purification

Guru Yoga

~ DudjomTersarNgondro

Guru Yoga is the method for receiving the direct blessing of the guru’s mind. There are two methods for attaining enlightenment. The first is the accumulation of merit and wisdom along with purification practices. The second is direct transmission from the guru’s mind to your mind.

Transmission really means receiving the taste of enlightenment. By analogy, when you think of a person, you get a direct feeling of that person’s qualities. These may be either positive or negative, within the limited concept of “personality”. Guru Yoga is the method for feeling and tasting the guru’s realization of ultimate wisdom. This realization is beyond personality and is always positive ~ the experience of totally faultless enlightened mind. As you experience the purity of the guru’s wisdom mind, it may appear to be coming from outside yourself. Actually, you are tasting the true nature of your own mind. Then develop and deepen this experience until you attain complete liberation. By thinking in this way, you will attain buddhahood.

A Commentary on the Dudjom Tersar Ngondro
Lama Tharchin Rinpoche

Livestream Webcast Ngondro Accumulation

~ DudjomTersarNgondro

Before we begin our daily meditation, we should clean our room and prepare our altar by cleaning it and making offerings. If we have no altar, we do not need to worry, we can simply visualize Padmasambhava in front of us.

The seven offering bowls which are offered on the altar symbolize the seven offerings:
🔸Water for drinking,
🔸Water for washing hands and feet,
🔸Flowers for adorning the head or hair,
🔸Incense for smelling to please the nose,
🔸Lamp for seeing to please the eyes,
🔸Perfumed water to sprinkle on the body, to refresh it, and
🔸Food to please the taste.
Music to please the ears can be an eighth offering.

The offerings which we make on the altar are symbolic. In our minds, we offer all pleasant things that we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel. We offer the light of the sun and the moon, all fresh flowers, all pleasing smells, all delicious food, and so forth, everything wonderful. Since these offerings are made to the Three Jewels and the Three Roots, who do not have any greed or desire for these offerings, they are made for the benefit of all sentient beings. After we have prepared our room and our altar, we begin our meditation with the common outer practice which is the four thoughts to turn the mind. These are:
🔸The preciousness of human birth,
🔸 Impermanence and death,
🔸The cause and effect of karma, and
🔸The suffering of saṃsāra.
By meditating on these four thoughts, the mind is subdued and one is led to renounce samsara.

Then we do the extraordinary inner preparation, which is the preliminary practice, ngondro. Within the Ngondro, there are:
🔸going for refuge,
🔸generating Bodhicitta,
🔸Vajrasattva purification,
🔸mandala offering,
🔸and the prayer of Guru Yoga

Thinley Norbu
Small Golden Key
Translated by Lisa Anderson
Shambala ©️2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Join in on the Livestream
WEBCAST NGONDRO ACCUMULATION
Sunday, August 18th at 11 am
with Regina

What you will need:
🔸Ngondro Text
🔸Prostration board, oven mitts or furniture slider
🔸Mandala Pan
🔸Mala

The Profound Preliminary Practice

~ DudjomTersarNgondro

The actual purification of your nature: the ordinary aspects are the four changes of mind; the extraordinary ones are the refuge, generation of Bodhicitta, purification of obscurations, and the two accumulations. Having practiced each of these assiduously according to the commentaries until you have truly experienced them, you should then consider the most extraordinary Guru Yoga, as the vital essence of practice, and persevere in it.* If you do not, growth of meditation will be tardy; and even if it grows a little it will be very vulnerable to obstacles and genuine understanding will not be able to take birth in your being.

So, if you pray with simple and very fervent devotion, after some time, through the transfer of the Heart-Mind realization of the Guru, and extraordinary understanding, inexpressible in words, will certainly take birth within. As Lama Shang Rinpoche said:

“To nurture stillness, experiences, deep concentration – these are common things.
But very rare is the realization born from within through the Guru’s blessings, which arise by the power of enthusiastic faith.”

Therefore, the birth of understanding in your nature of the meaning of the Great Perfection depends upon these preliminaries. That was what Je-Drigung meant when he said:

“Other teachings consider the main practice profound, but here it is the preliminary practices that we consider profound.”

* The four changes of mind arise from the contemplation of the preciousness and rarity of the human body, of the impermanence of all things, of the ineluctable law of cause and effect and of the imperfections and sufferings of Samsara. The Guru Yoga of Lamai Nal-jor, literally union with the Guru’s nature, is not only the essence of the preliminaries but also of all practices.

Extracting the Quintessence of Accomplishment  ~ pages 5-6
by Jigdral Yeshe Dorje
Translated according to the golden explanations of  Tulku Thondup Rinpoche,
Dungsey Trinley Norbu Rinpoche, and Taklung Tsetrul Rinpoche,
and with the kind assistance of many vajra brothers and sisters.
Originally published in 1979 by Orgyan Kunsang Chökhorling
Reprinted in 1998 by Vajrayana Foundation