Mahamudra
Mahamudra In Plain English
A Beginner's Guide To Calm Abiding, Insight, And The Four Yogas
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About The Book
Empty, yet vividly knowing. Knowing, yet nothing to grasp. This, just as it is, is your own primordial awareness.
The Ocean of Definitive Meaning is one of the clearest maps of the contemplative path ever set down. The Ninth Karmapa, Wangchug Dorje, wrote it in the sixteenth century to carry a practitioner from the very first turning of the mind all the way to nonmeditation. Maps like it are easy to admire and hard to actually walk.
This book walks it, lesson by lesson, in language a modern reader can hear.
What You Will Practice
- The four thoughts that turn the mind, and the four special preliminaries
- Calm abiding with a support, with the breath, and without any support at all
- Resting the mind, and working with dullness and agitation when they come
- Looking directly at awareness within stillness, within movement, and within appearance
- The pointing out instructions, the heart of the Mahamudra transmission
- The four yogas: one-pointedness, freedom from elaboration, one taste, and nonmeditation
- Enhancement practices, and the subtle errors that imitate realization
How Each Lesson Works
Twenty lessons across six modules. Each one gives you something to read, something to contemplate, and something to sit with, so that studying the path and walking it stay close together. A glossary of terms is included for the Tibetan and Sanskrit vocabulary the tradition uses.
A Word On The Words
The Tibetan sems is traditionally rendered as mind, but in ordinary English that word drifts toward intellect and mental chatter. So here mind is kept for exactly that, the thinking that stirs and settles, while the ground it arises within, prior to any thought and simply knowing, is called awareness. You can hear the whole path in the shift between them: the ordinary mind that is settled, the awareness that is investigated, and the primordial awareness recognized as having been present all along.
Who It Is For
Anyone drawn to look directly at their own experience. You do not need to be a Buddhist, to have taken any vow, or to belong to any lineage. If you have ever suspected that awareness itself, and not its passing contents, is the more interesting question, you are the reader this was written for. It is meant to serve a beginner settling the breath and a longtime practitioner returning to first things alike.
From The Book
A Note Before The Stages
Module Three
What follows is a map of ripening drawn by people who watched practitioners ripen. It describes twelve degrees across four yogas, with symptoms, plateaus, and characteristic errors, in more detail than most contemplative traditions have ever committed to writing.
In its original setting nobody read it alone. A teacher watched a student practice, listened to what they reported, and told them where they were. The map was the teacher's instrument, and the student received only the part of it that applied to them, at the moment it applied.
You are holding the whole thing at once, which is a different situation. The honest thing to say about it is short. Reading a stage description is not evidence of being in it. The descriptions are written from inside, in the first person of accomplishment, and they will feel recognizable long before they are true of you. This is not a flaw in the writing. It is what an accurate description of your own mind is bound to feel like.
It helps to know two things about how this map behaves. The first is that it does not run like a staircase. The tradition says plainly that there is no certainty experiences will arrive in the regular order, and that a practitioner may meet something belonging to a later stage before completing an earlier one. A great deal of unnecessary discouragement comes from assuming otherwise.
The second is what the map is calibrated against. Its authors correlate these twelve levels with the classical grounds and paths, though they disagree about how, and the author of the manual this book follows says of the final stage only that he is unable to evaluate it. Three quarters of one lineage's senior disciples were reckoned to have reached the third of the four yogas. Twelve levels sounds like a dozen steps. It is the whole distance, and the people who wrote it down were careful about claiming it.
So read this the way you would read a map of a country you intend to walk across, rather than a questionnaire about where you are standing. Know the terrain. Let the question of your own position stay open longer than feels comfortable, and take it to someone who can watch you practice. The stages are worth knowing whether or not you can place yourself on them, and the knowing is what this book can honestly give.
The Catalog
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