing about it. Sometimes made of crystal, but often golden. And the Badger in this context symbolizes compassion and skillful means or activity in the world. And he holds it in his left hand by his hip, what's called the Badger again to the Badger bells. Very beautiful silver bell with a Badger handle and a beautiful tone which symbolizes wisdom, sure you tell, are empty. So again, he's the union of wisdom and compassion. And in his heart, again on a pure white letter, sort of a pure white remat, is the deep blue syllable hall. You can see the syllable hall on his little prayer flanks. So that's his seed syllable in his heart. And around the seed syllable and clockwise direction, he letters up, upright or other syllables of the 100th syllable mantra, his mantra. These are often rationally white like moon beams, like moon light, like pearls, like the garland of pearls. So we can visualize him in the midst of a clear blue sky. He also appears at the top of your family with a refuge tree, our own refuge tree. He appears in that symbol above the five dinners, but sort of just floating in the clear blue sky. So he's quite mysterious. He's sometimes referred to as the last image before the image list. He's beyond space and time. He's completely unconditioned, beyond words and concepts, constructions, even beyond symbols. It's kind of quite hard to imagine. So he's a symbol of truth itself. He's the furthest limits of the expressible, a symbol of that which cannot be symbolized. So you can say things that we have to get a sense of what he's pointing to, what that symbol points to. So he symbolizes truth, reality, and therefore purity. He symbolizes the potential of the mind, our mind, to transcend all conditions, to transcend time and space. And as the Dharma, the truth is pure of all conditions. He symbolizes purity and he symbolizes our own inherent, pure, unstained nature, that we, in the beginning is time, our essentially pure, in our deepest nature. So this is not ordinary purity. That sounds a bit like the beginning is there. And I'd put a false-inspective spirit, doesn't it? (audience laughs) A false-inspective, so it's not ordinary purity. It's as bad as that for purity. (audience laughs) So yes, you can think of purity at different levels, but he obviously symbolizes transcendent purity. So it's not just physical, just moral, it's certainly not moralistic. And Banti says it's not even spiritual purity. It's not purity in the sense of something arising, independence upon our practice. So yes, we can purify our order of mind. We need to purify our order of your mind. But Vajrasattva's purity is not any purity that can be attained. We can only speak of it as primordial, primeval. The original spotless purity of our minds. Stainless, sparkling, unsoiled, untouched. So he's as simple as something incredibly positive, very, very positive. So it can of course be misunderstood. I said this this morning in the little introduction, we can think perhaps, well, okay, I'm inherently pure, and therefore what I do doesn't matter. But there's a sort of paradox in the volunteer because on the level of ordinary life, ordinary activities, what we do matters very, very much. Unschoolful actions have unschoolful consequences. Schoolful actions have skillful consequences. And we know from our own experience that that is true. We behave unschoolfully, there are consequences to that, and those consequences accumulate, and they affect us, they affect our states of mind, they affect our communication with others. So on the ordinary level, it's very, very important. But our actions, and the effects of our actions, also arise in dependence on conditions. So in that they arise in dependence on conditions, they are ultimately empty. And they don't affect our deepest bunch of suffering nature. So this is the kind of incredibly positive message of the symbol of bunch of suffering. So the analogy that we can use is, it's like the blue sky and the clouds. Again, I talked about this a little bit this morning. So we know that there are clouds, and the clouds kind of obstruct the blue sky. Sometimes they're quite lightly fluffy. Sometimes that's how our thought processes are. Sometimes the cloud cover is incredibly thick, and we can't see the blue sky at all from where we are, our experience. And you know what that's like, don't you? If you have days and days and days, you're English. I mean, of cloudy skies affects your mood. And you can sort of forget what a blue sky is like or a sunny day is like. But we know if we get in a narrow plane, we rise above the clouds, but the blue sky is there. We can sort of look down on the clouds from the airplane. And the blue sky is pure untouched radiant. It's always been that way, we'll always be that way, isn't it? So clouds come and go, and the sky remains the same. So in the same way, we can imagine our mind as being like the sky through which the clouds pass. So they come and go, and the sky mind remains untouched. So the clouds then are like the greed, hatred and delusion that pollute our minds. But because of the transient nature of those mental states, they cannot be said to be an inherent part of the mind. So I remember, I used to be a bit too out in the lake up in the Breckenbeacons, and it's in a valley surrounded by mountains, and there's a stream that goes through the valley. Sometimes you get sort of mist, a low line mist, and sometimes that mist is quite thick. I remember one morning, it was very misty, and somebody said, "Oh, we just got in the car, "and we drove up along the valley and up into the top of the hill, "and then we got up the car and walked up to the top of the mountain. "We'd be above the clouds. Why don't we do that?" So he said, "Yeah, that's a good idea." And somebody said, "Oh, that won't work." "Just be cloudy." So he's off we went, leaving this person behind. And it was great, you know, that's what it's like when you kind of get through the mist, and you're up on the top, and you're looking down and missing, you're completely a little sky as far as you can see. So it's a very evocative experience, isn't it? It's a very, you suddenly feel open and alive and fresh. Everything's new and you feel free. So we've got back down and said, "Oh, that's really great." And this person, I wish I'd gone, I'll go now. But by the time she got there, the cloud cover was very, very thick. It didn't work for her, so there you go, acting the moment. Hacked on a good idea. So yes, the special purity that's symbolised by Badra Safar is that we are by nature pure, we're untouched by anything. And Badra Safar's purification, because it's also associated with purification, even though what he's symbolising is the things of all his being pure. His purification consists in the realisation and the waking up to this experience. The purification of thinking that we are not pure, that's his special purification. So sometimes I think we can react to the word purity. Purity. Does it fill you with excitement? Maybe not. And maybe that's to do with some aspects of our conditioning. So we can think of purity sometimes, can't we? As being a naive or anemic or weak or goody-goody? It has connotations, I suppose, of innocence, childlikeness, community, or chastity. And I remember a Badra Safar practitioner friend of mine giving a talk on a women's convention many years ago and talking about our reactions to the word purity. And she said to us, you don't want to be wanting pure, do you? You'd rather be read and wild and running around like a darkening, which I thought was quite true. There were moments of agreement in the audience, so we'd much rather be kind of a darkening for the rather than wild and pure. But we come across purity quite early on in our contact with Adam. It's not a foreign idea to us, is it? We recite the precepts in English and we say, with deeds of love and kindness, I purify my body. There's truth for communication, I purify my speech. There's mindfulness, clear and radiant, I purify my mind. So we're used to the idea of we need to purify body speech and mind. And we're probably familiar with the traditional Buddhist verse, cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify the mind. So we do have associations with and connections with purity. But the precepts and that verse is about, in a way, purifying the ordinary mind. And as I've said, the purity is symbolised by Badra Safar, is on another level altogether, is this essential purity outside of time. It is an incredibly positive thing to contemplate or reflect upon that we're not miserable sinners for all time. We can transcend, we can wake up to the truths that we are essentially pure. So yes, we have different associations with purity and it may be that we do have associations with purity of naivety. Actually naivety, if you look in the dictionary, is as a positive definition, it means natural, unaffected, free from deception. But I think we often think of naivety as being not very clued up, being stupid or ignorant or easily taken advantage of or inexperienced. So those kind of associations aren't very appealing. Or lacking in experience. And we can also have connotations or associations with purity and innocence, and maybe innocence also doesn't have a positive meaning for us. Again, we think of innocence as lacking in experience. And I think Badra Safar's purity is a kind of innocent kind of purity. I think if we're in touch with that kind of purity, as I said, if you get up above the clouds and you're in the blue sky, there's a sense of innocence and the sense of everything is new, everything is fresh, everything is open, everything is unstained, there's no past, there's no future, we're outside the time. And this association is freshness and newness in that way. It means that Badra Safar's often associated with the dawn, the light just coming, the sun just breaking, the sun just rising, and how that feels if you're in our beautiful dawn, everything's new and new day ahead of you. So it has those kind of associations, has positive associations as well as not so positive for us. So I remember, I've done quite a lot of Badra Safar practice in my time, although it's not my main practice. I remember some years ago, probably a long time ago, doing quite a lot of Badra Safar practice on a meditation retreat. And at the time, I was struggling with some very painful experiences, emotional experiences, very painful memories from my past and my childhood, that just kept coming back and coming back and turning over and turning over. And I was at Badra Loca on retreat and it was a beautiful autumn and there were woods up there, so there was beautiful sunlight shining through the autumn leaves in the woods. But I was in the shrine room and they're struggling away. And suddenly, these things sometimes just happen, they just have little glimpse of something. I was in my imagination in the woods in a clearing and the sun was shining down to this. The sun was filtered through the beautiful autumn leaves. And at the same time, I could hear the sound of children playing, kind of completely innocently and freely. It was just a sort of momentary experience, but it was as though whatever was going on in my kind of painful experience is how I touched into the innocent state of childhood, or maybe my innocence that was underneath and beyond the conditioned pains that were. And a very, very strong experience, just a moment, actually, very beautiful experience. And those kind of experiences often are very brief when we have them, but they're very, very nourishing, very, very nurturing. They have a big effect even though they're not nurturing. So I think, I'm not saying I touched into Vajrasattva's innate purity, but I think in a reflection of that, I wasn't completely lost cause as it were. Some other part of me that was kind of untouched, it was open, it was innocent. So that had quite a big effect on me and my practice. And that did arise, I think, kind of contemplation of Vajrasattva. So innocence can be a very positive experience. Other associations with purity, well, Vajrasattva, sorry, the santra talks, one of his talks on Vajrasattva, about associations with purity. And he says, well, what about pure alcohol? What about comparing it with pure alcohol? Maybe an interesting analogy, but he says, well, if we associate purity, Vajrasattva's purity was being anemic or goody-goody or weak, pure alcohol is unadulterated, it's not diluted, it's not mixed with anything, it's full strength, it's concentrated, it's authentic. So in a way, you can say that's the kind of purity of Vajrasattva, it's unadulterated, it's not diluted by any condition factors. It's not mixed with anything else, it's not mixed with anything mundane, it's full strength, it's concentrated, it's authentic, it's essential. So in that sense, purity symbolizes our pure unadulterated consciousness, not diluted by any kind of mundane experience, a mind totally focused and absorbed in the contemplation and experience of humanity. So then you get a sense of the kind of purity we're talking about, with Vajrasattva symbolizes being very, very strong, very, powerful, and then able to be very, very transformative. So yes, Vajrasattva is the embodiment of purity, and as I've said, there's a kind of paradox because he does embody that purity beyond time and space, and that realization that at our deepest level, we've never been impure, there's never been a moment because there are no moments when we've been impure, but we do need to wake up to that. In fact, it's not enough to have an intellectual thought about that, it has to be an experience, we have to have an experience of waking up to that. And to do that, we need to create the conditions for that experience, that kind of insight as it were to arise, and to create those conditions, we do need to purify our ordinary consciousness, our ordinary mind, our body speaks your mind. So he both symbolizes purity in that absolute aspect, and participating in a recitable mantra helps to purify our mind, and to overcome our alienation and separation from that purity. So there's this sense, isn't there, there's a blue sky somewhere, or there's our own innate purity, and as goes a moment by moment now, most of us probably aren't that much in touch with them, of course, you can use it when you touch with it little by little or sometimes and other times. So there's a sense that we are separated from, as it would that real experience of ourselves, we're alienated from it, we feel distant from it, and sometimes if you not be touched with something or somebody, some aspect of yourself or maybe some other person, some aspect of them, if you're separate or alienated or distant, sometimes that thing as it becomes frightened also, even the hostile to you, do you understand that? Does that make sense yet? So we start off perhaps not being touched and isolated and separate, and maybe even a bit frightened, and that was my own experience with Vajrasattva for a long, long time. I'm a long-time practitioner of the entire practice, so we've been green, it's nice and soft, and it's in nature, and it's nurturing. The entire is a very beautiful figure, he's the quintessence of compassion, she's a female Bodhisattva, and she's stepping towards you, and she's putting her hand out, and he's very, very kind, she's very, very forgiving, so that was my choice of Bodhisattva. And I just never could relate to Vajrasattva, but I knew other people who we did the Vajrasattva practice, but he seemed completely enough to me, I suppose we mode towards, I just didn't have any connection at all with that figure. Didn't feel if you liked white, blue is absolutely what, my favourite colour, I know it's seven out of ten people, blue is their favourite colour, but it's never been fun. I was used to, yeah, the sort of soft green light of Tara, or rainbow coloured light that she generates, the sort of white light, it's really white light, like real light, very kind of harsh and cold, so that was my favourite association with Vajrasattva, kind of somewhere else. And that was, you know, that, it was like that for a long time, if you knew it was a long time, maybe 20 years or something. And then I was on a series of retreats, pre-ordination retreats, where we started to do the going for refuge and prostration practice, one of the really shocking, and at the top of the refuge retreat is Vajrasattva, and I think I probably knew him for quite a long time. And then I realized he was kind of important, in the refuge you practice white light comes down from the whole of the refuge tree and also from Vajrasattva. And I remember saying to someone, I really, I really don't like white light, could I not make it sort of soft and golden? You know, could I not do that? And they said, you know, I don't know if it helps. So yes, I had this sort of sense of white light being here very harsh, and it's like a neon light. And with that kind of pitiless quality, we're going to highlight every time fault and failure. I mean, I know that's what it's supposed to do, but there's a kind way of doing that, and there's a harsh way of doing that. And I think this does come from my early Christian condition, you know, God sits on your shoulder because he absolutely, everything brings about a rational feel to it, didn't he? So that was my kind of association with Vajrasattva and white light. And this retreat was a month retreat, it was quite intense, so we were doing this practice every day. And I must have begun to, you know, through the imagining of soft golden light, and maybe open up the light coming from the refuge tree in the white light. And then one day Vajrasattva, in the visualization, become very, very alive and very, very vivid to me. And at the same time, I hear voices in meditation. I belong to Joan of Art School's meditation. He voices voices, I just always say, "Now that take us to all the sins of the world, have mercy upon us." I heard this very, very clearly, and I was in sort of shock. I used to say that a lot is a child, but I hadn't said it for a very long time. I've been Buddhist for a long time because I hadn't said that for a long time. It's a Christian, a Christian liturgy, isn't it? So that was kind of a very strange experience, really, for old experience. And over the rest of the tree, I had a number of experiences where there was some kind of, well, initially it seemed to me like a confusion between my Christian background and my present Buddhism. Later on, it seemed to me that there'd been an integration of taking place, but it was quite confusing. Now in the Vajrasattva practice itself, once you've decided the mantra and you've been purified, there is a line that says, "My daughter and my son, your sins, and those, and those of all other beings are wiped out." So there was a kind of parallel, isn't there, a connection? So, yeah, how do we use strong effect when I thought, "Am I really a Buddhist?" "Maybe I'm not really a Buddhist. Maybe I'm some Christian." And after all this time, and I can't remember the other experiences, but I know it kind of, other things happened, and I began to think that when I was a practicing Christian, I was young, and I was very developed for two or three years. We couldn't last very well. And then I completely rejected Christianity for certain reasons, and I became a militant scientific atheist. I thought, "Oh, but there was probably something positive in that, though, that I've rejected." There was a kind of openness, there was a kind of innocence, and quite young, sort of, 11, 12, 13, 13, 13, 13. Something, you know, a desire to kind of open to something beyond myself, and to sort of surrender to something positive, and I thought, "Oh, maybe I, you know, kind of, I shut that off." And even though, you know, I'm a practicing Buddhist, I engage in culture, and I'm in fact, devotion. Maybe this is still something that hasn't come into consciousness. And so that was quite an interesting reflection. You know, I've become suspicious of something. So then, I realized that I had this desire, there was some beautiful shrines in the shrine, there was a main shrine in the tower of the shrine, and then all around the shrine, we built these shrines to different Buddhism-based sects, and the Vajrasattva shrine was very beautiful. I ignored it for a while. And I began to have this desire to prostrate in front of the Vajrasattva shrine, but I realized I had this desire, so it's very funny. Using the Thornbird, the movie the Thornbird, it's very old movie, Richard Chamberlain, in terms of Bishop, and he wears his lovely white frilly 90, and he's lying in front, as they do, he's lying in front of the shrine in crucifixion position. So I remembered that. And that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to sort of lie on the floor in front of the Vajrasattva shrine, like that. So I guess I was a bit worried and cautious. Anyway, I had good friends on the team on this retreat. One of whom was an ex-catcher, and I said, "I just got this early, don't go do it, don't do it, we'll find you a white 90 and go after the poogee and everybody else has gone to bed and just do it, because I'm sure it'll, you know, it'll do something before you'll do it. I don't think I went that far, but I did do it, and then I realised I didn't want to actually prostrate even but it's sense to Vajrasattva." So I did have a feeling that something very important was integrated during that retreat, kind of integration happened. And then, of course, I realised that the white light of Vajrasattva was actually the white light in a really golden light. It was actually very, very soft and very, very beautiful and very, very kind and very human and very refreshing, so, you know, I began to realise that it wasn't the way I thought it was, it was kind. So after that, yeah, I suppose I had such strong experiences. I had to take up a visualisation and Vajrasattva for many, many years as well as doing the Tara practice, and I still do the practice from time to time. So I think it kind of integrated something from my Christian path and it also, it did actually purify something. It purified my misconceptions about purity, I think, about white light rules and what purification rules and irrational goals and so on. So it's just a little story to point out that, I think reflecting on Vajrasattva, in terms of his mantra, can have a very strong effect. So we don't know what that effect is going to be or what's going to happen. To say something about the mantra itself, because one of the main parts of the practice is reciting the mantra, and we've been doing that this morning. We've done four rounds of teaching on Vajrasattva mantras this morning, so it's a very strong experience. So going back to this sense of initially feeling separate or isolated or not connected with one's inner depths, this primordial purity which has been there since the beginning of this time. This is symbolised in the mantra, in the form of the mantra. So the mantra is a kind of journey of reintegration with one's pure depths, one's true nature. So first of all we say, "Oh, Vajrasattva's samayar." And Vajrasattva's samayar, so, "Oh, bond of the adamantime beam." So first of all we just evoke Vajrasattva's nature, and samayar means bond. So we have a bond with him, we have a bond with our, you know, we are actually connected with our, you know, nature if only we knew it is it were. So we just bring that to mind, and a bond, a samayar, is like a contract from both sides as it were. So it's saying to us if we turn towards the possibility of the fact, the truth, that we are essentially pure, we give that central purity opportunity to manifest as it were. So we do one inside of it, and that, you know, purity does the other side of it, as it were all, you know, we open and Vajrasattva will kind of respond to us. So on Vajrasattva's samayar, manupalaya, protector of the mind, or protector of our own true nature, so he protects our own true nature. So we're not in touch with it, but it's still there available to us when we turn towards it. And then we ask Vajrasattva, "Vajrasattva turno-pattishta, stand beside me." So this is a stand beside me. So this is a closer to us, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the same directions, and stand beside me. And having someone that you rely on, standing beside is a very strong experience, even if it's, you know, more than a friend, it's a very strong experience, stand beside me, be with me. And then there's an increasing emotional dimension to the relationship. We say, "Drithole made of our befirm for me." You see, let's not wave, I think. We can wager in and out, I suppose, of thinking that we are essentially pure. We are essentially pure. So Vajrasattva, standing beside us, being firm for us, makes that realization more possible. Sitausho made of our be contented with me, be glad for me. Sitausho made of our be pleased for me, an aracto made of our lovely, deeply. So there's an increasing emotional connection. An aracto made of our very strong, lovely, deeply, lovely, passionately. So, it's not weak and anemic in any sense whatsoever. And yes, we want to be loved deeply, don't we? That's probably our deepest wish, is to be loved deeply, and also to be able to love the best to go together, don't we? So the fact that Vajras sat there would love us deeply, would be a wonderful experience. And when you love, when you really love, you give yourself that you surrender yourself. You're at one with the person or the object or the thing that you love. So we're getting closer and closer to Vajrasattva. Vajrasattva is becoming closer and closer to us, we're being sort of interfused, we're not different. So the next line is, "Sava Sid and Maipraya, grant me all perfections, grant me all cities." So we're very close, and at this point, all those policies of Vajrasattva, Vajrasattva's nature, become our quantities, our attainments, our cities. "Sava Karma Sutra may purify all my karma," and as it says in Ananda's poem, "Let the chain of past thoughts be broken forever," so just leave behind all our students. Go on. Shitham Shrayakuru had made me a better mind. So we wake up to Vajrasattva's mind that the fact that we've never been impure. And then, "Aha ha ha ha ha ha, hold a laughter," which again, Ananda, in his poem based on the mantra, translates as "the light of the unchained mind echoes forever." So that's really, really wonderful, isn't it, that kind of laughter. So you've kind of had this experience, you've just touched into an experience of, yes, there is the central purity. And when you have those kind of momentary kind of glimpses into something, it does have a sense, doesn't it, being outside time, it's always been like that, and you see, "How have you ever thought otherwise?" So it's a bit like you think, "How silly I was to not realize that this was the truth, and how dark it was." All you can do is laugh. You just fall around laughing. So there's a great sense of freedom at that point. And I do remember having the experience of this, again, on a meditation retreat, with good places to go, meditation retreats one day, lots of silence, lots of intensity, and again, we treat it, I think this is Badgerloka, and we weren't allowed to read anything. We weren't supposed to take any books or read anything on those silent, intensive meditation retreats. And I'm an addictive reader, so I took a book. I took the cult of Tara, so it wasn't as bad as you, it wasn't the detective level, anything. But I thought I have to have so much, I can't, did not read anything, so I'll read something, the cult of Tara is about the Tara practice. And I was, you know, the meditative mornings, complete silence. I think I was quite concentrated. And I came back after a whole morning's meditation, and I opened the book and read this passage, which was something about the non-difference between subjects and objects. And I do remember sort of getting it for a moment and falling on the bed laughing, staring at you. God, that's so great. It's so silly that we don't know that or whatever. And, you know, it's just again a moment. And then a few weeks later, when I was off retreat, I was feeling a bit miserable. And I thought, well, I could find that page in the cult of Tara, you know, it's such a positive effect on me. So I get the book, a big thick book. Could I find that page? Could I find those words? Could I find that paragraph? I wasn't in the right state of mind. You wouldn't find the paragraph that, you know, sparked off that thought process. So you have to be in the right state of mind. So laughter, laughter is very, very important, particularly transcendental laughter. So I think it's good when we chant the magic to really, you know, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, go with it. Let it go, as it were. We'll see what happens when we do the period this afternoon." So we're transcendentally laughing because we've kind of seen experience, even if it's only for a moment that innate purity, that we've always been pure, that we're un-sullied and un-stayed. And the next line is, "Bhagavan-sava tatakata, blessed all you buddhas." So at this point, it's not just that you bless all the buddhas, it's as though everything is but a mind. And that point of view, from that perspective, you see to the buddhas eyes, and you see everything as truth. And, you know, again, we have intimations of this, don't remember when we're on retreat, and we've had some sort of concentrated experience. You know, everything seems different. It seems more colourful, you know, it smells better when the flowers are bright. And, you know, so we have those kind of experiences on different levels. And then we say, "Bajama, main one, chaliberate me, o' graduate ones, a badger either barbe, chewy, badger, in my house, some I are, satavar, o' great here, of the bond." So there's a sense of this journey towards that experience. And then a kind of understanding, you're not going to be able to stay there, probably. But not now, not at this point, that's why we chop the mantras every time. So again, you're asking Vajrasattva to liberate you, to be truly vagic for you, to honour the bond. And then you end our whole fact, and lay with evil, and lay with evil. So yes, if the mantras are a journey of integration towards a realisation of our own mission. So because Vajrasattva is so strongly associated with purification, he's also very strongly associated with confession. And sometimes associated with Vajrasattva visualisation, recitation of the mantra, has something called the four opponent powers. So these are quite interesting as ways of looking at the whole process of confession. So firstly, you have the power of refuge. So you go for refuge, you invoke Vajrasattva as your refuge, as the embodiment of truth or reality. So in this morning session, before the session we read a description of Vajrasattva to re-enact that. So you bring Vajrasattva to mind, you bring that bond to mind, and the second power is the power of remorse. So in order to confess anything, one needs to understand the difference between school for one school for what it is that you can confess. So you reflect on your thoughts, your effect on what rises up in your mind, what you would like to change, and not with any kind of guilt, not many kind of irrational guilt, but with a wise, intelligent, objective sorting out of what needs to change. You know, it's very sincere from your heart. And then you can engage in chanting the mantra, and this is called the power of the remedy. So you chant the mantra, and while you chant the mantra, you visualise the nectar of the syllables, the whole and the Vajrasattva mantra. There's this pure white light pouring down and washing you clean until your completely filled with white light. So that's the major part of the practice. And then finally, what's called the power of resolve. So at the end of the practice, you decide to resolve not to do the unschoolful actions again. It's the same as we say at the end of the compassion, verse and approach. I shall not do again. And in some sense, since you know that you will do the end, but the more you say, I will not do it again, it will bring awareness to what you're doing. And hopefully you can eradicate that particular habit pattern at some point, but you will. So that nectar coming down during the recitation of the mantra is made of light. It's very cool. It's like moonlight. It's refreshing. It's nourishing. It's cleansing. It's transforming. It's healing. It's blissful. It's pure-fying. So it purifies all your hindrances, obstacles, and unschoolfulness. And you can visualize this as kind of feeling. All that unschoolfulness is sometimes it's like a sludge or suit. So you can sort of imagine your form of impurities as it goes on all levels, and then the white light just kind of washes it around. So it's a very positive practice, but can have a very strong effect. And the confession can have a very strong effect, purification can have a very strong effect because you're purifying unschoolful habits, and sometimes they're culturing to a quite deeply held, aren't they? And there's a resistance. They put up resistance as it were. So if you do a lot of Vajrasattva mantra chanting, and often people do chant 108 Vajrasattva mantras, which is quite powerful, yeah, it can have a very sort of powerful effect, but it's not necessarily kind of an easy or pleasant process purification. And Bante talks in, when he's discussing the suits of golden light, he's talking about the white light, which is a purifying white light of the dharma. It's as, sorry, the golden light. The golden light enters you because of your practice and because it's always been there as well. And once it's sort of got hold of you as it were, and once you're in touch with it, he says you can't get rid of it. It won't let you go, and it kind of forces all the kind of unschoolfulness out of you. He says it act like an ometic forces you up, so you may, doing these kind of practices, actually feel sick because you're kind of revomiting up. He says this, and it detects you revomiting up all your unschoolfulness. So just gives you a sense of the power of the Vajrasattva mantra. So those of us who've done the 108 Vajrasattva mantras know that that can have a very strong effect, and you know you can start off doing 108 Vajrasattva mantras. It takes about an hour and a half hour and 40 minutes, so it's quite a long time to be chanting. You can have quite a momentum as a chanting. And then you can hit the middle of this resistance and you kind of want to slide down and go unconsciously. You can hardly get the words out of the masses. So interestingly what happens is you undertake that sort of practice, and you're not necessarily sort of thinking about anything that much. We're just kind of trying to try to recite the mantra. Yeah, so all sorts of things happen. It has a very, very powerful effect. But it's worth doing, you know, it's, I think it's a strong practice. I don't know how people found it doing this morning, doing kind of shorter blocks, doing 21, 21, 21, 21, 21, 21. I think that's a little bit easier to kind of keep going. Yeah, so sometimes when you're doing Vajrasattva practice or reciting the mantra, you also have dreams, like when you're having a very sort of strange, not terribly pleasant dreams. It's the kind of whatever it is one needs to purify, you know, it's always sort of semi-consciousness that kind of rises into consciousness. It's a strange nightmare. It's all good stuff. So Vajrasattva is the embodiment of purity and chanting is an imaginal, ritual, and non-rational way of engaging with the process of purification. He's also called the confounder of hell, as I said in the beginning, and I suppose that's because hell, I suppose, there's no endless hell in Buddhism or the attempt to be hell. But hell is the accumulation of the consequences of our unschoolful actions, and that can be very, very painful at times, and we can feel in hellish states of mind that we can really suffer thinking about what we've done in the past. So hell is the most painful state, I suppose, we could be in Vajrasattva, it's the most positive state where he can transcend the most positive state, so he confounds hell more hellish states by purifying more calm. And he's also associated with death, which is why we chant this mantra as a newly dead and unparent of honor day, and why we have this day before apparently by the day. So death is the crucial situation, isn't it? And I think in any crucial situation, any kind of burden, death is a burden, but we experience other bardes in life. Any situation, any experience where our normal securities or the ground we're used to, or the habit pack we're used to, is not present, so that can be in a meditation practice, it can be on the retreat, it can be on the solitary, it can be when we experience loss, when we're in those kind of insecure places, in a way when we're in an insecure place all the time, but we don't all realize it, do we? When we're in those insecure places, often the contents of our mind rise up, we kind of realize things about ourselves, which otherwise we keep down. So death is the crucial situation, so at this point, yes, there's a there's a verse in the independent book of the day, which says, "May the element of earth not rise up as an enemy, may all the elements not rise up as enemies, may my unschoolful states not rise up before me purify my mind." So Virgil Sutton was very, very crucial in Tibetan book of the dead, he's there and the bardo is a positive symbol to open up to. So we need to, in any kind of bardo situation where our unschoolful memories, our unschoolful thoughts arise to go for refuge, to go for refuge, to our innate central purity, to purify our minds and we chance the bardo sat for a month of the newly dead to sort of help them in that process and give them our support in that process because as well as being a crucial situation, it's also a great opportunity to open up to reality. Sanger actually doesn't, he talks about the Bajra Satva's association with death, he doesn't actually say very much about it, he understood this, it seems from a visionary intuitive experience, which he often talks about, he's talking about Bajra Satva, it's quite interesting because he says, he was going to visit one of his teachers in Kalenpom, he was going to visit Jiangyun Kenti Rinpoche and Jiangyun Kenti Rinpoche asked him to wait, so when he finally got to see Jiangyun Kenti Rinpoche, he apologized and said he was chanting the Bajra Satva mantra for alarm that he knew would recently die because Bajra Satva was associated with death, so that was the teaching. And then some time later, I think some years later actually, Bante talks about he's in Kalenpom and he's in his heritage and he wakes up in the middle of the night, he says it's about three o'clock in the morning and he says he wakes up, he says it's not a dream, it's not a vision, he has a sense of waking up and by his bed, he sees as he warm his pit, he warm his pit very deep and in that pit, he's someone that he knew, he died, and all of them come because and he thinks, gosh, you know, he's in trouble, he's dead, he's in his pit and he just remembers this comment that Jiangyun Kenti Rinpoche says, the Bajra Satva mantra is associated with death and he says, well, I must chant the Bajra Satva mantra, so he chants the Bajra Satva mantra and he says he sees the syllables of the mantra form a kind of chain that he wants syllables, form a kind of rope that goes down into the pit, the person, it's hard to imagine what this vision is like, the person gets hold of this rope of mantra syllables, finds up after pit and disappears, one of those strange experiences, and at the same time he hears these horns blowing, you know, a certain cast of people in Campong, who at a certain point in the year they blow horns to all the dead souls, so at that point he's warned, so this is interesting, that's all, basically what he says about the Bajra Satva association with death, he seems to just think and therefore, you know, it works, and from that he's encouraged us to chant the Bajra Satva mantra on paring one day, so there you go, and one of these occasions when I was on solitary and doing a lot of sessions in 108 Bajra Satva Metries, I certainly had an experience which also, for me, I kind of intuitively understand that Bajra Satva's associated with death, so I'm chanting the Bajra Satva mantra over and over again, and I see we have this little kind of meditation, this glimpse, this little image, that I'm standing in front of green hospitals, swing doors, you know, the kind of doors you have on this building, and there's a couple of people with me in green, you know, in paramedic outfits about to go through these doors, and I, you know, was visiting hospitals quite a lot in those days I think, so the doors swing open when you go through these doors, and on the other side of the door is everybody will ever die, so that, you know, I just got a glimpse again into that experience of the Bajra Satva mantra death, so again these things are very, very brief sometimes, but they just open something up, some understanding about the nature of Bajra Satva. So just some thoughts about Bajra Satva's purification, his purity, Bajra Satva's a commander of hell, Bajra Satva and confession, and Bajra Satva and death. So he is a very, very positive, beautiful, mysterious and profound figure, and he encourages us to turn towards that innate purity, which is there, whether we turn towards it or don't, whether we realize it or not, whether we know about it or not, but he encourages us to turn towards that innate purity, our Bajra Satva nature, by reflecting upon him and by changing his mantra, so that we can wake up to the fact that we've never, in our deepest nature, we will be all this. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [ sub by sk cn2 ] [BLANK_AUDIO]
