Beauty

It is said that Guru Rinpoche was tricked into taking Padampa Sangye’s body. When he found out how ugly it was, he didn’t feel it a worthy vessel and decided to eject his consciousness and leave his material life. But the great Mahasiddha Yogini Machig Lapdron saw that this was taking place and immediately approached the body and lavished it with adoration. Her awareness and attentiveness found the beauty in that body, causing Guru Rinpoche to reconsider. One woman’s capacity to find beauty everywhere changed the history of the MahaSiddha Tradition. Guru Rinpoche kept that strange but beautiful form and gave her the dharma teachings that brought her beyond dualism. Through her work, the Chod, she now brings us beyond our own dualistic confusion. Machig Lapdron was not the only MahaSiddha who understood the power of seeing beauty, the tradition of Tantric Yogis has always been a tradition of beauty artists, beings who saw beauty, were beauty and spread beauty; a skill this world badly needs.

Because meditative mind is lost, beauty becomes rarified. Dualistic mind trapped in deluded view can find beauty only rarely, in “other,” in the exotic, the foreign, the inaccessible. It is lost to conditioned preconceptions of what is beautiful and what is not. It is reduced to mere form. It is reduced to that which is novel and new. It is limited to an age, or certain fashions, or certain colors or builds. The inherent beauty and vividness of all phenomena becomes obscured by the petty prescriptions of conditioned mind.

It is actually unnatural for this to be so. When we see anything wild, we see unbridled beauty; a tiger, a weed, my puppies’ faces, earth in my hand in the garden, banana slugs, the flowers offered during the summer tour that have now flourished in our side yard. Everywhere any of us look at nature- we see a vivid and inherently perfect beauty.

In meditation we become aware and present in the sense fields, we are sense-itive. We experience how the sense fields are the vehicle for experience, the playground of awareness. Our experience, all experience, is inherently rich, overwhelming yet acute and open. When disconnected to this sensitivity we are less alive, less sensitive and the world’s beauty is obscured. Conditioning clouds view and the world grows a little more ugly.

But the inherent beauty of existence and all beings, saturated with Buddha-nature, is irrepressible. It shines through. It arises in moments when we don’t expect, or at minimum, in the moments when we allow ourselves to see it. Wrinkles become lovely and fat becomes so generous. Even our own mind, does not look so dark and our own emotions so awful. Anger becomes an opportunity to find compassion. Conflict becomes an opportunity to reach greater intimacy. One’s weird and lovely body is discovered to be precious and full of wonder as it is. There is no need to cut up one’s body to find beauty, only meditative mind is needed. There is no need to abandon one’s partner to find attraction, only abandon dualistic and deluded view. Attraction is innate to existence.

Beauty is innate to health. When we are toxic we are ugly, stinky and funky in body and mind. When we clean and care for our internal body we restore natures innate loveliness. When our internal digestive fire is balanced, our desire and attraction become alive again. Therefore even when connection with beauty is lost, it can be restored, it can be brought forth by Great Mother Nature’s healing wisdom.

The state of enthusiastic attraction to phenomena can remain enlivened and fresh when we are artists of awareness. In meditative mind, we become sensitive to the full, vivid, fulfilling nature of what is before us. We feast on the senses. We find the compelling beauty endlessly revealing itself in front of us. What is ordinary is revealed as the extraordinary because we can see the extraordinary within it, our awareness is intact and so we connect with the glorly of Buddha nature in front of us, the Dakini Dancing as all things. When we are resting in our awareness and in our sense fields we can experience the newness and inherently perfection of what is in front of us, even the “ugly” parts. Things don’t have to look the same in some pseudo-enlightened blandness of all one- everything looks as it looks and its qualities are resplendent with the regal art of nature.

Attraction is not the grasping-attachment that is a sign of dualistic confusion. Attraction is one inherent quality of existence. This does not need to be renounced or denied. In fact it can be cultivated. It can be a cause for the experience of the vividness of empty luminosity of all things. It can be a cause for meditation.

Tantrics do not need to renounce form, our bodies are not just bags of pus, blood and bones as is said in Sutra. Our bodies are full of wonder, full of science, intelligence, the five colors and the clear light. We celebrate form; thus the ornaments, the colors, the art, the music of the MahaSiddhas, Tantrics, and Yogins. What a beautiful spirituality the Mahasiddha Tantric Yogis live. Even the ancient ancestor of the MahaSiddhas was beautiful, Shiva, the first Tantric Yogi. His hair was beautiful and his skin. He was of mixed race and because of that united people of warring races with his charisma. He taught them about herbal medicine, and danced with them. Later his teachings which were the earliest Tantric work, continued and finally mingled with the teachings of another beautiful master, Buddha, to eventually develop in to the MahaSiddha Dharma.

Because Tantrics do not renounce form, we have all been artists. If we are not all artists in the conventional sense of religious painting, or musicianship- we are all artists of being- the way of being of enjoyment without preconception. This is how beauty is known, via the way of being beyond conditioning, beyond preconceptions. Beauty is a way of being that we can only contact when we are in the non-dual state, when we are in the most beautiful way of being. It is the way of meditative appreciation of all that is.