Though the ultimate practice of Mahamudra is to rest in the nature of your mind, unless you have preceded this

practice with several other stages of practice, it is unlikely to be effective. Practicing tranquillity meditation to the point of some degree of stability, along with other means such as going for refuge, generating bodhichitta, and so forth must precede the direct pointing out of your minds nature. In this teaching I cannot engage in the direct pointing out of the nature of your mind. However, I can teach you a means through which you can gain this recognition on your own. The means consists of the application of tranquillity meditation, supplemented by cultivation of loving kindness, compassion, and devotion. Through bringing together all of these elements, you can naturally come to a decisive recognition of your minds nature through your own efforts. First it is important to understand the two aspects of the practice of tranquillity, which are physical posture and mental technique. In detail, the physical posture has seven aspects, called the Seven Dharmas of Vairochana, and it consists of two features: one is to be relaxed, and the other is to be straight and erect. You should relax your limbs so that the muscles of the arms and legs are not tense. It is good and important to keep your eyes open, because if you close them you start to see all sorts of things. When you open your eyes, your mind is in its natural or usual condition, and its lucidity is heightened. To be erect means to sit so that your spine is straight. If you straighten up too much, then you will arch your back and probably fall backwards. If there is a slight curvature forward or to the rear, that is not a big deal. Some people are too obsessed with the straightness of the spine, and are constantly micromanaging their posture, making fine adjustments all the time, and this becomes a distraction. Your neck should also be straight. Do not attempt to force your chin back into your throat, but also do not lean your head back and allow your mouth to gape open. The head is very important because all of your channels pass through your throat into your head, and the winds flow through them. In order to straighten everything in the back of your neck and the back of your head, bend your head forward a little. You can place your hands palms upright on your lap or down on your kneeseither is fine. Briefly put, that is the physical posture. Try just the physical posture without the mental techniques, without meditating. The purpose here is not to practice meditation, but just to get acquainted with the posture. Simply straighten your posture and then relax your body and your mind as much as you can. Be in the present moment, but do not attempt to actually meditate. Let your mind simply open and relax. Do not stop your thoughts, but do not forcefully follow the thoughts either. Imagine that you are an athlete in intense training, and you have just completed an exercise that was three hours long. At the end of this, you sit down to take a break, and you simply relax. Your mind will automatically open up, and that is what relaxation is. Just let your mind relax naturally, but do not meditate. What happens when you try doing this for a few minutes? Do you feel at peace and relaxed? I have a little secret to tell you, that you probably figured out already. The secret is that the exercise you just did was meditation. It is said that no meditation is the best meditation, because true meditation is without any object of meditation, and therefore without any effort. Our nature, buddha nature, is already pure and perfect, and therefore the path, which is the process of revelation of buddha nature, simply consists of abstaining from any attempt to alter it or do anything to it. It is said that when water is undisturbed, it is clear. If the mind is relaxed, it is lucid. If you attempt to clean water by stirring it,

all you will do is create waves and cause the silt to permeate the water; you will be unable to see any clear reflections in it. If you stop stirring it and let it settle by itself, soon it will be both clear and reflective. Thats easy, right? It is easier than eating food or drinking water. To drink water you need to first pick up the glass, open your mouth, swallow, and then return the glass. But to meditate you do not need to do anything, just rest in the natural state. In the same way, sounds that you might otherwise regard as potential distractions can serve as supports for meditation. These could be the sounds of the elements, such as the wind, or sounds of traffic or people speaking. Any sound can serve as a support if you remain in a state of merely hearing it. There are also techniques using external objects of the senses as supports for meditation, and these include thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Here the technique is fundamentally the same because the main point in tranquillity is simply mindfulness itself. You can use thoughts and other things that arise in your mind the same way as you use external objects. Previously, you might have meditated by directing your attention to something you could seea form. Now you do it by directing your attention to thoughts that appear within the mind. To look at these thoughts, do not attempt to hold onto any single one that occurs; simply attempt to remain mindful of all of the thoughts as they come and go. If you practice this, then thoughts will bring progress to your meditation. If you have a hundred thoughts, you will have a hundred helpers in your meditation. Often we carefully arrange the external environment for our meditation practice. We close the door to our shrine room, set up an elaborate shrine, arrange the cushions so that we are comfortable, and then sit down quietly. As soon as we sit down in that more or less ideal environment, we begin to become distracted because the space we have created is filled with thoughts. We find ourselves thinking about all sorts of thingsthe president of the United States and just about everything else. You need not be displeased or disappointed by this because the very thoughts that could potentially serve as distractions can equally well serve as supports of meditation if you direct your mindfulness to them. Now try to meditate again, using this technique. First, just sit with your mind relaxed. Then look at your thoughts. Then relax your mind again. [In the next portion of the teaching, Rinpoche and the audience meditate together and then have a dialogue about it.] All of your experiences are good. There is a great secret behind thisnot a little secret, but a big one. The secret is that when you looked at your thoughts, you basically had two different experiences. The more common of the two is what happens to most people when they first look at thoughtsthey cannot find any to look at. A thought arises, and as soon as you look at it, it is not there anymore. It is like waiting at a bus stop for the bus to come. The bus finally comes, and just as you are about to get on, it takes off without you. That is really good. That is one of the best meditation experiences. What happens is that when you try to look at thoughts and cannot, you experience a gap between thoughts. You look for the thought and cannot find it. It just gets lost somewhere. That is tranquillity without characteristics, and it lasts for only a few seconds, maybe one or two seconds. Then another thought appears immediately, and disappears immediately. It will be lost, and you will be left in a

state where you are not thinking or meditating at all. Your mind is left in a state of natural openness, and this is natural relaxation, a natural freedom from fixation that you have not intentionally created. From what I heard, it seems that this is what most of you here experienced when you attempted to look at thoughts. Most of you answered that you were unable to find or look at them. You had a hard time even creating thoughts. What happened at that time was that mindfulness arose within you. That is really good.
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