The Four Devils: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on Severance

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a rainy summer Monday afternoon here in Brooklyn, New York.

If you’ve been following along with the Barrcast, you know that we ran a series of posts on Evagrius Ponticus, the Christian desert father, who wrote really influential teachings on the eight evil thoughts, or logismoi. These were later turned into the seven deadly sins, as well as becoming the basis of the Enneagram. But in Evagrius’s telling, these eight thoughts, these logismoi, are like little imperceptible devils sent to the human mind to attack it, to impassion it, to inflame it and turn it further away from God.

So we’re now turning to a different religious tradition, that of Tibetan Buddhism. And I have in front of me Jamgön Kongtrül’s compilation on Chöd, or severance. This is a tradition that dates back to the 11th century, when a woman, Machig Labdrön, began teaching a new tradition. It says here that she taught what we’re about to read — this great bundle of precepts — in a single day to a large crowd that included three Indians who arrived instantly in Tibet by means of the practice called Swift Foot, to investigate the authenticity of Machig and her increasingly popular teachings.

So she was a bit of a maverick, and as a woman, probably the target of a lot of suspicion. And at the same time, her teaching is very traditional.

There are a lot of reasons why I’m excited to read it today, but as we’ll see, one of them is that we’re going to be firmly in the demonology realm — so, continuing Evagrius’s work with demons. And I think it maybe will surprise some that Buddhism is going to be using this word devil. But as we’ll see, the Buddhist conception of the devil is really different than Evagrius’s, even though a lot of the practice instruction is the same.

So we’ll read the text — it’s short — and then explore a little bit about what her project is here. There are four devils in her classification. We’re not going to get into the actual practice of Chöd much; this is going to be more of an investigation of the text itself.

I’ll just say, by way of preface, that this tradition on severance grew and grew and grew after Machig. There’s a story in the introduction of this compilation that says a monk visited a man who was in a huge room — a four-pillared room — surrounded with books stacked from the floor to the ceiling. He asked him, “What are all the books?” And the man said they’re all about severance, all commentaries on Machig. So this is an original teaching that spawned a lot of additional teachings and practices.

So with that out of the way, let’s hear from Machig herself.

[Reads the The Great Bundle of Precepts on Severance]

Why Devils?

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the use of this devil classification system. Why is it that Machig chooses to talk about evil? This is severance of evil objects — devils. It maybe sounds a little un-Buddhist; it maybe sounds a little Christian. And that’s what I was really interested in digging into. If you’ve been following the Barcast, you know we’ve been talking about devils in the tradition of early Christianity, as represented by Evagrius. So we’ll do a little bit of comparison there.

Machig is extremely clear up front about what devils are. She writes: the root devilry is one’s own mind. The devil lays hold through clinging and attachment in the cognition of whatever objects appear. Grasping mind as an object is corruption. Extremely clear. That’s really the beginning and the end of the system. So even though we’re going to dive into a fairly elaborate classification, the devil is one’s own mind.

And this couldn’t be more different from Evagrius’s framework, where there is an external adversary. Here the adversary is internal. However — there is an adversary. And this is a place where Machig and Evagrius would agree: there is an opponent who seems to actively work against one’s own wishes for enlightenment, awakening, coming to God. The attitude to take up regarding it is not enmity, not hate — although Evagrius will say indignation, thumos, this heart center. In his framework there’s a “no,” a saying no, “get back.” So there is a boundary, a No.

And we’ll see whether there’s something similar with Buddhism, or not — because this particular tradition confuses me at times. On the one hand, you’ll hear about Milarepa or some other great master inviting the demons to tea, welcoming them, inviting them in: a sort of boundarylessness, a porousness, a yes. And at other times this is a severance tradition, a cutting tradition, a No tradition. We’ll talk in a minute about the syllable phat — that plosive, to me the act of cutting and casting up into space for feasting. So how can it be both? I actually think there’s an answer, and it’s a classically Buddhist answer. But let’s get into that in a second.

Why do we even need to talk about devils at all, if the devil is one’s own mind? Keep in mind Machig is writing in the 11th century, so she has access to all the sutras. We see in the tradition words like obscuration, hindrance, ignorance, confusion — to name a few. These are all traditional ways of describing exactly what Machig is talking about: the process of clinging and attachment, aversion and attraction, passion and aggression, and confusion as the third, right at the beating heart of the samsaric wheel. But never really called devils. Well — okay, there’s Mara. Maybe Mara really is the tradition’s way of talking about the devil.

But still: why do we need this word? I think each word, each framework, affords its own understanding. If I think about darkness or ignorance or obscuration — words that indicate a kind of blindness — what that evokes for me is the opportunity for light to instantly resolve it. If I’m in a dark room, hopelessly probing around for the chair, and somebody turns the light on, I’m flooded instantly with understanding. And even if they turn the light off again, I’d probably still find the chair. So obscuration is effective at reinforcing a nondual point of view — by which I mean that light and dark are not two forces opposed to each other; there’s just light, and then the absence or occlusion of light, the sun behind the clouds. That’s helpful in not reifying, not grasping at difficulty. I once was blind and now I see. There’s a hopeful quality to the word obscuration, and I think that’s what’s foregrounded.

Then there are words like poisons, hindrances, obstacles. These are more practical ways of talking about things that happen to us on the path — pride, but also ill health, jealousy. And good health can be its own obstacle. Anything can arise as an obstacle. The way forward that this language affords is transmutation, transformation. Transformation is always tricky, because for those of us drawn to the wizard or alchemist archetype, there’s a feeling of “I’m going to change my jealousy into action, my grief into joy.” We can’t really bring that agenda in so successfully. Whenever the tradition talks about transmutation, it’s talking about that as the result of seeing sufficiently into what the grief is made of, what the jealousy is made of. So if obscuration points to light, obstacle points to transformation — going into the thing itself and seeing what it’s made of.

And then devil, I think, points to a third approach: instant opposition. Instant No. Instant cutting. It’s not gradual. It’s not really even a practice. It’s victorious. When I hear Machig talk about devils, I picture the haunted place with ghosts all around. It’s that they’re incessant — always arising, always attacking — but defeating them is effortless. Effortless, except for the incessance.

When we work with devils, we acknowledge that there certainly seem to be forces working hard against our awakening. If there weren’t, there’d be a lot more peace and contentment in the world. There aren’t just a few hurdles to step over; there seems to be a real adversarial force. And yet we recognize the emptiness of them — that the devil is one’s own mind. So it’s fighting the opponent within a larger understanding of the non-separateness of person and adverse condition. The adverse condition is my mind, and so it’s a constant opportunity for integration, for digestion.

So, why devils? Because cutting is only possible through that word. We don’t cut through obscuration; we don’t cut through darkness. We don’t really cut through poison or hindrance either. We cut through illusion. Things come at us and we cut through them. So there is absolutely a sense of warfare here. But the war being fought is, first of all, one-sided — not a fair fight. We have Arthur’s blade, we have the vajra, the indestructible weapon. There’s no enmity, no hostility, and the lack of hostility comes from the awareness that our opponent is our own mind. But there is scheming, complexity. The enemy does seem to have a strategy, a cunning. When we talk about a devil, we’re talking about an agent — to use everyone’s favorite word these days. There’s a perceived agency, which makes sense, because we’re acknowledging the devil is one’s own mind; what it’s made of is mind. So of course it has a certain cunning, a survival skill.

And that’s where Evagrius and Machig are on the same page. Even though Evagrius isn’t ultimately saying the devils are one’s own mind, the devils are made of mind. In that Christian tradition, devils, angels, and humans are all cut from the same cloth, which is God. If I tried to pull the two together, I might say in Evagrian language that devils and humans are ultimately both made of God-material — because in Evagrius, as in Origen before him, Satan himself and the devils are nothing but souls that departed from God through drift. So here, when we sit and do this practice — when we say phat — we’re taking on the God-seat. A lot of this practice is done as Great Mother, as Dharmakaya, from basic space. We’re taking up a pretty victorious attitude.

The Four Devils as Scaffolding

The other reason we benefit from the devil framework is that it affords the classification of the four devils: tangible, intangible, the devil of exaltation, and the devil of inflation. For me this feels like a Mahamudra move — creating scaffolding, a ladder, that ultimately gets kicked out. We always remember this is a provisional system that exists only to help practitioners overcome confusion in the short term. That provisional nature is baked in, because each devil belongs to the next class: the tangible devil is an instance of the intangible devil, which is an instance of the devil of exaltation, which is an instance of the devil of inflation. In the end there is just one devil to cut through. Once you see that, you have no use for the classification. But if you’re new to this work — if you haven’t yet spent months in haunted places calling all demons to feast on you — then you might benefit from it. So I’ll go through it quickly. It’s simple and quite traditional, despite some unfamiliar language.

The tangible devil is just objects — external objects. Even here Machig says tangible devils are numerous; i.e., objects are everywhere. But the tangible devil is the judging of appearances as desirable or undesirable: objects of negation or affirmation, objects of desire and aggression. Desire and aggression are my preferred words here, and they bring us back to Evagrius: desire, epithumia; aggression, thumos — these primordial human faculties. Evagrius makes a nice move. Desire, epithumia — longing — in its corrupted form is impassioned, inflamed, aggravated longing, and that becomes the basis for lust and avarice. Wanting, needing, not getting, wanting more — all that’s in the belly. But in its pure form, epithumia is a longing to be with God, to know God. It’s one of the Ten Commandments — do not covet your neighbor’s donkey or wife — that’s the same word. But Jesus in Luke also says, “I have longed to eat with you,” speaking to his disciples about Passover — the same word. So longing, appetite, is not something that goes away. It’s something the devils — Evagrius calls them logismoi — attack as thought. There’s a wispy, air-like quality, a prana quality; images appear as fluttering fantasies that try to hook the epithumia, inflame it, and then the devils are off to the races. That’s how the devils win — through hooking. And when we cut, what we cut is that stream, that continuity of illusion and fantasy.

Then aggression, which Evagrius calls indignation — same thing, a human faculty that gets corrupted. He’s so precise about this, and I find it to be true: the thumos, the heart center, can even smell the devils coming, so it’s already pissed off when they arrive. If I start to get a longing — I want some nachos with extra cheese — I also get disgust simultaneously at my longing. His point is that’s often exactly what the devils are after. Even when they spike your longing, what they may really be trying to do is turn your indignation into ire, anger, wrath, self-directed. Once the devils have your desire and your aggression talking to each other, you’re really in trouble. You get polarized: I really want this, but shame on me, I shouldn’t, but I deserve it, and why does everyone keep me from getting what I want — okay, now we’re really lost.

So that’s the tangible devil: any fixation on an external object, on sense perceptions. And emptiness and impermanence are the classic remedy — Buddhism 101. Machig cites the Heart Sutra here: form is empty of the essence of form; do not attach to form; meditate on it as empty. Very clear instructions, if you’re being attacked by the external devil — that’s your place to work. Evagrius, in his Praktikos, is writing for monks, and what he says again and again is that you’re probably past that point; you’re onto the much more difficult devil.

The Intangible Devil: Hope and Fear

The intangible devil is mentation — thinking, thoughts and feelings. Machig makes an important technical point: the external devils are just thought-forms that pass through sense consciousness, whereas thoughts and feelings can ultimately go through sense consciousness but are upstream of it, in mental consciousness. So moving on from desire and aggression, we’re now talking about hopes and fears. I like that a lot — these two pairs: desire and aggression, hope and fear. Now we’re arriving at an attitude of hopelessness and fearlessness.

Later, Machig brings up the realms, which she connects to the five poisons and the five Buddha families. She has to remove a realm to make the numbers work — I believe she takes away the god realm; there are a lot of ways to make it work, and we don’t need the technicalities. Her treatment runs: afflictive emotions such as the five poisons, fears about invisible demons, hopes regarding unreal gods — all similar hopes and fears about mental objects — arise from inflation. (She says inflation because she’s making her final point, but this is the intangible devil.) Aggression is liberated on its own ground, but it comes from cutting the root of inflation; released from the boiling and burning of the hell devil, mirror-like timeless awareness is obtained. Aggression, desire, stupidity, jealousy, pride — these are the five poisons associated with the realms, combining the titan and god realms to describe pride. They’re like moods, atmospheres.

Just as there are many tangible devils, but cutting the tangible devil cuts the one who desires or is aggressive — you cut that clinging — so too with intangible devils: there are many thoughts and feelings, but at the end of the day the intangible devil is hope or fear. What’s the difference between desire/aggression and hope/fear? To me, hope and fear feel more like long-term, ongoing projects, which is why I can think of them as moods or atmospheres. I can be in a mood of hope for a while: if I do this, then something’s going to happen, I really hope I get that job offer, and if I do, all these great things will follow. Or fear: I’m worried I’ll get fired, everyone around me wants to get me in trouble — an air of suspicion, paranoia. So the intangible devil is the realm, the mood, the vibe, the quality of the atmosphere, and how I cut through it, recognizing it as one of the five poisons. Desire and aggression feel very immediate; hope and fear feel more moody.

The Devil of Exaltation

If you’re this far along, you’re in great shape — but you’re not done, because you may now be sitting, as she says, in the haunted places. “In haunted places, when demons do not affect you, arrogance arises and becomes the devil of exaltation.” She spends the most time here, and even has a sub-classification: common devils and supreme devils. The common devils are the hindrances — wealth, fame, friends and foes are the devil of delight; gods and demons bestow spiritual powers. Remember these are concentric circles, so exaltation includes the intangible devil. This one feels to me like pride. I’m in conversation with Evagrius throughout. In the Christian tradition I don’t think he gives pride special treatment, but we all know the folk understanding: pride is the original sin, the sin of Satan. It’s pride that caused the cooling — that’s the word Origen and Evagrius use — the cooling of the relationship with God as one drifts and thinks, “I did it, I am the one.” It becomes much more subject than object: not me/mine but I — I did it, I made this. You fall out of awareness, you’re thrown into something unfamiliar, and the I asserts itself.

The reason these hindrances come up — wealth, fame, friends (they mention foes, but stick with wealth, fame, friends): who wouldn’t want those? The reason it’s such a disaster from the Buddhist perspective is that, as we get closer to the root of inflation, these are all opportunities to feel exalted, to feel bigger — some way that my external circumstances reflect on me, that I had something to do with it. And the answer Machig gives — she does such a great job clarifying this — is not that I had nothing to do with it. Rather: “as with the objects in dreams, engage without attachment to their nature. Like the beauty produced by a lovely face, self-occurrence adorns itself. There is no cause for arrogance.” You look ridiculous, from Machig’s perspective, if you’re exalted because of these things.

Let’s get more out of the common and into the supreme. Beyond ordinary, tangible exaltations — wealth, external things — let’s talk about supreme view. About awakening, realizing emptiness, experiencing grace or divine intervention. There are so many ways our path can be affirmed to us, shown that we’re doing the right thing, on the right way. What’s the right attitude toward that? Everything is an expression of mind — self-liberation, self-occurrence, self-adornment. If you do a deity practice and picture your deity in incredible garments, perfume, jewelry — imagine the attitude that deity has toward its ornaments. There’s a pride, a nobility; the ornaments work as signs of innate, inherent elegance, beauty, nobility, wealth. And there’s absolutely no fixation on them. One’s nobility isn’t reduced by taking off the earrings. If your deity removes any of its garments or jewels, is its nobility reduced at all? No. But if Elon Musk’s wealth goes down, or if I feel on top of my spiritual practice and then have a crisis, it starts to feel like the stock market — ups and downs. That’s all pointing at exaltation.

I love how much time Machig spends, in various ways, cautioning against exaltation. I really think her audience, in a way, is practitioners somewhere in the exaltation stage — just based on how much time she gives it. And she uses the word stupidity a lot, which I love. Take this passage: “Non-cognizant stupidity in the realm of phenomena, cognized as objective, is deluded by grasping. Cognition other than that of single inseparability is to cycle in the places of the three realms and be deluded in the places of the six classes. That is inherently deluded cognition.” Then she runs the list of tenet systems — nihilists, eternalists, Shravakas, Pratyekabuddhas, Chittamatrins, Madhyamikas, Father and Mother Tantras, Mahamudra, Great Completion — each of which “cognizes” its own object, all the way up the ladder. Thus, she says, all of these are cognitions that cognize objective reality, which is not the subject itself. Without an object, there is no cognition of mind. Any cognition is bondage by cognition.

So this is like the anti-thinkers’ club. Cognition is the devil — asterisk: cognition defined as having an object. And what is an object? An object means there’s fixation. These words carry so much. An object implies fixation; without it you’d say something like appearance — and appearance doesn’t stop. She uses the traditional image of waves in the ocean: from the great expanse of clarity, any thoughts and memories whatsoever may arise, like waves from the unmoving ocean, and a person with realization rests on their own ground without altering it. So thoughts arise, feelings arise, but they’re not objects. Once they become objects, they hook, and lead to more objects. The more time I spend with the severance tradition, the more I come back to the really basic teachings of the Buddha, the Theravada tradition — papañca, proliferation. It’s all being recapitulated here, but worked around this practice of cutting.

And anytime Buddhists argue with each other about the supreme view, the better view — all the way up to and including Dzogchen — that’s relevant here. Dzogchen has a tendency to laugh at other views because it’s the supreme view of no view. I won’t do justice to those arguments, but even Dzogchen isn’t safe from this critique: as long as you are cognizing a vehicle as the supreme vehicle, reifying it as some supreme view, that’s a devil of exaltation. And also — who exalts a view they don’t hold? You never hear that. So it really comes back to I, to pride.

The Devil of Inflation

There is no devil of inflation that goes beyond this, as far as I can tell. The devil of inflation is the superset; it’s the root devil. So I don’t think it has qualities to talk about, really, beyond being the root. Inflation is just a great word. Kenneth Folk used to give me instruction on deflating the air element, and that’s what comes up for me with inflation — it’s about air. You could say prana, if you want that more subtle, energetic system. Anytime we get confused about the air and think it’s something to hold — that’s really what an object is. An object is held. If we talk about perception as having a perceiver, then an object has a holder; it’s not an object if it’s not held. And this is really about not holding. Air moves — can the air move without being held? I think of the devil of inflation as a chronic layer, a comment on air. Just as a balloon is so nothing, but we can inflate it and it becomes an object, so too can we inflate appearances until they become three-dimensional.

I wonder if how to work with the devil of inflation is touched on elsewhere — this is a very thick book, so there may be more outside this particular text. But here Machig doesn’t have much to say directly about it, except that when you cut the devil of inflation, there’s nothing else to do. That is the practice. “Therefore this non-cognizant stupidity the victors teach as great timeless awareness. Ignorance is without object, so delusion is clarified. When objective appearance is just mentally abandoned, it is the decisive cutting off of all inflation without exception. Without an object, what would cognition get inflated about?” Such dense, powerful, direct teaching. Machig clearly has a fondness for this idea of great, vast, non-cognizant stupidity. “Ignorance is without object, so delusion is clarified” — what a sentence. In traditional discourse we’d usually talk about ignorance as the adversary, the thing to overcome. Here there’s a kind of ignorance, a deep stupidity, that is actually the resting place of cutting. It’s such an anti-intellectual teaching, in a way.

Cutting, and the Haunted Place

So I think we can stop there. There’s a lot more to say, and we might do more, but I wanted at least to cover the four devils — and maybe say one last word.

She doesn’t talk much here about the syllable phat (P-H-A-T); she doesn’t give much instruction on how we cut. Those instructions are elsewhere. What I’m after is just clarity about the attitude one takes toward the devils — what cutting is. Cutting is severing the chain of thinking: at the level of inflation, severing the chain of I, I, I, me, me, me, mine, mine, mine; at the level of exaltation, severing it more subtly, the getting-swept-up.

And at the end she does give a hint about practice, which is: take the hard road. “When severing in haunted places and such — just as one who is burned by fire is tormented again by that fire itself, the instructions for suppression and severing in a place are like cauterizing the wound by fire. Carry the load of appearing conditions. Understand that to carry the load is crucial. If you don’t carry the load of all phenomena, the remedy of peace and happiness can’t liberate you.” In other words: go prove it. Go find training grounds. Go actively seek out adversity. Adverse conditions are the way. It requires this attitude — the victor’s attitude, the bodhisattva attitude, bodhichitta. Maybe the instruction is nothing other than that: by taking up the victor’s attitude and seeking out adverse conditions, it becomes — I love this phrase — a good training exercise. Because what else would you do? Always returning to the root: the devilry is one’s own mind.

When you stomp around in haunted places, you’re not going to fight a dragon in Tibet. It sounds exotic, this idea of going to the haunted place, but it isn’t — because the haunted place is one’s own mind. That’s the whole point. If the practice works well, you are always in the haunted place. So this whole practice is a love of haunted places — recognizing that one’s own mind is the haunted place. There’s no out-there, exotic, scary place. Going to a graveyard is an expedient way of training, but you bring it back with you.

That’s a really different attitude than Evagrius’s. Although — if you’re a monk in the deserts of Egypt in 350, I’d say you’re also choosing to practice on haunted ground, and in fact a lot of the monks did. They’d go without water, without food, to meditate in the desert — and that’s where Satan attacked Jesus. I think a lot of the desert fathers were very consciously recapitulating Jesus’s own venture into the wild. So it’s not that they don’t share a certain courage to go to the haunted place. But I don’t know if Evagrius has an analog for the kind of nobility, courage, and bodhichitta — awakening mind — that is such a natural conclusion to the realization that one’s own mind is the devil. Therefore, what is there to worry about? There’s a confidence that comes from holding that awareness.

Whereas for Evagrius, the home base is prayer. I’m not making subtle distinctions confidently here, and I won’t put them firmly in different camps, but prayer is much more foregrounded in Evagrius’s recipe for working with devils, because it’s grounded in “I am but a humble man.” When I do this exercise as a humble man, I pray for angelic and divine intervention to help me against devils — because devils are ultimately superior beings to humans; devils and angels occupy a higher realm than the human one. Whereas when our starting place is that the devil is our own mind — capital-M Mind, not the small in-my-head mind — when we recognize these apparitions as not other than self, what is there to pray to, other than oneself? One becomes the haunted place. And it’s great to be the haunted place, because you become a feeding ground, a gathering place for all sorts of demons and suffering beings who will experience relief. But that’s for another time.

I think we hit enough. If you made it this far — thanks for joining me on this Barrcast, and we’ll see you next time.