Point 7: Guidelines

The seventh point of Mind Training in Seven Points is called Guidelines. Where commitments (point six) are about avoiding emotional reactions and approaches to life that break your connection with practice, the purpose of these guidelines is to keep you on track. Through these instructions, you develop ways to meet what arises in your life, internally or externally, that enables you to use what arises to deepen your experience of emptiness and compassion.

Because the Tibetan word for guidelines is often translated as precepts, it is good to remember that in Buddhism these instructions are descriptive rather than prescriptive—they describe how a person who has trained deeply in this tradition meets the reactivity that inevitably arises in the course of formal practice and going about his or her life. These behaviors and ways of working arise from within, not exactly naturally, but from training penetrating deep into your system and burning out reactive habituations. If you take these instructions as precepts and, without training deeply, you try to do what they point to, you run the danger of making your body and mind brittle and frangible, and susceptible to unpredictable eruptions of suppressed reactive emotions. 

Before I describe some examples, take a look at the map at the beginning of this practice tip. You can also find it on Unfettered Mind's website: a map of the Mind Training instructions. This map lists all the mind-training instructions, grouped in the seven points. I have added an additional layer of organization with various subgroups in points six and seven. I came up with these subgroups when I observed that the author, Chekawa, clearly had a certain logic in mind when he wrote this text.

General Guidelines

For the first subgroup, a Tibetan saying comes to mind:

In India, practitioners practiced one deity and saw hundreds.

In Tibet, practitioners practice hundreds of deities and see none.

As Jamgön Kongtrul the Great once said:

When you study, learn everything under the sun.

When you reflect, keep an open mind, like the sky.

When you practice, do one practice and go deep like the ocean.

In general, you do better finding one practice that speaks to you, and then devoting yourself to it completely.

Reminder Guidelines

The guidelines in the second subgroup are ways to create an internal environment that nurtures spiritual practice and enables mind-training to go deep. To put it another way, these are ways that you develop to make it possible for the practice to work on you.

Maintenance Guidelines

These guidelines make it possible for the practice to go deep in you. Memorize these four groups of three and take care to ensure their presence in your practice and your life.

Extension Guidelines

The fourth subgroup ensures that you don’t end up in a comfortable practice cocoon. Keep extending and reaching out both internally and externally, letting the practice work more deeply and more broadly.

In reviewing these groupings, I see that it makes more sense for the first two in the last subgroup to be included in the fifth subgroup.

Guidelines for Addressing Imbalances

The fifth subgroup is about practicing in such a way that you don’t inadvertently create imbalances in your practice. 

Sometimes, despite your efforts, imbalances do arise. One of the surest ways to generate imbalances is to try to make something happen. In doing so, you are almost always indulging one or more reactive emotions, and that indulgence causes problems. These same instructions help correct imbalances by pointing you in the direction of balance. The main point here is to practice with a quiet consistency and let the practice work on you, rather than trying to make something happen.

Guidelines for Avoiding Imbalances

The sixth and last subgroup, which I need to rename, is basically about bringing a poverty-stricken attitude to practice, practicing from the hungry ghost realm. Such an approach to practice is always problematic. Boasting reinforces your lack of confidence. Hypersensitivity reinforces a sense of self. Impulsiveness undermines stability. And expecting thanks for practicing means that you regard yourself as special in some way. 

Conclusion

Mahayana mind-training is a complete practice in and of itself. In this series of newsletters, I have tried to convey an understanding of each of these elements of practice—groundwork, formal practice, practice in life, a condensed formulation of practice, what mastery looks like, what commitments are involved, and guidelines for nurturing practice and understanding. Any system of practice includes all of these elements, along with prayers—e.g., lineage prayers, refuge and awakening mind, dedication, aspiration, and good fortune prayers, etc.—that set a context and provide a framework for this practice. By way of conclusion, the prayer Opening a Path to the Sea of Awakening sets out a framework for the practice of taking and sending, covering everything from being a bodhisattva and releasing beings from the six realms to the nitty-gritty of the pain and confusion of daily life.

Point 6: Connection

The sixth point in Mind Training in Seven Points is about maintaining a connection with the practice of Mind Training. This practice element comes into play when a fundamental shift in awareness and experience reveals to you the possibility of living in the union of compassion and emptiness. Such a shift needs to nurtured, not by trying to hold onto it, but by coming into it again and again until its place in your formal practice and in your life has become strong and stable.

For this aspect of practice, Chekawa Yeshe Dorje, the 12^th century author of Mind Training in Seven Points, uses the Tibetan term dam tshig (Pron. damtsik, Skt. samaya). Samaya is usually associated with Vajrayana, and it is somewhat unusual to find it in a system of practice based in the sutras. However, in his introduction to The Great Path of Awakening, his own commentary on Mind Training in Seven Points, the 19^th century master Jamgön Kongtrul notes that while Mind Training in Seven Points stands firmly in the teachings of the sutras, it partakes of the tantras, that is, of Vajrayana. It is for this reason that I have always regarded Mind Training in Seven Points not only as a potent practice in its own right, but also as a valuable bridge into the practice of Vajrayana.

That being said, let us consider the term samaya. What does it mean? And what does it mean in this context? The term is usually translated as commitment, or as sacred oath. Etymologically speaking, the Tibetan means binding word, that is, a promise. The promise is usually taken to mean the promise to perform certain rituals, to do certain practices, to refrain from certain actions, and to hold certain kinds of awareness or ways of experiencing life. But when I look at the range of these promises, it seems to me that all of them are about maintaining a connection with the kind of shift in awareness and experience I mentioned above, and, to the extent possible, the transformation of experience that comes about through practice. 

It is also helpful to remember that the many lists of do’s and don’t’s in Buddhism are more descriptive than prescriptive. They describe how a person is likely to live and conduct his or her life when awake rather than how you should live and conduct your life now. (See a previous newsletter on this topic: https://conta.cc/3I8QYgN)

Many teachers, from Atisha in the 11^th century to Paltrul Rinpoche in the 19^th, have said that it is impossible to keep samaya and it has to be restored again and again. As an exploration, in the preceding sentence, try replacing the word samaya first with the word commitment, and then with the word connection. How does the sentence sit with you in each instance?

For me, the word connection speaks more to my experience than commitment. I am committed to practice, but I lose connection with it again and again. I renew the connection by coming back to the practice, or recalling the echo of transformation of experience, usually in my body. This feels more accurate than saying I have broken a commitment. 

Why did Chekawa choose this word? He was a notable scholar, and his choice was not arbitrary. He may have wanted this section to carry a certain weight. He may have wanted to emphasize how important it is to keep connecting with the union of compassion and emptiness. 

When you look at the actual instructions in this section, all of them are about avoiding actions and attitudes that break your connection with that union. 

Take “Behave naturally,” for instance. When you behave naturally, you do not act from a sense of self. When you act in a contrived or artificial way, you are acting from a sense of self, and the connection with compassion and emptiness is gone. 

“Give up any hope for results.” That one is pretty straightforward. Whenever you find yourself hoping for something to happen in your practice, something to happen to you, you are deeply enmeshed in a sense of self. 

“Don’t make practice a sham.” This one, too, is about performing. 

Finally, what about “Don’t look to profit from sorrow”? Well, if you are looking to make a buck, literally or figuratively, from someone else’s pain, what can be said about your relationship with compassion?

Once the possibility of living in the union of compassion and emptiness has opened up in you, both your practice and your life change. In your formal practice, let the flower of compassion and emptiness bloom in your heart. In your life, let what you do and how you do it, what you say and how you say it, flow not from yourself, or your self, or even from your Self, but directly from the understanding that has awakened in you.