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Vajra Comment: Beyond Meditation in the Buddha’s Empty Footprints

     There is much discussion about Sutra or Mahayana Mahamudra as causal and Tantric Mahamudra as resultant. The term in common, Mahamudra, denotes ultimate experiencing of reality through the five aggregates, rediscovered as the five Primordial Wisdoms or Buddhas. The necessity for the abhisambodi transformation within the creation process of deity yoga is another way of stating the case for the supreme method of achieving Tantric Mahamudra. This is indisputable.  

      However, what’s known as the five Maitreya Sutras, reportedly dictated to Asanga by Maitreya, the next Buddha, were highly influential to tantric Buddhism in Tibet. In the Tibetan tradition, the five texts are: Mahāyānasūtrālamkārakārikā, ("The Adornment of Mahayana sutras"), Dharmadharmatāvibhāga ("Distinguishing Phenomena and Pure Being"), Madhyāntavibhāgakārikā ("Distinguishing the Middle and the Extremes"), Abhisamayalankara ( "Ornament for clear realization"), and The Sublime Continuum (Uttaratantra), which explains the intent of the sūtras teaching the inconceivable nature of reality (dharmatā). These also provide a ‘complete path,’ one often characterized as gentler, to Mahamudra realization and the attainment of fully enlightened Buddhahood. 

     A glimpse of that is contained herein: “Lord [Buddha] says, The unconditioned cannot be made known separately from the conditioned, nor the conditioned made known separately from the unconditioned. There the conditioned is the path and the unconditioned the abandonment [i.e., nirvana]. He makes it clear that there is a nominal structure to the path of meditation, not a real (laksanika) structure, because they cannot be made known separately from each other [meditation and meditator], and because what is properly seen is not different from the thing that makes it manifest.

     Understood in this way, you should understand all [the Lord] has taught about advice as follows: the practice of the perfection of wisdom is in the form of what takes nothing as a basis, the four noble truths are its objective support, the three refuges are its foundation, non-attachment is the cause of special advance, not tiring is the cause of non-retreating advance, full acceptance of the path is the cause of not straying into another vehicle, [53] the five eyes cause progress that does not depend on others, the six direct knowledges cause the knowledge of all aspects to be brought to full completion, and the paths of seeing and meditation cause advance to the final stage. And thus he says, This is truly the Bodhisattva's advice and instruction in the perfection of wisdom.” (Abhisamayalamkara, Gareth Sparham, 52)

     In regard to Vajrayana being characterized as ‘Path with the Result,’ or ‘The Fruited Path,’ or even ‘Resultant Mahayana,’ know the kernel of the above words by the Buddha suggest whether you just started meditating, or are in the process of meditating, or think you have just finished meditating, the result of that meditation was always beyond meditation, present in each step or stage of it, just as the Buddha was present in each step of his empty footprints.

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