Nothing to Get Used To
Reflections on Tilopa’s Pith Instructions to Naropa…and Us
A note I saved long ago resurfaced this morning: Tilopa’s pith instructions, from the song he sang to Naropa on the banks of the Ganges some nine centuries back. Renderings vary. Here’s one that stays a little closer to the Tibetan than the version in my old note:
Transcending all object and subject is the king of views.
Having no distraction is the king of meditation.
Lacking effort is the king of conduct.
Having no hope or fear reveals the result.Beyond objects of focus, the nature of mind is clear.
With no path to traverse, you’ve embarked on the path to buddhahood.
There is nothing to become accustomed to.
Once accustomed to that, you have achieved the unsurpassable.
Pith instructions earn the name by being pithy. They point past our analytic tendencies to experiential truths, so a long commentary would betray them. I’ll be brief.
I wrote in A Buddhist Path to Joy about the wild story behind this song—Naropa the great Nalanda scholar, Tilopa the sesame-grinding crazy-wisdom master, the 12 hardships Tilopa put Naropa through—and about the Six Words of Advice at its center. The lines above come later in the song, and they’re the ones I came back to this morning.
This is the tradition I live in. Mahamudra, as it traveled from Tilopa to Naropa to Marpa and on down to my own teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, is the root of my practice. So let me walk through the lines the way they land for one ordinary practitioner.
The fourfold frame.
The first quatrain lays out view, meditation, conduct, and result—the four stages of Vajrayana teachings—and crowns each one a king.
Transcending all object and subject is the king of views. In Mahamudra we practice awareness resting in itself, and the boundary between looker and looked-at gets porous. I get a small taste of this in yidam practice. Each evening I bring Amitabha to mind, and I’ve stopped being able to say exactly where the one visualizing ends and the one visualized begins. Tilopa tells us that porosity is the whole point. The king of views is the view with nobody holding it.
Having no distraction is the king of meditation. Mingyur Rinpoche likes to say you can’t fail at meditation. If you notice your mind has wandered, that noticing is awareness doing its job. Distraction only gains power when we declare war on it, and then we’ve traded one agitation for another. The king of meditation asks less of us than we think and gives more than we expect.
Lacking effort is the king of conduct. Tilopa ground sesame seeds for a living and ate fish guts by the river, and realization lived right there in the ordinary mess of it. After enough years, practice starts to carry itself the way breathing does. I gave up writing some years back because it was running on ego. It came back when it could run on bodhicitta instead, and now it feels closer to breathing than to striving. Effortless conduct looks like that. You do the thing because doing it is what’s left once ambition retires.
Having no hope or fear reveals the result. Hope and fear are negotiations with the future, and at some point I stopped negotiating. I’ve gotten friendly with death, as regular readers know, and friendliness with death turns out to be friendliness with today. The result shows up on its own schedule. Around here it looks like an ordinary Monday—doing the laundry and joking with Carol about our dog, Govinda, after a joyful weekend with my niece in Pittsburgh. (We got home in time to watch the World Cup final.)
The coda.
The last four lines loosen their grip entirely.
Beyond objects of focus, the nature of mind is clear. The clear sky doesn’t need a bird crossing it to prove it’s sky. Mind’s clarity runs whether or not we’re watching, which is lucky, given how often we aren’t.
With no path to traverse, you’ve embarked on the path to buddhahood. This is where I live, and it’s why this blog carries its name. The Pure Land of here and now doesn’t sit at the end of a road. You arrive by noticing you never left.
There is nothing to become accustomed to. Once accustomed to that, you have achieved the unsurpassable. The last line folds back on itself, and I love it for that. Forty years of practice, and what I’ve grown accustomed to is resting in a mind that needed no improvement in the first place. Even the habit of practicing gets to set itself down.
Tilopa sang all this beside a river that didn’t pause to listen. The Ganges kept flowing, he kept grinding his sesame seeds, and Naropa finally heard what all the texts at Nalanda couldn’t say. There’s a lesson in that for those of us who write and read about the dharma, so I’ll take the hint and stop.
Take a few breaths. Rest a moment. The unsurpassable can wait. It’s patient that way.
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