The Point Beyond Effort
By Michael Erlewine
If we examine, study, and practice any Vajrayana Buddhist lineage, we will find a very clear and detailed curriculum to follow. The question for me was will I follow such a difficult set of practices. I looked at the practice curriculum for the Karma Kagyu Lineage, which is the one I train in, for a number of years before daring to actually do the practices.
It was only thanks to my root guru, the Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, the abbot of Karma Triyana Dhamrachakra Monastery located in the mountains above Woodstock, NY that I bit the bullet and finally dove in.
Before that, I had years of toying around with the dharma. In the very beginning, in the late 1950s and on into the 1960s, I mostly talked about dharma. I did not consider actually practicing it myself. As fascinated as I was with the dharma, I was not about to actually take up the practice. I saw myself as a bystander, not a dedicated practitioner. After all, dedicated practice was for dharma saints like Tibet’s Jetsun Milarepa, not someone like me.
It was my meeting and spending a weekend serving as a chauffeur for the great Siddha Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche that galvanized me into seriously practicing meditation. Trungpa didn’t even ask me if I wanted to learn or explain what he was doing; he just took me into a room, sat me down in a wooden chair, and began to teach me Shamata (Tranquility Meditation) for a couple of hours, nor did he even give it a name. He never told me what he was doing.
Nevertheless, I loved being in the proximity of Trungpa and his caring to instruct me.
Be that as it may, after a weekend with Trungpa Rinpoche, I had taken the Kool-Aid and entered the stream of intentional dharma practitioners. This continues to this day, some 51 years later. Never mind that I toyed with dharma some 15 years before meeting Trungpa but was not yet serious about it.
And I’m not about to discuss or describe the standard curriculum for the Karma Kagyu Lineage, other than to say, the typical flow is:
The Common Preliminaries
Lojong
The Extraordinary Preliminaries (Ngondro)
Deity Practice
The Special Preliminaries
Mahamudra
I spent 36 years working with my root guru, who spoke no English, did my practice in Tibetan, and learned to read Tibetan, a little.
For those interested, the curriculum of dharma practice is straight forward, with no special serendipity required until one reaches Mahamudra training. That’s where some additional blessing or instruction is required. And so, I will talk a little about that because that is the point where serious practitioners tend to pile up and not easily find their way forward.
I am reminded of when I was a young man and driving up the very dangerous logging roads along the Klamath River in northern California. Dangerous because fully loaded logging trucks cannot always use their brakes when they are hurtling down a mountain road; they don’t dare, and cars have to get off the road or get run over. It happens.
Anyway, I parked my car off the road by a good sized mountain stream. The salmon were climbing up that stream. You could see their backs cresting as they drove forward. I left the road and followed the creek on foot upstream until it came to a deep pool where the salmon could go no farther. And there. in that deep pool, were dozens of huge salmon suspended almost motionless at different depths in the pool. They could not go on.
My point is that in dharma training, students who have completed all the preliminaries reach a point where sheer effort alone is no longer rewarded. This is where what is called the “Pointing-Out Instructions” as to recognizing the nature of the Mind from a qualified teacher or guru are required.
We can’t do it ourselves, at least according to the many pith instructions about the pointing-out instructions I have read, and I have read hundreds. These instructions have to be pointed out to us by an authentic guru for recognition on our part to occur. Period.
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And so, like the pool filled with large salmon I described, these student practitioners are gathered at the edge of what is called “Recognition” of the true nature of the mind, but unable to proceed farther without having the actual nature of the mind pointed out to them by an authentic guru, someone who has had the experience and knows how to point it out. And we as students have to be prepared to experience that recognition.
In my own case I had the pointing-out instructions given me by more than one Tibetan Rinpoche and nothing happened. I was unable to recognize the nature of the mind. That was fun. LOL. Years later, it did take place.
Perhaps we can be grandfathered in pursuing some of the different dharma curriculum levels, but “Recognition” is a hard-stop. We can’t fake it because ‘Recognition’ is not something we can show to anyone else but ourselves. We have to recognize the true nature of the mind on our own. And it has to be pointed out to us, until we get it, but the proof of the pudding is that we alone have to recognize how the mind works. We either do or we don’t. Even if we say we did, but didn’t, nothing will happen because nothing happened. I have seen this.
And to make it even more difficult, “Recognition” is NOT something dualistic, with a subject and an object, like Michael sees the nature of the mind. No. Recognition requires, perhaps for the first time for each of us consciously, that we experience non-duality, like this quote by the poet Sir Edwin Arnold:
“The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”
That HAS to happen and we don’t just press a button or do so many prostrations, mantras, of what-nots.
In Rinzai Zen Buddhism, “Recognition” is called “Kensho,” and in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, as mentioned, “Recognition” of the actual nature of the mind. Same experience, yet one that we must each ourselves go through. It can’t be faked because without it, we are without it, without full immersion in this present moment. We would only be fooling ourselves. As I like to say:
“No matter how clever I am, even I cannot sneak up on a mirror.”
And so, that’s the holdup, the bind, or what separates each of us from full immersion in non-duality or accomplishing the Recognition of the Nature of the Mind. I have more on this event, some very less understood, but to come in another Article.
[Photo by Elko Jones, used by permission.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
