In-Depth Meditation Training: Year 4, The Vajra Ground: Mahāmudrā and Kriyā Tantra

September 5 – November 28

In this culminating fourth year of our journey, our path turns inward to the mind itself—its empty, luminous nature—and outward to the transformative methods of tantra, where the naturally pure nature of our perception is recognized as the very ground of awakening.

As always, the year will start with generating the mind of awakening, using evocative instructions ranging from Langri Thangpa to Nāgārjuna and Lord Buddha in the famous Bodhisattvapiṭaka. This mind generation we’ll cultivate through the four immeasurable thoughts and the support of calm abiding.

Illuminated by the life stories of the masters of the Gelug Mahāmudrā lineage and beyond, we’ll explore its roots in the history of the early Indian Mahāsiddhas, such as Saraha and Tilopa, through the Kagyü master Gampopa’s and Je Tsongkhapa’s Mañjuśrī lineage up to Paṇchen Losang Chökyi Gyaltsen’s Highway of the Conquerors and its perspective on this practice. In Sūtra Mahāmudrā we will practice resting attention in the empty nature of awareness, recognizing its clarity and openness as inseparable.

Kriyā Tantra offers a complementary method. Rather than suppress the ordinary, narrow self-narrative that we impose on ourselves and our world, it substitutes for it an extraordinary perspective of pure view. Occasionally, by way of introduction, we’ll also taste practices from the higher tantras—glimpsing how afflictive emotions can be met as innate wisdom, and how the dissolution of the death process opens onto the innate mind of clear light. The structured practices of generation and recitation become a rehearsal for transformation, training perception to meet appearances as pure.

These methods rest on a relationship. We will therefore examine the practice of guru devotion candidly—both as the means by which the lineage’s realization is transmitted and as a practice with real pitfalls, requiring discernment as much as trust. Through the GandenLha Gyāma, the Yoga of the inseparability of guru and Avalokiteśvara, and supporting sādhanas, devotion is approached not as deference but as the ethical road toward the state of Vajradhara: the full integration of wisdom and method.

This final year is an invitation to let realization ripen into a way of being. Grounded in bodhicitta and the four immeasurables, sustained by the preliminary practices, and held by the strength of community, we learn to meet the mind without grasping and to meet the world as pure appearance. Our aim is not to accumulate practices, but to bring the path to maturity—wisdom and compassion no longer cultivated separately, but lived as one.

New!
Ngondro Lamrim Training: from mid-September onwards, Venerable Gendun will also offer this new 2-year course, using prerecorded meditations and classes. Read more and register here.