Eva Natanya, 27 Apr 2020
Eva (Yangchen) starts by saying that the meditation practice of today will be a cumulative practice of everything that we have done so far. She will be drawing from Düdjom Lingpa’s terma, interpolating with the visualizations.
Yangchen elaborates and how this practice is integrated with the path of śamatha, how one can make sense of practicing preliminaries along with the instruction to focus all day long on śamatha, with the least possible mantra recitation. If we are going to pursue śamatha, then the preliminaries is a preparation, she says, just after we have prepared the soil, can we focus on the śamatha pursuit. One can also do a one month retreat focusing on the preliminaries, to deepen the practice, and so on. So we do preliminary sometimes 80% of the time, sometimes 20% of the time, sometimes 100% of the time, and sometimes just our Vajrayana commitments, depending on our individual condition at every certain moment.
Afterwards, Yangchen comments on the ordering of the ‘six syllable mantra’ and the ‘dissolution of Vajrasattva’ in the Düdjom Tersar. This particular text is given as a concise practice to recite the mantras without visualization, she clears out, but if we are doing the visualization, then the opposite order is advised, as is instructed in the text by Düdjom Rinpoché and in the commentary by Thinley Norbu.
Eva responds to some questions she has received, these are: 1. What to do if one cannot follow the visualization through all those little details? 2. What should one do after Guru Yoga has concluded, how should one proceed with the practice?
She gives several suggestions to both of these questions, clarifies something about the buddhafield and buddha family of Vajrasattva, and then takes us into the practice.
Meditation starts at: 19:10
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