Another thing about the activity or manifestation of buddhas is that because it is nonconceptual and spontaneous, not only does it never fail, not only is it without delay, but it is never inappropriate. It is always perfectly responsive to the actual needs of every individual.
Nevertheless this is where the varying degrees of an individual’s receptivity, the varying degree of our faith, become key. To actually benefit greatly from the blessing of a buddha requires faith on our part. And faith is like an iron ring that can be grasped by the hook of the compassion of buddhas. Imagine that there is a ball of iron that weighs tons. For that to be lifted by a hook there has to be something the hook can grab, a ring on top of that ball. And the ring has to be strong enough that the hook and chain can actually lift this multi-ton mass of iron. The ring here is an analogy for degree of faith that is unconditional entrustment. The unbroken nature of the ring, the fact that the ring is a perfect circle without anything from which the hook could slip, is the unconditional aspect of that entrustment. And entrustment is actually putting ourself in the hands of the buddha’s blessing. If we lack unconditional entrustment, then we are like an iron ball with no ring, or with a broken ring, or with a weak or rusty ring. Buddhas are not going to be able to pull us out of this swamp.
It is interesting and significant that there is nothing that can replace this unconditional entrustment. No amount of learning, no amount of intellectual understanding of buddhadharma or of any other subject can replace this. There are loads and loads of scholars in this world. There is in some way unprecedented degree and prevalence of Buddhist scholarship. We find this in secular universities all over the world and in Buddhist monastic colleges as well. If learning could produce awakening, then all of these super-scholars who now proliferate would be buddhas, which does not appear to be the case. So what we need is unconditional entrustment without doubt, and not great learning.
In the West, most or many people who approach the Buddhist tradition are particularly interested in the vajrayana, in what is traditionally called the secret mantra. Vajrayana is very powerful. But without unconditional entrustment, its power will produce exactly the opposite of what it is intended to do. To give you an analogy, the power of a telescope is that if you look through the right end it will bring distant things much closer very quickly and make distant, almost invisible things clearly visible. Approaching the vajrayana without unconditional entrustment of yourself, however, is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It will only make things more distant, make things — awakening in particular — seem even farther away. To complete the analogy, the lenses here, which make the telescope powerful, are not something that we need to newly acquire. The lenses are already within us. We just need to learn to look through the right end.
There is a Tibetan saying about this that does not exactly involve the telescope analogy but is similar as it is a vision analogy: “No one can see their own back.” Without an elaborate system of at least two mirrors, no one can actually see their own back. We can see some of our own front, but none of our own back. And this is an analogy for the fact that we are constantly looking for the true goodness that actually is present within us as our own buddha nature, but we’re looking for it in all the wrong places. Because we can’t see our own back, our own guts, we can’t see our own insides, we look out and we don’t see it around us so we look even further out and we engage in this exhaustive and utterly fruitless process of looking further and further and further away from ourselves for some kind of goodness, some kind of salvation. Learning, even Buddhist learning, is another example of this. No amount of learning is going to reveal what is hidden from you. The only way to actually discover your true nature is through faith.
Now I mentioned a couple of minutes ago that the traditional common term for vajrayana is secret mantra or guhya mantra. And guhya, or secret, means more-or-less secret, hidden. And mantra can mean several things. When we hear the term secret mantra it sounds like some sort of weird, super-esoteric, hidden knowledge that only cool people have. And if we want to get that knowledge we have to become one of the cool people or convince one of the cool people to share it with us. But that is not what secret means here. Secret doesn’t mean knowledge that is jealously guarded by the few; it means simply what is hidden. And what is hidden is our own true nature. What hides or conceals it is not the jealous guardianship of the few, but our own obscurations.
Now mantra in this context has two connotations that are significant. One is manas traya, protection of mind, and the other is eulogy or praise. What is it that protects our mind or saves our mind from delusion, from doubt, from this ignorance that has afflicted us from the very beginning? In other words, what will enable us to actually discover this secret? That is faith. Faith enables us to see our own back; it enables us to see our own gut; it enables us to discover our own secret nature. So the “secret” in secret mantra is not hidden, esoteric knowledge; it is what we are trying to discover, our own buddha nature. And it’s always there waiting to be discovered, like the sun hidden behind clouds. Regardless of how cloudy the day may be, the sun itself has not been in any way damaged by those clouds. It shines as brightly as it ever did. If the clouds are removed, that secret sun will be revealed in all its glory.
[From a teaching on Fierce Compassion by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.]