Ngala Rig’dzin Dorje
The Laughter of a Tantrika
Cameras and microphones are black objects which people interpose between their faces and their subject’s face. In the moment when the subject responds to that interpolation, either there is stability in open communication, or there is retraction into self-consciousness. But open stability is also qualified by movement. Sometimes the practitioner is a mirror of phenomenal reality; and sometimes phenomena are a mirror to the practitioner. As Zhé-shen Gyaltsap Rinpoche writes in his commentary on Dorje Phurba, ‘Sometimes one meditates gathering everything into oneself. Sometimes one meditates on complexity. In any case, everything is apparent yet empty, empty yet apparent.’ These aspects alternate uninterruptedly as the wisdom and compassion ornaments of natural mind. There is equality in the sense of observation, and of being observed. Vajrayana practice tends to catalyse, and is catalyzed by, an ironic sense of humour; because irony empowers and is empowered by the appreciation of non-duality, in which opposites are both the case. Where such humour is a cultural trait – as for instance, Jewish humour on the east coast of the United States – Vajrayana is that much easier to teach. Without it, even the path of Sutra is difficult to follow, because of the danger of becoming complicit in ‘artificial Buddhist personality’. Artificial personality takes the form of complacent solemnity, synthetic serenity, brittle simplicity, pretentious oratory, ostentatious religiosity. Lineage Lamas of the Aro gTér are well-known for undermining artificial personality with humour on all possible occasions.