Thanks very much, Paramahram Bandhi. It's very good to be a popular graph. It's a long time since I've been on an immense event, and I'd forgotten how good they were. It's been very good to see friends old and new. So this morning, I'm talking about Vajrapani. The title of the talk is "Vajrapani, Energy Unlimited." And as you'll have heard already from Paramahram Bandhi, who's in a way been giving you bits of my talk sort of over the last day and a half in his introductions and things, the Badger is this very powerful implement. It has the qualities of a thunderbolt. One of its qualities is that when you throw it, it always returns to your hand. So I'm going to start, actually, not by talking about thunderbolts, which return to your hands. I'm going to start by talking about darts. For those of you who haven't spent much time in English, pubs, darts is a sort of English pub game in which it's a bit like kind of being an archer, but on a very small scale, you have a sort of feathered projectile which you throw at a board from a distance of about eight feet. But a few years ago, some researchers did an experiment in which they took some people and they divided them into three groups. So it's a bit like if I were to divide you into three groups. So this side of the room, I'd ask you to do nothing whatsoever, particularly definitely not to play darts for the next six weeks, say. In the middle of the room, I'd ask you to practice playing darts every day for a certain period of time. And then this side of the room, I'd ask you not to play darts, but ask you to imagine yourself. For the same amount of time, these people are actually playing. Just imagine yourself in the OK. Double top. Trouble 19. Yeah. And at the end of the period, say, six weeks, have a line, it is, I get you back together and I test each of you, each of you different groups to see if you'd improved. And you people over here, well, you haven't improved, but I suppose I can't expect you to have done. You haven't been playing. You haven't had anything to do with it, so why should you? You people in the middle, you've been playing away. So I think if you're the same as the people that they tested, you've improved by about 27% or something in this period of time. You probably haven't played much darts before, so you're starting from quite a low base. Now, the interesting thing is that you people over here, who've just been thinking about playing darts, you've also improved. You've improved by almost as much as these people who are actually doing it. You've improved by, I think, about 22%. Now, I was very sort of struck by reading about this. Makes me think quite a bit about how I learn a new skill. Now, usually, firstly, I sort of study it. Then I practice it. But there is also, usually, if there's anything that I'm interested in, almost involuntarily, there's an aspect of sort of mental rehearsal. I remember when I was a kid, I was really into playing football, and I play at every conceivable opportunity. But also, a lot of my time when I wasn't playing, in a city and class and stuff at school, I'd be imagining myself playing. I'd be imagining myself being Jimmy Greaves or Bobby Charlton, or whoever my hero at the time was. And that certainly wasn't sort of wasted time. Well, it was wasted time if I was sitting in class and supposed to be studying history. But it actually didn't have quite an effect on how I played football. So, this sort of mental rehearsal is very sort of common now. It's like if you're a top athlete, where it's one of the things that you do. You spend a lot of time just seeing yourself turning up at the stadium for your event, getting changed, going to the starting line. You imagine the crowd. You imagine yourself when the starting gun goes. You see yourself running that perfect race. You see your name at the top of the list, on the scoreboard. You see your time. And you just keep doing that over and over. And it does definitely seem to be very beneficial. So, the interesting question is, how does all this mental rehearsal apply if we're trying to learn the skills of the Dharma? If we're trying to learn the skills of wisdom and compassion or ethical action or awareness. So, in general, if we're trying to develop a positive quality Buddhist tradition, it says, well, there's three things we can do. Suppose we're trying to develop Viriya. Supposing we're trying to develop energy in pursuit of the good. Well, firstly, we can study, we can come to understand what Viriya is, we can read about it, we can listen to talks like this one. And then secondly, it's just that we go away and we really try and clarify what we've heard. We really try to reflect on what we've heard, see, how far it's true for us, what questions we've got. We try to really resolve those until we're quite definite about what it is we're doing and why we're doing it and we're really behind it. And then lastly, we practice it in all sorts of ways. So we put more energy into developing skillful mental states and doing away with unskillful mental states. But we can also use mental rehearsal. We can just imagine ourselves acting with more energy. We can imagine ourselves really putting ourselves into situations with the whole of ourselves and acting in skillful ways. We can imagine what it would be like if we had a great deal of energy moving in the direction of enlightenment. So, as we'll see, this all connects with Vajrapani. And Vajrapani is a figure who's particularly associated as we've heard with Viriya, with energy. Not just any old energy, but energy in pursuit of the good. You could say that energy is the link between your faith, your heart's deepest wish, what you really believe in, in the most positive way, and your actions. If you really start contacting your heart's wish, well then, you want to carry that into action. And the link that does that is Viriya. And Vajrapani is a figure who appears in Buddhist Tantra. Buddhist Tantra is a current of ideas and practices that arose within the Buddhist tradition about 750 years, say, after the time of the Buddha. And it was subsequently carried over from India into Tibet and Japan. And there are a large number of Tantric texts. And Vajrapani is particularly associated with those Tantric texts. He's, according to the story, he's the guardian of those texts, and also the collector and assembler of those Tantric texts. So he's known as the Lord of Secrets in some texts. And this Tantric current within Buddhism became very successful. It became a very major part of the Buddhist tradition. Mainly, I think, because it had methods for addressing deep levels of consciousness very directly. It used things like mantra and mudra visualization. Some of those methods involved mental rehearsal, you could say. So just as top athletes would visualize themselves preparing and then engaging in their event. So male and female Tantric practitioners rehearsed gaining enlightenment. They enlisted the support, you could say, of their unconscious minds. So just as the athletes try to get that message into deeper levels of their consciousness, so that automatically, as it was spontaneously, when the starting gun goes, they launch into their best possible performance. The Tantric practitioners were trying to get the message of enlightenment through to deeper and deeper levels of the mind, deeper and deeper levels of consciousness. And I think if you practice the Dharma over a period of time, whenever your practice starts going well, you discover that there's this kind of dialogue going on between what you think of as you, sort of everyday you, your everyday self, and deeper levels of your being, deeper levels of your consciousness. It's almost like there has to be a kind of collaboration between our everyday selves and the sort of deeper aspects of ourselves. And it's very important to try to pay attention to this, to messages that we get from those deeper levels and dream intuition and meditation, how it may come, and sort of promote that dialogue. We need to really try to listen to what's going on, beyond what we're usually aware of, and also to dwell on helpful symbols, because symbols are one of the ways in which we communicate with those deep levels of consciousness and in which they communicate with us. So Buddhist Tantra used sort of mental rehearsal, and this mental rehearsal was known as taking the goal as the path in Buddhist Tantra. It was called taking the goal as the path, because you imagined yourself as already having achieved the goal of wisdom and compassion and so on. You imagine that as if it were present right now, and you did that repeatedly. Until eventually, just through that repeated imagining of yourself as you could become, as you potentially are, that became, more and more, your present reality. So, if you were practicing in this way, you could imagine yourself having the good karma to be in the presence of a Buddha, or a great Bodhisattva, say. You could imagine that you'd actually arrived at the level where you were in direct communication with them, and they empowered you. You could actually imagine yourself having become a Buddha, having all the powers of the enlightened mind, and using those powers to help endless living beings. Because the Buddhist Tantra was based firmly on the Mahayana, on the Bodhisattva ideal, where you're not just concerned with gaining enlightenment for yourself alone. You see yourself surrounded by suffering, and you really want to help all living beings. But then you think, well, as I am at the moment, well, what can I really do? I hardly understand what life's about. I don't understand what it means to be a human being, really. So, what I need to do, if I'm really going to help, is I need to develop the wisdom and compassion of a Buddha, and then I can really be of some use to other people, then I can really be of help. So, the Tantra was very much based on that Bodhisattva ideal. So, you'd rehearse that transformed mental state. You'd imagine yourself as a Buddha or Bodhisattva. You'd see yourself doing what your heart's deepest wish really came down to, which was understanding the nature of things, and being able to help other people to understand too, so that they put an end to the suffering that they cause themselves. And you might even see the world as a Buddha would see it. You'd see it completely transformed. So, everything would become beautiful. Everything would become rich. It would be as if you were living in a mandala, a sort of beautiful, kind of rich palace. Everything you heard would be like mantra. Everything would be sort of transformed, perfect sound. And you'd also aim to experience mental states flowing through your mind, as though there were thoughts in the mind of a Buddha, completely unchained, completely free, completely onilous, no grasping, no sticking on to things, no kind of hanging on to them, like grim death, as we so often do. You just allowed this flow of loving, compassionate, wise mental states. So, people would just put themselves into that world. They'd rehearse being a Buddha or Bodhisattva. Now, although the principle of mental rehearsals is the same, whether you're trying to be a 100-meter runner, or if you're trying to gain enlightenment, the kind of transformation that the Tantra that Buddhism is trying to accomplish is a lot deeper and more radical than even the top athletes trying to achieve. If you're practicing the Dharma, your aim, however long it takes, isn't simply to have more physical speed, more stamina, more precision in your movement. Buddhas who practice these tantric methods were aiming to bring about an extraordinary transformation in how they use their minds. So how do you pit it to yourself? Something that really is an extraordinary transformation, a radical transformation of your mind. It's not so easy, it's not so obvious, it's not as simple as just seeing yourself, rescuing the tape at the end of your 100 meters. Because those deep levels of your mind work in very tangible, very concrete ways. They respond to pictures and to symbols. So you really need to make whatever you're trying to achieve in terms of the Dharma very tangible for yourself. If you just have a sort of sense of, well, what am I trying to do? Well, I'm trying to gain enlightenment. Well, actually nothing much will happen. Maybe all very good, but it's so kind of vague and intangible that it won't generate much emotional energy. You won't actually be able to get much of yourself behind that kind of thing. So what are you really trying to do? It's always good to be clarifying this for yourself in terms of your practice. We're always kind of working to produce this particular kind of outcome, this particular kind of mental state. We're working on this level in order to arrive at that better, that more satisfying, that more fulfilling mental state. Because it will make us happier, it will have a good effect on those around us. So the more we can make that concrete and clear and see it for ourselves, the more definite we can be, the more effective our practice will be, the more emotional energy we'll produce. So how do you picture and feel being enlightened? Well, in the early history of Buddhism, a lot of people just saw themselves in the presence of the historical Buddhist, Shakimuni. They just imagined he'd been the teacher who started the whole tradition. So they just imagined themselves in his presence and feel what it would like, be like to have been in the presence of Shakimuni and just feel those qualities. But as time went on, the ways in which people envisioned those enlightened qualities became much more imaginative, and they acquired deeper and deeper symbolism. So because of that, in Buddhist tantric art, you find Buddhas of all kinds. You find Buddhas of different colors. They can be green or blue or red or yellow. They can be holding all kinds of symbolic emblems, lotuses, mantras, poor birds, all kinds of things. However, you may find figures with many arms or many heads. So when you first come across these figures, I know when I first came across them, you think, well, what on earth is that Bodhisattva doing with those nine heads? Or all those arms? But whenever you look at a figure like this, you have to think, well, they're all designed, well, not designed because these figures tended to appear spontaneously at the depths of people's meditation. But they're all aimed, let's say, to help you to develop a particular spiritual quality. So if you come upon a piece of Buddhist tantric art, and you see some kind of strange figure with so many heads and so many arms and so on, well, the question you need always to ask yourself is, what would I feel like if I looked like that? And the first answer may be, well, I'd feel pretty weird if I looked like that, but if you go further into it, the question is, well, no, what mental state is that form trying to express? What's it trying to communicate? What quality of enlightenment is it trying to get across? So if you have a figure with tremendous number of arms, say, well, why would you want all those arms? Well, you'd want all those arms in order to just reach out to more and more and more living beings, just to be able to help them in whatever way you could. So just ask yourself, what quality is that figure trying to express? So over the centuries, a great flowering of these tantric meditations and visualizations took place. And the thousands of these visualizations were produced, which enabled people to take the goal as the path, either to imagine themselves being in the presence of a Buddha through visualizing that figure, as it were in front of them, or to imagine themselves as a Buddha through becoming that figure. But as these thousands of different meditations and figures appeared, it became a bit of a jungle. It became really chaotic. So there needed to be some kind of ordering principle for it all. And various ways of ordering these figures appeared. And particularly, there was an organizing principle under which all the different figures were arranged into five Buddha families, five different coolers as they were called, each of which had a particular Buddha at its head, and each of which had particular qualities that are embodied. But earlier on, before that system fully developed, there was a simpler arrangement, whether there were just three Buddha families. And these were based on the three main aspects of the enlightened mind that people were trying to develop. So there was wisdom, which is, you could say, almost the distinctive aspect of Buddhism. There was compassion, and there was energy in pursuit of the good. And the central family was the Buddha family, which was associated with wisdom. Then you had the Lotus family, which was associated with compassion, and the Vajra family, which was associated with energy. And each family had a host of associations to it, and different figures involved with it. Each one had a symbolic Buddha at its head. It had an emblem, such as the Lotus or the Vajra, a colour, some particular quality of mundane existence, and also there was a particular type of meditation that was associated with it on a particular aspect of reality. And in the case of energy, which is what we're concerned with this morning, the symbolic colour was blue. And the archetypal Buddha was called axopia, which means the imperturbable one. And the aspect or the mark, which is common to all, mundane existence, which it focused on, was impermanence. The fact that everything changes and just keeps on changing. It's the one thing we can really rely on is the fact that everything changes. Usually we're trying to find one thing which will stay the same, which we can rely on. If we just turn things around and rely on the fact that everything changes, then suddenly our lives become so much easier. And the friction between how we think they are and how they really are reduces a lot. And that friction is what we call dukkha or suffering. So, everything changes, everything is impound. That was the main sort of quality on which this family focused. So, the fact that everything changes is a dynamic quality. And there was a particular meditation, in particular samadhi as it's called, a deep meditation, which you arrived at through really contemplating deeply the fact that everything changes. This meditative state was known as the signless meditation. So, in that it was signless because if you see everything as dynamic, if you see everything as a continuing flow, you can never sum it up in any particular concept. It's constantly, whenever you think you've got it summed up in a concept, it changes, it develops, it moves on. So, there are no concepts which are really applicable to how things finally are. We need to use concepts and labels to help us live our lives. But if we ever think right, I've got it summed up now, this is how things are. The answer to life, the universe and everything is 49 or whatever. Then immediately, life transforms again and you find that you're chasing, if you're always chasing the game, everything is constantly moving on. You can never pin down reality with words and labels. And the emblem of this family was the Vajra. And the word Vajra has all kinds of meanings in tantric Buddhism far more than I could go into now. I've explored some of them in that little booklet on the Vajra and Bell that I wrote recently, which is available going cheap in the Padma Loka bookshelf. I don't know whether to be pleased or slightly sort of disheartened. Please, I'll be pleased. Okay, good idea. So, on one level, the Vajra is just a ritual sector that you can hold. Often in tantric ritual, you hold the Vajra in your right hand and a Vajra bell, a bell with a Vajra handle in your left, and together they symbolize wisdom and compassion perfectly united. But although, in a way, the Vajra is this piece of metal designed in a particular way, it has all the symbolism of a diamond. And the thing about diamond is that it's the hardest thing you can find in nature. A diamond will cut all other stones, but it will never be cut itself. So, the Vajra symbolizes a state of mind, which is unshakeable, which is imperturbable, which is never affected by anything mundane at all. But as well as having the nature of a diamond, the Vajra also has the nature of a thunderbolt. So, there's this tremendous thunderbolt energy, also incorporated as it were in the Vajra. And again, we're talking about something which symbolizes states of mind. We have to remember this again and again and again. So, you have the diamond and the thunderbolt. And I think in meeting the Buddha somewhere, I talk about how when I was young, you'd have this sort of playground riddle about what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. When you're about eight, you sort of stand there in the playground. You think, right, there's an irresistible force, but there's an immovable object. And you try to sort of work out what happens. Well, the Tantric answer to that is, well, the two just sort of fuse together and they become Vajra. You have this immovable object which has all the qualities of the diamond. So, you have a mental state which is completely immovable, unperturbable, but also it has all the qualities, all that dynamic power and irresistible force of the thunderbolt. So, the Vajra is irresistible, completely unstoppable, nothing mundane can stand against it. It smashes through all hindrances, all obstacles, and particularly all the ignorance that causes us suffering. And at the same time, it's completely stable and unaffected itself. So, very simply put, this is the main emblem of the Vajra family. And the main Bodhisattva of this family, as we've seen, is called Vajrapani. So, here's the main embodiment of wisdom and compassion in this family, particularly compassion, because he's a Bodhisattva. And Vajrapani is the holder of the diamond thunderbolt, the holder of the Vajra. So, there were these three Buddha families, there was the Buddha family in the middle, the Lotus family and the Vajra family. But over time, the Vajra family rose in importance. In fact, if you read the history of Buddhist Tantra, it's a bit like reading the history of a mafia family, who managed to get some very powerful commandments smuggled in from somewhere, and they gradually just take over some city or other. Because the Vajra is such a powerful symbol, such a powerful weapon against ignorance and inertia, spiritually, you could say, that the Vajra family became increasingly central in the Buddhist Tantric tradition. And eventually Akshopya, a blue Buddha, came to move into the center of the mandala and virochana, in the Buddha family, made way and moved into the east. So, most of the major Buddhist figures in the later Buddhist Tantra are associated with the Vajra and the Vajra family. And similarly, just as the Vajra family rose and rose, Vajrapani too, rose from humble beginnings, as it were. As Paramavan mentioned, he first makes his appearances in the early Buddhist texts as a yaksha, a very powerful nature spirit. Maybe a bit like an ogre, although I'm not quite sure what an ogre is. I mean, I won't say that. But yes, a very powerful nature spirit. And he quite often appears in the early Buddhist texts as a sort of guardian of the Buddha. We heard a reading the other night where it's of one story where he appears. There's another Sutra called the Ambata Sutra, where young Brahmin man comes to the Buddha and starts questioning him. And at the time, you'd already got the beginnings of the caste system, which has cast its shadow over India down to the present day as Dave was reminding us. So, this young Brahmin man feels quite superior to the Buddha because the Buddha is only a kshatriya. He's only of the warrior caste. So, this young man, Ambata keeps making slighting sort of comments about the Buddha for being a kshatriya of the sharkions that the Buddha comes from. In fact, he describes them as menials of sort of low people. And the Buddha just answers him very politely and patiently as Buddhas do. But eventually, I think he decides that Ambata really is causing himself a lot of pain through seeing things in this way. So, he says to Ambata, "Ambata, isn't it true that actually your family, your Brahmin family, are originally descended from a sharkion-serving girl?" And Ambata doesn't answer because he knows it's true. So, he keeps silent. And the Buddha asks him a second time, and Ambata keeps silent. And the Buddha asks him a third time. And, yes, the tradition seems to be that if you don't answer a question very reasonably put to you by a Buddha, even up to a third time, there is some danger that your head may split into pieces, whatever that may mean. So, at this point, Ambata looks up above the Buddha's, where the Buddha is, and there is this figure of Bajira Pani, as he's called in the Palikana, Vantra Pani. This very powerful figure with holding a Vantra waiting to strike. So, Ambata decides that perhaps he will answer the Buddhist question after all. Now, in a way, I find it hard to know what's going on in that story. It may just be that in a way, Vantra Pani symbolizes the sort of positive humiliation that some people felt when they came into contact with the Buddha and their pride was sort of shattered by his clarity and the truth which he just totally embodied from head to foot. People sort of come to the Buddha with all sorts of views, all sorts of positions. And the Buddha's, in a sense, not taking any position at all. And the Buddha's just relating to Ambata with kindness. But in a way, if you're standing back from the Buddha, you may find life rather difficult, even though the Buddha is actually being very kind to you. And at times in the Palikana and Bajira Pani seems to be a kind of, yes, a sort of guardian of the Buddha, a bit like his diamond, his genius, almost in the Roman sort of sense of the term. He seems to be a symbol of the Vajra-like intelligence of the Buddha that's just going to annihilate the delusion, the wrong views, that cause the suffering of the person who's questioning him. But although he starts off as this yaksha, as this powerful sort of nature spirit, Vajra Pani becomes more and more important as Buddhism develops, until eventually he comes to be seen as one of the great Bodhisattvas in the Tantric tradition, along with Avalokitesh, Ramanjushri, and so on. Now, we don't want to take all this too literally, it's not so much that there was, you know, there was this sort of nature spirit who in some sort of way, you know, sort of got promoted in some kind of celestial hierarchy to get us to sit on a lotus, you know, in some heavenly world. It's more like there's a sort of current spiritual energy which sort of starts from the Buddha that expresses itself through different forms. And as that current of energy takes forms that people find more and more helpful to them in their development, so that figure becomes more and more important. And Vajra Pani as a Bodhisattva takes on several different forms. So, he's got a very peaceful form, we got an example, next to Matthew on the shrine. Often the peaceful form is quite a light blue colour. So he's very young, maybe 16 years old, very radiant, and often in a very relaxed posture. Sometimes what's called sort of royally is where he's almost just leaning in a completely sort of easy sort of way. We often think of energy as something where you kind of have to screw yourself up and find your energy. It's very good to just look at the peaceful form of Vajra Pani because he's completely relaxed, he's holding the Vajuri, he's holding a lotus on which the Vajra is. So there's all that power, all that energy there. But it's being expressed through a state of mind where there's no tension, no forced willed effort whatsoever. It's just perfectly relaxed. So we have the peaceful form of Vajra Pani. But very often the form of Vajra Pani that you come upon is a rockful form and there are quite a number of these. Vajra Pani has outer inner and secret forms. But unfortunately we only have time for the auto and this morning. So, once a look at the common form, the common rockful form of Vajra Pani. So like all these figures, this form of Vajra Pani appears in a vast blue sky. And then within that there's a lotus flower because all these symbolic Buddhist and Bodhisattvas have grown out of the mud of mundane existence into the sunlight of enlightenment. And then there's a sun disk or sometimes one foot of Vajra Pani is on a moon disk and the other is on a sun disk. But more usually there's a sun disk on which the figure stands and then finally the figure of Vajra Pani himself. So he's a very powerful male figure in his dark blue in colour. Dark blue is often associated with wisdom in Bodhis Tantra. And he's very wrathful looking indeed. He looks really ferocious. He has glaring eyes, three of them, including one in the middle of his forehead, symbolising a higher wisdom, seeing into the nature of reality. He has sort of tusks or fangs. And in his right hand he's holding a golden Vajra as if he was about to hurl it. And as I said one of the qualities of the Vajra is that it always destroys its target and it returns automatically to the hand of the person who threw it. And again we have to think of this diamond thunderbolt not as a piece of metal but as reflecting a mental quality. Something which is capable of annihilating, of smashing through all our suffering, all our delusions about things are how things are so that we see things as they really are. And then with his other hand sometimes he's holding a Vajra bell, sometimes a wheel which symbolises the Buddha's teaching. But very often his hand's empty and he's just making a symbolic gesture of warding off enemies of the Dharma. So if we imagine ourselves a bit into this figure and think well what would I feel like if I looked like that, well then we have this mental state where there's tremendous sort of power and energy in pursuit of the good, in pursuit of the Dharma, we're capable of seeing through to how things really are, just sort of smashing through delusions. There's a tremendous compassion where well why do you want to wield this Vajra, you're not just wielding it for yourself. You just see so much suffering in the world and sometimes when you see suffering you just have a simple sort of gentle as it were heart response. At other times you just see that suffering needs to be, you know, people need to be rescued from suffering by quite forceful means. Sometimes you need to really go and stand shoulder to shoulder with people who are suffering, you need to really sort of stand up for them. You can feel a tremendous spiritual impatience about the fact that there's so much suffering in the world and that spiritual impatience comes out very strongly indeed. So that it may even look like sort of an angry state, but Vajrapani isn't angry in the ordinary sense at all, his heart is constantly compassionate. It's like he's taken this form just because it's the most effective form in which to help as many people as possible. And with this mudra of warding off enemies is if you're in a mental state in which nothing sort of negative can come anywhere near you, you're just so positive that the beginnings, even the slightest beginnings of negative mental state sort of just kind of look at you and think I won't bother. I just won't even try. And he's also, he's wearing a number of skulls and bone ornaments. And of course these are associated with death. And they remind us of impermanence, which the Vajra families associated with. But they're also, I think, about the death of limited ideas of ourselves. It's very often our limiting, limited ideas, which prevent us from finding more energy. We keep thinking, "I'm not the sort of person who does that." And we keep telling ourselves that. So every time a bit of energy comes up to go in that direction, that voice goes, "Oh, I'm not the sort of person who can do that." And so that energy is sort of congealed, it's sort of flattened back down again. So Vajrapani represents a state of mind in which you burst through all those sort of limiting ideas about who you are and what life is about. And as a result, a lot of energy has been freed up. And then he's also, he's almost naked. So he's very, he's kind of, again, there's a sort of spiritual openness there. He's not hiding anything whatsoever. He's in a state of mind where he's just prepared to completely be as it were who he is. He may just be wearing a tiger skin, which in the tantra is associated with overcoming anger, overcoming hatred. And quite often he's wreathed in snakes. There's a whole symbolism about Vajrapani. That haven't quite got worked out about nargas, as they're called in the Buddhist tradition, so serpent-like creatures, and garutas who are great sort of mythical kind of eagle-like birds. And in the Buddhist tradition, or texts, these nargas and garutas, they're sort of enemies. But Vajrapani, in the early texts, is called the Lord of the nargas. And he has these serpents. But then in some of his inner and secret forms, he takes on the form of a garuda. And he's in this one form where he's like a, he turns into a flight of garutas, like a sort of squadron of these sort of great eagle figures. And sometimes they're represented sort of holding nargas in their beaks. So I'm not quite sure which side he's on, really. He seems to be sort of spanning that sort of divide between those two sort of symbolic figures, the sort of heights and the depths. And then Vajrapani has a great protuberant stomach. He's something very sort of powerful and sort of solid about him. So again, your mental state, if you become Vajrapani, is this tremendous or powerful solid immovable by anything mundane state of mind. And then he's stepping, or perhaps I should say, stomping to the right. And in some versions he's champling a couple of figures underneath his feet, who are understood to represent ignorance and craving. So you're in such a wise, compassionate state of mind that ignorance and craving, well they're held completely under your feet. You don't even notice them, they're not there anymore. So down under your feet you don't see them when you look around at all. And all around him is this great halo of flames, the flames of transcendental wisdom. So there's a lot we could say about this figure, but times a bit limited. But what would happen? What would happen if you were mentally to rehearse being in the presence of a figure like that, perhaps eventually even becoming a figure like that in tantric meditation, day after day, year after year, decade after decade? Well although, as I've said, although he's described as a wrathful figure, you wouldn't become very angry in the ordinary sense. Vajrapani does have the loving, compassionate heart of a bodhisattva. He's just manifesting all this energy because he cares very deeply about all living beings. In one text he's described as grown out of the root of compassion. So he's just taken on this powerful, wrathful form to help living beings. So what happens if you just keep concentrating on this figure and reciting his mantra? Well in a way it's quite simple, you just develop more and more energy in pursuit of the good, in pursuit of wisdom. So if just day after day you were to see that figure and to recite "Om Vajrapani Hong" or sometimes the mantra "Om Vajrapani Hong Pat" or if you're a Tibetan you recite "Om Binsapani Hong" and "Om Binsapani Hong Pei" because the Tibetan's tend to sort of mangle their Sanskrit. If you just keep doing this, if you keep reciting the mantra seeing the figure, well you do, you liberate a tremendous amount of energy. And in a way Vajrapani stands for both the energy that you need, if he gives you the energy that you need in order to focus in order to break through ignorance and so forth. So that you penetrate into how things really are, you penetrate into the heart of reality. But he also represents the tremendous energy that's liberated when that breakthrough happens. As if when you finally make contact with things as they really are, a whole lot of delusions and a whole lot of limiting ideas and ways of being just fall away. And suddenly you have much more energy available to you. So if you just focus on Vajrapani in this way, increasingly you have that message communicated to you and it helps you to overcome all the hindrances to your energy flowing freely. Very often in Buddhism it said that there are three kinds of hindrances to free flowing energy. Well you could just call them three kinds of laziness I suppose, although we wouldn't think of them all as obviously lazy. Firstly there is the, we could call it the laziness of laziness. Yeah I've recently been staying in Cambridge where I was at university many many years ago. And when I was at university I was basically a hippie dropout, I did very little work for three years. And I remember this one day where I was invited to have lunch with the master of the college that I was in. And he was a very distinguished historian and he spent most of his time researching but he did try to get to know the members of his college. So he did at least once in three years so he invited us to lunch. And it was one o'clock I think it was. And I overslept. Yeah I just I spent a lot of my three years just particularly lying sort of gazing at the ceiling sort of looking at pretty patterns and things. So yes I didn't manage to make this one o'clock lunch. So that's that's yeah that's just the laziness of laziness. But there's also what's called the laziness of busyness. Which from the Buddhist point of view is not doing anything to actualize the potential which we have as human beings. If you've turned up in this world and you're not doing anything at all to help it. If you're really just filling up your time however busily you may be wishing about from the Buddhist point of view that's laziness. If you're just whatever playing a few computer games doing a bit of retail therapy. I think sometimes you can almost have a sense. Well if I look back at my life I've sometimes wasted bits of it just feeling that this wasn't quite the real thing. Or as if this was the rehearsal for life and the real thing was somehow going to happen later. Yes there can be something of that sometimes. Anyway if you just drift through life just doing nice things. From the Buddhist point of view that is the laziness of business because we all have so much potential. You may even be doing a great deal of very hard work but if really it's just for your own agitistical reasons. Not for anything any wider or higher goal. Then from the Buddhist point of view you might have to send Vantrapani around to have a little word with you. So there's the laziness of laziness, the laziness of business but then there's also the laziness of self pity and despair. Maybe discouragement is a good word. I think very often people take up the Buddhist path and they practice meditation and they work on themselves. After you've been at it for a while you begin to realise that it's actually this gaining enlightenment lark. It's actually going to be a bit more difficult than you realised. I'm not quite sure why that is partly because in the Dhamma part of the Buddha says somewhere that gaining enlightenment is like defeating a thousand men in battle a thousand times. Now according to my maths that's about a million battles which is quite a lot really. But I think there's always a tendency. Well we start off not really knowing ourselves very well, very deeply or very often. And we practice hard and then although we are changing we don't always see how we're changing because we're too close to ourselves. And so we get a bit discouraged. Yeah you just think well I don't know if I'm going to be able to change or get very far. And that can be very insidious. I think actually most Buddhist practitioners probably suffer from it occasionally at least. And what happens as a result is because you're a bit discouraged. You don't stop practising but you just sort of go through the motions a little bit. You're still doing a bit of meditation, you're still coming along to the centre now and then. But somehow you don't quite believe that it's really going to work. You don't deeply feel yes I'm on the right track. If I just keep making the effort that I'm making okay this will all take me to states that are really fulfilling and satisfied. And because of that you don't really give things your best shot. You don't really put energy into it. And as a result of that your practice doesn't work. So it can even become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. You feel a bit discouraged. You don't really kind of make the effort although you still look as if you're doing it. You still are to some extent but because you are going through the motions it's not really transformative. And as a result of that you can say well you know there we are. I was right after all you know I'll never get anywhere with the Dharma. So that's the laziness of discouragement. And often I think you know if your practice isn't going well there's an element of this in it that you've got a bit discouraged somewhere. You can even I certainly have at times over the years had this little voice which says well yes you know I do believe that meditation works. I do believe that the Dharma works but not quite for me it seems to be quite common. But these days if that voice crops up at all in me or somebody else I kind of want to say well what makes you think you're so special. Yeah the Dharma yes the Dharma has worked for so many thousands of people over the last two and a half thousand years. What is it that makes me think that I'm so special my particular difficulties and psychology and so on. So particularly complex and intransigent that I won't be able to sort of sort it out. I realize in myself it's a kind of pride really it's a yeah I'm sort of making myself this very special person from the Dharma won't work. You know I will be the one who defeats sort of Shah Khamini and all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas through my particular difficulties. So it's good to be aware of that possibility. And visualizing Vajrapani or bearing him in mind enables you to develop the opposite of those three things of the laziness of laziness the laziness of business and the laziness of discouragement. Just holding Vajrapani in mind you find generates virya, generates energy in pursuit of the good. It stirs your energy up and if you stir your energy well then you find that a number of positive qualities start to appear. Again Buddhism loves lists there's a list of sort of five aspects of positive energy. And I'm just going to finish by looking briefly at these because Vajrapani seems to me to embody all of them. So firstly Vajrapani embodies the energy which is described as being like putting on armor. There's an energy that you develop with your spiritual practice that is sort of defence against unskillful mental states, against unskillful volitions. If you manage so you're on retreat to get into meditation to clarify your Dharma practice then very often when you first come back for a little while at least this is if your difficult things happen but they don't affect you. They don't reach in and touch you so if you've got a sort of aura around you you've got a sort of positive energy which just throws off those things. It's a bit like Vajrapani's but like a sort of spiritual snow plow. He's sort of storming towards enlightenment and anything negative is just knocked aside. So he embodies that sort of positive energy that's like armor which just protects you from the unskillful. Then secondly he embodies the energy that consists in applied effort. In a way this just means keeping on going and keeping on trying. There's a point in the ordination ceremony where the last words of the Buddha are quoted with mindfulness strive on. And quite often at that point Sangeraj just said well that's all you have to do you just have to keep being aware and making an effort. And if you can sort of run along the spiritual path we're great but if not you walk along it. If maybe you just crawl along it but you just keep making an effort you just keep doing what you can do with whatever mental state you're in. Sometimes we feel we're on the spiritual path when we're in certain mental states and we're off it when we're in others. But the trick or part of the trick of the spiritual life is just whatever mental state you're in. Rather than thinking well that's not a spiritual state at all and sort of almost kind of hiding from yourself the fact that you're in it. It's just to acknowledge the whole of yourself and wherever you find yourself whatever state you're in you just make an effort. So I sometimes say well even if you're feeling suicidal you just make the effort to be depressed rather than suicidal. If you do that whatever state you find yourself in you just keep working with them everything over time becomes transformed. So this is applied effort and recalling Padrapani helps you just to keep making that steady effort. And yeah there is something very relentless about Padrapani. You don't get the impression that he meditates for three days and then kind of has a couple of days where he doesn't get around to it. You know he just keeps on keeping on. Then thirdly he embodies the barrier that doesn't despair but doesn't become daunted, that doesn't become discouraged I suppose. Yes that doesn't think oh I'll never be able to change. Whenever I think whenever you try and do something worthwhile whether it's just working directly on your mind or trying to do something about the state of the world you always discover at some point that what you've taken on is harder than you expected it to be. There's always a point where you think oh if only I'd realized what I was taking on I wouldn't have gone this way. But in a way those are the real spiritual challenges. So Padrapani when he gets to that point well he just digs deeper he doesn't sort of give up. He just thinks well okay this is just a negative mental state that I mean at the moment I don't have to identify with it. Yes I have to be aware of how I am but it's as if he kind of just takes stock and then regroups and sort of returns to the returns to the attack as it were. So he represents an energy that doesn't despair but believes if you like that wherever you are in your life well that's a workable place from which to move towards enlightenment. There is always something that you can be doing whatever position you're in. And along with that is this fourth kind of fear which is the energy that doesn't turn back. Whenever you practice the time in a way your commitment that you're making is always to the unknown. You don't actually gaining enlightenment is a leap in the dark it's not like doing something that you already know about it's not quite the same as anything that you've ever done. You can't you can't know what it's going to be like. You don't know what you're going to become you don't know what you're going to turn into as you practice the Dharma. In that way it's quite sort of magical. One of the things that I've really loved and rejoiced in about being involved with so many people in the order and around the FWBO is that you watch people turning into something that they could never have foreseen. You may find somebody you know who starts off quite so shy and unconfident and a few years down the track and they're standing up. Perhaps as I'm doing you know giving a talk to a whole lot of people on a men's event and they could never be matching themselves doing that when they started they couldn't have seen it at all. So it's really quite magical. So that's the positive side but also at times as you keep practicing will you discover difficult things about yourself that you didn't realize. You could never quite have imagined. You find things about the spiritual life that you don't like but you didn't realize perhaps we're involved in it. You're confronted with all sorts of situations and at that point when you really need that sort of Vajrapani energy that doesn't turn back. It requires quite a lot of heroic energy. There may be times where you just need to take a sort of spiritual stand. So if you sort of plant your standard and you say for the sake of all living beings I'm not going to back down in my quest for reality. My quest to become a more loving and kind and aware human being even though it's extremely difficult. So that's the energy that doesn't turn back. I think it's quite important in a way to make some contact with that kind of energy because I think the way society is currently in the West. We're almost sort of fed ideas that life should be quite easy. It should be quite simple. What we've given through adverts and so on is that yes life is going to be easy and it's going to work out. And if it doesn't work out it must be somebody's fault. It must be somebody we can sue. So I think that gives us an unrealistic expectation of life. Sometimes life is extremely difficult. Sometimes even practicing the Dharma is extremely difficult and we need to find that energy that isn't going to turn back. Or at least it's only going to make a sort of strategic retreat in order to find a place to go forward from again. So that's the energy that doesn't turn back. And then lastly there's the energy that is never satisfied. Vajrapani doesn't rest on his laurels or his lotus. He's not going to rest in fact until we're all enlightened. Until we're all free from suffering. Until we're all completely happy and fulfilled. So it's so easy sometimes to think yes I did really well on that retreat two months ago. So now you're two months on and constantly in a sort of just a smooth steady sort of way we need to be thinking okay I have developed this quality this far. I never thought I would maybe but here I am. But maybe I can even go a little bit further. I can just take it the next step. And a lot of Dharma practice is just finding what's the next step. And just the next thing that you can do is there always is a next step even if it's sort of three inches forwards. There is always a next step that you can take. So these are the kinds of energy that Vajrapani can help us to develop. The energy that's like putting on armor, the energy that's of applied effort, the energy that doesn't despair that isn't discouraged, the energy that doesn't turn back and the energy that is never satisfied. And it's very important to understand that this energy isn't a sort of willed forced grit your teeth effort. And it doesn't necessarily involve being busy 24 hours a day. It doesn't just dashing about. But it does involve producing the qualities of a sort of spiritual warrior. And I think at the moment in some aspects of the FWA the heroic ideal is taking a bit of a pounding. And I think there is a naive way of trying to be a hero and a warrior that doesn't work. And I tried to address some of the pitfalls in this in a talk that I gave a couple of years ago to the Order, which is again available from the Pabmaloka bookshop called "Hear be Dragons", "Disasters, dilemmas and dead ends on the spiritual path". So, yeah, if that sounds interesting, do have a look at it because it will kind of make you aware of the right and wrong ways to set about being a spiritual warrior, and perhaps in the heroic ideal. So, yes, it isn't just about, it isn't at all about a sort of force sort of mental effort towards an idea that you set yourself where your ego will feel very satisfied with who you are. That's nothing to do with it really. And it's always worth remembering that sort of peaceful form of Vajrapani. It's very relaxed, which is quite contemplative and completely at ease. It's almost that we need to put together the peaceful and wrathful forms of Vajrapani to get a sort of balanced sense of practicing the Dharma. So, yes, you can sort of screw up your energy and sort of force yourself ahead for a while. But that's not usually sustainable in the long run, and I think in practicing the Dharma what we need is sort of sustainable development. We need really to be tapping into sort of deep sources of energy in ourselves, which really will sustain us in the long haul of the spiritual life. And in a way that energy comes from two sources, I think it comes from a deep understanding of how things are, and then a deep care about yourself and about other living beings. So, there's an understanding of how things are a sort of wisdom aspect. And there's one aspect of the wrathful figure that I described that I didn't mention, that I didn't dwell on. And that's the fact that this great, muscular, powerful hero is made of light. His body is hollow. You can see right through it. And that has a very strong message, which again communicates itself to you, if you keep reflecting on the figure. In fact, the whole figure is giving us a message about the nature of reality. Everything, nothing is fixed, nothing is solid, everything is energy, everything is dynamic, everything is an interplay of energy. We are essentially energy. There's nothing fixed about us at all. And as I said, if you see that, if you really see that deeply, that releases a great deal of energy. So I say sometimes we think, "Oh, I'll never change this or that." But the more you explore your actual experience in meditation, you don't find anything fixed, anything that can't be changed. And if there isn't changing all the time, you just find a dynamic flow of energy. So if you really see that deeply, well, it's a bit like the spiritual equivalent of splitting the atom. There's this tremendous release of energy, because there's a huge amount of energy tied up with this preoccupation with ourselves in the wrong way. But if we see through it, then energy is released. And that experience of what we see can't be described in words. We come into this meditation on sinelessness, which just annihilates all our concepts in relation to how things really and finally are. But although we can't describe it in words, it's entirely clear to us in a way that when we lived in the world of words and concepts, things never were so clear. So the mantra that Padrapani wields smashes all our mental confusion, all the ignorance, which arises from taking our ideas about reality, for reality itself. So I find this image of peaceful and wrathful Padrapani, a very helpful one. It helps me in exploring myself in meditation. It helps me when I'm looking at the difficulties in the world. And it gives me a picture of my potential as a human being. So I said all those pictures and Buddhist art, in a way they're all just pictures of you. They're all just pictures of your potential, of different aspects of it that you have as a human being. And one potential that we all have is the potential to liberate tremendous amounts of spiritual energy. It is the potential to develop energy in pursuit of the good, so that we carry our hearts with our deepest beliefs, what we'd really like to see for ourselves in the world out into action. And in a way this is the way to contact you more energy. It isn't a force and sort of make yourself be more energetic. That doesn't really work. The key to it is to contact our faith. The key to it is to contact what we most deeply believe. When you're in contact with that you find energy automatically just sort of flows into whatever you're doing quite automatically. So if we also take on the message of the Vajra family that everything is impermanent, then not only do we, if we contacted our hearts, which we have a sense of what we'd really like for ourselves and for the world. We also realize that time is limited and that we don't have forever in order to try to bring it about. So we put those things together. Then we have a quality that Vajrapani embodies of making real effort heartfelt, compassionate effort knowing that time is short to make the best possible use of life. So when you're in touch with that sense of the purpose and preciousness of your own life and the lives of all human beings. So I said energy just naturally flows. You don't have to force it. It just naturally overcomes the laziness of lying about, the laziness of business. I sometimes think that Sanghsara sort of unsatisfactory existence is a way to simply taking the line of least resistance through life. It's quite easy really just to go where life takes you. But it takes a real decision and a lot of energy to take your life down a different track, to decide what you're going to become as a human being and how you'd like the world around you to be and to work towards that. If you can, if you can develop that clear sense of purpose, contact that real sort of heart wish and a sense of what you can achieve as a human being. Although it's going to be difficult along the way. If you can do that for yourself and for other people, well then you'll naturally just pick up the Vajra, the Diamond Thunderbolt, that state of mind. Which is imperturbable but also very powerful and has a very powerful effect. And you'll use that Vajra to liberate yourself and those you love from suffering. [Applause]
