Bending Mind Toward Good
Advice on Bending Mind Toward the Good[1]
by Khenchen Ngawang Palzang
Grandsire of a hundred siddhas—great scholar, Vimalamitra,
And you who fully embraced the spectacle of intentional emanation,
Lord of conquerors, Longchen Rabjam—
You are my unfailing refuge; not just now, but in the concatenation of my lives.
Emanation of the victorious ones, please carry out the victorious ones' enlightened activity.
The heart of the victorious ones' teachings is the Supreme Vehicle, the Great Perfection.
You who fly the victory banner of the teachings in the ten directions,
Please shine the Sun of the Teachings[2] on the lotus lake of my soul![3]
Cultivated for eons, your noble aspirations and virtues have ripened in season.
To you worthy ones who have committed yourselves to virtue,
I will give a bit of advice on bending this mind even more toward the good.[4]
With all my heart, I ask you to listen well to this advice!
Now that you have attained this precious human body with its freedoms and advantages,
If you do not strive in the Dharma with joyful enthusiasm,
Liberation, what the holy Dharma has to offer, will not come to you.
This is why you should throw yourself into the authentic Dharma.
If you don’t goad yourself with the contemplations of impermanence and death,
At your life's end, Dharma’s defenses will not come to you.
This is why you should throw yourself into goodness all day and all night.
This life’s schemes are like ripples on water.
Saṃsāra’s trifling affairs are never finished.
All that effort you put into them—ask yourself if it’s really meaningful.
Get rid of the eight delusions’ confusions as you would weeds overgrowing your path.[5]
If you don’t abandon confusion about all this life’s appearances,
You will not accomplish the holy Dharma—what is truly meaningful.
This is why you should think hard, deep in your soul,
About the virtues that will help you when you’re dying.
When you’re dying, nothing will help or harm you but the good and bad things you’ve done.
If you don’t contemplate the consequences of your good and bad actions,
You will never mix your mind with the holy Dharma.
Get serious about doing good and not doing bad!
Here in the arena of saṃsāra, there is not one scintilla of happiness.
The dead of the past were like guests passing through.
Whatever they did is now like last night’s dream.
If it makes sense to you that saṃsāra’s brokenness is non-existent by nature,[6]
Why don’t you abandon your confused obsession with all these appearances?
In light of all this, you’ve got to start by brooding on saṃsāra’s misery.
Next, you should rely on a virtuous and qualified guru,
And, finally, you should jettison your confused concepts about virtue.
A ho! I still have some advice for you!
Specifically, I will tell you the meaning
Of the precious special instructions of Luminous Great Perfection, the Magnificent Secret.
Please remember what I say.
The mind’s nature is the character of Great Perfection.
As its essence is empty, it is free from the extreme of permanence.[7]
As its nature is luminous, the extreme of nothingness does not obtain.[8]
Its all-pervading responsiveness is free from conceptual elaborations.
Like the sun in the sky, it does not hold back or choose sides.
It is beyond all reference points framing it as anything or everything.[9]
Please understand this nature of things, the fundamental condition.
The nature of thoughts is that they are the phenomena of confusion,
For they appear dualistically based on objects and agents of perception under the bewildering influence of unseeing.
When you hold what is not real as real, it sure seems real.
When you hold what does not exist as existing, it sure seems to exist.
When you take what is incorrect as correct, it sure seems correct.
What is by nature non-existent is like a magic show.
Please understand appearances perceived in confusion to be non-existent by nature!
Mind’s nature is primordially luminous.
The character of being, the Great Perfection, is uncontrived and spontaneously present.
When you investigate it and rest in not seeing it, that is when it is seen.
This is the view of the exalted wisdom of meditative equipoise.
Awareness beyond intellection is the transparent, naked character of being.
Its nature is the limpid state, the open expanse of empty awareness.
Like water merging with water,
Your own wisdom, seen for yourself—[10]
That is the view of the Luminous Great Perfection.
It is unaltered by tampering and clinging;
It is naturally flowing; a spacious, spontaneous equalness.
Within the enlightened perspective of freely resting in spontaneous presence,
Don't let your intellect meddle; rest freely in awareness!
Unrestricted by mindfulness, rest at ease in your natural home.
Without cultivating anything with meditation, leave it alone in its natural flow.
Great equalness is the naturally flowing innate character of being.
The most sublime meditation is letting things rest where they are, without altering anything.
That is the apex meditation of the Luminous Supreme Vehicle.
The nature of dharmatā is primordial luminosity.[11]
Within pristine awareness free from bondage and liberation, increase and decrease,
Not tied up by thoughts, not obscured by obscurations,
Is the pristine awareness that is the magnificent, primordially free innate nature.
Whatever adventitious confused thoughts arise,
First recognize that their true nature is freedom,
Then, elevating your posture and the gaze of your eyes,
Looking into the magnificent meaning of the enlightened perspective transcending intellection,
Thoughts free themselves like a snake in a knot.
Looking directly at them, you see that they have the true nature of freedom.
Being naturally free, they needn’t be rectified with antidotes.
They are free as soon as they arise, like a drawing on water.
Virtuous or negative thoughts, whatever comes up,
Are the expanse of dharmakāya beyond help and harm, acceptance and rejection;
They are the vast expanse of naturally traceless pristine awareness.
In the vast expanse of wide open, sweeping meditation,
Supreme conduct is the discovery of the natural place of ease.
That is the conduct of the Luminous Vajra Essence.[12]
Such are the stages of view, meditation, and conduct.
Through the stage of unwavering practice,
Confusion’s darkness is cleared deep within.
Then, through the stage of stabilizing transparent, naked awareness,
You intensify your post-meditative insight that discerns phenomena
And your compassion for deluded beings.
The complete integration of emptiness and compassion
Is the naturally arising sign of progress on the path.
It is the evidence that your paths of view and meditation have been without error.
One day, when you have realized the enlightened perspective,
Even the objects of distractions will arise as the display of dharmakāya.
The web of thoughts will arise as magnificent pristine awareness.
All of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa will be free in equalness.
Because mind is primordial awakening itself,
In the enlightened perspective, where there is no hope or fear of winning or losing,
Fruition is the attainment of the four confidences in the face of vicissitudes.[13]
This is the point of this brief discussion of the Vajra Heart.[14]
Just to avoid turning down a petitioners’ earnest request,
I, a distracted bhusuku[15] afflicted by confusion,
A man with no direction who has wasted his life in a frantic state,
Offered this rambling counsel full of meaningless words.
| Translated by Joseph McClellan with editorial assistance from Ninjyed N.T., 2024.
Bibliography
Source Texts
mkhan po ngag dgaʼ. "dgams pa grub brgya’i spyi mes" In gsung 'bum ngag dbang dpal bzang, 2: 225–230. Khreng tuʼu, n.d. BDRC MW22946_BB0792.
mkhan po ngag dgaʼ. gsung 'bum kun mkhyen ngag gi dbang po, vol. 1, pp. 114–118. snga ʼgyur kaḥ thog bcu phrag rig mdzod chen moʼi dpe tshogs. Khreng tuʼu: Si khron mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2017. BDRC W4CZ364088.
Secondary Sources
Germano, David Francis. Poetic Thought, the Intelligent Universe, and the Mystery of Self: The Tantric Synthesis of rDzogs Chen in Fourteenth Century Tibet. PhD diss. University of Wisconsin, 1992.
Longchen Rabjam. Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena. Junction City: Padma Publishing, 2001.
Wallace, B. Alan, trans. Buddhahood Without Meditation: Dudjom Lingpa’s Vision of the Great Perfection, Volume 2. Boston: Wisdom, 2015.
Version: 1.1-20241020
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The catalog title is dgams pa grub brgya’i spyi mes ("Counsel: A Hundred Siddhas’ Grandsire"), but it is almost certain that the piece was originally untitled and that editors simply used the first words of the first verse as the title. Doing so results in rather arbitrary titles, so, instead, we have extracted a line from the text and used it as the title. ↩
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Here, Sun of the Teachings is the name of Khenpo Ngaga's root guru, Lungtok Tenpe Nyima. ↩
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Here, “soul” translates blo, one of several words for mind that must be translated according to context. In general, it denotes the aspect of mind that dualistically judges, weighs, analyzes, and orients. In lines above, it has been translated as “intellect” and “attitude.” In other contexts, it is appropriate to translate it as “mentation,” “intellection,” “ratiocination,” “ordinary mind/consciousness” or nearly any other synonym that covers the active aspect of mind functioning within the framework of subject and objects. None of those more common translations sound quite right here given the prepositional phrase kho thag nang nas (“deep inside”). Therefore, here we use the term “soul,” not in the metaphysical sense of a permanent personal essence, which is doctrinally inadmissible in Buddhism, but in the sense of that part of yourself that thinks a lot, which we often call our “soul,” colloquially. ↩
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In this line “the good” is the same as “virtue(s)” above. The term means both, and since English style conventions discourage repetition, we take the opportunity to present overlapping synonyms. ↩
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“Eight delusions” here stands for the “eight worldly concerns,” the false paths of basing one’s happiness on gain and loss, feeling good and not good, praise and censure, and recognition and insignificance. In verse, we find “the eight worldly concerns” to have too many syllables to fit into a felicitous line. We therefore go with “eight delusions” in the sense that we are delusional to think that those eight priorities will yield anything but more suffering. ↩
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“Non-existent by nature” for rang bzhin med pa, the common doctrinal term for “without self-nature.” Here it is interpreted as rang bzhin gyis med pa. ↩
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We amend the locative particle la, found in both extant editions, to the ablative particle las. The former would be an ironic statement that there is freedom in the extreme of permanence; the latter, more expected spelling produces the statement “free from the extreme of permanence.” We base this reading on precedent and the repetition of the same structure using the ablative las two lines below. ↩
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In this line, we amend the genitive ba’i, found in both editions, to the ergative/instrumental bas. The former requires a contorted reading and disrupts what seems to be a repeated grammatical structure in the passage’s lines. ↩
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Resonant words are found in chapter nine of Longchen Rabjam’s Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena: gang yin kun yin yin min 'ga' med pas/_/gang snang gang shar 'dem ka med par grol (“There is not the slightest sense of there being anything, or everything, or even something that "is" or "is not" (Longchen Rabjam [2001], 77). And the next line resonates with a line from chapter five of the same text: yod med spros kun zhi bar mkhyen ‘tshal lo (“Please understand this in order to pacify all conceptual elaborations of existence and nonexistence” (45). The resonances may be incidental, but we feel it is more likely he is directly paraphrasing the Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena. ↩
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Both editions read rang gi mthong ba, which would give the line "Your own vision." However, we suspect it should be rang gis mthong ba, "seen for yourself." ↩
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Dharmatā has been translated above and “the nature of things,” however, this does not work well when it is followed by the term rang bzhin, which is almost always translated as “nature.” We therefore leave it in the Sanskrit to avoid confusion between “the nature of things” and the more generic “nature.” ↩
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Luminous Vajra Essence ('od gsal rdo rje snying po) is a synonym for the Great Perfection. ↩
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The newer edition reads gdeng bzhin, whereas the older edition reads gdeng bzhi. We find the latter more plausible, since the following verb thob, requires a direct object and bzhin, instead, would create an adverbial clause. Wallace gives the following gloss for gdeng bzhi: "These four confidences are (1) the confidence that even if one were to have a vision of three thousand buddhas, one would not feel the slighted faith in them; (2) the confidence that even if one were surrounded by a hundred thousand māras and murderers, one wouldn’t feel even a trace of fear; (3) the confidence of having no hope in the maturation of cause and effect; and (4) the confidence of fearlessness regarding saṃsāra and the miserable states of existence" (Buddhahood Without Meditation, 191). ↩
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Vajra Heart is another synonym for the Great Perfection. ↩
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A Sanskrit term for a loafer who only eats, sleeps, and goes to the toilet. ↩
