The Secret of How to Cultivate and Realize Buddhahood

Blessings Have Limits — Merit Has None: Practice, Śūnyatā, Merit Dedication

When you have cultivated to the Five Eyes and Six Supernormal Powers, wisdom opens; you know what fruit a thought (cause) will bring.You become afraid, you quickly repent, you nip the thought in the bud.The moment an evil thought arises you must chant "Amitābha" to catch it, and right there in that instant teach the thought (the thought) to extinguish.The Five Eyes: fleshly eye, heavenly eye, wisdom eye, Dharma eye, Buddha eye.The Six Supernormal Powers: divine sight, divine hearing, mind-reading, past-life knowledge, divine foot (travel), extinction of outflows.

The Diamond Sūtra speaks of subconscious behavior; it opens the right brain.In practice there are two choices:

First — cultivating blessings with attachment to form is called "blessing-merit" (fúdé).Blessing-merit yields the fortune of humans and heavens.The fortune has limits.Once enjoyed, it is gone.When the blessing is used up, there is no more blessing.When there is no blessing, evil retribution comes.So blessing-merit is very limited.It cannot escape the cycle of birth and death, because attachment has not been broken, there is still ego-grasping.

Second — cultivating blessings free of form is called "merit" (gōngdé).The fortune of merit is unlimited, because merit corresponds with the Way and accords with self-nature."How can one expect self-nature is originally self-complete, how can one expect self-nature can produce the myriad dharmas?" When you do a good deed and are not attached to the form of doing it, not attached to that good deed — this is merit.Merit can transcend the cycle of birth and death through the three realms, because within merit there is wisdom, there is no ego-grasping; with no ego-grasping you transcend the six realms.In the Diamond Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, the Buddha speaks of "merit" in: Section 14 "Freedom from Form and Extinguishment"; Section 15 "The Merit of Upholding This Sūtra"; Section 16 "Able to Purify Karmic Obstacles"; Section 28 "Receiving Nothing, Grasping Nothing."

So blessing-merit has outflows — it leaks down into the three realms.Merit is without outflow — it can transcend the three realms.However great your blessing, it is enjoyed within the three realms; once enjoyed, gone.At most it is a brief human-and-heaven fortune.The human-and-heaven fortune has outflow and is not ultimate; after it is used up you still fall into the evil paths to transmigrate.Our mind is bitterly waiting for us to practice, to wake it up, to redeem it in this life, to teach it — this is the aim of practice.

In practice do not get hooked by desire.Buddhahood: leave the material world, go to the world of light.Cultivate this body into a light-body (Buddha, Bodhisattva, Arhat grade)."God is everywhere" (Buddha = light particles, formless, markless).View the world from the perspective of the inner light.A person's time in the world is extremely brief — there is no need to cling to joy, anger, sorrow, delight.

Practice must break through the concept of time: first, because of the concept of time there is joy at reunion and grief at parting, which produce suffering.Second, because memory exists in the subconscious, it stirs up recollections, which hook and entangle.If pulled by various desire-thoughts of joy, anger, sorrow, delight..., the subconscious will feel there is still something unfinished — then it will transmigrate again.Open the 18 layers of the subconscious — this must be irrigated with sūtra and mantra; after entering the subconscious one becomes a newborn Buddha (primordial Buddha).

In practice you must find the seed-cause of the soul (light-point = maṇi jewel = true-mind Buddha-nature; Śākya"muni" = the śarīra spoken of in the Heart Sūtra — determining whether to become Buddha or to be reborn).The Dharma-body embryo must be found, otherwise it is only a Buddha of fantasy, and you still have to transmigrate.

The soul-particle has memory — a kind of quantum entanglement.Enter samādhi, return to the karmic creditors of former lives, face them, confess to them, redeem them (and redeem yourself).Meditate into śūnyatā — but this is not yet the Buddha's śūnyatā (you must see yourself).Śūnyatā: if there is entanglement, resolve it on the spot, reconcile, put it down, dissolve it.When reciting sūtra, reciting mantra, you need a remedying method — dedicate merit toward your greatest obstacle in this life.(If in a past life you killed people, in this life become a doctor and save people.)

Meaning of the Dependent-Origination Mantra (the Twelve Links): all dharmas arise from causes and conditions.

Om ye dharmā hetu-prabhavā: all dharmas arise from causes (arise from thought) (as in the four lines of "Ben-dou Heart Sūtra Verse" after Dharma class).

Hetun teṣāṁ tathāgato hy avadat: the Tathāgata has told their cause.

Teṣāṁ ca yo nirodha evaṁ vādī mahāśramaṇaḥ svāhā: all dharmas arise from causes and conditions; all dharmas cease by causes and conditions.

A human life of 70 years, to a Buddha's view only 7 seconds and it is over — no need to mind it, no need to worry over it.When reciting Amitābha, visualize transforming into a lotus and receiving sentient beings to be reborn in the Pure Land.When reciting sūtra, visualize that you are the Buddha-Bodhisattva in the sūtra, and sentient beings also are.

When giving, visualize that it is the Buddha-Bodhisattva giving.When reciting sūtra and mantra, hold mudra at the same time and visualize — only then is it a full one hundred points.

Excerpted from a teaching by Master Urgyen Topden Rinpoche on 2016-07-16