1.23 THE CREATIVE AND FULFILLMENT PHASES ARE COMPLETE AND PERFECT IN THE SPACE OF
BASIC EMPTY PRESENCE
On the various paths of the Mahayana and Theravada schools, different methods
have been developed to train us in the understanding that phenomena are unreal
and to make available to us experiential realization of this fact. In tantrayana, our
impure bodies in themselves are visualized as pure divine bodies; stabilizing this
through familiarization over a long period with a buddha-deity’s color, attributes,
face, arms, and so forth, is the main practice. Over time, our attachment to the
present body gradually diminishes, pure divine appearance increases naturally,
and eventually attachment to our physical body vanishes. Further, due to our
recitation of the divine secret mantra, when slander, flattery, or abuse come our
way, we hear such sounds merely as echo, and we suffer neither increase of
conceit nor loss of self-esteem. Whatever happiness or sadness we experience
appears as the display of the real nature of thought, and mind cannot waver from
that. Whatever concepts arise we see as children’s play, and, free of intellectual
imperatives, we are released from the round of temporal happiness and suffering
and become buddha. Because our minds are buddha in nature, we can see our
own bodies as divine bodies. In The Secret Core, it is said,
Emaho! The elements of the body-mind,
To be known as the five perfect buddhas...If we cultivate the recognition of our own body as divine, and stabilize this, then it
is quite possible that we will truly realize the five buddhas.
In Aspiration on the Gradual Path of the Wrathful Dakini, Dudjom Rinpoche says,
The creative phase, primordially perfected in the ground of being,
And the fulfillment phase of the spontaneous clear light seed:
These two in supreme secret union—
May this crux of the vajra point take us to the matrix of the sky.Once, in the kingdom of Varanasi, an old woman engaging only in shamata
meditation visualized a tiger, and it actually manifested in the flesh and terrorized
the city, which then became deserted. Further, once when Do Khyentse Yeshe
Dorje was giving the empowerment of the Great Compassionate One at Menyag
Lhagang, all the people present saw him on his seat as the real Thousand-Armed
Avalokiteshvara rather than as the lama himself. That occurred because the lama
visualized himself in the empty pure presence form of the deity and momentarily
created an envisionment of total sameness, thus blessing his fortunate, devoted
disciples. The key point here is that such transformations can be achieved only if
the world is insubstantial and equivocal, just an illusory display of the mind. By
such reasoning, we arrive at the insight that the root of all phenomena is
insubstantial and nonexistent and that ordinary people suffer constantly from
perceiving things as substantial and real.
The more wealth and fame we have, the more we are attached to them. They