By Victor M Fontane
The Karma Kagyu Tradition
The Third Karmapa’s Presentation The conventional nature of mental activity is “inseparable appearance-making (clarity) and appearances.” The deepest nature of mental activity is “inseparableawareness and voidness” and “inseparable appearance-making/appearances and awareness/voidness.”
Voidness – the other-voidness view, according to which voidness is a mental state beyond words and concepts – “beyond” both in the sense of an awareness that is devoid of all grosser levels of mind on which words and concepts occur, as well as in the sense of existing in a manner that is beyond what would correspond to words and concepts.
Inseparable, equivalent to non-dual – neither member of an inseparable pair exists or can be established by itself, independently of the other.
The Ninth Karmapa’s Presentation The conventional nature of mental activity is “clarity-making, knowing and starkness.”
Clarity-making, or simply “clarity (appearance-making)” – described as being “sparkling”
Knowing – equivalent to “awareness” in the sense of being “wide-awake”
Starkness – non-conceptuality, the cognitive state devoid of conceptual thought. Conceptual thought is what projects appearances of truly established existence and categorizes phenomena as “this” or “that.”
The deepest nature is the inseparability or non-duality of appearances and voidness, clarity-making and voidness, and knowing and voidness.
Voidness – the self-voidness view, according to which voidness is the state beyond words and concepts merely in the sense of existing in a manner that is beyond what would correspond to words and concepts (such as truly existent, non-truly existent, both or neither).
In the Karma Kagyu style of mahamudra meditation, one attains a state of shamatha by settling down, with mindfulness and alertness, in the present moment of clarity-making, knowing and starkness, free of any conceptual thought. This means meditating without expectations or worries, and without conceptually identifying as “this” or “that” concrete object:
What you are cognizing – some sensory information or a random thought
What you are doing
Who is doing it
What the conventional nature of the mind is.
The meditation employs the same methods for concentrating as used in the Gelugstyle described above. For gaining a state of vipashyana on the deepest nature of mind, the meditation examines and analyzes the relation between mind, in its conventional sense, and appearances.
Comments