9. Aspirations for Mahamudra: Ground, Path, and Result
Ken examines the Aspirations for Mahamudra, using its structure of ground, path, and result to explore how mahamudra practice unfolds. He discusses the relationship between view, meditation, and result, noting how they reflect the progression of understanding and direct experience. Topics covered include the limitations of intellectual understanding, balancing energy in practice, and the transformative power of direct awareness.
Aspirations for mahamudra
Ken: I want to do a couple of things. I want to go over one of the other prayers in the chant booklet, and introduce you to a couple of the others, so you know why they’re there and what you might do with them. I also want to talk a little bit about where does one go from here. So, first turn to page six. You notice that Franca, page six.
Franca: It’s your favorite page.
Ken: This is the Aspirations for Mahamudra. We’ve taken a quick look at some parts of it. I’m not going to give a full commentary, but just to give you a quick guide, so to speak. The first verse is invocation and aspiration for why Rangjung Dorje wrote this prayer. And the next verse is a general summary of the whole prayer:
A river of virtue, undefiled by the three spheres
Aspirations for Mahamudra
Springs from the snow-mountains
… and flows into …
the four expressions of full awakening
which I would now change to the four forms of full awakening. Those are the four kayas, though most of you know them as the three kayas: the dharmakaya, samboghakaya, nirmanakaya, etc. [Laughter] I just go in quickly here. Okay? This is just a guide.
Student: Etc.
Ken: Etc. Yeah.
The conditions for practice
Ken: Then the next two verses set up the conditions for practice. The verse following that, the study of scriptures, is a very overall summary of the progressive practice. It goes through study, contemplation or reflection, then meditation. The next section starts with the basic ground and goes right up to the second-last stanza on page six.
The basic ground consists of the two truths …
Aspirations for Mahamudra
The excellent path, the two accumulations …
The result obtained …
This is the overall framework for discussing mahamudra. So, you have ground, path, and result. And then the next stanza is all about ground, and view, and basically the foundation on which mahamudra practice rests. And we went through some of the stanzas on page seven:
All experience is the manifestation of mind.
As for mind, there is no mind; mind’s nature is empty.
Empty and unceasing, mind arises as experience.
By looking into mind deeply, may I be clear about how it is.
The view
And then that basic view is amplified in the following several stanzas, coming down to everything you experience, awake or asleep, is mind.
Since perception is mind and emptiness is mind,
Aspirations for Mahamudra
Since knowing is mind and delusion is mind,
Since arising is mind and cessation is mind,
May all assumptions about mind be eliminated.
Everything is mind. You can’t get away from it. Now, we constantly overlook the implications of this. One way I heard this described is delightful: bell hooks was describing an interaction she had with her teacher, Lama Yeshe. She was at the center, I can’t remember where, and she was just really, really angry that day, and she was throwing a tantrum. And in the middle of this Lama Yeshe comes up to her and just whispers in her ear, “Buddha mind very angry today.” And so the mind which is angry is the mind of buddha. Just a good thing to remember.
Practice
Ken: Starting with:
Unpolluted by meditation with intellectual effort …
Aspirations for Mahamudra
One moves into the practice. That particular stanza is about shamatha. That’s the overall practice. The one at the top of page eight is about shamatha. The next two are about vipashyana or insight. And you may recognize this from some of the work we were doing this morning.
When one looks again and again at the mind that cannot be looked at
And sees vividly for what it is the meaning of not seeing.
Then one’s whole understanding of such things as is and isn’t and existence and non-existence, etc., shifts. Things are just what they are. Through this one comes into the practice of direct awareness, which is summarized in the fourth stanza here. And there’s a phrase in Tibetan called gcig shes kun grol [pron. chik shé drol], which means knowing one, everything is freed, or everything is released.
So, when you experience mind nature, experience how things actually are, then you understand mahamudra; you understand dzogchen; you understand Madhyamika; you understand shikantaza because it’s all taught; you understand the perfection of wisdom; you understand buddha nature; you understand co-emergent pristine awareness, etc., because they’re all different names for the same thing. We have in Buddhism, tens if not hundreds of names, so many names for nothing. You wouldn’t believe it.
The unfolding of practice
Ken: Now, people ask, “How do things progress here?” There are different kinds of understanding or knowing that arise. The first is some kind of intellectual understanding. And about the only use that intellectual understanding has is that it may increase your confidence in practicing. In terms of actually changing how you experience the world, or how you interact with experience, it has relatively little power. There just isn’t enough energy in intellectual understanding to effect very much change.
As you continue in practice and the mind becomes quieter, body in balance, then there can be lengthy, or shorter, process of energy balancing, rebalancing and sorting itself out. And this energy arises in the body. It gives rise to emotions. It also gives rise to different ways of perceiving. So, a lot of different experiences arise, and they’re usually translated as experiences. And what they come from are surges of energy in the body. And some of these surges of energy give rise to experiences of great clarity, profound experiences of non-thought. They can also give rise to intense experiences of bliss or pleasure.
And of course they can give rise to the other kinds of experiences, a completely garbage mind, which just goes on and on and on, or feeling like you’re wading through a thick fog and you can’t see anything. And also give rise to experiences of quite intense pain in the body. And this is all stuff sorting itself out in the process of accommodating to what is happening in the practice.
But experiences of clarity and great pleasure and bliss and non-thought or emptiness reveal possibilities that you didn’t know were there. And so they’re useful in as much as they also encourage and strengthen one’s relationship with practice. Because these are surges of energy, they’re very unstable. And so they may last a second or they may last for several days or any period of time in between.
So, the advice there is don’t attach to them. But what happens to everybody is that they have one of these experiences and they think, “Oh, this is really cool. I’ve come to some kind of understanding.” And then they experience space, and the next words are, “I want it back. How do I get it back? How do I go back there? That was so cool.” And you can’t, there’s probably no way to generate the exact same experience because it’s always different.
So, that’s why you hear the immortal words of every teacher, “Not good. Not bad. Keep going.” [Laughter] Which I heard so many times from Rinpoche I just didn’t bother asking questions after a while. “Not good. Not bad. Keep going.” It was really like, “Well, it’s not actually good. And it’s not actually bad. Keep practicing.” Tibetan comes out more like that.
Then there’s another kind of knowing, and this is very different. Something happens and the system is forever changed, and you can’t go back even if you wanted. The degree varies a great deal, and it doesn’t have to be emptiness. This can happen with compassion. It can happen with impermanence, and it’s a moment, or a longer period of time, where you know.
And you know in such a way— it’s not a conceptual knowing at all, it’s an experiential knowing—and you can try and bury it if you want, it’s still going to be there. And I know people who, that was their reaction to it. They just wanted to bury it. That tends to happen when that kind of thing happens early on in a person’s experience, and they just aren’t ready for it. They don’t have a framework for understanding it. They’re just like, “I don’t want to deal with the implications of that.”
But as one practices and gets more understanding, then when something like happens, you go, “Oh, okay.” It can happen with compassion, so you understand in a completely visceral way that the process of suffering that you experience is identical to the process of suffering in every other person. And it forever changes how you experience the world because you may get very, very upset and angry with people. But something in you always knows that whatever they’re doing that’s infuriating you, they’re doing for exactly the same reason that you do everything else in your life. [Laughter]
Direct awareness
Ken: If the experience is one of emptiness, that is an experience in which, “Oh, all this is my mind,” which can be accompanied by “Cool!” or “Damn!” depending on where you are, but you can’t go back. That term is usually translated as realization. I don’t use that terminology. I translate it as direct knowing or direct awareness. And the reason I don’t translate it as realization, because we have this wonderful phrase realized being.
Now, if we look in a dictionary under realization, it is a financial term. It’s realizing a profit. That is, you buy something and it goes up in value, and when you sell it, you realize the profit, you make the profit real. I have no idea how it got into spiritual circles. I haven’t been able to track that shift down. It’s something that one of these language gurus probably knows.
But what the phrase realized being causes us to overlook is that there are all kinds of direct knowings. I’m not going to use the term realizations. And there are different degrees of them. Some of them are more profound, some of them less profound, etc., etc. So, there isn’t, from my point of view, a state in which one is a realized being. In fact, if I can go a little further, it makes absolutely no sense to talk about a realized being. Pardon?
Student: What are they translating?
Ken: Rtogs pa (pron tokpa) in Tibetan. And what that’s what I translate as direct awareness.
Student: The root word is?
Ken: The root word is rtogs (pron. to(g)), a form of the word is rnam rtog (pron. nam to(g)), which is partial knowing, i.e., thought.
Student: So, rtogs means knowing.
Ken: Knowing, but knowing without any intermediary conceptualization or intellectualization, knowing directly.
Student: So, someone would not use the word rtogs in ordinary conversation?
Ken: Very, very rarely. You might occasionally use it, probably not in Tibetan, I mean the closest English equivalent we have is grok. [Laughter] How many know grok?
Student: What does it mean? I’m the only one who doesn’t know.
Ken: Read Stranger in a Strange Land. It isn’t meaning at the same level as what I’m talking about, but it’s like you get it, you get the whole thing. In Tibetan, I think it’s almost exclusively used in the spiritual context. It’s not like a lot of other words. It has a very, very definite meaning. For me, the identifying characteristic of this form of knowing is that who you are and how you function changes and it doesn’t go back. And there’s an energy associated with it.
So, not infrequently, after having some kind of experience like that, the student will walk in to see their teacher, and teacher will say, “Okay, what happened?” And the student hasn’t said a word, but the teacher’s immediately aware that there’s been a shift in the configuration of the system. And as I say, one’s reaction to this varies. Some people it’s a great deal of joy, and some people it’s the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Student: You can have both at the same time.
Ken: You can have both at the same time, like “Oh wow!” And “Oh god.” [Laughter] Because you know that certain ways of understanding the world are forever gone. So, for some people, there will actually be an experience of grief as well.
I was doing a workshop, and I don’t think this was at the same level, but it illustrates it. You know the Karate Kid meditation we were doing? Okay, so I had everybody doing this, except I did one little thing, had everybody standing up like this, and they’re all balancing away like this. And I said, “Okay, what knows how to balance?” And this is one of Carolyn’s students actually. And this look of absolute sheer panic crossed this woman’s face, just total panic. And so I said, “Okay, everybody sit down.” And I said, “What happened?”
And she said, in a really shaky voice, “It’s really scary in there.” Because in that moment she had seen: nothing knows how to balance. It’s just there. And so that was her reaction, but she’d actually seen it right there. So, it can happen any time. And you read about this all the time where somebody’s been practicing meditation, and they’re sweeping the temple, and a pebble ricochets off the side, and [finger snap] they wake up.
So, don’t hold your breath. It won’t do any good. So, that’s that understanding. And once that kind of understanding or experience has arisen, you actually know what the whole business is about. You have a much clearer idea of what you’re actually doing in practice. You also have a much clearer idea of what your efforts and practice are going to cost you. And in some texts it says that’s when real practice actually starts.
Unfortunately, it’s where a lot of people stop because they think, “Oh, I’ve understood. I’ve understood this. That’s fine. I can just go on and live my life.” No, that’s not the case. Because now there is the whole matter of unfolding that knowing until it is present in every aspect of one’s life. And this is what differentiates, and the only thing that differentiates the first-level bodhisattva from a buddha, is the degree to which that knowing has unfolded in one’s life.
Student: Where are you?
Ken: Where am I? Well, if the starting gate is way over there … [laughs]
Student: Is the finish line further away or closer than the starting line?
Ken: Oh, the finish line. I don’t even worry about that.
Energy surge experiences
Susan: Just a question for you. I think I have an answer, but just to hear your opinion. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. There’s such a thing, they actually do them here called the Enlightenment Intensive, where you go for a weekend and do very similar to what we’ve been doing in this retreat. And people have huge openings of understanding, but then there’s no follow-up practice. And unless they pursue it, they can have a tendency to think that they’ve got it and that’s it, right?
Ken: What you’re describing there, and this is easy to do: you get a group of people, you jack up the energy, you push, push, push, push, and a good number of those people are going to experience some kind of energy surge. That’s what they’re getting. And you’re absolutely right, it’s not stable, but in most of those cases, it’ll be some kind of energy surge and energy [unclear] experience. But because of the context, they’ll be told “That’s it.” And this is a serious misconception. It’s very, very problematic. And there are many, many forms of psychotherapeutic intensives, spiritual intensives, religious intensives, which it is purely a matter of jacking up the energy until something like that happens.
Susan: The experience that actually happens though can be an experience of awakening to emptiness that’s created through the conditions. But then the problem is that one doesn’t follow up with a spiritual practice to integrate that.
Ken: Or to stabilize it. Because those energy-surge experiences are not stable, and they come and they may last, for several days, periods of time, and then they go. And if they lasted a long time, you may think, “Oh, I’ve woken up.” And then they go, you go, “What happened?” [Laughter] And that creates all that longing to get back, and the grasping, etc., etc. It’s actually pretty easy to instill or elicit some experience of mind nature in a relatively short period of time through—what I regard as—somewhat artificial techniques. Now, it may be useful because it plants a seed of experience, but if that’s regarded as the end of the path, you really haven’t done the person a favor, in my opinion.
Susan: I actually have an acquaintance who just did that a couple of weeks ago, and his life is forever changed. And I’m wondering how to really … I haven’t responded. They sent me an email and said, “Wow, this is the new me.” And it’s like, “Oh, what do I do with this?”
Ken: What do you need to do with this? That’s the first question.
Susan: I mean, he is anticipating a response.
Ken: Well, you can say anything from, “That’s bullshit,” to “Congratulations.”
Susan: I was thinking somewhere in between. “Congratulations, but … come and practice.”
Ken: I mean, the way that you asked the question, and I’m going to be a little personal here if that’s okay. The way that you asked the question, suggests to me, that it’s pulling something of the teacher out of you.
Susan: Well, yeah.
Ken: Are you his teacher?
Susan: Well, he has come to sessions at the center, right? So, I am resonating in that way. He’s come seeking something, and now he’s gone off and had this, and he sends me this email that says, “Do you know about this?” Right? “This is what happened.”
Ken: Well, so the teacher-student relationship is not clearly established here.
Susan: No. So, I don’t have a responsibility that way.
Ken: And that’s very, very important.
Susan: So, it’s more friend, acquaintance.
Ken: Yeah. Now, as a friend, how would you respond?
Susan: Well, my reaction was like, “I’m really happy for you.” However, in my heart, that’s what happened. “Oh, yay. An opening.” But realizing it’s conditioned, that’s impermanent. There’s going to be a big let down …
Ken: And I’m very grateful for you bringing this up, Susan, because friendship, teacher, that’s what you’re doing there. Okay?
Susan: Yeah. If it was just a friend, what would I do?
Ken: Now, as a friend, you can say, “That’s great. Tell me how it goes.”
Susan: Yeah.
Ken: Do you feel the difference? Okay. Now, just to take Sue’s incident here, this kind of tension comes up all the time. It comes up all the time when we see someone we care about doing something, which we think is not very good for them. And there’s a real natural inclination, particularly if we have experience with that direction, to move into a teacher role. That’s something very natural.
How do you feel when one of your friends moves into a teacher role with you? I would like you to link this back to the exercise we did this afternoon. Okay? Part of the awareness is, what is the relationship and in that relationship, what is possible? And coupled with that, is my concern sufficiently great here that I am going to step out of the relationship—because that’s another option—and move into a different relationship. I have a couple of friends who do this all the time. I say, “Well, I think I’m going to do this.”
And they take me by the scruff, and they say “No, you’re not.”
Yes?
Student: It’s different, is it not, when a friend asks you, they say, “What would you do?” or “What would you advise me to do?” When you’re being asked.
Ken: You’re quite right. And so, it’s, what is actually happening? And this is where attention is very, very important in our lives. Okay? Thank you.
Release
Ken: Now, continuing on. The fourth level of understanding or experience, what’s called release. And this is where there’s an opening, a letting go. So, that that particular aspect of knowing is now just present. With the previous one, with the direct knowing, you can have it, the system has changed, but you can actually forget it. It’s still there in the system. You can’t go back, but you may forget about it. At this fourth level, release, then it’s just there and you live it. You never have to think about it. In a certain sense, it becomes who you are, and there’s nothing contrived, nothing unnatural, nothing effortful about it.
You may see a phrase, it’ll be usually translated as: “May realization and liberation occur at the same time.” I would translate that as in the way that we’ve been discussing, “May that direct knowing and complete release arise at the same time,” because that sometimes happens. You don’t want to go through all of this slow process of integration.
Student: Can you reorient me where you are? Which stanza?
Ken: Oh, now I’m going to go back and tell you. I was just giving you this as a framework for this next stanza. So, the third stanza, page eight:
Look at objects, and there is no object: one sees mind;
Aspirations for Mahamudra
Look at mind and there is no mind: it is empty of nature.
Look at both of these and dualistic clinging subsides on its own.
Those describe three different direct knowings that arise, and there’s a progression. And when “dualistic clinging subsides on its own,” you “know sheer clarity.” The fact that there are 16 aspects of sheer clarity is another matter. We won’t go there today. [Laughter] When that happens, what’s being talked about here is that third level of knowing, direct knowing.
Free from mental constructions, it is called (this).
Free from extremes, it is called (that).
Because everything is complete here it is called (that).
May I gain confidence that, in understanding one, I know them all.
And one person, I did a retreat with, Nyishul Kenpo, in my first interview with him—and he was a man of extremely few words because he was at this stage of his life it was very, very painful for him to speak—and he looked at me and said, “Mahamudra, dzogchen. One man, two names. Understand?”
And I said, “Yes.”
“Mahamudra, dzogchen. One man, two names. Understand?”
“Yes, I understand. Thank you.”
“Mahamudra …”[Laughter] He was really making a point here.
So, there’s this direct knowing. Now he’s describing how this pervades one’s experience.
The great bliss of non-attachment is continuous.
Sheer clarity without fixations is free of obscurations.
Passing beyond intellect, non-thought is naturally present.
May these experiences continually arise without effort.”
And things go deeper
Attachment to good and fixation on experience subside on their own.
Because—as many of you experienced in the exercise that we did this afternoon—when you’re present, a whole bunch of things just take care of themselves. And the more present you are, the more that happens. So, you find that, and it’s very interesting how this works. The more present you are, the more awake, more aware, the more clearly you see what to do. So, there are less and less choices, because you just see clearly what to do, and it feels more and more natural. It feels like nothing at all. That’s not how it appears to the outside observer. They’re going like, “How did you know how to do that? How were you able to do that?” Because they can’t see that at all. So, on your side, it feels like nothing, and really, nothing special. So, you don’t get any pat on the back in this process.
You’re never gonna say, “Oh wow, I’m really getting somewhere.” Because the more present you are, the less special it seems. Now everybody quits and goes back to their regular [unclear].
Confusion and evil concepts are cleared away in the realm of ultimate nature.
In the ordinary mind, there is no control or alteration.
May I know the truth of pure being, complete simplicity.
Well, now you’re at first-level bodhisattva. And what he’s describing here is what I was calling release. And this arises even with direct knowing. Once you begin to experience things like this, then you see people struggling in their lives and you can’t help but feel compassion. It’s impossible not to. Not in the sense of superiority. I really want to emphasize that. It’s compassion, like, “Oh yeah,” just seeing the suffering and knowing the destructiveness of suffering. So, the compassion described in this one is the first two kinds of compassion: compassion for sentient beings, and compassion that arises out of spiritual understanding.
The next stanza, the very bottom one:
While such compassion is active and immediate,
In the moment of compassion, its essential emptiness is nakedly clear.
Even though they’re talking about this as compassion, this is a totally different piece to my opinion. This is the compassion that is the expression of awareness itself, is the expression of mind, and it is not an emotion. It is not subject to decay or corruption. It is the expression of the natural clarity of mind. So, it’s a very, very different beast.
And the Mahayana path can be summarized as exactly this point: In the moment of compassion, its essential emptiness is nakedly clear. A favorite phrase of Rinpoche was: stong niyid snying rje snying po can (pron. tong-nyi nying-jé nyingpo chen). stong niyid is the word for emptiness. snying rje is the word for compassion. snying po is the word for essence or core. can is to have. So, to have the essence: compassion and emptiness.
But I want to emphasize, the compassion you’re talking about at this level is not an emotion. It’s the expression of mind. Awareness is empty. It expresses itself as compassion.
The second to last verse describes all the stuff that comes along with it, and the last verse is dedication.
The Short Vajradhara Prayer
Ken: Now, page 10. This short prayer, which is known as The Short Vajradhara Prayer, I’ve never come across The Long Vajradhara Prayer. This one, The Short Vajradhara Prayer, is one of the most important prayers in the Dakpo Kagyu traditions. There are 12 Dakpo Kagyu traditions, and this is practiced and utilized in all of them. It is so highly regarded that it is very often taken as the basis for teaching—either a short teaching or a very long teaching—because it covers all of the essential points of mahamudra practice.
On one occasion, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche came to visit us in the three-year retreat, and this is in the second three-year retreat. We had about four or five people who spoke English and about five or six people who spoke French. And so, I was translating into English, and then my French counterpart was taking the English and translating that into French. His English was better than mine, but his Tibetan wasn’t quite as good. And Dilgo Khyentse chose to teach us this prayer. The little trick here was that Dilgo Khyentse had a totally different style of teaching from what I’d been used to, and apparently it’s something that was not uncommon in the Tibetan tradition. He would just talk and flow like a river.
Now, I was used to Kalu Rinpoche. And if I didn’t understand something Kalu Rinpoche said, while he was talking I’d say, “What was that?” And he would just stop and say that. And so Dilgo Khyentse started off, and I just was not ready for this flow. So, about two minutes into it, “What was that?” And his attendant said [unclear]. And meanwhile, the river’s just continuing to flow. I didn’t understand. So, I just went, all right, and it just went on and on and on. And this is the first verse, and about 15 minutes later, he stopped.
Now it’s my turn to translate. That’s not the worst of it. My French counterpart didn’t have the capacity for 15 minutes, so I had to break up my translation. Once I got used to it, it was just fascinating. It’s just like this river of stuff and it’s just poured into you.
The lineage
Ken: The first verse is describing the lineage. Vajradhara is the Vajrayana expression of Shakyamuni Buddha. It’s the buddha principle often referred to as Adi-Buddha or Primordial Buddha. The first human in this particular line of transmission is Tilopa. His guru was Vajradhara, whatever that means.
There’s a longer line of transmission, which goes back to the third century. Tilopa was in the 10th and 11th century. Naropa was a great Indian master, Marpa was Naropa’s principal student and was the first Tibetan, Marpa the translator. And goes from Milarepa, then Gampopa, and Dusum Chenpa is the first Karmarpa. And the “four great and eight lesser lineages” refer to the 12 different transmissions of the Dakpo Kagyu.
And the second verse goes on the same way:
Masters of the profound path of mahamudra,
The Short Vajradhara Prayer
The Instruction Lineages of Dakpo …
Trikung, Taklung, Tsalpa and the glorious Drukpa …
Those aren’t actually the four major lineages. Those are the four that probably were the best known. Of the 12 lineages, one, two, three, four are still extant and vibrant, and there are remnants of a couple of the others. And the others have died out. I mean, we’re talking, these were established 500 or 600 years ago. So, it’s reasonable to think that some of them have just died out.
Student: Do they end up being very different from each other?
Ken: No, they’re not very different at all. Each one emphasizes different things in a different way, but there’s a very large body of common knowledge, which is then explained and practiced a little differently, according to the different flavors of the teachers over the centuries. But everything that we’ve been discussing in this retreat would be shared among all of these. The next four stanzas are essential teachings of mahamudra as it is practiced in the Dakpo Kagyu traditions.
Student: Can I make one request that you leave enough time at the end to tell us about the person on the front cover of the book?
Ken: Oh, okay. Sure. All right, now we go real fast. Well, we may be a little late for dinner. That’s all. Okay.
Commentary on the verses
Ken:
Disgust and disenchantment are the legs of meditation, it is taught.
The Short Vajradhara Prayer
You may recall at the beginning, I asked you to think about some questions. And we talked about some teachings such as the precious human birth, and death and impermanence. In order to practice mahamudra effectively, you are going to have to let go of wanting to be rich or famous or all of these things. I mean, you may end up rich or famous. I’m not saying that won’t happen. But the criteria for success in conventional life are distractions from your spiritual practice. And that’s a very significant shift that needs to take place.
Otherwise, there’s just going to be more and more hankering after that stuff. The way that I come across this in the students that I work with is that they’ll practice for a while, until the practice bites sufficiently deep, and they hit something they don’t want to let go. They just stop right there. So, the willingness to let go of what we regard as conventional life is very important. So, when it says:
And has severed the ties to this life.
In traditional vocabulary that would refer to letting go of this life and putting your hopes and expectations and goals into future lives, getting enlightened or whatever that means. But from my point of view, I read this a little differently. “Has severed ties to this life,” this life refers to the life defined by society for us.
Give me energy to stop longing for money or prestige.
So, with that as a basis, then one turns to the transformation of energy. And here, as we discussed earlier in this retreat, the primary method for transforming energy is devotion.
Respect and devotion form the head of meditation,
To this meditator who continuously prays
To the teacher who opens the doors to the treasury of pith instructions
Give me energy to discover uncontrived respect and devotion.
When you discover that or uncover that “uncontrived respect and devotion,” there’s tremendous energy in your practice. One of the—I think Drupa Kagyu—one of these 12 transmissions, there’s a guy called Götsangpa who, when he was a very young man, met his teacher and just felt this overwhelming devotion, and this was his teacher. That was just it. And so he received instruction. He went off and prayed. He prayed for 30 days. At the end of 30 days, he had round-the-clock, continuous clear awareness through the power of devotion. That’s how much energy it generated. That’s exceptional. But I just mentioned it because it reveals possibilities.
Student: It isn’t an Enlightenment Intensive. [Laughter]
Ken: It stayed. Then he got down to serious practice. Okay, the next verse describes the actual practice of mahamudra.
Student: Can you just say something about devotion? It seems to me that devotion is a practice, but that devotion also arises through practice.
Ken: That’s exactly right. It is a practice. You start off and it’s contrived devotion. So, you practice it, and as you do this, you find it just opening up and now becomes uncontrived. It just flows.
Student: But even, given that I’m mainly schooled in the Theravadan tradition, even if you don’t actually practice devotion, that devotion does open up.
Ken: It definitely does. As the teachings become deeper and deeper in you, then there’s just a very natural opening and appreciation, which matures into a devotion. It may not be as it is in the Tibetan tradition, a devotion to a particular individual, but it’s something that is extremely heartfelt and very, very deep. Yes, you’re quite right.
Student: Is that similar to bhakti or is this different?
Ken: The real practice of bhatki yoga, you know how much nonsense flies around with that? Yeah. But this is the kind of thing that bhakti yoga was. It’s useful to remember that Hinduism and Buddhism developed in parallel in India. And so devotion is a very important element in Indian culture. So, it was present in both of these traditions.
And here we’re talking about a later development of Buddhism. Don’t forget, all of this stuff developed approximately 1,000 years, well, the earlier part of it developed, say 600, 700 years after Buddha lived. So, in the early, early scriptures, you don’t find anything about devotion to a person. That was an element that came through the evolution of Buddhism in India. There are about 500 Tibetan lamas who will strike me with thunderbolts for saying that.
Non-distraction is the substance of meditation, it is taught.”
You’ll see that translated as main practice or various ways.
To this meditator who lets the essence of any movement/ Rest fresh right there, in the moment, not doing anything …
This is the empty knowing, resting night, where whatever arises, you do nothing with it. That’s a practice. When you actually do the practice, you’ll wake up.
Give me energy to be free from working at meditation.
You’re praying for this. So, you gain the transformation of energy. So, that one has a level of attention in which you can just let experience arise and dissolve. And it is by resting in that, that you come increasingly to know what you are not. It’s doubtful that you’ll ever know what you are. And for reasons that we’ve talked about earlier, there’s nothing you can point to and say, that is what I am. So, you’ll never know what you are. But one way of describing Buddhist practice is becoming clear and clearer about what you are not.
And many of you, I know, will have experienced this. You are resting in meditation, and you find this emotion coming up. Now, whether you’re practicing bare attention, or noting, or mahamudra, or whatever, you do it. Anger, red anger, white anger, blue anger, anger. You can be noting it, or you can be just sitting there, and there’s this energy moving in you, and flames pouring out of every pore. [Laughter] It’s a red-hot iron rod running the length of your body, burning you from the inside out.
This is what I’m experiencing. And these stories screaming at you, how the only thing that’s appropriate to do to the world is to burn it to a crisp. [Laughter]
Student: Sounds like the movie Carrie.
Ken: I don’t know that one. And so you sit there. And just at the point you’re beginning to get into it, you find you’re just sitting there, and there’s no anger. You go, “Huh?” [Laugher] And then you recall what made you so angry, and you go, “So, what?” You go, “Huh?” And so you’ve experienced this emotion arising and going. How many have had something like this? I’ve dressed it up a little bit. Okay, so lots of people here. Okay. When you have this experience, what is one thing you know about this emotion. Or, to put it differently, what’s one thing you know about you?
Student: I’m not that.
Ken: You are not that. Why? Because it comes and goes. Okay? So, as you sit in mahamudra practice or whatever, you become clearer and clearer about what you are not. And you’re able to let all of that just arise and be there. You don’t have to do anything with it. You aren’t even working at the meditation. There’s some extraordinary freedom here. Okay, so that’s the actual practice.
Then the last verse describes the result:
The essence of thought is what is.
And for those technophiles, what is is dharmakaya, my sneaky translation of dharmakaya. You’ll see it: “The essence of thought is dharmakaya.” That’s how it’s usually translated. But I was trying to put this into English.
To this meditator who arises as an unceasing play,
Being nothing at all, but arising as anything,
Well, I’m sorry to tell you that the end result of your practice is that you’ll be nothing at all. Mind you, that’s what you are now, but you just don’t know it. But in being nothing at all, it becomes possible to be anything. And so the end of our practice—and this is very, very important—the intention of what the whole practice is about, why we work so hard at coming to know emptiness directly, is so that we can be free to be whatever is required of us in order to respond to the pain and suffering of the world. It’s about emptiness. Mahamudra is how it becomes possible for us to manifest compassion appropriately in each moment. You want Sukhasiddhi?
Student: Oh, I do. But I just had one question. On the previous page—
Ken: We know her by now, don’t we?
Student: There’s another expression that I thought was a little strange, and I wondered what that was a translation of. It’s in the guru yoga prayer, pure being.
Ken: Oh, that’s dharmata.
Student: Dharmakaya?
Ken: “Give me energy to know that all experience is pure being.” [Ken reading under his breath] Oh, sorry. In this case, it is dharmakaya. You’re right. Yeah, it is. All experience here refers to all experience, potential, and actual. Gee, I guess I should change that. Pure being.
Student: What is and pure being are the same term.
Ken: Well, yeah, two different translations of dharmakaya. See, I just refuse to use the word dharmakaya in English. So, I will translate it according to context into an English phrase that fits that context. Okay.
Give me energy to know that samsara and nirvana are not separate.
This means samsara and nirvana is the whole range of human experience, and it’s just what it is. Okay.
Now, Franca wanted me to talk about this woman on the front page. Whose name is Sukhasiddhi.
Sukha. S-U-K-H-A.
Student: It’s on the inside of the front. It says Sukhasiddhi right there.
Ken: You know what, it’s 5:28. I will talk about this after meditation this evening.
Student: Okay. Our bedtime story.
Ken: It’s your bedtime story.