Natural Liberation of Suffering
The Secret Practice of the Great Compassionate One from the Heart-Essence of the Vast Expanse
The Doorway of Compassion
There are teachings that are studied, and there are teachings that are received the way a seed receives the rain. The Secret Practice of the Great Compassionate One, known in Tibetan as Dukngal Rangdrol, Natural Liberation of Suffering, belongs to the second kind. It is a doorway, opened in the very heart of the Longchen Nyingthig tradition, through which the boundless compassion of all the Buddhas may be met face to face.
Its name holds its whole promise. Suffering is not fought, not suppressed, not endured. It is liberated, and liberated naturally, rang drol, by itself and in its own place, the way frost vanishes when the sun has risen.
The same word, rang drol, runs like a golden thread through the whole literature of the Great Perfection. Thoughts are self-liberated, appearances are self-liberated, and here suffering itself is self-liberated, because in the light of awakened compassion it is found not to have a solid core.
The Great Compassionate One, Avalokiteśvara, the Lord who gazes upon the world, has been loved across Asia and far beyond for almost two thousand years. His Tibetan name, Chenrezik, means the one who looks with the eyes of compassion. Mothers have whispered his name over sleeping children, pilgrims have carried it over high passes, and the greatest masters have rested in his presence at the threshold of death. Yet this practice approaches him in a particular way. It is called a practice at the secret level: here devotion, compassion and the nature of one's own mind are discovered to be the single, undivided sphere of luminous, spontaneous presence.
The opening line of the treasure text gathers this into a single sentence of extraordinary density. In form, the practice is the supreme Noble One, the Great Compassionate One. In essence, it is the Natural Liberation of Suffering. And it is called the tilaka, the crowning mark, of all that is most profound. Form and essence are named together because they are not two. The luminous form one meets in the practice is the radiance of the essence, and the essence is never found apart from the radiance.
A Treasure Sealed in the Heart
This practice comes from the Longchen Nyingthig, the Heart-Essence of the Vast Expanse, the cycle of mind treasures revealed by the great vidyādhara Rigdzin Jigme Lingpa. The colophon of the text tells its story with a beauty all its own.
It begins at Samye, the first monastery of Tibet, in the time of the Dharma King Trisong Detsen. On the middle storey of the great temple, in the chamber called the Blazing Turquoise Face, the venerable Mahāguru, Guru Padmasambhava, taught this most profound key point to the King, father and sons. That phrase, in the language of the treasure tradition, refers to the King together with his closest heart disciples. The teaching was not written down for general circulation. Padmasambhava entrusted it to the casket of the heart-treasury and sealed it with the mighty power of aspiration and entrustment.
This is the secret of a gongter, a treasure of the enlightened mind. It is not hidden in a rock or a lake, but in the deepest treasuries of a disciple's mindstream, where it waits, lifetime after lifetime, for the conditions to ripen. The aspiration of the Guru is the seal, and the same aspiration is the key.
Almost a thousand years later, when the time had come, in the Earth Male Tiger year of 1758, Jigme Lingpa beheld the face of the Great Compassionate One. In the expanse of what the text calls the luminous Net of Magical Display, a ḍākinī of the expanse of primordial wisdom placed in his hands a scroll, the Luminous Expanse, written in the symbolic script of the ḍākinīs. Such script is not read the way ordinary letters are read. A few signs open into an entire teaching in the mind of the one for whom they are destined. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa writes that he set down its symbols and in laying out its meaning concealing nothing.
Then comes a detail that reveals the heart of the great master. After keeping it under the seal of secrecy for seven years, he set it down in writing. Seven years of silence, of carrying a treasure within, of letting it mature in practice before allowing it into the world. And of this teaching, among the countless revelations of his life, he wrote that it was more precious than my own heart. Few words in the whole of the tradition carry such tenderness.
The colophon also calls upon a guardian: the great planetary demon Rāhu who protects the command, the fierce lord of the planets entrusted with the Longchen Nyingthig, asked to guard this essence without ever slackening. The practice thus comes to us not as an anonymous text, but as a living transmission, held by Padmasambhava's aspiration, revealed through the ḍākinī's grace, ripened in a master's silence and watched over by its protector: the fierce lord of the planets.
The Vessel and the Nectar
Because this is a practice of the Secret Mantra, it rests upon a foundation. After accomplishing the Longchen Nyingthig Ngöndro, or at least an equivalent Ngöndro, this practice is permitted to be done.
The great masters of the Longchen Nyingthig, from Rigzin Jigme Lingpa and his heart son Jigme Trinlé Özer to Patrul Rinpoche, never tired of saying that the foundational practices are the ground on which every higher practice stands. Through the four thoughts that turn the mind, the mind turns away from worldly distraction and toward what truly matters. Through refuge and bodhicitta, it is anchored in the Three Jewels and opened to all beings. Through the purification of Vajrasattva, the obscurations of countless lives are washed away. Through the maṇḍala offering, merit and wisdom are gathered. And through Guru Yoga, the heart is opened until the blessing of the lineage can flow into it by way of the four empowerments.
The tradition compares the practitioner to a vessel. An upturned vessel receives nothing, however much rain falls. A cracked vessel cannot hold what it receives. A vessel stained with poison spoils even the purest nectar. The Ngöndro rights the vessel, mends it and cleanses it, so that the nectar of a practice like this one can be poured in without being spilled or spoiled.
The practice is then received through empowerment, reading transmission and instruction from the qualified Root-Guru who holds its lineage. The empowerment ripens the mindstream, the reading transmission connects it to the living sound of the lineage, and the tri or upadeśa instruction shows how the words become experience.
For those who feel drawn to this practice, none of this is a barrier to be resented. Every prostration, every recitation of the hundred syllables, every heap placed upon the maṇḍala plate is already a step into the embrace of the Great Compassionate One.
Outer, Inner and Secret
The Longchen Nyingthig presents the Great Compassionate One at several levels, and this practice is explicitly the one at the secret level. In the language of the tradition, the outer level meets the deity as an object of devotion, the inner level unites one's own body, speech and mind with the deity's, and the secret level recognises the deity as the very nature of awareness. Here nothing is merely outer. The deity, the practitioner and the luminous ground are seen as one display.
Yet the secret never despises the outer. The treasure text begins, with great care, by describing the place where the practice should be done. The supreme place, it says, is one where the ground is soft, level and white in colour. It is a land where the virtuous spirits of the white side dwell, the upāsakas who protect virtue, and a region that has not fallen under the sway of enemies or harmful forces.
Each of these qualities speaks on more than one level. Soft ground is a place where the mind softens. Level ground is equanimity. White is the colour of the peaceful activity, the colour of the Great Compassionate One himself. And a land guarded by benevolent beings is one where the practitioner is surrounded by goodness rather than by conflict. The masters of old chose their places of practice with this same sensitivity, knowing that the outer environment and the inner landscape mirror each other.
Upon a well-arranged maṇḍala, an arrow's length across, the substances of accomplishment are set out according to the Visionary Instructions, the special guidance of the Longchen Nyingthig. Or, more simply, one relies upon amṛta, the nectar of medicine, rakta, the red offering of the essence of life, and torma, the sculpted offering that is at once an offering, a support and a symbol of the whole maṇḍala. Every element of the shrine is a door. The arrow's length recalls the measure of a body, and so the maṇḍala on the table becomes the maṇḍala of one's own being.
The whole practice then unfolds in the classic threefold structure that holds every sādhana of the Secret Mantra: the preliminaries, the main part and the conclusion. “Good in the beginning, good in the middle and good at the end,” as the Buddha said of the Dharma itself.
Preparing the Ground: The Seven Preliminaries
The preliminaries of this sādhana are seven, and together they turn an ordinary moment into sacred time and an ordinary room into a pure realm.
Refuge. The practice opens with a cry from the heart. In endless saṃsāra, whose very nature is suffering, the practitioner and all beings, who wander without freedom, go for refuge to the Deity of Compassion, the supreme Noble One, who is the essence of the Three Jewels. The refuge is taken from the depths of the heart, with fierce and burning longing. There is nothing tepid here. The tradition speaks of the longing of a child separated from its mother, and that is the tone of this refuge. It is significant that the object of refuge is the Great Compassionate One himself, as the essence of Buddha, Dharma and Saṅgha. All sources of refuge are gathered into a single figure of compassion.
Bodhicitta. Then the gaze turns outward to all beings of the six realms, who are named as my parents. They have become the objects of compassion because, not recognising their own face, they are caught in the actions of delusion. This phrase holds the entire Great Perfection view of suffering. Beings suffer not because they are bad, but because they have not recognised their own nature. To set them on the path of awakening through boundless compassion, the practitioner arouses the supreme mind in all three of its aspects: aspiration, engagement and the ultimate bodhicitta that rests in the nature of mind itself.
The seven branches. To all the sources of refuge throughout the three times, the practitioner offers the classic sevenfold practice of accumulation and purification: prostration with devotion, offerings outer and inner, open confession of every harmful deed, rejoicing in all virtue, the request to turn the Wheel of the Dharma, the prayer that the enlightened ones remain, and the dedication of every root of virtue to awakening. It closes with the aspiration that all beings attain the state of the Noble One. This is the great vehicle in miniature, the whole bodhisattva path folded into a single breath.
The torma for the obstructers. Having consecrated the torma, the practitioner speaks as the Lotus Mighty One, the wrathful power of the lotus family, the great executioner who tames all who lead astray. The obstructers are offered a torma of sense pleasures and commanded to depart to the far shore of the great ocean. Compassion does not mean weakness. The same Supremely Compassionate One who weeps for beings also has the fierce power to clear every obstacle from their path, and the tradition understands obstructers above all as the inner forces of distraction, conflictive emotion, doubt, and habit.
The circle of protection. Then comes one of the most beautiful verses of the sādhana. All that appears and exists is the Vajra Pavilion. The world and its beings abide as the three maṇḍalas: forms as the maṇḍala of the deity, sounds as the maṇḍala of mantra, and awareness as the maṇḍala of primordial wisdom. Against the demons and obstructers of habitual tendency and delusion, the boundary is sealed within the state of the three kāyas. What are the real enemies? They are not outer spirits, but habitual tendency and delusion, and the protection is not a wall but the recognition of the three kāyas, the nature of mind itself.
Calling down the blessings. From the expanse of emptiness, the radiant power of compassion's play gathers unceasingly, like rain clouds massing in the sky. Here the union of emptiness and compassion, the two wings of the Mahāyāna, become a single image. Through this blessing, all the relative substances of the shrine become the great maṇḍala, pure from the very beginning. The word pure from the very beginning, dö né dakpa, echoes kadak, the primordial purity that is the heart of the main practice of the Clear Light Great Perfection. Even the offering substances are recognised as never having been impure.
Consecrating the offerings. Finally, all offering substances, outer, inner and secret, are seen as substances in appearance, yet in essence primordial wisdom. They become great amṛta holding the splendour of a hundred flavours, and they become a springtime of delight for the deities of the maṇḍala. The offering is a springtime, a season of blossoming joy, in which the practitioner's generosity and the deities' delight are one and the same warmth and fresh fragrance.
The Arising of Potala
The main part of the practice unfolds in seven sections, and it begins where all genuine creation in the Secret Mantra begins: in emptiness that is not a void.
In the state where all phenomena are beyond reference, groundless and rootless, the unity of space and awareness is the realm of great purity. Three words in this line deserve to be held like jewels. Beyond reference means that nothing can be pinned down as an object. Groundless means that nothing rests on a foundation that could collapse. Rootless means that nothing grows from a cause that could be traced. And yet this is not nothingness, because it is the unity of space and awareness, ying rik zungjuk, the very phrase with which all the masters of the Clear Light Great Perfection describe the nature of mind. Space is its emptiness, awareness is its luminosity.
From this, the sacred place appears. My own perception, spontaneously present, is Mount Potala. Potala is the pure land of Avalokiteśvara, traditionally said to stand on a mountain by the southern sea, and its name has been given to holy places across Asia, originally probably the Saptagiri Hills of what is now known as the Tirupati (Tirumala) region in South India, and most famously now to the palace of the Great Chenrezig in Lhasa.
But here Potala is not a distant mountain. It is rang nang, one's own perception, and it is lhündrub, spontaneously present. In a single line, the whole of the Great Perfection, primordial purity and spontaneous presence, becomes the ground on which the deity's palace stands.
At the centre of the maṇḍala, perfect in symbol, sign and characteristic, upon a many-coloured, thousand-petalled lotus with a sun and a moon, the practitioner arises from the white, radiant seed syllable as the supreme Noble One. His seed syllable is the seed of the lotus family, the family of discriminating wisdom and of the Buddha Amitābha, and so the whole Deity blossoms from the single syllable the way a lotus opens from its bud. The lotus itself, rooted in mud and unstained by it, is the ancient symbol of compassion that lives in saṃsāra without being sullied by it. The sun and moon are skilful means and wisdom, and in a deeper meaning the red bliss-fire and the white nectar-essence of the subtle body.
The Deity is the mighty Avalokiteśvara Dukngal Rangdrol, with one face and four arms, standing up right with feet evenly placed. That he stands rather than sits is significant: he is poised to act, ready to step toward any being who calls. The one face is the single taste of all phenomena in the dharmakāya. The four arms are the four immeasurables of loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. His first two hands are joined at the heart in añjali, holding the Wish-fulfilling Jewel of Bodhicitta. The other two hold a mālā, the wheel of recitation through which beings are drawn out of saṃsāra one bead at a time, and the white lotus, the stainless purity of his compassion.
The text adds that the gestures are the same as those of Khasarpaṇa, an ancient and beloved form of Avalokiteśvara whose name means one who glides through the sky, swift and unobstructed in answering beings. He is in saṃbhogakāya form, beautiful with silks and jewels, white, aglow with a tinge of red, and adorned with ornaments of bone. White is his peaceful compassion, the red glow is the warmth of his love and his connection to Amitābha, and the bone ornaments are a reminder of impermanence and of the yogic realisation that transforms death itself into ornament. He is beautiful with the nine peaceful qualities of the peaceful deities, gentle, supple, radiant, youthful and serene among them, and the thirteen ornaments of the saṃbhogakāya, the jewels and silks of the enjoyment body. His crown is marked by Amitābha, the Lord of the Family, the Buddha of Boundless Light, of whom he is the compassionate emanation.
In the four directions, upon the four petals of the lotus, are four Ḍākinīs: in the east Noble Tārā, white; in the south Mārīcī, golden; in the west Kurukullā, with the glow of ruby; and in the north Vasudhārā, green. Each is complete with her own ornaments and attire. They are not ornaments of the maṇḍala but its living extension, and their meaning will open fully in the activities that close the practice.
At the four gates stand the four Mighty Ones, each in the colour of their activity: white for pacifying, yellow for enriching, red for magnetising and dark for taming. They are wrathful, holding curved knife and skull-cup, striding, terrifying and majestic, complete in wrathful attire and towering amid blazing fire. The praise names them as the Hayagrīvas of the four families, the horse-headed protectors whose neighing cuts through all obstruction and who are themselves the wrathful aspects of the lotus family. The peaceful centre and the wrathful gates are one compassion: gentle where gentleness serves, fierce where only fierceness can serve.
In the spaces between, innumerable buddhas, bodhisattvas and vidyādharas, vīras, ḍākinīs and oath-bound guardians gather like clouds. And then the line that carries the whole maṇḍala into the view: appearing yet empty, they shine vividly in the space free of all stain. Every deity is marked at the forehead, throat and heart with the three syllables of enlightened body, speech and mind. From these, light streams forth to the supreme abode of the natural state, above all to Potala, and to the twenty-four sacred lands and eight charnel grounds, inviting the hosts of wisdom deities.
Invitation, Homage, Offering and Praise
The invitation. Now the practitioner calls out across the sacred geography of compassion. From the Palace of the Power of Great Bliss in the west, Dewachen, the pure land of Sukhāvatī, the Protector Amitābha is invited. From Mount Potala, the realm of emanation, the mighty Avalokiteśvara, tamer of beings, is invited. From the palace where beings are tamed through compassion, all the deities of the maṇḍala are invited. The order traces a lineage of light: from the dharmakāya Buddha of Boundless Light, to his compassionate emanation, to the whole display of the maṇḍala. And the practitioner asks: bless us, the accomplishers, and bestow the siddhis, supreme and common.
The request to remain. What follows is one of the most philosophically exquisite verses in the whole Longchen Nyingthig. For deities of a maṇḍala that is self-liberated and beyond reference, the text says, no coming, no going, no request to remain can be conceived. Wisdom does not travel. It is already everywhere. Yet to purify the fleeting stains of dualistic appearance, the practitioner asks them to remain steadfast as the essence in which the envisioned deity, the samayasattva, and the wisdom deity, the jñānasattva, are not two. The whole relationship between relative ritual and ultimate truth is held in these few lines. The ritual is not denied, and it is not taken as solid. It is done precisely because there are stains to be purified, and it is done from within the knowledge that those stains are lo bur, fleeting and adventitious, never part of the nature itself.
The prostration. The homage is a dance of symbolic prostration, arising from self-knowing awareness free of delusion. The text then reaches for a remarkable comparison. The prostration is made just as the great gods of Nirmāṇarati delight in their own emanations. In Buddhist cosmology, the gods of the heaven called Nirmāṇarati, Enjoying Emanations, take pleasure in what they themselves create. So too here: the one who bows and the deities bowed to are all the play of awareness, and the prostration is awareness delighting in its own display. It is made from the state beyond rejecting and accepting, the hallmark of the Great Perfection.
The offerings. Clouds of offerings are presented as the display of Samantabhadra, recalling the Bodhisattva of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra whose offerings fill all of space, and also the primordial Buddha of the Great Perfection, whose name means All-Good. Flowers, incense, lamps and perfumed water, food and music, the five qualities of sense pleasure, and all the riches of gods and humans are offered without exception. The five senses themselves are offered: the very faculties through which we grasp the world are returned to the awakened ones as gifts.
The special offerings. Then come the wondrous substances of Great Bliss: amṛta, torma and rakta, the feast offerings, and, at the secret level, the Consort of Wisdom and the innate nature beyond mentation. Here the offering reaches its innermost meaning. The Consort of Wisdom is Prajñā, the Wisdom of Emptiness, inseparable from the Great Bliss, and the innate nature beyond the reach of thought is the dharmakāya itself. Nothing is held back. Even realisation is offered, and in being offered it is found to be the same as what receives it.
The praise. The praise moves through the whole maṇḍala in three great movements. First, to the central deity: from the Palace of the Dharmadhātu, free of all elaboration, you reign as the spontaneously present saṃbhogakāya, great treasure of boundless compassion. Then to the four goddesses: through the four immeasurables you lead all beings to freedom, dancing compassion's play, taming each as each requires, with the power to transform into anything at all. Then to the wrathful Hayagrīvas and the entire maṇḍala: wielding mastery over the four kinds of enlightened activity, poised in fierce display, transforming without obstruction. The phrase taming each as each requires, gang la gang dul, is the essence of skilful means. Compassion has no single face. It becomes whatever each being needs in order to be free.
The Heart of the Practice: The Recitation
Now the practice turns inward, into the heart of the deity, which is also the heart of the practitioner.
At the heart of oneself as the Great Compassionate One, within a spacious amulet of sun and moon joined together, stands the heart's life-force, the white seed-syllable, upon a moon disc, encircled by the syllables of the mantra. The image of the amulet, the ga'u, is beautiful. A ga'u is the small reliquary box that practitioners wear close to the body, holding a sacred image or relic. Here the sun and moon, skilful means and wisdom, close around the seed syllable like the two halves of such a box, guarding the most precious thing within. The tuk sok, the heart's life-force, is the very vitality of the deity, the point from which all of its compassion radiates.
From these syllables light streams forth in two great movements. Upward, it invokes all the buddhas and bodhisattvas, and above all the heart of the Great Compassionate One. Outward, it reaches all beings of the six realms and purifies their karma and kleśas. The rays then gather back and dissolve into the practitioner, who envisions receiving the siddhis, supreme and common. This rhythm of radiating and gathering, trö dü, is the breath of every recitation practice in the Secret Mantra. It mirrors the bodhisattva's twofold purpose: the benefit of others, as light goes out, and the ripening of one's own realisation, as light returns.
The instruction for the recitation itself is utterly simple: imbued with compassion for beings, recite. Everything depends on that first phrase. A mantra recited without compassion is sound; a mantra recited with compassion is the voice of Avalokiteśvara himself. The mantras of the practice are given only within the transmission, and so they are not written here.
The approaches. The text then sets out the measure of the practice in three ways, as the masters do for every major sādhana. The approach by number is a precise count of recitations, a very great number, carried out over a sustained period of retreat. The approach by time is four times the time that the count takes. And the approach by signs continues until the signs appear. These three measures teach something about practice itself. Number trains diligence, time trains steadiness, and signs teach that, in the end, what matters is not a figure on a page but a real transformation of experience.
The signs. The signs the text describes have a dreamlike beauty: gathering white flowers, dwelling upon a snow mountain, finding the deity's implements, music resounding, bathing, and the like. White flowers and snow are the colour of the Great Compassionate One, the stainless purity of his compassion now blossoming in one's own mind. Finding his implements, the mālā or the lotus, means that his qualities have become one's own. Music is the self-sounding mantra; bathing is purification. And the text adds, with great wisdom, that such signs may arise in waking reality, in meditative experience or in dreams, in no fixed way. They are not to be chased or grasped, but they are genuine messengers that the practice has begun to take hold.
The Four Ḍākinīs and the Four Activities
One of the most distinctive features of this treasure is that the four Ḍākinī goddesses who surround the Great Compassionate One are not only part of his maṇḍala. Each of them becomes, in turn, the channel of a particular enlightened activity. Secret Mantra speaks of four activities through which awakened compassion works in the world: pacifying, enriching, magnetising and, where necessary, subjugating. In this practice they unfold through the four goddesses in a sequence of breathtaking beauty. In each case, light streams forth from the Noble One's heart and invokes the heart of one Ḍākinī, so that the whole display remains rooted in his compassion.
Noble Tārā and the gift of life. For long life, the light invokes the heart of Noble Tārā, the White Goddess of the east. Tārā, the Saviouress, is said to have been born from a tear of Avalokiteśvara as he wept for the suffering of beings, and so she is his compassion made swift. From the realms of the stable and the moving, the outer world and the living beings in it, the essence of life is gathered. With it, the text says, the la, the lifespan, the life-force and the breath that have scattered are summoned back. La is a beautiful word: a subtle vital presence that can wander away through shock, grief or illness, leaving a person depleted. Here everything that has scattered is gently called home and dissolves into the one for whom the practice is done, and life is lengthened.
Mārīcī and the light of the dawn. For taming obstructers and increasing merit, the light invokes the heart of Mārīcī, the Golden Goddess of the south. Her name means ray of light, and she is the goddess of the dawn, of the first light before sunrise, invisible and therefore invincible. The lustre, radiance and vital essence of all who lead astray are drawn in like water through a pipe and dissolve into the practitioner, whose splendour becomes like the sun and moon. What is subtly being taught is the transformation of obstacle into strength. The energy that once obstructed is not destroyed but reclaimed, resorbed and turned into the strength of radiance.
Kurukullā and the magnetising of the three realms. For magnetising the three realms entirely, the light invokes the heart of Kurukullā, the ruby-red Mistress of Knowledge of the west. In the tradition she is the Goddess of Enchantment, whose flower-bow and flower-arrows draw all towards the Great Bliss. All the pure vital essence of the world and its beings, and above all the life, merit and power of the one held in focus, are gathered in a flash, in the form of red light, and dissolve into the practitioner, so that my splendour blazes. Magnetising, in Secret Mantra, is the natural power of awakened presence, the way a flower draws bees, gathering beings toward what is truly good for them.
Vasudhārā and the treasury of wealth. For filling the treasury with wealth, the light invokes the heart of Vasudhārā, the Turquoise-Green Goddess of the north, whose name means stream of treasure. The jewels of the gods, nāgas, ṛṣis and human beings are caught by rays of light like hooks and bestowed upon the practitioner, until one's wealth equals that of Vaiśravaṇa, the great guardian king of the north and lord of riches. In the bodhisattva path, wealth is never for oneself. It is the ground of generosity, the first of the six perfections, and the means by which practice and service to others can flourish.
The meaning of the four. Seen together, the four Ḍākinī goddesses reveal the full reach of compassion. It lengthens life so that the precious human birth is not cut short. It clears away obstacles and increases merit. It draws all conditions together in harmony. And it gathers the abundance that makes generosity possible. Compassion here is not only a feeling in the heart. It is a power that moves through every dimension of existence, from the breath of a sick person to the resources of a community.
At the close of these sections, the text says that the accomplishment substances, the la-stone and the life-force wheel, together with the key points of envisioning, are to be learned from the naked written instructions alone, and it seals this with the word Samaya. Some things are meant to pass only from teacher to student, and that is how they remain alive.
The Fruit: Suffering Liberated in Its Own Place
What, in the end, does this practice give? Those who have entered it speak of a softening that reaches into the very marrow of their being. Old griefs loosen their hold. The hard edges between self and other begin to dissolve. Compassion ceases to be an effort and becomes the natural radiance, as effortless as the warmth of the morning sun.
Within that radiance, the practitioner begins to recognise what the opening lines of the sādhana already proclaimed: that the realm of the Deity is the unity of space and awareness, that Potala is one's own perception, spontaneously present, and that the obstructers are nothing but habitual tendency and delusion. The Great Compassionate One is then no longer a figure outside. He is the luminous warmth of one's own mind, gazing out upon all beings with the same love with which he has always gazed upon us.
This is why the practice is called Natural Liberation of Suffering. Suffering is not carried away by an external power. It is seen through, from within, by a compassion so complete that it leaves no room for the solid self around which suffering forms. And when that self is seen through, what remains is not emptiness alone, but emptiness overflowing with love for every being who has not yet recognised their own face.
Rigzin Jigme Lingpa called this teaching more precious than his own heart. Perhaps that is because, practised fully, it reveals that his heart and the heart of the Great Compassionate One, and our own heart, were never three.
May all who read these words feel, even now, the first touch of that compassion. And may all beings, without a single exception, be naturally liberated from suffering.
