Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a rainy summer Monday afternoon here in Brooklyn, New York.

If you’ve been following along with the Barrcast, you know that we ran a series of posts on Evagrius Ponticus, the Christian desert father, who wrote really influential teachings on the eight evil thoughts, or logismoi. These were later turned into the seven deadly sins, as well as becoming the basis of the Enneagram. But in Evagrius’s telling, these eight thoughts, these logismoi, are like little imperceptible devils sent to the human mind to attack it, to impassion it, to inflame it and turn it further away from God.

So we’re now turning to a different religious tradition, that of Tibetan Buddhism. And I have in front of me Jamgön Kongtrül’s compilation on Chöd, or severance. This is a tradition that dates back to the 11th century, when a woman, Machig Labdrön, began teaching a new tradition. It says here that she taught what we’re about to read — this great bundle of precepts — in a single day to a large crowd that included three Indians who arrived instantly in Tibet by means of the practice called Swift Foot, to investigate the authenticity of Machig and her increasingly popular teachings.

So she was a bit of a maverick, and as a woman, probably the target of a lot of suspicion. And at the same time, her teaching is very traditional.

There are a lot of reasons why I’m excited to read it today, but as we’ll see, one of them is that we’re going to be firmly in the demonology realm — so, continuing Evagrius’s work with demons. And I think it maybe will surprise some that Buddhism is going to be using this word devil. But as we’ll see, the Buddhist conception of the devil is really different than Evagrius’s, even though a lot of the practice instruction is the same.

So we’ll read the text — it’s short — and then explore a little bit about what her project is here. There are four devils in her classification. We’re not going to get into the actual practice of Chöd much; this is going to be more of an investigation of the text itself.

I’ll just say, by way of preface, that this tradition on severance grew and grew and grew after Machig. There’s a story in the introduction of this compilation that says a monk visited a man who was in a huge room — a four-pillared room — surrounded with books stacked from the floor to the ceiling. He asked him, “What are all the books?” And the man said they’re all about severance, all commentaries on Machig. So this is an original teaching that spawned a lot of additional teachings and practices.

So with that out of the way, let’s hear from Machig herself.

[Reads the The Great Bundle of Precepts on Severance]

Why Devils?

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the use of this devil classification system. Why is it that Machig chooses to talk about evil? This is severance of evil objects — devils. It maybe sounds a little un-Buddhist; it maybe sounds a little Christian. And that’s what I was really interested in digging into. If you’ve been following the Barcast, you know we’ve been talking about devils in the tradition of early Christianity, as represented by Evagrius. So we’ll do a little bit of comparison there.

Machig is extremely clear up front about what devils are. She writes: the root devilry is one’s own mind. The devil lays hold through clinging and attachment in the cognition of whatever objects appear. Grasping mind as an object is corruption. Extremely clear. That’s really the beginning and the end of the system. So even though we’re going to dive into a fairly elaborate classification, the devil is one’s own mind.

And this couldn’t be more different from Evagrius’s framework, where there is an external adversary. Here the adversary is internal. However — there is an adversary. And this is a place where Machig and Evagrius would agree: there is an opponent who seems to actively work against one’s own wishes for enlightenment, awakening, coming to God. The attitude to take up regarding it is not enmity, not hate — although Evagrius will say indignation, thumos, this heart center. In his framework there’s a “no,” a saying no, “get back.” So there is a boundary, a No.

And we’ll see whether there’s something similar with Buddhism, or not — because this particular tradition confuses me at times. On the one hand, you’ll hear about Milarepa or some other great master inviting the demons to tea, welcoming them, inviting them in: a sort of boundarylessness, a porousness, a yes. And at other times this is a severance tradition, a cutting tradition, a No tradition. We’ll talk in a minute about the syllable phat — that plosive, to me the act of cutting and casting up into space for feasting. So how can it be both? I actually think there’s an answer, and it’s a classically Buddhist answer. But let’s get into that in a second.

Why do we even need to talk about devils at all, if the devil is one’s own mind? Keep in mind Machig is writing in the 11th century, so she has access to all the sutras. We see in the tradition words like obscuration, hindrance, ignorance, confusion — to name a few. These are all traditional ways of describing exactly what Machig is talking about: the process of clinging and attachment, aversion and attraction, passion and aggression, and confusion as the third, right at the beating heart of the samsaric wheel. But never really called devils. Well — okay, there’s Mara. Maybe Mara really is the tradition’s way of talking about the devil.

But still: why do we need this word? I think each word, each framework, affords its own understanding. If I think about darkness or ignorance or obscuration — words that indicate a kind of blindness — what that evokes for me is the opportunity for light to instantly resolve it. If I’m in a dark room, hopelessly probing around for the chair, and somebody turns the light on, I’m flooded instantly with understanding. And even if they turn the light off again, I’d probably still find the chair. So obscuration is effective at reinforcing a nondual point of view — by which I mean that light and dark are not two forces opposed to each other; there’s just light, and then the absence or occlusion of light, the sun behind the clouds. That’s helpful in not reifying, not grasping at difficulty. I once was blind and now I see. There’s a hopeful quality to the word obscuration, and I think that’s what’s foregrounded.

Then there are words like poisons, hindrances, obstacles. These are more practical ways of talking about things that happen to us on the path — pride, but also ill health, jealousy. And good health can be its own obstacle. Anything can arise as an obstacle. The way forward that this language affords is transmutation, transformation. Transformation is always tricky, because for those of us drawn to the wizard or alchemist archetype, there’s a feeling of “I’m going to change my jealousy into action, my grief into joy.” We can’t really bring that agenda in so successfully. Whenever the tradition talks about transmutation, it’s talking about that as the result of seeing sufficiently into what the grief is made of, what the jealousy is made of. So if obscuration points to light, obstacle points to transformation — going into the thing itself and seeing what it’s made of.

And then devil, I think, points to a third approach: instant opposition. Instant No. Instant cutting. It’s not gradual. It’s not really even a practice. It’s victorious. When I hear Machig talk about devils, I picture the haunted place with ghosts all around. It’s that they’re incessant — always arising, always attacking — but defeating them is effortless. Effortless, except for the incessance.

When we work with devils, we acknowledge that there certainly seem to be forces working hard against our awakening. If there weren’t, there’d be a lot more peace and contentment in the world. There aren’t just a few hurdles to step over; there seems to be a real adversarial force. And yet we recognize the emptiness of them — that the devil is one’s own mind. So it’s fighting the opponent within a larger understanding of the non-separateness of person and adverse condition. The adverse condition is my mind, and so it’s a constant opportunity for integration, for digestion.

So, why devils? Because cutting is only possible through that word. We don’t cut through obscuration; we don’t cut through darkness. We don’t really cut through poison or hindrance either. We cut through illusion. Things come at us and we cut through them. So there is absolutely a sense of warfare here. But the war being fought is, first of all, one-sided — not a fair fight. We have Arthur’s blade, we have the vajra, the indestructible weapon. There’s no enmity, no hostility, and the lack of hostility comes from the awareness that our opponent is our own mind. But there is scheming, complexity. The enemy does seem to have a strategy, a cunning. When we talk about a devil, we’re talking about an agent — to use everyone’s favorite word these days. There’s a perceived agency, which makes sense, because we’re acknowledging the devil is one’s own mind; what it’s made of is mind. So of course it has a certain cunning, a survival skill.

And that’s where Evagrius and Machig are on the same page. Even though Evagrius isn’t ultimately saying the devils are one’s own mind, the devils are made of mind. In that Christian tradition, devils, angels, and humans are all cut from the same cloth, which is God. If I tried to pull the two together, I might say in Evagrian language that devils and humans are ultimately both made of God-material — because in Evagrius, as in Origen before him, Satan himself and the devils are nothing but souls that departed from God through drift. So here, when we s...