The Mandala of the Victorious Body

Trul Khor, Tibetan Yoga, is a journey from the manifest to the unmanifest, from the gross to the subtle. With it we start with the physical body, with purifying movements for the parts of the body. And then we move more and more inward, into the great subtleties of our awareness.

But before we start the movements we connect to ourselves, to our teachers, to the enlightened beings of this world system. We find refuge.

In the Bön tradition, as in many spiritual traditions, refuge is a concept of great importance. Refuge means safety, security, trust, protection. Refuge is shelter from the storms of life, from its trials and tribulations. It does not mean the end of our problems, but it means that we are cared for, watched over, and protected. In christian terms, we are sheep under the care of a good shepherd.

This refuge exists in different ways. First is the external refuge. We take refuge in the Buddha, or in God, in the Great Mystery or All the Is. We look outside of ourselves and into the creation to someone or some being greater than ourselves. Like the great hero Odysseus when he washes up on the shores of Scheria and supplicates himself to the king’s daughter, Nausicaa, wer show oursevles as exposed and helpless - we ask for help. In Buddhism, we are clothed and fed with the dharma, the teachings and practices given by the buddhas and our teachers. The dharma protects us and leads us out of a life of suffering and dissatisfaction into the wholeness of our real being or essence.

Over time, and through taking our practice to heart, cultivating it, we discover the inner refuge. Here we start to see in ourself the qualities in which we took refuge outside of ourself. We find our own power, wisdom, and compassion. We start to stand on our own two feet. This inner resource or wealth is something that we always had, but that we had lost sight of or access to. There is a Tibetan story about a very poor woman: she has nothing and lives in a cave. She sleeps with her head on a rock. One day the king is passing by and a terrible storm comes. He seeks refuge from the storm in her cave and sees that the rock that is her pillow is in fact a massive stone of pure gold. The woman is even richer than the king, but she did not know it. We are like that poor woman, sleeping in ignorance of our true wealth, which was always right there to be seen. The discovery of inner refuge is that our nature is unbounded wholeness. We are complete in ourselves and in our relations to the world around us and all its living beings.

Once we come into contact with this inner treasury or resource, then we begin to experience the “Mandala of the Victorious Body",” or the expression of ourself as enlightened nature. Our body, speech, mind, become a sacred landscape expressing our wisdom and compassion. The body becomes a living universe. Deities pervade our being - our joints, bones, tissue, organs and blood. The flow of our energy and awareness and wisdom move thorugh the field of experience and awareness like blood in our vessels. This is the subtle body of channels and chakras, of tigles (unindividuated points of awareness) Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes beautifully of this:

This space of inner refuge can scare us at first. It seems to vast. It feels to different from our ordinary awareness, our smallness. It feels as if we could lose ourselves (the idea of who we think we are) and never come back again. A racing heart, anxiety, fear can arise when we first discover this boundlessness. This is natural! In this entire lifetime, for many many lifetimes, we have been turning away from our infinite and expansive nature. Because we have learned so completely, through force of habit and through our culture, not to see it the heart feels like a black hole whose gravity can suck us in and erase us. A natural reaction is to turn away from the experience, to turn on the lights and go back to being distracted by the world of things and ideas and our ego.

And yet, if you stay, this is a space of magic and light and infinite possibilities. It is indescribably beautiful. It is an unstained space, full of light. It is a source of unending strength and power so long as we connect to it. It is more nourishing than any food and more healing than any medicine. It has names: the natural state, the unspeakable state, buddha-nature, the living Christ, and more. There is also something oddly impersonal about the encounter in that there is almost nothing that you can really say about it, and this is one of the reasons that we can be frightened. And yet, there is nothing more personal, more deeply expressive of our true being, than this vast, inner landscape. The impersonality is in the seeming lack of ego and personality in this space, and the fact that it is the same in all times ind in all places. When we touch on the space of the heart, then love, joy, compassion, equanimity and all the virtues natually manifest from within us.

Once we have touched it, our practice - the practice of the nine breaths, tsa lung, trul khor, and especially meditation and prayer, are a path to reconnect and stabilize our encounters with this inner universe. We practice again and again and again and again. And though practice we are not creating anything. We are just walking the path back home to our true self, to our self-nature: still, silent, spacious, loving, and blissful. This is a lifetime practice for most of us. The great saints are the ones who are able to abide here in this world and simultaneously abide in this inner space, too.

As we deepen our experience of the inner refuge, then the innermost, or secret, refuge unfolds for us. The image at the top of this blog expresses this concept of inner and secret refuge together. Not only is our experiential body the mandala, but our actions, speech and thoughts are wise and compassionate expressions of that mandala. What is outside or inside ceases to be different. Whatever appears is awakened awareness revealing itself to itself, for itself. We act for our own benefit and the benefit of others simply because there is no other choice we would want to take: there is nothing that is not us. Therefore, since we would never knowingly harm ourselves or act against our best interest, our every act is for the good of all beings. We see the enlightened potential of all beings and merely act to assist others in recognizing for themselves there own nature. [This last bit is a paradox. Enlightened beings are everything and everywhere, but each apparent being is also unique and must awaken to itself. So, what is one abides as many and the many abide each in every one.]