The Essence of Nectar: Graduated Stages of the Path

Advice for Renunciant Meditators

by Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo

Master whose kindness is unequalled,

Wisdom kya of the victors and their offspring
With heartfelt faith I prostrate to you,
And here reveal a few pieces of profound advice.

Whoever renounces the world,

Aspiring to achieve the highest enlightenment,
Must initially seek out a teacher of the spiritual path,
And serve that spiritual friend in three ways.

According to their advice, stabilise your mind

By knowing what to adopt and what to avoid,
Apply yourself to receiving and contemplating the teachings,
And awaken the wisdom that comes from meditation.

By not transgressing your vowed training,

Youll achieve the state beyond regret,
From which, it is said, single-pointed concentration and
The perfect discrimination of Dharma will arise.

Through lesser, excellent and extraordinary application

Of the three higher trainings,
You may bring about the result of the rvakas and pratyekabuddhas or complete
enlightenment;
Seeing this, perfect your view and conduct.

Initially, use your intellect to analyse thoroughly

The imagined and co-emergent self;
Youll not find it as a naturally established,
Singular or multi-faceted entity.

Furthermore, the objects this self regards,

When broken down into gross and subtle, and in directional parts,
Are found to be mere conceptual imputations,
Each designated with its respective name.

1
The various perceptions which grasp at these objects,
Like the experiences and experiencer in a dream,
Are all dependent on what is actually false,
So how could they themselves be real?

Even the experience of this wisdom of non-duality

Must be investigated with the reasoning of the three times.
Without grasping at arising, cessation or centre,
Free yourself from elaborations extremes.

Objects to be negatedall elaborations

Are also primordially and naturally unobservable;
So the negationfreedom from elaborations
Is also not truly established.

Similarly, by investigating objects in the same way

Youll come to find the subject which is beyond expression
The genuine expanse, an inconceivable place of rest.
This is what we call settling meditation.

Should you wish to approach the state of Buddhahood

By means of compassions illusory nature
For the sake of all dreamlike beings,
Who have not realised the nature through this approach,

You should swiftly achieve the most excellent wisdom,

By taking the highest vajra-vehicle,
Which is distinguished by its methods and is
The earnest endeavour of the learned.

N, pra and binduwisdoms elements

For them to awaken into the resultant four kyas,
You should know how to plant continually the seeds
Of the four empowerments, of both cause and path.

With the condition of the stages of generation and completion,

And the close friend of the mantric precepts,
Combined with the secondary cause of conduct;
Youll find the state of union within this lifetime.

With the correct realisation of emptiness

Averse to the extremes of elaboration
If you can arrive at the essence of great bliss
Youll come to see the indivisible nature of samsara and nirvana.

2
With your gross body, speech and mind
Perfected as deity, mantra and dharmakya,
Its certain that youll reverse the common bewilderment of
Birth and decay within the three worlds.

To uproot the attachment of any clinging,

Through the yoga of the subtle n, pra and bindu,
Activate the vital points of the subtle body
And directly induce the wisdom of great bliss.

When bliss and emptiness come together,

Through this extremely subtle union,
The clear light of training and no-more-training,
Youll achieve the state of Vajradhara, with its seven aspects of union.

There is no need to say much, so, in essence:

Through thoroughly disregarding the affairs of this life
And striving to reach the state of liberation,
You form the basis for all subsequent paths.

The realisation of the way of abidingthe insubstantial nature

And the mode of appearancesunobstructed dependent arising
Conjoined with love for all beings,
Comprise the actual paths.

The ultimate, the wisdom of the natural state,

And the conventional, the generation and completion stages,
Naturally arising in accordance with the stages of method,
Comprise the paths exalted Dharmas.

Finally, through the practice of guru yoga,

All ordinary subjects and objects
Arise as the great-seal of fervent devotion:
This is the excellent life-pillar of the path.

Eh ma!
By this fine, short explanation
Of the meaning of the vast and profound,
May all, both animate and inanimate,
Arise as the web of magical apparition!

As requested by the yogi of the supreme vehicle, Chying Palden, who is dedicated to the
single-pointed pursuit of accomplishing the heart [of spiritual practice] and has caused
the lotus bud of intelligence to bloom with the nectar of perceiving the all-pervading
vajra-queens wisdom and, as such, is fearless in his understanding of many points of

3
the outer and inner sciences, this was composed by the ignoramus, the untrained and
bewildered ascetic, Jamyang Khyentse, who wrote down whatever came into his mind,
at the isolated spot of Jangchup Chling.

Sarvad mangalam!

| Translated in haste by the English idiot Tenzin Jamchen (Sean Price) with the help of the sublime
Khenpo Gyurme Tsultrim, 2007. Revised and edited for Lotsawa House, 2014.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

PDF document automatically generated on Fri Dec 8 06:30:35 2017 GMT from
http://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-masters/jamyang-khyentse-wangpo/essence-of-nectar