A counsel of our Root-Guru, and the long history behind it
I. The Counsel
In one of his commentaries, our Root-Guru, the Tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal, says something at the very start of the path that is easy to read past. He is speaking of the opening practices, the nine breathings and the consecration of speech, and he says that in the beginning they should be done in formal sessions. If they are not, “dissipation could happen.” And he goes on: with this dissipation it is not rightly called a complete practice. One becomes the mere appearance of a practitioner, not a thoroughgoing, authentic one. In the part of the text that describes the practitioner’s day, the same counsel is given in other words. At the beginning practice must be gathered into formal sessions, “otherwise it disperses, and one becomes only the semblance of a practitioner rather than an authentic one.”
It is a quiet sentence, and it is aimed at a very particular type of practitioner. This is not the cynic who has no interest in Dharma, nor the open hypocrite. It is the sincere practitioner whose practice is everywhere and nowhere. He (or she) has received teachings and read widely, and he knows the vocabulary of the view. He may sit now and then, and he may recite when he remembers. He tells himself that the whole of life is practice. But his mind has never been gathered into one place for long enough to be changed by what it touches, and so his practice disperses. The word dissipation is exact, because it names what happens to heat or water or attention that is spread over too wide a surface. Nothing in it is dishonest. Everything in it is thin. From outside, and from inside too, it looks like a practitioner, and that look is all there is.
In the same teaching, he puts the other half of the matter beside it. In the formal session one simply lets be, he says, and the confidence of that letting-be must then be carried into everything between the sessions. That is what he calls integration with the view. So the counsel is not against the view, and it is not in favour of ritual for its own sake. It says that the view has to be given a vessel in which to ripen, and that the vessel at the beginning is the session. Without the vessel there is a semblance, and with it there is a practitioner.
The sentence deserves to be understood in its depth, and its depth is historical. It is not a personal preference of one teacher, and it is not a rule of one lineage’s discipline. It is the latest voice in a conversation that has lasted two and a half thousand years, and every layer of the Buddhist tradition has said some version of it. The Pāli canon said it in the language of the counterfeit and of heedlessness. The Great Vehicle said it in the language of the one who only aspires to go. The Yogācāra masters gave it a psychology, and the tantras gave it a daily rhythm and a pledge. The Nyingma yogins built a whole way of life around it, and the Great Perfection, which seems at first to dissolve it, turned out to rest on it. What follows follows that conversation from its oldest voice to the voice of our Root-Guru, so that a practitioner who hears the counsel today can hear everyone who has ever spoken it.
II. The Word
A word is where such a history begins, and this one has a good history of its own.
Our Root-Guru’s “semblance” or “mere appearance” renders an idea that Buddhist languages express with one word. In Pāli it is paṭirūpaka, in Sanskrit pratirūpaka, from pratirūpa, “a counter-form, a likeness”. The plain adjective paṭirūpa is an interesting word in Pāli, and it means suitable, fitting, the proper form. The Maṅgala Sutta counts it a blessing to live in a paṭirūpa region, a place that suits the practice. Add the little suffix -ka, which in Indian languages so often marks the merely-like, the diminutive, the imitation, and the same word means a counterfeit. A paṭirūpaka is a thing that has the paṭirūpa of the real thing: its suitable outward shape, with something missing.
The Buddha himself uses the word for gold. There is a jātarūpapaṭirūpaka, a counterfeit gold, and a saddhammapaṭirūpaka, a counterfeit of the true Dhamma. Our whole history is the history of the third member of that family, the counterfeit practitioner. Tibetan has its own idioms for the same fear. A practitioner may be one in name only (ming tsam), or in outward guise only (cha lugs tsam). All of them mean what our Root-Guru means: someone with the form and without the substance.
The history shows that the tradition has always seen two kinds of semblance, and they are opposites. In the first, the form is present and the substance is missing: the robe without the purity, the recitation without the practice, the ritual without the insight. In the second, the substance is claimed and the form is missing: the person who says “I am always in the view” and has never given the view a vessel, who has the vocabulary of realisation without the long familiarisation that makes it real. Our Root-Guru’s counsel is about the second. The tradition, as we shall see, has spoken forcefully against both. It matters to keep both in sight, because the cure for one can easily become the other.
III. The Oldest Layer: The Pāli Canon
The counterfeit gold
Here is the oldest and most famous statement of the idea, from the Kassapa Saṃyutta. The elder Mahākassapa asks the Buddha why it was that in the old days there were fewer rules and more awakened disciples, while now there are more rules and fewer. The Buddha answers that the true Dhamma does not disappear until a counterfeit of the true Dhamma arises in the world. Just as true gold does not disappear until counterfeit gold appears, so the true Dhamma lasts as long as no imitation of it exists. When the imitation arises, the real thing vanishes. And it does not vanish all at once, like a ship going down, but by a slow dissolving from within.
The sutta then names the causes. Five things, the Buddha says, lead to the decay and disappearance of the true Dhamma, and they are all failures of reverence: monks, nuns and lay followers live without respect and deference for the Teacher, for the Dhamma, for the Saṅgha, for the training, and for samādhi. The list is worth reading twice. The fifth item is concentration, the formal gathering of the mind, the very thing a session exists to practise. Lack of reverence for it is named among the causes by which the true Dhamma dies. The counterfeit is born where practitioners stop honouring the discipline of gathering the mind. The Buddha did not say this about people who fail to believe in samādhi. He said it about people who live without respect and deference towards it, for whom it has become optional.
The cowherd and the scentless flower
The Dhammapada gives the same fear in images. The man who recites much of the scriptures but does not act on them, says verse 19, is like a cowherd counting other people’s cattle (gopo va gāvo gaṇayaṃ paresaṃ); he has no share in the recluse’s life. The man who recites little but lives in accordance with the Dhamma, abandoning passion, hatred and delusion, with clear knowledge and a freed mind, has his share. A few verses later, a fine flower of brilliant colour but without scent is like fine words that bear no fruit in one who does not act (51–52). The scholar who knows the view and the vocabulary of the path, and whose mind has not been touched, is the cowherd in the pasture of the Dharma. The scented flower is the practitioner whose practice has changed him.
The Dhammapada is also severe about outer forms. Verse 9 says that whoever wears the yellow robe without having cleared away the stains, without self-control and truthfulness, is not worthy of it. Verses 264 and 265 say that a shaven head does not make a recluse of one who is undisciplined and false. Verse 313 says that a lax ascetic only stirs up more dust. Verse 311 is the most vivid: as a blade of kusa grass, wrongly grasped, cuts the hand, so the recluse’s life, wrongly handled, drags one down. Verse 70 has a famous story attached to it, of an ascetic who for fifty-five years lived naked and took his food on the tip of a blade of grass, and the verse says that he is not worth a sixteenth part of those who have truly understood the Dhamma. The Dhamma’s own severity towards the form-without-substance is already complete in the oldest texts.
Not for deceiving people
The Itivuttaka goes straight to the motive. This holy life, the Buddha says, is not lived to deceive people or to flatter them, nor for the sake of gain, honour or fame, nor with the thought “let people know me as one who practises”. It is lived for restraint, for abandoning, for dispassion, for cessation. The Pāli has a word for the person who practises for the look of it: kuhana, the pretender. The text is not describing only the knowing fraud. It describes a motive that can sit quietly inside a sincere person, the wish to be seen as one who practises, and that motive can turn a real practice into a performance without ever making it a lie.
The heartwood
The finest of all the Pāli images for our theme is that of the heartwood, in two suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya, the Greater and the Lesser Discourse on the Heartwood. A man needs heartwood and goes into a forest where a great tree stands. Passing over the heartwood, he cuts off the branches and the foliage and carries them away, thinking they are heartwood. Another takes the bark, another the inner bark, another the sapwood. Each of them returns with something, and each of them is mistaken.
The Buddha explains what the layers are. Gain, honour and fame are the branches and foliage. Moral conduct is the bark. Concentration is the inner bark. Knowledge and vision is the sapwood. And the heartwood is unshakeable freedom of mind. A monk, he says, may go forth, and then become content with gain and honour, and exalt himself and disparage others; or content with virtue; or content with concentration; or content with knowledge and vision. Each time he has stopped at a layer and taken it for the heart.
The sutta is a mirror in which every kind of practitioner can find himself. It does not spare the meditator. Concentration is only the inner bark, and one can stop there too. But the point is not that the outer layers are to be despised. A tree cannot be reached at its heart except through its bark. The semblance of a practitioner is the one who has stopped at some layer, at any layer short of freedom, and taken it for the whole. And the one who has never reached even the bark, who has the branches and the foliage of the Dharma, its vocabulary and its company and its reputation, and no practice, is in the least favoured position of all.
Heedfulness
The Pāli language has a single word for the root of the disease, and it is pamāda, heedlessness. Verse 21 of the Dhammapada states the contrast in its plainest form: heedfulness (appamāda) is the path to the deathless, heedlessness is the path of death, the heedful do not die, the heedless are as if dead already. The word is pamāda, from pa-√mad, to be intoxicated, to be careless, to be adrift. It names exactly what our Root-Guru calls dissipation: the mind spread thin, carried off by the day, never gathered. The Buddha’s last words, in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, are an exhortation against it: vayadhammā saṅkhārā, appamādena sampādetha, “all conditioned things are subject to decay; strive on with heedfulness.” Everything the tradition has said about the semblance of a practitioner is a commentary on that last sentence.
The rhythm of practice
What then is the cure? The early texts do not leave heedfulness a mood. They give it a shape and a rhythm, and the rhythm is the earliest ancestor of the Tibetan session. The Pāli suttas speak of jāgariyānuyoga, devotion to wakefulness, and describe it exactly. By day, the practitioner purifies his mind of obstructing states by walking up and down and by sitting. In the first watch of the night he does the same. In the middle watch he lies down on his right side, mindful and clearly aware, with the thought of rising. In the last watch he gets up and again purifies his mind by walking and sitting. The day is cut into periods, and the periods are for practice. It is a session structure, three thousand times described, in the oldest strata of the canon.
The idiom the texts use for how to practise is also a session-word. Practice is to be done carefully and continuously (sakkacca, sātacca), and the standard formula for a quality that has taken root is that it has been practised, developed and made much of (āsevita, bhāvita, bahulīkata). A single thin or scattered exposure does not change a mind. The Dhamma is described in the same threefold way as a good session: lovely in the beginning, lovely in the middle, lovely in the end (ādikalyāṇa, majjhekalyāṇa, pariyosānakalyāṇa). Tibetan will turn this into the three excellences, the motivation at the start, the non-conceptual middle, the dedication at the close, which our Root-Guru’s instruction to begin each session and to seal it with dedication follows. The shape of a session is a shape that the Buddha’s own teaching has.
IV. The Great Vehicle
The counterfeit upholders
When the Great Vehicle took up the Pāli inheritance, it kept the word and enlarged the counsel. The Kāśyapaparivarta, one of the earliest of the Mahāyāna sūtras and a core text of the Ratnakūṭa collection, which Śāntideva quotes extensively in his Śikṣāsamuccaya, is built in groups of four. One of its fours is a catalogue of counterfeits: catvāra ime kāśyapa duḥśīlā śīlavatpratirūpakāḥ, “these four, Kāśyapa, are those who violate the precepts while presenting the appearance of upholding them.” The key word is pratirūpaka, the same word we found in Pāli. The sūtra describes people whose conduct has the form of virtue and none of its life, and it is merciless about them, as the Pāli suttas were.
What the Great Vehicle adds is the claim that the counterfeit can live inside the bodhisattva’s own vocation. A person can take up the vow, wear the name, speak the language of compassion and emptiness, and be only a semblance of a bodhisattva. The vow, being so large, offers more room for the semblance than any other form of life.
The one who aspires and the one who goes
Śāntideva, in the first chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, gives the most precise tool the Great Vehicle has for this problem, and it is a distinction in the mind of awakening itself. There is, he says, the mind of aspiration and the mind of engagement. As one understands the difference between someone who wishes to travel and someone who actually travels, so the wise should understand the difference between these two, in that order (1.15). The aspirant has the fine wish; the engaged person has set out. They share one name and one direction, and the fruit of the two is not the same. A practitioner who has the wish to awaken and who does not give it a structure in time, a regular place in the day, has the aspiration without the engagement. He is in the situation of the one who intends to go, and who will intend it for a long time.
Our Root-Guru’s formal session is the point where the aspirant sets out. A decision made once, in the heart, is real. But it is carried out in hours, and hours have to be set aside.
Between the fangs of the afflictions
Śāntideva also gives the psychology of what happens in the other case. The eighth chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, on meditation, begins with the cure for dispersal. One who has developed effort in this way should turn the mind to concentration, because a person whose mind is distracted (vyākula) lives between the fangs of the afflictions (8.1). That is a strong image. The distracted practitioner is not neutral or merely unprogressing. He is in the mouth of the very thing the practice exists to escape. The first fifty verses of the chapter are a counsel to abandon the whole round of worldly activity and company, the endless small engagements, because they are what scatters the mind. The dissipation that our Root-Guru gently cautions against is here named by its Sanskrit name, vikṣepa, and its danger is stated: where the mind has no settled home, the afflictions have one.
The sitter who is rebuked
The Great Vehicle also saw the opposite risk, and one of its most famous scenes is a gentle caution against over-valuing the formal form. In the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa, Śāriputra is found sitting in meditation under a tree in the forest, and Vimalakīrti rebukes him. This, he says, is not sitting. True sitting does not manifest body and mind in the three realms, does not rise from cessation and yet shows the conduct of a being in the world. The scene is a gift to every later teacher of the semblance, because it shows that the sitter, too, can have only the posture. A person can sit perfectly and be absent. Our Root-Guru does not contradict this. He says that the session is the vessel, and a vessel is not the water. But the reader of the tradition should know that the Great Vehicle watched both ditches, the one who never sits and the one who only sits.
V. The Yogācāra Anatomy
If the Pāli suttas gave the counsel, and the Great Vehicle gave it a universal scope, it is the Yogācāra masters who gave it a psychology, and the psychology is exact.
The school’s very name is a statement of its priorities. Yogācāra means “those whose conduct is yoga”, the practitioners. The great compendium that grounds it, the Yogācārabhūmi, is a manual of the stages of a yogin’s practice, and its authors never lost sight of the fact that a Yogācāra who does not practise yoga is the school’s own counterfeit.
The central text for our theme is the Madhyāntavibhāga, ascribed to Maitreya, which gives the classical list of why meditation fails. There are five faults. The first is laziness, then forgetting the instruction (avavādasaṃmoṣa), then laxity and excitement (laya and auddhatya), then non-application, the failure to use the remedy when it is needed, and last over-application, the continued use of the remedy when it is no longer needed. Against them stand eight applications: aspiration, effort, faith and pliancy against laziness; mindfulness against forgetting; introspection against laxity and excitement; application against non-application; and equanimity against over-application. This is the very anatomy of dissipation. Forgetting the instruction is what happens when the practice is not gathered into a regular time: what the mind does not touch daily, it loses. Laziness is the long deferral. Laxity is the dullness of the unstructured hour. And what is striking is that three of the eight antidotes, aspiration, effort and mindfulness, are the things a regular session is designed to supply.
Kamalaśīla, who carried this analysis into Tibet in the Bhāvanākrama, composed at the time of the great debate at Samye, applied it to a famous position. The party he opposed taught that the practitioner need only stop all mental activity and abide, and that gradual training and formal cultivation were unnecessary. Kamalaśīla’s answer was that this is a semblance of non-conceptuality, a blankness mistaken for wisdom, and that real freedom from conceptual activity is the fruit of a long and graded training. That debate, as Tibetans remembered it, is the first appearance in Tibet of the question our Root-Guru is answering: whether the highest view dispenses with the structured training that is supposed to lead to it. It does not. The Great Perfection, as we shall see, was to inherit the question and answer it in its own way.
The Yogācāra theory of mind explains why the answer has to be so. The school holds that experience leaves imprints (vāsanā, literally “perfumings”) in the deepest layer of the mind, the ālaya we met in the history of the homeless. A cloth is perfumed by being kept repeatedly near the fragrance, not by being waved past it once. The path is the deliberate perfuming of the ālaya with the imprints of hearing, thinking and meditating, so that the basis itself is turned (āśraya-parāvṛtti). What turns the basis is intensity and continuity, practice that has been made much of. Seen in this light, the scattered practitioner is not merely under-working. He is exposing the cloth to the fragrance for a moment here and a moment there, and the cloth does not take the scent. His practice leaves no imprint, and the practitioner he becomes is a surface, a semblance.
VI. The Tantric Day
Secret Mantra took all of this and made it a daily form.
The Indian tantras inherited an old Indian division of the day into its junctures, and the tantric practice that came down into Tibet is organised in sessions (thun), classically four a day, with the intervals between them (thun mtshams) being the place where the session’s recognition is carried into action. The structure of a single sādhana, which every practitioner of the Ngöndro and of every deity practice will know, is the three excellences in liturgical form: refuge and the arousing of bodhicitta at the beginning, the main practice in the middle, and the dissolution and the dedication of merit to close. Our Root-Guru’s counsel to “begin each day with a morning session and seal every session with the dedication of merit” is the tantric day in a sentence. In the practice lineages descended from the tantras, the daily sādhana is not merely recommended. It is a commitment, a samaya, the pledge that links the practitioner to the deity and to the teacher. To abandon the daily practice is to loosen the pledge. The tantras understood that the semblance of a practitioner often begins as a gap in the day.
But the tantric tradition is also the one that has delivered the most brilliant mockery of the form-without-substance, and a history of the semblance must hear it. The Mahāsiddha Saraha, in the verses preserved as the Dohākośa, takes the outward signs of the yogic life one by one and holds them up to ridicule. There are those who smear their bodies with ash and pile up their matted hair, who sit at home and light a lamp, and who sit in a corner ringing a bell. There are the naked ascetics, who mock the Way by their very appearance. If nakedness brought release, says Saraha, then dogs and jackals would be released. If it were the absence of hair, then the hips of women would be released. If it were raising a tail, the peacock and the yak would be released. And if eating food from the ground were the cause, then why not horses and elephants? Saraha is Buddhist, and his target is the same as the Dhammapada’s, the sign taken for the thing. His laughter is the Dhammapada’s severity in a lighter voice.
The tantric ideal makes the point by an old etymology. The Tibetan word for yoga, rnal ‘byor, is explained as “arriving at the natural state” (rnal ma la ‘byor ba), and a rnal ‘byor pa, a yogin, is one who has arrived there. The semblance of a yogin is the one who bears the name without the arrival.
How does this cohere with the insistence on sessions? It coheres because it has the same target. Saraha and our Root-Guru would agree that the matted hair and the bell do not make a yogin, and that a scattered life of good intentions does not make one either. The one tradition’s laughter and the other’s discipline are two ways of saying that a practitioner is known by what has changed in the mind, and that nothing external can stand for it, neither the outward sign nor the inward claim.
VII. The Nyingma Yogins
The Nyingma school is the one that took the tantric day and made it a way of life outside the monastery, and it is in the Nyingma yogic tradition that the counsel about semblance acquires its sharpest form.
The yogic tradition of the ngakpa and ngakmo, the mantra-holders, lives in the household, in the village, in the retreat hut. The monastery has a bell and a bowl and a community that holds the day in shape, the shared hours and the discipline of the assembly. The yogin has none of that. His discipline is entirely his own, and so the tradition is more insistent about it. It is also a tradition with a visible outward form, the dress and the hair and the shawl, and a form can be worn without the life. That is a reading of the situation, offered as one, but it explains why the yogic lineages have been so insistent that the sessions of practice must be structured and kept: for the yogin, they are the only walls the day has.
The Longchen Nyingthig tradition, the inner treasure of Rigdzin Jigme Lingpa, gave the structure its classic form. Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher, the great guide to the Ngöndro, arranges the practice in sessions and gives each session its three excellences. Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo’s notes on the daily practice of the Longchen Nyingthig Ngöndro, the Illuminating the Excellent Path to Omniscience, instruct the practitioner to rise at dawn and to practise all that has been explained in four sessions, “or however many you prefer”, a lovely instruction that gives a fixed form and leaves a human latitude in its number. The Omniscient Longchenpa’s Finding Comfort and Ease in the Nature of Mind, whose guided meditations stand behind so many later Nyingma preliminary practices, is arranged for the same practice in measured sessions. The tradition’s counsel throughout is that sessions should be short enough to stay fresh, and repeated often enough to take root.
VIII. The Great Perfection
Here the history reaches the place where the counsel seems at first to meet its contradiction. The Great Perfection says that the nature of mind is complete from the beginning, that nothing needs to be produced, that the ground is not made by practice. Its tantras teach that the cause of nirvāṇa is present in every being, without difference from the buddhas. Does a teaching like that need sessions?
The tantra of the Great Perfection that we know best answers the question itself. The Tantra of the Union of the Sun and Moon, in its first chapter, has the Great Sage of Non-Conceptuality ask whether one meditates on these tantras or is freed without meditating. The Teacher answers: in this tantra there is no meditation. And in the next breath: to a mind that has become familiar beforehand, bliss comes in the interval between the two births. Those of the best faculties do not need the two births. The middling attain in the interval, and the lowest at the moment the breath is expelled. The tantra says the same again in the passage on dying: the pith instruction given beforehand is what makes the difference when the hour comes. The whole structure of the Great Perfection’s freedom from effort rests on the word beforehand. The tantra’s “no meditation” is the condition of a mind that has been made familiar. For such a mind, effort is no longer needed, because the work has been done. The tantra does not offer it to the mind that has not done the work.
And so the first temptation of the Great Perfection is the one named in the tantra’s own three classes. Everyone prefers to count himself among the best. The best do not need anything, and so the whole discipline of beginning, the sessions and the accumulations and the long familiarising, can be set aside by one who has decided that he is of that rank. The tantra has already answered this. If one is of the best, it says, the two births are unnecessary, and the proof of such a person is not a belief but what he is when the hour comes. Our Root-Guru’s counsel is the same answer in the voice of a teacher with students. In the beginning, he says, one must practise in formal sessions.
The root text of the Great Perfection’s three-statements, Garab Dorje’s Three Statements that Strike the Vital Point, gives the structure from another side: direct introduction to one’s own nature, then deciding upon one thing, then gaining confidence in liberation. The third statement is the stabilising, and our Root-Guru’s teaching makes the same point in the voice of his own Teacher: what one has realised one needs simply to stabilise, and that is the view of the Great Perfection. Introduction is a moment. Confidence is a training, and training happens in time.
The session of the Great Perfection is not the session of the effortful path. In the formal sitting, our Root-Guru says, one simply lets be, in the word he gives, rang bap, to flop of one’s own accord. That letting-be, carried into the interval between the sessions, is what he calls integration with the view. There are, in other words, two failures at the two ends of that sentence. One is to have no session, and to have nothing for the view to settle into. The other, which our Root-Guru does not name here but which the whole tradition knows, is to keep the sessions and never carry them across, and to mistake the quiet of the cushion for the freedom of the world. Both are semblances. The authentic practitioner is the one in whom the two ends meet.
The Great Perfection has always insisted on one thing that deepens the diagnosis. Semblance is not a flaw in the ground. The ground, it says, has never been touched by either obscuration, and the nature of every practitioner, even the most scattered, is complete. The semblance is in the carrying: in how the nature is brought into a life. A person who has been introduced to his own nature and who does not stabilise it has lost nothing but time, and that is a great deal. The semblance of a practitioner is the shape that a real nature takes when it has not been given a vessel. It is a pity. And our Root-Guru, who at the beginning of his very teaching says that his disciples’ road to enlightenment is long and that they had better be happy along the way, speaks of it in the voice of a teacher, not of a judge.
IX. What the Sentence Holds
Seen now as a whole, the sentence has a strikingly complete ancestry.
Behind it is the Buddha’s counterfeit gold, and his statement that the true Dhamma dies where reverence for samādhi dies. Behind it is the cowherd of the Dhammapada, the scentless flower, and the layers of the tree in which the practitioner can stop at any layer short of the heart. Behind it is the Buddha’s last word, against heedlessness, and the early texts’ fine rhythm of waking and walking and sitting, their idiom of practising carefully and continuously. It is the pratirūpaka of the Kāśyapaparivarta, the aspirant of Śāntideva who has not set out, the mind between the fangs of the afflictions. It is the five faults of the Madhyāntavibhāga, and Kamalaśīla’s refusal to let blankness pass for freedom. It is the tantric day with its four sessions and its pledge, and the laughter of Saraha at everyone who wears the sign instead of the substance. It is the yogin’s lonely discipline in the Nyingma lineages, and in the Great Perfection’s own tantra the single word beforehand.
The history also gives the practitioner something no single teaching can, which is the shape of the whole danger. The semblance can wear the robe, and it can wear the vocabulary of realisation. It can be the reciter who does not practise and the sitter who is absent. It can be the one who says that everything is practice and never sits down. It can be the highest view carried by a mind that has never been gathered. The tradition names all of these and has an answer to each, and the answers agree: give the practice a time, give it a vessel, give it continuity, and let what is realised be stabilised and then carried into the day.
And the history ends where it began. The Buddha said, as he was dying, appamādena sampādetha, strive on with heedfulness. Our Root-Guru says, in the idiom of his own lineage, to practise in sessions at the beginning, lest practice disperse and one become only the semblance of a practitioner. They are one sentence, spoken twenty-five centuries apart, and the voices between them, the Great Vehicle’s and the siddhas’ and the yogins’, are all saying it too. A practitioner who hears it today is hearing the whole of the Dharma’s long memory of how a real practitioner is made.
The counterfeit and the true, in the Buddha’s own image, are both gold in appearance. What distinguishes them is what the practice has done to the one who practises. The sessions are only the furnace. The gold is the mind.
