Category:Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

Roger Jackson reviews Heart of the Great Perfection: Dudjom Lingpa’s Visions of the Great Perfection, Vol. 1 by B. Alan Wallace. From the Spring 2017 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly.

Before you fully embark on the path of the bodhisattvas and buddhas, says Chan master Sheng Yen, you must first practice the four steps to magical powers. What are these steps and what are the magical powers you need?

A simple three-word koan. Or just a one-word koan: buddhanature. So deceptively simple, so easy to leave in the realm of concept, yet it penetrates to the very heart of the matter. Here’s Geoffery Shugen Arnold, Sensei, on Case 30 of the Gateless Gate, “Mazu’s ‘Mind is buddha.'”

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche presents the essential teachings of Mahamudra and its three main approaches to practice, each offering effective methods for directly pointing out mind’s true nature.

An interview with Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche that turned into a Mahamudra teaching on the spot.

In order to overcome the five main obstacles facing a bodhisattva, says Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, we must realize that all beings are primordially pure. He presents the essential teachings on buddhanature from Maitreya’s Uttaratantra Shastra.

When the Buddha taught that all beings have buddhanature, says Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, he wasn’t contradicting the teachings on emptiness—he was clarifying them.

The point of zazen, says Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, is to live each moment in complete combustion, like a clean-burning kerosene lamp. In this talk at the Tassajara sesshin in the summer of 1969, the great Zen master explains Dogen’s teaching on practicing within imperfection and warns against the arrogance of the false self.

The goal of Shin Buddhism’s central practice, nembutsu, is not to attain buddhahood for ourselves, says Jeff Wilson, but to express gratitude for all we have received.

When we truly give ourselves over to practice, explains Roko Sherry Chayat, we let go of our dependence on outcomes and begin to trust just being what we are, buddhanature, revealed right here, right now, in this very body and place.

Many people find the Vajrayana teachings strange and confusing, but they offer a direct path to enlightenment. In this teaching, the late Karma Kagyu master Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche — who died on October 6, 2019 — presents a clear explanation of Vajrayana and its main practices of generation and completion, based on a song by the great seventeenth-century yogi, Karma Chakme Rinpoche.