Vajra Diaries, ‘Anthem of Certitude’

The thing in the beginning that impressed me most about my Guru (Deshung Rinpoche Kunga Tenpay Nyima—were I to actually say his name) is the thing that came back to me this morning wrapped in the utmost profundity. I would enter the shrine room up on 125th St. and Broadway, Spanish Harlem, do prostrations, and observe Rinpoche holding his mala high in the air as he recited OM MANI PADME HUNG, near breathlessly to himself. I was twenty-seven then and had only been a Buddhist, regularly meditating for a couple of years. While I had little realization of the meditative stages, somehow I knew what he was experiencing. Head tilted up, he was seeing in the space before his eyes a palelucent, twilit sky filled with the mandalas of all the deities to which he prayed and recited countless mantras to everyday. 

So this morning, up with the sun, after doing Lord Birwapa’s yoga, I started saying my Mani’s like my teacher did, attempting each day to fill the same five thousand quota. Soon I fell into an extreme pacification, perhaps dreamed, then woke to a clear vision of Rinpoche appearing palelucent in a twilit sky within a unified space before me. What was exceptional about this stable visualization—and one should expect to have at least some after years of extensive Vajrayana practice—is that it was also teaching me something of great certitude. A promise of ineffable purpose within an inherent emptiness.  

Calm abiding is the mediative stage in which such experiences occur. In his richly interiorized autobiography, Brilliant Moon, the sublimely accomplished Dilgo Khentse Rinpoche lamented having not yet achieved stabilization on the meditative stage of calm abiding. When I read this, I noted it with some credulity, thinking it over modest. During a drub chen at Tharic Tulku’s monastery, Boudhanath, in 1986, I experienced him as a Nirmanakaya Buddha when his bodily appearance seemed to enter mine, so I assumed he was an practitioner beyond a ‘mere’ stabilized or un stabilized practice. Now I understand the comment better, as even one instance of true calm abiding meditation can be an all-informing, yet fathomless experience of wisdom. What this morning’s insight taught me is that both the empty nature of phenomena, and the very nature of our mind, is unified in just this way, expressing itself as a non-expressibility. 

At the Jetsun Sakya Center, New York City, during the late seventies and early eighties, Rinpoche taught us that the nature of mind is the nondual arising of all phenomena, and that within that two-in-one unity, there is the mind-in-itself, the nature of which is clear, empty, and unimpeded. That is what my vision of him this morning imparted in an utterly non-conceptual manner. Further, that such visions, within the calm abiding stage always impart the nature of one’s mind to one as it is precisely taught and thoroughly realized by one’s Guru. This is the guarantor of that certitude mentioned above. 

Moreover, in advanced practice, stable visions in calm abiding are efficiently produced in the ‘generation stage’ when one daily recreates oneself into the tutelary ‘oath deity,’ or yi dam, who bears all the thirty-seven characteristics, thirty-two major and eighty minor marks, of a fully Enlightened Buddha. With patient, diligent, and attentive practice, mind’s lamp-lit, natural state will come. This experience is the pith of all Buddha’s instructions and will follow in the ‘perfecting stage.’ So, Hail to the Deshung Tulku! holding high his mala in respectful gratitude to all the messengers of the beyond profound. And to all the Gurus of the ‘Nine Chariots’ of Tibetan Buddhist teachings with its ardent community of practitioners!