Kalachakra Sadhana: Drop Yoga, Subtle Yoga, Mantra Recitation & Conclusion

The next is the drop yoga. This is also called the branch of attainment, and it’s analogous to when in the male the power of the white bodhichitta becomes complete at the age of 16, and then you have the full emanation or production of energy-drops of bodhichitta, and in ancient India you would take a wife.

You should note that 16 years here is a moon phenomenon, like the 16 parts of the waxing moon. The moon grows full in 15 days, and then the 16th is the time when it’s completely full. Likewise, the 16-year period of the development of the male, the white bodhichitta side, is analogous to the 16 parts of the waxing moon growing full. That also correlates on the alternative level to the 16 divisions for each of the four joys: you have the four blisses or joys, and each of those four is divided into four, so you have 16 blisses. You have those three levels of what the 16 is referring to as a moon phenomenon. 

Whereas in a woman, the blood speck becomes ripe at 12 years old, when one would start to menstruate; and this is a sun phenomenon, and so it’s similar to the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 12 zodiacal months. Also, based on the red bodhichitta, one speaks of the 12 divisions of joy – three each of the four joys – so the four blisses in terms of the female side are divided into three each so you get 12. You are going to find that symbolism in a lot of places, of either 16 joys being the male side and moon side, and the 12 joys being the female side and the sun side.

We get syllables at the various chakras as in the sadhana, and then we consecrate the organs. It says: 

At the top of my own and my lady of discriminating awareness’s head comes an OM, at our throats an AH, at our hearts a HUM, at our navels a HOH, at our pubic regions a HAM and at the crown of our heads a HAH. At my own private place, within a non-objectifying state, from a HUM comes a vajra, blue with five spokes, the hole of which is stopped with a syllable PHAT. At the private place of my lady of discriminating awareness, within a non-objectifying state, from an AH comes a lotus, red with eight petals, the hole of which is stopped with a PHAT.

Here when you do that the organ is the male, or the organ is the female in terms of the lotus as well, they retain the shape of the organ, but they’re transparent inside, and inside they would have either a vajra or a lotus. That’s what one imagines when one transforms the private organs into a vajra and into a lotus: they retain their ordinary shape.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a male or a female, because as a practitioner it doesn’t make any difference if you’re the male or if you’re the female. Because in fact you’re being generated as the couple: you’re both, plus you’re everybody else around as well, plus you’re the building, plus everything else. One shouldn’t get hung up in terms of identifying strongly with one’s ordinary appearance as being either male or female, but since both are involved in this practice, one just imagines being the entire procedure of the union and not just being either the female or the male in it. 

HUM. With the self-esteem of myself as a Holder of the Vajras, the fire of tummo, like stainless lightning, at the syllable HOH at my navel, being roused by my downward-voiding wind, scorches, with light-rays blazing up through the path of my avadhuti central channel, the five mandala rounds of energy-wind that, in the nature of my five aggregate factors, fall in my left energy-channel, and the five mandala rounds of energy-wind that, in the nature of my five elemental sources, fall in my right energy-channel, immobilizing them so that the sensors of my eyes and so forth are no longer involved with their objects.

The Tibetan text uses particular terms here for the channels. The central channel is called “shaken-off channel,” as I explained. It’s the central channel that’s shaken off the right and the left; that’s what the word avadhuti means. The “lolling channel” is the left channel, and the right channel is called “savoring.” It burns, it scorches, the five mandala rounds. 

Here you go into tummo, and it says:

the five mandala rounds of energy-wind that, in the nature of my five aggregate factors, fall in my left energy-channel, and the five mandala rounds of energy-wind that, in the nature of my five elemental sources, fall in my right energy-channel, immobilizing them so that the sensors of my eyes and so forth are no longer involved with their objects.

The burning of tummo stops the coursing of the winds in the right and left channels so that they do not go to the sensors – that’s the eye, ear and so forth – and external objects, so that temporarily these don’t function. These winds are stopped moving from their being burned, and in your imagination, you imagine that they go into the central channel, although on the generation stage they don’t actually enter there. What we want this to ripen into is that, with the tummo burning, the energy-winds actually go into the central channel. 

You should note that to get the bodhichitta melting and have these joys, it’s not pervasive that the winds have to be in the central channel, because you get bodhichitta melting and the joys even on a basis level when you’re in union. But if they are in the central channel through this process, then that’s a completing stage practice. On a regular basis level, and in the generation stage when one is imagining this, or if one actually gets some sort of experience of it from the visualization, it’s not actually in terms of the winds being in the central channel, but it will ripen into that. 

The important point is that it isn’t emitted; you shouldn’t lose that blissful energy or awareness. Because it says:

Being merely touched by these rays of light, the syllable HAM at the crown of my head melts

That’s the bodhichitta melting.

like that which possesses a rabbit

That’s the poetic metaphor for the moon. All these texts are filled with the metaphors from Sanskrit poetry, so that again is another subject matter, which is also studied: rhetoric, imagery and so forth. One has to have some sort of basic vocabulary to understand it. I think it’s unfair to gloss over it and just translate it as “the moon” because then you lose all the poetic imagery of Sanskrit, so I left it as “that which possesses a rabbit.” 

and, in the form of a drop, when it reaches from my crown to my throat – joy; when it reaches from my throat to my heart – supreme joy. When it reaches from my heart to my navel – distinguished joy; when it reaches from my navel to the tip of the gem of my vajra and is stopped by the syllable PHAT, I experience co-arising joy with its not being shifted outside.

The important thing is that it’s not shifted outside, which means that it’s not lost. What you don’t want to happen is for either the energy or the basis of the energy being the drops (depending on whether one is male or female), but in any case, in either case you don’t want the energy to be lost that would precipitate the whole experience of bliss ending. This is the thing that you don’t want to happen, because you want to sustain that blissful awareness so that it becomes a very powerful tool for understanding of voidness.

If one actually lost the energy, which was the basis for maintaining that bliss, then that whole instrument, this blissful awareness that you have for understanding voidness, the energy would go downhill, and you would no longer have what you’re aiming for in this practice. That’s the important thing that one is trying to keep in mind and trying to not have happen.

What you imagine with this is that when it speaks of the four blisses, all that you imagine is that the bliss gets stronger as you go from chakra to chakra. It’s the main thing that one imagines: that each of these joys from chakra to chakra is just more and more intense, so that then, when you get to the fourth one, at that point you apply the blissful awareness to voidness. Although one could argue that it’s applied to voidness throughout the whole thing because everything is within the state of voidness, but in any case, you reacquaint yourself with voidness at the point of the most intense bliss. 

In the single-deity practice, which some of you might be taking a look at, it’s a little bit confusing because in the prior section, where you get the blessing and the consecrating of body, speech and mind, then all of a sudden you get a consort, which you didn’t have before. That’s no problem. It doesn’t really matter; you can always get a consort here, or not.

And then, when we get this yoga of the drop, all of a sudden the consort isn’t there. I asked His Holiness about that, and His Holiness said that even though the consort isn’t there, it doesn’t say that there’s no consort, does it? Because it doesn’t say that there’s no consort, in fact one can visualize the consort in the single-deity practice as well. Or one can just do it as a single deity, like for instance in the single-deity Yamantaka when one experiences the blisses by oneself. Either with the consort or without the consort is perfectly OK. 

Do you visualize that the consort experiences the joys as well?

One can, but it doesn’t say that. It’s not necessarily; it doesn’t really specify. In some practices it emphasizes and says that one imagines both experiencing it. In other practices it says just focus in terms of oneself, but then it includes the consort. Because what one shouldn’t really get too much into is there being a big division between oneself and the consort as being two separate mental continuums, because in fact here they’re just two different aspects of the same mental continuum.

It’s just that you set up the letters that way?

Yeah. The letters are set up in terms of oneself; in terms of the male figure. Anyway, that’s the way that it’s done. There can be more elaborations on it, but there isn’t so much time.

The next practice is the “integrating practice of the subtle,” in other words the subtle yoga. That’s the branch of great attainment stage, and it’s analogous with the force of bliss now being complete. What you have are the drops going back up in the way in which they had done before.

Then once more this very drop proceeds as it did when it came before. From my private place it proceeds to my navel in the manner of a result that corresponds to its cause – joy. From my navel it proceeds to my heart in the manner of a result that has ripened – supreme joy. From my heart it proceeds to my throat in the manner of a man-made result – distinguished joy. From my throat it proceeds to my forehead in the manner of a result that’s a parting, so that I experience co-arising joy.

There’s this correlation of the four results, but none of the commentaries I’ve ever looked at has ever explained what it is, and none of the lamas seem to be terribly clear about what it actually refers to in terms of these four results. Serkong Rinpoche said that he thought that perhaps the result that corresponds to its cause is in the sense that all of these are proceeding now from having the fourth joy as the basis, so then these are more intense things within the sphere of the fourth simultaneously arising joy, so in that sense it corresponds to its cause.

What this ripens into is on the complete stage you have tummo and the blisses going from the top down. Also, you have with the tummo practice the blisses going back up, and that’s on the beginning stages of the complete stage. In the final stage of the complete stage, the sixth part of it, instead of having the blisses going up what you have are the drops being stacked up, with the drops not moving back up but rather staying stable and being stacked going up.

At the fourth one here, we also apply voidness. Just as we had the drops when they went down with the 16 divisions of the four blisses going down in the drop yoga before, which was correlated to the waxing moon, the moon growing full in 16 phases, so here with it going back up it’s correlated with the 16 phases of the waning moon, when it goes back down to the new moon.

What that symbolizes is, just as with the waning moon, the moon disappears through a process of 16, likewise at the end of this process of the stacking of the drops up through the chakras, the obscurations are depleted, they disappear, and the atoms of the gross body come apart, and that whole gross body disappears like a rainbow. When it speaks of the result that’s a parting, that also is reminiscent of being parted from the obscurations, being parted from the atoms being coagulated, and also parted in the sense of being parted from true existence and grasping for true existence. These four blisses stabilizing from below are more distinguished than the four of falling from above since they are already within the co‑arising bliss. 

These were the drop yoga and the subtle yoga. They’re going to ripen into the tummo practice, and then the practice of stacking the drops up to get the depletion of the obscurations and the gross body so that one arises just simply in the Form Body. As it says in the Stainless Light:

• On the generation stage, the supreme triumphant mandala is signifying the body becoming complete, that’s in the womb.
• The supreme triumphant actions is the speech becoming complete, for instance when you take birth and one is able to speak.
• The drop yoga signifies the bodhichitta becoming complete at the age of 16.
• And the subtle yoga is being aimed at complete bliss, as with the stacking of the drops. 

At this point, we can do the subtle generation stage, which is being aimed at a drop at the top of the central channel, which is in the midbrow here, between the eyebrows. You imagine a tiny little drop, and in that drop you imagine the entire full mandala of Kalachakra with all 722 deities. Then, when that is stabilized, you would have that multiply and have from the one drop two drops, and in that the full mandalas; and then in that four drops and in that the full mandalas, you multiply; and then have it come, if it’s eight drops, then they dissolve back into four, those into two, those into one and back into the central channel.

Thus, the rough generation stage is just being able to visualize the whole mandala around us and being able to do that for one sixth of a day, that’s four hours, without any mental wandering or lack of clarity or anything like that. When you can do that, with all of the deities, then you go into the subtle yoga of trying to get it in these tiny little drops. And when you can get that for four hours, with no wandering and, as it says, so clear that you can see the difference between the black and white of the eyes of all the deities, then you’ve got it. Then you’re ready to go on to the complete stage. The complete stage is not something that one just enters into casually. It requires a great deal of preparation.

After you do a little bit of the subtle yoga, which could be just being aimed at a drop over here, which is quite sufficient – you don’t have to strain yourself to try to get a mandala in it, but you can start with a drop – then you do these two mantras here, which are: 

OM SARVA TATHA-GATA ANU-RAGANA VAJRA SVABHAVA ATMAKO ‘HAM. 

The first one is for holding the pride of affection: “I am the vajra nature of the bliss, or affection, of all the Tathagatas.” And the second one:

OM SARVA TATHA-GATA ADHI-PATI VAJRA-SATTVA HAM, DUR-DANTA DAMAKA HUM HUM PHAT SVAHA. 

It is saying, “I am Vajrasattva, lord of all the Tathagatas, tamer of the hard to tame.” Durdanta is hard to tame; damaka is the tamer. This is holding the pride of the deities of desire; so, one holds the pride there.

Then the next thing that happens is at the end of the session we have the request to depart and so forth, which will start off with the recitation of the mantras. And for the recitation of the mantras one consecrates the mala, the garland of counters. You can get it in the fuller one – it’s eliminated here – and in that, one generates the beads as black Vajra Mind with the yellow consort, and then the beads go back to being the beads. 

Now you do the mantras. You recite all the mantras. What you visualize is at the heart on a black disc there is a seed syllable and the mantras being arranged around it in a circle. Actually, it never says what disc it’s on, but Serkong Rinpoche had said that it should be on a Rahu disc – that’s a black disc – because you always have a black disc at your heart in Kalachakra of the eclipsing planet with all the symbolism of it being the eclipsing thing. As for the seed syllable, you would have just HUM, although in some other practices the whole HKSHMLAVRYAM is taken as a seed syllable; but normally in this tradition it’s just used with a syllable HUM. As you say the mantras, you imagine that you emit deities that benefit sentient beings, make offerings to the Buddhas and so forth, and then they come back and dissolve in the heart. 

We have here the heart mantra:

OM AH HUM HO HKSHMLAVRYAM HUM PHAT

HKSHMLAVRYAM is pronounced in Tibetan as HANKYA MALA WARAYAM.

Then the near heart mantra:

OM HRAM HRIM HRRIM HRUM HRLIM HRAH SVAHA

It helps to check if we want to pronounce these correctly. And then the vajra body mantra is

OM SHRI KALA-CHAKRA HUM HUM PHAT 

One recites all three of these. 

In the OM SHRI KALACHAKRA HUM HUM PHAT, the OM is standing for vajra mind, the SHRI KALACHAKRA is standing for vajra speech, and the HUM HUM PHAT is vajra body. Because all the mantras are going to be similar to this, the later mantras that come, in having the structure of OM, then the name of the deity, then HUM HUM PHAT. 

Or you can take the first HUM as being vajra mind, the second HUM, the one with the long U, as being vajra speech, and PHAT and the seed syllable as being vajra body; the seed syllable being the one in the heart. That’s another way of taking it, the whole point here being that you should be mindful that you have the combination of vajra body, speech and mind with these mantras.

Or another way of taking it is that

• The heart mantra, that’s the OM AH HUM HO HKSHMLAVRYAM HUM PHAT, is vajra speech. 
• The near heart mantra, OM HRAM HRIM HRRIM HRUM HRLIM HRAH SVAHA, is vajra mind.
• And the root mantra, which is another name for the vajra body mantra, that’s OM SHRI KALACHAKRA HUM HUM PHAT, is for vajra body.

When you recite, you should keep inseparable body, speech and mind. 

In the nine-deity practice in the actual sadhana that was presented, the way that it was printed, it didn’t have OM PHREM VISHVAMATA HUM HUM PHAT as being recited. However, one would normally recite it. It just had the ten mantras for the ten ladies who are correlated to the far-reaching attitudes. 

• Dana Paramita is the black one in the corner, so that’s the southeast.
• Shila Paramita is the red one in the southwest corner.
• Kshanti Paramita is the white one in the northeast.
• Virya Paramita is the yellow one in the corner in the northwest.
• Dhyana Paramita is the black one in front of you in the main direction; that’s in the east. 
• Prajnaparamita is dissolved inside of Vishvamata, so you don’t visualize her. You just visualize Vishvamata, and in her heart is the Prajnaparamita mantra.
• Upaya Paramita is the one on your right, and upaya is means. She is the red lady in the south in the main direction.
• Pranidhana Paramita – that’s the far-reaching attitude of aspirational prayer – and she is the white one in the cardinal direction of the north, to your left.
• Then Bala Paramita, which is the far-reaching attitude of strength, is the one behind you, the yellow one in the west.
• And then Jnana Paramita again is in Vishvamata, in the main consort. 

And then when you do – it doesn’t have here in this sadhana the mantras for Akshobhya, Vajrasattva and the ladies with their partners, which would be Prajnaparamita and Vajradhatu Ishvari, but one can also recite them because in the mind mandala you do recite them. However, you don’t recite Prajnaparamita. You recite Akshobhya, Vajrasattva and then Vajradhatu Ishvari, leaving out Prajnaparamita, because she is taken care of by the other Prajnaparamita that we had as one of the ten powerful ladies, so her mantra is not recited separately. Again, this becomes a real exercise in “symmetry is stupid.” It doesn’t work out nicely symmetrically at all. One would go on to recite, if you’re doing the full practice, all the mantras of all the things. 

If you’re doing the full retreat, or the prior approximation, one would do the mind mandala, the whole mind mandala. Since you do the prior approximation, which is the name of the actual retreat, in order to be able to do the self-initiation for restoring your vows, and since the figures in the mind mandala are the ones that confer the seven initiations of entering like a child, which is what’s involved in receiving the self-initiation, then you have to do the full mind mandala in order to do the retreat to be able to do the self-initiation. It’s not necessary to have to do the mantras of all the body and speech deities as well in order to do the retreat, although often one will do the whole visualization of the whole thing and just do the mind mandala mantras for the retreat. It’s optional whether one visualizes the whole body, speech and mind one or not. 

For the retreat one does 100,000 of the heart mantra, that’s the OM AH HUM HO HKSHMLAVRYAM HUM PHAT. There’s no accumulation of the near heart or the vajra body: you don’t have to do a lot of OM HRAM HRIM and OM SHRI KALACHAKRA HUM HUM PHAT. You do some of it, but you don’t have to do 100,000 or 10,000. Then you also don’t do an accumulation of the ten powerful ladies mantras, of the DANA PARAMITA HUM HUM PHAT and so forth; although you would say some of those in your daily practice. 

But you do need to do 100,000 of the Vishvamata mantra, OM PHREM VISHVAMATA HUM HUM PHAT. Then you would do 10,000 each for the rest of the mind mandala. The rest of the mind mandala is 35 mantras, so you would do 10,000 each of the rest of the 35 mantras. Then you would do 10,000 of the heart mantra plus HUM HA ANZA at the end of it. That’s called the falling of deep awareness mantra. This is something that you have in all retreats. So, it would be OM AH HUM HO HKSHMLAVRYAM HUM PHAT HUM HA ANZA, and you do 10,000 of that.

The sum of all of this is 560,000 mantras that one would say in doing the full retreat, which actually isn’t that much. If you did the full Heruka retreat, there are more mantras than here. But it’s a pretty hefty number. Or if you do the full Tara retreat, it’s a million Tara mantras. This is only 560,000, so it’s not bad.

Then you do the 100 syllables of Vajrasattva to purify yourself of any mistakes in the recitation. Then after that you would do the consecration, the offerings, etc. You consecrate and do the outer offerings to yourself and imagine that you’re enjoying them. 

First, you offer the four waters, and in some of the texts it seems to be that you do the 12 offering goddesses, the 12 offerings: gandham, dhupam, dipam and so forth, as it has here in the nine-deity sadhana. In other sadhanas it seems as though you do the usual six of pushpe, dhupe, aloke, naividya, those usual six. In some it seems as though you do both, some as though you do one, some as though you do the other. The Namgyal Monastery tradition is you just do the six after the four waters: pushpam, dhupam, etc.

Then you get the consecration of the inner offering and make the inner offering. What you do with that is you call in the gurus. First, you make the inner offering:

OM – to my glorious and hallowed root guru,

You visualize your root guru – that would be His Holiness for Kalachakra – enthroned in the east, resting on the upper storey circular beam. You have to get a whole other teaching on the mandala building itself, but in any case, above where the green lotus is, with the main figure and the powerful ladies around them, above that – remember, that was in the fourth storey of the mandala; the fifth storey is just a roof, a steeple structure that’s on top of that – and dividing those two, up there there’s a round circular beam. On top of that beam in the east, in front of you, is where the root guru is sitting on a throne, and the rest of the gurus of the lineage are all seated around that circular beam up there. You offer the inner offering to them, holding the inner offering cup at your forehead and offering to the gurus up there.

Then you offer to the deities, in this case the deities in the mandala itself. Here it says:

OM – Ratna-trayaya – NAMAH

That’s to the Triple Gem.

OM – Shakya-muneya – NAMAH

That’s to Shakyamuni Buddha.

OM – Shri Kalachakraya – NAMAH

That’s to Kalachakra, so in a sense it’s to the same thing. And:

OM – guru buddha bodhisattva-bhyo – NAMAH

That’s to the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. In the long one after Shri Kalachakraya Namah it’s Vishvamataya Nama, to Vishvamati; and to Dashaparamita, the ten far-reaching attitudes, the ten powerful ladies. These are being offered to the actual deities in your mandala, and you hold the cup straightforward in front of you and offer it.

Then one offers it to the guru, Buddhas and bodhisattvas – that’s all the deities in the mandala. Then to all the guardians, so that’s the protectors; this is offered at the navel, and they are on the tips of the lotus underneath the mandala. Our mandala was resting on a lotus and the discs of the different planets, so on the ends of those lotuses is where you imagine the protectors would be, like Mahakala and other figures that one makes the offerings to the protectors there. 

And then:

OM – to all ruling deities of regions, local areas and villages – NAMAH

Those would be just different worldly deities. You imagine them outside the mandala, completely outside of all the elements fences. And then:

OM – to all limited beings as well, transformed into deities – NAMAH

You just offer to everybody. 

Then you do the secret and thusness offerings combined, and this is the same as the yoga of the drop. This is not in the nine-deity practice, but one would do it in the full one by just repeating the yoga of the drop. 

Then what you do is place a drop of the nectar to the tip of one’s tongue, forehead and crown of one’s head, and so you would taste it. This is from the inner offering cup. 

By placing a drop at my own three places and tasting it, may all the deities in my body be content.

You don’t actually have any deities in your body, but this is referring to the deities of the mandala who are in the nature of the purification of various aspects of the body.

Then you have the praises. That is called the twenty homage praises or twenty lines of homage, and there are two pages. 

Homage to you, granter of the best (boon), the foremost vajra; homage to you, the endpoint of what’s perfectly so; homage to you, the womb of voidness; 

It’s the word “homage” that’s repeated 20 times. The first set of praises comes from the Concert of Names of Manjushri. Each set of them, each sentence, is correlated to one of the five types of deep awareness: the first one being mirror‑like, the second one is dharmadhatu, the third is individualizing, the fourth is equalizing, and the fifth is all‑accomplishing; and that would require a complicated discourse on the Concert of Names of Manjushri.

After that one can do either that set of praises or the one that is typed here, and the one that’s typed here also was appearing in the Kalachakra six-session yoga:

I bow to you, Kalachakra. Having rid yourself of unions of vowels with consonants, and those with the syllables HUM and PHAT, 

That’s referring to wisdom. The vowels strung from A is the wisdom side or the female, and the method side is the consonants strung from KA, so the balanced union is the union of male and female; that’s method and wisdom, vowels and consonants.

The syllables HUM and PHAT are the syllables that block the organs. The organs are generated from the syllable HUM, and they’re blocked from the syllable PHAT. You have given that up, rid yourself of that, which means that you’ve rid yourself of arising from a union of an ordinary karmamudra in terms of an ordinary union of male and female; you don’t arise from that kind of bliss. And you don’t arise from the kind of bliss of a jnanamudra, that’s a wisdom partner, which is the visualized thing in the generation stage with the organs: visualizing yourself as the Buddha-figure, and the organs being generated as a vajra and lotus from the syllable HUM and blocked with a PHAT; you’re not like that.

Rather,

you’ve an enlightening body born from what is unchanging.

In other words, your body is a devoid form that is born from the unchanging bliss, which is the bliss derived from the union of that couple itself: the reflection of the clear light mind. It’s homage to Kalachakra who is not a reflection of the ordinary bliss with an external partner or the bliss of being with a visualized partner, but rather are the appearance of the bliss of this devoid form couple, which is the appearance of the clear light mind.

I bow to you, O Lady Mahamudra. You possess the supreme of all aspects having the nature of a magic-mirror image, beyond an actual nature of atoms.

That’s Vishvamata. Magic-mirror image means that she’s a devoid form. So, the supreme of all aspects – that’s voidness with an aspect, referring to devoid form.

I prostrate to you, Vishva-mata, lady giving birth to all the Buddhas. Having rid yourself of arising and passing, you possess the behavior of Samantabhadra.

That’s interpreted in two ways. If Vishvamata, Mother of Diversity, is taken as with aspect, that’s the devoid form: she gives birth to the five Buddha-families. She has rid herself of arising and passing, in terms of being a karmamudra – that’s an actual physical partner, someone who has arisen or born. And she has rid herself of being the passing one – that would be a jnanamudra, which is a visualized partner which would disintegrate or pass when you no longer have the visualization or the conceptual mind that’s imputing it. She’s a devoid form one, and she possesses the behavior of Samantabhadra, which is the behavior of voidness and bliss.

If you interpret this in terms of voidness without an aspect, that would be voidness itself. Then she gives birth to all the Buddhas, which would be the awareness of voidness gives birth to enlightenment. And having rid yourself of arising and passing would be getting rid of the two extremes of truly existent arising and truly existent passing; or arising being true existence and passing being total nonexistence. Having rid herself of that, she possesses the behavior of Samantabhadra. Again, it’s the deep awareness of voidness and bliss.

Then what happens is we get the actual dissolution, after the praises. Instantaneously we visualize all the vajras at the chakras, as what we had with overcoming the maras with vajras in the protection wheel. We don’t have this in the short one. We just have: 

At the crown of my head, to a five-spoked vajra, the principal father and mother and ladies of discriminating awareness pass. Instantaneously, I arise with one face and two arms.

Here we just have one green vajra at the crown of the head, with the five spokes. But in the full one we’d have the vajras at all the chakras all over our body, with the number of spokes of the channels there, and all the deities who are the purification of all these chakra channels will dissolve into those chakras at the different parts of our body. And the parts of the building where those deities are will dissolve into the chakra together with those deities.

Then instantaneously we transform into Kalachakra, one face and two arms. There’s no mention of a consort, so we’re just in that simple form. Then we would do the long prayer, which in the long sadhana would be the long prayer at the end of the six-session Kalachakra guru-yoga. Then we do a Vajrasattva mantra to purify, and then we would do the verses for everything to be auspicious. 

There’s also the offering of the torma, which can be done in between sessions, or it can be done in the daily practice itself, in which case it would be done after the praise and before the request to depart, in other words, before all the deities come into the vajras. You consecrate it like an inner offering, and then you invite another Kalachakra mandala and offer with a long Sanskrit mantra. Then either you offer the outer offerings or the inner offerings; some versions will differ.

Then you do some praise, and then you call in the 60 forceful protectors as in the protection circle. You do a whole torma offering to them, and then you dissolve everything into you.

And one can also do a thanksgiving offering, as Ling Rinpoche had said. It’s important to do that, after this torma offering. He said in all sadhanas it’s good to give a thanksgiving offering. One would again do an outer and inner offering and a five-verse praise to the Kalachakra couple after the torma offering, as a thanksgiving offering. And then you dissolve the guest Kalachakra mandala into yourself and return to the request to depart. 

Thus, you would do the torma offering after the praises. You call in a little mandala of Kalachakra and make the torma offering to them. You call in the 60 protectors and make a torma offering to them. The 60 protectors dissolve into you, into the chakras, the same way as they did in the protection wheel practice. Then you make a final thanksgiving offering to the Kalachakra mandala and have it dissolve into you. Then you make the request for the mandala around you to depart, and then they also dissolve into all your chakras, now with the vajras. Then after that, you arise as Kalachakra, the simple one. So that’s how you would do it in the long way.

That pretty much finishes the major portion of the sadhana. You shouldn’t get discouraged in terms of it being a long practice, because you have all these graded materials one can work oneself up to doing it. And you can do just a little portion of it each day; you don’t have to do the whole sadhana each day. A way to get into it would be to do a couple of pages of it or a section each day consecutively, and like that you familiarize yourself with it and get into it. 

Also, it’s important to realize that, although in the beginning it starts slowly and you’re doing it slowly, you should aim to be able to do it more quickly, because you’re never going to be able to do the fuller practices and the longer practices if you take forever to do your recitations. It’s not necessary to actually have to recite it out loud, although the Tibetans do recite it out loud, but they do it extremely quickly; you can speed-read it.

As Serkong Rinpoche said, it’s not a mouth transformation, it’s a self transformation. If you have a very supple mouth, you can do it like the Tibetans. If you’ve ever heard how His Holiness recites something, he can do it at superspeed, and most of the Tibetans can do it at superspeed, and I’m sure that we can do it as well in English at superspeed. But even if you can’t do like that, you can do it speed-reading in your mind. And the main thing is to do the visualization and to have the feeling of being the deity and the feeling of all this happening.

Now, that’s something that you work yourself up to, and by working yourself up to it you can do it more quickly. Because, as Serkong Rinpoche said, at the time of death, the Lord of Death isn’t going to wait for you to sit nicely and get your motivation together and to set up everything in the mandala very nicely and slowly. You have to be able to do it just like that, in one instant. Those are the stages, as discussed in the Ngag-rim chen-mo (The Grand Presentation of the Stages of Tantra Practice) of Tsongkhapa, the stages of going through the generation stage, eventually you’re able to do all the visualizations just instantly in all the full detail. What you want to do is work yourself up to going more and more quickly in it, so that eventually it’s something which you can do each day without it being a burden. So, you shouldn’t get discouraged.

As far as the retreats are concerned, a retreat is called an approximation practice, or serviceability retreat: it’s making the mind pliable with the practice. In the West, we call any period of time of intensive practice a retreat, but it’s doing misjustice to the actual word that the Tibetans are translating as “retreat.” It’s good to do such practices, what we call in the West retreats, like a thinking retreat – these lam-rim retreats in which we have the practice of hearing, thinking and meditating. What we do in the West are these thinking retreats really, of sitting and thinking about lam-rim. That’s very good. It’s taking a period of time to do something like that intensively. But you have to be careful with the terminology. 

In an actual retreat, you practice with the mantras and so on in the same seat. The main point of the retreats is not necessarily to do the mantras; that’s sort of an aside thing that one does. The main thing is to really do the visualization and the actual practice, and then when you get tired, you do the mantra accumulation. After the retreat, there’s the fire puja, which is a very large formal thing. Then you do the self-initiation, which has a self generation of yourself as the mind mandala, a generation of the body, speech and mind mandala in the vase, then a front generation of the body, speech and mind mandala complete, then an offering ceremony, a torma offering ceremony and then the self-initiation itself. Then in addition there’s a tsog offering of Kalachakra. 

All of these are generation stage practices, and they’re all very thorough and complete in Kalachakra. Then, of course, there are the complete stage practices that one does after that, once one is able to visualize the whole mandala for four hours with full concentration inside the drop.

These practices are very full, and they’ll encompass us our entire life, and many lives, although it’s possible to gain enlightenment in one lifetime through this. His Holiness says he feels it’s more inspiring to think of the Buddha’s example of gaining enlightenment over three countless eons; then we’ll have no expectations or no disappointments if nothing much happens over the course of time. It’s much more important to just have steady, stable and sustained practice, so that when some days you do your sadhana and it goes well, other days it goes very poorly, it shouldn’t matter to you.

You shouldn’t get excited if it goes well or get depressed if you have a lot of mental wandering. The point is to just sustain it, do it every single day. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care, because obviously you should take care to make it good, but don’t get depressed or excited if it’s good or it’s bad. Just continue it on a daily level, and then it’ll be something which is very helpful for all the reasons that I stated before, in terms of making you more stable, having continuity and so forth. And it will build up all these forces over a long-graduated period of time. It likewise deepens our following of the whole process of cause and effect, because we’re consciously striving to build up the causes for all of this to ripen into the complete stage. It increases our concentration and overcomes our grasping at things in an ordinary way and our own ordinary self-image that we have of ourselves, by imagining all day long that we’re Kalachakra.

We have to work very hard and put effort into putting it all together from all this material and more material that you’ll get, and then slowly it will make a difference. His Holiness said that we should observe over the past five years if there’s a difference in our personality in terms of the practices. Then you can sort of get a feeling of whether or not it’s working. Don’t just look in terms of, “I did a weekend retreat, and I’m no different at the end of the weekend,” but rather examine yourself now and the way you were five years ago, after doing five years of practice, and then you’ll see whether or not there’s some difference made.

His Holiness said that a sign of realization is if we are a calmer and a kinder person, that really is a sign that something is happening. Also, Serkong Rinpoche said that the main thing to do really is OM MANI PADME HUMs. As I mentioned, Kalachakra can also recite OM MANI PADME HUM, and it’s something which is very helpful and basic in terms of developing compassion and a kind heart. And after all, that’s really what it’s all about.

I want to thank you very much for being very patient with this very large amount of material. Work with it, and hopefully it will go OK. 

Let’s dedicate this in terms of it being for the benefit of everyone, and for us being able to attain enlightenment through this path by setting up very strong instincts and so forth now, and eventually getting into it slowly over a period of time.

You shouldn’t get discouraged with Kalachakra by trying to do too much at once. Unfortunately, I had to present a tremendous amount all at once but just go through it slowly and try to digest it and put it together piece by piece. Don’t be too ambitious with it, and then it’ll come out well. 

Let’s dedicate this so that we’ll be able to get further into it, and eventually achieve enlightenment through this path, and then truly be able to benefit everyone. We’ll have a few moments of silent dedication, and then you can do your final prayers.