Tönyön’s Questions on Chöd
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lies, or the six including the principal of all families, Vajradhara, together with the feminine aspects, and the five wisdoms. Just recalling that egg you gain merit. Visualizing your own consciousness as the egg and then transferring it is the easy way to gain the supreme state. It can bring you to buddhahood in one body and in one lifetime. No doubt about it, noble son. “Now then, this is how you should visualize the transference, so listen, son. Sit on a comfortable mat and settle mind and body into an alert, relaxed state without wavering. Assume the seven-point posture of Vairocana and exhale three times. Imagine that the sins and obscurations accumulated through body, speech, and mind, along with all the inner filth, are exhaled in the form of breath. The body and mind, everywhere outside and inside, are purified of obscuration and become sparkly clean. Imagine the inside of the body from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet to be empty, like a balloon.19 The five main cakras (rtsa ’khor) are inside [the central channel] at the crown, throat, heart, navel, and genital area. The petals of the radial fronds20 are face-to-face in pairs, and the two tops of the fronds are back-toback.21 Or, the two [cakras from the] tops of the fronds of the genital area reach from inside the thighs to the soles of the feet. Alternatively, as a substitute for the fronds, [you can think of the cakras as] two lotuses touching, or else two umbrellas touching face-to-face. “There are two methods: transference in stages and transference all at once. Here, the first, transference by stages, is the drawing out of the six realms of beings. In that method you visualize yourself standing up with your two anklebones touching. Your two hands are in the dharma-source mudr› on the crown of the head. Visualize a red drop on the sole of the right foot and a white one on the left.22 Imagine them the size of a barley grain or a pea in the fortunate eon, the nature of light. Then draw up the breath and shout p’e,23 thinking that you are calling them up. They rise up and join in the lower cakra, the white and red drops blending into one drop the nature of light, about the size of the new egg of a hen. It is unbearable to look straight at it, like the heart of the sun. Imagine that it is throbbing and flashing with potential movement [as if about to take off]. As you shout p’e, it moves to the navel, the heart, the throat, and then the crown. Then it is expelled out the hole in the crown and becomes a shining, blue-black syllable ha in the space about one cubit above you. This is the instruction of transference with a functional visualization.24 “As it emerges through the crown, the empty space and the immaculate,