The Relationship Between Practice, the Human Body, and the Universe
Giving Rise to Mind Without Abiding Anywhere — Tang Sanzang, Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, the Dragon Horse, the Mind-Monkey and Thought-Horse
Recite the Diamond Sūtra for thirty years and it gets richer the longer you recite — you penetrate deeper into its meaning.Last week's teaching mentioned this: rather than trying to change the brain, change the mode of thinking.In changing the mode of thinking the Diamond Sūtra says, "One should give rise to mind without abiding anywhere." Many people have no idea how to explain this line.Some say it means do not cling, then wisdom appears — that is correct.Some say do not stay stuck in one mode of thinking, so another form of thought can emerge — also correct.The Diamond Sūtra is entirely about śūnyatā.But what, exactly, is empty?In the past I would often debate with Zen brothers, and debate the metaphysics of Lord Lao Tzu — not for the sake of winning or losing, but because it feels like real progress.In practice and in learning Dharma, you cannot only listen without asking, nor only ask without answering — these are both great defects.
From the time the master was in his teens he was already debating the Way with others, starting from the theory of the Taoists.What is metaphysics?What is physics?Why is a white horse not a white horse?Why is a white horse not called a black horse?Why must it be called a white horse?
《Chu Ci · Bu Ju》: "A chi has places where it is too short, a cun has places where it is too long.Things have what they lack, wisdom has what it does not illuminate, numbers have what they cannot reach, spirits have what they cannot pass through." So-called long and short are relative concepts.If you simply put them side by side and compare length, of course a chi is longer than a cun.But if we use them in metaphor, that is no longer certain."Near at hand within a chi" fits when you want to describe how an opportunity is so close yet may still slip through.If you forcibly change it to "near at hand within a cun," then although even closer, so close that you cannot see it — looking at it but not seeing.Or "a chi and a cun yet a world apart" — meaning the distance is near but it is hard to meet, as if far at the horizon.
Before Qu Yuan threw himself into the river, he asked the state teacher where he should go.The teacher saw he was a man of wisdom and that there was no need to divine for him.Divination is only a tool.The tortoise shell is dead, the bamboo stick is just a tool.Why would a person of wisdom go asking a tool?What you think you should do, you just do.In the end he chose to leap into the river — loyalty and righteousness both fulfilled.
In the market today there is all sorts of fortune-telling, divination, tarot and so on.The main purpose is to find an answer.Where do answers come from?When we speak of the mysteries of cosmic space, we are not limited to religion.We can start from the Five Arts.Within the Five Arts there is Qimen Dunjia — Qimen Dunjia cuts a stream of information out of time-and-space, grabs those answers inside time-and-space, and then uses words, numbers, and the names of stars to display what answer is found when you cut into that point of time-and-space.When you have the ability to cut into the flow of time-and-space, entering through one segment of the flow of time and space, you can find every answer you want.Divination is very accurate, very potent.Qimen Dunjia is potent, Ziwei Doushu is potent, Bazi is accurate, the Chinese Yijing is accurate.Why can a few copper coins, some bone dice, or Plum Blossom Yi — seeing two birds fight on a tree and fall — be used to seek answers?Because all things have some linkage (as in the Chinese phrase "a human life relates to heaven").As long as you catch this one point, you can know what the next point will be.There seems to be no distinction between you and me — everyone is strung together.In the classics this is called the exchange of DNA, the linkage of DNA.In the past, the great crime of treason against the state carried extermination of the nine kindred — precisely so as not to leave behind that bloodline of DNA, lest a bloodline carrying the DNA of treason remain.
The master once saw a reading written by an old mainland master, telling someone at what age they would die and how many sons and daughters they would have to see them off — all verified.If a person's whole life were fixed from birth, what meaning would life hold?Destiny lies inside the stream of time.Time is like a river.People soak in this river, following it from upper reaches to middle, to lower, finally into the ocean, where they are diluted and vanish.But if you stand on the bank watching the river, you see not only how many people have drifted past, but also how the river floods, how it dries up, how it changes through spring, summer, autumn, winter — then you know how many changes this river has gone through, how many lives, how many rises and falls.People come to this world because they have not completed their lessons.If your lessons were all done, you would already have returned to where you came from.So each of us, living inside destiny, is living inside the stream of time, running with time.Time pushes you from child to youth, to middle-aged, to old, and finally pushes you out of this world.
All life on earth is controlled by time.Sow in spring, plant in summer, reap in autumn, store in winter — these are fixed.Time influences climate, climate influences life — all interlocking.How can you jump out from the interference factor of time?Astronomy verifies that the universe has black holes, wormholes, and white holes.A wormhole runs from this end to that end — a time tunnel.A black hole ends all life; a white hole births all life.Only by leaving time behind.If you do not want to be pushed by time, what do you do?If you want to shake off time's control, here is a method you can try:
When you are deeply down on your luck (do not change anything in the half-good half-bad times), swap your favorite food for the food you hate most, swap your favorite color for the color you hate most, flip your bed to face the opposite direction, swap and reverse every magnetic field in your life.Because the food you have liked all these years has never changed your rotten fortune, so what is the point of eating it?If you like wearing blue clothes and must wear blue clothes right up to your death, you will be unlucky your whole life — so what's the point of wearing blue?The color your natal chart produces is the color that generates your bad fortune.Swap blue for red (the color you hate).Blue belongs to water and conflicts with your natal element, that is why you are unlucky; red belongs to fire, swap water for fire.Pull open every closed thing in the house (drawers, closets), swap the mattress, swap and reverse every bad magnetic field around you.Extremely effective.
Train yourself to look at things with the mind, not with the eyes.Close the eyes.Open an eye on top of the mind.You will find that what you see is not what you ordinarily see — a different world.The body has many eyes.The third eye is at the gate between the brows (ancient people are said all to have had the third eye, something like telepathy).There is another eye at the mind (the mind's eye).Each eye feels and knows a different world.To clarify the mind and see one's nature: when the mind becomes clear, nature is not just seeing your own disposition — it is seeing every thing as it originally is, seeing yourself as you originally are, seeing other people as they originally are, seeing this world as it originally is, seeing this universe as it originally is.In fact the most beautiful thing is the thing as it originally is.
All the dynamic force that fulfills a wish comes from the mind.The mind connects to the right brain.Mind and right brain combine into an extraordinarily strong force of intention.Simply place the wish in the mind, project it through the right brain, and the wish has a very high success rate.If you simply think the wish from the brain, out through the left brain, it is very hard to fulfill.Wild imagination, free-flying thought — those run through the right brain.Calculating, hard-nosed, trading on self-interest — those run through the left brain.The left brain is IQ, very clever.The left brain is Mañjuśrī, very clever.The right brain is Samantabhadra.The center is Vairocana.The left brain thinks very cleverly, but what is inside the heart is not that.Greed arises in the heart and it gets led by the left brain into doing wrong.If the mind goes through the right brain, the right brain is EQ.When you think you are going to make big money, there is always a trick in it — there are no such deals in this world.Think carefully.
The middle way of a person lies in the interbrain (midbrain).The passage of the interbrain is the central channel.The central channel up to the Brahma-aperture is the bridge between right and left brain, used for coordination.When we open the heavenly eye, or open the third eye, or activate the high-wisdom region, it is in the interbrain.The interbrain can produce awarenesses you ordinarily do not have: eyes closed, seeing text with your hand; seeing things vibrating in the universe; the ability to foreknow; the ability to produce will-power; the kinds of functions religion calls the Five Eyes and Six Supernormal Powers; and the wisdom increases enormously.That is the function of the interbrain.So one cannot be stuck on good or evil, the path cannot bend to left or right — one must stay on the middle way.
That is why Śākyamuni said in the sūtras: hold to the middle way, do not enter the heretic path.Śākyamuni's sūtras are all talking about the changes and the descriptive terms of the body, the many layers of body-mind-spirit, not just the person.So when Śākyamuni originally said you have gone wrong, you cannot walk the heretic path, you must walk the middle way — he was correcting his own disciples: your energy and your channels cannot be biased to the left channel or the right channel, you must return to the central channel.That is what returning to the middle way means.Great wisdom only appears on the middle way.If you are biased into the left or right channel, you are still spinning around inside the seven emotions and six desires — you will not find wisdom.The reason wisdom cannot be obtained is that the interference of the seven emotions and six desires has clouded your wisdom.So what we work hard at in our practice is entering the middle way, opening up the central channel, opening up the interbrain.The master hopes everyone can review some of these teaching functions.You have heard a lot.Do not keep leading a person off into theistic religion — you have to let him have the ability to judge the difference between religion and the spirit, and the difference between religious behavior and the matters of the spirit.Then no one will go off the rails into obsession.
To attain the ability of the Five Eyes and Six Supernormal Powers, you must put down the seven emotions (in Buddhism: joy, anger, worry, fear, love, hatred, desire) and the six desires (as the Eastern Han philosopher Gao You annotated: "the six desires are life, death, ear, eye, mouth, nose"), and remove the five poisons (greed, anger, delusion, pride, doubt — these five kinds of mind).The Five Eyes and Six Supernormal Powers are only byproducts in the process of practicing to Buddhahood — and they do not necessarily appear.In the ancient metaphor of lighting a fire to cook rice, our purpose is to eat the rice (become Buddha), not to obtain the smoke that rises up while the fire is being lit (the Five Eyes and Six Supernormal Powers).The five poisons suppress the ability of the Five Direction Buddhas, not letting them function — the Five-Finger Mountain pressing down on Sun Wukong.Sun Wukong points to the mind (mind-monkey, thought-horse).The author of Journey to the West was a man of psychic sight; he took the standpoint of practice and wrote Journey to the West.If you can read it, Journey to the West is the finest book on practice — do not treat it as an ordinary novel.The master says he practiced from Journey to the West.Let the master share a few points.Why is Zhu Bajie called Zhu Bajie ("Pig Eight-Precepts")?To lock up the eight precepts (one: no killing; two: no stealing; three: no sexual misconduct; four: no false speech; five: no alcohol; six: no wearing of flowers and perfumes; seven: no sitting or lying on high broad beds; eight: no eating at improper times).Tang Sanzang refers to Buddha, Dharma, Saṅgha.Sun Wukong refers to the mind.
Sun Wukong was pressed under Five-Finger Mountain for five hundred years, then was released by Master Tang Sanzang and together they went west to fetch scriptures.How do you release the monkey inside your mind?Once released, the monkey makes a huge disturbance in heaven.With great difficulty you release it, and when your inner heart is impacted and released there is a tremendous shaking, a great disturbance at the Southern Heavenly Gate.The energy released from the heart runs upward, running to the head (the Southern Heavenly Gate).In the Yijing, the upper is the Li trigram (fire), the lower is the Kan trigram.Sun Wukong makes a great disturbance at the Southern Heavenly Gate (the mind has not yet been subdued).Avalokiteśvara teaches Tang Sanzang a tightening-headband mantra.When that monkey misbehaves, the tightening-headband mantra, which is the "True Words of Avalokiteśvara's Response," subdues Sun Wukong (the mind) — do not let the mind be agitated.Sun Wukong has a golden-ringed staff hidden in his ear.Why is the golden-ringed staff hidden in the ear?The staff comes from the Sea Dragon King's palace, the Needle That Stills the Sea.The Needle That Stills the Sea is the central channel standing up from the root chakra.It subdues demons and conquers evils.Once the central channel is cleared, no demon can disturb you — your body will emit light.
The dragon horse that carries Tang Sanzang represents the soul.In Chinese medicine the ears connect to the kidneys.The ears lead to the root chakra.The golden-ringed staff is shrunken down in the root chakra.The eyes connect to the liver, the nose to the lungs, the tongue to the heart.Five regions and five organs correspond.So in old age, when kidney energy wanes, the ears go deaf, hard of hearing.At the moment of death, awareness shrinks, you become like an ant-sized being — awareness becomes tiny.That tiny awareness is what Tantra calls the small bright drop.That is the origin-point of the soul.In those 49 days, awareness is extremely acute.Why 49 days of bardo?Because it (the soul's origin-point) must still make a final tour around the world.The three-thousand-great-thousand worlds are inside the body: when it passes through a certain place, what it sees there is the thing of the eighteen hells; the heavenly realms are in the midbrain.The universe is enormous, yet it can shrink to the extremely small.A human is a shrunken universe; the universe is inside the body, you can see it right there — but you have not looked.It turns out you and the universe are the same model (their composition and operation are the same).
So when a person dies, it (the soul's origin-point) will cross the Bridge of Forgetting (at the position of the perineal root).The structures of hell are almost all in our lower half, because the place with the most parasites in a human is the large intestine — if you put our large intestine cells under a microscope they look as terrifying as blue-faced, fanged demons.If the soul's origin-point shrinks smaller than an ant, inside the hair, each hair is like the sacred tree of a forest and it just spins around in there.If this bit of soul-light runs upward, up to the pineal gland of the brain, the pineal gland is the organ most sensitive to light — invisible light — which controls growth hormone and melatonin, letting you know whether it is now day or night.Entering a wormhole is also the pineal gland.At death, seeing a sheet of white light is the pineal gland.Seeing something like heaven and feeling very joyful is the pineal gland.
The pineal gland is a very important place.In Taoism it is called the Nīwán Palace.We call it the Lingxiao Bao Palace — where the Jade Emperor dwells.So when your soul drifts to the Nīwán Palace, there is a palace there — that is heaven.So the body is the representative of the universe; the universe can concentrate into the body, only we do not take enough care to think about this, we always think of ourselves as large.
Learn to shrink yourself down.Some people, when they meet a problem, blow themselves up — then the problem becomes small (vanishes, is resolved).But when you actually need to look at the problem, you have to shrink yourself down, then look at the problem — then you can see it in detail.The problem gets big, your judgment becomes clear.Sometimes you have to visualize yourself as a giant, sometimes visualize yourself as an ant-sized being.
In religious cultivation there is a beautifully put line: when you cultivate to a certain level, your soul-light "when released fills the Six Directions" — fills the universe, sees everything; "when rolled up, hidden in a single grain of millet" — you shrink the soul into a millet-grain-sized dot the size of a grain used in making mochi.Life is like that too.Sometimes you have to make yourself big, sometimes shrink.When to shrink and when to enlarge — this is practice, but it is also every person's training in life for adjusting the mind.This enlargement-and-contraction tuning has a very specific name in Tantric practice: Vajra Wide Contemplation (expand), and shrinking it is Vajra Gathered Contemplation (contract).From the small matters of daily life, dealing with life's problems, and then turning it into Tantric practice — you must have a grand view to view the universe, and you must also be able to go as fine as the microscopic, down into the world of cells.Both ends of this expand-and-contract tuning you must have.No wonder I have had this experience myself: when practicing phowa to the mandala and doing full-length prostration, sometimes I feel the body swelling bigger than the mandala, like a giant; sometimes the body shrinks as small as an insect.
Next time we will arrange a meditation retreat course that goes between Vajra Wide and Vajra Gathered with a very large sweep.Imagine a hoop in front of you is very big, draw a big circle, then the circle keeps getting bigger until the whole sun is framed inside it, then shrink shrink shrink down to a tiny black sesame grain.If you can control this freely it is extremely useful.The layman Feng Feng wrote in his own account that he once followed Avalokiteśvara outside the earth.He saw the earth like a small ball spinning rapidly in front of him.Then his body grew bigger — he saw the whole galaxy rotating before him.The feeling then was as if time was stopped, while he was moving very fast along the time axis, watching the rapid changes of the galaxy and the earth.Another time, while sitting in meditation at a Buddhist temple, he saw a huge monster several stories tall.He was puzzled why a monster would appear in a Buddhist temple.After coming out of meditation he went to ask the abbot.The abbot smiled knowingly and took him behind a Buddha statue to look at the ground, pointed at a spider and said: this is the giant monster you saw.
The Five Direction Buddhas of the human body are in the brain:
East = Forebrain: Akṣobhya Buddha, counteracting the poison of doubt.Prostrating to this Buddha stabilizes bodhicitta in sentient beings so they are not shaken by afflictions.Hence also called the Immovable Tathāgata.
West = Hindbrain (medulla oblongata, the center of life): Amitābha Buddha (when life ends you meet Amitābha, turn back and the shore is right there — the shore is the Western Pure Land).Counteracting the poison of delusion.Prostrating to Amitābha not only grants us health and long life in this life, but also, in the future life in the Western Pure Land, we can realize the eternal Dharma-body of wisdom-life.
South = Right Brain: Ratnasambhava Buddha, counteracting the poison of greed.Ratnasambhava governs the greed and arrogance of beings, enabling beings to cast off coldness and self-righteousness.
North = Left Brain: Amoghasiddhi Buddha, counteracting the poison of pride.Amoghasiddhi uses the hook of his original great loving-kindness and great compassion to draw beings in, able to hook the holy wisdom of all Buddhas into the minds of beings, and to hook all beings into the realm of all Buddhas, moistening our body and mind, bringing the benefit of unobstructed accomplishment.
Center = Midbrain: Vairocana Buddha, counteracting the poison of anger.Prostrating to Vairocana lets us be rich in inner wealth and outer wealth, with the road ahead brightly illumined — also called the Great Sun Tathāgata (which is Śākyamuni Buddha).
Each of the five brains holds 20% of the energy; together, 100%.Once all five Direction Buddhas are developed and activated, your brain reaches 100% and so you are a Buddha.The reason you cannot become Buddha is that greed, anger, delusion, pride and doubt keep spending and consuming the energy of the Five Direction Buddhas.Their energy keeps draining.To counter greed-anger-delusion-pride-doubt, you must practice the Dharma of the Five Direction Buddhas:
Those who want to make money should develop the right brain (Ratnasambhava).Those who want to complete great undertakings should develop the left brain (Amoghasiddhi).Those who want to save sentient beings should develop the hindbrain (Amitābha).Those who want to heal behavior and repair things should develop the forebrain (Akṣobhya).Those who want to let everything go and attain liberation should develop the midbrain (Vairocana) — fly out through the crown aperture in the middle.
Practice all Five Direction Buddhas together, let the four directional Buddhas of East-South-West-North concentrate their force at the interbrain, and the light of the Great Sun Tathāgata is produced.When the interbrain is developed you can place your thinking into the universe, you leave the wheel of time, you can transcend time.Time is an energy that controls all living bodies and binds them to one another.What are the gods of time?The Twelve Divine Generals are the gods of time.Kālacakra (Time Wheel Vajra) is also the god of time.One who cannot change time has no way to change destiny.
The simplest explanation is rhythm.Meditation, contemplation, retreat, Dharma practice, hypnosis, an old monk entering samādhi — these can change time.Changing the mode of living can change time.Time and distance are what produce destiny.Add one more factor, energy — this is Einstein's relativity: time, energy, space.
Our Dharma practice falls under energy.Time and space work through meditation.Meditation contains the ability to change time and space.When the central channel is opened, ability and energy are produced; it begins to absorb the energy of heaven and earth, and energy is generated.So when time, energy, and space are all equipped together, destiny can be modified.How modify it?Enter the stream of time to modify it.Then you can see the process on your fate-chart — the stream of time.You can also see your past life, this life, and future lives, because what you see is a theatrical scene — the stream of time performing.
Earth-time is relatively slow.Outside the earth, time is measured in light-years.
For Buddhas and spirits from outside the earth, or spirit-bodies that have successfully cultivated, when they come to look at everything on earth, six minutes can see sixty years of earth's process.When one day you meditate and are able to leave the earth's magnetic field and look back at earth, you will discover that everything that has happened on earth is finished in a glance.You can grasp that a Buddha is all-knowing: he practiced to this degree.Leaving the earth and looking back at the earth — in the time-difference view, he looks for one minute and all ten years of events on earth are seen.
So when Christianity says "believe in God and gain eternal life," it is not really talking about believing in God for eternal life.God is everywhere; He represents the secret and definition of the universe.When you enter the laws of the universe and understand the universe, you will discover this everywhere-present ability.Why believe in God and gain eternal life — your soul-light will not die, you will not perish along with the earth.
After a person dies, cultivation must be done in the form of light.While alive, you must cultivate the light out.When you die, if you have a strand of this light, you can enter the world of light — you can travel the light-year world.So Guru Padmasambhava wrote in his biography, and the Kālacakra also writes, that He lived two hundred years in the palace of this light — that is Shambhala.That palace, only one who cultivates light can find.If you have not cultivated light, you cannot see where that palace is.Padmasambhava cultivated himself to a transparent body producing light-transformation, and used this light-transformation to see this light-palace, and could enter the world of light by means of light.If you were material or using fleshly eyes, you could not see the light-palace is there — Shambhala is right there.
When you cultivate to something like the energy that can enter the Crystal Palace, you can also enter the sea bottom and find the Crystal Palace, because it is invisible light.One with heavenly eye, or who has cultivated to this state, going to the sea floor can see the Crystal Palace.Whatever mode you appear as, that is the world you see.Watch how you train the use of your mind to view different worlds.Whatever world you want to see, train your mind into that mode.
When you let one sense-organ rest for a time, another sense-organ will open up.Remember this: the Avalokiteśvara-Dharma-gate.It is not that Avalokiteśvara should be called Avalokiteśvara — he used the ear-root to cultivate into bodhisattvahood, so he is called the Hearing-Sound Bodhisattva.Sea-Tide Avalokiteśvara sat on a cliff by the shore listening to the waves pound the coast, entered meditation, and became bodhisattva by sound — opened great wisdom.Hence Sea-Tide Avalokiteśvara.So, cultivating accomplishment through sound, opening the wisdom region — that is the Avalokiteśvara-Dharma-gate.
There is the eye-root "Avalokiteśvara-Who-Observes-the-World" (Guānzìzài Púsà); the nose-root; the tongue-root; the ear-root ("Avalokiteśvara")...each can be cultivated.Just gather one root and control one root — "eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind" paired with "form, sound, smell, taste, touch, dharma" — these are relative pairs.If you can control one organ, the others will produce special functions.The Diamond Sūtra's "give rise to mind without abiding anywhere" is talking about this.Eye-ear-nose-tongue-body-mind keep interfering with today's energy, keep spending your energy.The five roots (five bandits) are the window of consumption.Sometimes you can close the five roots and not activate them for a while, so the energy of the five roots comes back.The nose-root's energy — use the breath-regulation method and inhale it back to the dāntián.Seal the ears, let the golden-ringed staff return to the root chakra.Close the eyes — the eyes contemplate inwardly (Guānzìzài).Recite "Avalokiteśvara-Who-Observes-the-World, practicing the deep prajñāpāramitā, perceived that the five aggregates are empty, crossed over all suffering..." turn the eye-root back — the shore is right there, look behind.All of them turn inward, this is called inner gathering practice.Then slowly you can gather the Five Direction Buddhas back.When the eyes come back, Eastern Akṣobhya returns.When the breath-center (brainstem) returns, Amitābha returns.When all desires return, Southern Ratnasambhava returns.When for every living condition you no longer calculate with others, no longer burn with fierce fire to possess at any cost, Northern Amoghasiddhi returns.When the four directional Buddhas have returned, they attend upon the center, Vairocana — he will wake, and the interbrain comes alive.
Elder Sister: Asks where the soul is.
Master: The soul is usually not fixed in one place.At night when you sleep, the three souls return to their original positions, most of them returning to the original place of the heart.If your thoughts are too many, the soul does not return to its original place — that night you do not sleep well, your spirit is restless.That means your mind-spirit is not at its post.Those with heavy work pressure and overthinking — soul not keeping its post, it runs into the head to work.Scattered wild thoughts, soul not keeping its abode — it does not return to the house.Our soul has three souls (main-soul, sentient-soul, life-soul) with three places of belonging:
Main-soul (Buddha): In the heart region.Governs thought, reasoning, learning and other higher-level spiritual behavior.
Sentient-soul (Dharma): In the brain.What it governs is sensory feeling.
Life-soul (Saṅgha): At the navel.Governs the life function of the body — this is why the ancestor tablet is linked to the life-soul in your dāntián.
Among living things, only humans have all three souls complete.Animals have only life-soul and sentient-soul; plants have only life-soul.To cultivate our soul is to merge the three souls into one — called essence-qi-spirit-as-one, called Buddha-Dharma-Saṅgha-as-one, called sun-moon-star-as-one.The myriad methods return to the one source — in the end the three souls must be united.If the three souls do not unite as one, after death there will be rebirth, the life-soul reports at the ancestor tablet, the sentient-soul reports at the graveyard.For the correct process of rebirth as human, the three souls must come back at the same time point.If none of the souls comes back, that is called a residual spirit — the souls have been scattered.Residual spirits become sea creatures, spiders and such, womb-born or egg-born, giving birth to tens of thousands at once — those are residual spirits.
Every day call the three souls back as one: Om (spirit) Ah (energy) Hum (essence) svāhā — this is the three souls uniting.Three fires: main-soul one fire, sentient-soul one fire, life-soul one fire — called the Three-Samādhi True Fire.If the fire has shrunk to a tiny bit, how can the three souls unite?That is why tummo (an energy or force) cannot be ignited.So in Tantric tummo practice, this tummo of the life-soul must come up — must cultivate upward, unite at the heart-chakra chamber, drawing the sentient-soul down to the heart.The heart is the place of coordination, coordinating the sentient-soul and life-soul back to their original places.
The fifteen minutes before sleep is the best time for cultivation.The brain's resistance is not so strong, self-grip is not so great — because it wants to rest.The guard is not strict.The subconscious region and the place of the void-store easily come out.It is the easiest time to grasp.When self-grip is too strong, the sense of self is too heavy and too intense, it (the inner nature) dares not come out, because it is kind, and the self is unkind.Consciousness is all a bad guy; the subconscious, that void-store region's native spirit, is the kindest.As soon as you are active, it dares not come out.As soon as you are active you have to battle, quarrel with people, fight to the death with people, compete over who is above and who below — it dares not come out.If you injure it, it will fear you and not come out.When your brainwave is α-wave (the wave of world peace), it makes your awareness and your soul feel this world is safe — then it comes out.
In meditation, dozing off is actually bad.Sitting meditation and samādhi require good spirit, so you do not fall drowsy.Ordinarily you need eight hours of sleep.With sitting practice and samādhi, about four to five hours of sleep is enough — you can obtain the greatest rest and recharge of energy.
Before sleep, use breath regulation to unite the three souls.The best is abdominal breathing.
Padmasambhava has a vase-vessel breathing method: place a vase at the dāntián, deposit all inhaled breath in Padmasambhava's vase for safekeeping — like a bank deposit, dripping water bores through stone.When the energy you breathe in has accumulated in the vase to a certain degree, tummo begins to generate and give off heat.There is also two-way breathing, one in on the right, one out on the left — several methods.
For ordinary daily cultivation, use abdominal breathing.When practicing, press a heavy book on your belly while lying on the bed and you will naturally do abdominal breathing.What is the benefit of abdominal breathing?Human stem cells can repair all cells, letting cells be reborn.Stem cells are inside the umbilical cord.Cord blood is the immortal elixir, the sweet dew.When a child is born, the moment the umbilical cord is cut, it divides into two halves — mother and child each half of the stem cells.The cord blood is inside the navel.When you do abdominal breathing, your navel region gets abundant oxygen, letting you self-release cord blood, which repairs your body's cells, keeping youth and warding off aging, repairing your illnesses.That is why, after practicing to a certain degree, your complexion becomes good and your body gets better — that is abdominal breathing releasing stem cells from the cord blood, repairing aged cells, metabolizing, so complexion improves.
Śākyamuni also used abdominal breathing.Afterwards tummo rose, the central channel cleared, and whatever reactions occurred are all written in the sūtras — nobody understands them.The usual explanation that Pāpīyān is a demon is wrong, because he (Śākyamuni) called everything that leads you astray or causes you to err a demon.That is not the correct name — it is not that.It is muscle twitching.波 is like a wave, ten days is one 旬; the two combined is when a muscle starts twitching like spontaneous qigong movement.Śākyamuni said: do not become possessed, do not go imitating medium jumping or spirit-channeling.When muscle twitches, let it twitch; do not pay it any attention.If you attend to it, you become a medium, you follow the twitching like dancing the Third Prince — that is what he meant.So he called it demon.Śākyamuni told you: this is a change in the qigong state.So I call it: not accurately called a demon; calling it a demon is more of a taboo — do not cling to muscle twitching, you will go off the deep end.Hence "demon" — a taboo.Zen schools observe this: during the seven-day Zen sitting, if someone sways there, the brother behind will strike your back with the striking-board, make you re-enter respectful stillness.So Śākyamuni specifically ordered: first, no Buddhist chanting (梵唱) — rest when resting, sit when sitting.Mantra and chanting are not the same.No chanting.When it is time to recite mantra, recite mantra — only then can you enter samādhi.Chanting draws your mind-spirit into enervating music, so he opposed chanting.Second, in samādhi no shaking, jumping, swaying, spirit-channeling and such behavior.
Demons must be recognized.Once I know the secret of the demon, it cannot interfere with me.So that's it — I'm perfectly clear.So I will not go off the deep end.
When one does not abide anywhere, another mind can be produced.When I am not using my eyes, my ears become especially sharp.When I am not using my ears, my eyes become especially keen.When one sense stops, another sense's function strengthens.As Christianity says, if God closes one door, He will surely open a window for you.When you lose something, do not be disheartened, do not be discouraged — you will produce something new.The law of the universe is like this.Somewhere a person dies, somewhere else a baby is born.So, losing everything is only to create something new.Stop consuming certain things and some energy will be freed up.When you abandon the concept of the body and can perform the Dharma-gift of chöd, then your soul-light comes alive.
Excerpted from a teaching by Master Urgyen Topden Rinpoche on 2016-12-03