December 11, 2024 • 22 mins
When you start to get “serious” (whatever that is and however you try to define it) about your vajrayana practice you will face the question of the “preliminaries” or “foundation practices”. Best to be warned about what’s involved. And it would be good to have an idea of what this ngondro is good for.
Prostrating - again and again!
Offering mandalas
Words or phrases you might want to look up:
- “Words of my Perfect Teacher” (book)
- Dorje Chang
- Dudjom Tersar
- Gampopa
- Guru Rinpoche
- Jamgon Kongtrul
- Karma Kagyu
- Karma Kamtsang
- Longchen Nyingtig
- Mala
- Mandala
- Meru
- Milarepa
- Naropa
- Ngondro
- Nyingma
- Shakyamuni
- Torch of Certainty
- Vajrasattva
- Yuthok
#Buddhism #Vajrayana #DoubleDorje #Ngondro #FoundationPractices #PreliminaryPractices
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
Hello all you good listeners. This is the Double Dorje podcast. I'm Alex Wilding, and in this episode
I'll look at some of the issues surrounding the famous preliminary practices - the ngondro.
When you start to get serious, whatever that is and however you try to define it, about your vajrayana practice, you will face the question of these preliminaries or foundation practices.
(00:37):
It's best to be warned about what's involved, and it would be good to have an idea of what this ngondro is good for.
First, rather quickly, the two things that have to be said every time. Number one, please take a moment to like, subscribe or whatever you can to support this podcast. It does matter. It does help. Number two, if your listening platform doesn't show you the extra material, such as a list of words you might want to look up - that list is actually rather long this week -
(01:08):
you'll find that material on Podbean where this podcast is hosted when it is first published.
So - let's imagine you are interested in Vajrayana Buddhism.
You've learned a bit and you're learning more. You've been practising a bit, finding out how easy it is or how easy it isn't to sit cross legged,
(01:33):
and how far you can get towards the full vajra posture. You know, the one where your left foot is on top of your right thigh and your right foot is on top of your left thigh.
Some people actually call this the lotus posture, and as I understand it, that might be correct in an Indian yoga context. But in Vajrayana Buddhism it's known as the Vajra posture.
(01:56):
But now, in the tea room at your local centre, or maybe while you're eating a few momos and drinking a coke in the Double Dorje restaurant
- both of these are good places for gossip -
You happen to hear about these foundation practices.
There seems to be a bit of a mystique about them, and you wonder what they are.
(02:17):
Could they be something for you?
A few months into my connection with my first Dharma Centre, I recall a couple of guys who went under the nicknames of Tealeaf and Trolleybus.
Whether that was daft or not, I'm not really sure, but it did seem OK at the time.
(02:39):
They were due to leave for India in the following few days where their dream was to study and do some practice.
And they came into the tea room fresh from an interview with Chimi Rinpoche, who was the founder of that centre.
A few months ago I mentioned the old duplicating system known as roneoing, and the two of them were each clutching a couple of sky blue roneoed sheets of paper, joking about having received secret teachings that were going to make that time in India fruitful.
(03:13):
I was to learn later that the sheets were headed the Precious Light-Ggiving Guidance, starting students off at the beginning of Mahamudra practice.
Hmm, I really ought to do an episode about what Mahamudra is, in simple, practical terms some time. But for now, we just need to know that these blue and largely legible sheets of paper contained notes on the four revolting thoughts which we've talked about several times before,
(03:43):
along with a brief description of the visualisation and prayers necessary for the prostration and refuge part of the Mahamudra preliminaries.
I was impressed. Secret teachings, indeed! This was the real deal.
So the seed was planted of the idea that beginning the ngondro was a really, really big step. This was the way to go to get enlightened.
(04:10):
With hindsight, I occasionally wonder whether people who don't take this step have an even better shot at enlightenment because they're not so attached to their own progress. Who knows?
Well, actually Bab, we pretty much do know the answer. Progress, for want of a better word, depends far more on our motivation and our sincerity than it does on the outer practices. So you can take that step or not.
(04:35):
Nothing is guaranteed either way.
In a few minutes, I'll go into an outline of what preliminary practices of this sort involve, as there may well be some listeners who don't yet have much idea at all of what I'm talking about.
But I'm not going to go into the fine details about how they are done, and that's for a couple of reasons.
(04:59):
The first reason is that joking about secret teachings aside, we are in the realm of secret teachings.
As regular listeners will know, secret doesn't exactly mean secret.
These things are often easy to find out, especially these days, and indeed there are a number of books that talk about and describe them in plenty of authoritative detail, and which may well be worth studying before you start.
(05:28):
I'll just mention the Words of my Perfect Teacher as one of these, but there are quite a few more.
The details of these practices do vary, sometimes a little and sometimes really a lot, from one system to the next.
It's only in the context of having a connection with a lineage of teachers and making a spiritual commitment to practising within that lineage that these things actually make any sense at all.
(05:58):
Without that, it's just pointless.
The details do indeed vary.
And for good reasons.
So there's therefore not an awful lot of benefit to be had from knowing the fine details of a system that you may never have a connection to.
In other words, one - and I do stress one - function of these ngondro practices is to make our way into a particular lineage or cycle. To enter, so to speak, its stream of blessing.
(06:31):
This contrasts with a mistake that has occasionally been made.
At an early stage, I've seen people who, quite clearly, are enamoured of the idea of being a ngondro practitioner in a general sense and then trying to choose between various ngondros that they've heard about.
(06:52):
For example, they might find the Longchen Nyingtig preliminary is attractive not only because it's a highly admired system, but also because the preliminaries are very beautiful. Though I should say that if you are inclined in this direction, all of these ngondro practices are beautiful.
On the other hand, they might be drawn to the Yuthog preliminaries, not because they're drawn to studying and practising Tibetan medicine, which is what they are related to, but because those preliminaries are essentially intended for doctors or doctors in training and are unusually short.
(07:32):
They would then believe or hope that they could say they had completed ngondro within a matter of weeks or months.
On the other hand, perhaps they should do the preliminaries for the Karma Kagyu, the Karma Kamtsang preliminaries as they are known, because they have such a fabulous reputation.
Then again, the Dudjom Tersar preliminaries, while the number of repetitions expected doesn't make them any sort of short circuit, the work entailed is just as much, the chants required to continue them as a daily practice are extremely convenient.
(08:07):
This is just not the way to go about it. It's a classic cart-before-the-horse situation.
The choice of whether to do ngondro should be made in consultation with your teacher.
In particular, the question of which ngondro to do depends entirely on which stream of practice you are about to dive into.
(08:31):
So before I confuse you any further, and especially for those who don't yet know anything about ngondro, let's take a look at what such a practice might entail.
I’ll base this description mainly on the Karma Kagyu preliminaries.
A translation of Jamgon Kongtrul's commentary to this practice was published in the 1970s under the title Torch of Certainty, and it is still quite easily available.
(09:10):
A student begins with contemplations on the floor revolting thoughts.
I've talked about these several times before. They even have their own episode here somewhere, so there is no need to repeat that.
There is little, if any, formal liturgy connected with these. It's simply expected that the student will be extremely familiar with them and will have taken them deeply to heart.
(09:36):
Next comes the big one, the one that puts people off.
The one that people sometimes struggle with, but in many ways the most important one.
The student attempts a complex visualisation of what is called the refuge tree, which consists literally of a visualisation of a tree with the lamas of the lineage and a considerable number of associated deities surrounding it.
(10:03):
The central figure, much larger than the others, will represent the source of the lineage concerned.
In this Karma Kagyu tradition,
that figure is the dark blue Buddha named Dorje Chang, sitting cross legged and dressed in silks and jewels.
This is the form in which Shakyamuni is said to have appeared when teaching tantras.
(10:28):
The central figure may be Shakyamuni appearing very much like a conventional Buddha in monks robes and holding a begging bowl.
In the Nyingma traditions, the central figure will almost certainly be one form or another of Guru Rinpoche.
It does occur to me that I'm using quite a number of foreign terms in this episode, so a quick reminder that as usual, I'll include some of them in the word list at podbean,
(10:56):
which you can look up if you like.
One does one's best with this visualisation, recites a number of prayers and then proceeds to perform 100,000 full length, flat-on-the-floor, prostrations to that visualised Buddha and all the other figures on the tree.
(11:17):
Not all in one session, needs hardly to be said!
How long does it take?
If we're talking about young, fit kids who've been sent to a monastery with the expectation of going into higher meditation training, maybe kids in their late teens and who are doing this at the beginning of what might be a long retreat,
(11:38):
they may get through it in s matter of a few weeks.
People who do it in modern society, along with a normal working and family life, are likely to take a year, or even a few years.
This number of 100,000 is called a “bum” in Tibetan. It's the same number as the Indian lakh.
(12:01):
In the case of these numbers of performances, it is more or less literal, although in fact it is taken to mean 1000 times a usual mala of 108 beads.
Now holding a string of 108 beads while making full length prostrations has its own difficulties. They slap around, they clatter, and because of that the string tends to break. So it's pretty usual to use a small mala, with just 27 beads, that fits easily in the hand or round the hand.
(12:35):
And in that case, of course, four rounds of that little mala add up to 108, which is what we call 100. Pretty simple innit? Once you got used to it.
In other contexts, this word “bum” is not literal at all.
There's a well known collection of songs and teachings of Milarepa, which was published as the Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. It simply means a rather large book containing the collected works of Milarepa, and that, The Collected Works of Milarepa would actually have been a better translation of the title.
(13:07):
Or maybe not. It might have been more boring ,and therefore not sold so well.
Not my call to judge that.
That done, the student moves on to the purification process.
The key points to purifying bad karma are regret for what you've done, resolve not to do it again, the effort to make reparations wherever possible. In this context, the practice addresses the final aspect of purification, which is clearing out the stains, the bad taste, if you like, left in our minds
(13:44):
even when those first three things have been done.
It involves a visualisation of the lama as a brilliantly pure white Buddha Vajrasattva,
delivering a stream of cleansing nectar while the student recites the associated hundred-syllable mantra, once again done 100,000 times.
(14:08):
The third preliminary, designed for the accumulation of merit, is the offering of mandalas.
Here mandala refers to a visualisation of the universe pictured as the central Mount Meru, surrounded by oceans, rings of mountains, the sun, the moon and continents, one of which is the world in which we are said to live.
(14:32):
Some people have suggested that, while in ancient India and in Tibet it was believed that the world really did have this physical configuration,
we now know that it has quite a different shape, and the argument goes that we should therefore use that in our visualisation. Frankly, and I am by no means alone in this, I think that is nonsense.
(14:56):
The point is that the visualisation represents the universe as something beautiful and worthy of offering to the Buddha, and that’s simply what we need.
There is a core verse used in this practice which is recited along with the offering of piles of rice onto a mandala plate held in the hand, rather a large number of times. Yes, you have guessed it - 100,000 times.
(15:26):
Finally, and this is usually said to be the most important part,
the student comes to the Guru Yoga.
In the case of the Karma Kagyu preliminaries, there is a fairly extensive liturgy listing the names of all the lineage holders going back about 1000 years, followed by the recitation of a particular prayer to the Lama.
(15:50):
Yes, 100,000 times again,
and the recitation of a mantra.
Getting through all this is really hard work, there's no doubt about it. People can come to feel that it's just a slog, prostrating and prostrating and prostrating in their free time, day after day after day.
Some teachers are very strict about this.
(16:13):
I remember Ato Rinpoche telling us how he had been surprised - and actually a bit amused - when he was teaching these preliminaries to a group in Canada.
He started his teaching with a certain number of students in the room,
and when he moved on from the prostrations and refuge to Vajrasattva,
(16:34):
all those who hadn't finished their prostrations left the room. When he finished Vajrasattva, all those who hadn't completed the Vajrasattva practice left while he went on to the mandala and Guru Yoga.
So at the end, only a few were left to hear those final Guru Yoga explanations.
Well, that was their system.
(17:02):
I have to say, and this is a matter of personal taste, that the systems in which the students do all of the preliminary practices from the beginning in parallel
are easier and, dare I say it, more rewarding. There is more of a sense of fullness about them from the beginning.
It's still hard work, but it doesn't feel quite so much like the grind of doing 100,000 prostrations without much change of scenery.
(17:31):
Let me stress again that the structure of the preliminaries does vary, sometimes quite a lot.
The number of preliminary practices may vary, and so may the actual actions carried out.
If you get this far yourself, don't be surprised to find that in the system you are following, the sequence of preliminaries varies, the visualisations vary, and so on.
(17:58):
So now what is it good for? It may first help to remember that the word preliminary can be misleading.
Yes, it does quite often happen that accumulating a certain number, such as the classic 100,000, is required before students are given the empowerment and practice at which the preliminaries are aiming.
(18:23):
But it should not be thought that completing this famous number somehow entitles us to receive higher teachings.
I did even hear of somebody who was attracted to the Yuthok system, whose preliminaries are relatively short, as I explained above,
in the belief that they could then go to another teacher and say something like, “OK, I have completed the preliminaries. Now will you give me the initiation and teachings for your humdinger of a practice?”
(18:54):
It doesn't work like that. In most cases, one particular set of preliminaries is aimed at an associated set of what we can call the main practices.
I did hear of an important lama in the Dudjom Tersar tradition who was quite strict about expecting his students to complete 100,000 before moving on to the main deity practice that he was teaching.
(19:20):
He allowed that students who had completed the 100,000 of a different Nyingma ngondro would only need to do 10,000 of the preliminaries of this specific teaching.
And someone who had completed the 100,000 of, let's say, the Karma Kagyu preliminaries wouldn't be given that much slack, but would need to do 25,000.
(19:44):
Once again, this all depends on the particular teacher.
Foundation would be a better word than preliminary, and another reason for that is that it is very possible to continue these practices throughout one's life.
Some great lamas are said to have made ngondro their main or central practice for their life.
(20:09):
For those of us who are not professional practitioners, it might be difficult to get through a full set of preliminaries in less than a couple of hours,
and this might not sit so well with a modern working life.
This is one advantage, as I hinted at before, of the Dudjom Tersar preliminaries, in which you can do a small number of these practices in less than half an hour.
(20:35):
This wouldn't be great for accumulating large numbers, but it is a very rewarding way to practice in everyday life.
But again, this would not be a good reason to choose it, but it is a bonus if you happen to be going down that particular road.
We shouldn't think that the tradition of preliminaries in this form is incredibly old.
(20:59):
There's no evidence that they were practised, again in this form by, for example, Naropa, Milarepa, Gampopa.
No doubt these figures did perform all of these practices in one way or another at one time or another, but they hadn't crystallised into the sort of packages of preliminaries that we have today.
(21:22):
To the best of my limited knowledge, this crystallisation took place a couple of centuries ago.
If we have any historian scholars in the listenership here, perhaps they would let us know.
Another reminder that these things are not necessarily set in stone.
(21:43):
So whichever way we approach it, whether we go into retreat and accumulate the numbers in a few months, or whether we take a much longer time and accumulate the numbers over years,
and whether or not we are then able to maintain a daily practice based on the ngondro, whichever of these applies, the strength and the confidence arising from the devotion, the purification, the merit and above all, the blessing of the Guru Yoga does make it possible to live a bit differently, to be different,
(22:15):
and to have our lives blend, bit by bit, more and more into Dharma practice.
So, please remember to like, subscribe, tell your friends and all that sort of stuff. And remember, the preparation can be more important than the main part, so don't leave home without it!
(22:39):
Bye.
Hello all you good listeners. This is the Double Dorje podcast. I'm Alex Wilding, and in this episode
I'll look at some of the issues surrounding the famous preliminary practices - the ngondro.
When you start to get serious, whatever that is and however you try to define it, about your vajrayana practice, you will face the question of these preliminaries or foundation practices.
(00:37):
It's best to be warned about what's involved, and it would be good to have an idea of what this ngondro is good for.
First, rather quickly, the two things that have to be said every time. Number one, please take a moment to like, subscribe or whatever you can to support this podcast. It does matter. It does help. Number two, if your listening platform doesn't show you the extra material, such as a list of words you might want to look up - that list is actually rather long this week -
(01:08):
you'll find that material on Podbean where this podcast is hosted when it is first published.
So - let's imagine you are interested in Vajrayana Buddhism.
You've learned a bit and you're learning more. You've been practising a bit, finding out how easy it is or how easy it isn't to sit cross legged,
(01:33):
and how far you can get towards the full vajra posture. You know, the one where your left foot is on top of your right thigh and your right foot is on top of your left thigh.
Some people actually call this the lotus posture, and as I understand it, that might be correct in an Indian yoga context. But in Vajrayana Buddhism it's known as the Vajra posture.
(01:56):
But now, in the tea room at your local centre, or maybe while you're eating a few momos and drinking a coke in the Double Dorje restaurant
- both of these are good places for gossip -
You happen to hear about these foundation practices.
There seems to be a bit of a mystique about them, and you wonder what they are.
(02:17):
Could they be something for you?
A few months into my connection with my first Dharma Centre, I recall a couple of guys who went under the nicknames of Tealeaf and Trolleybus.
Whether that was daft or not, I'm not really sure, but it did seem OK at the time.
(02:39):
They were due to leave for India in the following few days where their dream was to study and do some practice.
And they came into the tea room fresh from an interview with Chimi Rinpoche, who was the founder of that centre.
A few months ago I mentioned the old duplicating system known as roneoing, and the two of them were each clutching a couple of sky blue roneoed sheets of paper, joking about having received secret teachings that were going to make that time in India fruitful.
(03:13):
I was to learn later that the sheets were headed the Precious Light-Ggiving Guidance, starting students off at the beginning of Mahamudra practice.
Hmm, I really ought to do an episode about what Mahamudra is, in simple, practical terms some time. But for now, we just need to know that these blue and largely legible sheets of paper contained notes on the four revolting thoughts which we've talked about several times before,
(03:43):
along with a brief description of the visualisation and prayers necessary for the prostration and refuge part of the Mahamudra preliminaries.
I was impressed. Secret teachings, indeed! This was the real deal.
So the seed was planted of the idea that beginning the ngondro was a really, really big step. This was the way to go to get enlightened.
(04:10):
With hindsight, I occasionally wonder whether people who don't take this step have an even better shot at enlightenment because they're not so attached to their own progress. Who knows?
Well, actually Bab, we pretty much do know the answer. Progress, for want of a better word, depends far more on our motivation and our sincerity than it does on the outer practices. So you can take that step or not.
(04:35):
Nothing is guaranteed either way.
In a few minutes, I'll go into an outline of what preliminary practices of this sort involve, as there may well be some listeners who don't yet have much idea at all of what I'm talking about.
But I'm not going to go into the fine details about how they are done, and that's for a couple of reasons.
(04:59):
The first reason is that joking about secret teachings aside, we are in the realm of secret teachings.
As regular listeners will know, secret doesn't exactly mean secret.
These things are often easy to find out, especially these days, and indeed there are a number of books that talk about and describe them in plenty of authoritative detail, and which may well be worth studying before you start.
(05:28):
I'll just mention the Words of my Perfect Teacher as one of these, but there are quite a few more.
The details of these practices do vary, sometimes a little and sometimes really a lot, from one system to the next.
It's only in the context of having a connection with a lineage of teachers and making a spiritual commitment to practising within that lineage that these things actually make any sense at all.
(05:58):
Without that, it's just pointless.
The details do indeed vary.
And for good reasons.
So there's therefore not an awful lot of benefit to be had from knowing the fine details of a system that you may never have a connection to.
In other words, one - and I do stress one - function of these ngondro practices is to make our way into a particular lineage or cycle. To enter, so to speak, its stream of blessing.
(06:31):
This contrasts with a mistake that has occasionally been made.
At an early stage, I've seen people who, quite clearly, are enamoured of the idea of being a ngondro practitioner in a general sense and then trying to choose between various ngondros that they've heard about.
(06:52):
For example, they might find the Longchen Nyingtig preliminary is attractive not only because it's a highly admired system, but also because the preliminaries are very beautiful. Though I should say that if you are inclined in this direction, all of these ngondro practices are beautiful.
On the other hand, they might be drawn to the Yuthog preliminaries, not because they're drawn to studying and practising Tibetan medicine, which is what they are related to, but because those preliminaries are essentially intended for doctors or doctors in training and are unusually short.
(07:32):
They would then believe or hope that they could say they had completed ngondro within a matter of weeks or months.
On the other hand, perhaps they should do the preliminaries for the Karma Kagyu, the Karma Kamtsang preliminaries as they are known, because they have such a fabulous reputation.
Then again, the Dudjom Tersar preliminaries, while the number of repetitions expected doesn't make them any sort of short circuit, the work entailed is just as much, the chants required to continue them as a daily practice are extremely convenient.
(08:07):
This is just not the way to go about it. It's a classic cart-before-the-horse situation.
The choice of whether to do ngondro should be made in consultation with your teacher.
In particular, the question of which ngondro to do depends entirely on which stream of practice you are about to dive into.
(08:31):
So before I confuse you any further, and especially for those who don't yet know anything about ngondro, let's take a look at what such a practice might entail.
I’ll base this description mainly on the Karma Kagyu preliminaries.
A translation of Jamgon Kongtrul's commentary to this practice was published in the 1970s under the title Torch of Certainty, and it is still quite easily available.
(09:10):
A student begins with contemplations on the floor revolting thoughts.
I've talked about these several times before. They even have their own episode here somewhere, so there is no need to repeat that.
There is little, if any, formal liturgy connected with these. It's simply expected that the student will be extremely familiar with them and will have taken them deeply to heart.
(09:36):
Next comes the big one, the one that puts people off.
The one that people sometimes struggle with, but in many ways the most important one.
The student attempts a complex visualisation of what is called the refuge tree, which consists literally of a visualisation of a tree with the lamas of the lineage and a considerable number of associated deities surrounding it.
(10:03):
The central figure, much larger than the others, will represent the source of the lineage concerned.
In this Karma Kagyu tradition,
that figure is the dark blue Buddha named Dorje Chang, sitting cross legged and dressed in silks and jewels.
This is the form in which Shakyamuni is said to have appeared when teaching tantras.
(10:28):
The central figure may be Shakyamuni appearing very much like a conventional Buddha in monks robes and holding a begging bowl.
In the Nyingma traditions, the central figure will almost certainly be one form or another of Guru Rinpoche.
It does occur to me that I'm using quite a number of foreign terms in this episode, so a quick reminder that as usual, I'll include some of them in the word list at podbean,
(10:56):
which you can look up if you like.
One does one's best with this visualisation, recites a number of prayers and then proceeds to perform 100,000 full length, flat-on-the-floor, prostrations to that visualised Buddha and all the other figures on the tree.
(11:17):
Not all in one session, needs hardly to be said!
How long does it take?
If we're talking about young, fit kids who've been sent to a monastery with the expectation of going into higher meditation training, maybe kids in their late teens and who are doing this at the beginning of what might be a long retreat,
(11:38):
they may get through it in s matter of a few weeks.
People who do it in modern society, along with a normal working and family life, are likely to take a year, or even a few years.
This number of 100,000 is called a “bum” in Tibetan. It's the same number as the Indian lakh.
(12:01):
In the case of these numbers of performances, it is more or less literal, although in fact it is taken to mean 1000 times a usual mala of 108 beads.
Now holding a string of 108 beads while making full length prostrations has its own difficulties. They slap around, they clatter, and because of that the string tends to break. So it's pretty usual to use a small mala, with just 27 beads, that fits easily in the hand or round the hand.
(12:35):
And in that case, of course, four rounds of that little mala add up to 108, which is what we call 100. Pretty simple innit? Once you got used to it.
In other contexts, this word “bum” is not literal at all.
There's a well known collection of songs and teachings of Milarepa, which was published as the Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. It simply means a rather large book containing the collected works of Milarepa, and that, The Collected Works of Milarepa would actually have been a better translation of the title.
(13:07):
Or maybe not. It might have been more boring ,and therefore not sold so well.
Not my call to judge that.
That done, the student moves on to the purification process.
The key points to purifying bad karma are regret for what you've done, resolve not to do it again, the effort to make reparations wherever possible. In this context, the practice addresses the final aspect of purification, which is clearing out the stains, the bad taste, if you like, left in our minds
(13:44):
even when those first three things have been done.
It involves a visualisation of the lama as a brilliantly pure white Buddha Vajrasattva,
delivering a stream of cleansing nectar while the student recites the associated hundred-syllable mantra, once again done 100,000 times.
(14:08):
The third preliminary, designed for the accumulation of merit, is the offering of mandalas.
Here mandala refers to a visualisation of the universe pictured as the central Mount Meru, surrounded by oceans, rings of mountains, the sun, the moon and continents, one of which is the world in which we are said to live.
(14:32):
Some people have suggested that, while in ancient India and in Tibet it was believed that the world really did have this physical configuration,
we now know that it has quite a different shape, and the argument goes that we should therefore use that in our visualisation. Frankly, and I am by no means alone in this, I think that is nonsense.
(14:56):
The point is that the visualisation represents the universe as something beautiful and worthy of offering to the Buddha, and that’s simply what we need.
There is a core verse used in this practice which is recited along with the offering of piles of rice onto a mandala plate held in the hand, rather a large number of times. Yes, you have guessed it - 100,000 times.
(15:26):
Finally, and this is usually said to be the most important part,
the student comes to the Guru Yoga.
In the case of the Karma Kagyu preliminaries, there is a fairly extensive liturgy listing the names of all the lineage holders going back about 1000 years, followed by the recitation of a particular prayer to the Lama.
(15:50):
Yes, 100,000 times again,
and the recitation of a mantra.
Getting through all this is really hard work, there's no doubt about it. People can come to feel that it's just a slog, prostrating and prostrating and prostrating in their free time, day after day after day.
Some teachers are very strict about this.
(16:13):
I remember Ato Rinpoche telling us how he had been surprised - and actually a bit amused - when he was teaching these preliminaries to a group in Canada.
He started his teaching with a certain number of students in the room,
and when he moved on from the prostrations and refuge to Vajrasattva,
(16:34):
all those who hadn't finished their prostrations left the room. When he finished Vajrasattva, all those who hadn't completed the Vajrasattva practice left while he went on to the mandala and Guru Yoga.
So at the end, only a few were left to hear those final Guru Yoga explanations.
Well, that was their system.
(17:02):
I have to say, and this is a matter of personal taste, that the systems in which the students do all of the preliminary practices from the beginning in parallel
are easier and, dare I say it, more rewarding. There is more of a sense of fullness about them from the beginning.
It's still hard work, but it doesn't feel quite so much like the grind of doing 100,000 prostrations without much change of scenery.
(17:31):
Let me stress again that the structure of the preliminaries does vary, sometimes quite a lot.
The number of preliminary practices may vary, and so may the actual actions carried out.
If you get this far yourself, don't be surprised to find that in the system you are following, the sequence of preliminaries varies, the visualisations vary, and so on.
(17:58):
So now what is it good for? It may first help to remember that the word preliminary can be misleading.
Yes, it does quite often happen that accumulating a certain number, such as the classic 100,000, is required before students are given the empowerment and practice at which the preliminaries are aiming.
(18:23):
But it should not be thought that completing this famous number somehow entitles us to receive higher teachings.
I did even hear of somebody who was attracted to the Yuthok system, whose preliminaries are relatively short, as I explained above,
in the belief that they could then go to another teacher and say something like, “OK, I have completed the preliminaries. Now will you give me the initiation and teachings for your humdinger of a practice?”
(18:54):
It doesn't work like that. In most cases, one particular set of preliminaries is aimed at an associated set of what we can call the main practices.
I did hear of an important lama in the Dudjom Tersar tradition who was quite strict about expecting his students to complete 100,000 before moving on to the main deity practice that he was teaching.
(19:20):
He allowed that students who had completed the 100,000 of a different Nyingma ngondro would only need to do 10,000 of the preliminaries of this specific teaching.
And someone who had completed the 100,000 of, let's say, the Karma Kagyu preliminaries wouldn't be given that much slack, but would need to do 25,000.
(19:44):
Once again, this all depends on the particular teacher.
Foundation would be a better word than preliminary, and another reason for that is that it is very possible to continue these practices throughout one's life.
Some great lamas are said to have made ngondro their main or central practice for their life.
(20:09):
For those of us who are not professional practitioners, it might be difficult to get through a full set of preliminaries in less than a couple of hours,
and this might not sit so well with a modern working life.
This is one advantage, as I hinted at before, of the Dudjom Tersar preliminaries, in which you can do a small number of these practices in less than half an hour.
(20:35):
This wouldn't be great for accumulating large numbers, but it is a very rewarding way to practice in everyday life.
But again, this would not be a good reason to choose it, but it is a bonus if you happen to be going down that particular road.
We shouldn't think that the tradition of preliminaries in this form is incredibly old.
(20:59):
There's no evidence that they were practised, again in this form by, for example, Naropa, Milarepa, Gampopa.
No doubt these figures did perform all of these practices in one way or another at one time or another, but they hadn't crystallised into the sort of packages of preliminaries that we have today.
(21:22):
To the best of my limited knowledge, this crystallisation took place a couple of centuries ago.
If we have any historian scholars in the listenership here, perhaps they would let us know.
Another reminder that these things are not necessarily set in stone.
(21:43):
So whichever way we approach it, whether we go into retreat and accumulate the numbers in a few months, or whether we take a much longer time and accumulate the numbers over years,
and whether or not we are then able to maintain a daily practice based on the ngondro, whichever of these applies, the strength and the confidence arising from the devotion, the purification, the merit and above all, the blessing of the Guru Yoga does make it possible to live a bit differently, to be different,
(22:15):
and to have our lives blend, bit by bit, more and more into Dharma practice.
So, please remember to like, subscribe, tell your friends and all that sort of stuff. And remember, the preparation can be more important than the main part, so don't leave home without it!
(22:39):
Bye.
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