Dud- Tibetan DemonDemon"Mara Demons"

Mara at the Bodhi Tree

Before there were Dud, there was Mara. He ruled the highest heaven of the desire realm, and every being still caught in wanting belonged to him. When Siddhartha sat down beneath the Bodhi tree and vowed not to rise until he had broken free, Mara took it personally. He sent his armies first: demons with animal heads, armed with flaming rocks and poisoned arrows. The earth shook. The sky went dark. Siddhartha did not move.

Mara sent his daughters next. They danced. They offered themselves. Siddhartha did not look up. Finally Mara challenged Siddhartha's right to sit there at all. Who would vouch for him? Siddhartha reached down and touched the ground. The earth itself answered, and Mara's throne collapsed beneath him. That gesture, the bhumisparsha mudra, became the image Tibetan painters returned to more than any other: the moment a man's hand on bare ground defeated the lord of all obstruction.

The Demons Who Follow

In Tibetan understanding, Mara did not stay defeated. He broke into four and kept working.

The Dud of afflictive emotion is the oldest: desire and hatred rising unbidden in the mind. The Dud of the aggregates is subtler. It is the conviction that the five skandhas, the heap of form and feeling and thought that makes up a person, are a solid self worth protecting. The Dud of death is blunt: it cuts life short before a practitioner can finish the work. And the Dud called Devaputra, "son of the gods," is Mara himself in his original form, the external tempter who appears when a meditator is close to breaking through.

Patrul Rinpoche warns in The Words of My Perfect Teacher that these demons grow fiercer as practice deepens. A beginner faces mild resistance. A practitioner near realization faces everything Mara can throw. The Dud have no interest in those who are not trying to escape.

Feeding the Demons

Machig Labdrön, the eleventh-century yogini who founded the Chöd lineage, proposed a solution that horrified conventional practitioners. Instead of fighting the Dud, she said, feed them. Go to the charnel ground. Sit among the corpses. Visualize cutting open your own body and offering your flesh and bones to every hungry spirit in the cemetery.

She did not theorize this from a monastery. She practiced it in cemeteries across Tibet, sitting where the dead were left to decompose, sounding the Chöd drum and thighbone trumpet at night. Her students followed her there. A demon that feeds on fear cannot grip a practitioner who has already given everything away. The offering leaves nothing to defend, and a Dud with nothing to obstruct has no reason to stay.