Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

The Shangpa Masters and Their Lineage 237
Niguma and Sukasiddhi would answer, “No.” While it’s true that Naropa
and Milarepa in particular had difficult spiritual lives, we should recall
that they were particularly difficult characters. Before his awakening,
Naropa had been a brilliant Buddhist university professor, one of the best
of his time. Yet his tight, solid, self-assured mind was so unfit for meditation,
or instruction in the mind’s nature, that his teacher had him undergo
hardships instead. For his part, Milarepa had practiced black magic and
killed forty people before meeting his teacher.
Naropa and Milarepa were not average people and did not follow an
average path to awakening. Their stories are well loved throughout the
Himalayas, but Tibet’s Buddhists also know many other “templates” for the
path to enlightenment. While we might not be able to attain enlightenment
in an evening or a week, as Niguma and Sukasiddhi did, we can
absorb that possibility into our outlook. Things can be light and easy—we
receive pith instructions from a qualified teacher and we give ourselves
permission to allow the teachings to guide us to awakening. It could be as
simple as that. And so it was for our two uncomplicated, straightforward
dakinis.
New Buddhist converts must confront the inevitable influence of their
former religion’s presentation of the spiritual path, which in the case of the
Judeo-Christian tradition is not necessarily good news. Whether or not
new Buddhists actually practiced in that tradition, the pervasive influence
of Judeo-Christian culture has given most of us a deep, reflexive expectation
that a spiritual path will involve something along the lines of dark
nights of the soul, suffering, painful ego death followed by glorious spiritual
rebirth, and so on. While such a template seems incredibly dramatic
and foreign to Buddhism, it is perfectly “normal” if we recall that Western
culture, both religious and secular, has been deeply influenced by the idea
of original sin, the opposite of Buddhism’s intrinsic enlightenment or primordial
purity. Niguma and Sukasiddhi were unburdened by such debilitating
expectations; they were “pure” Buddhists who did what all
Buddhists should—they became pure buddhas. Fortunately for them and
for us, no one told them that enlightenment was beyond them or that the
path had to be long and arduous.