5/12/22
The ‘Avalokiteshvara According to the Master Tsembupa Practice,’ an Unexcelled Yoga Tantra, is a ‘unified field’ approach to the plurality of deity practices in Tibet. It proliferated in the nineteenth century at the time of the Rime unification movement and was especially prevalent in Kham. His Eminence the third Deshung Tulku (Kunga Tenpei Nyima) of the Tharlam monastery in that region, given his ardent dedication to the above practice and to Chenrezig in general, is a most excellent exponent of the Rime Movement. Possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of Buddha’s Dharma, as well as all things Tibetan, he was guided by the present era’s greatest practitioner, Ngawang Legpa Dorje Chang. I bow down and pay homage to both of these exceptional Gurus, who turned the Wheel of Dharma in degenerating times, fully acknowledging any success in gathering those two indispensable heaps, Merit and Wisdom, depends upon their kindness.
In the Thunderbolt vehicle, the quickness of success in one’s practice depends upon the degree of trust one has in the Guru. Like the flash of lightening, one’s attraction to the Guru, and likewise his or hers to you, comes from the wisest of discriminations; an understanding of Interdependent Origination. To know this truth, pronounced the Buddha in The Rice Seedling Sutra, is to know the essence of the Dharma. And to know that, is to know me. ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears.’ This too is a lesson in depend arising of all phenomena. Having seen, felt, and perhaps even tasted, the very agency of the Buddha within this supreme introduction, an inner-most, determined desire to stop the pain of existence for oneself and others arises. After such a fateful, most correct appraisal of this relationship, and being convinced of the moribund nature of worldly, un-renounced sufferings, one takes refuge in the Guru as the Buddha, Guru as the Dharma, and Guru as the Sangha. In light of this seriousness, requiring openness and a test of vulnerability, one embraces the Guru as one might one’s own parents airlifting you up from a roiling sea. Generosity, and it remedial effects, which matures patience and pliability, further strengthen one’s resolve and one’s own Buddha nature becomes closer at hand with the removal of adventitious defilements, faults and failings. That compulsion to be the ‘knowing’ one, the one in control of the ‘others,’ attempting to dominate through mental and physical aggressions, gradually weakens its death grip. Then it’s time to pray, unabashedly, to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and especially to one’s Guru, to completely overcome all fear, anger, and indifference from which pride and jealousy also arise. Turn your attention outwards and analyze where you and your cherished individuality end and someone else’s begins. Focus on that point of inseparableness. Reflect on the Guru’s kindness, the same as your mother’s most tender demonstrations of love for you as her baby. Amplify this love with the fullness of your own mature passions. Direct this strong desire for unification with the object of your passion onto the Guru as the objectless projection of one’s own mind. Recall the Buddha’s teachings, that all is a projection of one’s own mind, until feeling the ripening acceleration of that passion become Great Compassion, a loving kindness and commitment to help others by realizing one’s Buddha nature. Pay homage to the Guru, and resume your four modes of being, free from worry or concern about oneself, knowing your Guru loves and supports you in your aspiration to become a great mind hero.
11/12/22
These "five points" describe an arhat as one still characterized by impurity due to semen release (asucisukhavisaṭṭhi), ignorance (aññāṇa), doubt (kaṅkhā), reaching enlightenment through the guidance of others (paravitāraṇa), and speaking of suffering while in samādhi (vacibheda.) Schism debate issue of Second Council.
By the time of the Fourth Buddhist Councils, Buddhism had splintered into different schools in different regions of India. The Southern Theravada school had a Fourth Buddhist Council in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka at Alu Vihara (Aloka Lena) during the time of King Vattagamani-Abaya. The council was held in response to a year in which the harvests in Sri Lanka were particularly poor and many Buddhist monks subsequently died of starvation. Because the Pāli Canon was at that time oral literaturemaintained in several recensions by dhammabhāṇakas (dharma reciters), the surviving monks recognized the danger of not writing it down so that even if some of the monks whose duty it was to study and remember parts of the Canon for later generations died, the teachings would not be lost.[16]
Another Fourth Buddhist Council was held in the Sarvastivada tradition, said to have been convened by the Kushan emperor Kanishka, in 78 AD at Kundalban in Kashmir. It is said that Kanishka gathered five hundred Bhikkhus in Kashmir, headed by Vasumitra, to systematize the Sarvastivadin Abhidharmatexts, which were translated from earlier Prakrit vernacular languages (such as Gandhari in Kharosthiscript) into Sanskrit. It is said that during the council three hundred thousand verses and over nine million statements were compiled, a process which took twelve years to complete. Although the Sarvastivada are no longer extant as an independent school, its traditions were inherited by the Mahayana tradition. The late Professor Etienne Lamotte, an eminent Buddhologist, held that Kanishka's Council was fictitious.[17] However, David Snellgrove, another eminent Buddhologist, considers the Theravada account of the Third Council and the Sarvastivada account of the Fourth Council "equally tendentious," illustrating the uncertain veracity of much of these histories.[18]
12/12/22
Because you practice cultural elitism and harbor inequality toward others, your bloodless hegemony wins enemies, not friends, and discourages people by the droves. Perhaps it began out of laziness, how to think your way out of any repetitive effort. Perhaps it began while in school when you were rewarded for your smart dative responses. Perhaps it’s just cowardice, how to avoid the pain and drudgery of living in a physical world and instead you generated one that runs just by thinking. In this desire you are not wrong. Perfection of some sort is always close at hand. However, reality born of belief in one’s ideas is the essential allegory of caves; a life of shadows. The cave you really need to get back to is the one from which you were born. Meditate upon your own primordial energies and ascending pieces of thought. Experience the unity of clarity and emptiness. Forsake elitism for the equality of universal Buddha nature; the birthright of all beings.
***
You can’t make this stuff up. Last night while doing my sadhana and poised to recite Vajrayogini mantras, a Cambodian sister, spiritual friend and fellow Hevajra mandala entrant, text’d me. Having to run it through Google Translate, it came up with: ‘I changed my motorcycle after work.’ I text her back said, “You mean you changed the oil?” She replied, “What oil? I’m menstruating and can’t sit before my god for three days.” I replied ‘no problem,’ and elaborated: “I must tell you in Vajrayana Buddhism the woman’s menstrual blood is venerated. Just as is the man’s semen. Ideally they are mixed together and offered in ritual. This is one way to experience one’s Buddha nature. It also gives one siddhis. Maybe you will learn this later, as I understand, for now, you don’t observe both Theravada and the Vajrayana. So you must do what makes you comfortable. She replied: “OK. [Today I will not sit before the Buddha.] Because it is [out of] my respect for the Buddha.”
***
On Interdependent Origination: if you see things as a whole made of dependent, working parts, you start to get the hang of it. It’s like ‘sight reading,’ where instead of having to analyze every element composing a word and then all the words and punctuation composing a sentence, the entirety of what is being ‘sighted’ is grasped all at once. So hum into a friend’s ear a few bars of ‘row, row, row your boat/ gently down the stream…’ and many causes and conditions—as if one were pulling a rabbit out of a hat—will seamlessly come together, and then they will sing back ‘…merrily, merrily, merrily/ life is but a dream.’
13/12/22
‘Hung the bells’ (Indrabhuti commenting on Cakrasamvara Tantra) is the HAM inverted and the short AH ‘bell’ ringing at the crown, then dripping down thick white bodhicitta upon the Lotus Chakra. OM exciting sixteen deities with lotus handled bells, there is an expansion of seat and increase of element, raising subtle airs of ecstasy. Extreme bliss then perches upon any sensually based sexual desire like a Victor’s foot upon Mahavira.
14/12/22
During my recent long retreat, there was some apprehension about becoming partners with my Wisdom Consort, Dagmema (Nairatmya Yogini). Attachment to another ‘spouse,’ I thought. But this has not been the case. It’s been almost eleven months since she was given to me by the Vajra Master. In truth, I’ve always known her but only through many veils of obscuring defilements. Chief among them, a discrimination of the existent and the none-existent which I no longer harbor and seek to root out when it becomes apparent. Last night, Dagmema spoke to me in her language and I understood much of it. One thing she said, causing deep feelings of love for her, was that, ‘while I would be OK without her, I needn’t worry because she would never really leave me.’ At first, this produced the attachment of much gratitude. Later, I recognized it as being relative mind speaking to absolute mind. Even at the time, a recognition of its non-dual sentiment struck me as profound.
Since my K’mai sister told me of her menstruation, I’ve been meditating on that metallic taste I remember from other women. It’s been generating great bliss, especially when coupled with Vajrayogini’s mantra. I now see Vajrayogini as wholly embodying menstrual flow of a powerful persuasion (shakti) and so imaginatively mix the taste with the essential semen (‘Hermès’ Glass,’ per Ouan Weor) of Vira Vajradharma and Cakrasamvara, who are both non-dual with the Guru. About that metallic taste, I’m wondering if it the same thing the dakinis of old, the cannibalistic raksini and yaksini, were after when they’d devour a man’s heart for its ‘iron sediments.’ Related to this is that Tantric practitioners break vows if they disparage, or experience distaste for, the taking of dutsi (properly made of of the five nectars) during regular sessions of sadhana practice.
15/12/22
“Perched atop passion’s pinnacle, seeking the highest Equanimity in meditational equipoise, I engaged the bull-headed one and got the horns.”
The above selection taken from the ‘Copper Notebook’ (soon to be a blog of its own for the recipients of Sakya Lamdre only) is a yogi’s experience journal, as well as the conveyance of the Wisdom of Simultaneously Arising Phenomena, often borrowing the words of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, saints, sages, and scholars, to convey to those of the Impure Vision the extraordinary sights seen in the Vision of Experience, the supreme practice of the Lamdre Vajrayoga.
18/12/22
We all know about ‘Who’s Who,’ the registry of names and the forms of people populating our karmic sphere. It’s all these beings and their karmic connections to us that get smashed, pulverized and burned, their continuums transferred to the Dharmadhatu through the agency of the Profound Protection Chakra. Once that’s accomplished, it’s time to consider ‘who’s you?’—starting with the seeming coming, staying, and going of all thoughts. Where do they come from? What produces them? Why and how do they leave? What keeps them? More to the matter, who is the ‘you’ that is asking these questions and hunting down the answers? That’s the, ‘who is you?’ It’s also the, ‘whose are you?’ For we often think we belong to others, if even to our own, isolating self, which is far from the Buddha and his Sages’ truth. As they find no sentient beings in Nirvana, and have determined their phantom creation an anonymous vacuity, projected by a mind that is neither existent nor non-existent: a non-affirmation, with no implications, of an entirely baseless proposition. No thesis, antithesis, or synthesis is required to abide in the non-abiding Nirvana—just the two accumulations of merit and wisdom and the realization of the Buddha’s pith teaching. For that—the supreme nonduality of which there is no other— consult your local, qualified Guru.
21/12/22
I’ve been out of my nine and a half month retreat for over six weeks now. Yesterday, there was a drinking party in the apartment below so I stayed at my condo, rode my motorcycle around, and walked a great distance, earning me a blister while I reluctantly killed time. When I returned to the apartments, I spoke with a K’mai driver and guide who spoke a fair and amount of English, so it wasn’t necessary to struggle with languages. We had a good conversation. After he and company left, I laid down in bed for a brief while with my partner for the first time in quite awhile. Returning to my apartment upstairs after she fell asleep, I meditated in bed, and it continued until I awoke up in the middle of the night, with episodes of deep sleep and dreaming layered in between each other. This morning while doing Virupa’s yoga, the lotus seats of the Five Wisdom Buddhas enthralled me and that led into Hevajra, and then various engagements with other deities.
Over all, I’m noticing a slow integration process where the recollection of things I do while out and about create blissful experiences when I remember them at home, once alone. It seems I’m generating mandalas of locales in town where I walk, stop, eat, talk, and do whatever. These locales create modalities of experiences both fettered and free. They’re becoming part of a point of view where Samsara is more closely bound to Nirvana. Seems I’m having to balance sense gratification against meditative heat, desiring the latter, afraid the former will overtake it. It’s like a version of having to watch what you eat so you don’t become overweight. During retreat, the three or four sessions didn’t allow time for sensuous excess. One is always pretty much centered in the vajra yoga, experiencing the Simultaneous Arising Wisdoms, coming out of thoughts either peaceful or disturbing. Going to my practice, the sadhanas and so forth, is now not so preferred over going to town and being around people and their delusions of excitement.
So the above attachment to both Samsara and Nirvana is lessening as the realization sets in that, fundamentally, they’re both labels for the same thing: a desire for the perfection of total gratification within the three realms (desire, form, and formless). Cessation (of this attachment) is the nondual emergence of these two extremes and it can’t be expressed—spoken of, thought, or imagined—but only witnessed or ‘marked’ by the disciple.
I’ve ‘gone off book’ (doing a minimal sadhana practice by memory) before and then been swallowed up by the distractions and entertainments of the bazaar. But this time I see the dynamics of that.
Here a reliance upon the teaching of the ancients (ningma-pa) is useful. It’s the so-called ‘natural state’ one can settle into right away, that gives heat, spoken of by Dzogchen masters. This is the actual dawning of Clear Light, wed to the presence of one’s Guru at the time of one’s death—only one isn’t dying. What’s being spoken of here is that supreme natural state, one of the ultimate Primordial Wisdom moments, and not some weaker experience of simultaneity, where the Basis and the Actual are split. Neither is it one of ‘example’ Mahamudra, given to one by the Guru during the Unexcelled Yoga Tantra third consecration which is merely the union with the Mudra that’s being recalled later but isn’t a resultant Primordial Wisdom.
22/12/22
After reading through the Vajra Verses yet again, I noted and questioned what exactly are the ‘clear essences’ and whether or not I’d been experiencing them in relation to the Vajra body. This morning, again, while visualizing pure supports, an increased awareness of the five chakra petals became sharper, and then a clarified vision came as well of the entire seat of each Wisdom Buddha. A shaft of clear essence, extending up and down endlessly, signaled an eventual clear essence emptiness of my form. The wish then was to extend it to all phenomena.
23/12/22
As I stated above: “The so-called ‘natural state’ one can settle into right away, that gives heat, spoken of by Dzogchen masters, is the actual dawning of Clear Light wed to the presence of one’s Guru at the time of death, only one isn’t dying.” When non Buddhists think of the ‘natural state’ it’s something perceived through the defiled five senses aggregated by a ‘my, me, mine’ orientated entity, locked in isolated predispositions that ultimately have a death wish. That entity, whose uncle is Mara, eventually wakes to the cloying nature of its own surfeited means and singularly selfish drives. At that time it seeks either oblivion or annihilation of one’s being for relief and renewal. The ‘natural state’ for insiders, those practicing the Buddha’s awareness in all its 84,000 lifesaving manifestations, is the purification of a grasping, preferential entity—cessation of the three existential conditions of constant change, perennial dissatisfaction from sensuous desires, and no substantive self-same soul.
According to the modern Nyimgma Master Yu-khog Chos-dbyings rang-grol: “Self-clinging appears through the force of ignorance and delusion. It is through attachment to how things appear, and through solidifying that attachment and clinging to it as real, that we cling to a self and what belongs to that self—in other words, “I” and “mine.” Furthermore: “The self is also impermanent at the coarser level of its continuum. It is therefore merely the interdependent connection of causes and conditions, and there is nothing more to it than this—no true existence. When we realize this, it naturally dispels any clinging to self, so this is the realization of individual selflessness. This is how, like a herdsman with his herd, we cling to what we take to be ours, or what we imagine belongs to the self.” (Pearcy, 2018, 292-3.)
24/12/22
As regards the ‘basis’ make it a stronghold superior to the last—the ‘actual,’ make as desirous as one can muster while nested in meditative equipoise. Taste the drops of meditative fruit. Nothing is needed, signed, nor affirmed, no how.
27/12/22
I fear the faithless rationalists, their consciousness distorted and defiled by conceptual proliferation—the very cause of samsara, according to Sakya Pandita—find at times the faithful, Buddha Dharma vow-bound, ingenuous and uncritical. But it’s only the ardent latter who can crack the kernel of awareness—holding open the two sets, three Vajras (sphere of body, voice, and mind) in five Lotuses (chakras of Primordial Buddhas)—to merge Guru and the original Clear Light’s dawning to experience the unification of Mind, which is the marriage of Wisdom and Space.
This practice is catered to in several systems. But for the Sakyapa who promote the tradition, it’s conveniently gathered in the sadhana of ‘Avalokiteshvara According to the Master Tsembupa,’ transmitted in this era by the fully realized, Two Heaps Holder, Deshung Rinpoche, for the Unexcelled Yoga Tantra meditation upon Chenrezig.
To practice the Sakya Preliminaries, as are found in the ‘Ornament to Beautify the Three Appearances,’ a little faith is required: “For the guidance by means of the three appearances, the disciple to be guided is one who has faith.” As the Sutra of the Ten Attributes says:
Virtuous traits will not arise
in people lacking faith, just as
a green sprout will not arise
from a seed burnt by fire.
In deep faith, was this practice of repeatedly offering to the Guru rice-heaped mandala plates representing a lavishly idealized universe, recently promoted to me by my above mentioned Guru, Deshung Tulku Dorje Chang, while I was in retreat. By no mere coincidence was it auspiciously employed eleven days after finishing said retreat, when I took up the practice, after a near forty year hiatus, in observance of the Guru’s kindness toward a deceased Vajra brother who was a faith bearing practitioner and Dharmapala. It’s important to note, I also did this for the deceased, for the sake of other beings at large, and for my own salvation—as now I too feel death’s immanent threat.
So, by my reckoning, it’s been forty-three days since the deceased passed away. I’m feeling like he’s right now experiencing the complete dissolution of his continuum into intrinsic awareness of the complimentarily arising phenomena, a stable sahaja, as guided and fully ripened by his greatly kind root Guru. I base this on my own reciprocal experience, holding up my part of the bargain by regularly reciting ‘prayers for the deceased.’ And also, because of my own experiences over the last few days of the repeated dawning, in small blasts, of the original Clear Light. I believe it’s due to the Guru’s great kindness toward our beloved vajra brother. And now, because of his passing, and his earthly absence, this same extraordinary siddhi is available to us.
However, like Tertons and their arising of Mind Treasures, only by focusing our faith upon this enlightening largess from the Guru through diligence in our advanced practices of innermost discovery, such as the Tsembupa Chenrezig, or the Vajra Master’s emanations of Virupa, Hevajra, and Vajrakilaya, to site a seminal core, can we enjoy the success of our fellow Vajra brothers and sisters. Let us praise then the Guru, in this instance, His Holiness Sakya Trichen—an emanation of the Guru Padmākara Pemajungné—in order to accomplish this auspicious turning.
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