The seventh point of Mind Training in Seven Points is called Guidelines. Where commitments (point six) are about avoiding emotional reactions and approaches to life that break your connection with practice, the purpose of these guidelines is to keep...
The seventh point of Mind Training in Seven Points is called Guidelines. Where commitments (point six) are about avoiding emotional reactions and approaches to life that break your connection with practice, the purpose of these guidelines is to keep you on track. Through these instructions, you develop ways to meet what arises in your life, internally or externally, that enables you to use what arises to deepen your experience of emptiness and compassion.
Because the Tibetan word for guidelines is often translated as precepts, it is good to remember that in Buddhism these instructions are descriptive rather than prescriptive—they describe how a person who has trained deeply in this tradition meets the reactivity that inevitably arises in the course of formal practice and going about his or her life. These behaviors and ways of working arise from within, not exactly naturally, but from training penetrating deep into your system and burning out reactive habituations. If you take these instructions as precepts and, without training deeply, you try to do what they point to, you run the danger of making your body and mind brittle and frangible, and susceptible to unpredictable eruptions of suppressed reactive emotions.
Before I describe some examples, take a look at the map at the beginning of this practice tip. You can also find it on Unfettered Mind's website: a map of the Mind Training instructions. This map lists all the mind-training instructions, grouped in the seven points. I have added an additional layer of organization with various subgroups in points six and seven. I came up with these subgroups when I observed that the author, Chekawa, clearly had a certain logic in mind when he wrote this text.
General Guidelines
For the first subgroup, a Tibetan saying comes to mind:
In India, practitioners practiced one deity and saw hundreds.
In Tibet, practitioners practice hundreds of deities and see none.
As Jamgön Kongtrul the Great once said:
When you study, learn everything under the sun.
When you reflect, keep an open mind, like the sky.
When you practice, do one practice and go deep like the ocean.
In general, you do better finding one practice that speaks to you, and then devoting yourself to it completely.
Reminder Guidelines
The guidelines in the second subgroup are ways to create an internal environment that nurtures spiritual practice and enables mind-training to go deep. To put it another way, these are ways that you develop to make it possible for the practice to work on you.
Maintenance Guidelines
These guidelines make it possible for the practice to go deep in you. Memorize these four groups of three and take care to ensure their presence in your practice and your life.
Extension Guidelines
The fourth subgroup ensures that you don’t end up in a comfortable practice cocoon. Keep extending and reaching out both internally and externally, letting the practice work more deeply and more broadly.
In reviewing these groupings, I see that it makes more sense for the first two in the last subgroup to be included in the fifth subgroup.
Guidelines for Addressing Imbalances
The fifth subgroup is about practicing in such a way that you don’t inadvertently create imbalances in your practice.
Sometimes, despite your efforts, imbalances do arise. One of the surest ways to generate imbalances is to try to make something happen. In doing so, you are almost always indulging one or more reactive emotions, and that indulgence causes problems. These same instructions help correct imbalances by pointing you in the direction of balance. The main point here is to practice with a quiet consistency and let the practice work on you, rather than trying to make something happen.
Guidelines for Avoiding Imbalances
The sixth and last subgroup, which I need to rename, is basically about bringing a poverty-stricken attitude to practice, practicing from the hungry ghost realm. Such an approach to practice is always problematic. Boasting reinforces your lack of confidence. Hypersensitivity reinforces a sense of self. Impulsiveness undermines stability. And expecting thanks for practicing means that you regard yourself as special in some way.
Conclusion
Mahayana mind-training is a complete practice in and of itself. In this series of newsletters, I have tried to convey an understanding of each of these elements of practice—groundwork, formal practice, practice in life, a condensed formulation of practice, what mastery looks like, what commitments are involved, and guidelines for nurturing practice and understanding. Any system of practice includes all of these elements, along with prayers—e.g., lineage prayers, refuge and awakening mind, dedication, aspiration, and good fortune prayers, etc.—that set a context and provide a framework for this practice. By way of conclusion, the prayer Opening a Path to the Sea of Awakening sets out a framework for the practice of taking and sending, covering everything from being a bodhisattva and releasing beings from the six realms to the nitty-gritty of the pain and confusion of daily life.