inevitably follows; if we are detached from those experiences, then happiness will
result. This is established not only by those who have deep experience of
meditation but also by our own ordinary experience. In his Collected Fragments,
Patrul Rinpoche says,
What we cling to, abandon,
For attachment is the work of the devil;
With confidence that objects of attachment are illusion,
That all and everything is play—ganachakra feasting!Regardless of whether attachment is to something good or something bad, if it is
attachment, it is the cause of suffering. If only we could engage wealth, fame, and
a youthful body without desire or attachment, we would be able to experience
total temporal happiness. We would then not accumulate negative karma, and,
recognizing everything as the creativity of pure presence, we would experience all
sense pleasures as the play of the primordial unborn space of Samantabhadri’s
great happiness. In this way, we practice the yoga of constant enjoyment in the
feast offering of primal awareness.
For yogins and yoginis who have confidence in the yoga of constant enjoyment,
every single action of their body, speech, and mind is an offering at the feast, and
there is no need to strive for the accumulation of merit or develop view,
meditation, conduct, or fruition. As Jigme Lingpa says in The Chariot of Wisdom,
Thoughts released into pure presence, the artificialities of view, meditation,
conduct, and fruit all crumbling, regular ritual and daily religious devotions
ceasing to be a burden, free of all conceptual elaboration, inseparable from
luminous mind, reality is all-embracing.This type of nonattachment to the view, meditation, and conduct is difficult for
the beginner, but it is very important to carry the release of whatever arises—all
the nonattached movements of body, speech, and mind—into the bed of the
dharmakaya. That can be called “excellent conduct.”
It is obvious that attachment to the eight worldly obsessions must be abandoned,
but attachment to the vows of self discipline, the vows of a bodhisattva, and the
commitments of a tantrika should also be forsaken. The latter are positive
attachments and should not be rejected by ordinary people, but since such
attachment is an obstruction to buddha, even such noble attachment must be cast
off by Dzogchen yogins and yoginis.
Impure samsaric experience in which nonexistent illusory appearances are
believed to have substantial existence and the peaceful visions of nirvana labeled
immaculate: these two are mutually dependent and therefore exist as nothing
other than mentally imputed experience. The word “father” is given meaning by a
son, and the word “son” is validated by “father”; in the same way “the noble
attachment to experience of nirvana” and “the ignoble attachment to experience of
samsara” are mutually dependent in the intellect. When thoughts naturally
remain in the matrix of pure presence, which is quite free of conceptual