[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. I want to break out, batter down the door, go tramping black heather all day on the windy moor, and at night in hayloft are under hedge, find a companion suited to my mind. I want to break through, shatter time and space, cut up the void with a knife, pitch the stars from their place, nor shrink back when lidded with darkness, the eye of reality opens and blinds me, blue as the sky. So that's Sangha Rakshita in 1967, very much in the spirit of the Mahasiddhas, of the ecstatic wanderers that emerged in eighth, ninth, maybe a bit earlier, century India, very much in that tradition, in that spirit. Sangha Rakshita in 1967 had just about begun to start what we call "Ben the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order." It was a year before the First Ordinations, and he describes this period, the period after being expelled from the then British Buddhist establishment as being in the wilderness. Being in the wilderness, and what a wonderful place the wilderness was, where everything became clear and where he was really trying to get away from all of the, if you like, stultifying traditions that had even developed in early British Buddhism, and even the stultifying traditions that he'd perhaps operated in, in India, where he was a very, very pure, very pure-minded Buddhist monk, communicating the Dharma extensively, practicing the Dharma, and here he was in an entirely new situation, late 1960s London, late 1960s Britain, and he talks about really trying to practice the Dharma as it appears in the earliest Buddhist scriptures, where you have the Buddha, and his disciples, no monasteries, no heavy organisation, in a sense, no doctrine. The Buddha just communicating his realisation directly to whoever he counted, whoever they were. Yes, other wanderers, but also ordinary men and women, farmers, prostitutes, courtesans, farmers, businessmen, political leaders, and so on and so forth. Whoever he met, he communicated the bliss of liberation, the way to liberation directly, and it has to be said, of course, that Buddhism was very, very successful in India, and by the 8th century, the 9th century, you had huge Buddhist monasteries, wonderful centres of learning and culture, and that are rightly celebrated. However, it also has to be said that Buddhism, in some senses, bricked itself in. Cut off from the people, cut off from the world around them. Sangha Rachta didn't want to cut off from people, he was told by a leading British Buddhist dignitary, think of yourself as the Buddhist vicar of Hampstead. Well, you didn't want to be the Buddhist vicar of anywhere. He wanted to communicate with people, and in the same way, you find a whole movement in India, trying, in a sense, to get back to what the Dharma was really all about, living a life of renunciation, living a life totally, regardless of your circumstances, living a life of inspiration, totally inspired to live the Dharma, and to break out, and to go into the markets, go into the bizars, go into the villages, go into the streets to, well, celebrate what you've discovered, and these are the Siddhas. This is the origin of Tantric Buddhism. The Mahasiddhas, sometimes called the 84 Mahasiddhas, are the kind of mythical origins of Buddhist Tantra, and they are a really odd bunch. They're really, really odd bunch. Some of them are kind of monks, but often they're monks who've sort of broken their vows, horror of horrors. You get Virupa, Mr Ugly, because he's fat, pop-bedded, bulging eyes, but he's also called Virupa, because he's broken his precepts, but he's regarded as one of the highest-standing Tantric adepts. You get all sorts of other people. I'd love to spend time just celebrating all the different Siddhas and their encounters with people. One of the messages of the Siddhas is that anybody can practice. If you think you can't practice, think again. If you think you're uniquely flawed, think again. One of my favourite stories is of a very fat boy. He came from wealthy parents, and they doted on him, fed him all delicacies, and he got so fat, he couldn't get up. And the parents thinking, "Well, who's going to look after us in our old age?" They just had him carted off to the cremation ground, so there's this huge fat boy, now a young man, who's sort of lying there in the cremation ground, left by his parents, and along comes a sitter, and he said, "Oh, what are you doing? What's up?" He said, "Well, I've just been left here. I can't do anything. I can't move, because I'm so fat." And he said, "Well, aren't you going to beg? He could at least beg for food." He said, "Well, I can't go and beg, because I can't get up. I'm too fat." They said, they said, "Look, all right, okay, I'll beg your food, but do you think you could meditate? Do you think you could practice?" He said, "Well, as long as I don't have to get up, I'll do anything." So he said, "Okay, I'll teach you." He said, "Great teaching, isn't he? You don't have to get up." He said, "I want you to concentrate in front of your nose and visualize a sphere as small as a mustard seed." He said, "Yeah, I've got that. As long as I don't have to get up and you bring me food." And so he does that, really concentrating on this sphere, the size of a mustard seed. And the next instruction is to see hundreds of thousands of Buddha fields in the mustard seed, and of course, he has a breakthrough. He attains Mahamudra, he's enlightened, he's blissed, and he's realized. I don't know whether he can get up after that or not. But if you have any doubts about how worthy you are of practice, whatever you look like, whatever you feel like, however unhappy you are, think again, the citizens aren't interested in your complaints. They just know that as a human being, you can gain realization. So they're out there, they're out there on the streets. And one of my favourite stories is, and a very famous story, is of a great abbot of Narmanda named Abbai Kehti. And one day he was sitting outside his monastery with his back to the sun, interesting detail, looking into the books of grammar, epistemology and logic, in all these sort of arcane Buddhist wisdom books, and then a terrifying shadow fell over him. And he looked round and he saw a dark woman, old woman, very, very significantly, the colour symbolism, dark and black. Very often the sitters are dark and black, and they encounter people with those, from those backgrounds, because of course in India, when you have a reference to colour, it means marginalized, discriminated against, outcast, so called. And for the Buddhist tantrics, the really interesting places are outside of the mainstream. It's in the sort of liminal that the creativity happens. So here is a very outcast person, a widow, an old woman, utterly rejected, and how does she appear? Her hair was fox-carded and disheveled. Her forehead large and protruding. Her face had many wrinkles and was shriveled up. Her ears were long and lumpy. Her nose was twisted and inflamed. She had a yellow beard streaked with white. Her mouth was distorted and gaping. Her teeth were turned in and decayed. Her tongue made chewing movements and moistened her lips. She made sucking noises and licked her lips. She whistled when she yawned. She was weeping and tears ran down her cheeks. She was shivering and panting for breath. Her compaction was darkish blue. Her skin rough and thick. Her body bent and a skew. Her neck curved. She was humpbacked and being lame. She supported herself on a stick. What an appearance. And Naropa, you know, turned to her, looked at her and she said, "Venerable one, what are you looking into?" He said, "I study the books of epistemology, grammar and logic." And the old woman said, "Do you understand the words or the meaning?" And a biker, he said, "No, who becomes the sitter, Naropa?" He said, "I understand the words." And she started to dance with joy. She started to kind of swivel on her stick and laugh with ecstasy. And thinking he'd please her even more, he said, "I also understand the meaning." And she said, "Well, she didn't say it. She just burst into tears." She started sobbing uncontrollably. And he said, "Why did you laugh happily when I said I understood the words?" And weep, when I said I understood the meaning. And she said, "I laughed. I was happy because you, a great scholar, didn't lie when you said you understood the words." But I was sad when you said you understood the meaning because you're lying. You don't understand the meaning at all. And this was a tremendous shock for Naropa, you have to understand. Being the abbot, one of the abbots of Nalanda, he was a great dignitary. And here he is, being told by an outcast woman that he doesn't understand the meaning. He's got all this intellectual knowledge, but he doesn't know the meaning, the real meaning of life, you could say, or the real meaning of the dharma. So he said, "Well, who does know the meaning?" She's really got inside him. She's got into him. Who understands the meaning? She said, "My brother knows the meaning." And he said, "Well, where can I find your brother?" And she said, "Find him yourself." And just vanished. Just vanished. This incredible apparition, and it's very interesting what happens next. This is a real encounter with reality. This is very, very much a feature of tantric Buddhism. You're constantly confronted by reality. It really brings you right up against what the truth is. And what he started to sing, he sings this great song. I don't think I can read it all. It's an amazing song, very famous song, about the dukkha of life. After this encounter, it begins with the incredible lines. Sanghsara is the tendency to find fault with others. Sanghsara is the tendency to find fault with others. An unbearable fireball. A dark dungeon. A deep swamp of the three poisons. And on and on and on. Like that, another very famous line. It's the taste of honey on a razor's edge. So another one. So it's a real insight into how bounded he is, even though he knows everything about the dharma. But really, he's caught. He's bound in the Sanghsara. And it's this old woman telling him how bound he is. And he just can't hang around. He's just got to go and find her. Well, she said her guru is her brother. He's got to go and find him. And the rest of the life of Naropa, or a big part of the life of Naropa, is going on this journey, this strange, symbolic journey. It's almost like a strange dream that you enter, even a sort of nightmare at times. As he tries to find the brother of this strange old woman. And at last, I won't go into, there's all sorts of trials and tests. And at last, there appears a dark man. Dressed in cotton trousers. His hair knotted in a tuft, and with protruding bloodshot eyes. This is Tilapar. This is the old lady's brother. This is the Guru Naropa has been searching for, to find the meaning, who will give him the meaning of the dharma, the meaning of life. And he says immediately, why have you not, why have you eluded me? Why have I not been able to find you? I've searched and searched. I've been treated you. That's the first thing he says. And Tilapar says, I've been with you since the old leper woman came to you. In other words, she was him. She was him. In other words, reality has always been there. It's always been available if only he'd been able to wake up. And then there were even more tests and trials as Tilapar constantly confronts Naropa's egotism. Constantly confronts his self-grasping. This is the thing, the Siddha constantly confronts. This is what the Tantric tradition is all about. The main problem, you know, in all Buddhist tradition, is our egotism. Is our pride. Is our conceit. We might think it's other things. But the main block between us and opening up to reality is our self-identity. The way we separate ourselves from others, from life. The way we believe and we have all these sort of trips and stories that separate us out from, well, from real love, from real knowing, from real understanding, from direct tasting of the great bliss of two in one, as the Tantric tradition calls it. Sangharachta met a Tantric. I mean, there were his Tibetan teachers, of course. But he met a Tantric who was kind of operating within the Hindu tradition. But when you read about it, there were sort of rumours that this man was 600 years old. This was in South India, 600 years old. And Bhante even wondered if he was sort of left over from the great Siddhas. And he was one-eyed when he'd been told about this teacher by people he was with. And when they went to see him, he suddenly appeared at three o'clock in the morning in the middle of the forest in this building. He appeared and, you know, Bhante got a shot because he had only one eye. And he says it gave his features already grim and terrible enough. So starting linearly villainous a cast, that they seemed more appropriate to some notorious highwayman or pirate of the old days than to a celebrated ascetic. At the same time, and all this registered instantaneously, Yalahankaswami had an expression of compassion I had not seen on any other human face. So this really sort of grim figure, one eye, and yet great compassion, this is very much the spirit of the Siddhas. And he and his friend met with Yalahankaswami and Yalahankaswami told him about his teaching. He said the main problem is egotism. What blocks people from reality, from realization is egotism. And this is what Yalahankaswami said all the way Bhante tells it. Egotism could be overcome only by the prolonged experience of samadhi, by which he meant not meditation in the ordinary sense, but by a super conscious state in which all sense of seperative individual selfhood was transcended. In the training of his disciples, he said, his sole concern was to eradicate egotism by inducing the samadhi experience. Since there were two different forms of egotism, pride and humility, he had two different methods of dealing with people. With those who were proud, he behaved more proudly still. With those who were humble, with even greater humility. Thus both were made to realize how egoistic they actually were. "However high you go," he concluded, "addressing me directly, Bhante, I shall always be above you; however low you go, I shall always be below you." The idea that humility was just a much a form of egotism as pride represented an important new insight for me, and I never forgot the Swami's words. A bit earlier on, you hear how he could be Yalahankaswami. High-ranking government officials, who in most ashrams were received with semi-divine honours, fared no better than anybody else. If they showed the slightest trace of arrogance upon dissension, he would start abusing them the minute they appeared in the doorway. "What do you want here?" he would shout roughly. "Think you're doing us an honour in coming here, don't you?" "Think you're a big man?" "Well, we don't want your bigness here, you can get out quick." Only if he survived this fusilard was the visitor permitted to enter and lost to sit down. I mean, you have it very easy arriving at Pavmaloka, don't you? You really do. Well, none of you I know are arrogant in that way. Sometimes knowing his reputation and anxious to escape rough treatment, visitors would deliberately adopt an attitude of profound humility, but for tactics of this sort, the swami was more than a match. Springing to his feet, he would welcome such people with every mark of deference, saying how greatly honoured he felt by their visit. And what a blessing it was for his ashram to have such an embodiment of sanctity within its walls. As soon as they were seated in the place of honour and impressed to take tea or pan or a cold drink, he would beg them with folded hands to give him and his disciples the benefit of their extraordinary wisdom on their protesting their unworthiness. When they're protesting their unworthiness, as of course they invariably did, he would only redouble his demonstrations of respect until the end they collapsed in agonies of embarrassment and beg for mercy. Jeremy, maybe you should try that as well. So these two forms of egotism, pride and humility are really powerful. I mean, there's a third nowadays, isn't there? The view that we're equal to everybody, that's a pride, isn't it? That's another version of egotism. And in fact, in Buddhist tradition, pride has that threefold definition. The view your superior to others, the view your inferior to others, the view that you're equal to others. In other words, you've got to get rid of all views about yourself and others and just come into direct communication, direct love and friendliness and openness. Anyway, Naropa has many trials with Tillipa, all sorts of trials, all sorts of terrible things that he goes through. You know, I won't go into the ball because they're really strong stuff. And at the end of every trial, there's Naropa in a heap, you know, feeling as though he's really, you know, really been battered down by his teacher. Naropa, Tillipa says to him, and this wonderful line, this is what he says to him when Naropa has been burnt, this log of your body, believing in an eye, deserves to be burnt. Naropa, look into the mirror of your mind, the mysterious home of the darkening. Look into the mirror of your mind, the mysterious home of the darkening. The darkening is so important in Tantric Buddhism. The darkening is the mind, the darkening is the inner companion. The darkening can manifest in all sorts of ways, the old woman at the beginning. She was a darkening. There's a depiction of a darkening. If you want to know what a darkening looks like, look at her looking up at Padma Samava, much better to have an image of the darkening. So he's saying, look into the mirror of your mind, the mysterious home of the darkening. When egotism starts to dissolve away, when it goes, the mind, the real mind, the true mind, the pure mind, the enlightened mind can really show itself. And we can intellectualise about the mind, the nature of mind, we've had a lot of that, lots of ideas, lots of thoughts. The mind is a darkening. Stop thinking about the mind and look at the darkening. What does that tell us about the mind? You meditate on the darkening, the mind is naked in its true state and its natural state. It's naked, it's authentic, it's not covered with any habitual stuff, any habitual trips and stories. It's just raw, naked, authentic and real. There's no boundary to it, it's naked. In that sense, it's red. In the sense, it's love, it's passion, it's great compassion. It's naked and empty and compassionate and blissful and inspired. Looking up with a kind of natural, unfamed devotion and reverence to the blessings descending from the teacher, from the guru. It's blazing, the mind is blazing and inspired on fire. It's completely aware of its own insubstantiality. She has garlands of severed heads and bone ornaments and yet it's vividly present. So this is what we've got to start looking at. The guru, the cedar, the cedar guru will confront us. It will challenge our egotism until it fades away so that the mysterious home of the darkening, the mind can start to blaze forth and we can live from that. Eventually, the darkening takes us to the lands of the Siddhas, takes us to the ultimate city, takes us to attainment. The city means attainment, magical attainment. The highest city, of course, is enlightenment itself. It takes us to the attainment of the five Ginyanas. Ginyana is usually translated as knowledge. It can be translated as primordial wisdom, very, very hard to understand what the Ginyanas are. And they're embodied in the five Buddha forms that we can see in here. Akshobia, Ratnasambhava, Amitabha, Amogasiddhi, Virochina. So I don't have to describe them because they're here. The five, we usually think of wisdom as seeing things as they are, which of course is wonderfully expressive and direct. You know, when you see something as it is, it's a great metaphor for something being real. But there's a problem with it because it implies a seer and a scene. And we have to move from dualistic knowing, Vignana, which is the usual word for consciousness, to Ginyana, non-dual awareness, primordial wisdom. The Siddaguru takes us there, the darkening takes us there. So instead of thinking of enlightenment as a seeing, think of it as a land. As lands, you inhabit. Because the Ginyanas, which are a description of enlightenment, are the complete transformation of everything. Our scanders, the elements, the poisons, the entire world itself. In a parting song of Padmasambhava, when he leaves Tibet, when he leaves his disciples and goes off to, "We know not where." Well, we do know where because he says where he's going. He keeps talking about going to the lands, the realms of the Ginyanas. That's where he's going. He says, "I'm going away. I leave now for the land of the mirror-like wisdom," and so on. So it's so important that we really try to dwell on this, to forget about this idea of wisdom as something we possess. It's much better to think of wisdom as something we inhabit. We need to sort of abolish, if you like, self and other when we start approaching Njana. So a writer who Vanti put me onto really tries to evoke the realms of the Ginyanas, the realms of the Buddhas. This is Chogym Trungpa Rinpoche. I was thinking, I was giving about to give a talk on the lotus symptom a long time ago. Just after I was ordained, I'd been asked to give a talk about the meaning of the word Padma and all its symbolism. And Vanti said, "Have a look in Trungpa Rinpoche. Have a look at what he says about the lotus family and about all the other families." And I did, and he's very expressive. So this is in honor of Vanti and Trungpa Rinpoche because he gave me an entrance into thinking about Ginyana, not just thinking, contemplating Ginyana in this way. So first of all, I want to talk about the land of the mirror-like Ginyana. This is the land of the Vajra family, the land of the Buddha Xhobia, the deep blue Buddha of the East. It's the sun rising in the depths of winter. It's dawn on a very white winter morning. Everything is snow and ice, and in the sunlight everything is absolutely clear and sparkling. Hatred has been transformed into absolute clarity. A cutting-through clarity, a Vajra clarity, and add a Mantine clarity. But the sun makes everything sparkle and shimmer. Rupa form hovers in emptiness. Emptiness creates form. Its expressive form is expressive of emptiness, the emptiness of vast space. So the Siddha Guru is the Vajra Guru, the Guru who cuts through all your solidity and confusion. His Vajra is so precise, it is hard-cutting, abrupt, and extraordinarily skillful. There is no drama to it. He just takes the ground from under you, under you, without your knowing it. You try to stand up and your legs have gone. I've had some very interesting communications with Sanger Akshta over the years that have been like that, where an apparently innocuous conversation has just taken the ground away. When you chant Vajra in the Pupmasambhava Mantra, this is the realm that you enter. You enter the land of the utter clarity of the mirror-like wisdom. You enter the Vajra world. Then there's the land of the Ratnakula, the dual family. There is over there the yellow Buddha, the rich, deep yellow Buddha, the dual-born, the dual creator. Here we are in the southern realm in autumn time, in harvest time. We're in a world of warm, gold sun, of abundant fruit, of reddening apples, of golden and russet leaves, hanging from boughs, of bees buzzing. The mood is abundant and beneficence. The earth is giving in abundance. It is a realm of rich sensation. Sensation, Vedana, is transformed into the richness of touch. There is no impoverishment. There is a wealth of feeling. There is gratitude and faith. There is no conceit, no separation of the ego, just an immense natural pride in life. The dignity of being a human being. The deep human feeling of wanting to share and to give, and to give away to everybody. The sun is shining happily on a golden palace roof and on a dung heap with no discrimination. There is a sense of profound sameness, a deep sameness. It's the same life, the same humanity, the same living beingness in everything in everybody. We're here in the realm of the Siddha Guru himself, the sovereign of the visible world. As Padmasambhava is described, filled with riches and abundance, the Guru, the Siddha Guru, naturally gives and blessing. His hand is open. He doesn't have the tight fist of a bad teacher who holds things back as the Buddha calls it, the open hand of teaching to everybody. So the Guru's nature is why the Guru is depicted wearing richly embroidered robes. He is like a king, available to everybody. No one is excluded because everybody is profoundly the same. Everybody and everything are blessed and enriched naturally and easily. There is no effort to bless when somebody talks about, "I need to bless" or "I need to bless" as ridiculous. Blessing is natural. This is the realm of refuge. The three jewels are naturally given. There is a feeling of tremendous reliability, of immense generosity. Nothing can let you down here. So when we chant the Padmasambhava mantra through the word Guru, we enter the rich and abundant land of the wisdom of sameness. Then there is the land of the Padma Kula, the lotus family, the realm of the red Buddha Amitabha, the great western realm, the great western sky. The sky opening up like a lotus. Here it is springtime. It's early spring. It's the time of unfoldment and new life, of buds and blossoms and of birdsaw. Everything is opening. Nature is becoming flamboyant again, showing itself again, revealing itself, showing its distinct colors and sense again. You can feel the life emerging. There is vitality, fire and warmth and passion. Passion, desire transformed. So there is real attention. We notice all the particularities, as you would in a lover, but in all things. The distinctness of the blossoms on the trees, bird flight, the beauty in faces and movement. It is a time of love, of the intensity, of love, of passionate interest, of the Siddha Guru's love. True Siddha Guru's are the real friends and the greatest lovers. They love what is deepest and particular in us, distinct in us. They seek the real union, the real meeting, the precise, the exact meaning, meeting. Here, everything arises as the great symbol, as the Mahamudra. This is the place of bliss, of the union of self and other, the union of bliss and emptiness. This is the realm of the natural yogi in the paradise of nature. This is losing yourself in the great bliss and the great love. This is the place of the song of the great tribal Siddha, Shabhara. Shabhara Padmasambhava, and this is his song to the Shabhara girl in the high mountains. Higher and higher in the mountain, the Shabhara girl lives. This Shabhara nymph flaunts a peacock's feather around her neck, a garland of red goonja berries. She scolds her husband, you crazy Shabhara, you drunken Shabhara. Don't raise a ruckus or cause such a commotion. Don't you know that I am your own wife, Sahaja Sundari, Lady Naturally Beautiful? The canopy of diverse, beautiful trees is in bloom. Their branches stroke the sky, the Shabhara girl bearing a Vadra and wearing earring sports in the forest alone. Shabhara prepares the entire cosmos as his power. The bed of great great bliss is made ready. For this Shabhara is the real lover. With Lady selflessness as his delightful one, love lights up the night. Afterwards he chews the essential bettle nut of the heart and the camphor of great bliss. Thus receiving beautiful lady selflessness into his throat, the rays of great ecstasy light up the night until dawn. Hey Shabhara, with your guru's word as the tail feather. With the arrow of mind, with just one shaft, pierce, pierce, highest nirvana. That crazy Shabhara, drunk on the bliss of two in one, raging with that bliss has wandered into the ravine between the high mountain peaks. How will this Shabhara ever get out? Different kind of Buddhist text. When we chant Padma in the Vadra Guru Mantra, this is the world of love that we enter, the world of the Padma family. Then there's the land of the all accomplishing wisdom. The northern realm of Amogasiddhi, the infallible accomplishment, the infallible city, the infallible attainment, the land of the Karma family, the family of spontaneous activity, enlightenment activity. This is the green realm, where the samskaras, the Venetians are transformed into spontaneous compassionate activity. Spontaneous and precise, the realm of Upaya, skillful means. Here there is no envy, there is no competition, just total natural absorption in creative activity, total action. There is nothing left out, there is no alienation created by belief in an ego, just complete absorption in the dance, in the dance of Maya, the dance of illusion for the benefit of all. And we are in the north, at the height of summer, in the forests of the north, the dense green forests, we are close to water, water and land are merging. It is rich and fecund, earth and water and sky are merging here, it is marshland, fenland even, this is the isthmus, the hinterland, in the north, teeming with life. There is the sound of thunder, and a strange wind is passing through the trees, it is warm and close. The sun does not set, for this is the place of the midnight sun, of green lights in the sky. This is the realm of the union of opposites, here Sanghsara and Nirvana are meeting and blending, and the Siddha Guru is the green Siddha, moving mysteriously, subtly, invisibly. He leaves no traces, he is the trackless one, yet affecting extraordinary change and transformation. Here are the long eyes of a Moga city in the twilight, in the green, moving like a spirit, a ghost, a stranger. The Siddha, the greatly accomplished one, affecting magical transformation, moving freely through all the worlds. The Siddha Guru can seem so strange, so close to us, yet so far away, so present and yet so elusive. A Moga city's animal is the Kinara, which means literally is it a man, because it also looks like a bird. Completely fearless and unconcerned with convention, the Siddha wanders the forests and cities of existence, singing the songs of Sahaja, ecstatic spontaneity. The Siddha Mitraper sings, "The thought free yoga is like a child, like a bee in a flower garden tasting every bloom, like a lion roaring in the jungle, and like wind blowing where it will." If his mind is trained in attention and discretion, his behavior is immaculate. If there are no checks upon his mind's effusion, the yogaing behaves like a divine madman, or in the Zen tradition, without troubling himself to work miracles, suddenly dead trees break into bloom. Or, in the Sufi tradition, with no effort, bitterness is made sweet, copper becomes gold, the dregs become pure wine, pains are turned into medicine, the dead are made alive, a king becomes a servant, a servant becomes a king. When we chant "Sidi" in the pakmasam of Amantra, this is the realm that we enter, the green northern realm of Amoga City. The land of the Buddha-kula, the Buddha family, the central land, the land of Varocha, there he is in the center. The land of the wisdom of the Dharma-dhatu, the union of all the wisdoms itself, ignorance, unknowing, is exhausted in the vast open space. The wisdom of the Dharma-dhatu is space, trackless, open, emptiness. It is desert and wilderness, but filled with endless possibility. It is the vast sky, in which you can see in all directions, it's all round awareness, panoramic awareness. I remember being with Banti, Sangharachta, on retreat in India, up in these very, very bare mountains, he had just done lots and lots of Dharma talks and he was there on retreat to ordain people, around lots of crowds and seeing so many people, tremendous activity. But on that retreat he was content to sit in his bare room and just look at the desert fastness from his window. On all sides around, this is him, one could see the flowing contours of the bare yellow-brown mountains, with their curiously contorted peaks, range after range to the horizon, as well as the remains of hill forts. Below a few vague patches of cultivation showed green against the prevailing yellow-brown. Apart from performing ordinations giving a talk and seeing people, he said, "I spent the greater part of the retreat, very pleasantly, doing absolutely nothing." Just looking out of the window at the yellow-brown hills, or at an unfamiliar bird fluttering among the rose bushes, enjoying the brilliance of the sunshine and the blueness of the sky, and emerging only for order meetings, a question and answer session, and of course, the private and public ordinations. So the Siddha Guru is one who can sink naturally into the great space from which all emerges. It can be disconcerting, being around someone who is contented in space, who is the space, who has the ease of space. It can be very, very frightening, because here, all conceptualization is exhausted in dharmatar, dharmanes, reality-ness. Consciousness is just an open-ended, boundless luminosity. This is the basic ground, which is no ground. This is the space of vast, luminous emptiness, which is continually expressing itself in endless creativity for the liberation of all who do not know this truth. In the final words, I began this talk, or early on in this talk, I referred to an old woman speaking wisdom to a conceited monk, and I want to an end with another old woman, an old woman that I met in India. I went to India for some years, and I'd go on dharmatours. And one such tour was in an area called Nasik in North Maharashtra. I went with all the member friends, and interpreters, and so on. And we went to a town called Manmad, Manmad. Manmad is a railway town. It's actually quite famous as being a Sikh holy place, but when the British were railwaying India, they set it up as a big junction between north and south and east and west. So Manmad is one of these railway towns. Most of the people are employed in the railways, or there used to be. A lot of Buddhists employed in the railways in those days. And we'd gone to this place, and I was told that there was a huge amount of conflict between the Buddhists in this town, in this city. They're weird places railway towns, because it's like you just sort of, people are just thrown up against each other. But big Buddhist community, not to do with our own order and movement, but there was a lot of conflict, a lot of political conflict, a lot of factionalism, and I was asked. And those days I was wearing robes, I was Buddhist monk, I suppose, in Anagarika. So I was asked, please give a talk on how to create harmony in the Sangha, how to create harmony among people. So of course I did my best with my very good interpreter, turning my words into really direct, punchy, marathi, making it as down to earth as possible. And it was quite an occasion, you know, people had really wanted to welcome me. And there's photographs of me disappearing under garlands, because everybody wanted to garland me, and they were coming so fast, I couldn't take them off quick enough. I thought it was actually going to suffocate under these garlands. Anyway, we did the talk, it was really as usual with these things, tremendous sort of atmosphere, and went back to the lodge I was staying in. And the next morning I was sitting in my bedroom with my interpreter, and an old woman came in. You know, classic nine meter sari, as they call it, country sari, the old women wear wrapped around, and she was the cleaning lady of the lodge. So she was squatting, you know, line face squatting, sweeping the floor, and she started to mutter and talk. Started to just talk and talk, and tears were rolling down her face. And my interpreter said, "Go out, don't disturb us." And I said, "No, please translate what she's saying. She wants to communicate with me, and I want to know what it is." And she was saying, according to my interpreter, "We should listen to you. We should all listen to you." She was a Buddhist lady. She'd been at my talk the night before, probably illiterate, I would think. And she was a Buddhist lady, and she was saying, "They should listen to you. You're giving the proper teachings of the Buddha, of Dr. Ambedkar. We should all be in harmony like this. Why can't people be in harmony like this? Why can't people come together around the Dharma?" And it was really strong. You know, I felt she was almost, I couldn't help feeling. She was sort of telling me off. You need to be doing more. That seemed to be the implication to create harmony in the world. And of course, it's not just Buddhists at that time who are in conflict. The world is in terrible conflict. We know, don't we? There's a war. There are wars right now. One can't not be aware of the horrors going on in the Middle East and in Ukraine. And in so many parts of the world, we can't ignore them. We enjoy freedom and peace. So many right now, so many innocent people, old and young, are suffering terribly at the hands of others. In our own society, there's so much injustice and violence and conflict. We cannot ignore that as Buddhist. I'm not, I don't have any political position, absolutely none, by the way. But as Buddhists, we cannot ignore this world. And we have to realise that the root of everything, of all this violence and conflict is egotism. And all the attachment and dogmatism and cruelty that arises from that. We need to replace our Buddhist practice in that context. The Siddhas are the embodiment of the powerful magic of love, of meta, of wisdom love. Meta is no flabby sentiment. It's not just our sort of fumbling efforts to get a little bit of friendliness going. We have to realise and invoke a powerful force that can actually affect the world. The Siddhas, the Siddagurus are the agents of this love. So we need to follow them. We need to take that love with us out onto the streets, into the cities, into our lives, into our family lives, into our community lives, into our workplaces, into all the areas of existence. But perhaps I pray, I hope, that will make some difference living from that love in this united world. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freeputus.io.com/donate. And thank you. [MUSIC]
