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2019 Saraha’s Mindfulness | Facebook

Saraha’s Mindfulness
JON NORRIS · SOBOTA 28. ČERVENCE 2018 · READING TIME: 7 MINUTES

Ok, buckle up; this is going to be a trip. Back on July 24th, I put up a post called ‘Which Way
to Nirvana?’ That post talked about contemporary approaches to mindfulness meditation as
opposed to classical shamatha meditation. There were some great comments on that post, so
you might want to read that before you plunge into this one. In this post, I will try once more
to make the point that mindfulness meditation is not an optional preliminary practice, but
the essential gateway to enlightenment. To that end, I am going to compare several
perspectives on mindfulness with that of Saraha. Then we will wrap things up with an Ati
level perspective on mindfulness from the 1973 Vajradhatu Seminary of Chogyam Trungpa
Rinpoche.

1. Let’s start with Dharmācarya Ken Holmes’ introduction to the Tibetan terms for
mindfulness as presented in his training manual at Kagyu Samye Ling:

The term mindfulness is used rather loosely as a global term to cover several quite precise
Buddhist topics. This happened in Tibet as well, but it has become more pronounced with the
global spread of Buddhism and with the advent of secular “mindfulness” training in the West,
which is in many ways more akin to what Buddhists call awareness training. Traditional
Buddhist mindfulness is part of a threesome of mutually-supporting factors:

Awareness (Tib: shes bzhin, Skt: samprajanyam )

Mindfulness (Tib: dran pa, Skt: smrti )
Care (Tib: bag yod, Skt: apramādha )

Tibetans also use a hybrid term that sounds like drenshee (Tib: dran shes ) to cover all three
factors in unison. It is this term that a lama will often have in mind when saying something
like, “Be mindful!” So, if we were to put the totality of the three elements of drenshee into a
single formula, it might read: “Being very aware of what is happening in the moment, one
remembers wise counsel, because one cares deeply about the outcome.”

2. Ah, but what about the ‘concentration’ aspect of mindfulness ? For that, let’s focus on the
second of Ken’s three elements, ‘mindfulness’ proper (Tib: dran pa, Skt: smrti ). Let’s see
what Saraha has to say about it in his famous ‘Dohakosa’ trilogy. Saraha is more known for
his presentation of mahamudra than mindfulness, but they are after all inseparable, and thus
he presents mindfulness in conjunction with its antonym: ‘non-mentation’ (Tib: dran med,
Skt: asmrti ), but we have to be very careful here. Our dualistic western minds want
everything to be black and white, so our first impulse is to assume that dran pa and dran
med are opposites in the same way that awareness (rigpa) and unawareness (marigpa) are
opposites. If that were true, we would translate dran pa as mindfulness and dran med as
ignorance – dran pa good – dran med bad, etc, etc! But that is not how Saraha uses these
terms. For Saraha, dran med (asmrti) meant ‘non-mentation’, and that was a good thing. In
fact, it is synonymous with ‘insight’ (prajna). To understand this better, let’s see how these
two terms fit into Saraha’s overall schema of mahamudra.

Saraha’s presentation of mahamudra is summarized as Four Symbols (brda), and these Four
Symbols correlate roughly to other teachings like the Four Yogas of mahamudra, the Four

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Joys and Four Seals of tantra, and the Four Samadhis (jhanas). [Khenchen Thrangu has a
wonderful table showing these correlations on page 100 of his book, ‘A Song for the King’.]
The Four Symbols are: Mindfulness (dran pa), Non-mentation (dran med), Unborn (skye
med), and Beyond Intellect (blo ‘das). You can readily see a rough correlation to the Four
Yogas: One-pointedness, Non-elaboration, One Taste, and Non-meditation. Whichever set
we use, we need to be clear that none of this is about theory or philosophy or cosmology;
these are just linguisitic attempts to communicate stages of meditative realization that
quickly transcend language and intellectual speculation altogether. So, here’s what Saraha
sings about the Four Symbols:

First I teach unwavering mindfulness,

Then as you drink the elixir of non-mentation,
Self and other are forgotten.

Whoever realizes that mind itself is forever unborn,

Will come to know that reality is beyond the intellect;
The nature of mind knows neither name nor symbol.

~ Excerpt from Karme Trinlepa’s commentary on ‘A Song for the People’

So, as Ken said, dran pa can refer to any sort of ‘mental engagement’ including shamatha
with a sign or without a sign, deity visualization, or even subtle-body yoga. In essence, those
are all mindful exercises. It also includes forms of awareness (shes bzhin) and care (bag yod)
as Ken mentioned above. But ultimately it is the bliss, luminosity, and non-conceptuality of
samadhi that is going to mark the pacified state of dran med where we can directly see the
emptiness of phenomena externally and mind’s true nature internally. With the guru’s
pointing out instructions, even mindfulness and insight can be seen to be empty of any
inherent substantiality. The culmination of shamatha and vipashyana comes when they
combine in the ‘single taste’ of ‘naked awareness’ (rigpa). Saraha calls that taste ‘unborn’
because like buddha-nature, it has no birth and thus no end. Such an experience has no
logical or intellectual explanation, so it is often referred to as cutting through (khreg chod),
and accordingly, Saraha calls it ‘beyond the intelect’. When that experience is stabilized by
maintaining combined dran pa - dran med spontaneously within the matrix of the here and
now, you have achieved the fourth yoga of ‘non-meditation’, otherwise known as the Great
Seal of Mahamudra.

Legend tells us that these dohas about the Four Symbols were sung by Saraha the arrow
maker in the jungles of India in the 9th century, and they are the precursor of all the later
mahamudra traditions. They show quite clearly that mindfulness meditation was the
essential first step on the mahasiddha’s path just as it had been for Buddha in the Vinaya and
in the Mahayana sutras.

3. Now, let’s look briefly at a couple more models of mindfulness. [I have posted about these
in earlier notes.] Dudjom Lingpa lists the following four stages as a map for taking the mind
as the path:

(1) single-pointed mindfulness,

(2) manifest mindfulness,
(3) the absence of mindfulness
(4) self-illuminating mindfulness.

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Even the four visions of direct crossing over (tögal) show a similar progression:

(1) the direct perception of reality,

(2) progress in meditative experience,
(3) consummate awareness,
(4) the extinction into reality itself.

So, if we string together the fourth stage of all these models, we get an interesting picture of
the ultimate goal of shamatha mindfulness. It is the unelaborated non-mentation beyond the
intellect of a self-illuminated extinction into reality itself! Got it ? That’s no joke. That
elementary mindfulness meditation, that seemed at first blush to be just a boring preliminary
to the ‘higher’ practices of tantra, is actually the doorway to enlightenment. All those ‘higher’
practices are just enhancements.

4. Finally, let’s see what Chogyam Trungpa told his students about the accomplishment of
dran pa and dran med in plain English at the very first Vajradhatu Seminary in 1973. He
said:

“Meditation practice has to be approached in a very simple and very basic way. That seems to
be the only way that it will apply to the experience of what we actually are. If we anticipate
that something more is happening, we get involved in hope and fear in relation to all kinds of
things that are not actually happening. Only one thing can happen at a time in meditation. It
is easy to imagine that two things are happening at once, because our mental journey back
and forth between the two may be very speedy. But even then we are doing only one thing at
a time.

Even to apply bare attention to what we are doing is impossible. We would have to have two
personalities to do that: one personality with the bare attention, and the other personality
doing things. Real bare attention is being fully present all at once. As we develop insight, we
begin to see that we are not really mindful of what we are doing. That is impossible. Real
mindfulness is the act and the experience of the act happening as one.

Obviously, we could have a somewhat dualistic attitude at the beginning, before we get into
real mindfulness. At first, we have to be willing to try mindfulness, willing to surrender,
willing to discipline ourselves. But eventually, when we do the thing, we just do it. It is like
the famous Zen saying “When I eat, I eat; when I sleep, I sleep.” You just do it, with
absolutely no implication behind what you are doing, not even of mindfulness.”

Take the leap.

Poof !
~ Tonpa Jon

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Casa Mila Catalonia Your thoughts, comment and insights are so appreciated Jon. Thank you.
To se mi líbí · Odpovědět · 1 r

Nina Kühtreiber do you maybe have a link to this translation of ` ‘A Song for the People’ `?
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Nina Kühtreiber odpověděla · 2 odpovědi

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Roy Barris Thank you for this. Clarity that may save many years of misdirection
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Matthew Simpson Jared K Jones

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