The basic ground consists of two truths, free from the extremes of order and chaos,
The excellent path—two gatherings, free from the extremes of embellishing and diminishing,
The result obtained—two aims, free from the extremes of existence and peace.
May I meet teaching without flaws or errors.
Commentary
This verse outlines the basic philosophy of mahamudra in terms of ground, path, and fruition. Ground is about how things are. Path is about what you do. Result or fruition is about what arises through practice. The first three lines apply the principle of the middle way, that is, not falling into an extreme, to each case.
Ground is what you experience. On the one hand, experience arises vividly, whether it is a sensory sensation such as seeing a child playing, a feeling such as anger or joy, or a thought or a train of thoughts. Whatever the experience, it seems solid and real. On the other hand, when you look at any moment of experience and ask, “What is this?” you find nothing. Thought, feeling, or sensation, it makes no difference. You cannot find any thing there.
These are the two truths. Apparent or conventional truth is that experience appears to be solid and real. Sacred or mystical truth is that nothing can be found that makes experience solid and real.
If you take what is apparently true to be real, you are prone to one extreme, that all experience is ordered and predictable. If you take what is mystically true to be real, you are prone to the other extreme, that all experience is chaotic and unpredictable. Neither extreme accurately describes what experience is. Experience isn’t random, but it isn’t always predictable. On the other hand, not all experience is predictable, but it’s not always random, either. You can argue, analyze, or philosophize about experience to the nth degree and you won’t get any further.
The point here is that every experience is a vivid clear arising, but there is nothing that makes it what it is. It seems to be something, but what that something is is impossible to pin down. That is the ground.
In the second line, Rangjung Dorje describes the path as two gatherings, the gathering of goodness and the gathering of timeless awareness. Gathering is a metaphor. It points to the building of momentum in practice. As you engage what is good and wholesome, the momentum of goodness builds in practice. As practice matures, you touch into an awareness that stands outside of time. Like goodness, as you keep touching that timeless awareness, another kind of momentum builds, the momentum of wisdom .
Two patterns dissipate momentum, the tendency to embellish and the tendency to diminish.
When you move into either, you move into the conceptual
mind and lose your relationship with what you are actually experiencing. You embellish experience by taking it to be more than it is, as real, solid, or definite in some way. You diminish experience by taking it to be less than it is, as fictitious, inconsequential, or unreal. Embellishing dissipates the momentum of wisdom, diminishing dissipates the momentum of goodness. To avoid falling into either extreme, you practice the middle way, receiving what arises in experience without making it more or less than it is.
The third line is about result. The results of practice are described as the two aims, your own welfare and the welfare of all beings. Again, there are two extremes here, existence and peace. You fall into the extreme of peace when you uncover the possibility of utter peace and forget about the welfare of others. This is a dead end, ending up in arrogance and indifference. You fall into the extreme of existence when you take the struggles and suffering of others as solid and real and lose any sense of peace and presence in your own experience. This is also a dead end, ending up in despair and depression. The experience of emptiness counteracts the extreme of existence, compassion counteracts the extreme of peace.
In every generation, teachers arise who emphasize the conventional over the mystical or the mystical over the conventional, goodness over wisdom or wisdom over goodness, or emptiness over compassion or compassion over emptiness. The aspiration in this verse is to meet teaching that in every aspect of practice—ground, path, or fruition—is free from error, that avoids any of these extremes, and that presents the middle way as a constant moving in the direction of balance.