How to Leap Off The Edge Of a Cliff

There is a story sometimes told in Vajrayana Buddhism to illustrate the level of trust expected in the guru-disciple relationship. A teacher instructs his student to leap off a cliff, and the student does so without hesitation. He crashes to the ground below, his body shattered, bones broken, blood pooling around him as he lies in agony for a day or two. When the guru finally returns, he restores the student instantly, every injury vanishing as though they had never occurred.

A claim within some Buddhist traditions is that you are already enlightened. Nothing needs to be added, constructed, or improved. Enlightenment is described not as an attainment but as a recognition, something that appears the moment one stops not seeing it. In this sense, the entire spiritual path becomes strangely circular. The student must somehow come to believe the truth that has always been true. Once this belief settles, realization feels less like a discovery and more like remembering something obvious that had been forgotten.

Yet this is not an easy belief to adopt. It is existentially vertiginous. To fully accept “I am already enlightened” is, for the unprepared mind, as absurd as believing nothing bad will happen if one leaps off a cliff. The mind resists. It demands evidence. It asks for incremental steps, safer experiments, lower ledges. And so the traditions devise methods gradual, skillful, often elaborate routes to prepare a person to make a leap that cannot be tested in advance.

From a scientific lens, one might say the psyche possesses strong self-preservation heuristics. The ego is a structure evolved to protect continuity, to avoid catastrophic loss of orientation. Asking it to dissolve spontaneously is like asking a nervous system to calmly walk off a cliff. Of course it refuses. And so the various schools of Buddhism, along with mystical systems across cultures, function as adaptive technologies. They identify latent human mechanisms: trust, devotion, compassion, loyalty, parental instinct, tribal protection and repurpose them to make this existential jump possible.

Chan and Zen traditions cultivate a mental atmosphere of directness and intensity, using paradox, meditation, and cognitive shock to break linear patterns of thought. They create the conditions in which the mind inadvertently steps beyond itself.

Guru-yoga relies on a different evolutionary lever: the deeply ingrained mammalian instinct to follow a leader, to entrust one’s life to a figure who embodies safety and authority. This mechanism, perfected in armies and kingdoms, is redirected toward a teacher who commands not physical obedience but existential surrender.

The bodhisattva path taps yet another instinct, the readiness to die for one’s offspring, to sacrifice for kin and tribe. By training practitioners to see all beings as mothers, children, or beloved kin, the tradition activates an ancient mammalian circuitry of care. When enlightenment becomes framed as the ultimate service to all beings, the mind finds itself willing to “jump” not for its own liberation, but for the imagined safety of countless others.

If we examine these systems scientifically, we find psychological technologies built upon our species’ own inherited machinery. If we examine them literarily, they resemble myths of heroic transformation, where the protagonist must leap from one world into another. And if we examine them from within Buddhism itself, we see the evolution of a tradition continuously discovering new ways to guide the human organism toward this magical, mystical being that it already is.