The Double Dorje: Looking at Modern Vajrayana Buddhism.
Cut and chop, cut and chop! Yes, it's Chöd.
Wed, 25 Sep 2024
Chöd - a vast stream of Buddhist practice! Here is a taste. Chöd Chödpa - (images of) Jamgön Kongtrül Treasury of Knowledge Rimé Sakya Kadampa Kagyu (Marpa and Shangpa) Nyingma Kalachakra Machig Labdrön - Machik’s Complete Explanation Phadampa Sangye Dakini Damaru Karma Kagyu Dudjom Tersar Yeshe Dorje (Rainmaker) #Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #chöd #mantra #meditation #nyingma #kagyu In the early weeks of this podcast I included an approximate script, not particularly well edited, on a blog page. For the episode dropped on 4 September entitled “Bad gurus, tosh gurus and good gurus” and for episodes due to be dropped from 18 September onwards, starting with “Jyekundo / Yushu: travelling in East Tibet” there is a transcript file which is much closer to the actual words used. Note that other distribution platforms do not necessarily pass this on, and if you want to read it you may need to listen on podbean. YouTube has been making its own transcript, which was an unholy mess. I think I have now deleted all of these "auto-generated" scripts, but it will not be possible to retrospectively add properly edited transcripts to episodes prior to September 2024.
Hello, and a warm, warm welcome again to this Double Dorje podcast. Come in, sit down, have a cup of tea, and let's talk about chud. A week ago I had a rare but welcome visit from members of my family. None of them are Buddhists, but they are naturally curious about some of the things I get up to, and it came into conversation that churd is one of my regular practices.
Let me say straight away that I'm not a great practitioner, but I have been doing it for quite a lot of years now. Inevitably, one of my visitors, my niece as it happens, asked me just what this churd practice is. I gave her a bit of an explanation, but it was muddled and it was unclear. So I made the excuse that because I haven't done a podcast about it yet, I haven't got my thoughts into order.
So here we are doing just that. Before we get started, I want to encourage you to take a moment to like this episode, subscribe to the podcast, tell your friends in whatever way is appropriate for the channel you're listening on. At the time of first publishing, the podcast is hosted on Podbean, but it's very likely that you're listening somewhere else.
If you want to see the brief comments, but they don't appear in your channel, you will find them on Podbean. So, picture yourself now, if you will, in some kind of primitive guesthouse in remote, well, where? Maybe Nepal, or Tibet, or Sikkim, or even Scotland. We do have practicing Buddhists and Buddhist centres in the West, after all, as well as haunted houses and haunted graveyards.
It's night-time, and the room is dark, lit only by a couple of candles. The conversation It is witty, but you find you just do have to go outside for a leak. It does happen. Not wanting to pollute the ground right next to the inn, you walk 50 yards up the path. It's not difficult. There is a quarter moon hanging low in the west, giving enough light.
As you arrange your clothing again after relieving yourself, you hear something in the distance. Bop, bop, bop, bop, along with ting, ting, ting, ting. You strain your ears.
Aaaaaah! Aaaaaah!
The blare of what is in fact a human thigh bone being used as a trumpet. Whoa! Back in the double dorge, because this guest house that we are picturing is an emanation of the real virtual double dorge restaurant, you tell your companions what you heard. Ooh, they say, so we have a chur par in the neighbourhood, do we? Let's check him out.
Do you suppose he's up at the old cemetery, the one that got too full of bodies? See if we can scare him, see if he's the real deal. You troop out and head that way, staying very close to one another. If by daylight you wonder whether the place is haunted by ghouls and ghosts, at this time of night you have very few doubts indeed. Twenty minutes later, you're getting close.
The sound does indeed lead you to the graveyard. say your companions. When you've crept to within 20 metres of the source of the sound, the voice tells you that the practitioner is a woman, which is even braver than a man, if that is for other, less ghostly reasons.
10 metres, creeping, creeping, getting closer, just 5 metres, and then altogether, woo-hoo, boobly, holla, holla, boobly, boobly, waving your arms about in the darkness. If this practitioner jumps up and runs away in terror, she will have to find another site to look for support.
But if she calmly continues with the bop, bop, bop, bop, the ting, ting, ting, ting, and the sonorous melodies of the chant, then yoghurt, barley flour, butter and fruit are going to be offered over the coming days and even weeks. So what then is this church? The simple answer is that it's a method of spiritual practice. A fuller answer is that it's a whole bunch of methods of spiritual practice.
So much so that it is counted as one of the eight great chariots of Buddhism in Tibet. It's described that way in the Treasury of Knowledge, which was composed in the 19th century by the one and only Jamgon Kontrol the Great.
The first Jamgon Kontrol was a towering figure in the spiritual life of the Tibet of his time and was one of the founders of the Primae movement, the movement that dismantled at least some of the artificial walls between the established schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
The founders of the movement worked very hard to make sure that it wasn't creating some kind of mishmash and that it was preserving all the traditions in their full individuality. The implication of this seems to me that the movement may have been as significant politically as it was spiritually.
As part of his work, Jamgon Kontrol produced an enormous literary output, including the Treasury of Knowledge, which is something of an encyclopedia of Buddhism. In it, he refers to these eight chariots, the eight practice lineages, or we might also think of them as eight great rivers running through the Buddhist continent of the time.
They include, amongst others, the Nyingma tradition, which is based on the early translations, the Kadam, which emphasised strict discipline and study, the teachings known as Path and Fruit of the Sakyas school, the tradition of the Kalachakra Tantra, which was perhaps the last major Tantra to develop in India and reach Tibet, two quite distinct varieties of cardew, and the tradition of churn.
As usual, there's more to it than I have just mentioned, and in the description I will include some technical terms if you want to look them up later.
I don't really think there is an equivalent in Western culture, but for a very, very rough suggestion, you might think of these rivers as having a parallel with, say, the Presbyterians, the high church Protestants like the Anglicans, the Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox Church. All have a lot in common, but they are quite different in other ways.
There are two particular unique features of the church tradition. Firstly, although its origins are closely connected to an Indian figure, Padampa Sanjay, Chert as we know it now is a tradition indigenous to Tibet. Its main teachings and practices were formulated by an extraordinary woman, Machig Labdron.
If you only want to look up one of the things I mention in this episode, I would suggest that Machig Labdron would be your best starting point. Iconographically, she is most often painted as a white darkiny figure, dancing on her left leg, holding a rather large raised double-sided drum, known as a damaru in her right hand, and a bell in her left.
Oh, she also has a third eye in the middle of her forehead. In these pictures she is, obviously enough, raised pretty much to the status of a deity in her own right, although it remains perfectly clear that she was a very real human being. I'll not say more about her here, as the episode would then become altogether too long.
And what were those teachings that eventually became so popular and that we still practice today? I think it might help to distinguish two sides, which is to say the ritual practice and the underlying thrust of her teachings. The first is perhaps better known, and the second perhaps more important. The name Ch'er itself means cutting. It refers to the cutting of all attachments.
On a conceptual level, this means recognising the emptiness of all phenomena, a vital Buddhist theme, as you almost certainly know. This is the focus of the perfection of wisdom teachings, and it is, so to speak, the soil from which the Chö practice grows.
More personally, it means cutting attachment to ourselves and not being carried away by what are known as the Four Maras, something you'll hear a lot about if you do study Machik Labdron's teachings. The explanations she provides to this are extensive, they are subtle, and they are profound.
If you're interested in learning more detail, Machik's complete explanation might well be the book to go for. Now, the thing to which the majority of us are most tightly attached is our own bodies, and the ritual practice of Chöd is aimed at letting go of that attachment.
In our visualization and meditation, we think of our bodies as being chopped up, cooked up, and offered to the four guests, or rather the four classes of guests. The first of these classes is the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to whom we have devotion, and these are called the guests of honour.
The second class are the powerful deities who may not be fully enlightened Buddhas, but who can offer us protection and help on the path. The third class is quite simply all sentient beings. Every one. And the fourth class, which actually is a subdivision of the third, it's all those beings to whom we specifically owe a karmic debt.
Those who have done things for us that we have not acknowledged, and those whom we have harmed or exploited, are karmic creditors. Shortly before the COVID pandemic struck, I was attending some teachings in Vienna. One of the students also in attendance was a wonderful young woman from South America. Argentina, if I remember correctly. In any event, she had a great fondness for mate tea.
She had been learning chud from her teacher. I'm not sure who that was. And a few months before this occasion had developed a very nasty rash on one side of her face. The teacher told her she should be delighted because it was a sign that the practice was working. Provided she continued, it would clear up. I certainly hope that it did.
On the side of ritual practice, there is an enormous variety in both the extent of the rituals and in the intensity with which they are practiced. The simplest one I've come across is a single four-line verse recited about once a day as part of a regular preliminary practice.
The tradition associated with the medical tantras has a Chö practice that's a couple of pages long and can be done in 10 or even perhaps as little as five minutes. The Karmacarya tradition has a popular and very beautiful practice, which can be shortened, but which can easily take some hours.
While the tradition from the Dudum Tersa is a large compendium of Chö practices, which might perhaps take half an hour each. but there are hundreds more Chö practices in circulation. In parallel with all these variations in length, the intensity with which the practice is performed also varies.
Obviously enough, a single verse, what we might call recognition of the principle of Chö, of offering our own bodies to others, is likely to be just a small element in some other larger practice. At the other extreme, practitioners who are specifically devoted to this practice may perhaps make a tour of 108 cemeteries, moving to a different one each day to perform the offering.
One related tradition, not quite the same, is to use a sling, something like what David must have used against Goliath. In the morning, the practitioner would shoot off a stone with this sling, move to wherever it fell, and that would be the campsite for the next night.
And for yet more variety, hundreds or I believe even thousands of practitioners of the Dujum Tersa tradition gather each year in Bhutan to practice together. It's impressive. Look for it on YouTube. That's the sound of thousands of practitioners at one of the huge meetings in Bhutan. Here is the sound of a lone practitioner.
Here is the rather charming sound of 40 or 50 chirpers practicing together, most of them women, which to my mind gives something rather beautiful to the tone. We should not forget that the cemeteries known to the tradition were not the peaceful, hygienic, almost sterile graveyards known to us in the West.
Bodies would be laid out and left to wild animals or, quite commonly in Tibet, chopped up for vultures. In any event, not places of pretty polished marble stone. These very serious chirp practitioners would, was more, have an appearance that is perhaps best described as unconventional. An internet search for images of chirpas will show you what I mean.
And finally, we should take a look at the equipment that's typical of Chö practice. The first thing you will notice when you see somebody practicing Chö is the large, double-sided drum, or damaru. A smaller Damaru, perhaps six inches across, is widely used in a lot of Tibetan rituals. But the one used for Chö is very roughly twice as big in each direction.
So, obviously enough, it has a deeper tone and is played more slowly. It goes bop-bop, where the standard one rattles. Oh, you can hear a standard one. It just occurs to me in the intro and outro I'm using for this podcast. It's played along with the bell, which is, again, something very common in Tibetan rituals, to accompany a chant that tends to be slow and in its own way very melodious.
From time to time, this is punctuated by blowing the kangling, a sort of trumpet. Originally, and still quite often, a kangling is made of a human thigh bone, although these days wooden and resin versions are also used for a number of reasons. The fact that a human thigh bone is not easy to come by is only one of them. The requirements of travel is another.
The rules and the laws about taking human body parts across borders will all differ according to the countries concerned. And in many cases, it is in fact legal to take such an object, even though it does consist of human remains across borders.
But not in all cases, and not all border cards are in any case likely to know the detailed rules about the difference between human tissue and an antique artifact. My own teacher recently told me a nice story about one of his teachers, the late Yeshe Dorje, a powerful Churd practitioner, also noted as a rainmaker. There is a biography of him referring to that very name, the rainmaker.
He had travelled across the border between Nepal and India quite a number of times with his real kangling without any problem. But on one occasion, the Indian border staff decided that this was just not a good thing, and they wanted to confiscate the kangling. Yeshe Dorji said something like, ''Oh, very well, but give me a couple of minutes first.''
He then picked up the kangling and blew it fiercely in the four directions, before offering it to them, saying, Now you may confiscate it, but if anything bad happens, I accept no responsibility. The guards, by now quite nervous, wouldn't touch it, saying, No, no, no, take it away. Off you go and take it with you. So...
How did our practitioner out in the dark and haunted cemetery, a kilometre away from the Double Dorje extension guesthouse, react? Did she scream and run away in terror? Or did she overpower you all with the splendour of her spiritual realisation? That part of the story is for another time. So, with that, we've reached the end of today's episode.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe, and keep letting go. Bye!