3. Taking Consciousness as the Path: A Synthesis of Pith Instructions from Our Lineage Gurus
B. Alan Wallace, in collaboration with Eva Natanya
“Of [the] ten kasiṇa bases, this is the foremost, namely, when one perceives the consciousness kasiṇa [i.e., the quintessence of consciousness] above, below, across, undivided, measureless. There are beings who are percipient in such a way. But even for beings who are percipient in such a way there is alteration; there is change. Seeing this thus, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple becomes disenchanted with it; being disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate toward the foremost, not to speak of what is inferior.”
—Buddha Śākyamuni, Kosala Sutta, Aṅguttara Nikāya
“In this way, the mind is not the mind; the nature of the mind is clear light.”
—Buddha Śākyamuni, Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajāpāramitā Sūtra, chapter 1
“Examine the character of unborn awareness.”
—Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījāna, The Seven-Point Mind Training
All of us “space-travelers” are directly or indirectly taking consciousness as our path to śamatha and beyond, to the identification of pristine awareness. In phase 1 of The Vajra Essence, the Lake-Born Vajra teaches the practice of “taking the impure mind as the path” as the entryway to the Dzokchen path of cutting through to pristine awareness. This is directly parallel to the practice of “taking the aspect of the mind as the path” as taught in the Sharp Vajra of Conscious Awareness Tantra and its commentary, excerpted earlier in this volume. The Lake-Born Vajra describes the culmination of this particular practice for achieving śamatha as follows:
O Vajra of Mind, the bonds of mindfulness and firmly maintained
attention are gradually dissolved by the power of meditative
experiences until finally—because the ordinary mind of an
ordinary sentient being, as it were, disappears—thoughts go dormant,
and roving concepts subside into the space of awareness.
You then slip into the blank vacuity of the substrate, in which
self, others, and objects disappear. The state that becomes manifest,
in which the appearances of self, others, and objects have
vanished, and in which there is an inwardly focused grasping to
the experiences of vacuity and luminosity, is the substrate consciousness.
This description corresponds closely with many other classical descriptions of the achievement of śamatha within the Buddhist tradition, wherein the five physical senses no longer perceive their objects, and the mind is completely focused within a domain of subtle mental consciousness. As Jé Tsongkhapa writes in his Concise Presentation of the Stages on the Path to Enlightenment, “Finally, when you settle in meditative equipoise, only the aspects of sheer cognizance, luminosity, and bliss of the mind appear, without the appearance of the signs of visual form, sound, and so on.”184 In the context of Dzokchen, this subtle dimension of brilliantly lucid, nonconceptual consciousness is simply called the substrate consciousness, but not in the philosophically reified sense typically associated with the Cittamātra school. There is consensus, then, from the Pāli Canon through Asaṅ-ga’s Śrāvakabhūmi, Kamalaśīla, Tsongkhapa, and many other authoritative sources within the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist tradition, that the achievement of śamatha—as the necessary basis for fully realizing the fruits of vipaśyanā—involves a withdrawal and implosion of the five physical senses. In the Dzokchen and Mahāmudrā traditions, however, if one continues to meditate diligently, one will pass beyond this phase of “an inwardly focused grasping to the experiences of vacuity and luminosity” to a phase where the creative power of consciousness that manifests as outer appearances is once again unimpeded, but in a transformed way, so that one may remain in flawless śamatha with the senses “clear.”
In this vein, the Lake-Born Vajra goes on to describe a further stage of practice that is still within the domain of śamatha alone yet is more advanced than taking the impure mind as the path, because the meditator already has the capacity to rest consistently in the substrate and substrate consciousness, undisturbed by even subtle mentation or conceptualization. Here is just a partial account of this phase of meditation, which is not yet explicitly imbued with the wisdom of vipaśyanā, and thus is not yet the actual practice of cutting through to pristine awareness—though one may be very close:
"Ever-present, translucent, luminous consciousness shines through."
In this vein, the Lake-Born Vajra goes on to describe a further stage of practice that is still within the domain of śamatha alone yet is more advanced than taking the impure mind as the path, because the meditator already has the capacity to rest consistently in the substrate and substrate consciousness, undisturbed by even subtle mentation or conceptualization. Here is just a partial account of this phase of meditation, which is not yet explicitly imbued with the wisdom of vipaśyanā, and thus is not yet the actual practice of cutting through to pristine awareness—though one may be very close:
On the other hand, someone with enthusiastic perseverance
may recognize that this is not the authentic path, and by continuing
to meditate, all such experiences defiled by clinging to
vacuity, or to vacuity and luminosity, are cleared away into the
space of awareness, as if you were waking up. Subsequently, outer
appearances are not impeded, and the inner rope of mindfulness
and firmly maintained attention is cut. Then you are not bound
by the constraints of good meditation, nor do you fall back to
an ordinary state through pernicious ignorance. Rather, ever-present,
translucent, luminous consciousness shines through,
transcending the conventions of view, meditation, and conduct.
Without dichotomizing self and object, such that you can say
“this is consciousness” and “this is the object of consciousness,”
ever-present, self-emergent consciousness is free from clinging to
the domain of experiences within mentation.
The Lake-Born Vajra then makes a crucial distinction between experiencing just this ever-present, self-emergent consciousness and actually identifying the ground dharmakāya, which is pristine awareness:
Even though you practice in order to achieve stability in the
profound path of this conscious awareness itself, free of conceptual
elaboration, if the dharmakāya, primordial consciousness
that is present as the ground of being, is not realized, as soon
as you pass away from this life, you will have the power to be
propelled to the form and formless realms. But with that
alone it is impossible to achieve the omniscient state of buddhahood.
Once you have identified this path for the first time, if the
dharmakāya—primordial consciousness that is present as the
ground—is then identified through the power of intense meditation,
this is the path wisdom and the creative power of primordial
consciousness.
In a consistent theme, even such a marvelous meditation as flawless śamatha that abides with stability in the profound path of “consciousness awareness itself ” is necessary but not sufficient for achieving the actual, liberating path of Dzokchen. For the latter, one must realize the great emptiness of all phenomena and then identify the ground dharmakāya, which completely transcends all extremes of conceptual elaboration.
As tantalizing as it may be to imagine such states of meditation, if one is an ordinary practitioner—and not a highly realized being even before taking birth in this lifetime—one must pass through the preliminary phases step by step. In phase 6 of The Vajra Essence, there is a passage that clearly distinguishes a more advanced phase of śamatha practice known as taking consciousness as the path—which “makes manifest unimpeded ordinary consciousness, which is the ground of the mind”—from the beginner’s phase of taking the impure mind as the path. In the beginner’s phase, “you observe thoughts with the conceptualization that the mind is observing the mind, you observe conceptualization with consciousness, and you seek the path that merely elicits the upheavals of pleasure and pain that are produced when you correct, modify, accept, and reject with cognition and mentation.” By taking the impure mind as the path, you purify the mind, gradually subduing the five obscurations, but because you are still observing the movements of the mind dualistically, this elicits outer, inner, and secret upheavals, as mentioned by Düdjom Lingpa in the text “Taking the Aspect of the Mind as the Path,” above. When, in phase 1 of The Vajra Essence, the bodhisattva Boundless Great Emptiness asks the Lake-Born Vajra why it is necessary to practice such meditation, which often arouses various painful and even frightening meditative experiences and is not sufficient by itself for reaching the path to omniscience, the Lake-Born Vajra responds:
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For those who aspire to the total enlightenment of a buddha, the contemplative practices of śamatha and vipaśyanā play a crucial role from the beginning of the path to its culmination. Designed to free one first from the five obscurations that hinder the natural clarity and balance of the mind—and eventually from the ignorance that is the root of suffering—these practices, when imbued with bodhicitta, enable one to reach a pivotal stage within the Mahāyāna path of accumulation. This is the stage at which one gains irreversible, gold-like bodhicitta, after which one is assured of being a bodhisattva in all one’s future lifetimes until enlightenment.
