Vajrapani - The Archetype of Energy

This talk was given at the London Buddhist Centre in 1998

When we want to connect with ideals, with what we aspire to, we need to use our imagination. An ideal, especially a spiritual ideal, is always beyond us, beyond our experience, beyond our knowledge and so we have to use intuition and imagination to make contact with what our ideals are like when realised.

In the Buddhist tradition those who have gone ahead, so to speak, those who have attained to higher states of consciousness and to Insight have tried to communicate their experience. To do this they have resorted to words and concepts, to images, sounds, colours, and even to paradox. From the depths of spiritual insight and experience there has poured forth a vast, abundant treasure of teachings in all these forms. From the depths of meditation experience there arose the various images, colours and sounds that represent the archetypal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. These images are the embodiment of profound spiritual experience and although they are all different – Tara, Amitabha, Manjughosha and so on - they are also all the same – they all represent the fullness of the Enlightenment experience, while emphasising a particular aspect. There is only one archetypal Buddha or Bodhisattva in a sense and that one has manifested in myriad forms through the spiritual experience of many unique individual practitioners. And so when we contemplate the figure of an archetypal Buddha or Bodhisattva we are contemplating Enlightenment, we are contemplating the highest possible spiritual ideal. To do that we need to be able to allow our imagination to engage and interact with the form and colour before us.

Let us turn then to Vajrapani and allow our imagination and intuition to engage with him. On first sight Vajrapani is not exactly attractive – he is fierce and terrifying - liberated, free, unconventional – doesn't care what you think of him, gone beyond the vain pursuit of facade and posturing.

He is a dark blue colour. He has fierce, glaring eyes, sharp protruding teeth. He wears a crown of skulls. He is naked apart form a tiger skin wrapped around his loins. His fierceness is a skin, you have to look deeper than the surface, look into the deep blue of Vajrapani. He is moving to his right, stamping his great feet – under his feet he is crushing two human figures. He is holding a Vajra in his right hand and all around his body there is a halo of flames. All in all he is a frightening sight.

The figures he is stamping on, crushing beneath his feet, represent greed, hatred and spiritual ignorance. He is victorious over these forces of the mind. He dances the dance of victory – the ecstatic dance of triumph over the forces of negativity and debilitating habit. In his right hand he holds a Vajra. Vajra means “thunderbolt” or even “diamond thunderbolt”. It represents the energetic and even destructive aspect of Enlightenment.

The Wisdom of Enlightenment destroys all ignorance. It destroys all negativity. It destroys all egotism, all selfishness. It destroys self-pity, it destroys hatred, it destroys disharmony. Vajrapani holds the Vajra aloft, ready to hurl it, ready to put to flight all that is inimicable to the Dharma. Vajrapani is the quintessential warrior hero. Standing lone against all odds, defending truth and beauty. His left hand is in the gesture that wards off evil – demons and enemies of the Dharma. The flames surrounding Vajrapani indicate the passionate fiery energy of transformation, burning up impurities. To transform ourselves or the world, we need to have a passion for our ideals. We need the single-mindedness and wholeheartedness that produces the hot furnace of energy represented by those flames. Energy is fundamental to the spiritual life, indeed to all life. Vajrapani is the embodiment of the powerful unstoppable energy that is required to break through into Insight, breakthrough into Reality, break out of the prison of egotism.

The energy required for spiritual transformation is called Virya. Virya is energy in pursuit of the good. Sometimes people speak of having different kinds of energy – creative energy, sexual energy, physical energy, mental energy etc. The image that comes to mind is of a petrol station with different kinds of fuel. It's as if people see their energy in this way sometimes. Personally I think this is probably not a useful way to think about our energy. I think it can be alienating. We can get to the point of speaking about our energy as if it were some “thing”apart from us. So that “I don't seem to have the energy” can be a euphemism for “I'm not interested”. We all have energy, vitality, vigour. That's what it means to be alive. To have vitality, energy. What often happens though is that we dissipate our energy, we waste it – we allow it to leak out. And then we feel dull and listless.

I want to talk about about Virya - energy in pursuit of the good - under three headings, Conservation, Consummation, and Courage.

Conservation

As I said we often waste our energy – allowing it to leak out. Basically the main way we waste energy is through distractions and through the indulging in negative emotions, such as fear, anger, ill-will, jealousy, self-pity, worrying about the past, irrational guilt, and so on. The demons that Vajrapani is warding off.

We often allow our energy to flow in many different directions simultaneously. And then we haven't got much left to live the spiritual life. Some of the things we put our energy into may even be going in the opposite direction to our spiritual aspirations. For instance, if we watch violent movies, this will affect our minds and make mediation more difficult.

Some of the main areas where we invest our energy usually, apart from the spiritual life, are in our addictions, our leisure activities, our work and family. Some of these overlap of course. Before I say anything about any of these, I would like to issue a warning- that is, that change takes time and you should not expect yourself to be able to focus your energy in the spiritual life fully, until you've been practising for some time. Spiritual transformation is a process and it happens gradually over time, with periods of fast growth and even breakthrough, and periods when perhaps nothing much seems to happen. If you're practising, it is always happening on another level.

The biggest addiction for most people these days seems to be sex or more precisely the romantic relationship, which is held together by sex. The only thing I want to say about this is that we need to be more aware of how much energy we give to this area and how it affects our spiritual progress. I'm not advocating that people give up sex – it's not a simple matter and most of us are just not capable of maintaining contentment without some sexual outlet. But it does take up energy, both physically and emotionally and we need to become more conscious of that as a first step in moving towards giving our sexual activity and sexual relationship a more appropriate place in our lives i.e. not centre stage.

As regards our leisure activities, we can often waste a lot of energy in the pursuit of pleasure. And quite often what we think will bring us pleasure doesn't satisfy us at all. Whether it is sex, cinema, TV, internet, newspapers or whatever – we are often left with a feeling that it's been a bit of a waste of time. We do need pleasure and leisure in our lives, but strangely, for many of us it takes years and years to fully realise where our pleasure and leisure needs are really satisfied. In the meantime we squander a lot of energy on absurdities ( Since this talk was given the absurdities have multiplied enormously via Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and more.)

A first step that we need to take is to become more discriminating in what we do with our leisure time and more discriminating in what stimuli or input we engage with every day. This is not easy – it requires mindfulness and emotional maturity and I must admit that many of us don't have sufficient mindfulness and discipline to discriminate effectively about what is spiritually beneficial and what is spiritually detrimental. I'm posing a tough question when I ask you to become more discriminating about what to input into your mind. Nevertheless, in the spirit of Vajrapani, I will pose the question – I will lay down the challenge, which is a challenge to myself too. Weakness of resolve is not a spiritual virtue. Without a strong resolve to do better and an ability to carry it through we can carry on forever wobbling, dithering or dozing.

Apart from our addiction to romantic relationships and our rather indiscriminate pursuit of pleasure, we also waste energy through the verbal expression of negative emotion. This is complaining, grumbling, fault-finding , gossip, nagging, self-pity, self-hatred, undermining others – all these are ways in which we waste energy verbally. We waste energy anyway by talking too much, but negative speech takes a heavier toll on our energy. It's exhausting because it is pushing against Reality- it's a way we have of trying to keep reality at bay. The reality of our interconnectedness with all humanity and all of life. All these negative expressions are our way of trying to shore up our defences. We need to work hard to keep our chaotic tongues in check. I don't mean that we should deny our feelings of negativity – I think we should acknowledge them, recognise them and confess them, but not pour them over people.

Whether we waste our energy through our addictions or distractions or verbal expression of negative emotions, the first step towards stopping the leaks and conserving energy is awareness – recognition of what's happening. Acknowledging honestly and frankly to ourselves what we do with our energy. The next step is developing positive emotion. And this obviously starts with ourselves. We need to to develop a genuinely positive attitude towards ourselves. Sometimes people develop a sort of pseudo-positive attitude towards themselves, in which they will sing their own praises and acknowledge their good qualities but won't do anything much to help themselves progress. This is the sort of attitude that says - “Well, I'm pretty okay. I've got my faults, but I'm alright and there you are, take me or leave me”. A genuine positive attitude towards yourself looks for the best in yourself, looks for your good qualities, acknowledges them and strives to make them grow. A genuine positive attitude is one that is always endeavouring to enhance, encourage and nourish the best in ourselves and others.

It's not enough to just sort of like ourselves in some vague way – we need to clearly recognise our unique qualities and our positive responses and to deliberately give attention to them. We need to deliberately nourish and encourage what is best in ourselves. If we do this we will experience Metta, and if we experience metta we will experience a measure of contentment and satisfaction and therefore we will experience less of a craving to distract ourselves or dissipate our energy and more of a genuine desire to channel our energy into spiritual growth and caring for others. Positive emotion is essential to the spiritual life. If we frequently feel restless and anxious and chase after all sorts of distractions and addictions, it is because we are lacking in Metta. We don't really care for ourselves enough. If we really care for ourselves, we will experience greater energy and vitality. We will feel alive and glad to be alive.

As far as conserving energy that is wasted through negative speech is concerned, well we need to just stop it basically. We need to stop grumbling and complaining and criticising and gossiping and nagging and undermining others and cynicism and self-pity. Traditionally these states are personified as demons – we need to ward off the demons. We need to take responsibility for our mental states as being our mental states and acknowledge and confess negativity rather than waste energy pouring it all over other people.

Consummation

What do I mean by Consummation of energy? Usually we hear the word consummation in relation to sexual intercourse in marriage. A marriage is consummated by sexual intercourse. Consummation means to bring to completion. That which is consummated has been completed. So what is meant by the consummation of energy - the bringing to completion of energy. What I'm getting at here is the appropriate channelling of energy, the appropriate use of energy, which indicates psychological integration and is the expression of psychological integration. A whole person, a complete person and integrated person, uses or channels energy in an appropriate way.

I want to talk about consummation of energy under the headings of, unblocking energy, sublimating and refining energy and channelling energy.

Quite often people find at the very early stages of the spiritual path that their energy is not fully available to them - in other words, their energy is blocked. This manifests often in a lack of emotionality, an inability to feel emotions. There can be all sorts of reasons for repression of the emotional life – e.g. guilt about sex due to wrong education and bad religion or fear of being hurt or engaging in mechanical routine work or not having any outlet for inspiration or creativity or big disappointments in life or even just an absence of any real communication. There are all sorts of reasons why our emotional energy might be blocked and what we have to do is unblock it.

We unblock energy and emotions first of all through meditation and introspection. In meditation this quite often happens spontaneously as you get concentrated. Communication is another obvious way to unblock energy. You may have noticed that after a good session of communication exercises you feel energised and alive. The communication exercises are just to loosen us up and wake us up to the possibilities in communication, the possibilities for affirmation, acknowledgement, and expression, bring the best in us into relation with the best in others, that we have all the time in the Sangha. (for an explanation of communication exercises see Subhuti, Sangharakshita:A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition, p.160)

Some kind of creative work also helps to unblock energy. By creative work I don't mean composing poetry or painting pictures, necessarily. I mean work that is related to your spiritual aspirations – either because it is obviously ethical in a life enhancing way or because it is together with other Buddhists or somehow helps you to grow and develop spiritually. Work in a Triratna team-based right livelihood is creative because it is ethical, it encourages growth and development and it is in co-operation with other Buddhists. I recommend it. Physical exercise is another important way to keep energy moving. When our energy gets more and more unblocked, we can waste it or we can sublimate it and refine it. Usually we choose to waste it.

To sublimate and refine our emotional energy we need to quite consciously and deliberately put a check on the expression we give to our energy. The opposite to refined is coarse and coarse energy is not sufficient for the spiritual life. To engage with meditation, ethical practice and higher states of consciousness, we need to have a refined sensitivity. We refine ourselves by engaging our emotions and our energy in more refined and sensitive activities, such as the arts. Even interaction with beauty in the form of landscapes can have a refining effect on us. The point here is about not wasting energy through an indiscriminate pursuit of distractions. If we are more discriminating about where we engage our energies, more discriminating about what we read, what we watch at the cinema or on TV, more discriminating even in our conversation - if we are more discriminating we can choose the refined over the coarse and develop gradually the necessary sensitivity to practice the spiritual life.

Here is what Bhante Sangharakshita says about the sublimation and refining of emotions in his essay Advice to a Young Poet: “it should be clearly understood that emotion is essentially a force, and that it has a natural tendency to express itself in some outward form.If this force is consciously checked, so that it is no longer able to express itself in the normal manner, the inhibited energy will assume a subtler and more powerful form, and therefore tend to expressions on a higher plane of experience. Feelings are like fountains, in which water, unable to to find an outlet on its own level, shoots up through a narrow aperture to leap a hundred feet in the air. It should be noted that the 'check' of which we speak is a conscious and deliberate process; were it unconscious, then the inhibited emotion would simply be pressed down beneath the conscious surface of the mind into the unconscious depths below and what disturbance a repressed emotion is capable of creating has been too strongly insisted on by psychoanalysts to need repetition.” (The Religion of Art,p. 131/132)

It's up to each individual how they refine their emotions but the necessity of a refined emotional energy is applicable to all. After the unblocking, and the sublimation and refining of energy, there comes the channelling of energy. This is the final consummation.

The channelling of energy is basically a practice of moment to moment mindfulness. There is a channelling of energy that takes place in terms of choosing a context – that could broadly be labelled commitment. Choosing a context might mean choosing a particular spiritual group, in our case Triratna and within that framework, choosing a context could mean, living in a community, working in a team-based right livelihood, staying with the family or whatever, and then within that situation the implications of practice are followed through with mindfulness.

We have to consistently make decisions about what we do and to be able to make those decisions we have to be awake to the choices we are being presented with. Sometimes people don't even realise that they are making decisions because they are totally unaware of the choices confronting them. When that happens we act purely from habit and are more asleep than awake, more dead than alive. So we need to to try to wake up to the choices in our lives and make decisions about what to do with our energy, both in terms of the wider context in which to live our lives and in terms of the moment to moment business of living. When we are awake and alive in this way, we are more like complete or whole persons and our emotional energy is consummated in a constant stream of creativity.

Courage

We need courage to go beyond the limitations of our personality and self image. We need courage to let down our defences, to come out from behind the facade of our personality and enter into genuine communication with each other. We need courage to break through our doubts and fears and move into more expansive ways of being. We need courage to be wholehearted, to throw ourselves into the practice of the Dharma. We even need courage to be generous. The practice of Buddhism needs a heroic attitude, a pioneering, adventurous attitude. The archetypal Bodhisattva Vajrapani is also an archetypal hero or warrior. He represents an active, fearless approach overcoming limitations and doubts. This attitude or approach is also symbolised in Tantric Buddhism by the cremation ground. To quote Bhante, “The cremation ground is the place where you come face to face with everything that you usually avoid”. What you face in the cremation ground is death and fear and loneliness and perhaps even insanity.” “The cremation ground represents a crucial situation, a situation of crisis into which one deliberately plunges oneself, a situation on which one is compelled to change. You come face to face in the cremation ground with yourself. You know yourself. You know your weaknesses and your strength.” (Mitrata, The Tantric Path 5, p.12)

If we are to develop courage we will have to put ourselves into crucial situations, discover our own personal cremation grounds. For some people doing communication exercises is a crucial situation, something they fear. For others speaking up in a group is a crucial situation. Others again fear to let anyone see their sadness or insecurity. For some people there is even a fear of expressing affection. Each of us has our own crucial situation, our own cremation ground and this is the arena in which we can be heroic. This is where we can muster our energies and go forward courageously breaking through limitations, taking risks. The more we can take these personal risks and move beyond our current limitations, the greater will be our ability to progress spiritually, to expand our consciousness, and rise to higher levels.

We could say that in the spiritual life there are two great hindrances: the tendency to settle down and the tendency towards distraction. We need to become more aware of any tendency we may have to settle down, whether of body, speech or mind. As we grow older it is natural for us to start to settle down into habitual behaviour, habitual ways of communicating and habitual mental states. But settling down is death to our spiritual practice (a slow death!), so we need to be aware of this tendency and actively work against it.

Settling down in terms of body can mean having a strong attachment to our bit of territory, our house or flat, our room and our possessions, our money, and our way of doing things. Settling down in terms of speech means getting into habitual ways of speaking without much reference to the precepts. We may no longer be asking ourselves whether our speech is truthful or exaggerated, whether it's kindly or cutting, whether it's meaningful or trivial, whether it's harmonising or gossipy. Settling down in terms of mind means allowing yourself to indulge in habitual negative mental states on the grounds of that is who you are. We can settle down with self-pity or irritability or anxiety or loneliness, because even though they are painful they are what we are used to.

The opposite of settling down is going forth. Vajrapani could be seen as the Bodhisattva of Going Forth, always watching out for complacency and moving on, going beyond, breaking through. I think we need to guard against any tendency to settle down and give ourselves a good shake from time to time.

Whatever particular activity or situation is our current cremation ground or crucial situation, we are all aiming to increase our own confidence, this is the self-regarding aspect of courage and we are also aiming to achieve genuine, heartfelt, open communication with others. Confidence can be built up simply by the activity of spiritual practice. If we practice we will progress. We need to avoid any unrealistic expectations in the early stages of the spiritual life and not expect our meditations to be blissful or our communication to be transcendent all the time. If we make the effort to practice we can be sure that we are good enough to practice and progress. You don't need to be young, you don't need to be old, you don't need to be educated, you don't need to be artistic, you don't need to be special. In fact it's probably quite arrogant for someone to think that the Dharma is not within their capability – that would be a claim to being special indeed. We can be confident that we can practice and that consistent practice does bear fruit in higher states of consciousness and more expansive awareness.

Communication is the other area where we need to proceed with courage. As we enter into closer communication with other people, as we begin to form friendships and those friendships go deeper and become more intimate, we encounter two potential difficulties. These are that our normal tendencies to attraction or aversion becomes heightened and emphasised. We might find to our discomfort that our friendliness is turning into feelings of sexual attraction. And, at least for those who are not homosexually inclined, this can be very uncomfortable indeed. It can cause all sorts of fears and confusion to arise. This is something that often happens and is simply another area for communication. This happened to me, about ten years ago, in two of my closest friendships and for a time caused me great confusion and distress but when I eventually communicated to my friends what was going on, there was not a problem. The main issue had been my bottling up of something that I felt uncomfortable about. In those of homosexual inclination, there can be confusion between romance and spiritual friendship.

We may also find that as we get closer to someone we experience strong feelings of anger or resentment towards them. Again we can communicate our way through this if there is enough genuine friendliness there. As Vessantara puts it in “Meeting the Buddhas”, “these strong feelings are just the dragons that guard the treasure of intimate communication and deep friendship.” (p.167)

Vajrapani is the embodiment of energy. He is the embodiment of Virya – energy in pursuit of the good – energy raised to its highest level. He dances the passionate fiery dance of transformation. He stands naked and fearless before the forces of ignorance and limitation and hurls his vajra thunderbolt with the power of wisdom at all that threatens the Truth of the Dharma. He is energy and courage, he is fearlessness and freedom, and as we watch him his halo of raging fire starts to grow and expand and reach out to us, touching us with the heat of his fiery passion for truth, and awakening within us the spirit of adventure, of going forth, the spirit of the hero warrior ready to enter the field of spiritual endeavour, wholeheartedly and courageously.