Precept and Instruction — An Intuitive Guide

Emergence and the Storehouse of Practice
A spiritual genius arises into the stage of action in faith across an incalculable eon. Through sustained aspiration the heart swells: faith increases without measure and the learner’s virtues multiply like the water of the ocean. With the stores of merit and wisdom gathered over lifetimes, a primordially pure spiritual genius — endowed with keen intellect and uncontaminated will — turns fully to meditative application. This purity is the unmixed vow, the correct view, long study, and freedom from impediment.

Receiving Instruction and the Flow from Study to Realization
From the awakened ones she receives extensive instruction in the stream of Dharma-concentration to cultivate broad serenity and penetrating intuition. Begin by fixing the mind upon the teaching’s title and its general import; next examine the text closely; analyze phonemes and meaning; concentrate the findings into memory; and finally generate a powerful will to realize what has been gathered. This is a sixfold progression of thought: basic thought, discursive thought, analytic thought, ascertaining thought, synthetic thought, and willful thought — the scaffolding by which study becomes lived insight.

Investigation, Nonverbal Attitudes, and the Twofold Path
Investigate continuously, examine thoroughly, and internalize by nonverbal conscientious attitudes that unify experience. Know that serenity synthesizes the words of the teaching while transcendent insight analyzes their meanings. The integrated path is the combination; its functional tasks are to prevent derailment and to pacify excitement. Orient yourself by cultivating perseverance and devotion — steady, sustained application and a reverent heart.

Stabilization of Mind: Nine States to Fluency
When attention wavers, quickly restore it. Repeatedly draw the mind away from external objects and tame it through practice. Cease any distaste for concentration; quell avarice and anxiety; and work the mind into free-flowing concentration first with effort, then through repetition until it stabilizes without effort. This sequence of nine states transforms fixation into fluency; the mind becomes easy, stable, focused, tame, calm, utterly quiet, streamlined, and perfectly concentrated.

Fluency, Superknowledges, and the Ferrying of the Heart
With great physical and mental fluency the spiritual genius acquires an enduring conscientious attitude. Through prolonged development she reaches fundamental stabilization. Purifying this stabilization for the superknowledges, she attains the best competence in contemplation. By means of those attainments she can travel the universes to worship and receive instruction from buddhas without number. Through innumerable aeons of such worship the mind refines into supreme competence.

Five Benefits — Precursors of Purity
This cultivation yields five preliminary fruits that stand as precursors to purity. Becoming a vessel of purity, the spiritual genius proceeds toward the unexcelled stages: body, speech, mind — all purified. In meditative concentration she no longer perceives objects as separate from the inner mental discourse; she intensifies illumination through persevering energy and remains in a mind-only recognition that all objects are reflections in mind, thus abandoning the distraction of objectivity and quickly shedding subjectivity distractions until unobstructed concentration arises.

Aids to Penetration and the Path of Insight
The successive supports — the aids to penetration — are ordered and purposefully cultivated (heat, tolerance, peak/illumination, etc.). When the states of penetration unfold in due order, nonconceptual intuition perfects buddha-qualities and the aftermath intuition serves to skillfully develop beings according to their situations. This meditative cultivation, carried forward across vast eons, culminates in final meditation, an anointing in which the spiritual genius attains a diamond-like, unbreakable concentration and foundational transmutation free of obscuration. From this fountain flows universal omniscience — the ground from which welfare for all beings is accomplished.

The Realization of Sameness and the Nondual View
When the spiritual genius realizes equality in the realm of truth, she gains constant awareness of sameness with all beings. This sameness is known in five ways: sameness in selflessness, in suffering, in duty, in not expecting reward, and in kinship with other awakened offspring. With purified nondual intuition she sees the creations of the three realms as unreal imaginative constructions. Having reached the state beyond subject and object and freed herself from insight-abandoned addictions, her path of insight stands proclaimed.

Knower of Voidness and the Grounds of Signlessness & Wishlessness
She is declared a knower of voidness upon understanding three voidnesses: the voidness of imaginatively constructed phenomena, the voidness of relative existence, and the natural voidness of perfect reality. The ground of signlessness is the complete termination of conceptualization; the ground of wishlessness is the unreality of mental constructions themselves. Simultaneously with the path of insight she acquires the various accessories of enlightenment — the supporting qualities that make skillful activity possible.

The View of the Great Self without a View of Self
By abandoning the useless, addicted view of self, the spiritual genius discovers the view of the great self: a self that has the great goal of accomplishing all beings, a self without the narrow, egoistic view. She experiences a paradoxical state: intense suffering without being overwhelmed by personal suffering; supreme freedom of mind yet bound by the heavy chains of responsibility to countless beings. Not seeing the end of suffering, she applies herself tirelessly.

Final Cultivation and the Great Fruits
On the remaining meditative stages she cultivates the two sorts of intuition: nonconceptual intuition to perfect buddha-qualities, and situational (aftermath) intuition to skillfully develop beings. After immeasurable eons she reaches final meditation, the diamond-like unbroken concentration, foundation transmutation free of taint, and finally omniscience — the inexhaustible stance from which she dispels darkness and illuminates the world like a great sun.

The Practical Fruit of Precepts
Those who take precepts from the stream of awakened doors continually see buddhas and hear matchless Dharma; their faith becomes deep and their minds are satisfied with pure intensity. The awakened justly praise realistic dedication to one’s true concerns and condemn false obsession with petty aims. For those intent on stability and discernment, the awakened teach without reserve the methods that assist and the pitfalls to avoid. Precepts are not mere rules — they are the foundation that matures concentration and opens the far shore.

Fruition
Ever full of the store of spiritual beauty, those who receive and embody the personal precepts from realized teachers attain expansive meditative concentration and cross to the far shore of the ocean of excellence. The path from hearing to realization is exacting, gradual, and cumulative — yet it ripens into an incomparable power for the benefit of all beings.