Source Text
Again and again, Yongdzin Rinpoche told me the importance of finishing all the preliminary practices. He insisted he would not teach me Dzogchen unless I completed the preliminary practice. The preliminary practices are meditations for a beginner to prepare for Dzogchen transmission. Dzogchen is the highest teaching of the Bön tradition. The preliminary practice consists of nine kinds of meditation practice.
These are: impermanence, generating the mind of compassion, mandala offering, hundred syllable mantra recitation and so on. A practitioner needs to practice each of these nine kinds of meditation one hundred thousand times, i.e. a total of nine hundred thousand. It seemed as though it would take a very long time to finish all of them. I was getting ahead of myself – I wanted to learn the essence of Dzogchen meditation right now. I prepared myself for preliminary practice and started it. In the Bönpo monastery, a Lama never allowed a student to start meditation immediately. In the beginning, a Lama directly taught his student the purpose of practicing, how to practice, and the result of meditation, in accordance with authentic scriptures. The student could practice meditation afterwards.
I nearly cried. Finding the answer solved already without thinking about it myself was the most difficult conundrum. I suffered deeply all night. Next morning, I told Yongdzin Rinpoche just the model answer. Yongdzin Rinpoche got angry and said to me: “You need to find an answer by yourself. It is meaningless to ask somebody else the answer. Consider this question by yourself tonight again. And come back here tomorrow morning “.
One morning when I woke up, it happened. Even though I was in complete darkness, clear light was overflowing all around. Right then, all my doubts about both the Dzogchen teaching and Yongdzin Rinpoche evaporated, disappearing without leaving any trace. Just like an old scripture says: “frost is melted and disappears by sun light.”
Because he gave me Dzogchen instructions in the form of lectures, my blind eyes hid the truth from me and I suspected him. I was now convinced of the Dzogchen view from the bottom of my heart. Above all else, “This is the nature of my mind.”
“Didn’t you say that I had given you everything?” he said. His words were the words I had said to him years ago. I felt as if he had pinched my heart with his two fingers. This was the mischief of Yongdzin Rinpoche, a Dzogchen master.
AI Summary
My Dzogchen Experiences by TAKAHIKO HAKODERA presents key insights from the Dzogchen tradition. The 6 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 6 are particularly representative.
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