Counsel to Chödrak and Wangchuk Rabten

“Thousand-eyed” (mig stong ldan pa) is a phrase imported from the Sanskrit sahasrākṣa, an epithet for the Vedic god Indra, the sun, or other divine entities. It conveys the general sense of “holy and learned,” and, here, Khenpo Ngaga is using a metaphor style (gzugs can rgyan), related to classical Indian kāvya poetics, whereby he compares his teacher, who abides at the summit of knowledge, to Indra, who abides on the summit Mount Meru.  ↩

The ten sciences (bcu phrag rig pa). The five major sciences (rig gnas chen po lnga): (1) craftsmanship; logic; grammar; medicine; and “inner science” (Dharma). The five minor sciences (rig gnas chung lnga) are synonymics; mathematics and astrology; performance (dance, drama, music); poetry; and composition.  ↩

The three trainings (bslab gsum) are the trainings in ethical discipline (tshul khrims; adhiśīlaī); meditative absorption (ting ‘dzin; samādhi); and wisdom (shes rab; prajñā).  ↩

Bhusuku is a Sanskrit term meaning “one who only eats, sleeps, and uses the toilet.” It was most famously applied to Ṥāntideva who appeared to be a lazy monk while he surreptitiously pursued his tantric practices. When applied to a hermit, it conveys the sense of the hermit’s minimal maintenance of biological function whilst engaging in no other ordinary activities.  ↩

Tentative interpretation of this ambiguous line. The first phrase, rjes las thob pa, is roughly synonymous with rjes su thob pa, regularly contracted to rjes thob and translated as “post-meditation,” as in times outside of deep meditation. It is then linked with a genitive particle to the next term zhu mchid, an honorific term for an epistle. Finally, the verb that punctuates the entire stanza is spros pa, “to proliferate/elaborate.” The main stumbling block is whether the author means that the letter he is writing to his students is about post-meditation, or if it is a letter he composed during his own post-meditation. The former is reasonable since the counsel that follows is largely about ethics and not much about deep meditation. The latter option also makes sense since the previous lines referred to his lifestyle as a mountain meditator who does not regularly write letters.  ↩

"Guide" translates ston pa, which usually refers to the Buddha.  ↩

This line is more literally, "[Those who], renouncing big houses, hold to autonomy in small houses."  ↩

"But it doesn't have to be that way" is very loose for the common conjunction 'on kyang ("yet/nevertheless/on the other hand," etc.)  ↩

"Sense of right and wrong" translates spang blang ("accepting and rejecting").  ↩

This is a reference to Abhidharma terminology related to buddhist karma theory. Among many other categories, there are the “five types of result” ('bras bu lnga), one of which is the “result of individual effort” or the “man-made result.” (skyes bu byed pa’i ’bras bu). Whereas many things, such as your basic psycho-physical character, are the result of long and recondite processes of karmic conditioning, other things in life can be seen more simply as the direct results of an agent’s actions. The Great Tibetan Dictionary (Tsikdzö Chenmo) glosses it as “One division of a fivefold classification of results; a result that depends upon the efforts of a living being or individual, such as a harvest that results from planting crops or the wealth that is created through a business transaction.” Alexander Berzin offers a more nuanced discussion: "Then we have man-made results or results made by a person, literally, and these are two types: man-made results that are produced or develop, and man-made results that are attainments. And both of them arise as a direct result of effort of a limited being. They don’t ripen from karma. For instance, when you bang your foot, the bruise is the man-made result of banging your foot. Or you do business and you make a profit; the profit is the man-made result from the business. Why does one person succeed in business and the other doesn’t succeed in business? Well, that’s a result that corresponds to their cause in terms of our experience, but that’s the result of something different. In other words, whatever profit we make, that’s the man-made result of making business. It doesn’t ripen as a karmic result from doing business. The only thing that ripens as a karmic result is the actual amount that we make: whether our profit is large or small. An example of the second type of man-made result (a man-made result that’s an attainment), would be the attainment of a seeing pathway of mind; in other words, a path of seeing, which would be non-conceptual cognition of voidness as the result of the prior moments or sequence of meditation with a conceptual understanding of voidness. That attainment is the man-made result of the meditation. It’s not something that ripens from the meditation as its karmic result. You have to bear in mind that man-made results are things which follow immediately from their causes in most cases. So, for instance, you bang your foot and you get a bruise; or you sell something for a price higher than what you paid for it and you make a profit; or you sit down and you do a meditation and at the end of the meditation you achieve an attainment of another level of mind. These are things that follow immediately from the action that is their cause, and they’re not something that ripen through a long process of karmic tendencies or seeds and habits and so on which are laid on a mental continuum” (Berzin, “Types of Karmic Result”). Thus, in this passage, it appears that Khenpo Ngaga is saying that maintaining one’s ethics (spang blang, “rejecting and accepting”) is up to our own effort. “A previous result improving” may refer to something like compassion or insight increasing through one’s meditation.  ↩

The five bodhisattva paths of (1) accumulation, (2) joining, (3) seeing, (4) meditation, (5) no more learning. The qualities associated with these paths would be, respectively, (1) an increase in aspiring and engaging bodhicitta and an increase in efforts to accumulate merit; (2) an increase in wisdom; (3) direct realization of absolute bodhicitta; (4) deepening and stabilization of that realization; (5) complete enlightenment with the overcoming of the subtlest obscurations.  ↩

"Compounded confusion" or "two-tiered confusion" (nying ‘khrul) refers to how we are afflicted by the basic epistemological and metaphysical confusions of a saṃsāric being, and, on top of that, we experience exacerbated or more specific and diverse forms of confusion. This is likened to how, within sleep, we experience outrageous dreams.  ↩

Noble ones ('phags pa’i skye bo; Skt. ārya) are those on the third, fourth, and fifth bodhisattva paths.  ↩

[Corrosive] offerings (dkor) are offerings made by the faithful to one they hope is a legitimate field of merit. Thus, these offerings are heavy with karmic responsibility and their misuse is especially disgraceful. See Gyalwang Drukpa, My Crazy Tale, “Root Text,” note 2.  ↩

This line is more literally, "Don't waste your life's sunshine; may your lives be long." We find that that "may your lives be long" (sku tshe ring) rings rather flat in English, so we add the more expected, "and well," the sense of which we believe is implied.  ↩

The "eight preoccupations" are more commonly known as the "eight worldly concerns"—being motivated to act by considerations of gain and loss, comfort and discomfort, being relevant or irrelevant, and being praised or criticized.  ↩

Just as a dog would have no interest in the stellar constellations you might try to point out, most humans have no interest in the maha-, anu-, and atiyoga teachings. Khenpo Ngaga uses the same phrase in another text (BDRC UT22946_002_0021): chos ’od gsal rdzogs pa chen po de/ sngon ‘phags pa rnams kyi spyod yul las/ dus deng song snyigs ma’i sems can la/ mkha’i gza’ skar khyi la bstan pa bzhin/ (“The teachings of luminous Great Perfection were a field of experience for the ancient āryas. By contrast, to beings in these degenerate times, they are like the planets and stars of the firmament shown to a dog.”  ↩

The older edition reads yang dag rig pa'i lam (“the path of genuine seeing”), which can also be “path of authentic awareness” or any number of other synonym combinations. However, the newer and usually more accurate edition reads, yang dag rigs pa'i lam ("the path of authentic reasoning"). While the difference in meaning is not minor, we see little reason to prefer one over the other. We therefore opt for the older version, finding it more amenable to English translation.  ↩

The three kindnesses of a guru are, in the exoteric context, the conferral of (1) precepts, (2) reading transmissions, and (3) guiding instructions. In the tantric context, they are the conferral of (1) empowerments, (2) tantric exegeses, and (3) special instructions, or upadeśa.  ↩

The Nyingtik teachings.  ↩

"Blighted by the frost [of corruption]" loosely renders sad gyis khyer ba, lit., "carried away by frost/cold wind."  ↩

“Childless” for rmang po  ↩

This list of three seems to come from Gampopa’s biography of Tilopa and Naropa (BDRC I1PD97374, p. 131). They appear in Kagyu anthologies, but we are unable to find a commentary on this specific teaching. We find a passage in the works of Tsasum Lingpa (BDRC I1PD108818, p. 542) that appears to borrow from this teaching: nyams len med pa'i 'chad 'dod dang / /ma mthong mngon shes bshad pa dang / /mi thub nad pa'i sngas srung gsum/ /de gsum chos spong 'dra ba'i rgyu/ (“Desiring teachings from those who have no practice; claiming mental powers while having no vision; and an invalid standing guard—these three are forces tantamount to abandoning the Dharma.”). Moreover, in another text by Khenpo Ngaga, we find the same teaching with alternative wording: ma mthong mngon shes ‘chad pa dang/ /nus med lha ‘dre de bdo dang/ /rmang po’i sri’u gso ba gsum// (“Claiming mental powers while having no vision; the proliferation of impotent gods and demons; caring for the progeny of the childless.”). [As we are more concerned with the general meaning than with arriving at a definitive rendering, the translations given above vary slightly even though the Tibetan for the respective lines is more or less the same]. Though we lack a commentary, the meaning of the first item (“claiming mental powers”) is rather straightforward. The second item (“caring for the child of the childless”) may refer to investing your time and energy into dead-end beliefs and activities, or in things that indeed do not exist at all. The third item (“volunteering as a [spiritual] sentry”) includes the term sngas srung which has been translated as “pillow guarding”—the practice of stationing a spiritually powerful person over a recently deceased corpse to protect it from molestation by malevolent spirits (see Cuevas, Travels in the Netherworld, 94).  ↩

"Records" (kha byang), here, refers to the tradition of logging all the empowerments and teachings one receives, since sometimes one might receive a large suite of empowerments or transmissions that one is not in the position to put into practice until more favorable conditions materialize.  ↩

This is referring to the third bodhisattva path—the path of seeing—in which one has direct realization of pristine awareness (i.e., wisdom, ye shes). Practically speaking, this would mean hankering after teachings on Mahāmudrā and Great Perfection.  ↩

In classical India, brahmin children were arranged to be married at a very young age with the understanding that they would only be together once they reached maturity. This could take many years. The young boy might fantasize about his future wife intensely, but any number of things might prevent them from ever meeting. In the same way, if we fantasize about being Great Perfection yogis, such realization may never come, especially if we neglect the accumulations of merit and wisdom, the preliminary practices, etc.  ↩

A slightly loose rendering of the phrase, "A great boor who is exceedingly arrogant" (ha cang rlom pa'i spyi brtol che ba).  ↩

The Nyingtik teachings.  ↩

A note says: to Chödrak and Wangchuk Rabten  ↩

Jönpalung was Khenpo Ngaga's home monastery in Nyoshul, which he founded in 1922 after retiring as senior Katok Khenpo. The colophon suggests that this piece was sent from Jönpalung while Khenpo Ngaga was in retreat. From his autobiography, we know that he was in extended retreat in 1927 and 1939, though there were probably many other shorter periods.  ↩