Reflections on Rigdzin Jigme Lingpa’s Secret Path to the Mountain of Glory
The Longing
There is a question that every lover of the Lotus-Born carries quietly in the heart, though it is seldom spoken aloud: what would it be like to live there? Not to read about it, not to envision it for the span of a session, but to wake each morning on the Copper-Coloured Mountain, Zangdok Palri, in the presence of Guru Padmasambhava himself.
Rigdzin Jigme Lingpa answered that question in a prayer. He composed it in the Flower Cave at Samye Chimphu, the cave he called the assembly hall of all the ḍākinīs of Akaniṣṭha, at the request of a yogini of the Oral Lineage of the Vajra Queen named Dharmakīrti. He writes that the moonbeams of the compassion of the Dharma King of Orgyen and his consort fell upon his heart, and from that blessing the prayer arose. He called it The Secret Path to the Mountain of Glory.
It is a secret path because it does two things at once. On its surface it is a journey: a description, line by line, of a land, a mountain, a palace and its inhabitants, so vivid that the heart begins to ache with longing to go there. But underneath, it is a key. At the very moment the longing is strongest, the prayer turns, and reveals that the mountain we long for has never been anywhere else than here, in this body, in this world, at the centre of our own heart.
So to ask what it is like to live on the Copper-Coloured Mountain is to ask two questions together. What is that land like? And what are we like, when we finally recognise that we have never lived anywhere else?
Each verse of the prayer ends with the same refrain, a single line that returns again and again like a heartbeat: may we be born on this Copper-Coloured Mountain of Glory. Let us walk with it, verse by verse, and see where it leads.
Arriving
The prayer does not begin with a place. It begins with the nature of mind. Its nature is completely pure, beyond the conceptual mind, a primordial expanse. Within that expanse a ceaseless radiance shines, bliss and emptiness indivisible, the display of the saṃbhogakāya. And that radiance appears, as an aspect of our own world of Endurance, as a nirmāṇakāya pure land. Before we have taken a single step towards the mountain, we have been told what it is made of: the three kāyas, the dharmakāya's purity, the saṃbhogakāya's radiance and the nirmāṇakāya's tender closeness. The land we are about to enter is the nature of our own mind, appearing as a place so that we can find our way home.
Then the prayer gives directions, as if to a pilgrim. At the centre of our world stands the Vajra Seat, Bodhgayā, where the Buddhas of past, present and future turn the wheel of the Dharma. North-west of there lies the land of Ngayab Langké Ling, the island of the rākṣasas, where the Lotus-Born went when he left Tibet, to tame the fierce cannibal beings who threatened the human world. This is where the mountain rises. It is not in a heaven beyond the clouds. It is on the same earth as Bodhgayā, in a direction you could point to. The pure land is close.
And then, the mountain itself. A spontaneous array, a mountain rising in the shape of a heart. Of all the shapes a sacred mountain might take, it is a heart. Its base rests on the crown of the hooded king of the nāgas, the serpent beings of the depths, so that even the deepest and most hidden forces of the world become its foundation. Its slopes are thronged with formless ḍākas and ḍākinīs celebrating the feast. And its peak rises as high as the meditative absorptions of the form realms, where gods dwell in states of pure concentration.
To live there is to live inside a heart that reaches from the lowest depths to the highest heavens and excludes nothing. The nāgas below are not cast out; they carry the mountain. The gods above are not set apart; the summit touches them. And all along the way, on every slope, there is celebration. Imagine waking to that: a world in which the ground itself is a heart, and its sides ring with the laughter of the feast.
A Palace Without Walls
On the summit stands a palace beyond all measure. Its eastern side is crystal, its southern side lapis lazuli, its western side ruby and its northern side emerald. These are the colours of the four enlightened activities, pacifying, enriching, magnetising and subjugating, so the very walls of the palace are made of the ways in which compassion acts in the world.
And yet, the prayer says, it is all translucent like the arc of a rainbow, with no outside, inside or in-between. This is perhaps the most astonishing line in the whole prayer. A palace has walls; that is what makes it a palace. But this one has none that divide. Light passes through everything. To live there is to live in a home where nothing is hidden and no one is shut out, where to stand inside is to see the whole world, and the whole world can see in. Ordinary houses protect us from what is outside them. This palace dissolves the very idea of outside.
Its corridors, corners and parapets pulsate in rainbow outlines. There are terraces and friezes, hanging garlands of jewels and tassels, water-spouts, roofs, ornamented doors and porches, and on the summit the wheel of the Dharma, the parasol and the finial. Every detail of its architecture is, the prayer says, perfect in symbols, meaning and signs. Nothing in this place is merely decoration. Every ornament teaches. A life lived there would be a life in which every glance falls on a teaching, every corner turned opens onto meaning.
Around the palace lie gardens. There are wish-fulfilling trees and fountains of nectar, and green groves sweet with the fragrance of healing plants. The air itself heals. And these groves are full of sound: ṛṣis and vidyādharas, flocks of birds and swarms of bees, quivering with the sound of the Dharma of the three vehicles, and with mystic songs.
Think of what this means. On the Copper-Coloured Mountain, even the birds and bees speak the Dharma. The great sages and the smallest insects share the same voice. There is no separation between the holy and the ordinary, the human and the animal, teaching and nature. The hum of a bee in a flower is a sūtra. The song of a bird at dawn is a tantra. To live there is to hear, in every sound, the voice of awakening.
In His Presence
At the heart of the palace, upon an eight-cornered jewel, a lotus, and a sun and moon, sits Padmākara, all the sugatas in one, embodying the three kāyas, resplendent in an aura of rainbow light. He has not been summoned there. The prayer says he spontaneously appears. He is simply present, as the sun is present in the sky.
Then comes a verse of infinite tenderness. From his wisdom of great bliss, profound and luminous, emptiness manifests as compassion, and from compassion as a magical display. In every direction of space, and especially the land of Tibet, your emanations stream out, on and on, in their thousands and millions. To live on the Copper-Coloured Mountain is to live beside a heart that never stops giving itself away. Even as he sits in his palace, the Guru is everywhere at once: in every land, in every age, in countless forms, wherever a being calls to him. The centre of the pure land is not a throne of rest but a fountain that never ceases to overflow.
Around him gathers the assembly. On his right sit the vidyādharas of India and Tibet, their minds suffused with the vajra play of luminosity, the limitless view of the Great Perfection. On his left sit the scholars and saints, their voices ringing with the sound of the Dharma, debating and revealing their experience and realisation. Realisation and learning, silence and speech, sit side by side as the two arms of the Guru. Neither is greater. Both are needed.
Around them are the King and his subjects, the twenty-five heart disciples who received the teachings in Tibet, and the nirmāṇakāya tertöns and great siddhas who would reveal his treasures in the centuries to come. They practise the cycles of the nine graded vehicles, and they keep the yogic discipline of one-pointed, unwavering realisation. Here, on the Copper-Coloured Mountain, all nine vehicles are lived at once, each in its perfection, around the one who embodies them all.
In every direction, in every corner and gallery, the palace is filled with ḍākas and ḍākinīs, gods and goddesses, with their vajra hymns and dances, moving like a mirage, sending out clouds of offerings, outer, inner and secret. Like a mirage: they are utterly real to the senses, and utterly without solidity. This is how life moves there. Everything dances, and nothing grasps. Everything is offered, and nothing is held back.
What would it be like to live in such company? It would be to know, every moment, that you are surrounded by beings who love you, who understand you completely, and who want nothing from you except your awakening. It would be to sit at the feet of the Guru as one among friends, among the masters whose stories you have read and whose prayers you have recited, and to discover that they are not distant figures from the past but your own family.
Above, and Above Again
The palace of the Lotus-Born has more than one storey, and each rises into a subtler dimension of the same reality.
Above the hall of the Guru lies the palace of the saṃbhogakāya, limitless, an array of utter beauty, where Padmapāṇi, Avalokiteśvara, the Lord of the World, presides, surrounded by an entourage beyond imagination. His presence utterly destroys discursive thought and habitual patterns, subtle enemies and negativity. Notice what the enemies are here: not outer foes, but our own discursive thoughts and the grooves of habit worn into the mind over countless lives. On this storey of the mountain, the compassion of Avalokiteśvara burns them away, not by force, but the way a warm hand melts frost.
And above that, in the joyful pure land of the dharmakāya, is Samantabhadra, the appearance from the ground, essence of primordial wisdom, appearing as Amitābha, Boundless Light. He teaches through symbols to an entourage no different from his own awareness. And here the prayer reaches the most beautiful line of all: where teacher and disciples possess equal realisation and enlightened activity.
This is the secret heart of the Copper-Coloured Mountain. In its highest storey there is no longer any distance between master and student. The one who teaches and the ones who hear are of one mind, one realisation, one activity. Every relationship of devotion, every longing of disciple for teacher, every tear shed in supplication, finds its fulfilment here: not in being forever beneath the Guru, but in discovering that his mind and our mind have never been two.
At the four gates stand the Four Great Kings, keepers of their vows. The eight classes of gods and spirits, outer, inner and secret, are despatched as envoys to tame all that would harm the teaching, and an ocean of oath-bound protectors beat the victory drum. The pure land is not fragile. It is guarded on every side by the very forces that, in the ordinary world, can obstruct and harm. Here they have become servants of the Dharma. To live on the Copper-Coloured Mountain is to live in perfect safety, because everything that once threatened has been turned into protection.
The Mountain in the Heart
And now the prayer turns, and everything we have seen is revealed in a new light.
Having envisioned vividly every detail of the pure land, Jigme Lingpa says, and having aspired towards this outer Copper-Coloured Mountain with our inner awareness, may it be that inside this very body of ours, here in this world of Endurance, our entire experience actually arises, here and now, as the Copper-Coloured Mountain of Glory.
Here and now. In this very body. In this very world, the world of Endurance, Mijé, with all its difficulty and suffering. The land we have been longing for is not somewhere we must die to reach. It is the true nature of where we already are, waiting to be recognised. The heart-shaped mountain was always the shape of our own heart.
The prayer then reveals how this recognition ripens, and it does so with the precision of the Secret Mantra. Through the profound interdependence of the generation and completion stages, the knots of the three channels and five centres are freed. The central channel and the two side channels, the five chakras of the subtle body, are the inner landscape of the mountain. When their knots loosen through practice, the winds enter the central channel, and the bliss and clarity of innate wisdom unfold. Then, in the great palace of the Copper-Coloured Mountain of Glory in the centre of our hearts, we perfect the play of the power of innate primordial wisdom, and so meet the Lord Padmākara, our own rigpa, face to face.
This is the meeting every devotee of the Guru longs for, and the prayer tells us exactly where it happens and who it is we meet. We meet him in the heart, and we meet him as our own rigpa, our own naked awareness. The Guru who sits on the eight-cornered jewel and the awareness that knows these words are not two. To live on the Copper-Coloured Mountain is, finally, to live as rigpa, recognised and stable, with the whole pure land as its natural display.
The prayer then lays out the entire path to that realisation, in a single breath. Through the five paths of accumulation, preparation, seeing, meditation and no-more-learning; through the bhūmis from Perfect Joy up to Universal Radiance; then through the two supreme stages of the Secret Mantra; and especially through the extraordinary stage of the Clear Light Great Perfection, the Unexcelled Wisdom, Yeshe Lama: may we complete them all, effortless, unaltered and at ease, and so be liberated in the space of the ground, the Lotus Light.
The whole path, from the first step to the final ground, is offered in one aspiration, and it is to be travelled effortlessly, at ease. That is how one walks on the Copper-Coloured Mountain. Not by straining up a cliff, but by resting more and more deeply in what has always been present, until every stage completes itself.
Taken by the Hand
And if we do not reach that realisation in this life? The prayer does not leave us alone even there. In what may be its most tender verse, it says: yet if we cannot perfect the full strength of realisation, through the power of our fervent prayer and aspiration, when death arrives with all its overpowering force, let the messengers of Padma, the ḍākinīs, gracefully dancing, actually take us by the hand, just as they did Kharchen Za and Guṇanātha, and lead us to the pure land of Lotus Light.
Kharchen Za is Yeshe Tsogyal, the lady of Kharchen, the Guru's closest disciple and consort. Guṇanātha was an Indian master whom the ḍākinīs also led away into the pure land. These are the precedents the prayer names. What happened to them can happen to us.
There is no image in the whole of the literature of the Lotus-Born more intimate than this. At the moment we are most alone, when death arrives with its overwhelming force and everything we have known falls away, we are not abandoned. Ḍākinīs come, dancing, and they take us by the hand. Not metaphorically, the prayer insists, but actually, ngönsum, in direct perception. The hand that has reached for so many things in this life is finally held by a hand that will never let go.
This is what the Copper-Coloured Mountain means for a practitioner's whole life. It is not only a destination for the end. It is a promise that runs through every day: that devotion is never wasted, that every prayer is heard, and that at the hour when no one in this world can accompany us, we will be accompanied.
Returning as guides
And then the prayer closes, not with our own arrival, but with our return. By the truth of the utterly pure dharmadhātu, and through the compassion of the ocean of the Three Jewels and the Three Roots, may all our aspirations be accomplished, and may we each become a guide, leading all beings to the pure land of Lotus Light.
This is the final answer to the question of what it is like to live on the Copper-Coloured Mountain. Those who truly live there do not stay. Like the Guru himself, whose emanations stream out in their thousands and millions, they go back out into every world where beings are suffering, and they take others by the hand, as they themselves were once taken. To live on the Copper-Coloured Mountain is to become, in turn, one of its messengers.
So let the longing grow. Let the refrain beat in the heart, morning and evening, until it becomes the heart's own rhythm: may we be born on this Copper-Coloured Mountain of Glory. And let us remember, each time we say it, the secret Jigme Lingpa left for us in the middle of the path: that the mountain rises in the shape of a heart because it is our heart, and that the one we long to meet there, face to face, has always been our own awareness, waiting with infinite patience to be recognised.
