Mahamudra In Plain English

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.