Devotion is Tricky

Last night I gave a talk for a group of Buddhist organisations in Italy. It was the first time I had done this and the more or less simultaneous translation was a challenge. You have to go slow and listen to the translator to make sure they do not get left behind. The person who organised it wanted me to talk about Dzogchen, Who’s Who and What’s What in the Great Perfection - the handbook I have compiled for this Tibetan teaching. And they particularly wanted me to talk about writing in a way that I describe as a middle way between a straight replication of the position of the tradition and a scholarly or academic position that is sympathetic to the tradition but also stands outside, enquiring into it. This was a big ask because, although I know what I mean by this, I am not used to conveying it and I am certainly not used to doing so whilst listening to its Italian translation.

So how did it go? The truth is I’m not sure. I chose to give as an example the entry on Padmasambhava which may have been a mistake because it is complicated and controversial. Padmasambhava is the most important figure in the Dzogchen teachings. He is considered a second Buddha who brought the Dharma to Tibet and while there he left innumerable hidden treasure teachings to be discovered in the following centuries that would /will keep the teachings pertinent and vital for generations to come. Furthermore, considered more deeply, the mind of Padmasambhava - Guru Rinpoche - is identical with our own mind. It is the indivisible unity of emptiness and clarity. This is the position of the Nyingma tradition.

However, this is not quite as straight forward as it seems. It turns out that the early textual evidence for Padmasambhava is rather thin - there are one or two teachings that are ascribed to him but are far from certain and other (minimal) mentions found in the Dunhuang manuscripts only give us a view of him around a hundred and fifty years later. He certainly did exist but from a scholarly perspective, not much else can be said. His growing fame and the details of his extraordinary and magical life with his consorts Mandarava and Yeshe Tsogyal are all the work of his later biographers involved in an ever unfolding devotional genre of discovered treasure teachings.

So my question is how do we hold these two positions together? My educated self will not allow me to ditch the scholarly and simply believe the tradition. This is like taking fairy tales literally. But I also know that at the back of the scholarly is the position of scientific materialism - prove the facts - and this has the disadvantage of reductively destroying mystery. Neither is a good way to go - what is needed is a middle way.

Then what might this be? My personal answer is really a journey. I started off feeling rather indifferent to the accounts of Padmasambhava’s life - so much so that a long time ago he appeared in a dream and told me to regard him like my grandfather - this gave me the appropriate emotional distance. It warmed him up and made him personal. But as my studies unfolded I became aware of all the problems around his history and this wetted my intellectual appetite. I have a deep need to get to the truth of something and cannot stop digging until I do. Following this line, Padmasambhava became intellectually interesting for the first time but obviously this did not include him becoming an object of devotion. My relationship to him became in some ways emotionally more distant. Then one day while I was sitting on my meditation cushion, looking up at a small painting of the master I suddenly realised, (You may say, “At last!”), that his power was that of an archetypal image. He had come to embody - be invested with - the universal form of the wise wizard; he was Melin or Gandalf in Tibetan guise. This was the bridge! Whether the stories were historically true or not did not matter in the least. His importance, his power was not based upon this. Rather, it was grounded in psychological reality, our need to have access to what he represented: To have power over supernatural forces beyond physical control, the have a means to bring our unhappiness to an end, to overcome the limitations of our material bodies, to dance in the sky while having sex and turn into rainbows. Finally to recognise that the nature of our own mind, right in this very moment, is already, always, enlightened. Something the Nyingmapas already knew in their deepest understanding of the Great Guru.

Was this then part of the middle way? Thinking about it more I realised this was part of it but there was also something more. The study of Padmasambhava is really astonishing. His person has entranced treasure finder after treasure finder and each has further unfolded the details of his life and ever increasing accomplishments. He has cast a spell which has unlocked a deep seam of wonder within the Tibetan imagination and this has released a rich and beautiful creativity that says as much - perhaps more - about the authors as it does about their subject. These two together, the transformational power of an archetypal image and its influence on those that feel called to express it, are something that does open my heart and make me feel connected to something bigger than myself. Jolly close to devotion really.

NW. 20 Feb 2024 With thanks to Dr. Paolo Roberti di Sarsina for the invite.