The third section of Gampopa’s instructions for mahamudra is about refining how thatness arises. The first of the four instructions in this section is about groundwork:
For groundwork, practice teacher-union with faith, devotion, and awe three times a day and three times at night.
This one sentence is a bit of a challenge for this newsletter. There are five topics here:
Groundwork
Teacher-union practice
Prayer
Faith, devotion, and awe
Do you need an actual teacher
Groundwork
Many people regard groundwork as mere preliminaries to practice, that is, the stuff you have to do before you do the real stuff. This is an unfortunate misconception. Groundwork is what makes it possible for you to practice effectively. The more work you put into groundwork, the fewer problems and disruptions you are likely to encounter in your spiritual journey.
In mahamudra, many practitioners hold onto ideas about how mahamudra should be, how it should feel, what the experience should be, etc. When they sit and do nothing, they hold themselves a little apart from the practice. They are unwilling or unable to sit in the mess of confusion and reactivity they encounter and let the turmoil act on them. Often, they do not have the skills to recognize when they are distracted. Nor do they know how to move in the direction of balance when they are out of balance. Nor do they have the mental strength and stamina to maintain attention when reactive patterns come up.
Instead of experiencing direct awareness, they try to understand direct awareness conceptually. Instead of accepting what arises in practice, they strive for ideal states. Instead of meeting and resting in what does arise, they try to change or eliminate anything that does not fit their understanding of how practice should be or how practice works. As a result, they relate to practice as something that they do, thus reinforcing the sense of a separate self. They try to think through the practice and control what they experience. By holding onto a separate self and trying to control experience conceptually, they prevent the practice from working on them.
Groundwork properly done is quite ruthless. The rigor and demands of groundwork cut through expectations and efforts to control what you experience. Groundwork goes a long way to reducing, if not eliminating, such problems. It also creates conditions in you in which the practice itself may be able to flower.
Teacher-union practice
In teacher-union practice, you hold your teacher in mind and pray to him or to her. Your teacher is mahamudra. The living human being with whom you meet and talk is how you, at this point in your practice, experience mahamudra. This is a mythic way of speaking, a way of speaking that goes much deeper than a literal interpretation. Traditionally, to assist you here, when you practice teacher-union, you may think of your teacher as Vajradhara, Padmasambhava, Je Tsong Khapa, Machik Lapdrön, or any other figure who represents this understanding to you. Whether this figure is someone you have met or not, whether from the past or present, whether historical or mythic, whether male or female does not matter. What matters is that this figure, this presence, expresses for you what you yearn to know. You pray from there.
When you do teacher-union practice, all your teachers are present, all of them, from your earliest years to the present day — your mentors, your coaches, your trainers, anyone and everyone from whom you have learned something that meant something to you or something that has stayed with you and has helped bring you to where you are right now. Even if you do not think of them explicitly, sooner or later as you go deeper into this practice, they show up, and you melt in gratitude for how they helped you come to this point, whether they did so gently or harshly, wittingly or unwittingly, or intentionally or unintentionally.
Prayer
In the Tibetan tradition, there are several different kinds of prayer. In teacher-union practice, the word for prayer comes from the verb to throw seeds out — your requests are seeds that you are sowing in a field. There are hundreds of teacher-union prayers in the Tibetan tradition. Find one that speaks to you. Some are very short, a few syllables, a virtual mantra. Others are longer, up to six or even eight lines, each line freighted with meaning.
Pray to touch what you yearn to touch. Pray to see what you yearn to see. Pray to know what you yearn to know. Pray to be in a way that you are not. In sowing a field with these requests, you are reaching out to what you do not know. You are praying to form a connection, however tenuous, with something that is beyond your touch, beyond your knowing, beyond your being. When you pray, let yourself feel the yearning burning in your heart and mind. Feel it burn and burn, even to the point that it moves you to tears, Let yourself feel this fire until you know that it cannot be put out, even if you wanted to put it out.
When you pray this way, you may encounter anger, fear, pride, greed, frustration, depression, darkness, helplessness, abandonment, and oblivion — everything under the sun, under the moon, under the stars, and everything upon which no light has ever shone. It is just you and your teacher, and your teacher’s silence is deafening. You see that you, yourself, are responsible for whatever arises. You, yourself, have to meet it, however you can. At the same time, you may encounter bliss beyond conception, gratitude beyond expression, and peace beyond expectation, waves upon waves that leave you gasping for breath. You have no say in what arises, no control at all. Yet a feeling of connection begins to form. To what you have no idea. It leaves you utterly speechless in awe and wonder. Everything, good or bad, that you thought you knew or understood falls away and you are left naked and alone in a vastness of devastating unknowing.
At the end of your practice session, feel the presence of your teacher, the presence of mahamudra, dissolving into you. The body, mind, and heart of mahamudra join with your body, mind, and heart — pure clear water pouring into pure clear water — and there you rest.
Faith, devotion, and awe
As Gampopa wrote earlier, faith, devotion, and awe are the genesis of mahamudra. I have chosen these three words to translate the Tibetan phrase dad pa dang mos gus (pron. dä pa dang mö gü).
Faith is the willingness to open to whatever arises in our lives. We develop faith through prayer and practice. As our practice or prayer deepens, we uncover an increasing capacity to live in this willingness.
Devotion is constancy in the care, respect, and precision we bring to what arises — whether it is bowing when we enter a temple, how we wash dishes or speak with someone, or how we attend to what we and others are feeling. As a student, I attend to my teachers with devotion. As a teacher, I attend in a similar way to my students with devotion. Like faith, devotion develops through practice, particularly when we have intimations of possibilities or a door opens unexpectedly.
Awe is the feeling of being intimately connected to someone or something infinitely greater than we are. It, too, develops through practice, deepening as we engage mystery more and more fully.
With these descriptions, it becomes clear, I think, why Gampopa writes that faith, devotion, and awe are the genesis of mahamudra.
Do you need an actual teacher?
Maybe it is just a generational thing, but it seems to me that this question comes up more frequently than it used to. Perhaps it is partly due to the wealth of material now available on the web. People find teachings that speak to them, and put together a practice portfolio of their own, drawing on the vast riches of teachings in a way that was virtually impossible before the web was developed.
Maybe this works, but I don’t know. What I do know is that if we look at any other discipline, playing a musical instrument, say, or martial arts, or the practice of medicine, the question of needing a teacher rarely, if ever, comes up. Further, no matter how talented a person may be in music, say, they are going to be a better musician if they study with a teacher. Why would spiritual practice be different?
That being said, it can be hard to find a good teacher. Then there are all the accretions of tradition. They can be wonderfully helpful on the one hand, and they can also be difficult to work through on the other.
Teacher-union practice in particular is fraught with misunderstandings. Many people no longer know what it means to have a religious or spiritual relationship with a living person, with a teacher. Psychological and cultural differences are other sources of confusion, and translation issues abound. In other words, the potential causes of confusion are many and profuse, and the problems that arise from that confusion can be long-lasting and difficult to remedy. It is for this reason that I have tried to spell out the various aspects of this practice as clearly as possible.
Teacher-union practice is not for everyone. No practice is. But if you choose to pursue it, you will almost certainly find that the stripping away of assumptions, expectations, and projections that inevitably takes place in the practice of prayer leaves you well prepared for mahamudra practice, as do the shifts into opening (faith), engagement (devotion), and what lies beyond words (awe).
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