FIVE BUDDHA FAMILIES
- Meiun Caroline MABY
- Mar 26
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 27
" Very beautiful situations have developed using chaos as part of the enlightened approach. There is chaos of all kinds developing all the time: psychological disorder, social disorder, metaphysical disorder, or physical disorder, constantly happening. If you are trying to stop those situations, you are looking for external means of liberating yourself, another answer. But if we are able to look into the basic situation, then chaos is the inspiration, confusion is the inspiration.”
― Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
My journey as a painter is a continuation of that of a Buddhist student, that is, an explorer of the plays of the mind. While my work does not always explicitly reveal an inspiration imbued with Dharma, meditation is always an underlying enhancer.
I practice Zen and also study with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, driven by a deep curiosity for Dzogchen. I sometimes like to grasp Buddhist concepts, particularly Tibetan ones, because they are extremely visual. I aspire to unfold them in our contemporaneity through artistic representations to address the major questions that affect me, the main one being my relationship with Nature and Animal world, and the suffering that the era inflicts on them. Full presence and attention allow this.
Of the five colors of Tibetan prayer flags, we know that each is associated with an element: earth for yellow, water for blue, fire for red, air for green, and ether or space for white. However, their symbolic dimension is much broader than that: each of these colors relates to a particular mode of manifestation of the phenomenon. Buddhist tantra or Vajrayana presents the five families of Buddhas as a comprehensive vision, both of the sacred world of the awakened mind and the neurotic world of egocentric existence.
In the early 1970s, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche introduced the five wisdom energies to Western practitioners to help them to understand their deeper nature: personality, emotional landscape, relationships with others and the world.
Vajra, Padma, Karma, Ratna and Buddha: these families are each precisely defined and symbolically codified.
See for example the description given by my sangha, Zen Peacemakers International: https://zenpeacemakers.org/zpi-publishing/characteristics-five-buddha-families-chart/ .
Sometimes the Vajra family is white and that of Buddha is blue (for Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche or the Kagyu lineage for example), most often it is the other way around.
Take Padma for example: red energy is associated with Amitabha, the west, the lotus flower, the garuda or peacock, passion and desire but also compassion and emotional discrimination.
Energy itself has nothing inherently harmful or wrong. To fully integrate it, it is necessary to inhabit it consciously. Simply bear witness to it. When it manifests in our experience, whether in its relative or realized form, it is appropriate to simply observe it or move with loving kindness, without attempting — in vain— to manipulate or control it.
The energies then become a way to celebrate our strengths and work on our weaknesses.
These are difficult times — the chaos quoted in the epigraph — and what ideological extremism, mad potentates, the ravages inflicted on the planet show us... is a unique opportunity to acknowledge the agony of the old vertical, dualistic, anthropocentric models in order to create an innovative, integrative and horizontal world, replacing man as a part of Nature.
Under the yoke of the ego, the psychic forces at play generate elemental natural disasters that express themselves in a symbolic way; Water: raging authoritarianism, drought, flooding for example, Fire: passion and possessiveness, fires, volcanic eruptions, falling temperatures, Earth: pride, earthquakes, Air: jalousy, storms, pollution, Ether: ignorance, loss of biodiversity, planetary suicide...
Understanding the true nature of these impure phenomena is a path to ecology in order to redefine our societies.
I chose to explore this wonderful holistic system of the five families of Buddhas and to orient it towards a contemporary plea for the preservation of the Planet and its Biodiversity.
Two of the five representations have already been completed.
PADMA
The strength of the Polar Bear gives all its power to PADMA , passion flower.
The Bear is represented in the center in its awakened form: discriminating wisdom and compassion in its balanced arctic universe, supported by the lotus, symbol of Padma.
Padma is the fire energy that, if not controlled, expresses itself in its wrathful form: greed, emotionality, passion. These amphetamines of the ego are today setting the planet on fire — that of weapons, of fires — and melting the ice; understand: destroying, as a corollary, one's own vital space.
I just finished VAJRA , another of the three poisons*.
It is the strength of the Tiger that gives its power here to the creation dedicated to adamantine energy.
He is depicted in the center in his awakened form: clarity of mind, acuity, integrity. The ritual object vajra, the symbol of this buddha family, is suspended.
Vajra is the energy of water, which can have the quality of a mirror (acuity of mind) or that of waves or tsunamis. It is still a question of balance: if there is no more water, drought wreaks havoc (yellow). Vajra, which can transform into analytical, critical, authoritarian anger, demanding perfection, is still rage, war in all its forms in the service of narcissism .
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* The three poisons are attachment or passion, aversion or anger and ignorance respectively associated with the Padma, Vajra and Buddha families.
TO BE CONTINUED...
I am currently working on the third expression of the Tathagatas (in Sanskrit: Thus-come Ones): the "Buddha" family, space, white, ignorance but also non-ego.
Do you know which animal will embody this energy?**
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** pɹɐdoǝן ʍous ǝɥʇ
Reading Notes:
Reference: "The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Vol. Seven" (Shambhala, Boston & London, 2010)
An interesting article from Himalayan Art: https://www.himalayanart.org/pages/Visual_Dharma/buddha.html
An interesting article from Lion's Roar: https://www.lionsroar.com/the-five-buddha-families/
If Philippe Cornu devotes an article to the five buddha families in the French "Dictionnaire Encyclopedique du Bouddhisme" (Éd. du Seuil), it is Fabrice Midal - whose teaching I do not promote btw - who, to my knowledge, presents the most exhaustive description in French ("Introduction to the Tantric Buddha, the Incandescence of Love" published by Fayard (pages 35 to 43).
