Eva Natanya, 12 May 2020
Eva (Yangchen) begins today’s session by clearing out some lingering questions. These questions are about the scope of action of the Guru Yoga practice, when purifying broken samayas or restoring a connection to empowerments of other tantric systems. She also comments on the meaning of the term ‘samayam’ in the Vajrasattva mantra, and on how is it that, even though we are already visualizing ourselves as Vajrayogini in Guru Yoga, we can go into a practice meant to purify obscurations. The last question concerns when, during the 7 preliminaries, to do physical prostrations.
Yangchen then draws from Thinley Norbu’s commentary to explain the resultant state of each of the four empowerments – siddhis. She speaks of the signs that manifest (gradually) from receiving the vase empowerment (attachment, body, earth and water elements, bliss, eye of wisdom, nirmāṇakāya), the secret empowerment (hostility, speech, wind and fire elements, luminosity, eye of primordial consciousness, sambhogakāya), and the wisdom empowerment (delusion, mind, space element, non-conceptuality, eye of ultimate reality, dharmakāya). The fourth empowerment encompasses the previous three, and the experience is that of the svabhāvikakāya, the emptiness of the other three kāyas.
Meditation is at [43:50], and is a complete practice of Guru Yoga as given on “A Chariot on the Path to the Union of the Two”. Yangchen reads directly from the text.
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