Tibetan Buddhism is full of wonderful symbols and rituals - many of which seem very strange to westerners. For instance, there is a pantheon of 100 deities - 42 peaceful deities and 58 wrathful deities.
| FORTY-ONE PEACEFUL DEITIES |
While the peaceful deities are portrayed as, well, peaceful - serene and appealing - the wrathful deities are vicious and scary-looking. Pictures of wrathful deities are full of disturbing images of blood and skulls. They have bestial faces and are often shown stomping on corpses ... not our favourite images of the divine.
It's important to point out that these 100 deities are not seen as beings or gods in a literal sense; they are symbolic representations of different aspects of the divine - in other words - Buddha-mind. Another way of saying it is they represent the different aspects of enlightened activity, or a perfect state of being.
The peaceful deities represent the quiet, natural purity of of our being.
The wrathful deities are something else again.
Wrath doesn't mean violence or fierceness as we
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| MAHAKALA: A WRATHFUL DEITY |
might understand it. Wrath refers to the transformative, aggressive process that is required to overcome the deep-seated conditioning that keeps us beings deluded - a delusion that has us identifying with what our ego tells us is real. And our delusion creates the primal disease - suffering.
The wrathful deities represent what is required to change. They represent the difficult process of transformation.
So, you ask, why am I going on about this? What does it have to do with dealing with our lives in relationship - and all the struggles our relationships bring us every day? Fair questions ... let me explain, and I'll use addiction as an example:
As you know very well, addiction is an insidious, powerful, mysterious illness that affects us to the very core of our being. Not only the addict, but everyone who loves them is impacted and eventually mirrors the addictive behaviour. Understood this way, addiction is a relational, spiritual disease - and therefore a relational, spiritual approach is required to overcome it.
Here's my point - which brings us back to the Buddhist deities: a spiritual approach must, along with the peaceful spiritual aspects - like awe and wonder, gratitude and acceptance, include wrath.
Wrath is about courage - courage to tell the truth, to be honest with oneself and others, to be responsible for one's own behaviour and not control others. Wrath requires determination and firmness - with oneself and others. Wrath is not about compromise and dialogue, it is about transformation - the courage to change, the determination to do things differently.
Wrath is confronting addictive behaviour
Wrath is setting boundaries.
Wrath is self-remembering
Wrath is tough-love ...
And so on ...
Here is how a well-known Buddhist master, who happens to be a Canadian, put it in one of his teaching talks:
You need anger at the situation in which you find yourself if you want to get out of it. Not only discipline - you need that too! - but you need wrath. You must have determination if you are going to get up from where you are wallowing around, so that you can get on with the work of putting down the unwholesome.
Sometimes I suspect that [people] don't have any anger about their suffering, that they are not really tired of being sick. ... you continue the dialogue with the unwholesome states. Having a conversation with your illness won't subdue it. You have to get it under you and stamp on it like Hevajra or Demchog. You know that those deities are portrayed with corpses under their feet, don't you? ... Subduing, firmness, wrath.
I tell you most truthfully, if there is no wrath, there is no bliss. If there is no fire in your being, there is no bliss. So get out of your lethargy. It takes strength to break the chain
- from Body Speech and Mind, Namgyal Rinpoche, p. 103
Namgyal Rinpoche is not talking specifically about addiction - he's referring to our human condition. But what demeans our human condition more than when addiction assaults our relationships - our very being?
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| DEMCHOG: A WRATHFUL DEITY |
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