This is the Oral Instruction Given by the Great Vidyadhara of Immortality When His Physical Body Was About to Depart into Dharmadhatu.
At all times and in al situations, I bow and take refuge in the sublime qualified master endowed with boundless compassion who is like wish-fulfilling jewel! Please bestow your blessings upon me!
To attain the state of unexcelled enlightenment after entering the gate of the precious Buddhadharma, you must give up concerns for this life!
Your parents, family members, friends and other people lead your mind towards the fleeting goals of this life’s activities, giving you countless temporary and ultimate schemes, and innumerable seemingly affectionate advice. Fooling yourself with these will result in all kinds of hindrances for Dharma practice; so it is essential not to listen to their words!
You won’t find anyone beside a qualified master who can give genuine spiritual advice. If you want to truly practice the Dharma you must quickly make preparation for death. Besides that, someone who entertains many temporary and ultimate plans, will not be able to be a Dharma practitioner. People nowadays who try to please everyone may pretend to do so outwardly but that proves they are possessed inwardly by Mara.
Place your trust in the Dharma and your master! Take mountain retreats and unpeopled valleys as your dwelling place! Give up clinging to the short-lived pleasures of food, clothes and the like! Cut your ties to close family members! Cast away all hypocritical flattery and manipulation! Focus one-pointedly on whatever your master says! By doing so your Dharma practice will be pure.
In general, people nowadays fall under Mara’s reign. In particular, fickle and indolent women don’t follow the advice of their teachers and instead take guidance from their family. By doing so they wait for the future to what is definitely needed now: their study of and training in Dharma practice. They seem to bee primarily caught up in pointless worldly activities, kowtowing to family and friends, and the like. Therefore take hold of the “rope of your nose” and don’t listen to others!
Sincerely take to heart the fact that the time of death lies uncertain, then apply yourself to spiritual practice with the strong diligence of knowing that there is no time to waste!
Your parent’s kindness can only be repaid through Dharma practice, there is no benefit in repaying them with mundane (attainments). Your teacher’s kindness can only be repaid by practicing meditation, nothing else will repay it.
As for benefiting sentient beings, you can only do so through the bodhicitta resolve and by making aspirations; any immediate benefit is limited. For your vows and samayas, unless you take your own conscience as witness, you won’t escape turning into a hypocrite even though you may maintain a superficially virtuous exterior and morality.
Remain in unpeopled valleys and mountain retreats, because the spiritual practice done among many people only makes you get caught up in situations. If you fail to be the steersman of your own mind, even though you may make many promises and take many vows there will still hardly be any benefit.
Unless you realize the key point of natural awareness – that knowing one thing liberates all – you won’t find any certainty in pursuing endless ‘important’ information.
To summarize all vital points: with the thought “I will surely die!”, speed up your plans to practice the Dharma! Since a master is your only hope, supplicate him from your heart! Since all pleasure and pain, whatever befalls you, is repayment from the past, don’t entertain many plans! Treat good, evil and impartial people as being higher than yourself, and always take the lowest seat!
Train in impartial pure perception and do not belittle others! Acknowledge your own faults and don’t meditate on other’s shortcomings! Since the vital point of all the teachings lies in your own mind, always scrutinize it’s nature!
Cast away the fixation of rigidly meditating upon a reference point and instead release your awareness into carefree openness! Decide that whatever you experience is the playful expression of awareness; don’t try to improve good or correct evil!s
All experiences is your own mind and this mind, free from arising and ceasing, is the identity of the trikaya guru. This guru is indivisible from your natural awareness. Its cognizant radiance encompassing all that appears and exists.
Since all of appearance and existence is the magical display of this single expanse of awareness, the ‘ultimate view’ is to see your own mind in utterly naked naturalness, ‘Meditation training’ is to remain in the continuity of that. ‘Ensuing cognition’ is when a thought is projected. ‘Post meditation’ (‘ensuing attainment’) is to recognize that projection. ‘Conduct’ is to mingle walking, sitting, and all other activities with the state of awareness.
The indivisibility of meditation and post-meditation is to be continuously free from even a second of distraction or confusion, uninterrupted by gaps of stillness or thought occurrence. When perfected it is the indivisibility of appearance and mind, of self and others, of pleasure and pain, enmity and friendship, and of love and hate. In short, ‘Fruition’ is to have perpetually exhausted all kinds of duality fixating concepts.
When that has happened, samsara and nirvana are purified into the space [of dharmadhatu] and you have realized the spontaneously present three kayas. This is called ‘attaining buddhahood,’ the ‘exhaustion of phenomena and concepts’ or ‘becoming a siddha.’ This is the time of gaining mastery over birth and death and the physical elements, and when effortless compassion and activity spontaneously occur to an extent that is equal to space.
In brief, the basic cause of al this is nothing but your present natural awareness. The sublime key point is therefore to continuously maintain your natural awareness throughout both day and night without any separation.
As for the thoughts that occur as the expression of this natural awareness, be they gross or subtle, don’t analyze them and don’t follow them either. Don’t try to bring them back into your meditation or obstruct them. If you succeed in simply recognizing the sudden occurrence of a thought, then let be in just that.
When it happens that you get involved in thoughts that recollect the past or entertain the future, then let be directly in awareness. If a thought pattern continues, there is no need for a separate antidote since whatever takes place is liberated by itself. What occurs spontaneously is the radiance of your own mind. To see it with vivid clarity is the essential instruction!
It is your mind’s natural disposition to spontaneously reflect. Consequently, spend your life within this state of carefree and pervasive openness, of undistracted nonmeditation, of knowing one thing that liberates all – in which all that appears and exists is dharmakaya, samsara, and nirvana are indivisible, and arising and liberation are simultaneous. If you spend your entire life in spiritual activities within this kind of state, in which the thinker and the object of thought are an undivided unity, there is not a single doubt that you will capture the ‘stronghold of nonregression’ in this very life.
Wherever the person stays who has abandoned all activities,
That place is itself the buddhafield.
If you can supplicate without duplicity (deception),
All that appears and exists is itself the guru’s mandala.
As soon as you cut the root of the demon Ego-clinging,
You are permanently free from obstacles, misfortune and Mara.
The moment you understand that the guru is indivisible from your own mind,
The falsehood of seeming meeting and separation spontaneously falls apart.
Once you resolve that samsara and nirvana are the display of awareness,
Who is there to experience the pain of any lower realm?
When realizing that your natural awareness is the primordially free dharmakaya,
What then is the point of entertaining hopes and fears about the paths and bhumis?
In the meeting of the already acquainted mother and child luminosities,
What is the use of fearing the collapse of the illusory body?
When dying, die within the primordially pure space of luminosity!
While alive there is nothing more important than training in meditation with unflagging constancy!
You may compare all the sutras, tantras and oral instructions,
But the essence of realization is nothing other than this!
This is exactly the ultimate and essential heart advice!
My last words at death are also none other than this!
All worthy one who have devotion to me,
Don’t pay lip-service to this, but assimilate its meaning!
The experience of original wakefulness will then dawn from within your hearts,
And you will arrive at buddhahood in a single instant!
By whatever merit there may be from this advice
May all my old mothers, sentient beings, filling space, be liberated!
Mangalam.
Translated at Nagi Gompa by Erik Pema Kunsang.
Edited at Nagi Gompa by Michael Tweed February 7, 1995.
Copyright 1994 Rangjung Yeshe Translations & Publications, All rights reserved.
This text was translated for the use at the yearly seminar conducted by Rangjung Yeshe Institute at Ka-Nying Shedrup Ling Monastery,
Boudhanath, Nepal. P.O. Box 1200, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Tsele Natsog Rangdröl is also the author of Mirror of Mindfulness, Lamp of Mahamudra, Empowerment, Heart of the Matter, and Circle of the Sun.