Strand of Jewels: My Teachers' Essential Guidance on Dzogchen by Khetsun Sangpo

Author:Khetsun Sangpo [Sangpo, Khetsun]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2016-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

8Fine Points of Practice

INSTRUCTIONS AND STORIES

HIGHEST TANTRA gives teachings on the naturally abiding lineage described as unchanging, without past or future. This lineage is ongoing, definitive, and always pure. It neither improves nor deteriorates. Nine widely accepted metaphors describe it as something pure and merely covered over. Contrary to this, there is also a mistaken way of describing Buddhahood as arising in dependence on causes and conditions. Dzogchen does not say this.

Once your lama identifies your mindnature for you, whether your mind is stable or proliferates out to objects, you see everything within a union of serene abiding and special seeing.

The great Kagyu master Gyalwa Lorepa (rGyal ba Lorepa, 1187–1250), composer of many texts, was identified as a tulku of Guru Rinpoche. He was an incomparably great adept, a mahasiddha, practitioner of both Mahamudra and Dzogchen. He said that if we grasp any object of any of the six consciousnesses, we are not practicing. When we don’t grasp, appearances are self-appearing and self-liberating. We don’t hold them as good or bad. They become free, like a knotted snake that just unwinds itself. In this way, we realize our inseparable unity with our own nature.

Some think that once you are realized, all appearances are liberated. Dawning and liberation, however, are simultaneous. If an appearance was followed by its liberation, the two could not be inseparable. Conceptions obscure mindnature, just like water obscured by sediment floating in it. When you simply let water be in its own transparency, you can clearly see bugs and whatever else is there. Effort at making appearances arise or cease is like stirring a river bottom. You only muddy things up. The stirred-up dirt, like exerting any degree of mental effort, obscures. Our thoughts are stains on our mindnature. Let it become transparent.

Our recognition that neither sheer awareness nor the afflictions obstructing it are truly established is special seeing. This seer is naked, clear and empty. The special seeing that knows this is itself a clear emptiness, a nakedness of mind. Seen and seer are not separate, for both are clear and both are empty. They are not different. And it is special seeing’s place to understand that they are not separate. This is how special seeing and serene abiding are unified. This is how we can carry afflictions to the path.

Appearances are merely the playful display of sheer awareness. No matter how they abide, change, or proliferate, no matter how very good or very bad they are, not one of them is truly established.

When we say appearances have been purified, we do not mean everything becomes empty like the sky. We mean that within an emptiness of attachment, clear and empty objects arise in space, just like objects appearing in a mirror. We cannot hold or grasp those objects, even though they appear. They are on their own empty ground, and they themselves are empty.

At this point, the grasping mind has been purified. It is free from all holding. And now we come to the most essential point: Liberation of grasping occurs right in its own place.

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