1 First One Tames the Mind with the Practice of Tranquility

At the Chehalis Healing Centre near Agassiz, British Columbia, in July of 2002, the Very Venerable Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche led a mahamudra retreat, at which time he gave instructions on The Ocean of Definitive Meaning. Rinpoche gave his instructions and commentary in Tibetan; these were orally translated by Lama Yeshe Gyamtso.

I would like to begin by welcoming all of you here and by expressing my sincerest appreciation to everyone for giving me the opportunity to share this time with you, and especially for giving me this opportunity to discuss mahamudra. We will be studying The Ocean of Definitive Meaning,1 the longest of what are considered to be the three greatest texts of mahamudra instruction. As many of you know, this text has now been translated into English. So I am delighted to be able to offer you instruction in this text, which you will thereafter be able to study to your benefit. Let us chant the lineage supplication, and since the realization of mahamudra requires faith and devotion, please chant the supplication with as much faith and devotion as you can muster.

[[[Rinpoche]] and students chant:]
Supplication to the Takpo Kagyus
Great Vajradhara, Tilo, Naro,
Marpa, Mila, Lord of Dharma Gampopa,
Knower of the Three Times, omniscient Karmapa,
Holders of the four great and eight lesser lineages—
Drikung, Taklung, Tsalpa—these three, glorious Drukpa and so on,
Masters of the profound path of mahamudra,
Incomparable protectors of beings, the Takpo Kagyu,

I supplicate you, the Kagyu gurus.
I hold your lineage; grant your blessings so that I will follow your example.
Revulsion is the foot of meditation, as is taught.
To this meditator who is not attached to food and wealth,
Who cuts the ties to this life,
Grant your blessings so that I have no desire for honor and gain.
Devotion is the head of meditation, as is taught.
The guru opens the gate to the treasury of oral instructions. To this meditator who continually supplicates the guru, Grant your blessings so that genuine devotion is born in me.
Awareness is the body of meditation, as is taught.
Whatever arises is fresh—the essence of realization.
To this meditator who rests simply without altering it,
Grant your blessings so that my meditation is free from conception.
The essence of thoughts is dharmakaya, as is taught. Nothing whatever but everything arises from it.
To this meditator who arises in unceasing play,
Grant your blessings so that I realize the inseparability of samsara and nirvana.
Through all my births may I not be separated from the perfect guru And so enjoy the splendor of dharma. Perfecting the virtues of the paths and bhumis, May I speedily attain the state of Vajradhara.

This supplication was written by Pengar Jampal Zangpo. The last stanza is a traditional verse of aspiration. Translated by the Nalanda Translation Committee, slightly amended by the KSOC Translation Committee.

People in the West are very fortunate in general nowadays because of the flourishing of the buddhadharma, but even more fortunate because of the serious and authentic interest in the Buddha’s teachings found nowadays in Western countries. This involves the presence of two conditions: the external or environmental condition of the availability of these teachings in your countries, and the individual or personal condition, which is your own individual faith and openness to the teachings. The coming together of these two conditions is how many of you are making your lives most meaningful. But in all of this, what is of perhaps the greatest or most particular significance is that Western practitioners in general are seriously and genuinely interested in the practice of meditation, which is the most important feature of the Buddha’s teachings. Of course, we can speak of the two accumulations, the conceptual accumulation of merit and the nonconceptual accumulation of wisdom, but even when we do so, we have to keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of the conceptual accumulation of merit is to lead to the nonconceptual accumulation of wisdom. Finally, we must accept that the true nature of the path (whether it takes the form of mahamudra practice, or the great middle way (madhyamaka), or the great perfection (dzogchen)) comes down to taming your own mind. And because you recognize this priority in practice, you are particularly fortunate.

Our text, The Ocean of Definitive Meaning, is divided into three main sections, the preliminaries and the two aspects of the main practice of mahamudra, which are tranquility2 and insight.3 The preliminaries here are divided into three groups, called the common, the uncommon, and the particular or special preliminaries. The first two sets of preliminaries, especially, have already been explained extensively by many great teachers, and many students have already practiced these assiduously.4 Therefore, I am not going to talk about the preliminary practices. I will begin with an explanation of the mahamudra practices of tranquility and insight. Nevertheless, before I do so, I feel I should make a few remarks about the role of the preliminaries in mahamudra practice. It is by no means the case— in other words, it is not true—that if you have not completed the preliminary practices you are somehow unfit to hear mahamudra teachings. That is not true. On the other hand, it is also not the case that these practices are unnecessary. They do serve very specific purposes, and therefore, they should not be neglected. So, if you have done the preliminary or ngöndro practices, I congratulate you, and I remind you that you are very fortunate in having done so. I urge you to continue to practice them, because these practices will definitely continue to help your cultivation of mahamudra meditation. Even though you may have completed the cycle of preliminary practices one time, if you repeat them, you will find that there is even more to be gained from these practices on a second visit. Among them, the four common preliminaries are necessary from the very start, because they are how we can discover a genuine inspiration for the practice of dharma to begin with. The uncommon preliminaries are important because they are the most effective way to cultivate the two accumulations and purify or remove the various obscurations in preparation for mahamudra practice. So therefore, please do these preliminary practices as much as you can. It is appropriate to do the preliminaries after receiving mahamudra instruction. It is also appropriate to do them if you have been instructed in them and have not yet received mahamudra instruction. You should not think that, having received mahamudra instruction, or having completed the preliminary practices once, that you can discard them. You should not think, “I am a mahamudra practitioner, I do not need that stuff anymore,” because in fact you do continue to need them and they remain of great value. Nevertheless, having said that, I am not going to discuss the preliminaries further, and I will begin to present the main practices of tranquility and insight.

The particular format of instruction which characterizes the Kagyu tradition is two-fold: there is the path of liberation, which is mahamudra, and the path of method, which is the Six Dharmas of Naropa.5 In the history of our tradition, various holy beings have used these two methods or formats of practice in different ways. Some have combined their practice and attained awakening; some have practiced only the Six Dharmas of Naropa—the path of method—and attained awakening; and some have practiced only mahamudra and attained awakening. Therefore, from a Kagyu point of view, we would say that any of these three ways of practice is okay. In this particular context, our text, The Ocean of Definitive Meaning, does not present the path as a combination of mahamudra and the Six Dharmas, but as the cultivation of mahamudra itself. Therefore, the whole structure of our text is based on how someone who purely practices mahamudra would proceed from the very beginning of their practice until they reached the citadel of the dharmakaya, which in mahamudra terminology is called the state of no meditation.

This book, The Ocean of Definitive Meaning, was previously unavailable in English, but now, as a result of the flourishing of the teachings in these countries, it is now available. Since it is such a valuable source text for your practice of mahamudra, I urge you to study and read it assiduously. I am going to operate under the assumption that you will be studying the text. Therefore, in order to make it practically available to you, I am going to attempt during the next eight days to explain the complete practice of tranquility and insight from the standpoint of mahamudra. This means that I will have to summarize this rather long text rather than go through it word by word.

In this text, the practice of tranquility meditation is said to have two aspects: the physical technique and the mental technique. The physical technique is the meditation posture, which here is explained as the seven d harmas of Vairochana.6 I think that you must all have heard a great deal of instruction in meditation posture already, and so I feel it is not necessary for me to present it here again and am going to move on to the mental technique.

With regard to the practice of meditation in general and of tranquility meditation in particular, in the sutras we find the statement, “Utterly tame your own mind; that is the Buddha’s teaching.” We can infer from this that the fundamental or overriding purpose of all dharma practice is to tame our minds. The only distinctions we can make within that injunction are among the methods which are used to do so. In the practice of mahamudra two methods are used. First one tames the mind with the practice of tranquility, and then with the practice of insight. Therefore, we need to begin with the practice of tranquility. In order to provide support and background for the practice of mahamudra, the Third Gyalwang Karmapa, Rangjung Dorje, wrote three books. The longest one of them, called The Profound Inner Meaning, is actually generally regarded as a source book or background reference manual for the Six Dharmas of Naropa, rather than as a source book or reference manual for mahamudra. However, the other two, called the two little books of Rangjung Dorje for the simple reason that they are both quite short, were written to provide background and understanding for the meditation practice of mahamudra itself. The names of these two books are Distinguishing between Consciousness and Wisdom and An Explanation of the Essential Nature.

Now, while these books are quite short as books go, they are nevertheless extremely profound. Their purpose, as I mentioned, is to explain how the mind works so that you understand it well enough to proceed with the practice of mahamudra. Therefore, a background is presented for both the practice of tranquility and the practice of insight. According to Rangjung Dorje’s explanation in Distinguishing between Consciousness and Wisdom, what we call mind, which in general is that which practices meditation, consists of eight functions or eight consciousnesses. Among these it is the sixth consciousness, referred to as the mental consciousness, which practices tranquility. The first six consciousnesses are the eye consciousness, the ear consciousness, the tongue consciousness, the nose consciousness, the body consciousness and the mental consciousness. Of these the first five are sense consciousnesses. Therefore, their ability or capacity is limited to mere experience, which means they are not conceptual; they simply experience their individual objects. Therefore, the eye consciousness sees, the ear consciousness hears, the nose consciousness smells, the tongue consciousness tastes, and the body consciousness feels. None of them are in and of themselves capable of any kind of judgment, appraisal, or conceptualization. Therefore, none of these five consciousnesses are involved in the act that we call tranquility meditation.

Then, we also have the seventh consciousness, which is the afflicted consciousness or the klesha consciousness, and the eighth consciousness, which is called the all-basis or alaya consciousness. These two are also not involved in the practice of tranquility meditation. The problem that is dealt with in tranquility meditation—and therefore the basis, or we could say, the subject of that meditation—is the arising or occurrence of thoughts, which happens in and to the sixth consciousness. Since tranquility meditation is a process of bringing the sixth consciousness, the mental consciousness, to a state of stability, it is, therefore, the sixth consciousness that performs tranquility meditation and that is primarily affected by it. Through the growing stability of tranquility meditation the mental afflictions are somewhat weakened and pacified. This is not to say that all functions of the sixth consciousness are regarded as negative. Some of them are negative, some of them are virtuous, and some of them are neutral, but all of them involve some kind of conceptuality: the concepts of good and bad, likes and dislikes, and so on. It is because of the presence or arising of thoughts and the concepts borne by thoughts that our minds are unpacified.

Now, because the sixth consciousness is in this way conceptual, it is regarded as bewildered or confused. In this case bewilderment or confusion is meant literally, because it is the sixth consciousness that mistakes or confuses one thing for another. For example, it is the sixth consciousness that mistakenly identifies an object of external perception, such as a form, with the concept or linguistic term or word which is used to describe that form, and takes these two things to be one, when in fact they are not one. So, the sixth consciousness, which in that way is bewildered and conceptual, generates coarse concepts—thoughts that are evident and active. Now, how does this occur? The sixth consciousness, which is referred to in the context of the discussion of the arising of thought as the principal mind, is, from one point of view, a principal mind and, from another point of view, an environment within which thoughts arise. When thoughts arise, they arise as though they were a retinue of this principal mind, which is their projector; but because they are perceived by the sixth consciousness, it may be helpful also to think of them as arising within it.

The thoughts that arise can be categorized in different ways—for example as the fifty-one mental arisings,7 and so on. Now, it is for this reason among others that in the practice of the generation stage, deities are depicted in some of the ways that they are. For example, in the generation stage practice of the peaceful and wrathful deities one visualizes in one’s heart the five male and five female buddhas in their peaceful forms, in which they represent the consciousness itself or the principal mind, while the coarse thoughts that are generated by that mind are in the context of the same visualization viewed as the fifty-eight wrathful deities visualized as being inside one’s brain. The iconography of the wrathful deities represents the coarseness and the energy of the thoughts that can arise within the principal mind. And the iconography of the peaceful deities represents the fact that there is the possibility of these coarse thoughts subsiding into a state of tranquility or peace within the principal mind itself. As we know from our own experience, the various thoughts and other mental arisings—the fifty-one, and so forth, that arise within the sixth consciousness—in a physical sense occur within our brains, and that is why they are depicted in that way.

Also, if we consider the iconography of Vajrayogini, we see that she wears a long necklace of fifty-one freshly severed human heads. These freshly severed human heads do not represent human heads; they represent thoughts, and the number fifty-one is the number of types of mental arisings or samskaras that can occur within the sixth consciousness. But the nature of all these mental functions, of all the eight consciousnesses, in fact, is the five wisdoms, which in their nature are not inherently deluded or conceptual. So therefore, the five wisdoms are represented by five skulls which adorn her tiara. Now, the dryness of the skulls represents the absence of conceptual bewilderment in the nature of the mind’s functions, and the wetness of the freshly severed heads represents the presence of conceptual bewilderment, which is to be cut through. As for how we cut through this conceptual bewilderment, there are many different ways of doing so, but in the context of mahamudra the method taken is neither the practice of the generation stage nor the practice of the completion stage,8 but the direct approach of tranquility meditation which allows these concepts and thoughts to be pacified naturally within the sixth consciousness.

So in general, when we talk about the mind that meditates, we are referring to the sixth consciousness. The sixth consciousness somehow never stops, but while it never stops, and in that sense appears to go on functioning through time, its defining characteristic, indeed the defining characteristic of the mind itself as a whole, is cognitive lucidity—the capacity to know, the capacity to experience. And because that is what never stops, that cognitive lucidity, therefore, this unceasing or continuous quality of mind would in no way need to be a substantial entity. What never stops is not itself substantial. Therefore, the mind is not a solid and dead thing like a stone. Lacking substantiality, it does not have the coarse substantial existence of something like a stone. Also, because of its insubstantiality, it is possible to change how it functions. So the starting point of the practice of tranquility meditation is the beginning of this process of changing the mind and pacifying the functions of the sixth consciousness.

In this presentation, there are two aspects to the mental technique of the practice of tranquility—the general point and particular methods. The general point here is stated as follows: “Do not prolong the past. Do not beckon the future. Rest evenly in cognitive lucidity that is without conceptualization.” Now you will all be getting this book, so you will find this instruction in the book, but just so you have it right now, the basic instruction is, “Do not prolong the past. Do not beckon the future. Rest evenly in cognitive lucidity that is without conceptualization.” The first point is, “Do not prolong the past.” Prolonging the past here means thinking about the past or recollecting the past. When we recollect the past, one of two things happens. If we recollect a pleasant aspect of the past, then we become excited. If we recollect an unpleasant event or aspect of the past, then we experience regret. In either case, whether we are disturbed by excitement or regret, we are distracted and are not aware of the present. So here, the first point in the practice of tranquility is to relax your mind by letting go of the past.

The second point concerns thinking about the future. What is meant by “beckoning the future” is simply thinking about the future. Whether or not we are capable in any given situation of accurately imagining the future, we think about it a great deal. Thinking about the future is fine and, indeed, necessary in post-meditation,9 but during the practice of meditation, for the sake of uncontrived awareness, we also let go of the future. So the second point is not to speculate about the future. Now, if you stop thinking about the past and you stop thinking about the future, what remains? You might imagine, since thoughts by their nature tend to be about the past and the future, that no cognitive function whatsoever would remain in the mind, and that your mind, therefore, would become like a dead lump of stone. In fact, this does not occur. The mind’s cognitive lucidity does not depend upon thinking for its existence. You can remain in a state of cognitive lucidity even when you are not thinking about either the past or the future. So here the instruction is to remain in that cognitive lucidity that is independent of thinking about either the past or the future and to do so in a way that is free of any kind of conceptualization. Initially, when you try to do this, you can do it only briefly. As we will see later on in the text, traditionally there are enumerated nine stages to the cultivation of tranquility. In the first stage, called placement, your mind can rest in this state only briefly. In the second, called additional placement, it can rest in this state somewhat longer, and so on, as we will see in detail later. In any case, in this practice you rest in the direct awareness or experience of the present moment without conceptualizing it.

So within the second point of the practice of tranquility, the mental technique, we saw that there were two parts: the general technique or general point and the particular techniques or particular methods. What I have just presented is the general technique or general point of the mental technique for the practice of tranquility meditation. Following that, and making up the bulk of the text’s presentation of tranquility, are particular techniques or particular methods, classified according to the experience of the teachers of the Kagyu tradition into three groups of techniques. These groups of techniques are classified or divided according to what level of practice and practice experience for which they are appropriate, and are called “getting hold of it when you have not gotten hold of it,” “stabilizing it when you have gotten hold of it but have not stabilized it,” and “progressing when you have stabilized it but have not progressed beyond that.” Each of these groups contains several techniques within it. When you begin to practice meditation, the first thing you have to do is to get hold of the basic idea of what you are doing, and that is what is meant here by getting hold of it when you have not gotten hold of it, grasping it when you have not grasped it. This corresponds to our effort to begin really to understand through practice what meditation is. In the beginning we do not know what it is. Our minds do not stay put and we are not really sure what we are doing. So the first body of techniques is designed to enable a beginning practitioner to get hold of or grasp the fundamental process of meditation. Then, once you know how to meditate, and you have grasped the basic process, you have to use the practice of meditation to actually develop stability within your mind. So, for that purpose, the second class of techniques is provided, which is called how to stabilize it when you have grasped it but have not yet stabilized it.

And then finally, once you have generated some stability in your mind, you need to progress further. Therefore, there is the third set of techniques, how to progress when you have stabilized the mind and the practice of meditation. Now, in terms of the first of these, grasping it when it is as yet ungrasped, while we may know theoretically that the nature of our mind is emptiness and therefore has no substantial characteristic on which we can really fixate, it is very hard to rest in that. So in the beginning, especially, there is a need for some kind of a technique or focus. Therefore, within the first of these three classifications, grasping it when it is ungrasped, there are again three sections. Of these, the first and the easiest to perform is resting the mind on a conceptual focus, an intentionally entertained or maintained conceptual focus. But that is not enough; eventually one has to transcend that approach. Therefore, there is the second section, resting the mind without conceptual focus. And finally, there is the third, resting the mind on the breathing. So, within the first of the three sections, there are again three. Now, within resting the mind on a conceptual focus, there are two sections [laughter]: resting the mind on an external focus, and resting the mind on an internal focus. And we are going to stop there for this morning.

[[[Thrangu Rinpoche]] and students dedicate the merit:]10 Unborn, eternal, self-arising dharmakaya Arises as the miraculous kayas of form;

May the three secrets of the Karmapa be stable in the vajra nature And may his limitless buddha activity spontaneously blaze. Splendor of the Teachings, Venerable Karma Lodro, may you remain steadfastly present. Your qualities of the glorious and excellent dharma increase to fill space. May your lotus-feet always be stable,

And may your buddha activity of teaching and practice blaze in all directions. By this merit, may all attain omniscience. May it defeat the enemy, wrong-doing. From the stormy waves of birth, old age, sickness, and death, From the ocean of samsara may I free all beings.