(Common and uncommon preliminaries as the gateway to Dzogchen)
In the tradition of Dzogchen lineages, you first need to practice the common preliminary practices, like accumulation of 500,000 repetitions or 100-day retreat. After that, you need to practice the uncommon preliminary practice. The common preliminary practice means this practice common with the lower vehicles, like understanding the difficulty of finding a precious human life, the impermanence of life, and so forth. The phrase uncommon preliminary practices means these preliminary practices are not common with the lower vehicles, but are needed to practice Dzogchen, such as discerning samsara from nirvana and turning the mind, which have been explained in Yeshe Lama, and so forth.
THE SUFFERINGS OF THE SIX REALMS 1st Day: Sufferings of the Hell Realms
After you meditate like this about the hell realms, you ask yourself, “If I don’t practice dharma at this time, when will I have the time to practice? Therefore, I should practice dharma diligently”. After your analytical meditation, then, you need to rest your mind for a little while in a thoughtless state, not following after past, not inviting future, not thinking at the current moment. This we call “stabilizing meditation”. It is just resting your mind, but is not actual Dzogchen practice yet. When you conclude your meditation, you need to dedicate the merit toward enlightenment with this dedication prayer: By this accumulation of virtues, May I attain all-seeing omniscience, and may all faults be annihilated, The whirling turbulent waves of birth, old age, sickness, and death; From this ocean of samsara, may I liberate beings!
(Death as the great revealer: karma, regret, and the practitioner’s readiness)
Those who do not have any wisdom in dharma will experience inconceivable sufferings and regret upon dying. Whatever was accumulated during his lifetime – wealth, fame, power, family, and relatives – will all be left behind when you die. You can only follow your own karma for what he has done before regarding those listed above. When death approaches, the dharma practitioner will not feel regret, fear, or negative emotions. They will feel happy when death approaches, regarding practicing the great vehicle of Sutra. When Bodhisattvas die, they know death is like existing from one garden into another. In their next life, they will be born with a successful life from their prayers, concentration, and powers. Even if they will be born from their past negative karma, they will be born with great compassion and bodhicitta. After that, they will exhaust all negative karma from what had been done before. Those who practiced Dzogpa Chenpo in their lifetime will experience even greater realization.
42nd Day: Suffering of Not Getting What You Want The forty second day’s meditation instructions are meditating on the suffering of not getting what you want. This means suffering from being unable to get what you want, and you cannot do what you wish to do. Everybody wants happiness, but it is very difficult to get what you want for your happiness. For example, many people wish to be rich, but their business fails and they become poor.
Quality & Benefits 52nd – 54th Days: Cause & Effect
When karma can be reduced by purification, we call it karma with uncertainty of its result. You may complete the karma through the six branches as follows:
- complete it purposefully, 2. do it completely, 3. have no regret, 4. rejoice for having done it, 5. not being purified, and 6. having potentiality from the ripening of result.
For example, if you had the karma to be born as a dog in your next life, and this dog was eaten by another; but now, you have met a Guru and received dharma teachings on how to practice, your karma has been shifted, and you will be born in a human life with the eight freedoms and ten advantages or in a Nirmanakaya pureland. So, the Lama’s kindness is inconceivable, and it is very difficult to repay his or her kindness.
BODHICITTA Arousing Bodhicitta – The Four Immeasurables 59th – 61st Days: Boundless Impartiality
(The four boundless qualities: impartiality first, then love and compassion)
Starting from the fifty-ninth day and the next twelve days (three days each), we will meditate on the four boundless qualities: (1) boundless of love, (2) boundless of compassion, (3) boundless sympathetic joy, and (4) boundless impartiality. This will start our meditation on the actual path. Please practice even more diligently than before. Boundless means to practice for all sentient beings; therefore, we call it boundless or immeasurable. When we give a teaching on the four boundless qualities, we give the boundlessness of impartiality last. But, when we meditate on the four boundlessness thoughts, we need to meditate on boundless impartiality first. The reason is that if you meditate well on the boundlessness of impartiality, love and compassion will arise naturally; and when you meditate on the love and compassion, your practice is not rooted in partiality. So, the fifty-ninth day of the 100-day retreat and the following two days, we contemplate boundless impartiality.
But, when you practice impartiality, it is not necessary to remember your relatives were your enemies in your past lives. The most important point is that you need to remember all enemies, those who you don’t like, were your parents in many of your past lives.
It is very easy to think about that when you see any being, and this is a very easy practice, which can bring strong results in your practice. If you can do this for one month or two months, even for a few weeks, you will see a decrease in your anger and hatred, while your love and compassion get so much stronger that you can not even believe it yourself. Even more, if you practice boundless impartiality, the next time you take the Bodhisattva Vows, you will never break your vows for those forsaken sentient beings.
77th – 79th Days: Exchanging Self and Others
(Tonglen: taking and giving synchronized with breath)
When you inhale, you see somebody’s suffering with your own eyes, or you remember another’s suffering in your mind. Then when you exhale, you visualize your happiness, excellent body, wealth, and all of your merit and virtue are given to them, and they receive them right away. When you inhale, you visualize whatever sufferings they have, take them into yourself to relieve them from shouldering heavy things. Therefore, the name of this kind of practice is called “taking and giving” (Tonglen) and “mind turning depending on breath”. Geshe Potowa practiced six years on only this. Therefore, he could abandon completely any self-fixation.
To practice, or pretend to be practicing, the Great Perfection, Mahamudra, or any other practice without compassion is like trees with truncated roots. Such trees are simply incapable of bearing fruit of high spiritual realization, or for that matter, any outcome that is beneficial to the sentient beings. We must therefore always refrain from indulging in such misconceptions of expecting fruits from a tree with no roots.
was such a frightful sight that you would not wish to think about, let alone see it personally. As the crabs are fried dry in the pan, I could feel their excruciating pain as they gather all their might and desperately start leaping in every direction, but alas, to no avail, as they could not lift the lid open. After witnessing that, we tried our best to save some money every month to save and free some crabs from that hellish damnation.
Fourth, we should not be angry if we think carefully the nature of the relative truth. When anyone harms you, this means that he is not actually harming you, but his delusion harms to you because his delusion has control over him, and he has lost his control completely to his delusion. So his delusion pushes him to do this even when he does not like to do this.
(Three stages of concentration: ordinary, discerning, and Tathagata)
In the concentration practiced by ordinary beings, you are attached to the experiences of bliss, clarity, and absence of thought in meditation and intentionally seek them; or your practice is colored by any affinity for experiences. That is called the concentration practiced by ordinary beings. In clearly discerning concentration, you are free from any attachment to meditative experiences and are no longer fascinated by concentration, but still cling to emptiness as an antidote. That is called clearly discerning concentration. In the excellent concentration of the Tathagatas, you no longer have any concept of emptiness as an antidote, but remain in a concept-free concentration on the nature of reality. This is called the excellent concentration of the Tathagatas. During the excellent concentration of the Tathagatas, your concentration is becoming in union with wisdom, and it is called transcendent concentration. Please develop your understanding of this in these three days, and then do the concluding practices the same as before.
If you cannot practice everyday for a long time due to business or job, you need continuous practices with the minimum of 1 to 2 sections a day. If you do not stop your practices, you will obtain stable realization in Dharmakaya day and night, and you will never be away from the Dharmakaya state. In that time you will obtain the same level of awareness holder as your masters. Within this single life, you will achieve varjadarahood. So, we need to contemplate in these last three days like above and do the concluding practices the same as before.
We have now completed the meditation on the Six Perfections, which are the precepts of action bodhicitta. In addition, we have completed the full 100-Day Retreat! Congratulations!
We are sure 100 percent that we will leave behind everything that we have done in this worldly existence, even our own body, which is the most dear to us. These never follow you when you are changing your life.