Author: Kadampa Ryan

Happy Tsog Day: Receiving the blessings of the four empowerments

Kadampa Ryan Tsog Days

In order to remember and mark our tsog days, holy days on the Kadampa calendar, I am sharing my understanding of the practice of Offering to the Spiritual Guide with tsog.  This is part 20 of a 44-part series.

Through the force of requesting three times in this way, white, red, and blue light rays and nectars, serially and together, arise from the places of my Guru’s body, speech, and mind, and dissolve into my three places, serially and together. My four obstructions are purified and I receive the four empowerments. I attain the four bodies and, out of delight, an emanation of my Guru dissolves into me and bestows his blessings.

At this point we meditate briefly on receiving the blessings of the four empowerments according to the commentary. Then we imagine that an emanation of Lama Losang Tubwang Dorjechang comes to the crown of our head and, entering into our central channel, descends to our heart. We imagine that our subtle body, speech, and mind become of one taste with our Spiritual Guide’s body, speech, and mind, and meditate on this special feeling of bliss for a while. After this we recite the mantras according to the commentary.

The single-pointed request also has the function of requesting the spiritual guide to bestow the four empowerments. The four empowerments are the empowerment of the body; speech; mind; and the body, speech, and mind together of Je Tsongkhapa. The first empowerment bestows the body of a Je Tsongkhapa, which has the ability to emanate countless forms according to the needs of living beings. The speech empowerment bestows upon us the vajra speech of Je Tsongkhapa, which has power to guide all living beings to enter onto, progress along, and complete the path to enlightenment. By attaining the vajra speech of Je Tsongkhapa, our every sound will function to teach the truth of Dharma. The mind empowerment bestows the vajra mind of Je Tsongkhapa, which possesses the five omniscient wisdoms and can see clearly and directly all phenomena in all three times. The empowerment of the body, speech, and mind together functions to unite the vajra body, vajra speech, and vajra mind of Je Tsongkhapa so that they function together in harmony. Receiving the empowerments in this way is exactly the same as receiving the Je Tsongkhapa empowerment. In this way, the practice of Offering to the Spiritual Guide has the same function as self-initiation of Je Tsongkhapa.

We can also understand the empowerments at a deeper level where the vajra body empowerment is the similar in nature as the vase empowerment of Heruka that has the result of enabling all the meditations on the profound generation stage of the body mandala and leads to the final resultant attainment of the Emanation Body. The speech empowerment is similar in nature as the secret empowerment of Heruka, which empowers us to meditate on the completion stage of illusory body and have the good fortune of attaining the resultant enjoyment body. The mind empowerment is similar in nature to the wisdom mudra empowerment which empowers us to meditate on the completion stage of the clear light of the Mahamudra and will give us the good fortune of attaining the resultant Truth Body. And the body, speech, and mind empowerments together is similar in nature to the precious word empowerment, which empowers us to meditate on the completion stage of inconceivable and have the good fortune to attain the resultant union of Vajradhara.

When we receive the empowerments, we imagine that from the crown of our spiritual guide comes white wisdom lights that bestow the body empowerment; from the throat of our spiritual guide come red lights that bestow the speech empowerment; from the heart of our spiritual guide come blue lights which bestow the mind empowerment; and then from the body, speech, and mind of our spiritual guide simultaneously come white, red, and blue lights which bestow the body, speech, and mind empowerment together. As these light rays and nectars descend, we should feel as if we are receiving a subtle infusion of our Guru’s body, speech, and mind into our own body, speech, and mind bestowing upon us all the attainments.

After receiving these blessings, we then imagine that the entire field of merit dissolves into our spiritual guide in the space in front of us, who then comes to our crown, descends through our central channel down to our heart, where he mixes in separably with our indestructible wind and mind. It should feel as if his mind has entered into ours, and our mind is now his. Essentially, we receive a mind transplant where his enlightened mind becomes our own. Since the ultimate nature of our Guru’s mind is the union of great bliss and emptiness, we feel as if our mind has merged with an ocean of bliss and emptiness. Perceiving only the clear light, experiencing great bliss, and seeing directly the mere absence of all the things that we normally see, we recognize this clear light emptiness as our definitive spiritual guide and we impute our “I” upon it, strongly believing that we are Truth Body dharmakaya of our spiritual guide.

How to Engage in Sadhana Practice with the Four Pervasive Qualities and all Five Aggregates

Kadampa Ryan 3. Tantra

Sadhanas are called ”methods for receiving attainments.” We spend the vast bulk of our formal meditation time engaging in them. If we are to receive attainments, we must train in engaging in them in increasingly qualified ways. For me, this consists of infusing each word of the sadhana with four pervasive qualities and meditating with all five aggregates. Practicing in this way enables us to bring all of the Dharma practices of Sutra and Tantra into each word of our sadhana practice. Through training in these four pervasive qualities and learning to engage in our sadhanas with all five aggregates, we become like a spiritual gymnast who can joyfully spend countless hours perfecting their routine, yet still feel like their routine has much room for improvement. We can spend our whole life, indeed countless lifetimes, perfecting our spiritual routines (our sadhanas), content in the knowledge that by doing so we will fulfill the ultimate wishes of ourself and others. How to do so will now be explained.

Sadhanas are Meditations Guided by the Guru

Much of our Dharma practice is reciting sadhanas. Some people mistakenly feel sadhana practice is just a preliminary for meditation, or even a distraction from meditation, thinking we spend all our time reciting sadhanas and therefore have very little time for meditation itself. This confusion comes from making a false distinction between sadhana practice and meditation. Sadhana practice is meditation.

Meditation is mixing our mind with virtue. We all wish to be happy all the time. Our happiness depends upon inner peace. If our mind is peaceful, we are happy even if our external situation is very challenging or indeed painful. If our mind is unpeaceful, we will be unhappy even if our external situation consists of everything our worldly desires ever wanted. Sadhanas are meditations guided by the guru. Engaging in them is a supreme method for mixing our mind with virtue. They are special meditations we are encouraged to memorize and then engage in every day as the very core of our practice. They are written by our Guru – they are our emanation scriptures. We are encouraged to engage in them every day as the principal method for progressing along the path. It would be hard to find anything more important than learning how to engage in sadhana practice in a qualified way. The more we mix our mind with the sadhana, the more completely we will mix our mind with virtue and the more quickly and powerfully we will receive attainments, including the supreme attainment of enlightenment.

Avoiding the Fault of Treating our Sadhanas Like Objects of Attachment

Some people grow bored engaging in sadhana practice, feeling like they are eating the same bread every day, and eventually it grows tiresome. When we first discovered them, they would blow our mind and fill our heart with joy, but now they have gone flat and just don’t do anything for us anymore. Yeah, yeah, we know this, we want something new. This reaction comes from relating to our sadhanas in the same way as we do any external object of attachment – we think these external things have some power to do something to us, and over time their ability to do so wanes.

It is incorrect to say they do anything to us since they do not exist from their own side. Rather, if we want to receive attainments through sadhana practice, we need to do something with them. For myself, what follows is how to engage in our sadhana practice with all of our being. We can quite literally spend our entire life training in improving the quality with which we engage in sadhana practice and still feel we have only scratched the surface of their depths.

Infusing our Sadhana Practice with Four Pervasive Qualities

The power of our sadhana practice depends primarily upon the extent to which we infuse them with the four pervasive qualities of faith, a pure motivation, single-pointed concentration, and an understanding of emptiness. We need to do this with each word of the sadhana. These are being called pervasive qualities because our goal is to have them pervade every word as we engage in the sadhana practice.

Faith. Our faith primarily functions to open our mind to receiving the guru’s blessings. Blessings are what give our practice divine power. Many of our practices are called ”guru yogas.” What, exactly, does this mean? Guru Yoga is a special way of viewing our spiritual guide. We view all the Buddhas of our practices as emanations of our spiritual guide and we view our spiritual guide as an emanation of all the Buddhas. In the beginning, these seem like two different things, but when they fuse into one we have found ”guru yoga.” Why do we want to do this? Because through guru yoga we can receive the blessings of all the Buddhas. Receiving the blessings of a single Buddha has the power to transform our mind from a negative state to positive state, or more generally send our mind in the direction of enlightenment. Receiving the blessings of all the Buddhas multiplies the power of these blessings by the number of Buddhas, which are countless. These blessings supercharge our mind. As explained above, each word of the sadhana is a meditation guided by our guru – the words themselves were written by our lineage gurus. More profoundly, each word of the sadhana is itself an emanation of our guru functioning in our mind. We need to practice “guru yoga” with respect to each word of the sadhana, viewing it as an emanation of our guru, and as we mix our mind with the word we are directly mixing our mind with the realizations of our guru’s mind. Our spiritual guide has already gained all the realizations referred to by each word of the sadhana. By viewing each word as his realization emanated in our mind appearing as the word, by mixing our mind with each word we release our guru’s realization into our own mind. Removing the many layers of doubts we have about this is how we deepen our faith behind each word.

A pure motivation. Our motivation is the ’why’ we are engaging in our practice – and more specifically, why do we recite each word of the sadhana. Without a clear why, our practice has no purpose and therefore no meaning. The vast path of the Lamrim is primarily about getting our ’why’ right through improving our motivation. When we first start meditating, our main goal may be to find some peace in this life – we are stressed out and we hope to become happier in this life. There is nothing wrong with starting here, it is very good in fact. But there are much more powerful reasons we can develop to meditate. Just because there are more powerful reasons doesn’t mean our wish to be happy in this life is wrong. It is good, but there are even better reasons. We don’t need to abandon our wish to be happy in this life to expand the scope of our why to include much more. As we train in Lamrim, we first learn that we can die at any point and we are in grave danger of falling into the lower realms where we can remain trapped for countless aeons. This is not ”fire and brimstone,” this is fact. Just because such a prospect is terrifying doesn’t mean it is wrong. Engaging in sadhanas can function to create within our mind a safety net preventing us from falling into the lower realms. It can plant the karma on our mind to continue to find the spiritual path uninterruptedly in all our future lives until we attain enlightenment. This is a good why behind each word.

Similarly, as we deepen our Lamrim training, we realize it is not enough to avoid lower rebirth, we must escape permanently from any form of samsaric rebirth. As it say in the Lord of All Lineages Prayer, ”and if, as it is said, the tears I have shed from all this suffering are vaster than an ocean I still do not feel any sorrow or fear, do I have a mind made of iron?” Our sadhana practice can deliver us from the ocean of samsara by destroying its root, self-grasping ignorance and the other delusions. In exactly the same way, “all of our mothers who have cared for us with great kindness are drowning in the ocean of samsara.” If we are to free them from suffering and mistaken appearance, we must become a Buddha ourselves who has the power to be with them every day, bestowing blessings in life after life until they are eventually led to enlightenment themselves. How can we become a Buddha? Through engaging in our sadhana practices. All of our sadhanas, especially our Highest Yoga Tantra sadhanas, are methods for transforming ourselves into an enlightened being who has this power. This is their ultimate why and function. When we engage in our sadhanas with the motivation of bodhichitta – wishing to become a Buddha so that we can lead all beings to enlightenment – we multiply the power of our practice by the number of living beings, which are also countless. Since each word of the sadhana can be engaged in with any (and all) of these whys, we can literally spend our whole life building up the power of our ”whys” behind our recitation of each word. We can infuse all of the Lamrim into each word.

Single-pointed concentration. Meditation is mixing our mind with virtue. The more we mix our mind with virtue the more profoundly it transforms us. Whatever we mix our mind with, we become. Since the sadhana itself is an emanation of our guru, if we mix our mind with it completely, we attain his enlightened mind. Geshe-la said when he opened the temple at Manjushri that we have been given everything we need to attain enlightenment, all that remains is learning to engage in our practices without distraction. There are two main faults to pure concentration, mental sinking and mental excitement, each of which has two levels, gross and subtle. Gross mental excitement is when our mind goes to an object of attachment and we forget our object of meditation entirely, and subtle mental excitement is when part of our mind remains with the object and part of our mind is on an object of attachment. Gross mental sinking is when we hold the object, but its clarity decreases; and subtle mental sinking is when the clarity remains, but our grip on the object loosens. Our goal is to engage in each word of the sadhana free from gross and subtle mental sinking and excitement. Depending upon our karmic history with each word of the sadhana, we may have a different nexus of faults of our concentration on different parts. Learning to engage in every part, every word, with faultless concentration is our goal.

An understanding of emptiness. Due to countless aeons of mental habit, we tend to grasp at a chasm between ourselves and, well, everything, including the words of our sadhana. As a result, our sadhanas remain ’there’ while our mind remains ’here,’ and a gap between the two remains. This grasping prevents a complete mixing of our mind with the sadhana. Realizing the emptiness of each word of the sadhana, the emptiness of our guru (which each word is an emanation of), and the emptiness of our own mind will eliminate these gaps so that our guru’s realizations, the words of our sadhana, and our mind mix like water mixing with water. In some traditions, practitioners engage in special spiritual dances. The dances themselves are divine sequences that reflect the functioning of the ultimate in this world. By engaging in the dance perfectly, the dancer comes into alignment with the divine and produces profound spiritual experience in the dancer and all those who watch the dance. In exactly the same way, our sadhanas are a dance of emptiness our mind performs that functions to channel the guru into this world. By eliminating our grasping at the differences between our guru’s realizations, the words of the sadhana, and our own mind, we bring ourselves into alignnment with his spiritual dance. There are many levels of grasping and many levels of realizing emptiness. Our training is to eliminate completely all dualities with respect to every word.

Meditating with All Five Aggregates

When we engage in our sadhana practice, we should strive to do so with all of our being, not just our mouth or just our intellectual mind. This takes a lifetime of training. What, specifically, does it mean to engage in our sadhana practice with all our being? It means to learn how to do so with all five aggregates. What are we? We are an “I” imputed upon five aggregates – form, discrimination, feeling, compositional factors, and consciousness. This is all our being. Attaining enlightenment, quite simply, is changing the basis of imputation of our “I” from the five contaminated aggregates of a samsaric being to the five completely purified aggregates of a Buddha. The five main stages of the path are renunciation, bodhichitta, the wisdom realizing emptiness, generation stage, and completion stage of highest yoga tantra. How can we understand these? There is one activity on the path – changing the basis of imputation of our I from a samsaric being to an enlightened being. There are two reasons why we do this – for ourself (renunciation) and for others (bodhichitta). There is one thing that makes it possible – everything is empty. To engage in our sadhana practices with all our being does not just mean learning how to do our practices with all five of our aggregates, it means learning how to do them with the five completely purified aggregates of our guru! Therefore, we can say meditating with all of our being – meaning all five aggregates – has two levels: according to Sutra and according to Tantra. Doing so according to Sutra means learning how to do so with our present five aggregates and doing so according to Tantra means learning how to do so with the five completely purified aggregates of our guru.

Learning to meditate with our aggregate of form. According to Sutra, our aggregate of form is essentially our body. Technically, it is all forms in the three thousand worlds, but due to our self-grasping we relate to our aggregate of form primarily as the body that we normally see. When we engage in our sadhana practices, we want to do so with our body in the correct meditation posture as explained in the Lamrim texts. At a minimum, we want to try keep our back straight and our hands in the appropriate postures – such as together with our thumbs touching at our navel or with our palms pressed together at our heart or engaging in the various mudras of our tantric practices.

According to Tantra, our pure aggregate of form is viewing every aspect of our pure visualizations as emanations of our guru. When we engage in our sadhana practices, there are always visualizations that accompany each aspect of them. Buddhas have the ability to manifest their realizations in the aspect of forms. What we see is the visual form, but we understand these forms are by nature the realizations of our guru’s mind. We should view each word of the sadhana as a form of checking meditation on the visualizations we are engaging in. As we recite each word of the sadhana, we should recall a specific aspect of the visualization that ”speaks to us” as representing the meaning of the mind we are generating as we recite the word of the sadhana. In the commentaries to the different sadhanas found in our Dharma books, Geshe-la explains how each aspect of the visualization symbolizes specific Dharma realizations. Where such explanations exist, as we recite each word, we should mentally recall this aspect of the visualization while understanding that these visual forms are actually the realizations of our guru appearing in the aspect of form. Where such explanations do not exist, we can just mentally recall whichever aspect of the visualization represents for us the meaning of the word of the sadhana. In this way, our sadhana practices are all checking meditations. Ultimately, with a bodhichitta motivation and single pointed concentration, we can recall that all of these visualized forms are manifestations of our guru’s mind of bliss and emptiness.

Learning to meditate with our aggregate of discrimination. Our aggregate of discrimination is the ability to differentiate one object from another by realizing its uncommon characteristic. The way we ’know’ anything is by differentiating the object from everything else by realizing what makes that object uniquely it – its defining characteristics. Functionally speaking, we can say our aggregate of discrimination is our intellectual understanding. Sometimes we criticize intellectual understandings of the Dharma, as if they are somehow bad. An intellectual understanding of the Dharma is good, a heart-felt understanding is even better. Just because a heart-felt understanding is better doesn’t mean an intellectual understanding is bad. Indeed, the intellectual understanding of the Dharma is almost always the foundation, or pre-requisite, for being able to realize the Dharma in our heart. We gain an intellectual understanding of the Dharma primarily through the power of listening to and studying Dharma. According to Sutra, therefore, we can say that learning to meditate with our aggregate of discrimination means we need to listen to many Dharma teachings and study our Dharma books to gain an intellectual understanding of what exactly we need to do in our practices and what do these things mean. It also means memorizing our sadhanas so that we can engage in them without having to keep our eyes open or listen to their sounds. We have the ability to engage in all our practices and intellectually know exactly what we are doing and why. We may not feel everything in our heart yet, but we know exactly what we are trying to do. According to Tantra, we learn how to engage in the sadhana with our guru’s aggregate of discrimination. This is a form of bringing the result into the path. With deep faith, we imagine we have our guru’s perfect understanding of the practice and the meaning of each word, and we see all of these individually as manifestations of his mind of bliss and emptiness. We don’t just self-generate as the deity, we learn how to meditate as the deity with his aggregate of discrimination as our own.

Learning to meditate with the aggregate of feeling. Generally speaking, our aggregate of feeling refers to how we experience objects. Contaminated aggregates of feeling experience objects as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Pure aggregates of feeling experience all objects as all the different flavors of great bliss. Just as there are many different flavors of ice cream, a pure aggregate of feeling experiences each object as a different flavor of great bliss. Practically speaking, meditating with our aggregate of feeling means learning how to meditate with our heart. There is a qualified difference between meditating just with an intellectual understanding and heart-felt meditation. Our job is to learn how to meditate with our heart, where we feel in our heart the realizations implied by each word of the sadhanas. How do we do this? There are two principal methods. First, through blessings. We request our guru to bless our mind so that we may realize each word in our heart – that we may recite each word of the sadhana from our heart, that each word of the sadhana is “giving voice to” what we genuinely feel in our heart. With our guru’s blessings, we can accomplish anything, including, bringing the Dharma into our heart. Second, through contemplation. Geshe-la explains in Mirror of Dharma that the purpose of contemplation is to bring the Dharma to our heart – to have the Dharma touch our heart. Contemplation is decidedly not an intellectual exercise, though our intellectual understanding is the starting point of our contemplations. Qualified contemplation is making the Dharma our lived truth. A shortcut to qualified contemplation is to ask ourselves, ”if this Dharma was true, what would it change?” For example, if we really were standing on the precipice of hell, what would it change about how we experience our lives. We then get a ”feeling” in our heart. The Dharma has touched our heart. But we then may still have doubts about whether that Dharma is in fact true. So then we can test the truth of the Dharma instruction through checking our own lived experience or examining whether it makes sense, is logical and consistent with everything else we know. Venerable Tharchin says the wisdom arising from listening is primarily gaining an understanding of how the enlightened beings see things and the wisdom arising from contemplation is transforming this Dharma into our own understanding and experience of the world.

Practically speaking, then, according to Sutra learning to meditate with our aggregate of feeling means contemplating deeply each word of the sadhana until it touches our heart. As we go through the sadhana, we build and then recall the mental pathways from our intellectual understanding to our heart, so that with each word of the sadhana we are touching our heart much in the same way a master pianist touches the keys of their most treasured piano. According to Tantra, it means doing so with our guru’s aggregate of feeling. We bring the result into the path and, with deep faith, imagine that we are feeling in our heart each word of the sadhana as our guru does. Ultimately, it means experiencing each word of the sadhana as a different flavor of our guru’s mind of great bliss.

Learning to meditate with our aggregate of compositional factors. Generally speaking, we say that we have a body and mind. Our body is our aggregate of form, and our mind is the other four aggregates of discrimination, feeling, compositional factors, and consciousness. Compositional factors are essentially all of our different mental factors except for discrimination and feeling. In How to Understand the Mind, Geshe-la explains all of the different mental factors, primary minds, and so forth. These are traditionally called Lorig teachings. In simple terms, we can say mental factors know the aspects of an object whereas the primary mind knows the mere entity of the object itself. For our present purposes, we can say that the aggregate of consciousness is the primary mind and the aggregate of compositional factors is all of our mental factors except discrimination and feeling.

More specifically, there are fifty-one mental factors. Geshe-la explains all of them in detail in How to Understand the Mind. They can be divided as follows: (1) The five all-accompanying mental factors, (2) The five object-ascertaining mental factors, (3) The eleven virtuous mental factors, (4) The six root delusions, (5) The twenty secondary delusions, and (6) The four changeable mental factors. The five all-accompanying mental factors include discrimination, feeling, intention, contact, and attention. Discrimination and feeling have already been discussed. Intention is our ”why,” which was explained above in the four pervasive qualities under a pure intention. Contact, attention, and the five object-ascertaining mental factors refer to the mental factors we employ to concentrate single-pointedly on our objects of meditation, which was explained above when we discussed concentration. The eleven virtuous mental factors are minds we try bring to each word of our sadhana, and the six root and twenty secondary delusions are mind we try abandon completely as we recite each word of the sadhana. Therefore, to learn to meditate with our aggregate of compositional factors according to Sutra means to cultivate each of these mental factors according to their respective instructions as we recite each word of the sadhana, and to do so according to Tantra means to bring the result into the path, imagining with deep faith that we are meditating with our guru’s fully qualified and pure mental factors. In this way, we bring our entire practice of Lorig into each word of our sadhana.

Learning to meditate with our aggregate of consciousness. As explained above, our aggregate of consciousness knows the object itself. The aggregate of consciousness knows the tennis racket itself and the mental factors know the attributes of the tennis racket. Upon the basis of seeing the attributes, the basis of imputation, we impute the mere name ”tennis racket,” which is the object itself. To meditate with our aggregate of consciousness means our primary mind becomes the realization referred to by the word of the sadhana. If the aggregate of discrimination is the wisdom arisen from listening and the aggregate of feeling is the wisdom arisen from contemplation, the aggregate of consciousness is the wisdom arisen from meditation. I mentioned above that Venerable Tharchin said with listening we gain an intellectual understanding of the guru’s point of view and with contemplation we make the guru’s view point of view our own, but he went on to say with the wisdom arisen from meditation we make the guru’s realizations ”an acquisition of our personality.” Whatever we mix our mind with, we become. When we meditate with our aggregate of discrimination, we understand what we are doing; when we meditate with our aggregate of feeling, we touch our heart; and when we meditate with our aggregate of consciousness, we become our objects of meditation. The realizations referred to by the words of the sadhana become part of our basis of imputation for our I. They become acquisitions of our personality or our self. Once again, according to Sutra, learning to meditate with our aggregate of consciousness is to transform our primary mind into the realizations referred to by each word of the sadhana; and to do so according to Tantra means with deep faith strongly imagining that the duality between our guru’s realizations and our own mind has completely dissolved. In short, we impute our I onto his realizations. Each word of our sadhana practice becomes a training in self-generation.

Putting it All Together

It is my experience and understanding that training in sadhana practice is the gradual process of improving the quality with which we engage in our sadhanas by infusing them with the four pervasive qualities and learning to meditate with all of our being – all five of our aggregates. Each one of these alone is an enormous practice that we could profitably spend our whole life training in. Until we have fully qualified faith, motivation, concentration, understanding of emptiness, and fully harnessed all five aggregates behind each and every word of our sadhana, we still have work to do. Viewed in this way, we can joyfully train our whole life in our sadhanas, understanding them to be our guru’s heart advice for how we can gain all the mundane and supermundane attainments. I pray that all those who read this may, day by day, year by year, life by life, improve the quality of their sadhana practice, finding ever deeper levels of joy until they become fully centered in the supreme omniscient bliss of full enlightenment.

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: Being on Retreat is a State of Mind

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

We now can turn to Shantideva’s verses.

(8.1) Having generated effort in this way,
I should place my mind in concentration;
For a person whose mind is distracted
Is trapped within the fangs of the delusions.

(8.2) Distractions do not arise for those
Who abide in physical and mental solitude.
Therefore, I should forsake the worldly life
And abandon all disturbing thoughts.

(8.3) Attachment to people, possessions, and reputation
Prevent me from forsaking the worldly life.
To abandon these obstacles,
I should contemplate as follows.

(8.4) Realizing that delusions are thoroughly destroyed
By superior seeing conjoined with tranquil abiding,
I should first strive to attain tranquil abiding
By gladly forsaking attachment to worldly life.

What does it mean to abide in physical and mental solitude?  If this is what we long for, how do we not start to view our family, friends, work, and other responsibilities as “obstacles” to our training in concentration?  What does it mean to abandon the “worldly” life?  How it is possible to train in the way Shantideva explains and still attain the union of Kadampa Buddhism and modern life that Geshe-la encourages us to do?

There are two levels at which we can answer these questions:  conventionally and ultimately.  Conventionally speaking, we can say that these instructions on concentration refer to those times when we are able to go on retreat and focus on our practice.  It is very important that we do so.  Retreat is like doing a deep dive into our mind, where we find both terrifying sea monsters but also priceless Dharma jewels.  We should train alternately in retreat and our daily practice.  We go into retreat from time to time to discover new spiritual wonders or take our practice to the next level, and then we train in our daily practice to consolidate and solidity what we discovered during our retreat.  Even physically being on retreat is not enough if mentally we bring our normal world with us in our mind.  We remain distracted and preoccupied with our normal life and are therefore not able to truly and fully mix our mind with our Dharma objects.  We therefore sometimes need both physical and mental solitude, and we need to leave our family, friends, work, and normal concerns completely behind. 

Ultimately, though, we do not need to limit our training in concentration according to Shantideva’s instructions to when we are able to get away on solitary retreat.  There is nothing stopping us from being on retreat right now – with our families, at work, out in the world.  Being on retreat is a state of mind, not an external condition.  We can externally be on retreat, but still mentally in the ordinary samsaric worlds; or we can be in our normal modern lives, but mentally be on retreat.  How can we have physical solitude while out in the world?  By being inside our indestructible drop at our heart with our guru as we go about our day.  The world still churns around us, but we remain with our isolated body (maybe not yet of completion stage, but a similitude of it) inside our heart.  Mentally we can remain in solitude by believing we are on retreat and viewing everything that happens to us during our day as part of our retreat.  We can be certain (or can we?) that we are the only one in our office with this mental view, so in this sense we are in mental solitude on retreat even while at work.  Our work and family are only “worldly” if we relate to them in a worldly way.  If instead, we view everything that happens to us during our day is part of our retreat emanated by Dorje Shugden for our spiritual training, then nothing will be worldly for us, even though conventionally what is happening around us is just another Tuesday in samsara.  

Sometimes we go from one extreme to another.  We either grasp at our normal modern life as inherently “not retreat” and only being on solitary retreat at Tharpaland as being “on retreat.”  Or we go to the other extreme of thinking we can transform our every day into our long retreat by adopting the mind of retreat as we go about our day and then conclude we don’t also need to, from time to time, do conventionally normal retreat.  In truth, we should be on retreat all the time – the only thing that varies is whether we are on retreat in the context of our normal modern life or at a Kadampa retreat center.  We should always be in physical and mental solitude and we should always leave behind worldly life, again regardless of whether we are at Tharpaland or not. 

We can understand the importance of the training we have studied so far in achieving success in concentration. Mindfulness and conscientiousness.  These helps us to become aware of what is going on in our mind and develop an attraction towards and appreciation of virtue and a distaste for non-virtue.  This redirects our mind towards virtue since our mind is naturally drawn to what it considers to be a cause of happiness.  Patient acceptance.   When we are trying to concentrate and we discover that we have lost our object of meditation, we can often enter into a ridiculous dialogue of guilt and discouragement about how we cannot concentrate.  We should just accept what has happened and redirect our mind back towards our object.  How can we accept it? We can study what our mind goes to to show us what we still need to abandon, etc. We can accept it as Dorje Shugden giving us another chance to create the karma of generating our object of meditation, and thus create the tendencies on our mind to do this.

How I Experience Dorje Shugden’s Mandala

Kadampa Ryan 5. Reliance upon Dorje Shugden


We know in general that Dorje Shugden eliminates all obstacles and arranges all the conditions necessary for our practice. Geshe-la provides some explanation in Heart Jewel how all of the different elements of Dorje Shugden’s mandala help us, but mostly we are encouraged to rely upon him with faith and develop a personal relationship with him. In this way, we come to experience directly how Dorje Shugden enters into and helps with our life. Here, I would like to share how I experience Dorje Shugden’s mandala.

The way I think about it is our Dharma centers exist on the shores of refuge on the island of enlightement surrounded by the ocean of samsara. The Eight Guiding Monks are like our Dharma teachers inside our centers. The Ten Youthful and Wrathful Assistants are like an outer perimeter in the shallows of the ocean of samsara where they both gather living beings and bring them into our Dharma centers and they serve as guards against those in samsara who would obstruct the practice of Dharma within the centers.

The Nine Attractive Mothers are then deeper inside the island enticing practitioners into the forest to practice Tantra. There is a more profound way of understanding the nine attractive mothers as permeating all four elements and the five objects of desire of samsara and nirvana.

Within the charnel grounds there are countless guardians who assist practitioners with their practice, all of whom are, from a certain perspective, also part of Dorje Shugden’s mandala. They guide us through the charnel grounds and deliver us to the iron fence and wisdom fire protection circle which marks the entry into Keajra Pure Land proper. Technically, there is no place that is not Keajra, but conventionally the iron fence and wisdom fire protection circle are like the pure walls around the city of enlightement, within which are the four continents, Mount Meru, and Heruka’s Celestial Mansion.

Kache Marpo is like a spiritual Rambo of Dorje Shugden’s mandala who can go anywhere in samsara or nirvana and rescue, inspire, or protect anybody. In my mandala, a former student named Taro and Kache Marpo are the same being. There are many reasons why for me this is true. Those who knew Taro, who died in Summer 2021, would likely have the same view.

Surrounding the Ocean of Samsara is Dorje Shugden’s protection circle. Everything that happens inside the protection circle is exactly perfect for the swiftest possible enlightenment of all living beings. The beings of samsara do not understand what appears to them in this way, but due to our faith in Dorje Shugden, we receive special wisdom blessings that enable us to see things in this way. When others share their problems with us, we see and understand how whatever has ripened is perfect for their practice. We can then share our perspective with others, helping them see their life through a different lens. In this way, we are able to help them transform their samsaric experience into the quick path to enlightenment.

The Five Lineages of Dorje Shugden each specialize in ripening one of our five aggregates into the five omniscient wisdoms of a Buddha. They do this at the level of Sutra, Generation Stage, and Completion Stage. Dorje Shugden himself is one nature with Lama Tsongkhapa – like a hologram. From one perspective my spiritual guide appears as Guru Sumati Buddha Heruka, but from another he appears as the Great King Dorje Shugden depending on the angle from which I view him. From one perspective, the interpretative appearance of the five lineages is as described in Heart Jewel and as we see at the temple in Manjushri, but from another perspective they permeate the three thousand worlds wherever the respective aggregates they ripen appear. In my mandala, they circle in the space above the four continents around Mount Meru, serving in many ways the function of Chakravatin Kings and their retinues, so that all my guests in the pure land may quickly be ripened in the paths of Sutra and Tantra.

Dorje Shugden is my spiriutal father, caring for me in life after life, providing everything I need for my swiftest possible enlightenment. Like a hologram appearing differently depending on how you look at him, he is my guru, Yidam, and protector. Practically, he is my best friend and his mandala are my closest sangha.

Some may ask, as some always do, “where does Geshe-la explain all of this, where does this understanding come from?” The nature and function of Dorje Shugden are explained in Heart Jewel. Venerable Tharchin explained about his protection circle surrounding the ocean of samsara. The rest is the composite of my understanding after 25 years of daily reliance upon him. There are three types of wisdom – the wisdom arisen from listening and reading, the wisdom arisen from contemplation, and the wisdom arisen from meditation. These three, especially the wisdom arisen from meditation, are primarily experiential understandings – insights gained from our direct personal experience with the instructions and our direct personal relationships with the holy beings. They are living and evolving things. Just because some elements are not explained directly in Geshe-la’s books does not mean they are not part of the body of his teachings waiting for us to discover as we connect the dots he has given us though our personal practice. I do not claim any of this is objectively existent. But it is my honest subjective personal experience based upon my practice of and reliance upon Dorje Shugden. I pray all who read this directly come to experience Dorje Shugden and his mandala in their lives.

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: Abandoning Attachment to Results

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

Bodhisattva Downfall:  Being preoccupied with the taste of mental stabilization

Here taste refers to the experience of bliss, peace, and suppleness induced by concentration.  If we become attached to this and regard it as the ultimate result of concentration, we incur a downfall because this attachment diminishes our wish to help others.  The real value of concentration is it is a means by which higher realizations can be achieved.

For most of us, we have very little experience of the taste of actual mental stabilization, so from one perspective this downfall can seem remote to our experience.  But it drives at a deeper point in terms of how we approach our practice of meditation.  There is a fundamental difference between meditating in search of results and meditating in pursuit of creating causes.  The former is an example of this downfall and the latter is the correct way of practicing. 

What does it mean to meditate in search of results?  Quite simply it means our intention of meditation is to enjoy pleasant inner experiences while doing so.  In other words, we treat meditation as simply another means of fulfilling our worldly concern of experiencing pleasure.  We like to feel “blissed out” or we want to forget our troubles or we simply become attached to experiencing results while we meditate.  Or we become despondent when our practice is a struggle, we can’t seem to focus, find our objects, and we feel nothing in our practice.  All of these are examples of this downfall.  The definition of pure practice is practicing for the sake of our future lives.  Clearly practicing for the sake of the time during our meditation session is not that. 

Attachment to experiencing results while meditating is very common and can be very subtle.  We perhaps want to experience some sort of “ah ha” moment, or perhaps we are attached to attaining a certain level of mental concentration, such as the second mental abiding.  In our Tantric practice, it is very easy to become attached to the imagery and the visualizations, relating to it as some form of spiritual pornography.  At a subtle level, it can simply be a subtle form of wanting to harvest the results of past efforts and judging the success of our meditation against the standard of whether or not it was a “good meditation” (by which we mean one that was pleasant and easy going).  Such attachment to results while meditating quickly destroys our practice.  Attachment functions to separate us from the objects of our attachment, so the more attached to results we become the more distant they will be.  Likewise, when results do not come, we quickly become frustrated with our practice and can falsely conclude that it doesn’t work.  Many have completely abandoned their practice for this reason.  This can especially be a problem for people who do retreat.  In my view, attachment to results during retreat is the single biggest problem people face during retreat, and if they do not learn how to overcome it retreat time can be a living hell creating all sorts of bad habits they then carry into their daily practice.

The correct way of practicing is to completely forget about any results.  Our only goal in engaging in practice is to create good causes, not harvest their results.  We seek not to experience any results, rather we seek to progressively improve the quality with which we create good causes for ourselves.  Like a training gymnast, we strive to perfect the internal gymnastics routine that is our sadhana.  Like someone diligently saving up their money, we view our daily practice as our rare opportunity to put away some good causes for a better future.  Like a squirrel, we go about the work of stocking up inner resources for the long winter ahead.  For a practitioner free from attachment to results, difficulties during meditation are greeted with enthusiasm since we know we are working through our greatest obstacles.  The greater the inner struggle, the happier we are because we know it is by persevering through them that we will make it to the other side.  Retreat for a pure practitioner is not engaged in with any hope for results, rather it is viewed as an extremely rare and precious opportunity to create countless good causes for the future.  Venerable Tharchin said we should think that everything that happens in this life was caused by actions of our past lives, and everything we do now will not ripen in this life but only in our future lives.  While of course this is not strictly true, there will be some effects which ripen from causes created in this life, as a mental outlook this is perfect. 

Happy Tsog Day: The Synthesis of All Dharmas

Kadampa Ryan Tsog Days

In order to remember and mark our tsog days, holy days on the Kadampa calendar, I am sharing my understanding of the practice of Offering to the Spiritual Guide with tsog.  This is part 19 of a 44-part series.

Single-pointed request

You are the Guru, you are the Yidam, you are the Daka and Dharma Protector;
From now until I attain enlightenment I shall seek no refuge other than you.
In this life, in the bardo, and until the end of my lives, please hold me with the hook of your compassion,
Liberate me from the fears of samsara and peace, bestow all the attainments, be my constant companion, and protect me from all obstacles.  (3x)

In many ways the single-pointed request is the very synthesis of the entire Buddhadharma. In the Lamrim teachings it says that bodhichitta is the quintessential butter that comes from stirring the milk of all 84,000 of Buddha’s teachings. In the same way, from a practical view, according to the union of sutra and tantra, the single-pointed request is the very essence of all our practices.

We sometimes refer to the Wheel of Dharma. If all Geshe-la’s teachings were the Wheel of Dharma, we would normally say that Joyful Path of Good Fortune is the hub of the wheel and all his other books are like the spokes. But from my perspective, the book Great Treasury of Merit is the actual axle around which the hub of Joyful Path of Good Fortune turns. In other words, Joyful Path of Good Fortune is the sutra condensation of all Geshe-la’s teachings, and the book Great Treasury of Merit is the union of Sutra and Tantra condensation of all Geshe-la’s teachings. The book Great Treasury of Merit is a commentary to the practice of Offering to the Spiritual Guide, which this series of posts is a my personal understanding of. But just as Offering to the Spiritual Guide is the Synthesis of Je Tsongkhapa’s New Kadampa Tradition, the single-pointed request is the synthesis of the practice of Offering to the Spiritual Guide. It is the very center of the axle around which the wheel of Dharma turns. If we were only to have one verse of Dharma, it should be the single-pointed request. By directly engaging sincerely in the practice of the single-pointed request, we are indirectly engaging in all the practices that we have been taught. There is no more important request in all the Dharma. If we were to only have one mantra, it should be the single-pointed request. We can and should recite it day and night, year after year, life after life.

When I recite the single-pointed request, I like to do so with the visualization of myself as Heruka surrounded by the deities of the body mandala in Keajra pure land as the basis of making the request. Venerable Tharchin said we can imagine that Dorje Shugden’s protection circle surrounds the entire supported and supporting mandala of Heruka. In other words, Keajra is inside Dorje Shugden’s protection circle.

When I recite “you are the Guru,” I recall Lama Tsongkhapa at my heart. When I recite “you are the yidam,” I recall myself generated as Heruka. When I recite you are the Daka, I recall all the deities of Heruka’s body mandala. And when I recite “and Dharma protector,” I recall that the entire visualization of Keajra pure land is inside Dorje Shugden’s protection circle. When I recite “from now until I attain the essence of enlightenment,” I recall that my greatest wish is to maintain the uninterrupted continuum of my Dharma practice between now and my eventual attainment of enlightenment. If I fall into the lower realms or fail to find the Dharma again, I will quickly become lost and it could be aeons before I find the path again. When I recite “I shall seek no refuge other than you,” I recall that it is not enough to simply attain a precious human life where I find the Dharma again, I also need to maintain the continuum of my faith in the three jewels. There are many people who meet the Dharma in this world but have no faith in it and so therefore cannot receive any benefit from it. Here I am requesting that I always maintain faith so that when I find the Dharma again, I am eager to once again put it into practice.

When I recite “in this life, in the bardo, and until the end of my lives please hold me with the hook of your compassion,” I am specifically requesting that my spiritual guide continue to appear to me in all my future lives and that he never lets go of me with the hook of his compassion. Whether the spiritual guide appears to us in our future lives depends upon whether we create the karma for him to do so. By requesting that he always hold us with the hook of his compassion, we create the karma for him to continue to appear to us in all our future lives.

When I recite “liberate me from the fears of samsara and peace,” I recall that the principal function of the Guru is to do precisely that. I am directing this request specifically to my spiritual guide in the aspect of Lama Tsongkhapa at my heart that he perform this function. The function of Heruka is to bestow all the common and uncommon attainments of the realizations of the stages of the path. When I recite “bestow all the attainments,” I am requesting Heruka to perform this function in my life. The function of the Daka is to be our vajra sangha. The deities of the body mandala are our supreme sangha friends. When I request “be my constant companion,” I am requesting the deities of the body mandala always appear to me in all my future lives as my supreme sangha friends. The function of Dorje Shugden is to arrange all the outer, inner, and secret conditions necessary for our swiftest possible enlightenment. He is our Dharma protector. By relying upon him, nothing is an obstacle because we see with wisdom eyes how everything that arises can serve as a cause of our enlightenment. So when we request “and protect me from all obstacles,” we are requesting Dorje Shugden to perform his function for us.

Seen in this way, we can understand how the single-pointed request is the synthesis of all the stages of sutra and tantra. By reciting this request, we are practicing in one short verse everything Geshe-la has ever taught us. I pray that all Kadampas memorize this verse, recite it day and night, and remember it at the time of their death. May its power echo in eternity.

Happy Tara Day: How to increase the power of our mantra recitation

Kadampa Ryan 7. Kadampa meaning of special days, How to Rely Upon Tara

This is the 11th installment of the 12-part series sharing my understanding of the practice Liberation from Sorrow.

Mantra recitation

OM TARE TUTTARE TURE SÖHA   (21x, 100x, etc.)

The meaning of this mantra is: with ‘OM’ we are calling Arya Tara, ‘TARE’ means permanent liberation from the suffering of lower rebirth, ‘TUTTARE’ means permanent liberation from samsaric rebirth, ‘TURE’ means the great liberation of full enlightenment, and ‘SÖHA’ means please bestow. Together the meaning is: ‘O Arya Tara, please bestow upon us permanent liberation from the suffering of lower rebirth, permanent liberation from the suffering of samsaric rebirth, and the great liberation of full enlightenment.

The power of our mantra recitation depends upon four key factors: the degree of our faith, the purity of our motivation, the single-pointedness of our concentration, the depth of our wisdom.  The stronger we make these four factors, the more powerful will be our mantra recitation.  This is true for all mantra recitation.  These will now be explained in turn.

The degree of our faith:  Faith is to Dharma practice like electricity is to our electronic devices.  Without power we say our devices “are dead.”  The same is true for our spiritual practices.  But it is not like an on/off switch, but rather more like a volume knob, where the more we turn it up, the more powerfully the Dharma will resonate in our mind.  As discussed at the beginning of the 21 homages, there are three types of faith:  believing faith, admiring faith, and wishing faith.  Believing faith believes in the good qualities, admiring faith develops a sense of wonder understanding their meaning, and wishing faith wishes to acquire these good qualities for ourselves.  When we recite the 21 homages, we are building up the strength of our faith.  We should carry it with us into our mantra recitation.  The mantra is the condensation of the 21 homages.  By reciting the mantra with faith, we accomplish the same function as reciting the 21 homages.  We should believe in Tara’s amazing good qualities, develop a feeling of wonder and amazement that she is in our presence, and then wish to acquire all of her good qualities ourselves. 

To increase our faith in the mantra of Tara, we need to consider its primary function.  As Geshe-la explains in the sadhana, the primary function of Tara’s mantra is to protect us from lower rebirth, rebirth in samsara, and to bestow full enlightenment.  In other words, her mantra functions to bestow upon us the realizations of Lamrim.  This is why she is called the Lamrim Buddha.  For this function to move our mind, we must first understand our samsaric situation:  we are barreling towards lower rebirth, where we will become trapped experiencing unimaginable suffering for countless aeons.  This is our present destiny, our inevitable fate if we do not change course.  It is not enough for us to just avoid lower rebirth, because even if we attain upper rebirth, we risk falling back down into the lower realms; and even while born in the upper realms, we continue to experience problems like waves of the ocean.  And it is not enough for just ourselves to escape from samsara, but all our kind mothers are likewise drowning in its fearful ocean, and if we do not rescue them, they will continue to suffer without end.  As it says in the Lord of all Lineages Prayer, “if we give no thought to their pitiful suffering, we are like a mean and heartless child.” 

The purity of our motivation:  Our motivation for mantra recitation determines the final karmic effect of our recitation.  According to the Lamrim, living beings can be divided according to the scope of our motivation.  Specifically, it explains there are three types of being:  beings of initial scope, beings of intermediate scope, and beings of great scope.  Being of initial scope are of two types – those who wish only for happiness in this present life and those who wish to avoid lower rebirth in their future lives.  Beings of intermediate scope wish to not only avoid all lower rebirth, but to permanently free themselves from any type of samsaric rebirth.  Samsaric rebirth occurs when we uncontrolledly impute our I onto the contaminated bodies and minds of the six realms of samsara – hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, demi-gods, or gods.  Beings of great scope are not satisfied to merely attain their own liberation from samsara, but they wish to gain the ability to gradually lead each and every living being to the ultimate state of full enlightenment.  Any virtuous action can be performed with any of these motivations. Generally speaking, we say that our motivation becomes “pure” if we engage in the action for the sake of our own or others future lives.  Somebody whose primary motivation is to attain happiness in this life is considered a “worldly” being, and those who are looking to attain happiness in their own or others future lives are considered “spiritual” beings.  This does not mean spiritual beings do not also wish to be happy in this life, rather they wish for happiness in this life AND all of their future lives.  In this way, as we expand the scope of our motivation, we subsume the lower levels of motivation with our higher level of motivation.  There is no contradiction between being entirely dedicated to the enlightenment of all and being happy in this life. 

The teachings on karma explain it is primarily the scope of our motivation that determines the type of karma we create.  If we recite the mantra with a motivation of initial scope, the karmic effect of our recitation will be to avoid lower rebirth in our future lives; if we recite the mantra with a motivation of intermediate scope (otherwise known as renunciation), the karmic effect of our recitation will be to escape from samsara; and if we recite the mantra with a great scope motivation (otherwise known as bodhichitta), the karmic effect of our recitation will be not only our own full enlightenment, but the full enlightenment of all.  This does not mean with one recitation, we will attain enlightenment.  Rather, it means the karma we create will continue to function until the final goal is attained.  It is like a locomotive gradually building up momentum – the more power we add, the more momentum is built up moving it down the tracks.  Great scope karma keeps powering us along the path until its final goal is realized.  As we recite the mantra, we can request blessings that Tara expand the scope of our motivation for reciting her mantra, thus greatly increasing the power of our recitations.

The single-pointedness of our concentration:  The definition of meditation is the mixing of our mind with virtue.  The more we mix our mind with virtue, the more we create the causes for future inner peace.  Inner peace is the inner cause of happiness – when our mind is peaceful, we are happy, regardless of our external circumstance.  The more thoroughly we mix our mind with virtue, the more peaceful our mind will become.  There are three levels at which we can mix our mind with virtue:  listening, contemplating, and meditating.  Venerable Tharchin explains when we listen to or read the Dharma, we come to understand a spiritual perspective; when we contemplate the Dharma, we transform our own perspective into a spiritual perspective; and when we meditate on the Dharma, we become ourselves a spiritual being.  In other words, whatever we mix our mind with, we become.  Applied to the practice of mantra recitation, when we read about Tara’s mantra, we can come to understand that it functions to bestow upon us Lamrim meditation.  When we recite the mantra understanding its meaning, strongly believing we are requesting her to bestow these realizations on our mind, we are reciting while contemplating.  When we understand by mixing our mind with the mantra we are mixing our mind directly with Tara’s Lamrim realizations so that her realizations become our own, we are reciting while meditating. 

It is important that we try recite the mantra with single-pointed concentration.  Geshe-la explains in Joyful Path that according to Sutra there are three types of faults to our concentration:  mental wandering, mental excitement, and mental sinking.  Mental wandering is when our mind wanders to some object of Dharma other than the mantra.  While still virtuous, this other object is not our object of meditation.  Mental excitement is when our mind moves towards some object of attachment – typically any object that is not our mantra and not some other object of Dharma.  Mental sinking is when our mind sinks into a degree of non-awareness of anything, an extreme form of which is falling asleep.  Concentration free for mental wandering, excitement, and sinking is calm, collected, relaxed, and absorbed into our object of meditation – in this case the mantra. 

In Sutra, we concentrate with our gross mind, in Tantra we learn how to concentrate with our subtle and very subtle minds.  The key to understanding how is to understand the relationship between our mind and our inner energy winds.  Our inner energy winds are like the deep currents of our mind that flow through our inner channels.  The channels of our subtle body are like the scaffolding of our mind – the structure which holds it all up and together.  Our channels and winds are not physical phenomena that can be detected with x-rays or microscopes, but are rather mental phenomena that are experienced energetically primarily in the aggregate of feeling.  Wherever we direct our mind, our winds follow.  Since our mind is scattered around countless object of samsara, our winds scatter everywhere outside of our central channel.  If the object of our mind is contaminated, the wind it is mounted on also becomes contaminated.  Conversely, if our winds are pure, the minds mounted upon them also become pure.  There are two ways to purify our winds.  The first is to bring them within our central channel.  Our central channel is like a purifying bath for our winds.  As our contaminated winds cease, our contaminated minds – including all of our delusions – cease as well.  The second way is to mix our mind with pure objects.  If the object of our mind is pure, then it functions to purify the wind that is its mount.  Pure objects are those that exist outside of samsara – such as Buddhas and motivations that wish to get ourself or others outside of samsara. 

Mantras are, by nature, the purified wind of the Buddha.  When we recite Tara’s mantra, we mix our mind with her pure winds.  A Buddha’s mantra is like a subtle emanation of the Buddha.  Their pure winds appear in the aspect of their mantra.  When we recite the mantra, we mix their pure winds with our own, like water mixing with water.  In effect, their pure winds become our own.  The minds mounted on Tara’s pure winds are the Lamrim realizations of the initial, intermediate, and great scope.  By bringing her pure winds into our mind, mixing them with our own, the realizations of Lamrim will naturally arise in our mind.  Gathering mantra into our winds and our winds into mantra is how we concentrate on mantra recitation according to highest yoga tantra.  The highest form of mantra recitation is called “vajra recitation.”  Geshe-la explains in Tantric Grounds and Paths and Clear Light of Bliss that with vajra recitation we don’t “recite” the mantra with our gross mind, rather we “hear” it emerge within our mind, recognizing it as Tara infusing her pure winds into our very subtle mind. 

The depth of our wisdom:  The goal of mantra recitation is to mix our winds with Tara’s pure winds.  The primary obstacle to being able to do so is grasping at the inherent existence of her, her mantra, our winds, and ourself.  We grasp at these things as being four distinct things, completely separate from one another, like there is some chasm between them and they cannot interact.  This grasping prevents us from seeing Tara as inseparable from her mantra, her mantra as mixed with our winds, and all of this as our own.  When we let go of this grasping, we experience her mantra as her pure winds mixed inseparably from our own, arising within our mind.  The duality between her mantra and our pure winds dissolve completely, and her vajra speech becomes our own.  Single pointed concentration explained above brings our mind to the mantra recitation, realizing the emptiness of Tara, her mantra, our winds, and ourself is how we mix completely with her mantra.  When our absorption into mantra recitation is complete, it will feel as if we are her mantra being recited, accomplishing the function of bestowing Lamrim realizations.  It is like the whole world is absorbed into or, more deeply, appears as her mantra.

These four key factors for powerful mantra recitation are equally true for all mantras – Vajrayogini, Heruka, Dorje Shugden, and so forth.  When we engage in close retreats, while our primary practice is engaging in mantra recitation, most of our inner work is building up the strength of these four factors.

Happy International Temple’s Day: Building the Embassies of the Pure Land in this World

Kadampa Ryan 7. Kadampa meaning of special days


The first Saturday of every November is International Temples Day where we celebrate the creation and maintenance of Kadampa temples around the world.  On this day we principally try to recall why temples matter.  On this basis, we become inspired to do what we can to become part of the International Temple’s Project – and don’t worry, there are many other ways we can help besides just donating money.

What is the International Temples Project?

One of the central legacies of Geshe-la in this world is the International Temples Project.  Launched in the mid-1990s, it is Geshe-la’s vision for there to eventually be a qualified Kadampa temple in every major city of the world.  Geshe-la’s wish is for the Kadam Dharma to pervade everywhere, and these temples are like iron frames upon which buildings are built.  They provide the basic structure sustaining and supporting the development of Kadam Dharma in the minds of the beings of this world.

The very first temple was opened in 1997 at Manjushri Kadampa Meditation Center in Ulverston, England.  It is the mother center of the NKT, and this temple is the mother temple for all the others.  Later, another temple was opened in Glen Spey, New York.  I was fortunate enough to be at the opening of both temples.  Since then, temples have sprung up in Brazil, Arizona, Spain, and more are planned until eventually, they will be everywhere.

Gen Losang once told me, “temples are like Embassies of the Pure Land in this world, and our Dharma teachers are like the Ambassadors of all the Buddhas.”  An Embassy is like a portal through which another country can express its culture and share its experience in a foreign land.  The goal is to improve relations between the two countries and their peoples.  By coming into contact with temples, the beings of this world are introduced to the pure worlds of the Buddhas.  Through temples, the wisdom of all the Buddhas is brought into this world.  Those who are interested can enter into these spiritual Embassies and be transported to new worlds.

Geshe-la explained that each temple is by nature Heruka’s celestial mansion in this world.  One of our refuge commitments is to regard any statue of a Buddha as an actual Buddha.  We are supposed to see past the craftmanship, no matter how beautiful it may be, and with our eyes of faith see a living Buddha.  In exactly the same way, when we see or enter into a temple, we should recognize it as an in essence Heruka’s celestial palace in this world, where we are transported to the pure land, can receive the blessings of all the Buddhas, and can learn all of the stages of the path.  Without a portal, we cannot enter.  Temples are an outer portal that leads us to the inner portal to lands of eternal peace.

Geshe-la has said that our Kadampa temples are our places of pilgrimage.  We are not always able to make it to every Kadampa festival or Dharma celebration, but we should make an effort to go at least once in our life.  One of the commitments of Muslims is to make a pilgrimage to the Haaj at least once in their lifetime.  Personally, I think this would also make a wonderful commitment for all Kadampas.  One cannot help but be moved by the experience, and karmically speaking the experience quite literally stays with us our whole life.

Geshe-la explains that the karma we create by helping a Dharma center continues to accumulate for as long as that center exists, and it continues to expand as the center expands.  In the early days, there was no center in Los Angeles, just a small, rented house in Santa Barbara.  There was a woman who lived in the center named Lea, who helped keep the center afloat financially with her rent payments and who dedicated her time to organize classes and other center activities.  In the beginning, it was basically just her, and without her, the center would have never gotten off the ground.  Later, a branch was opened in Los Angeles, which grew and grew until eventually now there is a vibrant spiritual community.  Eventually, I have no doubt, there will be a Manjushri-style temple there.  I don’t know whatever happened to Lea, she was likely just an emanation of Tara sent to help, but the karma she accumulated from that initial help continues to multiply today.  The temples we build are built to last.  There are churches in Rome that are over a thousand years old.  We are at the very beginning of the International Temples Project, and the help we provide now will be like Lea’s, and the karma we accumulate will serve us in all our future lives.

Why do temples matter?

Everyone appreciates a beautiful temple, even non-religious people.  All over the world, tourists flock to churches, temples, mosques, and other sites of worship.  They are living testaments to the faith of the practitioners who built them and serve as a point of focus for practitioners.  Normally we might think it is a sign of degeneration that these places of worship become tourist attractions, but Geshe-la explains this is one of their greatest advantages.  Why?  Every time we see a Buddha image, it creates a non-contaminated karmic potentiality on our mind which can never be destroyed and will eventually become a seed of our future enlightenment.  Angulamala had killed hundreds of people and when he went to ordain, seers said he could not because they could find no virtue on his mind.  Buddha, however, looked into his mind and saw that in a previous life he was a fly who landed on some dung next to a stupa (a representation of Buddha’s mind).  This seed could not be destroyed, even by all his evil deeds, and later became the foundation for his spiritual life.  When busloads of children and tourists come and visit our temples, they behold hundreds of images of Buddhas, each time planting the seeds of their future enlightenment on their minds. 

Gen Losang once famously asked who is more important, those who come to the center and stay or those who come to the center and leave?  If we look at how centers are organized, it seems our implicit answer is those who come and stay.  But Gen Losang said it was those who come and leave who are more important because they are more numerous.  Some practitioners might think they don’t need temples and they wonder why so much emphasis is placed on creating them, but this is because they are thinking primarily about their own needs and not the larger function temples serve in the world.

Kadam Lucy said the most important thing people discover when they come to a temple or Dharma center is not the building, but the people.  Everyone is looking for happiness but rarely do we find genuinely happy people.  If when people come to visit our Dharma centers they find happy people, others will naturally want to stay and find out what the secret to their happiness is.  Everyone is looking for unconditional love and lightness, and we can provide that.  Seen in this way, we – the practitioners of this tradition – are equally part of the Temple’s project simply through the force of our example and our welcoming attitude.  The essence of the Kadampa Way of life is “everybody welcome.”  This does not just mean nobody is excluded, it means everyone is made to feel welcome as if they are coming home.

My teacher in Paris said when we work to flourish the Dharma, we need to avoid the extremes of external and of internal flourishing.  The external extreme is when we focus exclusively on external developments, like buildings, temples, ritual objects, and other external manifestations of being a “Dharma practitioner.”  The internal extreme is when we completely neglect these things and only focus on gaining inner realizations, thinking the external manifestations are unnecessary or even anti-spiritual.

Venerable Tharchin said the real temple is the inner realizations and interpersonal connections of the practitioners who practice there.  While of course, outer temples are important, inner temples are their main cause.  He explains that since our minds are not separate from others, our inner realizations are like a beacon of light in the darkness of the minds of the beings of our community.  All living things are naturally drawn towards the light, and the more realizations we gain and the closer the karmic connections we create with our fellow sangha, the brighter our light shines.  The spiritual light in each one of us is like a single candle flame, but when we put our lights together, it creates a blazing spiritual sun in our communities.  Venerable Tharchin explains that when the inner temple is right, the outer temple will spontaneously appear, almost like magic.

Venerable Tharchin also explains that every time we do a spiritual practice with others we create the causes to do the same spiritual practice with the same people again in the future.  When we do a puja in a temple, for example, we create not only karmic connections with the Buddha of the given practice, but we create karma with all of the other practitioners engaging in the practice with us.  This karma will ripen in the future in the form of us reuniting with these same people engaging in the same practice.  It is in Temples that our international Kadampa family gathers together as a global sangha to engage in teachings and practices together.  Without the temples, we could not gather together and create this karma.  Seen in this way, temples are also like an insurance policy for finding the Dharma and our spiritual family again and again in all our future lives. 

How Can We Celebrate International Temples Day?

The main way we celebrate this day is by contemplating why temples are so important to generate an appreciation for them.  Sometimes we might hold ourselves back from doing so because we are afraid if we do so, we might then have to give some of our money, and we are extremely reluctant to do that.  We wonder whether all of this talk about temples and the International Temples Project is really just a clever scam to get our money!

There are many ways we can contribute to the flourishing of Kadampa temples in this world without having to part with any of our money.  Many people volunteer their lives and their skills to building temples.  They travel the world offering their labor and their time to help build the temples the rest of us enjoy.  How wonderful it would be to let go of our worldly concerns and live the life of an international temple builder!  But even if that is not possible for us, we might be able to offer a Saturday afternoon using whatever skills – be they building skills or office skills – we might have to help advance the project.

All of us can rejoice in those who can donate their money or their time to the project.  Rejoicing costs us nothing, but in doing so we create very powerful karma similar to that of those who are actually doing it.  This karma will ripen in many ways.  The ripened effect will be to be reborn either as a temple benefactor or a temple builder.  The environmental effect will be to have temples appear in our lives in all our future lives.  The effect similar to the cause will be to have the means in the future to be able to more easily give to the project.  And the tendency similar to the cause will be to always appreciate the good qualities of Kadampa temples and those who make them happen.

We can additionally dedicate the merit we accumulate from our spiritual practices to the realization of Geshe-la’s vision for a Kadampa temple to appear in every major city of this world.  One of the uncommon characteristics of pure wishes is the karma we dedicate towards them can never be destroyed and never ceases to work until our pure wish is fulfilled.  This does not mean one prayer alone is enough, but each dedication we make adds energy towards the realization of this wish, and this energy can never be destroyed.  When enough energy has been created, the result will spontaneously arise.  All of us engage in spiritual practices every day, but how often do we decide to dedicate that merit to the fulfillment of Geshe-la’s vision for international temples?  At a minimum, International Temple Day gives us an opportunity to make such dedications; and even better, to decide to start making such dedications every day.

Perhaps our city doesn’t yet have a temple.  We might even become jealous of those cities that do have one or think we can’t advance in our practice unless we too have a temple, transforming them from an object of refuge into an object of attachment.  Or perhaps we think our city is far away from having a temple because our Sangha is so small, so why should we help support the development of temples somewhere else where we won’t receive any benefit from it ourselves?  None of us would admit to having any of these minds, but they do arise and they are as ridiculous as they sound.  So what should we do?  First, we can recall that by helping others have temples, we create the causes for ourselves to have one.  That’s how karma works.  Second, we can imagine that, even though our center might currently be a classroom we rent out one night a week in a local massage school, our actual center is Heruka’s celestial palace, a fully qualified temple.  While our physical eyes might see plastic chairs in a room, our eyes of faith can imagine we have gone to the pure land and are receiving teachings in a temple.  This imagination is very similar to generation stage of highest yoga tantra and creates the causes for our correct imagination to eventually become a reality.

One of the best ways we can contribute to the International Temples Project is to build within ourselves the inner temple of realizations Venerable Tharchin refers to.  We can become the kind-hearted happy Kadampa who makes everyone feel welcome that Kadam Lucy extols.  We can build close karmic connections with our Sangha friends so we can unite our candles together into a blazing spiritual sun.  We can make a point of attending classes and putting our guru’s teachings we have received in temples or centers into practice.  All of these actions create the deep substantial causes for temples to appear in this world.  Without them, we fall into the extreme of the external flourishing of Dharma. 

And yes, some of us can donate money. 

The reality is temples cannot appear in this world without financial resources.  It is not a scam or a cult, this is simply a fact about how the world works.  Yes, the Dharma should be made freely available to all, but how is that to happen if nobody gives to them?  There is a very special offering called a torma offering.  The meaning of a torma offering is we are mentally willing to give everything we have for the sake of Dharma realizations because we recognize them as that valuable.  Geshe-la’s books are filled with examples of practitioners willing to cut off their flesh or undergo incredible hardship for the sake of gaining access to teachings.  He tells us these stories not to encourage us to do the same but to realize that it would be worth it even if we had to do so.  Such practitioners, from their own side, value the Dharma more than they do their material belongings, including their own bodies. 

Perhaps we don’t have any money now to give.  No problem, we can give in all the other ways described above, or at a minimum, we can rejoice in those who do have such ability.  We can also think about including the International Temples Project in our last will and testament so that when we die, whatever resources we have accumulated go towards spiritual purposes.  In Joyful Path, Geshe-la tells the story of somebody who was extremely attached to their money when they died and was later reborn as a snake inside their money jar.  He encourages us to give everything away before we die so that we are not attached to anything.  Of course, we need to provide for our families, but we can also use some resources we have for spiritual purposes.  Universities around the world accumulate vast endowments from such giving, which continues to support opportunities for students for generations to come.  Why can we not do the same?  Similarly, if our parents or relatives pass away, instead of keeping the money for ourselves, we can give some or all of it away to the Temples’ Project.  Why keep it for ourselves when we can create so much better karma by giving it away?  Such giving also helps our deceased relative because they get a fraction of the good karma of our giving away their money to spiritual causes.

My teacher in Paris once said, “We should give until it hurts.”  Wow!  What a statement.  While it is perhaps unskillful to say, she makes a valid point.  It is easy to give away things we don’t need or don’t use anymore, but it cuts into our self-cherishing to give more than that.  What is bad for our self-cherishing is good for us.  Geshe-la explains in the teachings on emptiness that an effective way to identify the self that we normally see is to think of it in a situation where it is particularly manifest, such as imagining we are standing on a high precipice.  At such times, we clearly see our I.  In the same way, sometimes we are forced to confront our demon of self-cherishing straight in the face, and others asking for donations is usually one of the most manifest examples.  Our self-cherishing roars in protest and comes up with a thousand reasons why we shouldn’t give or feels like we are being spiritually manipulated out of our money, so we reject doing so as a matter of principle. 

But are we being manipulated here?  Is that the motivation and goal?  Or are we merely being given an opportunity to accumulate amazing merit while benefiting countless future generations?  Is our resistance to giving a matter of principle, or is it our self-cherishing rationalizing our miserliness?  We need to be honest with ourselves.  We talk all the time about the evils of our self-cherishing mind, but when we are presented with an opportunity to go against its wishes, how do we feel about that?  Venerable Tharchin says it is better to give one penny a day for 100 days than $1 on one day.  Why?  Because the point is not the money, it is training in the mind of giving.  There is something we can give, so why not do so?  If we can’t part with our money, then no problem, there are still so many other things we can do that cost us nothing.  We shouldn’t feel guilty or beat ourselves up for not being able to give money, it is just where we are at.  No problem.  We can recognize that and do what we can.  When we do, we will find helping in greater and greater ways becomes easier over time. 

In any case, we can meditate on the many good qualities of international temples and rejoice in their arising in this world.  This is the essence of International Temples Day.  The rest flows naturally from this.

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: How to overcome Obstacles to Concentration

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

Bodhisattva Downfall:  Not overcoming obstacles to mental stabilization. 

In this context there are five.  If we make no effort to abandon them we incur a secondary downfall: (1) Needless self-reproach and excitement, (2) Malicious thoughts, (3) Sleep and dullness, (4) Distracting desires, (5) Frequent and disturbing doubts.

Needless self-reproach refers to how we tend to beat ourselves up when we discover that we have become distracted.  Anger at ourself is still anger, and therefore a delusion.  When we discover we have been distracted, we should patiently accept it and gently (but firmly) decide to go back to our object of meditation without unnecessary drama.  It’s normal and natural that we become distracted, that is why we are training.  Needless excitement refers to when we have some mental breakthrough or some profound “ah ha” moment and we get over-excited about it.  Sometimes this is hard to resist, but our over-excitement about it will cause us to lose the feeling or understanding.  Better to be happy and try to maintain the continuum of remembering the new discovery for as long as we can.  The longer we do, the more deeply we plant the new understanding on our mind.

Malicious thoughts are bad both in and out of meditation, but they are especially bad in meditation itself.  We do not usually realize, but this happens more than we think.  What often happens for me is I am meditating on some idea of Dharma, and then it causes me to recall how somebody else in my life is not living up to this idea of the Dharma, and then I start to judge the other person using the Dharma as my lens of judgment.  This can also take the form of we are angry at somebody, we sit down to meditate to try calm down, but we spend our whole meditation time contemplating the faults of the other person and why we are right and they are wrong.

Sleep and dullness happens to all of us.  Our gross minds arise from our subtle minds, and our subtle minds arise from our very subtle mind.  The entire purpose of meditation is to plant the Dharma at increasingly subtle levels of mind.  When we do so, all of the minds that are grosser than the depth to which we have planted the Dharma will be a reflection of the Dharma pattern we planted deeper than these gross levels of mind.  It is a bit like putting the stained glass of Dharma on our mind, and the light that then shines through it reflects the pattern of the stained glass.  The more we concentrate, the more subtle our mind becomes.  The problem for us is the only subtle minds we know are sleep.  So when we enter meditation, we fall into the parts of our mind that correspond with sleep and we become sleepy, we get the “nods” (our head bobbing up and down as we fall asleep while trying to stay awake), etc.  There is not a single meditator who does not, from time to time, struggle with this.  What can we do to overcome this?  First, it is usually best to meditate in the morning because we are more rested and less likely to fall asleep.  If we are generally groggy in the morning, we can take our shower and shave first, do our meditation, and then get dressed for the day.  Second, when it does happen, accept it as part of our training.  When we die, our mind will likewise become increasingly subtle.  By learning to try to maintain mindfulness of our objects of meditation as our mind becomes more subtle is the best possible training we can do to become prepared for death.  Third, we need to keep a positive attitude.  Do not beat yourself up or feel like a failure, instead know you are purifying and working through your obstructions.  We all have to go through this.  It is a training, not a demonstration of accomplishment.  Fourth, sometimes if it is really bad, we can try open our eyes, stretch, roll our head around to the maximum extent possible in a circle, etc.  As a general rule, we should avoid giving in to the sleepiness and going to take a nap.  This is a bad habit to get into, and it will train our mind to equate meditation with taking a nap, and so we will have the problem of sleepiness even more in the future.  If you want to take a nap, you can do so after your meditation is over, but you will find that most often as soon as you come out of meditation your sleepiness goes away.  Fifth, request blessings.  The Buddhas are right there waiting to help us with our meditation.  All we need to do is request their help with faith.  It does not matter if the sleepiness goes away.  What matters is we keep training and keep trying.

Distracting desires was discussed extensively in the earlier posts on the vows related to mental stabilization, so I refer you there.

Frequent and disturbing doubts refers to our inability to ever believe anything until we are 100% convinced.  Blind faith is an extreme in the Dharma, but so too is the inability to believe.  We need to ask questions and probe the Dharma to gain a deeper understanding, but we also need to not expect to have a perfect understanding until we actually attain enlightenment.  We need to be like a scientist.  Scientists work with hypotheses.  They gather all available evidence and information, and they say, “given all of this, what is the most logical and reasonable conclusion I can draw.”  That conclusion then is their “hypothesis.”  They then say, “how can I test to see whether or not this hypothesis is correct?” and they design experiments to test the validity of their hypothesis.  The results of their experiment then give them more information and evidence with which they can either confirm or modify their hypothesis.  They continue to work in this way, gradually refining their theories until eventually the develop “laws of nature” or “scientific axioms.”  Throughout this entire process, they are never 100% sure that their theories are correct, but they are able to reach sufficiently high confidence levels that for all practical purposes this is what they “believe” to be true.  On the basis of this belief, they can build cars, computers and space ships. 

Modern Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: How to Train in Concentration

Kadampa Ryan 2. Modern Bodhisattva's Way of Life

Once we have a deep appreciation of the benefits of our objects of meditation, and mixing our mind with them is genuinely felt to be the most important thing in our life, then we will not find training in concentration to be that difficult.  We train as follows: First, we contemplate the benefits of mixing our mind with our chosen object to generate a desire to do so.  Then we engage in the contemplations which give rise to our object of meditation as explained in the various books.  Once we have found our object, we simply try to maintain the continuum of remembering it, in particular remembering its meaning.  In the process of doing this, basically without us being aware of it, our mind will gradually slip away and become distracted by something else.  At some point we will “wake up” and become aware of the fact that we have lost our chosen object of concentration.  When this happens, we then ask ourselves the question, “what is more beneficial, mixing my mind with this object of distraction or mixing my mind with my object of meditation?”  If we have done our preliminary work well of realizing the benefits of our objects of meditation, the answer to this question will be obvious and heart-felt.  We then, on the basis of this desire to mix our mind with our object of meditation, re-engage in the contemplations which lead to our object and we start the cycle over.  We continue in this way again and again for as long as we have time to actually meditate.

The actual attainment of tranquil abiding appears to be a very high attainment and appears to be very far off.  Given this, it is difficult for us to actually be motivated to train in tranquil abiding because it seems like an impossible task.  Venerable Tharchin explains if we do not think something is doable, we cannot really generate a genuine effort to do it. 

It is useful for us to consider the benefits of the earlier mental abidings.  The first mental abiding is being able to remember our object for one minute.  This is the basic building block for all subsequent attainments in concentration.  Think of how revolutionary it was for humanity to develop the first brick.  Think how that one invention has changed the world.  It is the same with the first mental abiding.  The second mental abiding is being able to remember our object for five minutes.  These are the cornerstones of our future enlightenment.  Bricks are wonderful, but they can easily fall.  If, however, we have the ability to make solid cornerstones then the structure of the object within our mind will be very solid.  The third mental abiding is when we forget our object of meditation, we can quickly regain it.  This is the difference between having to laboriously make each brick by hand compared with having industrial equipment which can crank them out quickly and perfectly every time. 

The fourth mental abiding is the ability to go an entire meditation session, even one that is four hours long, without ever once completely forgetting our object of meditation.  We are able to maintain the continuum of our meditation without interruption.  This is, in many ways, our most important attainment along the entire path.  The benefits of this are countless.  First, once we attain the fourth mental abiding, we see directly that it is entirely doable to attain tranquil abiding.  Because we see it is doable, we can then easily generate the necessary effort to complete our training in concentration.  Once we attain tranquil abiding, enlightenment will come very quickly.  Getting to the fourth mental abiding is like entering into a slip stream that leads inexorably to the attainment of tranquil abiding.  It is said that once we attain the fourth mental abiding, if we enter into strict retreat it is possible to even attain tranquil abiding within six months. 

Second, once we get one object to the fourth mental abiding it is fairly easy to get all of the others to the same level.  Venerable Tharchin advises we take one object and get it to the first mental abiding.  Once that is stable, we then bring all of the others to the same level.  We then do the same with the second mental abiding, the third mental abiding and finally the fourth mental abiding.  The attainment of each abiding is like a muscle.  Once we build up the strength of a given muscle to lift 10 kilos, then it does not matter if the object we are lifting is round or square, we can lift it.  It is the same with the muscle of concentration. 

Third, we will have built the foundation of our future enlightenment.  Bricks are nice, cornerstones are great, but without a solid foundation it is all vulnerable.  Getting all of our meditation objects to the fourth mental abiding is like laying the entire foundation for our future enlightenment.  Everything that follows will be built on this foundation, and everything we subsequently build will not be lost nor fall down.  Once we get all of our objects of meditation (the 21 lamrim meditation, the six perfections, the three bringings, and the generation and completion stage objects) to the fourth mental abiding we will have laid all the necessary foundation for building enlightenment in our mind.  This is a very important moment in our spiritual life.  It basically means there is no going back for us for at least the rest of this life.  There is no longer a danger of us losing the path in this life.  There is no danger of us wasting our precious human life. 

Fourth, the greatest benefit of attaining the fourth mental abiding is we can guarantee we will make it to the pure land at the time of our death.  Venerable Geshe-la explained at a summer festival many years ago when he first started teaching about the Mahamudra that if we attain the fourth mental abiding on the Mahamudra object, then it is guaranteed we will attain the pure land at the time of death.  Once we attain the pure land, we will be guaranteed to complete our training.  This means attaining the fourth mental abiding is, for all practical purposes, us reaching a point of inevitable emergence from samsara.  If we can just make it to here, we will make it all the way. 

Attaining the fourth mental abiding is entirely doable.  We may not at present genuinely believe we can attain tranquil abiding, but if we put enough effort into it, we do feel that attaining the fourth mental abiding is something that is doable.  It will not be easy, it will take a lot of work, but surely it takes less effort to attain the fourth mental abiding than the amount of effort we put into the average professional career.  But just look at the difference in the rewards between the two!  A good career may create stable external conditions for the rest of this life; attaining the fourth mental abiding will create stable internal conditions for eternity.