Looking Directly at the Nature of Mind

Mahamudra instructions proceed by direct examination of experience rather than by philosophical argument about it. A practitioner is first led to settle the mind in a calm, undistracted state, and is then instructed to search that settled mind for a location, a color, a shape or a boundary, an inquiry that consistently finds nothing at all to seize on or point to. What the search discloses is described as the union of clarity and emptiness, mind's cognizant, aware quality and its complete lack of any findable substance experienced together as one and the same fact rather than as two separate observations laid side by side. The teaching is central specifically to the Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism, among whom it functions as the culminating instruction of the entire path of practice, though a broadly comparable pointing out instruction exists under other names in other Tibetan traditions, including Dzogchen within the Nyingma school. It is transmitted in two recognized forms, a tantric form embedded within deity practice and requiring the corresponding empowerment, and a sutra form that can be given to a student who has not yet received that tantric empowerment, a distinction that governs who may receive which version of the instruction and in what sequence.