1

First, train in the preliminaries.

COMMENTARY

The preliminaries are also known as the four reminders. In your daily life, try to:

1. Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life.

2. Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.

3. Recall that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, has a result; what goes around comes around.

4. Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don't want does not result in happiness.

2

Regard all dharmas as dreams

COMMENTARY

Whatever you experience in your life — pain, pleasure, heat, cold, or anything else — is like something happening in a dream. Although you might think things are very solid, they are like passing memory. You can experience this open, unfixated quality in sitting meditation; all that arises in your mind — hate, love, and all the rest — is not solid. Although the experience can get extremely vivid, it is just a product of your mind. Nothing solid is really happening.

3

Examine the nature of unborn awareness.

COMMENTARY

Look at your mind, at just simple awareness itself. "Examine" doesn't mean analyze. It means just looking and seeing if there is anything solid to hold onto. Our mind is constantly shifting and changing. Just look at that!

4

Self-liberate even the antidote.

Do not hang on to anything — even the realization that there's nothing solid to hold onto.

5

Rest in the nature of alaya, the essence.

COMMENTARY

This is instruction for a meditation practice called There is a resting place, a starting place that you can always return to. You can always bring your mind back home and rest right here, right now, in present, unbiased awareness.

6

In postmeditation, be a child of illusion.

COMMENTARY

When you finish sitting meditation, if things become heavy and solid, be fully present and realize that everything is actually pliable, open, and workable. This is instruction for meditation in action, realizing that you don't have to feel claustrophobic because there is always lots of room, lots of space.

7

Sending and taking should be practiced alternately.

These two should ride the breath.

COMMENTARY

This is instruction for a meditation practice called tonglen. In this practice you send out happiness to others and you take in any suffering that others feel. You take in with a sense of openness and compassion and you send out in the same spirit. People need help and with this practice we extend ourselves to them.

8

Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue.

COMMENTARY

The three objects are: friends, enemies, and neutrals. The three poisons are: craving, aversion, and indifference. When you feel craving, you own it fully and wish that all beings could be free of it. When you feel aggression or indiVerence you do the same. In this way what usually causes suVering — what poisons us and others — becomes a seed of compassion and loving-kindness, a seed of virtue.

9

In all activities, train with slogans.

COMMENTARY

Recalling any of these slogans "on the spot" can dissolve our self-centeredness and unkindness.

10

Begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself.

COMMENTARY

Whatever pain you feel, take it in, wishing for all beings to be free of it. Whatever pleasure you feel, send it out to others. In this way, our personal problems and delights become a stepping-stone for understanding the suVering and happiness of all beings.

11

When the world is filled with evil, Transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi.

COMMENTARY

Whatever problems occur in your life, instead of reacting to them in the usual habitual way, you could transform them into the path of the bodhi heart. That is to say, you could awaken your compassionate and open heart. Use the tonglen approach and breathe in the pain of the situation, wishing that all beings could be free of it. Then breathe out and send loving-kindness to all suffering beings, including yourself!

12

Drive all blames into one.

COMMENTARY

This is advice on how to work with your fellow beings. Everyone is looking for someone to blame and therefore aggression and neurosis keep expanding. Instead, pause and look at what's happening with you. When you hold on so tightly to your view of what they did, you get hooked. Your own self-righteousness causes you to get all worked up and to suffer. So work on cooling that reactivity rather than escalating it. This approach reduces suffering — yours and everyone else's.

13

Be grateful to everyone.

COMMENTARY

Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck. They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting — shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. When you react in the habitual way, with anger, greed, and so forth, it gives you a chance to see your patterns and work with them honestly and compassionately. Without others provoking you, you remain ignorant of your painful habits and cannot train in transforming them into the path of awakening.

14

Seeing confusion as the four kayas Is unsurpassable shunyata protection.

COMMENTARY

Through meditation practice you begin to realize that:

1. Your thoughts have no birthplace, they just pop up out of nowhere — that is called dharmakaya.

2. Thoughts are nevertheless unceasing — this is sambhogakaya.

3. They appear but are not solid — that is nirmanakaya.

4. Putting that all together, there is no birth, no dwelling, no cessation — this is svabhavikakaya.

This understanding gives the unsurpassable protection of realizing what is called shunyata, or "complete openness." There's nothing solid to react to. You have made much ado about nothing!

15

Four practices are the best of methods.

COMMENTARY

The four practices are:

1. accumulating merit through any actions or words that lessen self-absorption and thus create more space in your mind and heart,

2. laying down evil deeds through honest and joyful self-reflection,

3. offering to the döns by welcoming mishaps because they wake you up, and

4. offering to the dharmapalas by expressing your gratitude to those who protect the teachings that help you and your fellow beings to wake up.

16

Whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with...