Currently I’m studying Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones with a Dharma friend, the Venerable Tashi Nyima.

This is my contemplation on verse 29 of the root text of Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones.

“Purifying the obscurations, initiating the practice

of the path and actualizing the four kayas,

The essence of the four empowerments is the

teacher Chenrezi;

If you recognize your own mind as the teacher,

all four empowerments are complete;

Receiving innate empowerment by yourself,

recite the six-syllable mantra.”

 

Full disclosure:

I found the whole idea of empowerment nearly impossible to work with. So today’s writing is about impressions I got from working with the verse as a whole, combined with Patrul Rinpoche’s commentary and Tashi’s Dharma talk. I invite you to think of this as a Monet Dharma painting.

Explain to someone else (making it my own)

My mind gets in the way a lot. It really does. This morning for instance, my mind’s take on this stanza is…who needs all this empowerment stuff? That’s a Tibetan thing, isn’t it? How about that new chocolate chip cookie recipe? It’s just begging for some coconut and walnuts.

Mind is like that, isn’t it? You schedule time, you get all ready, get all the tools, and your mind decides it’s a good time to catalog all the stuff you put off doing over the weekend. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this frustrates us. The other one percent, we just give in and do what mind wants.

If we could take a step back from the afflicted emotions which cause us to so strongly identify with our mind, we would see the deluded nature of our lives. We are not our mind or our thoughts. If we are able to take that step back, we can begin to recognize the inherent quality of our mind as empty and luminous. How does this help us in samsara?

Patrul Rinpoche says, “Primordial purity really is the true state of all phenomena, and our usual impure perceptions are totally false, delusions without the slightest grain of truth—like mistaking a piece of rope for a snake or thinking a mirage is really a shimmer of water in the distance.”

Think about this: according to the latest studies, the average person has fifty thousand thoughts a day. Imagine having a teacher who was inseparable from you, and who had fifty thousand nuggets of wisdom to share with you each and every day of your life. Welcome to your mind without the obscurations of wrong view and afflicted emotions.

I think my mind has way too much of a western bent to completely understand the idea of receiving empowerments, but I understand this much. Our Buddha Nature is inherent in us. It is primordial, perfect, unchanging. Once we come to fully understand this, we will begin to see that our mind could not possibly be any other than the mind of the teacher Chenrezi. When we come to recognize this, can we merge our mind with that of the teacher? I don’t think so. Not right away. But we can begin to see with clarity that it can be done—one thought, one moment at a time.

***

 Apply to a past situation (how would it have been different?)

I like to read. A lot. A whole lot. I had an account on Goodreads and every year I’d take the Reading Challenge and my goal would be sixty books. That’s five books a month for a year. I’d hit my goal every year, but…I would read some real honest to god who-did-you-pay-to-publish-this trash. It was bad, but hey, it was number forty-seven in the challenge and I had to move on.

This year, I’ve decided to do things differently. I have a brand new account. My challenge this year? One book. That’s right—one. I’m currently at 800%. I’ve read eight out of one books according to Goodreads. Whew! No more challenge. Now I’m exploring genres, meeting new authors, and reading for the sheer pleasure of it, not to ‘make the list’. I took this radical step because the whole sixty books a year thing made me take a look at my life.

I was kind of approaching spiritual cultivation the same way. Well, I’d think, I’ve done the Mind Training prayers—check it off the list. What’s next? If I’d been able to take a step back from my life sooner, I would have seen that I was like a farmer tossing seeds into dirt, then never coming back to the field. [I know it’s not really called ‘dirt’. Sorry. City girl thing.]

I may have noticed that rather than initiating any kind of practice or cultivation that might have made those seeds take root, I was simply leaving them on the surface of my mind, where they quickly blew away. Having noticed this, I may have thought about what it means to have a spiritual practice. I may have let go of the list of things to be learned and turned to my own mind. In doing this, I may have recognized my ordinary mind—everyone’s mind—for what it is: a set of patterns of habitual delusion. Having recognized this, I may have begun to seek a spiritual practice that would gradually dissolve the obscurations veiling the mind’s true luminous nature.

***

 Apply to an (ongoing) present situation (how does it matter today?)

The biggest thing going on in my life right now is learning a new method to bake bread. I noticed over the weekend that one of my bread machines is making a funny noise. A couple of weeks ago, I would have been cringing at the thought of investing in another machine. But when I heard that strange little noise, I thought…better learn this Ken Forkish thing faster.

With the Ken  Forkish method, I don’t need the bread machine. In fact, with that method, the baker is so in touch with the dough that the only machine that needs to be really fine-tuned is the mind. After baking just twice with this method, I’m coming to completely understand how important it is to get to know your dough.

In working with the spiritual path, I find that the ‘dough’ of spirituality is the mind. If we are to cultivate spirituality, we have to come to know the nature of our mind intimately. We have to recognize that our mind constantly creates a world of delusion which we accept without question. But, if you “recognize your own mind as the teacher”, then you realize that enlightenment isn’t some hidden treasure to be unearthed in some distant foreign place. No. It’s right here, right now. It’s what you truly are. Your mind is no different than that of Chenrezi or any of the Buddhas. You are working with the same primordial ‘dough’ so to speak.

A couple of times when I’ve been baking a Ken Forkish loaf, and working with the dough, I’ve thought to myself…he must be working with something different in those pictures. This dough is impossible to work with! Then I remind myself that I’m working with flour, water, salt, and yeast—just like Ken Forkish does. The only difference is he’s got decades of practice, and I’ve only put in two weeks’ worth so far.

Just so on the spiritual path. We all have Buddha Nature. We all have moments when our compassion shines through. In working with recognizing our mind as no different than that of the teacher, we are practicing to resonate with our inherent qualities of true purity, true bliss, true permanence, true self.

***

 Apply to a potential situation (bringing it home to play)

Sitting here, in the early dawn solitude of my air-conditioned apartment, birdsong and the mellow sounds of slow traffic just past my window, the possibilities for bringing this into my life seem endless. But soon, I’ll get up from here, I’ll take a shower, I’ll step out into the heat of late June in Dallas, and I’ll drive to work in my un-air conditioned car. Then I’ll get to work and…well…the possibilities won’t seem so endless.

One of the wonderful things about spiritual cultivation on the Buddhist path is that you can travel light. It’s even better than baking! The only tools you need are your mind and the Dharma. You know what’s really awesome about that? Wherever you are, they’re always with you. We can’t go anywhere without our mind tagging along. And since the Dharma is reality as it truly is without elaboration, we can never step beyond it or outside of it.

Lately at work, I’ve been extraordinarily…what? Restless, I think. The problem is it’s been very slow, so there’s been plenty of time for me to reflect on how many other things I want to do with my life, but how unwilling I am to risk being homeless and hungry.

Today will be no different. I can depend on mind to be restless and vaguely dissatisfied. Except…it will be different. Today, even though I’ll be starting out with the same ingredients of mind and Dharma, I’m going to try a new recipe. Today at work I will try seeing how all that arises in mind is inseparable from the empty luminosity of mind. I will try seeing that my suffering is my path to the union of wisdom and compassion, through compassion. I will try seeing that when we recognize our mind as the teacher, all the conflict and suffering and drama of mind becomes a beautiful friction^* that is constantly scrubbing away our obscurations.

I don’t know if I can do this, but just the thought that I could makes me feel one step closer to recovering the naturally splendid all-ground of who I truly am, who we all truly are.

 

 

 

* Thank you to my Dharma friend Rinchen for the idea of a beautiful friction.