[THE OBEISANCES]
To the Divine Body of Truth,[1] the Incomprehensible, Boundless Light;
To the Divine Body of Perfect Endowment,[1] Who are the Lotus and the Peaceful and the Wrathful Deities;[2]
To the Lotus-born Incarnation, Padma Sambhava,[3] Who is the Protector of all sentient beings;
To the Gurus, the Three Bodies,[4] obeisance.
[THE INTRODUCTION]
This Great Doctrine of Liberation by Hearing, which conferreth spiritual freedom on devotees of ordinary wit while in the Intermediate State, hath three divisions: the preliminaries, the subject-matter, and the conclusion.
At first, the preliminaries, The Guide Series,[5] for emancipating beings, should be mastered by practice.
[THE TRANSFERENCE OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS-PRINCIPLE[6]]
By The Guide, the highest intellects ought most certainly to be liberated; but should they not be liberated, then while
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 See pp. 10-15.
- ↑ ‘These Deities are in ourselves. They are not something apart from us. We are one with all that is, in every state of sentient existence, from the lowest worlds of suffering to the highest states of bliss and Perfect Enlightenment. In this esoteric sense, the Lotus Order of Deities represent the deified principles of the vocal functions in ourselves; the Peaceful represent the deified principles of the heart or functions of feeling; the Wrathful represent, in the same way, the functions of our mentality—such as thinking or reasoning, and imagination or memory—centred in the brain.—Lāma Kazi Dawa Samdup.
See p. 1311. - ↑ Padma Sambhava (Tib. Pēdma Jungnē), i. e. ‘The Lotus-Born’, referring to birth under pure, or holy, conditions, commonly called by the Tibetans Guru Rin-po-ch’e (‘The Precious Guru’), or simply Guru (the Sanskrit for ‘Teacher’), is regarded by his followers as an incarnation of the essence of the Buddha Shakya Muni in its Tantric, or deeply esoteric, aspect.
- ↑ See pp. 10-15.
- ↑ ‘The Guide Series’ refers to various treatises offering practical guidance to devotees on the Bodhi Path through the human world and thence through Bardo, the After-Death State, and onward to rebirth or else to Nirvāṇa.
- ↑ The Text contains merely the Tibetan word Hpho (pron. Pho), meaning
