We now turn from outlook to practice. The seven verses in this section outline the principal practice sequence in the sutric tradition of mahamudra. In the overview presented in verse 15, the first step is to develop a relationship with calm abiding, a way of cultivating attention that does not rely on the conceptual mind. As attention develops, conventional concerns start to fall away, leaving a space for the cultivation of the understandings, skills, and capacities that make insight possible. Together, calm abiding and insight provide the basis for a higher level of attention, a level of attention that opens the experience of mind-nature, a clear empty non-conceptual knowing that is the essence of mahamudra practice.
Of the many descriptions of the unfolding of mahamudra practice, one that I
find helpful is:
Appearances become mind.
Mind becomes empty.
Emptiness becomes effortless presence.
Effortless presence becomes natural freedom.
As we abide calmly in the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that comprise
our experience of life, we come to see and know that all these arisings are, as
Rangjung Dorje says in verse 9, magical movements of mind. Then, as we rest in the experience of mind, we see and know that mind is empty. Even though experience arises, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, there. As we become familiar with the groundlessness of experience, we uncover the ability to be completely present in what arises in experience. It involves no effort because we know, directly, that whatever arises is a magical movement in empty awareness. And as that understanding is absorbed, we find that we do not have to do anything with what arises in experience. It comes and goes by itself. As it says in the last chapter of The Diamond-Cutter Sutra:
Regard conditioned experience as like
A shooting star, a floater in the eye, a butter lamp,
A magic spell, a drop of dew, a bubble,
A dream, a flash of lightning, or a thunder cloud.