Chöd, inner trolls, brigdes and inner stagnation…

Recently, I decided to spend the early portion of a Saturday doing Chöd under the Pulaski Bridge that connects Brooklyn and Queens (connecting Kings county and Queens county), and crosses the infamous Newtown Creek.  Newtown Creek, for those who are unaware, has the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted waterways in the United States, and is home to the second worst oil spill in America; an estimated 30 million gallons of oil flowed into the creek in the 1950’s, none of which has been removed.  As a result of the oil spill, a century of raw sewage being dumped into the waterway, as well as the dumping of various wanted byproducts of heavy industry such as sulfuric acid, fertilizer and other chemical admixtures there is a layer of highly toxic sludge fifteen feet thick that blankets the floor of Newtown Creek.

In making the decision to head to the Pulaski Bridge and Newtown Creek three distinct criteria had to be addressed:  there had to be a bridge, the place had to have some equivalence to a charnel ground, and it had to invoke fear/discomfort.

The latter two criteria speak to the nature of where chöd has historically been practiced: places that invoke fear and terror; places where there could be a direct mirroring of one’s own internal demons with the projected demons of haunted locales.  Such sites have often included charnel grounds, and also places where terrible events have happened.  A reader once commented on another post that I wrote about chöd that civil war battle sites seem to hold some relevance as chöd sites.  This is a brilliant observation!  Upon second glance, it is easy to notice a wide variety of places that invoke strong feelings of fear and terror.  They surround us and yet we tend to drive or walk by them interacting with them in a way that lacks the direct depth of honest observation.  Often we fail to  interact with them at all.  As I caught myself feeling slight dread in practicing under the Pulaski Bridge amongst the oil depots and industrial traffic that pulsates along the dead creek I realized that this was a great place to go practice.  What better way to be curious about why I should feel discomfort in practicing there?  What is the difference between practicing there and at home, or in a park, or even a cemetery?

That the site should have a bridge reflects a larger curiosity that I developed a few days before about bridges and trolls.  In June I finished 2 units of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which in addition to being oriented around Zen Buddhism, is heavily informed by Jungian psychology.  Reflection upon the symbolic meanings presented by patients, or a given patient’s particular affect, as well as our own perceptual reactions to what arises at any given moment is encouraged. While walking in Prospect Park, and with this training still fresh in my mind, I found myself under a bridge and for the first time in many years I reflected that trolls are often associated with the space under bridges.  They live under bridges, and hide under the cross-roads-like environment that we commonly find under bridges.  Somehow this space elicits discomfort, such spaces seem secret, hidden, perhaps the place where illicit things happen.  I wanted to explore this in chöd practice.

I packed my kyangling and damaru, my pecha and bell and dorje, and brought along a bumpa vase with water blessed with many sacred substances including special pills made by the late Kyabje Pathing Rinpoche for the express purpose of dispelling demons and “inner” hindrances.  In addition to performing chöd, I wanted to offer these substances to Newtown Creek.  With my bag packed, I headed to this industrial charnel ground, the site of an alchemical bridge that joins Kings County with Queens County (Male and Female, Salt and Sulfur) that crosses a body of water that deep under fifteen feet of unknown matter (unconscious mind) and may house inner trolls and local gods.  Kye Ho!

Upon finding a suitable place for my practice, I considered how the place made me feel.  What were its trolls going to be like? When I touched my “inner” trolls what would I find?  I remember from childhood the story of the Three billy Goats Gruff; the story of three goats of ascending size who wish to cross a bridge so that they may feast on greener pastures, the only problem is that they must cross a bridge that is protected/owned, or the home of a nasty troll.

Bridges are places of vulnerability.  Their structure is meant to carry us from one stable ground to another, in-between (a bardo), we are not standing on solid ground.  Perhaps when we are experiencing the bardos of change; the invariable transition from one moment to another; one experience or feeling to another, we are vulnerable to being unseated in a more direct and profound manner.  These bardos are bridges, and where there are bridges there are trolls.

In Norse mythology trolls are generally held to be large, slow, human-like beings.  Trolls are not known for their intellects. They are impulsive, brutish, stubborn, earthy, and grounded.  In a way,  trolls seem to be a personification of the weight and anchoring qualities of the earth element, but in a self-defensive, perhaps self-protective manner or function.  Indeed, the slow conservatism, the heavy reactive stubbornness that trolls are known for seem to be the prime emotions in opposition to the easy experience of transitioning across bardos; across our bridges from one moment to the next.  They want to hold on.  They try to exert the magnetism of discursiveness; the force of myopic focus that prevents us from seeing the larger picture.  They want us off the bridge, they try to prevent us from making the transition; they will even try to kill us to this end.

It seems that trolls show their heads very frequently in my experience of everyday life; this stubborn stupidity, a dullness, and desire to not embrace change.  I easily lose count in trying to reflect how often these trolls try to unseat me.

That Newtown Creek has a fifteen foot layer of toxic sludge separating it from the “real” earthy bottom seems particularly significant, if not essentially symbolic.  What stagnation!  It is as if the earth herself is being suffocated.  Perhaps just as we suffocate ourselves when our inner-demononic-troll-like stubbornness, our hard-headed personification of gravity, our dull stupidity, and brutish reactivity arise, this poor creek-cum-canal is being suppressed and held down.  Toxicity has many shades, and it’s easy to focus upon its generic staples: fear, anger, jealousy, greed, laziness.  But what of toxicity in its more subtle and elusive forms?

How do we allow ourselves to stagnate?  How do we dissempower ourselves?  How do we allow ourselves to fail, to be imperfect? How do we let our trolls steal the vitality of our transitions (bardos)?

This is what I set upon to discover; these demons of Newtown Creek, the demons of stagnation and sedate subconsciousness as well as the army of trolls that seek refuge and feast underneath the Pulaski Bridge.  They are not far, they arise from within ourselves…

In making an offering of myself to these beings, I feel that I was able to shed light upon them as they arise.  It is a process of honoring and respecting the natural occurence of emotions as they arise.  It lends itself to both a process of developing a greater awareness of the play of mind, as well as a means of offering deep witness to our unique inner constellations.  Such constellations, wonderous displays, are already perfect- they arise with the same natural clarity and depth as the constellations that we see in clear night skies.  There is nothing to add or to take away.  The brilliance of their simple appearance is suggestive of immense wonderous beauty.  Nothing to subjugate. Perhaps this is chöd-of-mahamudra: the offering of the suchness of our own minds as witness to it as it arises…

I visualized that  the offering deities and the demons themselves came with great ferocity, like a howling wind, stealing portions of my torn flesh and warm organs.  Those with more time and resources carefully selected prime sections, the liver and heart perhaps.  Others still set up camps and carefully roasted various portions of the offering taking time to set up their own feasts.  That these demons may be honored, and receive my offering helps to liberate them- my emotional habits, self-clinging and the like are allowed to loosen into non-referential emptiness.

As I was performing the chöd sadhana, on that day and at that location, the portion of the text that focuses upon offering the remains of the central ganachakra felt very salient and meaningful.  I have come to try to allow myself to rest in sadhana practice while I am doing it, and in so doing, realizing that at different moments and for a whole host of possible reasons the pecha speaks with powerful clarity at different moments in different ways.  There are so many secondary practices within each pecha that as our inner weather changes, there are many differing modalities of our practice that may be tailored to best suit ourselves at any given moment in time.  If we can view the practice text as alive, full of endless vitality and imbued with the potential for constant unfolding compassion, then every time we sit down to recite a prayer or a particular sadhana we are really engaging directly with the text as a vehicle through time and space.  Every time we read a pecha it can be as if we are reading it for the first time.

This is also another great place where trolls arise.  They arise in our practice.  Our mind can easily become the slow dense troll-mind where pechas feel boring and long, always the same and perhaps even a little dusty.  The pecha becomes a thing, a book, a physical text, the warm humid breath of the dakinis, in this case of Machig Labdron herself dissipates.  It is lost when we become dull.  The full dynamic interpenetration of individuated hermenutic bliss fades; the electricity of the rich moment dies.   The possibility for realizing “the lama-as-appearance” to use the wonderful term that the late Kyabje Bokar Rinpoche often used to describe the mind as lama (that appearance in all of its myriad display is the lama-as-appearance) becomes compromised.

In recognizing this, the offering of the remainder of the ganachakra felt timely, both within myself as well as within my immediate environment.  So, as I sat under the bridge while trucks rumbled down Box Street I imagined that the slippery flesh of my ignorance,  raw and painful, was mixing with a seemingly endless ocean of my own warm sticky blood, rich in iron: my desire; and my rattling bones, still moist and full of rich marrow: my hatred.  I mixed these together and offered it in a vast torma vessel- my own skull.  I offered this to the local gods, the local protectors, to the particular trolls that inhabit the Pulaski Bridge, as well as my own trolls.  This ambrosial nectar, the very last remnants of my body, I offered to this particular place- this polluted earth, forgotten and ignored by many who speed by, is the same earth that supported the Buddha.  Somewhere underneath that thick toxic sludge is the same earth that the Buddha touched, similarly, within ourselves is the same Buddha. The ability to recognize “the lama-as-appearance” is always part of us.

After the practice session I brought my bumpa vase filled with water blessed by His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, blessing pills associated with Chenrezig, Amitabha, and Dorje Phagmo, as well as sacred medicinal substances, and pills specially made by the late Kyabje Pathing Rinpoche for averting the disturbances caused by ghosts, demons and the previously mentioned “inner” hindrances up onto the Pulaski Bridge.  While reciting a variety of mantras I poured the amrita into Newtown Creek that there may be benefit.  May the magic of this place be known!  May the power of its local gods be appreciated, and may they, the local gods, the trolls and the great teachers of stagnation, of dullness and of forgetfulness never be forgotten!

Perhaps every place is imbued with wonderful symbolic representations- dynamic reminders- of our own strengths and our weaknesses. Whether it be Newtown Creek, the Gowanus Canal, or a former slave burial ground, if we look a little more loosely the lama-as-appearance is always present.  It offers a constancy of potential liberating circumstances.  The charnel ground of the chödpa is everywhere.  I am reminded of something that I once read by the previous Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche in which he said that the mind is the essential charnel ground as it is here where thoughts come to die.

Perhaps then, we carry all of the eight great charnel grounds of India within our very experience of mind.

This being a possibility, I offer prayers that we all may realize the chöd-field of our own minds.  May we be free of clinging to this body as real, may we recognize it as illusory.  May the sound of Machig Labdron’s kyangling and damaru permeate the entire universe liberating all upon hearing!