“Every movement of the mind becomes bliss and emptiness; All polarity disappears when the mind emerges into nakedness. This is the mandala in which the six senses are self-liberated. On seeing your face I am overjoyed. Now pain and pleasure alike have become ornaments which it is pleasant to wear. The experience of joy becomes devotion and I am drunk with all-pervading blessings. This is a sign of the merging of mind and guru. The whole of existence is freed and becomes the guru.”
– passage from the Sadhana of Mahamudra, a liturgy discovered by tertoen Choegyam Trungpa
4-week practice study
intro
Mark writes in his 4-week practice study introduction:
“Guidelines for obtaining personal copies of the text are on this Nalanda Translation Committee page. All of this can be part of the discussion: this sadhana is a core unifying practice for all the various lineage streams coming from Chögyam Trungpa’s presentation of buddhadharma in the West.
The sadhana is also somewhat unusual, in that the approach to it, from the earliest days, was basically to just jump right in and do it, regardless of familiarity or lack of it with the various terms and names found there: just feel the energy.
In some ways that amounts to feeling the energy of the original inspiration, which then gets translated into words. The Sadhana is considered to be terma, a revealed or discovered text. CTR wrote it down in Tibetan, and then he and Richard Arthure (aka Kunga Dawa) translated it into English, with that English translation being considered as much terma as the Tibetan translation.
In a sense I’d like to re-discover this Sadhana fresh, by diving into it, but also by asking what some of the basic terms and forms used mean, then and now. These include:
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Sadhana: what is that?
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Mahamudra: what’s that?
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How did this Sadhana arise, what was the context?
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Going over the different parts of the Sadhana
Some references:
Sadhana of Mahamudra Archives - The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
There’s several articles here, including one by CTR:
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The Story of the Sadhana of Mahamudra (from intro to Volume 5 of Collected Works).
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Vol. 5 includes at least two relevant articles: Joining Energy and Space: Comments on the Sadhana of Mahamudra, and Hum: An Approach to Mantra. In that last one he writes:
“I hope that the people who practice The Sadhana of the Embodiment of All the Siddhas [The Sadhana of Mahamudra] will study this essay very closely.”