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has, therefore, never been tainted or mixed up in Samsara. For this reason, He has been called the
First or the Primordial Buddha. In Western religious terms, He could be called the Supreme Being.
But this notion of a Primordial Buddha should not be confused with Western-style Biblical
monotheism or with some supposed theistic trend within the development of Buddhist thought
itself. The concepts are quite different.
Even though Kuntu Zangpo understands and has been the Buddha or enlightened from the very
beginning, He did not create Samsara. Unlike the Biblical God, He did not create the world by fiat
and then mankind out of clay, by blowing his spirit into an earthen replica of Himself. The universe,
or rather, the complex natural process called Samsara, was never created as part of some one' s
intention or plan, nor did it ever have an absolute beginning in time and history. Samsara is cyclical
existence as such and it just goes on and on, endlessly circulating and revolving from beginningless
time. It was not created or brought into existence with some prototypical historical event, such as a
Big Bang. Rather, it is an ontological category, a mode of existence. But, in the relative sense, in
terms of the psychogenesis of each individual stream of consciousness, one may speak of Samsara as
having a relative beginning, as being created in the moment following psychic death when awareness
reawakens at the onset of the Bardo experience. The Bardo of the Clear Light becomes effulgent with
Nirvanic visions and the Bardo of Existence becomes flooded with Samsaric visions. Failing to
recognize the real nature of these visions, the individual stream of consciousness, or Namshe (rnam-
shes), once again re-enters the rebirth process (srid-pa). One becomes born again or re-born (yang
srid). So, in this sense, for an individual sentient being, it may be said that Samsara has a beginning.
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However, the visions of Samsara naturally and spontaneous ly arise out of the Nature of Mind, the
Primordial State of the individual. These visions, which form the world as we know it, were not
created by some transcendent God, nor are the Bardo visions inflicted upon the individual soul as
reward or puni shment by such a God. Rather, the particular aspect of these visions, whether blissful
or terrifying, are determined by the process of the karmic inheritance of that individual. It is karma,
an impersonal natural process, which guides and governs the evolution and unfolding of these
visions that we call our world, and not some personality transcendent to it. Even though the clear
lights in the Bardo arise of themselves, freely and spontaneously, without prior cause or design, it is
the karmic process operative in the mi nd-stream of the individual that determines how these initial
displays of chaotic lights are ordered and interpreted. In reply to the first question found in the
Roman Catholic catechism, "Who made the world?" the wisdom teachings reply that it is kar ma
which has made the world. In the most profound sense, we are the actual creators of our own
reality. Outside, there is only space and light, but it is the intervention of mind that molds and
transforms this into the reality of our world.
Kuntu Zangpo is not the God of Biblical theism who first creates the world, then mankind, then
expels the first human beings from paradise for disobedience, punishes humanity with a great flood,
lays down the law on a mountain, including moral and dietary rules, and favors one human group
over all other nations. Kuntu Zangpo is not a monarch sitting on His throne at the summit of heaven,
ruling over heaven and earth and dispatching his angels on various missions among mankind below,
much like a worldly emperor. These mythological images do exist in Buddhism and Bon, where such
roles are played by Brahma and Indra (actually generic titles) -- but theirs is considered a divine
order that still belongs to the conditioned existence of Samsara. Brahma and Indra are among the
Samsaric gods and, although well intentioned and righteous, they are not Buddhas or enlightened
beings. They are sentient beings like ourselves, although much more powerful and wise and longer
lived. When their accumulated stock of meritorious karma, which has led them into such an exalted
rebirth, is exhausted, they too shall pass away and be reborn elsewhere.
Kuntu Zangpo is not such a god as they are. Rather, Kuntu Zangpo is the exemplar and the
archetype of enlightenment, never having had a human existence in time and history. He did not
work His way up through the evolutionary ranks from a mineral to a plant to an animal to a human
being, then to a Bodhisattva, and finally to an enlightened Buddha, as did the various Nirmanakaya
Buddhas who have appeared throughout the ages. Yet, because every sentient being, no matter how
ignorant or deluded or degraded, participates in Kuntu Zangpo as the Dharmakaya-- harboring
within one's breast a spark of His light, so to speak, that one has the possibi lity, the potentiality,
even the destiny to realize that same state of Buddhahood or full enlightenment and liberation
which He embodies. Even though the Dharmakaya is parceled out among an infinity of sentient
beings throughout all times and all possible universes, its infinity and its plenitude is in no way
diminished thereby. Kuntu Zangpo is not any less for the fact that, at the core of one' s very own
being, there is Kuntu Zangpo. He is the Bodhichitta, the principle of enlightenment, at the heart of
existence. Buddhahood is both singular and universal, as well as being individual and infinite in
numbers. It transcends and is not restricted by the logic of the excluded middle, of necessarily
having to be either A or not-A. See the discussion of this question in terms of the Dharmakaya and
the Rupakaya in the Appendix of my Sel f-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, ibid.
[12] The Archontic powers refer to the Archons or "rulers," that is, the planetary powers that
dominate and rule man' s fate according to Gnosticism and much of later Hellenistic and Roman
philosophy. We are still familiar with them today as the seven planets of classical pre-modern
astrology. The Babylonian or Chaldean science of astrology, which developed over the course of
many centuries, came to read the fate of the king and the state in the omens and portents of the
heavens, both astronomical and meteorological. The Greeks adopted this Semitic science and
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