Ascending the Mountain: The Stages of the Stageless

On the subdivisions of ground-rigpa, path-rigpa and fruit-rigpa in the Great Perfection Teachings of the Tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal

Note: As several rather secret terms and practices are alluded to in this essay, we ask the practitioner to recite Vajrasattva three times before reading it and three times after completing it.

Prelude: Can the Stageless Have Stages?

The Great Perfection possesses detailed elaborations of ground, path and fruit, far more articulated than is commonly supposed. They are not stages of rigpa itself, which neither grows nor diminishes, but stages of its recognition, its unfolding as display, and its final resolution into itself. The most complete doctrinal elaboration is the scheme of the eleven vajra topics, set out in the Pearl Necklace Tantra, unfolded in Vimalamitra's great commentary, and brought to perfection by the Omniscient Longchen Rabjam in the Treasury of Words and Meanings and the Treasury of the Supreme Vehicle. The most complete practical elaboration is the living path of the Longchen Nyingthig, in which Rigzin Jigme Lingpa gathered every method from the first turning of the mind to the rainbow body into one continuous ascent.

This is the paradox that every student of the Great Perfection meets. On the one hand the Seventeen Dzogchen Tantras declare, again and again, that there is nothing to cultivate, nothing to purify, no path to travel and no fruit to attain. The Omniscient Longchenpa's Treasury of the Dharmadhātu says that since there has never been delusion, there is no delusion now and there will never be. On the other hand the same Seventeen Tantras describe with breathtaking precision how awareness abides in the heart, along which luminous channels it travels, through which gateways it shines, what luminous appearances the yogin beholds in the first vision and in the fourth, what happens when mother and child luminosity meet at death, and how the body dissolves into light. And the lineage masters, from Rigzin Jigme Lingpa to Patrul Rinpoche and the Adzom Drukpa tradition, have taught that this very path begins with a person sitting down, straightening the spine, and contemplating that life is short. The stageless has a geography, and it has a first step.

This study follows that geography from the foothills to the summit. It does not name its steps, for the masters never numbered them, and a practitioner who counts steps is still standing at the bottom. Yet the steps are real: well over a hundred subtle shifts of experience and realisation unfold between the first tear shed for the suffering of beings and the final dissolution of the body into light. Some are shifts of feeling, some of the subtle body, some of view, some of recognition. They are woven around specific practices, and each practice, rightly done, brings forth its own transformations of the five poisons, its own changes in the channels and winds, and its own deepening of the recognition of the single taste of awareness.

The ascent proceeds in this order. First comes the view of the ground, the mountain as it is before anyone climbs it. Then comes the long and decisive work of the foundations: the vajra recitation, the four contemplations, refuge and bodhicitta, purification by nectar, spontaneous accumulation of merit and wisdom, Guru Yoga and transference. Then the special preliminaries of the Great Perfection: the Omniscient Longchenpa's sevenfold mind training, the holding of the mind, and the separation of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. Then follow the three roots of Lama, Yidam and Khandro with the development stage. The yogin passes through the twenty and then twenty-one Yogic Exercises of the Vidyādharas. He cultivates the four blisses with Yumka Queen of Great Bliss, distinguished into sixteen minute joys. Only then can path-rigpa proper unfold powerfully: introduction, decision and confidence, and the many measures of their maturing. The modes of liberation are experienced through trekchö. Then Direct Crossing with its four visions. The sixteen bhūmis of the Wisdom Guru. Then the fruit, and the modes of liberation that measure the whole way.

Through all of this runs a single thread, which Garab Dorje placed at the summit of his last testament: liberation. Through all of it too runs a second thread, the gradual unveiling by which appearances are revealed as the deity, sounds as mantra and thoughts as the dharmakāya. This unveiling is not an either-or, achieved at a single moment; it grows from the first imagined glimpse in the Guru Yoga of the beginner to the effortless display of the third vision, and its measure is the measure of the path.

One Awareness, Three Names

Ground-rigpa, path-rigpa and fruit-rigpa are not three awarenesses but one, named by its relation to recognition: unrecognised yet present, recognised and being integrated, and recognised without remainder. The Seventeen Dzogchen Tantras express the same truth through the image of mother and child luminosity, ma 'od gsal and bu 'od gsal, and their meeting.

The mother luminosity is the ground itself, the clear light that is the nature of every being's mind, unborn, undying, untouched by delusion or by liberation. It is present in the hell-being as fully as in Samantabhadra. The child luminosity is the same clear light as it is recognised on the path through the introduction of a master and sustained in practice. It is called a child not because it is smaller in essence, for the child is of one substance with the mother, but because its recognition is still young, intermittent and unstable. The fruit is the meeting of mother and child, which the Pearl Necklace Tantra places at the moment of the bardo: when the outer elements and the gross mind dissolve at death, the ground luminosity dawns nakedly, and the practitioner who has become familiar with the child recognises the mother at once, as a child leaps into its mother's lap.

The distinction between sems and rig pa, ordinary mind and awareness, governs the whole structure. Mind is the grasping that takes the ground's own radiance for an object; awareness is the ground knowing itself without that grasping. The Omniscient Longchenpa distinguishes in the same way between the kun gzhi, the all-ground or all-substratum of the habitual tendencies of all beings, and the chos sku, the dharmakāya. The ground of saṃsāra and the ground of liberation are one ground, but the kun gzhi is that ground as it is veiled, and the dharmakāya is that ground as it knows itself.

Three further names complete the picture. Rigpa in itself is ye shes, primordial wisdom, when it is fully manifest at the fruit. The ground's capacity to manifest is called rtsal, its dynamic energy or dynamic expression, and the Heart Essence masters speak of three modes in which that energy appears: gdangs, radiance; rol pa, play, the display of light and forms within the field of awareness itself; and rtsal in its narrower sense, the dynamic energy that appears as an apparently external world. These three modes run through ground, path and fruit alike. In the ground they are the potential of the Youthful Vase Body; on the path they are the field in which recognition is trained, from the radiance seen in trekchö to the play seen in Direct Crossing; at the fruit they become the three kāyas.

The threefold unveiling: appearance as deity, sound as mantra, thought as dharmakāya

One measure accompanies the practitioner from the first day to the last, and it shows more clearly than any other that the stages are real. It is the threefold unveiling taught throughout the Nyingma tantras: snang ba lha, appearances as the deity; sgra sngags, sounds as mantra; dran rtog chos sku, thoughts and memories as the dharmakāya. These three are the purity of body, speech and mind, and of the three kāyas. They are never achieved at once. They are unveiled, layer by layer, in a sequence that spans the entire path.

At first they are only words of instruction and acts of imagination. In the Guru Yoga of the Ngöndro the beginner is told to regard the place as the Copper-Coloured Mountain, all sounds as the guru's speech, all thoughts as the guru's wisdom mind, and he tries, and fails, and tries again. In the development stage the imagination is trained until the deity's form becomes vivid and stable, the mantra hums without effort, and the mind rests in the samādhi of suchness; now there are moments, outside of session, when the world in the evening light suddenly seems made of light, when the sound of wind is heard as the self-sound of the mantra, when a surge of anger dissolves into a bright and open space before it can harden. In the completion stage these moments become physiological as well as perceptual: the winds that carry thoughts enter the central channel, and thought itself loses its grip. In trekchö thoughts are recognised directly as the dynamic expression of rigpa and are freed as they arise; this is dran rtog chos sku no longer as a contemplation but as a fact. In Direct Crossing appearances literally arise as maṇḍalas of light and deities, and by the third vision the world of ordinary perception has almost wholly given way to the display; this is snang ba lha no longer internally felt or imagined but actually seen. At the fruit the three are not three: there is only the self-display of the three kāyas, and nothing remains to be transformed.

This is why one can speak of stages without contradiction. Rigpa does not develop. What develops is the degree to which it recognises its own display as its own. The tantras measure this degree with extraordinary exactness, and those measures are the stages of the stageless.

Ground-Rigpa Unfolded: The Mountain Before It Is Climbed

Ground-rigpa has no stages in time, but it has a precise inner anatomy, which the Heart Essence scriptures describe under five headings: its threefold nature, its sealed interior as the Youthful Vase Body, its outward shining through the eight gateways, the three ignorances through which beings miss that shining, and its abiding within the body of every being. These five correspond to the first five of the eleven vajra topics. The whole ascent that follows is nothing other than the gradual recognition of what is described here.

The threefold nature: essence, nature, compassion

The Pearl Necklace Tantra opens its summary with the words that reality, though inconceivable, has wisdom in three aspects. These are the ngo bo, the essence, which is empty, primordially pure, ka dag; the rang bzhin, the nature, which is luminous, spontaneously present, lhun grub; and the thugs rje, the compassion or responsiveness, which is all-pervading, unobstructed resonance. They are not three parts but three ways of describing one indivisible reality, as a mirror is at once clear, bright and able to reflect.

Primordial purity is the ground's freedom from every limit: it is not something, not nothing, not both, not neither. Spontaneous presence is that same purity's luminous capacity, the inner glow of the five lights in their unmanifest condition. Compassion is the ground's ceaseless readiness to appear and to respond. When the tantras say that the ground is the union of purity and presence, they mean that emptiness is never a blank and luminosity is never a thing.

The Youthful Vase Body

Before any appearance has arisen, the ground abides as the gzhon nu bum pa'i sku, the Youthful Vase Body. It is youthful because it never ages; it is a vase because its radiance is turned inward, sealed within itself like a lamp burning inside a closed vessel. This is called inner clarity, nang gsal. Here all the qualities of the kāyas and wisdoms are present, but not displayed. It is precisely to this inner clarity that the fruit will return, with one difference that the whole path exists to produce: then the radiance will know itself.

Ground-manifestation and the eight gateways

When the seal of the vase opens, the ground shines outward as gzhi snang, the ground-manifestation, like light streaming from a vase that has been broken. The tantras describe this shining through the eight gateways of spontaneous presence, lhun grub kyi 'char sgo brgyad. Compassion arises as compassion; light as light; the kāyas as kāyas; wisdom as wisdom; nonduality as nonduality; liberation as freedom from extremes; the gate of pure wisdom; and the gate of impure saṃsāra. The first seven open toward nirvāṇa, the last toward saṃsāra. In one luminous display the whole potential of awakening and the whole possibility of delusion stand side by side.

What happens next depends entirely on recognition. Samantabhadra recognised the display as his own radiance and was liberated in that very instant, before a single moment of delusion arose. The Aspiration of Samantabhadra, revealed by Rigdzin Gödem, describes six special qualities of that liberation: the ground was surpassed by its own recognition, its display arose as its own, the distinctions were discerned, liberation came through that discernment, it did not come from anything other than itself, and it remained in its own place. These six are the most refined analysis of the ground recognising itself that the tradition possesses. They are also, in miniature, the entire description of fruit-rigpa.

The three ignorances

Beings did not recognise. The Seventeen Dzogchen Tantras analyse this failure into three ignorances. The first is the bdag nyid gcig pa'i ma rig pa, the ignorance of single identity: awareness simply does not know its own face, though nothing yet has been distorted. The second is the lhan cig skyes pa'i ma rig pa, coemergent ignorance: born together with that not-knowing, a subtle sense of separation arises between the knower and the lights. The third is the kun tu brtags pa'i ma rig pa, imputing ignorance: the lights are taken as objects, the knower as a self, and the elaboration of saṃsāra begins, from the five lights solidifying into the five elements to the five wisdoms congealing into the five poisons.

This triad is the ground's own diagnosis of the path. The first ignorance is undone by introduction, for the face is shown. The second is undone by stabilisation, for the gap between knower and known is allowed to dissolve. The third is undone by the integration of all appearance, for whatever is imputed is liberated as it arises. And because the third ignorance has congealed the five wisdoms into the five poisons, every practice of the foundations that works on pride, desire, anger, jealousy and dullness is already working, from below, on the very same knot that introduction will cut from above.

How the ground abides in the body

The ground is not elsewhere. The Pearl Necklace Tantra says that the kāyas, families and wisdoms abide within oneself; that their seat is the centre of the heart; that the pathway is the channels; that the gateways are the eyes; and that the field of arising is the cloudless sky. In the precious heart, the citta, the Youthful Vase Body abides as a tent of five-coloured light. From it a hollow luminous channel, the crystal kati channel, rises to the eyes, and through the eyes the inner radiance shines outward into space. This subtle anatomy of light is not separate from the vajra body of channels, winds and essences worked with in the completion stage; it is its innermost dimension, and the long work on the channels and winds throughout the path is what makes it accessible.

The tantras describe this anatomy through the lamps. In the sixfold enumeration they are: the lamp of the abiding ground, the radiance in the heart; the lamp of the white smooth channel, the kati; the far-reaching water lamp, the eyes; the lamp of the pure expanse, the luminous space against which visions appear; the lamp of empty spheres; and the lamp of self-arising wisdom, awareness itself. Sometimes the list is condensed into four and sometimes expanded with a lamp of the bardo. These lamps are ground-rigpa as it is embodied, and they are also the gateways through which, on the path of Direct Crossing, ground-rigpa is recognised in its play.

Ground-rigpa therefore has a complete inner articulation: threefold in nature, sealed as the vase body, shining through eight gateways, missed through three ignorances, and abiding in the heart, the channel, the eyes and the sky. None of these is a stage. Each is a facet of what is always already here, and every step of the ascent is a step toward seeing it.

The Threshold: Posture, Breath and the Vajra Recitation

The ascent begins in the body. Before a single word of the four thoughts is recited, the Longchen Nyingthig places the practitioner in the posture of Vairocana, has him expel the stale winds, and joins the breath to the three vajra syllables. This is not a warm-up. In the vajra recitation of OM ĀḤ HŪṂ, the enlightened body, speech and mind of all the Buddhas are joined to the breath, and the lineage holds that this practice, carried to its end with the posture, would by itself suffice for complete awakening.

The posture

The seven points of Vairocana are the outer form of the inner channels. Legs crossed in vajra posture, hands resting in the mudrā of equanimity, spine straight like a stack of golden coins, shoulders spread like a vulture's wings, chin slightly lowered, gaze along the line of the nose, tongue touching the palate: the tradition teaches that these seven points bring the five principal winds, the downward-clearing, the fire-accompanying, the pervading, the upward-moving and the life-sustaining, each into its natural place. When the body is straight, the channels are straight; when the channels are straight, the winds flow freely; when the winds flow freely, the mind settles of itself in its own place. And the secret posture. Every master of the Heart Essence returns to this sequence of causes. The posture is the first instruction of the Great Perfection, it resurfaces in the Yogic Exercises of the Vidyadharas, and it is also secretly the last: Direct Crossing will simply refine it in unique ways.

The first transformations are humble and physical. The beginner discovers how crooked he usually sits, how the breath catches in the chest, how the shoulders hold years of tension. After weeks of daily sessions, the spine begins to rise of itself, the breath sinks toward the navel level (closer to the spinal column than is usually explained), and there is a new feeling of uprightness that is as much moral as bodily. This is already the first loosening of pride and of sloth.

Expelling the stale winds

The stale breath is expelled through the right nostril, the left, and both together, three times each, while one envisions the three poisons leaving the three channels. The beginner feels little at first beyond a slight lightness. With time the expulsion becomes a precise inner event: one feels the right channel and the left as distinct currents, notices which is blocked on a given morning, and senses the central space between them. This is the first direct acquaintance with the three channels, and it is gained not from a diagram but from one's own prāṇa.

The vajra recitation

Then the prāṇa and the three syllables are joined. With the in-breath, OṂ, white, the vajra body of all the Buddhas; as the breath abides gently close to the spinal column on the level somewhat below the navel, ĀḤ, red, their vajra speech; with the out-breath, HŪṂ, blue, their vajra mind. The ordinary liturgy suggests twenty-one repetitions, a gentle measure for beginners; in the oral lineage practitioners are asked to accomplish it far longer, a thousand times a day and more, because it is the root of everything that follows. The posture and this breathing are the essential base of all channel-and-wind practice and of Caṇḍālī itself. In the Indian completion stage of the Guhyasamāja, the mahāsiddha Nāgārjuna's Five Stages places vajra recitation as the very method for isolating speech, the gateway through which the winds are brought into the central channel. In the Longchen Nyingthig the same practice stands at the doorway of the Ngöndro, given to the newest student on the first day.

What unfolds through it can be described from experience, in a sequence that the masters recognise even though they do not number it. At first the syllables are mere words laid over the breath, and the breath is uneven. Then the mind begins to ride the breath, for wind and mind travel together like a horse and its rider; as the rider follows the horse, thoughts thin out. Then the three syllables begin to be felt rather than thought: a coolness and brightness at the crown with OṂ, a warmth close to the spinal column on the level of the navel with ĀḤ, a deep resonance through the entire spinal column back up towards the crown with HŪṂ. Then the breath lengthens and the pause in which ĀḤ abides grows of itself, without strain; a gentle heat gathers below close to the spinal column on the level of the navel, and one notices outwardly that the in-breath and out-breath are becoming equal in the two nostrils. This equality is a sign that the winds are beginning to gather toward the centre.

As practice deepens over months and years, subtler signs appear, which are the same signs that will appear at death as the elements dissolve: a shimmer like a mirage, a flowing, sudden bright sparks, a steady radiance like a butter lamp, and then a clear, empty, sky-like brightness. These arise because the winds are entering, abiding and dissolving in the central channel. The practitioner who meets them in the vajra recitation has already had a glimpse of the unfolding of path-rigpa. When the breath has become so fine that it is hardly a breath, the one who knows is suddenly naked to itself. Many practitioners receive their first unmistakable taste of the nature of mind here, long before any formal introduction, simply by breathing OṂ ĀḤ HŪṂ in a straight body and with the secret posture.

The vajra recitation thus contains, in the space of a few breaths, the whole structure of the path: body as OṂ, speech as ĀḤ, mind as HŪṂ; development, completion and the Great Perfection; nirmāṇakāya, sambhogakāya and dharmakāya. It is the first place where the threefold unveiling begins to be felt in the body, and the practitioner who returns to it daily never leaves the summit entirely out of sight.

The First Turning: The Four Thoughts and the Birth of Renunciation

The four thoughts that turn the mind, the precious human birth, impermanence, the defects of saṃsāra and karma, are the first training of the heart, and they correspond exactly to the paths of the persons of lesser and middling scope in Atīśa's Lamp for the Path to Awakening. They are not a preface to be hurried through. Patrul Rinpoche's Words of My Perfect Teacher adds the benefits of liberation and the way to follow a spiritual friend, and insists that until these contemplations have changed the practitioner from within, every higher practice will be built on sand.

The unfolding of the four contemplations

At first they are information: one agrees that life is short and that actions have karmic consequences. This agreement changes nothing. Then, often unexpectedly, at the death of a friend or in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, one thought pierces: I too will die, and I do not know when. The piercing passes, but it leaves a scar of seriousness. Through daily contemplation the scar becomes a way of seeing. The practitioner begins to notice the precious human birth not as a doctrine but as a fact of this very morning: the freedom to sit, the faculties intact, the teachings present, a teacher living. Gratitude arises, and with it a quiet urgency that Patrul Rinpoche compares to someone whose hair has caught fire.

Then impermanence turns from an idea into a perception. Seasons, faces, one's own moods are seen passing in the very act of appearing. This perception is the first, distant foreshadowing of the self-liberation of the Great Perfection, for what is seen to be passing is already seen to be ungraspable. Then the contemplation of saṃsāra's suffering opens the heart to the six realms, not as mythology but as states one recognises in oneself and in others: the burning of hatred, the craving of the hungry ghost, the dullness of the animal, the restlessness of the jealous gods, the complacency of the gods. Here the first compassion appears, not yet universal but real. Finally the contemplation of karma descends into the details of conduct. The practitioner begins to notice the small cruelty in a word, the small lie in a gesture, and to care. This care is the beginning of mindfulness and of ethics as a living sensitivity and resonance rather than a rule.

The measure of the first turning

The sign that the four contemplation have done their work is nges 'byung, renunciation, the definite wish to awaken. The masters describe it as the feeling of a prisoner who thinks of nothing but escape, or of a person with jaundice who feels nausea at a plate of greasy food. It is not depression. It is an urgency born of no longer expecting from saṃsāra what it cannot give. The eight worldly concerns, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and obscurity, pleasure and pain, lose their grip by degrees. Laziness in its three forms, sloth, attachment to trivial activity and discouragement, is undermined at its root.

In terms of the five poisons, the four contemplations work above all on attachment, for they dissolve the desire that holds to the appearances of this life, and on the dullness that lets a human life slip by unnoticed. In terms of the ground they are the first loosening of the third ignorance, the imputing mind that solidifies a world and a self within it; for impermanence, once truly seen, makes solidity unconvincing. The Longchen Nyingthig asks the practitioner to return to these contemplations at the beginning of every day for life, because even on the higher slopes the mountain's foundations must be renewed.

Refuge, Prostrations and Bodhicitta: The Great Treatises Condensed

The uncommon preliminaries of the Longchen Nyingthig can be viewed as the Bodhicaryāvatāra of Śāntideva and the Lamp for the Path to Awakening of Atīśa condensed into a liturgy, and like those treatises they are a graded training, not merely a set of accumulations. Each section works on a particular affliction, opens a particular dimension of the subtle body, and ripens a particular realisation. Refuge and bodhicitta, joined with prostrations, are the first two great steps.

The refuge that already names the whole path

Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's verse of refuge contains the entire mountain in four lines. One takes refuge in the Three Jewels; in the three roots, Lama, Yidam and Khandro; in the channels, winds and bindus as the nature of bodhicitta; and in the maṇḍala of essence, nature and compassionate energy. This is the outer refuge of the sūtras, the inner refuge of the development stage, the secret refuge of the completion stage, and the innermost secret refuge of the Great Perfection. The beginner recites words whose meaning will take a lifetime to unfold, and the sequence of that unfolding is already laid out in them: the path will lead from the Jewels, through the deities, through the subtle body, to the ground itself.

The envisioning of the refuge tree, Guru Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal in the centre, surrounded by the lineage, the yidams, the Buddhas, the Dharma, the Saṅgha, the ḍākinīs and protectors, is the first training in the development stage. At first the envisioning may be a vague picture felt or held with effort. With repetition it becomes vivid in parts, then whole, then alive, as an energy expanse experienced rather than just a cerebral visual exercise; there are days when the refuge field seems more present than the room. This is the beginning of the unveiling of the maṇḍala in which one is requesting entry.

The hundred thousand prostrations

Prostrations are the most physical part of the Ngöndro and among the most transformative. Their first work is on pride, the affliction that refuses to bow. The first weeks bring fatigue, aching knees and a stubborn inner resistance; one counts, calculates and bargains. Then a rhythm establishes itself, and the body learns to move with the breath and the recitation. Then, often without warning, old emotions surface: grief, anger, memories long forgotten. The masters say this is the karma of body surfacing, and the practitioner learns not to fear it, trusting the Root-Guru that it will be exhausted. Then devotion begins to flow; hairs stand on end at the sight of the refuge field; the body that bows may sometimes be felt as light or radiance already at this stage. Pride, which had seemed a fixed trait of character, is found to soften, and a natural humility appears that is not self-deprecation but a vast openness.

The work is also on the channels. The repeated stretching and folding of the body loosens the knots at the joints and along the spine, warms the whole body, opens the breath, and prepares the channels for the later practices of the winds. The tradition does not separate the moral and the physiological: as pride is released, the channels at the heart and throat soften, and as the channels soften, pride finds less purchase. Prostration is the first trulkhor.

Bodhicitta

The arousing of bodhicitta follows Patrul Rinpoche's sequence: the four immeasurables, beginning with equanimity so that love does not remain partial; then aspiration and application bodhicitta; then the exchange of self and other; and, as its summit, ultimate bodhicitta. This section is the heart of the Bodhicaryāvatāra itself, whose eighth chapter on the equality and exchange of self and other the Longchen Nyingthig practitioner takes into daily life.

Its unfolding has many subtle steps. First, love is extended easily to those one already loves and with difficulty to strangers. Then the meditation of equanimity reveals how arbitrary these preferences are, for friend and enemy change places across lifetimes and even within a single year. Then compassion arises for those one dislikes, and the practitioner is surprised to discover that resentment has quietly lost its taste. In the practice of sending and taking, breathing in the dark suffering of others and breathing out light, the self-cherishing that is the root of jealousy and of anger begins to crack. A day comes when, meeting someone in pain, one's response is immediate and unselfconscious. Bodhicitta has moved from the cushion into the reflexes.

Ultimate bodhicitta, at this level, appears as glimpses: in the midst of compassionate practice the one who has compassion and the one who receives it are seen to be equally empty, and the compassion does not diminish but becomes vast and light. These glimpses are the first touches of the inseparability of emptiness and compassion that the Great Perfection names essence and responsiveness. In terms of the poisons, bodhicitta works on jealousy and anger; in terms of the ground, it awakens the third aspect, thugs rje tsal, the all-pervading compassion resonance, which was present from the beginning and is now beginning to be actually felt.

Purification and Accumulation: Vajrasattva, the Maṇḍala, the Kusāli Offering and the Fire of Caṇḍālī

The middle sections of the Ngöndro purify the obscurations and spontaneously gather the two accumulations, and each of them is already an inner yoga in seed form. The Vajrasattva practice is a descent of nectar from the crown through the body; the maṇḍala offering offers the three kāyas; the Kusāli offering cuts attachment to the body in the fire of wisdom. The afflictions they dissolve and the experiences they bring are as distinct as the practices themselves.

Vajrasattva: the descent of nectar

Above the crown sits Vajrasattva inseparable from his consort, white and luminous. With the four powers, the power of the support, of regret, of resolve and of the antidote, the hundred-syllable mantra is recited, and a stream of nectar descends from their place of union, enters the crown aperture and fills the body, driving out all negativity as dark liquid, pus, blood and smoky vapour, insects, spiders, and so on through the lower doors and the soles of the feet.

The first effect is emotional. Long-buried guilt and self-reproach may come to the surface, and with them anger and aversion, the affliction that this practice above all purifies. The practitioner learns to feel regret without self-hatred: genuine regret is light, because it already contains the resolve to change. Then come dreams, which the masters list with precision in the Words of My Perfect Teacher: dreams of bathing and washing, of vomiting bad food, of pus, excrement and blood leaving the body, of flying, of the sun and moon rising, of crossing bridges or putting on clean white clothes. They are not to be grasped, but they are genuine signs that the karma of body, speech and mind is being exhausted.

The second effect is in the subtle body. The envisioned descent of nectar from the crown through the entire subtle body channels is the same pathway that the white nectar follows in Caṇḍālī. As the practice matures, the descent of nectar becomes felt rather than imagined: a coolness flowing down from the crown, a melting sensation in the throat and chest, a subtle bliss that spreads through the trunk. Without naming it, the practitioner is tasting, in its most gentle form, the descending order of the four blisses. At the conclusion, when the world has become his pureland, all beings have become Vajrasattvas, and oneself as Vajrasattva sequentally dissolves, one then rests in the state where there is no one who has done wrong and nothing to be purified. The confession becomes the ultimate confession: resting in the natural state. This is the first time traditional practitioners are deliberately asked to rest without object at the end of a session, and the quality of that rest in the natural state deepens over the years.

The maṇḍala offering: the three kāyas offered

The maṇḍala is offered with the plate and heaps of grain, and in Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's liturgy it is offered on three levels: the nirmāṇakāya maṇḍala of the three-thousandfold universe with Mount Meru and the continents, the sambhogakāya maṇḍala of the pure realm of Akaniṣṭha, and the dharmakāya maṇḍala of bodhicitta, the pure expanse itself.

Its affliction is greed and the poverty mentality that underlies it. At first the practitioner simply performs a gesture; then, rubbing the plate, he begins to feel the meaning of giving everything away: his body, possessions, merit, the whole of his world. A sense of abundance grows; the inner experience of lack, which had seemed a permanent condition, loosens. Generosity becomes natural rather than calculated. And something subtler happens: the habit of seeing the world as an offering begins to change how the world appears. Mountains, rivers and skies are no longer neutral scenery or objects to be possessed; they are seen as ornaments fit to be offered to the Buddhas. This is the second foreshadowing of appearances as the deity: the world as a pure realm. The dharmakāya maṇḍala, offered last, is nothing other than resting in the expanse, and the accumulation of wisdom is completed in that rest.

The maṇḍala offering has its inner energy channel equivalences, awakening the experience of the bindus, and the union of emptiness and clarity.

The Kusāli offering and the fire of Caṇḍālī

In the offering of the Kusāli, the mendicant's accumulation, one's consciousness leaps through the crown as the black wrathful ḍākinī, cuts the body, sets the skull as a vast cauldron on a hearth of three skulls, places the body within it, and transforms it through the fire beneath into an ocean of nectar offered to the four classes of guests: the Buddhas, the protectors, the beings of the six realms and those to whom one owes karmic debts. This is the Chöd of Machik Labdrön in its Longchen Nyingthig form, and its affliction is the deepest of all: attachment to the body and to the self that it seems to contain.

In some forms of the Ngöndro, and in the longer elaborations of the Longchen Nyingthig preliminaries given in the oral lineage, Caṇḍālī is already an integral part of this offering. The fire that blazes beneath the skull is not a merely external fire but the inner fire of Caṇḍālī kindled in the lower part of the body; it rises, heats and melts, and the nectar that fills the skull-cauldron is the same nectar that descends in the completion stage. Thus at the level of the preliminaries the practitioner is already working with the fire and the nectar, heat and bliss, the two forces whose union will become the four blisses.

The experience of the Kusāli unfolds. At first the visualisation is grim or simply abstract. Then fear might arise, sometimes strongly, for the body is being given away. Then, through repetition, the fear is seen through: what is cut is the idea of possessiveness. A lightness appears, and with it a fearlessness that carries into ordinary life. Many practitioners find that this practice, more than any other in the preliminaries, loosens the very sense of being a solid someone, and as it resembles phowa, many energetic processes build up at the fontanel and in the head. The channels are becoming subtle. It also builds heat: practitioners report warmth in the body during and after the offering, and the oral lineage explains this as the stirring of the bliss-fire of Caṇḍālī.

Guru Yoga: The Four Empowerments, the Four Blisses and Transference

Guru Yoga is the summit of the preliminaries and their bridge to everything that follows. In the four empowerments with which it concludes, the practitioner receives each day, in seed form, the whole of Secret Mantra and the Great Perfection: the development stage, the winds and mantra, the four blisses of the completion stage, and the introduction to rigpa. Transference of consciousness, which follows, gives the unmistakable experience of the central channel itself.

Devotion as a path

In the Longchen Nyingthig Guru Yoga, the practitioner arises as Vajrayoginī in the Copper-Coloured Mountain, and before him in space appears Guru Padmasambhava, inseparable from the Root-Teacher. The seven branches are offered, the Vajra Guru mantra is recited, and the Lama is supplicated with longing.

Devotion has its own sequence. It begins as respect, sometimes as mere admiration. Through supplication it becomes longing, a felt ache of separation, the very feeling that brought Rigzin Jigme Lingpa to tears on the night of his great revelation. Then come moments when the longing breaks open and there is a sudden stillness, with tears and the hair standing on end, in which the Teacher is utterly energetically present and one's own mind is momentarily without a centre. The masters say that the blessing of the lineage enters through precisely such openings. Gradually the practitioner comes to see the Teacher not as a person who represents the Buddha but as the Buddha, and then to see that what is meant by the Teacher is the nature of his own mind, the inner Lama. Patrul Rinpoche taught that realisation of the natural state can arise through devotion alone; the whole Dzogchen lineage, from Garab Dorje to Rigzin Jigme Lingpa, is a lineage of minds mixed through devotion.

The four empowerments: the whole path in seed

At the end of the practice, light streams from the three places of the Lama into the three places of the practitioner.

From the white OṂ at his forehead, white light enters one's own forehead. This is the vase empowerment. It purifies the karma of the body and the obscurations of the channels, authorises the practice of the development stage, plants the seed of the vajra body and of the nirmāṇakāya, and lays the potential for the level of the fully matured vidyādhara.

From the red ĀḤ at his throat, red light enters one's throat. This is the secret empowerment. It purifies the karma of speech and the obscurations of the winds, authorises mantra recitation and the yoga of the winds, plants the seed of vajra speech and of the sambhogakāya, and lays the potential for the vidyādhara with power over life.

From the blue HŪṂ at his heart, blue light enters one's heart. This is the wisdom empowerment, the empowerment of prajñā-jñāna. It purifies the karma of mind and the obscurations of the essence-bindus, authorises the completion stage of bliss and emptiness, in which the four blisses arise as the essence melts and descends, plants the seed of vajra mind and of the dharmakāya, and lays the potential for the mahāmudrā vidyādhara.

Then a second ray from the heart, or the light of all three places together, enters all three of one's own. This is the precious word empowerment, the fourth. It purifies the subtle obscurations of the all-ground and the habitual tendencies of body, speech and mind, authorises the Great Perfection, introduces the nature of mind, plants the seed of the svābhāvikakāya and lays the potential for the vidyādhara of luminous spontaneous presence. Finally the guru melts into light and dissolves into oneself, and one rests in the state where the Teacher's mind and one's own are not two.

This daily rite is decisive for understanding the place of the four blisses in the Great Perfection. They are not an optional appendix; they are already named and given in the third empowerment of the Guru Yoga that every Longchen Nyingthig practitioner receives from the first year of practice. The completion stage of bliss is thus the explicit unfolding of the third empowerment, just as the Great Perfection is the explicit unfolding of the fourth. The same rite shows the sequence of the four vidyādhara levels as seeds that later practice will ripen.

Transference: the opening of the central channel

The practice of transference, 'pho ba, follows. Amitābha, who is Guru Rinpoche’s ultimate own source, is envisioned above the crown, flanked by Avalokiteśvara and Vajrapāṇi; within one's central channel, straight and hollow, one's consciousness rests at the heart as a sphere of light; by engaging the secret syllables and the prāṇa in the secret way taught by the guru, individual consciousness riding on the prāṇa actually shoots upward toward Amitābha’s realm, into his heart and dissolves into him.

Here the subtle body becomes unmistakably real. The masters list the signs in sequence: the tingling at the crown, the swelling or softening at the fontanelle, pressure in the channels of the head and around the crown (almost like a permanent hallow developing), a sense of heat and shimmering radiance in the geography of the spinal column, sometimes a drop of clear fluid or blood at the crown, and, as a traditional test, the insertion of a stalk of kusha grass into the opening. These outer and inner signs show that the central channel has been opened at its upper end. For many practitioners, this is the first time the central channel is not an idea but a felt passage from heart to crown. It is also the most explicit rehearsal of death in the preliminaries, and a practitioner who has accomplished it faces dying with a new confidence (and a new urgency to actually traverse all the stages of the Dzogchen path, to reach the actual main practice; not to waste one’s life merely in energetic experiences and exhillarating moments).

Mind Training for the Great Perfection

In the Adzom Drukpa tradition, the general preliminaries are followed by special trainings that belong to the Great Perfection itself, and the first of these is blo sbyong, mind training. Its principal form here is the sevenfold mind training of the Omniscient Longchenpa, drawn from the Tantra of the Sole Offspring, one of the Seventeen Dzogchen Tantras, and expanded by Rigzin Jigme Lingpa in his Steps to Liberation. Its seventh training already contains the bliss of Caṇḍālī, the clarity of the winds and the nonconceptuality of the natural state, so that mind training opens directly into the subtle body and into rigpa.

The sevenfold training

The first training is impermanence, contemplated outwardly in the world and the seasons, inwardly in beings and one's own body, and secretly in the moment-to-moment passing of the mind itself. Where the four thoughts made impermanence a conviction, the Omniscient Longchenpa's training makes it a meditation in which phenomena are watched dissolving as they appear. The sign is a natural weariness with clinging, and a strange tenderness toward everything that passes.

The second is the difference between fleeting and lasting happiness. The practitioner examines every pleasure he has known and sees that each was brief and left a residue of craving. Only the happiness of awakening, which depends on no condition, is lasting. The sign is that pleasures continue but lose their power to deceive.

The third is the many conditions of death. The body is seen as a candle in the wind, and food, medicine, house and friends, the very supports of life, are seen also as its possible causes of ending. The sign is that the practitioner no longer postpones practice.

The fourth is the meaninglessness of worldly activity. Every project undertaken for this life alone is seen as building sandcastles before the tide. The sign is a decisive simplification of life.

The fifth is the qualities of the Buddha. Having seen the futility of saṃsāra, the mind turns toward what does not deceive, and refuge becomes a joyful certainty rather than a formula. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa urges the practitioner here to cast off sloth and to rejoice.

The sixth is the lama's pith instructions. The practitioner reflects on why the instructions must be practised and not merely received, and on the rarity of meeting them. Devotion and diligence are joined.

The seventh is the threefold nonconceptual contemplation, and here mind training opens into the inner yogas. In the contemplation of bliss and emptiness, a short A blazes at the navel and a HAṂ rests inverted at the crown; the heat of the A rises and melts the HAṂ, and nectar descends, filling the body with bliss, which is then recognised as empty. This is Caṇḍālī in its essential form, placed by the Omniscient Longchenpa within mind training. In the contemplation of clarity and emptiness, the breath is expelled and the mind mixes with the clear sky, and the clarity that remains is recognised as empty. In the contemplation of nonconceptual reality, all effort is released and the mind rests in its own nature, beyond any object. The three nonconceptual states thus correspond to the three experiences of bliss, clarity and nonthought, and to the three kāyas, and they are offered here not as hazards to be avoided but as doorways to be entered with understanding.

The sevenfold training therefore recapitulates and deepens the outer preliminaries in its first six steps, and in the seventh steps through to the inner yogas and to the natural state. A practitioner who has trained through it has already met, in a gentle and integrated way, the fire and nectar of the completion stage and the open rest of the Great Perfection.

The other great traditions of mind training

The Nyingma masters also teach the mind training of Atīśa as condensed in the Seven Points. Its heart is the training in relative and ultimate bodhicitta: understanding all phenomena as dreams, examining the nature of unborn awareness, resting in the nature of the all-ground, and, in post-meditation, practising sending and taking upon the breath, driving all blame into one, and transforming every adversity into the path. Its measures are tellingly practical: that all teachings converge in a single point, that one's own conscience is the principal witness, that a joyful mind is maintained in all circumstances, and that one is able to practise even when distracted. Jamgön Kongtrul's commentary on these seven points was widely studied in the nineteenth-century Rimé circles in which the Longchen Nyingthig flourished. Thogme Zangpo's Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva and the Omniscient Longchenpa's own Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind are further forms of graded mind training, the latter leading step by step from the precious human birth through refuge, bodhicitta and the generation and completion stages to the natural state.

All these mind trainings have the same function within the ascent. They take what the preliminaries planted and make it continuous, carrying the transformation of the afflictions into every circumstance. They turn adversity, illness, insult and loss into occasions of practice. And in their ultimate dimension, resting in the nature of the all-ground or in nonconceptual reality, they bring the practitioner to the threshold of the special preliminaries of the Great Perfection.

Holding the Mind and Separating Saṃsāra from Nirvāṇa

After mind training come the special preliminaries of the Great Perfection proper: the sems 'dzin, the holdings of the mind; the ru shan, the separation of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa; and the trainings of body, speech and mind that Rigzin Jigme Lingpa sets out in the Wisdom Guru. Their purpose is singular and precise: to bring about the experiential distinction between ordinary mind and rigpa, sems rig shan 'byed, so that the introduction, when it comes, falls on prepared ground.

The holdings of the mind

The semdzins go back to the Dzogchen tantras themselves, above all to the Union of the Sun and Moon, and were arranged by the Omniscient Longchenpa; in several lineages, including the Adzom Drukpa tradition, they are numbered as twenty-one. They are short, concentrated exercises of body, breath, sound, gaze and imagination: fixing the mind on a white A or a sphere of light before the eyes; letting a sphere travel along the channels; sounding a long HŪṂ or a sharp PHAṬ; holding certain breaths; gazing into open space; cutting the stream of thought abruptly. Each has a specific effect, and the masters choose among them according to the student.

Their effects unfold in a recognisable, although not fixed order. First they calm: the mind that had been scattered is gathered on a single point, and the practitioner discovers how far stillness can deepen when it has a support. Then they reveal stillness itself: when the support is released, there remains a calm, clear, empty state that is very pleasant. This state is not yet rigpa; it is the neutral calm of the all-ground, and the semdzins teach the practitioner to recognise it as such. Then, at a decisive moment, often with the sudden shout of PHAṬ, the calm itself is cut: in the instant after the shout there is neither thought nor stillness, but a naked, wide-awake knowing that belongs to neither. This is the first experiential separation of mind and awareness. The masters use the semdzins precisely to produce this instant, and then to teach the student not to confuse the calm of the all-ground with the awareness that knows it.

The separation of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa

The outer ru shan is performed in solitude. The practitioner enacts with body, speech and mind the emotions of all the beings of the six realms: the rage of the hells, the craving of the hungry ghosts, the dullness of animals, the passions of humans, the rivalry of demigods, the pride of gods, moving, crying out and thinking as they do, until body, voice and mind are exhausted. Then he rests, completely still, without correction. The experience is first cathartic, often wild; then exhausting; and then, in the stillness that follows, an extraordinary openness appears, in which the whole drama of saṃsāra is seen to be movement and the rest beneath it to be untouched. This is the separation of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa as lived fact.

The inner ru shan purifies the seeds of the six realms within the body, where the tradition locates six syllables at six places, by burning them with the fire of wisdom or dissolving them in light. In the inner work the practitioner feels the six places of the body as distinct centres of habit, and senses their release as warmth, lightness or tears. The secret ru shan is the direct discernment of mind and rigpa through a secret posture taught by the guru.

The trainings of body, speech and mind

The Wisdom Guru then prescribes three trainings. The body is trained in the vajra posture, squatting with the palms joined above the head, held until the body trembles and collapses; the body's habitual tensions are exhausted, and the channels are shaken loose. Speech is trained with HŪṂ in four steps: sealing the world with HŪṂ, so that everything appears filled with blue syllables; training with HŪṂ, sending out and drawing in chains of syllables; making the mind pliant with HŪṂ, letting them move freely in space; and entering the path with HŪṂ, letting the sound and the syllables dissolve into emptiness. These steps loosen the solidity of appearances and of sound itself, and so they foreshadow both sounds as mantra and appearances as luminous display.

The mind is trained by searching for its origin, its abiding place and its destination. Where does a thought come from? Where does it stay? Where does it go? The practitioner searches with sincerity, in the body, outside it, in the past and present, and finds nothing. This finding of nothing is not a failure but the great discovery of the preliminaries: the mind that seemed so real has no place, no shape, no colour, no origin and no end. The masters call this destroying the hut of the mind. After it, one rests: body, speech and mind left in their own condition, without fabrication.

With these practices the ground has been fully prepared. Renunciation and compassion have been established, purification and devotion have opened the channels and the heart, the inner fire and nectar have been tasted, and the difference between the movement of mind and the stillness of the all-ground has been experienced. The practitioner is now ready either to receive the direct introduction or to enter the three roots and the development and completion stages, which the Longchen Nyingthig places as the next great section of the ascent.

Lama, Yidam, Khandro: The Development Stage and the Four Vidyādhara Levels

After the Ngöndro, the Longchen Nyingthig organises its main practice around the three roots: the Lama, root of blessing; the Yidam, root of accomplishment; and the Khandro, root of activity. Our Precious Teacher's instructions are explicit that the approach phase of a three-root sādhana must be completed, and stability gained in the development stage, before the channel-and-wind practices are undertaken, for without the generation phase one is like a person who hopes to press sesame oil without seeds. The three roots are therefore not a detour from the Great Perfection but the stage at which the threefold unveiling becomes a trained capacity.

The three roots of the Longchen Nyingthig

The Lama root unfolds in four degrees of the guru sādhana: the Assembly of Vidyādharas, as the outer practice; the King of Great Bliss, as the inner; the Lion-Faced Ḍākinī, as the secret; and Yangsal Lhadrub Thigle Gyachen, the Sealed Essence, in which the Omniscient Longchenpa himself appears, as the innermost secret. The Yidam root includes The Great Wrathful Assembly of the Eight Herukas, and Avalokiteśvara who Naturally Liberates Suffering. The Khandro root is Yumka Queen of Great Bliss, the innermost secret ḍākinī, whom we shall meet in her own section. Practised in sequence or in parallel according to the master's direction, they carry the practitioner from devotion through transformation to bliss.

Each root works on the poisons in its own way. The Guru practices transform pride and ignorance into devotion and the recognition of the Guru's mind as one's own. The peaceful yidam transforms aversion into compassion; the wrathful assembly takes anger itself as the energy of wisdom and, in the Palchen Düpa, the wrathful deities manifest the fierce clarity that cuts through any obstruction. The ḍākinī transforms desire into great bliss and opens the completion stage. Thus the three roots are the three inner yogas within the frame of one cycle: Mahāyoga, which, as our Precious Teacher teaches, overcomes anger; Anuyoga, which overcomes desire; and Atiyoga, which overcomes ignorance.

The unfolding of the development stage

Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's Staircase to Akaniṣṭha describes the development stage with great exactness. It begins with the three samādhis: the samādhi of suchness, resting in emptiness; the all-illuminating samādhi, from which compassion arises; and the causal samādhi, the seed-syllable from which the maṇḍala unfolds. Then come the three essentials of the deity: clear appearance, stable pride and recollection of purity.

Clarity develops in a recognisable sequence. At first only fragments appear, a hand, a colour, an implement, flickering and dissolving. Then the whole form holds for a moment, then for longer. Then the details become distinct, the eyes, the ornaments, the folds of silk, each luminous and empty like a reflection in a mirror or a rainbow in the sky. Stability passes through the five experiences that Rigzin Jigme Lingpa describes for both calm abiding and the development stage: movement, like a waterfall; attainment, like a river in a gorge; familiarisation, like a slow broad river; stability, like an ocean without waves; and perfection, like a mountain. Pride matures from a borrowed attitude into a confidence that is no longer personal: one does not think “I am the deity" but actually abides as the deity's presence. Recollection of purity makes each detail transparent to its meaning: the three eyes as the three kāyas, the ornaments as the perfections, the consort as the union of method and wisdom.

The mantra recitation adds the dimension of speech. The four phases of approach, close approach, accomplishment and great accomplishment are visualised as the mantra circling like a moon garland, as a whirling firebrand, as a king's emissary sending out and gathering light, and as a beehive breaking open so that all sound becomes mantra. The practitioner discovers that the mantra continues by itself, in the breath, in walking, in sleep. This is the second of the threefold unveilings becoming a habit: sounds as mantra.

The measure of the development stage, the masters say, is that appearances arise as the deity even outside session, that the mantra is heard in every sound, and that this continues into dreams. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa adds that its essence is not visualisation at all but the purification of the habit of ordinary appearance: the generation phase purifies birth, life and death, the very processes by which the ground-manifestation once solidified into a world. The four nails of approach and accomplishment, the nail of samādhi, the nail of the essence mantra, the nail of the unchanging intention and the nail of radiating and absorbing activity, gather the whole practice into its vital points, and the third nail, the unchanging intention, is nothing other than the view of the natural state.

The four vidyādhara levels

The Nyingma Mahāyoga describes the fruit of the development and completion stages as the four levels of the vidyādhara, which the four empowerments of the Guru Yoga had already planted. The fully matured vidyādhara is the practitioner whose mind has matured into the deity while the body is still ordinary; in the usual correlation this corresponds to the culmination of the paths of accumulation and joining. The vidyādhara with power over life has transformed the body into a vajra body beyond birth and death; this corresponds to the path of seeing and the first bhūmi. The mahāmudrā vidyādhara arises in the illusory body of the deity, as the path of meditation unfolds through the bhūmis. The vidyādhara of luminous spontaneous presence is the culmination, the equal of the Buddha. These four are the Mahāyoga's own map of the summit, and they run parallel to the visions and bhūmis of the Great Perfection, as two faces of one mountain.

The Yogic Exercises of the Vidyādharas

The channel-and-wind practices of the Longchen Nyingthig are not a side path to the Great Perfection but one of its own wings. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's treasure calls them the Yogic Exercises of the Vidyādharas; it names its path of method Buddhahood Without Meditation; and it associates each of its exercises with one of the eight great vidyādharas of India, Vimalamitra, Prabhahasti, Hūṃkara and the others who received and accomplished the eight great sādhana teachings. A practice that carries the signature of the vidyādharas who transmitted the Great Perfection and the eight Vidyādharas is meant to be fully and wholly part of the path.

The texts and the lineage

The cycle is taught in Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's Clarifying the Concealed Meaning of the Vidyādhara's Yogic Exercises and in the Wish-Fulfilling Jewel, the scroll of the aural lineage for the completion stage of bliss and emptiness based on the winds. The movements themselves closely resemble the bodily exercises that the Omniscient Longchenpa set out in his commentary on the Wish-Fulfilling Treasury, and they are reckoned in the lineage as a sequence of twenty, and in another arrangement twenty-one, with five fundamental movements at their root. It is said that in Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's time Tibet was filled with cotton-clad yogis practising them, that the lineage later dwindled until Patrul Rinpoche was its principal holder, and that Patrul practised the five fundamental movements until the day he died.

The treasure text explains their logic in a few lines. When the interdependent conditions are rightly arranged in the body, realisation dawns in the mind. Breath practice pierces the vital points and opens the fixed channels; the exercises unite the winds and release the knots of the channels by themselves; understanding the instructions on the entrances lets the bodhicitta spread; and upon the vajra waves the suchness of the fruit is seen. This is a complete vision of the path: body, wind, channel, essence and awareness in one sequence.

Why each exercise belongs to a vidyādhara

The eight vidyādharas of India each received one of the eight great sādhana teachings: Mañjuśrīmitra the practice of Yamāntaka, body; Nāgārjuna that of Hayagrīva, speech; Hūṃkara that of Yangdak Heruka, mind; Vimalamitra that of the nectar of qualities; Prabhahasti that of Vajrakīla, activity; and Dhanasaṃskṛta, Rombuguhya and Śāntigarbha the practices of the mother goddesses, the worldly offerings and praises, and the wrathful mantras. To associate an exercise with a vidyādhara is to say that this movement embodies that master's accomplishment. When the practitioner moves through the sequence, he is not exercising the body for health but receiving, through the body, the realisation of the whole assembly that the inner guru sādhana The Assembly of the Vidyādharas invokes. The yogic exercises are thus the Lama root, the Yidam root and the Khandro root enacted in flesh.

Preconditions and the warning against pride

Our Precious Teacher lays down the order without compromise: the four contemplations, the uncommon preliminaries done wholeheartedly and not like a reluctant tax, the empowerment of one of the three roots of the cycle, a definitive understanding of the development stage, and the completed approach phase. He insists equally on the knowledge of the vajra body from the Omniscient Longchenpa's Wish-Fulfilling Treasury, from Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind and from Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's Treasury of Precious Qualities. And he gives a cautioning that defines how progress is to be measured: one should not be proud of yogic falls, of holding the breath for a long time, or of generating bliss and heat. These are ephemeral. The true signs are that the winds and the mind have become workable in the four chakras and that the knots in the channels have been released, together with the qualities of the paths of accumulation, joining, seeing and meditation as the Wish-Fulfilling Treasury describes them.

The experiential unfolding

The work begins with the prāṇa, refining what the vajra recitation started. The vase breath is learned gently: the upper wind drawn down, the lower wind drawn up, the two sealed together below the navel. At first the retention is short and a little effortful; the practitioner strains. Then the breath becomes soft and long; the belly is warm; a subtle fullness is felt towards the spinal column on the level of the navel even outside sessions, radiating upwards in blissful waves. Then the exercises are joined to the held breath: shaking, rotating, stretching and the characteristic falls, in which the body drops onto the cushion and the wind is driven into the central channel.

The effects arrive in waves. Physically there is heat, sweat and sometimes trembling; the joints and spine loosen; the body becomes light, sleep shortens, appetite lessens, cold is less felt. Emotionally, knots in the channels release as knots in the heart: old grief, fear and anger arise and pass with surprising speed, as if a river long dammed had found its course. Mentally, thoughts become less sticky; they arise and fall like writing on water. In dreams, clarity increases and the practitioner begins to recognise the dream state. When the winds become unbalanced, as they may, the exercises themselves are the medicine, and the guidance of the guru is indispensable.

As the winds gather, the signs that first flickered in the vajra recitation return more stably: the mirage, the sudden sparks, the blazing, and then, in the systems that count ten, further signs like the moon, the sun, darkness, lightning and a blue sphere, as the winds enter, abide and dissolve in the central channel. These are the signs of the three appearances, the white appearance, the red increase and the black near-attainment, through which the mind passes in falling asleep and in dying. Our Precious Teacher states the ultimate purpose of the whole practice: on the basis of the example wisdom elicited by the four blisses and the four emptinesses, the habitual tendencies of the transference of the three appearances are purified, and supremely immutable great bliss is really made manifest.

Our Precious Teacher gives an instruction that joins this path seamlessly with the Great Perfection: when awareness rests in its own place, the winds naturally subside, and the central channel naturally expands to include all the channels in its flow. The yogic exercises bring the winds to the centre by method; resting in rigpa brings them there by itself; and the practitioner who combines the two discovers that the central channel is not a narrow tube to be forced open but the natural space of awareness in which the whole subtle body is gathered.

Yumka Dechen Gyalmo: Caṇḍālī, the Four Blisses and the Sixteen Joys

The four blisses and the sixteen joys are not peripheral to the Great Perfection; in the Longchen Nyingthig they have a body, and that body is Yumka Dechen Gyalmo, the Queen of Great Bliss, the innermost secret ḍākinī of the cycle. In her the joys, the drops, the winds and the emptinesses are one living form, and her practice is the place where the bliss of the completion stage and the awareness of the Great Perfection are recognised as a single reality: bde ba stong pa dbyer med, bliss and emptiness indivisible.

The Queen of Great Bliss

Yumka Dechen Gyalmo is Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's treasure revelation of Yeshe Tsogyal as wisdom ḍākinī. The treasure text describes her as the Mother of all the Victors, as Prajñāpāramitā and as Viśvamātā, the consort of Kālacakra. In the expanse of the dharmakāya she is Samantabhadrī; in the sambhogakāya she is Vajravārāhī; in the nirmāṇakāya she is Yeshe Tsogyal. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa recounts that in 1773, on pilgrimage to Drakyi Yangdzong, he came to the lake of Tsogyal, offered nectar and a silk scarf, and as the bowl sank slowly into the water his ordinary perception fell away; drinking from the lake, he beheld the face of the wisdom ḍākinī and received the symbolic script from which her practice was later decoded. She is red, naked, semi-wrathful and passionate, holding a hand-drum and a curved knife, one foot raised in readiness, adorned with bone ornaments and a long garland of flowers.

Within her sādhana, the hundred peaceful and wrathful deities who appear in the bardo of dharmatā are visualised at precise points within her own body. This single fact is enough to show that the Yumka practice belongs to the core of the Great Perfection. The display that Direct Crossing will reveal in the lamps, and that the bardo will reveal at death, is here already gathered into the subtle body of the ḍākinī, and the practitioner who arises as her has the whole maṇḍala of the bardo within his own channels.

Caṇḍālī and the four blisses

In her completion stage the practitioner, arisen as the ḍākinī, works with the three channels and four chakras. At the navel, where the three channels meet, the short A of Caṇḍālī is kindled; at the crown, the HAṂ rests inverted. The inner fire rises through the central channel, and the white essence melts and descends.

As the essence melts at the crown, the first bliss, ānanda, arises: a pleasure that is still mingled with ordinary sensation and with conceptual noting. As it descends to the throat, the second, paramānanda, supreme bliss, arises: the bliss intensifies and thought begins to fall silent. As it reaches the heart, the third, viramānanda, the bliss of cessation or special bliss, arises: the bliss is so complete that the grasping at bliss ceases, and with it the polarity of passion and dispassion begins to dissolve. As it reaches the navel and below, the fourth, sahajānanda, coemergent or natural bliss, arises: the innate, which the Hevajra Tantra describes as free from both passion and its absence. This is the descending order. When the essence is then drawn back upward and stabilised in each chakra in turn, the four blisses arise in the ascending order and are more stable and profound.

With each bliss an emptiness is known. The four emptinesses, the empty, the very empty, the great empty and the all-empty, are the progressive dissolution of the three appearances into the clear light, and they are the inner side of the four blisses: bliss as the radiance of emptiness, emptiness as the nature of bliss.

Example innate and true innate

The completion stage itself distinguishes two degrees of the fourth bliss. The example innate is accompanied by a subtle structure of one who experiences and something experienced; it is a genuine taste of bliss and emptiness, and it serves as an example of what it points to. The true innate is free of that duality. It is the clear light itself, don gyi 'od gsal, the meaning luminosity, which is nothing other than ground-rigpa recognised. Here the completion stage and the Great Perfection meet without remainder. When the practitioner recognises the knowing within the coemergent bliss, the bliss does not vanish; it is seen as the self-radiance of awareness. The difference between the two is not the difference between bliss and its absence, but between bliss as an experience, nyams, and bliss as realisation, rtogs pa.

The sixteen joys and the music of emptiness

The four blisses become sixteen when each is subdivided into four, the joy of joy, the supreme joy of joy and so on, across the four domains of body, speech, mind and wisdom at the crown, throat, heart and navel. Other tantras arrange sixteen gradations differently, and the Kālacakra correlates sixteen emptinesses with the waning fortnight and sixteen compassions with the waxing. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's Lute of the Gandharvas, a song of offering to the sixteen vajra goddesses, gathers these into one constellation: the practitioner is borne upon the winds of the sixteen joys, the sixteen drops are naturally purified, and the sixteen emptinesses resound as the music of the vajra lute. In the Great Perfection this image is exact. Emptiness is not silence; it is the self-sound of dharmatā, the same sound that the bardo will reveal as the thousand thunders of the natural voice of reality.

The experiential unfolding of the sixteen is a progressive pervasion. At first the bliss is local, at the navel or the heart. Then it pervades one region of being, the body, and then speech, so that the voice itself carries bliss, and then mind, so that thought arises soaked in it, and finally the dimension of wisdom, where the bliss is no longer anywhere in particular. Four becomes sixteen, and sixteen becomes one taste.

Where the four blisses stand on the mountain

The four blisses therefore run through the whole ascent rather than standing beside it. They are tasted in seed form in the descent of Vajrasattva's nectar and in the fire of the Kusāli offering; they are named and given in the third empowerment of the guru yoga; they are contemplated in the seventh of the Omniscient Longchenpa's mind trainings; they are trained in the Yogic Exercises of the Vidyādharas and in Caṇḍālī; and they are embodied in Yumka Dechen Gyalmo. The true innate, recognised as the clear light, is the meeting point of the completion stage and of path-rigpa in its depth.

The fourth bliss is still not the fourth vision. The fourth bliss, even as the true innate, is the recognition of the clear light within experience; it can be entered and re-entered, and it belongs to the heart of the path. The fourth vision is the exhaustion of all display, including all bliss, all lights and all visions, into dharmatā; it occurs once, at the summit, and it is the gate of the rainbow body. The two are not rivals. The bliss-emptiness of Yumka is the inner warmth that ripens the practitioner for the visions, and the hundred deities within her body are the very display that the visions will unfold and finally exhaust.

Path-Rigpa: Recognition, Decision, Confidence in Self-Liberation

The most fundamental articulation of path-rigpa is Garab Dorje's testament, the Three Words That Strike the Vital Point: introduction to one's own nature, deciding upon one thing, and gaining confidence in the self-liberation of arising states. Every other scheme of the path in the Great Perfection can be read as an unfolding of these three. They are not three meditations but three moments in the life of recognition: its birth, its maturing into certainty, and its ripening into effortless freedom. Everything that has gone before, from the vajra recitation to the bliss of Yumka, has been preparing the ground on which this seed falls.

Introduction: ngo rang thog tu sprad

The first word is introduction directly to one's own face. Path-rigpa begins at a definite moment, when the master shows the disciple what has always been present and the disciple sees it. Our Precious Techer, in his explanation on the three words, describes this as the moment when the fresh, naked awareness of the present instant is laid bare, without the coverings of thought, as when a shout shatters the chain of thinking and leaves only a bright, empty, wide-awake knowing. This is the first and decisive threshold. Before it, rigpa is only ground. After it, rigpa has become path.

The Seventeen Dzogchen Tantras explain that introduction may come in many ways: through the master's word, through a symbol, through a gesture, through the power of blessing in the mind-to-mind transmission, through the empowerment of the dynamic expression of awareness, rig pa'i rtsal dbang, which the Heart Essence gives beyond the four empowerments of the tantras, or through the practices that have gone before. The fourth empowerment of the daily guru yoga, the cutting PHAṬ of the semdzin, the vast stillness at the end of the vajra recitation, the true innate within the coemergent or natural bliss: each of these is a door at which the introduction may take place. The preliminaries of the Heart Essence, the outer and inner ru shan, the discernment of saṃsāric emotions and nirvāṇic wisdom, are designed to produce the decisive distinction between mind and awareness, sems rig shan 'byed. When that distinction is clear in experience, the introduction has given birth.

Decision: thag gcig thog tu bcad

The second word is deciding upon one thing. Having recognised, one may still doubt: perhaps this is only a pleasant calm, perhaps there is something higher. Decision means that all doubt is cut. Whatever arises, whether bliss or misery, clarity or turbulence, thought or stillness, the practitioner returns to the natural state that was introduced and is certain that there is nothing beyond it. This certainty is not a belief but a seeing that has become unshakeable.

Decision is itself a long stage, and the tantras describe its inner movement. At first recognition is a glimpse, lasting a moment before it is reabsorbed into conceptual thought. With repetition it becomes more stable. The meditator learns not to fabricate it and not to grasp at it, for every effort to hold rigpa turns it back into conceptual mind. Little by little the meditation becomes uncontrived, ma bcos, and the practitioner discovers that sustaining awareness requires no effort at all but only resting. Short sessions repeated many times are the masters' constant advice at this stage, so that the freshness of recognition is not replaced by the dullness of a habit.

Confidence: gdeng grol thog tu bca'

The third word is gaining confidence in the self-liberation of arising states. Here the measure is no longer the quality of stillness but what happens to movement. When a thought or emotion arises within recognition, it frees itself. This self-liberation is the hallmark of the Great Perfection and the true sign that path-rigpa is maturing, for the lower vehicles purify, transform or abandon what arises, while here what arises is its own liberation. All the work on the afflictions in the preliminaries, the softening of pride in prostration, of anger in Vajrasattva, of greed in the maṇḍala, of attachment in the Kusāli offering, now reaches its natural completion: the afflictions are not merely weakened but are seen to be the dynamic expression of the five wisdoms.

Patrul Rinpoche, following the older masters, describes this confidence through three images that are themselves stages. At first liberation is like meeting an old friend in a crowd: a thought arises, is recognised within rigpa awareness, and in that recognition it is freed. Then it is like a snake uncoiling the knot of its own body: the thought frees itself without any act of recognition being needed. Finally it is like a thief entering an empty house: thought arises and departs, as if moving through space, and there is neither benefit nor harm, for there is nothing for it to take and no one to be robbed. These three images are among the clearest maps of the stages of path-rigpa in all of the literature of Dzogpachenpo, and we shall return to them when we consider the modes of liberation.

The four confidences

The Pearl Necklace Tantra gives as the gauge of practice the yoga of four confidences. In the form usually taught in the Heart Essence, these are freedom from any fear of the lower realms, freedom from any hope for the ripening of karma, freedom from any hope for nirvāṇa, and freedom from any delight in attaining it. They do not describe an inner experience but the condition of a practitioner in whom hope and fear are being exhausted by recognition. They are the outer face of certainty and confidence: one who has truly ascertained rigpa awareness no longer fears saṃsāra, and one who has truly gained confidence no longer longs for nirvāṇa. Here the renunciation that the four thoughts first awakened is itself transcended: one no longer flees saṃsāra, because saṃsāra has been seen through.

The Maturing of Recognition

Beyond the three words, the Great Perfection describes the maturing of path-rigpa through several further sets of measures: the four yogas of the Mind Series, the four ways of leaving things as they are in trekchö, the skilled handling of the experiences of bliss, clarity and nonthought, and the continuity of recognition through sleep and dream. Together they give the most detailed inner map of trekchö that the tradition offers.

The four yogas of the Mind Series

The Mind Series, the sems sde, transmitted by Vairocana from Śrī Siṃha and Garab Dorje, arranges the path as four yogas. The first is gnas pa, calm abiding, in which the mind settles into stillness and the turbulence of thought subsides. The second is mi g.yo ba, the unmoving, in which insight recognises that stillness and movement are equally the display of one natural awareness, so that awareness no longer moves when thought moves. The third is mnyam nyid, sameness, in which all appearances and all experiences are discovered to be of one taste in awareness, without the slightest division into inner and outer. The fourth is lhun grub, spontaneous presence, in which contemplation has become uninterrupted and everything arises as the self-perfected play of the state.

These four yogas correspond closely to the four yogas of Mahāmudrā taught by Gampopa's successors, one-pointedness, simplicity, one taste and non-meditation, and the correspondence is not accidental: both describe the same natural unfolding of recognition. The first of them is still close to the calm that the semdzins revealed; the last is indistinguishable from fruit.

The four ways of leaving things as they are

In the trekchö of the Heart Essence the practitioner is instructed in the cog bzhag bzhi, the four ways of leaving things as they are. The body is left like a mountain, unmoving. The eyes are left like the ocean, gazing into space without fixation. Awareness is left as it is, without correction. Appearances are left as they are, without acceptance or rejection. These four are not successive stages but four dimensions of a single natural rest, a symphony of rest. Yet the masters note that a practitioner first finds rest in the body and eyes, then in awareness, and only last in appearances, for it is the outer world that most stubbornly continues to seem solidified. In this way even the four ways of resting reveal a hidden order. The mountain-like body is the fruit of years of posture and vajra recitation; the ocean-like gaze is prepared by the semdzins; the uncorrected awareness was introduced; and the uncorrected appearances are the threefold unveiling come to rest.

Working with the experiences

As recognition stabilises, the experiences, nyams, arise in waves: bliss, clarity and nonthought, and with them many others, lightness or heaviness, visions, sounds, fear, exaltation, tears, sudden laughter, physical heat or cold. The tradition associates bliss with the essence-bindus of the body, clarity with the winds, and nonthought with the stilling of the mind. They are signs that the elements of the body are being drawn into recognition, and they are not to be dismissed. The masters work with them with great sensitivity, as a physician works with the signs of a recovering body.

The practitioner learns, first, to let an experience arise fully without clutching at it and without pushing it away. Then to recognise the knowing in which it arises, so that bliss is known as bliss-emptiness, clarity as clarity-emptiness, nonthought as awareness-emptiness. Then to adjust the practice according to what arises: when dullness and heaviness dominate, the gaze is raised, the posture sharpened, the session made brief and fresh; when agitation dominates, the gaze is lowered, the body relaxed, the breath allowed to sink; when bliss becomes sticky, one turns to the open sky; when clarity becomes brittle, one returns to the body and the warmth of devotion. Experiences that indicate imbalance in the winds are met with the yogic exercises and the master's advice. In this way the experiences become the very material of the path, and their unfolding is itself a sequence of steps.

The danger the tradition names is not the experience but the grasping. Grasped, bliss leads to the desire realm, clarity to the form realm and nonthought to the formless realm. Unconfined, the three experiences are the doors to the three kāyas. The tantras distinguish between nyams, experience, and rtogs pa, realisation: experience is like mist, which comes and goes and changes with the weather; realisation is like the sky. Yet mist is how one first learns that the sun is warming the earth. A practitioner who has never had experiences may be practising too dryly; a practitioner who collects them is practising for the wrong reasons. Between the two lies the path of the masters, who measure path-rigpa above all by the stability of recognition and the self-liberation of what arises, while honouring the experiences as the ripening of the body and the elements.

Calm abiding as a support

Some of the Heart Essence manuals, including Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's Wisdom Guru, describe the stages of calm abiding that may precede or support recognition: thoughts first appearing like a waterfall, then like a river winding through a gorge, then like a slow broad river, then like a still ocean, and finally like a mountain. These five stages belong to the training of mind rather than to rigpa itself, and the masters are clear that rigpa can be recognised at any point among them. They are the scaffolding around the path, not the path.

The measure of sleep, dream and death

The most searching measure of path-rigpa is what happens when the conscious effort of meditation ceases. The tantras describe a progression: at first recognition is present only in formal meditation; then it continues in daily activity; then it continues in dream, so that the practitioner knows the dream as dream; then the dream itself dissolves into the luminosity of deep sleep, so that the night is spent in clear light without dreams. This progression is the most intimate rehearsal of death, for the dissolution of sleep and the dissolution of dying are the same process at different depths, the same three appearances that the vajra recitation and the yogic exercises have already made familiar. A practitioner whose recognition does not falter in deep sleep has nothing to worry about in the bardo.

The Modes of Liberation

The modes of liberation are the living measure of path-rigpa, and they span all three: the most primordial of them describes the ground, the intermediate ones the path, and the last the fruit. They unfold the third of Garab Dorje's three words, confidence in liberation, into a complete gradation. They are experienced above all in trekchö, before the visions of Direct Crossing unfold, and they continue to measure the whole way to the fruit. Two enumerations are found in the tradition, and they illuminate one another.

The four modes in the teaching of the three words

In the oral explanation of Garab Dorje's testament, as taught by Patrul Rinpoche and in our own time by our Root-Guru the Tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal, four modes are distinguished according to how a thought or emotion is freed within contemplation.

The first is gcer grol, naked liberation or liberation through bare attention. A thought arises; it is noticed nakedly within awareness, without commentary; and in that noticing it is freed. This is like meeting someone one has met before: there is still a moment of recognising. It is the liberation of the beginner whose recognition is real but still requires a turning of attention.

The second is shar grol, liberation upon arising. The arising state is freed in the very instant of its arising, without the need for any separate act of noticing. This is like a snake that uncoils the knot of its own body: the movement itself is the release. It belongs to the practitioner whose recognition has become continuous enough that arising and liberating are simultaneous.

The third is rang grol, self-liberation. Thought arises and passes with neither benefit nor harm; there is nothing it can do, for there is no one to be affected and nothing to be gained. This is like a thief entering an empty house. It is the liberation of the practitioner for whom the distinction between stillness and movement has completely dissolved.

The fourth is ye grol, primordial liberation. Here one recognises that the thought was never bound at all; liberation was its nature from the beginning. This is not a further technique but the view of the ground itself, revealed fully at the fruit.

Patrul Rinpoche, in his commentary, gives the same three images in a slightly different order of names, calling the first stage, the meeting with the old friend, liberation upon arising, the second self-liberation, and the third liberation without benefit or harm. The variation in naming should not trouble the student. In every presentation the three images describe the same progressive naturalness: from a liberation that still involves recognition, through one that is simultaneous with arising, to one in which arising itself has lost all power to bind.

These modes have long roots in the earlier steps of the ascent. The practitioner who learned in the four thoughts to see impermanence, in Vajrasattva to let regret pass without self-hatred, in the Kusāli offering to let fear be seen through, and in the yogic exercises to let old emotions release as the knots of the channels loosen, has been practising the forerunners of naked liberation and liberation upon arising for years before he knows their names.

The four great modes of liberation

The second enumeration, the grol lugs chen po bzhi, the four great modes of liberation, is found in the tantras and in the Omniscient Longchenpa's instructions: primordial liberation, ye grol; self-liberation, rang grol; direct or naked liberation, cer grol; and liberation from extremes, mtha' grol. Our Precious Teacher explains them in this way. Self-liberation means finding freedom within awareness's own domain without seeking any separate antidote. Liberation upon arising, when it is included, means that whatever arises is freed by its own arising. Primordial liberation means that within the primordial nature of every thought there has always been freedom. Naked liberation means that thoughts do not merely subside into themselves but dissolve nakedly into the expanse, leaving no trace. Liberation from extremes, finally, is freedom from every limit of existence and nonexistence, saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, bondage and freedom itself.

Read in their own order, these four describe the whole arc of ground, path and fruit. Primordial liberation is the ground: nothing was ever bound. Self-liberation and naked liberation are the path: what arises is freed in its own place and dissolves without remainder. Liberation from extremes is the fruit: even the concept of liberation is exhausted, and nothing remains to be called free or bound.

The six liberations

The Heart Essence also speaks of the six liberations, grol ba drug: liberation through seeing, hearing, tasting, wearing, touching and remembering. These describe the power of the realised practitioner's blessing to plant the seed of recognition in others, through sacred images, the sound of the teachings, consecrated substances, amulets and the remembrance of the teacher. They belong to the fruit as activity: fruit-rigpa does not rest in itself alone but continues to liberate others through every channel of the senses.

Direct Crossing: The Four Visions and the Sixteen Bhūmis

The four visions of Direct Crossing are, strictly speaking, stages of path-rigpa rather than of fruit-rigpa: the eleven vajra topics place them under the practice and the gauge, and treat the fruit as a separate topic. Yet the fourth vision is the very threshold of the fruit, and the four together describe how ground-rigpa's spontaneous presence is recognised in its play until it returns, complete and self-knowing, into the Youthful Vase Body. On these highest slopes the Heart Essence also names its bhūmis, not ten but sixteen, the last of which gives its name to Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's own Wisdom Guru.

Trekchö and Direct Crossing: purity and spontaneous presence

The two great practices of the Heart Essence correspond to the two aspects of the ground. Trekchö, cutting through, is the path of primordial purity: it cuts through every fixation and rests in the empty essence. Direct Crossing is the path of spontaneous presence: it allows the luminous nature of the ground to display itself outwardly through the gateways of the lamps, so that the yogin recognises the luminous pure appearances, spheres and kāyas as the radiance of his own awareness. Most masters insist that Direct Crossing without the stable recognition of trekchö can become a mere fascination. The process truly unfolds only for one in whom the essence has been recognised, for it is the essence that recognises the display as its own.

Everything below this point on the mountain now bears fruit. The posture trained since the first day of the Ngöndro becomes the three postures associated with the three kāyas. The breath refined in the vajra recitation and the vase breath becomes the gentle, unforced breath of Direct Crossing. The channels opened by prostration, transference and the yogic exercises become the luminous pathway from the heart to the eyes. The deities visualised in the development stage, and the hundred peaceful and wrathful ones placed within the body of Yumka, now appear by themselves in space. Direct Crossing is practised with the gaze in the sky, in which the inner lamps shine without any outer support.

The first vision: direct perception of dharmatā

The first vision is chos nyid mngon sum, the direct perception of dharmatā. Luminous space, spheres of light and fine vajra-chains of awareness appear in the lamp of the pure expanse. At this stage the luminous pure appearances are unstable, moving like water poured from a jug or like a bird that cannot settle. The yogin recognises them as the self-radiance of awareness, not as external objects. The first vision corresponds to the moment when one leaves the realm of information and directly sees the dharmatā.

The second vision: increasing experience

The second vision is nyams gong 'phel ba, the increase of experience. The luminous pure appearances expand and multiply; the spheres grow, the colours deepen, the chains of awareness slow and begin to rest. Within them the first sketches of the maṇḍala begin to appear. The yogin's ordinary perception of the outer world begins to be pervaded by radiance. Experience intensifies, and with it the danger of attachment, so the instruction remains to recognise all as one's own display.

The third vision: awareness reaching its full measure

The third vision is rig pa tshad phebs, awareness reaching its full measure. Complete buddhafields appear, with the deities in their maṇḍalas, the families in union, palaces of light. The sambhogakāya, which was always latent in the ground as spontaneous presence, now manifests fully as one's own radiance. The ordinary perception of a solid world almost entirely dissolves into the display. Here the threefold unveiling is no longer a practice: appearances are the deity, sounds are the self-sound of dharmatā, thoughts are the dynamic expression of the dharmakāya. The masters say that at this stage the yogin has fully realised the sambhogakāya, and that if death came, liberation in the bardo would be certain.

The fourth vision: exhaustion into dharmatā

The fourth vision is chos nyid zad pa, the exhaustion into dharmatā. Having reached their full measure, the visions withdraw. The buddhafields, the maṇḍalas, the deities, and the pure luminous appearances dissolve back into their source, like the moon waning into the dark of the new moon. With them, the coarse body, which is itself only the solidified form of the five lights, dissolves too. Nothing is left to be seen, and no one is left to see; the radiance has returned into the inner clarity of the Youthful Vase Body, but now with full self-recognition. The fourth vision is the end of the path because it is the end of all appearance as other. It is enlightenment.

The sixteen bhūmis

The sūtras count ten bhūmis: Perfect Joy, the Stainless, the Luminous, the Radiant, the Difficult to Conquer, the Manifest, the Far-Reaching, the Immovable, Excellent Intelligence and the Cloud of Dharma. The Secret Mantra adds an eleventh, Universal Radiance, kun tu 'od, and a twelfth, the Lotus of Non-Attachment. The Heart Essence continues further, to sixteen. In the enumeration preserved in the lineage, the thirteenth is the Great Assembly of the Wheels of Syllables, the fourteenth Great Samādhi, the fifteenth the Vajra Holder, and the sixteenth Unexcelled Wisdom, ye shes bla ma. The Self-Arisen Awareness Tantra describes the highest of them in terms of the visions themselves: mounting the stage of the wheel of syllables; then, abiding in the vision of wisdom, the stage of great bliss; then, gaining certainty in the stage of natural formation, the stage of samādhi; and finally, when wisdom naturally dawns on the ground of primordial purity and nothing higher remains, the sixteenth stage, Unexcelled Wisdom. The lists differ slightly in naming, but their sense is one.

The four final bhūmis are called the stages of those who abide in wisdom, and they are the bhūmis of the fourth vision. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa's great instruction manual on trekchö and Direct Crossing bears the name of the sixteenth, The Wisdom Guru, so that its very title is the summit it describes; and the tradition identifies the attainment of the rainbow body with this sixteenth stage. In the broad correlation that our Precious Teacher offered, the first vision belongs to the stages before the path of seeing, the second and third to the ascent through the bhūmis, and the exhaustion of the fourth to the final bhūmis culminating in Unexcelled Wisdom. Precise placements differ among the masters, and the bhūmis are best understood not as a ladder separate from the visions but as another language for the same deepening.

Why the visions belong both to path and to fruit

The four visions describe the unfolding of the ground's spontaneous presence through the eight gateways, recognised step by step, until it returns into primordial purity. They thus reverse, with recognition, the very process by which the ground-manifestation once became saṃsāra. The first three visions belong to the path, for they still contain an element of appearing; the fourth belongs to path and fruit at once, for it is the path coming to rest in the fruit. This is why it is natural to feel that the four visions are the stages of fruit-rigpa: they are the stages through which the fruit comes into view.

Fruit-Rigpa: The Ground Regained

Fruit-rigpa is the ground recognising itself completely, and the tradition articulates it along three axes: the manner of its attainment, which depends on capacity and on the moment at which recognition becomes total; its content, the kāyas and wisdoms; and its activity, which continues spontaneously for beings. The Pearl Necklace Tantra gives the eleventh topic in a single phrase, saying that the stage of liberation comes first, for the fruit is not something new but the ground that was there before delusion.

Buddhahood on the ground’s own seat

The Heart Essence calls the fruit gzhi thog tu sangs rgya ba, awakening on the seat of the ground, and rang sa zin pa, seizing one's own place. The radiance that once streamed outward through the eight gateways and was mistaken for a world has returned into the Youthful Vase Body. The vase is sealed again, but now its inner clarity is aware of itself. The difference between the primordial ground and the regained ground is therefore not one of content but of re-recognition: what was once the unknowing ground is now the ground that knows. The Omniscient Longchenpa expresses this with the image of the ocean and its waves: the waves have subsided not into a different ocean but into their own. In the language of the Mahāyoga, this is the spontaneously present vidyādhara; in the language of the bhūmis, it is Unexcelled Wisdom.

The three junctures of awakening

The Seventeen Dzogchen Tantras describe three junctures at which fruit-rigpa can be won, corresponding to three degrees of capacity.

The highest practitioners awaken in this very life. Through the exhaustion of the fourth vision the body dissolves into light. The 'ja' lus, the rainbow body, leaves behind only hair and nails, which are not pervaded by the channels; the body shrinks and vanishes in light over seven days. In the rarer 'ja' lus 'pho ba chen po, the rainbow body of great transfer, the body does not even die but becomes a body of light that remains to benefit beings, as the tradition affirms of Guru Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra. The masters distinguish these two because the great transfer is accomplished without the passage through death at all.

Practitioners of middling capacity awaken in the bardo of dharmatā. At death the elements dissolve, the white and red essences meet at the heart through the three appearances already rehearsed in the vajra recitation, the yogic exercises and sleep, and the ground luminosity dawns as the mother clear light. The practitioner who has become familiar with the child recognises it, and mother and child meet. If this moment passes unrecognised, the ground luminosity unfolds again as sounds, lights and rays and as the peaceful and wrathful deities, the same display that Direct Crossing reveals in life and that the Yumka practice placed within the body. Recognition at any point in that unfolding is liberation into the sambhogakāya.

Practitioners of lesser capacity awaken in the bardo of becoming, by taking birth in the natural nirmāṇakāya fields, the pure lands of the five families, where the path is completed without regression. The transference practised in the Ngöndro is the door for those who have not stabilised more. The Pearl Necklace Tantra summarises the bardo as the meeting of mother and child, and the whole of the tenth vajra topic is devoted to these three junctures and their signs.

The kāyas and wisdoms

The content of the fruit is described as the kāyas and wisdoms that were always present in the ground and are now manifest. The dharmakāya is the empty essence, primordial purity become self-aware. The sambhogakāya is the luminous nature, spontaneous presence become self-aware, with the five families and their fields. The nirmāṇakāya is compassion, the ceaseless responsiveness that appears in whatever form beings need. The tantras also speak of the ngo bo nyid sku, the essence-body that is the inseparability of the three, and of the unchanging vajra body. Each kāya possesses its wisdoms: the wisdom that knows things as they are and the wisdom that knows them in their variety, and the five wisdoms of the dharmadhātu, the mirror, equality, discernment and spontaneous accomplishment. The seeds of these kāyas were planted in the four empowerments of the guru yoga; they are now ripe.

The Great Perfection teachings add a subtle and beautiful refinement. The dharmakāya regained is described as nang gsal, inner clarity, its radiance turned inward like the Youthful Vase Body; the form bodies appear not to the Buddha himself but to beings, as reflections of their own karmic vision in the sky of his compassion. The Buddha does not see himself as appearing. This is why the fruit is described both as complete stillness and as ceaseless activity: from the side of awareness there is only the self-aware ground, and from the side of beings there is unceasing manifestation.

The fruit as the Aspiration of Samantabhadra

The six special qualities of Samantabhadra's liberation, described in the Aspiration of Samantabhadra, are the most precise description of fruit-rigpa that the tradition possesses: the ground surpassed by its own recognition, its display arising as its own, the distinctions discerned, liberation through that discernment, a liberation not dependent on any other, and an abiding in its own place. Every practitioner who reaches the fruit repeats in himself the liberation of the primordial Buddha. The path is nothing other than the ground's slow rehearsal of the moment Samantabhadra recognised it all at once.

The Whole Mountain: How Everything Corresponds

All these practices and schemes describe one movement seen from different sides: the ground's radiance going out unrecognised, being recognised, and returning home aware of itself. Seen as a single ascent, the foundations, the three roots, the yogas of the subtle body and the Great Perfection are not separate paths but successive and overlapping layers of one path, each preparing and then being absorbed into the next.

The foundations as the undoing of the third ignorance from below

The imputing ignorance congealed the five wisdoms into the five poisons, and the foundations work on each poison in turn while opening the subtle body. The posture and the vajra recitation straighten the channels, gather the winds and give the first taste of the three appearances and of the naked knower. The four thoughts dissolve attachment to this life and the dullness that wastes it, giving birth to renunciation. Refuge names the whole path in advance; prostration softens pride and loosens the channels; bodhicitta melts jealousy and anger and awakens all-pervading compassion. Vajrasattva purifies aversion and guilt and lets the nectar descend from the crown for the first time; the maṇḍala purifies greed and reveals the world as an offering in three kāyas; the Kusāli offering cuts attachment to the body in the fire that, in the oral lineage, is already the fire of Caṇḍālī. Guru Yoga transforms pride and ignorance into devotion, and its four empowerments plant the seeds of the development stage, the winds and mantra, the four blisses and rigpa itself; transference opens the central channel at its crown.

The special preliminaries as the separation of mind and awareness

The Omniscient Longchenpa's sevenfold mind training deepens the foundations and, in its seventh training, opens into bliss-emptiness, clarity-emptiness and nonconceptual reality. The semdzins reveal the calm of the all-ground and then cut it to show the knower; the separation of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa exhausts the drama of the six realms; the trainings of body, speech and mind shake loose the channels, dissolve the solidity of sound and appearance, and find no place where the mind could be. The distinction between sems and rig pa is now an experience.

The four empowerments as a key to the whole map

The four empowerments given daily in the guru yoga are the clearest key to the correspondences. The vase empowerment purifies body and channels, authorises the development stage, and plants the nirmāṇakāya and the level of the fully matured vidyādhara. The secret empowerment purifies speech and winds, authorises mantra and the yoga of the winds, and plants the sambhogakāya and the vidyādhara with power over life. The wisdom empowerment purifies mind and essence-drops, authorises the completion stage of the four blisses, and plants the dharmakāya and the mahāmudrā vidyādhara. The word empowerment purifies the all-ground, authorises the Great Perfection, and plants the svābhāvikakāya and the spontaneously present vidyādhara. Lama, Yidam and Khandro, the development stage, the Yogic Exercises of the Vidyādharas and Yumka Dechen Gyalmo are the ripening of the first three seeds; trekchö and Direct Crossing are the ripening of the fourth.

The three roots and the subtle body

In the development stage appearances are trained as the deity and sounds as mantra, with clarity, stability and purity passing through movement, attainment, familiarisation, stability and perfection. The Yogic Exercises of the Vidyādharas carry the accomplishment of the eight vidyādharas into the body, releasing the knots of the channels and making the winds and mind pliable in the four chakras, with qualities that the Wish-Fulfilling Treasury correlates with the paths of accumulation, joining, seeing and meditation. In Yumka Dechen Gyalmo the four blisses and sixteen joys unfold through Caṇḍālī; the example innate points to the clear light, and the true innate is the clear light recognised. This true innate is where the completion stage and path-rigpa meet; it is not the fourth vision, which lies at the summit.

Path-rigpa and its measures

Introduction undoes the first ignorance, for the face is shown. Decision undoes the second, for the split between knower and known dissolves in uncontrived rest. Confidence in liberation undoes the third from above, for whatever is imputed is liberated in the very act of arising, completing what the work on the poisons began from below. The four yogas of the Mind Series run alongside: calm abiding and the unmoving belong to introduction and the beginning of decision, sameness to mature decision, spontaneous presence to confidence. The modes of liberation measure confidence from within: naked liberation, like meeting an old friend; liberation upon arising, like the snake's knot; self-liberation, like the thief in the empty house. The continuity of recognition through activity, dream and deep sleep measures it from outside. The four confidences describe its effect on hope and fear. The skilled handling of experiences keeps the body and the elements within the path rather than outside it.

Direct Crossing, the bhūmis and the fruit

Trekchö fulfils the three words with respect to primordial purity; Direct Crossing fulfils them with respect to spontaneous presence. The four visions measure this second fulfilment, and the sixteen bhūmis offer another language for the same deepening, culminating in Unexcelled Wisdom. The first vision is introduction applied to the luminous play; the second and third are the maturing of decision and confidence in the domain of appearance, and in the third the threefold unveiling is complete; the fourth is liberation from extremes, mtha' grol, in which even appearance and its recognition are exhausted. The fruit is then won at one of three junctures, in the rainbow body or great transfer, in the bardo of dharmatā, or in a natural nirmāṇakāya field, and continues as the six liberations.

The eleven vajra topics as the doctrinal frame

The eleven vajra topics of the Pearl Necklace Tantra, which the Omniscient Longchenpa made the architecture of the Treasury of Words and Meanings, contain the Great Perfection's own part of this mountain in one sequence. The first five describe ground-rigpa: the ground, the manner of delusion, the buddha-nature in beings, its seat in the heart, and its pathway in the channels. The next three describe the meeting of ground and path: the gateways of the eyes, the field of the cloudless sky, and the practice of trekchö and Direct Crossing. The ninth, the gauge with its four confidences and its visions, measures path-rigpa. The tenth, the bardo where mother meets child, is the juncture of path and fruit. The eleventh, the stage of liberation that comes first, is fruit-rigpa. The Longchen Nyingthig sets this doctrinal frame on the foundation of the Ngöndro, the mind trainings and the three roots, so that the whole ascent, from the first straight-backed breath to the rainbow body, is one continuous path.

Closing: The Return of the Radiance

The stages of the stageless are not rungs of a ladder that awareness climbs. They are the successive ways in which awareness ceases to mistake its own light for something other. Ground-rigpa is the light before it knows itself; path-rigpa is the light beginning to recognise its own rays, first in a glimpse, then in certainty, then in the effortless freedom of every movement; fruit-rigpa is the light returned into its source, knowing itself without remainder.

This is why the Seventeen Dzogchen Tantras can say both that there is nothing to attain and that the path must be travelled with the greatest precision. From the side of the ground, every being is Samantabhadra and nothing has ever been bound. From the side of the path, the spine must be straightened and the breath joined to OṂ ĀḤ HŪṂ; the mind must turn; pride must bow, anger must melt, greed must give, the body must be offered; the guru must be met; the mind must be held and then found to be nowhere; the deity must be seen and the mantra heard; the winds must enter the central channel and the four blisses unfold in the body of the ḍākinī; recognition must be introduced, decided upon and allowed to ripen; the visions must unfold and be exhausted; and mother and child must meet. Both are true, and the masters of the Great Perfection hold them together without strain. The Omniscient Longchenpa wrote in the Treasury of the Dharmadhātu that everything is the Great Perfection of Spontaneous Presence; and in the Treasury of Words and Meanings he described, line by line, the channels and lamps and lights through which that Perfection comes to know itself. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa then gave that knowledge a body, from the first prostration to the Yogic Exercises of the Vidyādharas and the Queen of Great Bliss.

For the practitioner the essential is simple. The ground is already here, in the heart, shining through the eyes into the sky. The path begins in the first straight-backed breath and in the moment of recognition, and it is measured by how freely what arises is liberated. The fruit is not elsewhere but is the ground seen completely. Every scheme in this investigation, from the eight gateways to the sixteen blisses, the four visions and the sixteen bhūmis, serves only to make that seeing whole.

Garab Dorje's last words were three:

Introduce the face

Decide

Gain confidence in liberation

When these three are complete, all the stages have been traversed in leaps and bounds, and one discovers that one has gone nowhere at all, but has come home to the place where the natural radiance was always burning, now aware that it burns.

ye dharmā hetu-prabhavā hetuṃ teṣāṃ tathāgato hy avadat |
teṣāṃ ca yo nirodha evaṃ-vādī mahāśramaṇaḥ svāhā | |

“Phenomena which have arisen from causes –
 the Tathāgata explained their cause, and he explained their cessation.
Thus spoke the Great Śramaṇa, svāhā.”