Three Vajras - Exegesis

Exegesis

The Three Vajras are often employed in tantric sadhana at various stages during the visualization of the generation stage, refuge tree, guru yoga and yidam, or meditational deity, processes. The concept of the Three Vajras serves in esoteric Twilight Language to convey polysemic meanings, aiding the practitioner to conflate and unify the mindstream of the meditational deity, the guru and the sadhaka in order for the practitioner to experience their own Buddha nature.

Speaking for the Tibetan Nyingma tradition, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche perceives an identity and relationship betwixt the Buddha Nature, Dharmadhatu (essence of all phenomena and the noumenon), the Dharmakaya, Rigpa (the "awakened state") and the Three Vajras, saying:

"Dharmadhatu is adorned with dharmakaya, which is endowed with dharmadhatu wisdom. This is a brief but very profound statement, because 'dharmadhatu' also refers to sugata-garbha or buddha nature. Buddha nature is all-encompassing ... This buddha nature is present just as the shining sun is present in the sky. It is indivisible from the three vajras of the awakened state, which do not perish or change."

Robert Beer (2003: p. 186) states:

"The trinity of body, speech, and mind are known as the three gates, three receptacles or three vajras, and correspond to the western religious concept of righteous thought (mind), word (speech), and deed (body). The three vajras also correspond to the three kayas, with the aspect of body located at the crown (nirmanakaya), the aspect of speech at the throat (sambhogakaya), and the aspect of mind at the heart (dharmakaya)."

The seed syllables corresponding to the Three Vajras are: a white om (enlightened body), a red ah (enlightened speech) and a blue hum (enlightened mind).

Gold (1994: p. 5), a once upon a time associate of Mead, after codifying his extensive ethnographic fieldwork with the Tibetan and Navajo peoples in his work of comparative Anthropology, stated:

...Om, is the most important mystic sound of Buddhism, for it expresses the sum of all sounds--forms of energy--permeating the totality of the cosmos. And hum is the powerful aural agent for unifying the relative, conditioned, real-world state of mind with the unconditioned oneness of the cosmos as embodied in the Om. Hum, then, represents the act of merging the ideal with the real....

Simmer-Brown (2001: p. 334) asserts that:

When informed by tantric views of embodiment, the physical body is understood as a sacred maṇḍala (Wylie: lus kyi dkyil).

This explicates the semiotic rationale for the nomenclature of the Himalayan somatic discipline Trul Khor: Trul Khor may be rendered in English as "Magical Wheel".

The www.nitartha.org search results for lus kyi dkyil are: lus kyi dkyil 'khor body mandala .

The triunic continua of body-voice-mind are intimately related to the esoteric Dzogchen doctrine of 'sound, light and rays' (Wylie: sgra 'od zer gsum) as a passage of the rGyud bu chung bcu gnyis kyi don bstan pa rendered into English by Rossi (1999: p. 65) states (Wylie provided for probity):

From the Basis (of) all, empty (and) without cause,
sound, the dynamic potential of the Dimension, arises.
From the Awareness, empty (and) without cause,
light, the dynamic potential (of) Primordial Wisdom, appears.
From the inseparability, empty (and) without cause,
rays, the dynamic potential of the Essence, appear.
When sound, light and rays are taken (as) instrumental causes
(that) ignorance (turns into) the delusion of body, speech (and) mind;
the result (is) wandering in the circle (of) the three spheres.
Kun gzhi stong pa rgyu med las/
sgra ni dbyings kyi rtsal du shar/
rig pa stong pa rgyu med las/
'od ni ye shes rtsal du shar/
dbyer med stong pa rgyu medlas/
zer ni thig le'i rtsal du shar/
sgra 'od zer gsum rkyen byas nas/
ma rtogs lus ngag yid du 'khrul/
bras bu khams gsum 'khor bar 'khyams//

Barron, et al. (1994, 2002: p. 159), renders from Tibetan into English, a terma 'pure vision' (Wylie: dag snang) of Sri Singha by Dudjom Lingpa that describes the Dzogchen state of 'formal meditative equipoise' (Tibetan: nyam-par zhag-pa) which is the indivisible fulfillment of vipaśyanā and śamatha, Sri Singha states:

"Just as water, which exists in a naturally free-flowing state, freezes into ice under the influence of a cold wind, so the ground of being exists in a naturally free state, with the entire spectrum of samsara established solely by the influence of perceiving in terms of identity.
Understanding this fundamental nature, you give up the three kinds of physical activity--good, bad, and neutral--and sit like a corpse in a charnal ground, with nothing needing to be done. You likewise give up the three kinds of verbal activity, remaining like a mute, as well as the three kinds of mental activity, resting without contrivance like the autumn sky free of the three polluting conditions."

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