White Lotus: An Explanation of the Seven-Line Prayer to Guru Padmasambhava by Mipham Jamgon

Author:Mipham, Jamgon [Mipham, Jamgon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2012-04-16T03:00:00+00:00

Just as a sesame seed is filled with oil, so too is the nature of the mind pervaded by primordial wisdom, ultimate and self-arisen, dwelling within it as the youthful vase-body. The latter is, however, constrained and hampered by the ordinary aggregates, the elements and sense fields, karma and negative emotion. The natural, luminous wisdom body, the multicolored lights, the primordial wisdom, and ultimate reality are consequently obscured, with the result that beings fail to behold what is in fact their own true nature. Nevertheless, thanks to the essential instructions of [highest atiyoga], the sovereign vehicle, even ordinary people are able to glimpse this nature—their own self-arisen primordial wisdom—within the luminosity that is spontaneously present. Thus the crucial point of thögal, the path of “spontaneous presence,” is the self-arisen primordial wisdom, here symbolized by the syllable Hung.

The words Orgyen’s land refer to the “lamp of the heart of flesh.”84 The Tibetan genitive particle gyi [rendered into English as upon], indicates the connection between the “lamp of the heart of flesh” and the youthful vase-body, in other words, the luminous essence-drop of primordial wisdom in the center of the heart. West indicates that the latter is sunk (nub) within the aggregate of the vajra body—meaning that it dwells in it. This luminous essence-drop of primordial wisdom is the inner expanse. North, understood here in the sense of purity (byang), refers to the external expanse, namely, the unclouded sky. The rim, or frontier, is the meeting place of these two expanses. It is the “lamp of the far-catching water lasso,”85 the path of the inner visual sense power, thanks to which, within the pure sky of the external expanse, there arises the “lamp of the utterly pure expanse,”86 blue and limpid, filled with nets of rainbows and adorned with bright mirrorlike disks of light. When one becomes accustomed to this, the “lamp of the empty disk of light”87 will manifest, bright red, round and limpid, displaying the kind of configuration that one sees on the surface of a pool when one throws a stone into it. These latter two lamps are indicated by the word lotus. The lotus flower, being immaculate, symbolizes the flawless dharmadhatu, the perfectly pure expanse of the mother, which is like a measureless palace.

The pistil-cup represents the radiance of awareness, the vajra-chains interlinked and curving—like gold chains or strings of pearls or else like knotted strands of horsehair. These mobile configurations and disks of light are the radiance of the “lamp of self-arisen knowledge,”88 the natural light of awareness-wisdom. The word stem indicates that when, in accordance with the pith instructions of the path of thögal, the three doors are left in their natural state and one concentrates strongly on the three key points of this practice,89 one’s awareness will be in its natural, uncontrived state, free of thoughts, and its radiance will be “imprisoned” within the fence of space. In other words, through concentration on these key points, space-awareness will become perfectly firm. One will lay the

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