A Liberating Reminder

by Khenpo Pema Vajra

I prostrate at the feet of the peerless guru!

Generally, the key points for taking the teachings of Buddha to heart are:
Motivated by renunciation and bodhicitta,
To avoid non-virtue and put your effort into virtuous deeds,
And to train your mind as much as you can in the paths of stra and mantra,
With the three noble principles, six pramits and phases of generation and
perfection.
Even if you were to die right now, what else is there to do but this?

The key points for the path of the supreme vehicle in particular are:
With a mind that sees the guru as an actual Buddha,
Pray, receive the four empowerents, and merge your mind with his or her wisdom
mind.
Allow your body, speech and mind to settle, and, deeply relaxed both physically and
mentally,
Let go of all deluded thoughts of past, present and future, and ordinary mind and
mental events,
Recognizing how they lack basis and origin, and have never been real.
Allow them to vanish by themselves without trace.
The mind as such is clear light, the realm of awakening mind,
Unaltered by thinking, untainted by temporary experience,
Empty and clear, like space, without centre or periphery.
In a state of non-grasping, without fixation, this is spacious and open.
In a state of non-meditation, without distraction, the stronghold is secured.
Whatever thoughts arise as the expression of awareness, whether good or bad,
Do not block or indulge, accept or reject them, and do not entertain hope or fear.
But allow movement to settle by itself, liberated as dharmakya,
Like writing on water or a snake uncoiling its own knots.
This is the training, the exercise of thought: natural self-arising and natural self-
liberation.

When death arrives, all of a sudden,

Eject your consciousness into the unborn, sky-like space of awareness.
With the guru's wisdom mind and your own mind inseparably united,
Rest in an experience of space-like infinity.
This is the instruction for liberation into dharmakya at the time of death.

In the bardo of dharmat, no matter what sounds, colours or rays of light may occur,
Rest in a state of pure and open awareness,

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Without grasping attachment, to gain liberation as sambhogakya.
If you wander into the bardo of becoming,
Then, like an arrow shot by a great archer,
Proceed directly to a pureland, such as the five realms where the great spirit of
liberation is rekindled.
This is the instruction for liberation in the bardos.

Be kind enough to keep these instructions in mind.

Spoken by Pema Vajra, who holds the name of khenpo. May it be virtuous!

Magalam!

| Translated by Adam Pearcey, 2017

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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