We need heart advice like this!

How amazing! Listen, my two friends!

Now that you have found a free and fully endowed human body, so difficult to attain, You should accomplish your everlasting goal. You have met the one who is difficult to meet- Your Lama, the Buddha incarnate.

You then received the profound instructions, the swift path to liberation in this lifetime. This fortune has been won with your previously accumulated merit’s power, not with wealth of jewels. Therefore, with intense diligence, have your practice accompany you to the end of your life.

The teachings’ foundation is the mind of awakening. The Victorious Ones’ spiritual heirs spend their lives helping others. Lacking this, the hearer’s vehicle does not lead to enlightenment. If anger’s hailstones rain down upon virtue’s bountiful harvest, the fruit may be totally destroyed. Keep the watchman of mindfulness alert!

Individual liberation vows without self-control; Bodhisattva training without compassion; Tantric practice without keeping samaya, these cause rebirth in the hells. Empowerment’s foundation is samaya- If you keep them, tantric practice is the nectar of immortality; If you do not, it is like a deadly poison you have already consumed. With such potential advantages or disaster, such positive or negative effects, protect your tantric commitments as you would your life!

Having discarded one and seized another among the many deep, deep sacred teachings, you will not accomplish even one ultimate result. Therefore, be diligent in practicing one of them!

Apparent existence ~ all phenomena of existence and enlightenment ~ is the false design of your own mind’s delusion: Recognition of awareness as primordial dharmakaya is the view. To settle in the evenness of the natural state within the fresh, continual state of unimpeded original awareness (shes pa) unbound by dualism’s fetters: this is meditation.

To abide within a state of non-action during the ninefold activities of body, speech, and mind, and to conform your behavior to the dharma are the essential keys of conduct.

Not searching elsewhere for what is to be attained but to grasp within yourself Buddha Kuntuzangpo manifest, your own awareness ~ this is the spontaneously present sovereign result.

Know the true nature of view, meditation, conduct, and result correctly as I described, and cultivate their experience single-pointedly. You will definitely reach the unassailable state during this lifetime.

If my Lama’s compassion prevents obscurations by negative acts and pollution due to accepting undeserved offerings and gives the fortune to reach the pure lands to one such as I ~ without spirituality, neither a lay person nor a monk ~ I pray repeatedly that we, teacher and disciples, remain together as inseparable companions.

I, Yeshe Dorje, spoke this so as not to refuse both Chowang and Tsultrim’s insistent request: “We need heart advice like this!”

Wisdom Nectar
Dudjom Rinpoche’s Heart Advice

The truth of the path

While the causal condition for the path is the Buddha-nature, the dominant condition is the sublime teacher, because the path comes about through practicing his or her teachings, and realization of the ground as it is depends on the teacher. The actual practice of the path depends on the individual; the path itself is virtue that combines skillful means and wisdom and serves as the gateway to liberation.

It is said in the sutras:

Wisdom accompanied by skillful means is the path.
Skillful means accompanied by wisdom is the path.

And in the Abhidharma texts we find:

The path, in brief, is to fully recognize suffering, to abandon the origin of suffering, to realize cessation, and to follow the path of meditation.

It is by energetically and single-mindedly training in the general and specific stages of the path that comprise the Buddha’s doctrine, matching them to one’s own individual capacity, that one will gradually travel the paths of accumulation, joining, seeing, and meditation, all the way to the end. For the actual attainment of the result depends on practice.

Dudjom Rinpoche

Torch Lighting the Way to Freedom

View, Meditation and Conduct

The realization that all phenomena of samsara and enlightenment are emptiness inseparable from naked awareness is the view. To release present awareness within the spacious natural state and then to sustain the self-liberation of thoughts without grasping is meditation. All post-meditative activity done harmoniously with the Dharma is the conduct. The complete manifestation of that abiding nature is the result.

I, Vajra Jnana, wrote this in response to the nun Jampa Chodron.

 

Wisdom Nectar
Dudjom Rinpoche’s Heart Advice
Photographer: Sonam Famarin

 

About the Photo:
HH Dudjom Rinpoche Kudung Stupa and Throne Seat
at the Shrineroom Pema Osel Ling
~ Santa Cruz Mountains