Spiritual Practice: Selections of Tibetan Buddhism Texts by the Venerated Chokgyur Dechen Lingpa (vegetarian), Part 1 of 2

We now present teachings of Master Chokgyur Dechen Lingpa (vegetarian) on being diligent in our spiritual practice for liberation.

Advice for Disciples

“[…] You must meditate intently, dear disciple. If you wish to practice, you should study. Without proper study, how will you be able to reflect? Those who do not study and reflect Cannot cut through doubts and misconceptions during meditation. It’s no use just to study; You must reflect wholeheartedly on what you’ve learned. If you don’t use reflection to investigate and refine your knowledge, You’ll be led astray into diversions and pitfalls, time and time again.

It’s of no use just to reflect; You must meditate well on your reflections. The view that is gained through study and reflection Is mere intellectual understanding, of course. If you rely on an intellectual understanding of the view, It’s like jumping without wings into a yawning abyss. Meditation alone will not be of any help; All the signs of progress need to arise. If the signs of progress do not gradually arise, It’s a sign that your meditation has failed to strike the vital points. When practice fails to strike the vital points, it is never effective; Even if you meditate for a long time, it will only make you tired.

Before any meditation, you must attend to the preliminaries: Namely, developing a stable mind of renunciation. For in this dungeon of samsara [cycle of death and rebirth], Amid the countless beings that wander through the six realms, A precious human birth is incredibly hard to find. […] If you don’t exert yourself urgently, with haste, Know this body to be like a bubble, a fleeting flash of lightning. If you can’t be sure that things will last from one moment to the next, How can you believe you won’t die tonight?

People who’ve reached their eighties Still talk and seek out ways of prolonging their lives. Are their hearts made of steel, or what?! After dying, they’ll be destined for the lower realms; How could it be otherwise? And why? Forget all the misdeeds, obscurations, and habits Endlessly amassed throughout beginningless time; A mere instance of the misdeeds accrued in attempts to prolong this current life Is enough to cause a fall to the lower realms. As we find ourselves falling into the abyss, If we do not then take hold of ourselves, To hope for another’s assistance is plain self-treachery. And so, if we fool ourselves, And are reborn in the lower realms, The suffering that awaits us will be more than we can bear. We cannot even imagine how it might be. Since the thought of such suffering can even tear asunder The great hearts of the Bodhisattvas, How could the rest of us even conceive of it?

Woe and alas! This state of affairs Has arisen from desire and anger and ignorance, And all that is unwholesome, the great mass of negativity. My accumulated karma, be it virtuous or not, Will ripen upon me eventually, even if the eon ends. Even the noble ones can’t protect me from the way it must mature. This karma, I must purify alone. If unskilled in methods, I will find this difficult, But if skilled in methods, purification becomes easy. There is no end to the ocean of samsara [cycle of death and rebirth], With its fierce churning waves of ferocious suffering, Brimming with hordes of water monsters— the three poisons. Wretched, with no refuge, we drown. Besides the Three Jewels, What has the power to save us? […]”