Practicing the Great Perfection by Shechen Gyaltsap IV

Author:Shechen Gyaltsap IV [Gyaltsap, Shechen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

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A PITH INSTRUCTION ON THE GREAT PERFECTION FOR BEGINNERS

I bow in homage to the Second Buddha, the omniscient Lord of Speech, Longchen Rabjam of the glorious foundation of Samyé.

It is now time to give a brief explanation of the crucial points of the actual practice of the Great Perfection. To begin with, the crucial point related to the body is that you should sit on a comfortable seat, relaxed and at ease, in the seven-point posture of Vairocana. In particular, since the eyes are the gateway for the arising of primordial wisdom, you should not use any visual support but gaze directly ahead into space. The crucial point of speech is that you should allow yourself to breathe quite naturally, not through the nose but very gently through the mouth. There are important reasons of each of these key points, and it is imperative that you do not treat them lightly.

As a preliminary step, cultivate feelings of sadness and weariness with samsara, decide that you will turn away from it forever, and develop feelings of compassion and the attitude of bodhichitta.

Then meditate on your teacher in his or her ordinary form, seated on a lotus and a disk of the moon above the crown of your head. Pray to your teacher that the extraordinary realization of the profound path take birth swiftly in your mind—with such devotion that you have tears in your eyes. Mere words and lip service are of no use. For the realization of the Great Perfection to arise in you, it is essential to receive blessings from a teacher belonging to that lineage. And since the reception of blessings depends on the devotion of the disciple, this alone is the most important factor. So without any complacency with regard to all the recitations and practices you may have been able to complete, you should pray to your teacher with great fervor. Finally, while adopting the appropriate visualizations, you should receive the four empowerments from him or her and, mingling inseparably your mind with his or hers, you should maintain, free of all fixation, the state of the great bliss of the fundamental nature, empty but luminous.

This does not mean that you are meditating in the blank and indeterminate state of the universal ground. Neither are you meditating in the state of the consciousness of the universal ground, which is simply clear and aware. Nor are you training in a dazed experience of no-thought. It also does not mean that you are meditating in a state in which thoughts about all kinds of things, occurring as mental objects, are in constant movement.

So what is this meditation like? When the previous thought has ended, the later one has not arisen, and you are unconcerned with the one occurring in the present, there comes a bare, self-cognizing awareness, a spacious state in which luminosity and emptiness are united. This is the mind-transcending primordial purity of the trekchö path of the Great Perfection. It is a naked state of openness in which the phenomena [of samsara and nirvana] are exhausted.

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