Padmasambhava

The teaching

Taught from what the Tibetan tradition keeps in his name, from the Garland of Views to the treasure texts.

The view and the deed

Tibetan tradition gives his teaching one line above all: though my view is higher than the sky, my care for the cause and effect of actions is finer than flour. The view is the mind's own nature, open and without limit, in which there is nothing to take up or throw away; the conduct is the plain law of karma, kept in the smallest act. The two are held together, and neither excuses the other.

The nine vehicles

The Garland of Views, a short text the Nyingma hold to be his own, sets every path in order, and the school counts nine vehicles after it. Three lead out of the source of suffering: the vehicle of the hearers, who know the four truths and the absence of a self in persons; of the solitary buddhas, who see the twelve links of dependent arising alone; and of the bodhisattvas, who join the emptiness of all things to compassion for all beings.

Three are the outer tantras, of purity and austerity: in kriya the practitioner serves the deity as a subject serves a lord, with washing, fasting and offerings; in charya the two meet as friends; in yoga the practitioner and the deity are of one nature. And three are the inner tantras, of skilful means: mahayoga, which sees all that appears as the mandala of the deities and trains in the stage of creation; anuyoga, the stage of completion, where space and wisdom are inseparable, worked through the subtle body only under a teacher; and atiyoga, the Great Perfection, which teaches that the mind's nature is pure and complete from the beginning, so that there is nothing to make and nothing to remove, only to recognise.

Taming, not destroying

The oldest stories tell of him as one who tamed the spirits of a land, and the tradition teaches what that taming is. A hostile spirit is not killed but brought under an oath to protect the teaching, so that the old gods of mountain and lake become its guardians. The wrathful deities of his rites, and the ritual dagger of Vajrakilaya above all, work in the same way: the dagger pins down what obstructs, and its three-sided blade cuts the three poisons, desire, hatred and ignorance, which are the real enemies. The fierce form is compassion at its fiercest, aimed at the obstacle and never at the being.

The mind's own nature

The cycle of treasure texts in which the Book of the Dead was found holds a short teaching in his name on seeing awareness naked. This one mind, it says, which holds all of the round of births and all of nirvana, has been present from the beginning, and yet it is not recognised. The schools give it many names, the self, the mind, the middle, buddha nature, the great seal, the ground of all. Look into your own mind: looking, there is nothing to see, and that not seeing is the seeing. It is empty, without centre or edge; it is clear, and knows; and its display never stops. The buddha is not to be looked for anywhere else.

The between

From the same cycle comes the Liberation by Hearing in the Between, read to the dying and the dead. Its six betweens, the clear light at death, the peaceful and wrathful deities, and its counsel to recognise all that appears as the mind's own display are taught on the page of the Tibetan bardo, among death and what follows. It is the teaching of naked awareness given for the hour when it is needed most: whoever has learned in life to recognise the mind's nature can recognise it in death.

The prayer and the mantra

He is approached first by prayer. The prayer in seven lines that every Nyingma practitioner knows calls on him from the north west of the land of Oddiyana, where he was born on the stem of a lotus and gained the highest accomplishment; it names him the Lotus Born, surrounded by many dakinis, and asks him, as the one in whose footsteps the practitioner follows, to come and give his blessing.

His mantra is Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum. The first three syllables are the body, speech and mind of the buddhas; Vajra Guru is the teacher of the indestructible; Padma is the lotus, his family and his name; Siddhi asks for accomplishment, the ordinary kind and the highest; and the last Hum gathers it into the heart. It is recited in a steady voice, without strain, with the mind on its meaning.

Guru yoga

The heart of his practice is guru yoga, union with the teacher. One sees him in front or above the crown of the head, in his familiar form, and prays with the seven lines and the mantra. Lights stream from the three syllables at his forehead, throat and heart, white, red and blue, into one's own forehead, throat and heart, cleansing body, speech and mind and giving their blessing. At the end he melts into light and dissolves into oneself, and one rests, making nothing, in the nature of mind, which is the teacher's mind and one's own, never two.