Diamond Key for Opening the Wisdom Eye

Diamond Key

for Opening the

Wisdom Eye

Title of the book rendered in Tibetan

Second Edition

Geshe Dakpa Topgyal

Radiant Mind Press

Charleston, South Carolina

Contents

Forward

Author's Introduction to the Revised Edition

1. Why Meditate?

General Nature of the Ordinary Mind

How the Mind Functions

How and What the Mind Creates

How the Mind Projects Its Creation Onto the World Around It

How the Projected Illusions of the World Become Real to You

How This False Belief in the Mental Projection as Real Gives Rise to Confusion and Emotional Pain

How Baseless Emotions Interfere in Your Natural Relationship with the World Around You

2. What Meditation Is, What Meditation is Not

What Meditation Is

Two Basic Types of Meditation

Shamatha Meditation

Vipassana Meditation

3. Creating Conditions, Choosing Objects

Creating Favorable Conditions

Choice of Clothing

The Best Times to Meditate

Conducive Place to Meditate

How to Sit, Your Posture

How Long to Meditate in One Sitting Session

Objects of Meditation

What is Meant by the Object of Meditation

Choosing Your Object of Meditation

4. How to Meditate

The Nine Stages of Calm Abiding

Fixing the Mind

Fixation with Some Continuity

Re-Fixing the Mind

Close Fixation

Subduing

Pacifying

Fully Pacifying

Single Pointed

Meditative Equipoise

Hindrances to Meditation

How to Find the Object of Meditation

More on How to Find the Object of Meditation

5. Other Supportive Practices

Merit and Purification

Physical Health

Hatha Yoga and Prostrations

Regarding Food

Offerings

6. Ultimate Analysis: Abiding in the Very Conclusion

Vipassana Meditation

Levels of Understanding

Impermanence

Reasoning for Full Understanding of Subtle Impermanence

Emptiness

Interdependent Origination

Mode of Imputation

The Way Things Normally Appear to Your Naive Mind

The Object of Negation

The Ultimate Analysis

7. The Road Map of the Paths and Bhumis

Path of Accumulation

Path of Preparation or Linking

Path of Seeing and the First Bhumi

Very Joyous—The First Bhumi

Path of Meditation and Remaining Nine Bhumis

Stainless—The Second Bhumi

Luminous—The Third Bhumi

Radiant—The Fourth Bhumi

Difficult to Overcome—The Fifth Bhumi

Approaching—The Sixth Bhumi

Gone Afar—The Seventh Bhumi

Immovable—The Eighth Bhumi

Excellence—The Ninth Bhumi

Cloud of Dharma—The Tenth Bhumi

Path of No More Learning

The Three Kayas

Conclusions

About the Author

Copyright

Dedication

May the merit collected from writing this book implant an

enlightened seed in the mind of every reader of this book.

Om Ah Ra Pa Tsa Na Dhi

[ Manjushri’s mantra of wisdom ]

Forward

Foreword Translation

May one reach the Path of Accumulation and the Path of Linking

Through full insight realization

Which is achieved upon the perfection of Shamatha

By overcoming laxity and pacifying discursive thoughts.

May the ultimate level of attainment be achieved

As a result of the cultivation of the Path of Seeing

And the Path of Meditation (direct, non conceptual realization).

With the above aspirational prayers I introduce Geshe Dakpa Topgyal of Drepung Loseling, Dakpa Khamtsen, who has studied with extreme devotion the five major Buddhist philosophies from various great masters by embracing listening, contemplation, and meditation.

He is most qualified to teach and perpetuate the Buddha Dharma through giving teachings and writing.

I highly recommend this book on Shamatha and Vipassana meditation, the Five Paths and Ten Bhumis, and the Fruition of the Three Kayas, which are presented in depth, free from obsolete expressions, and enriched with his personal experiences, thus making them easy to understand. May this book become the cause for the flourishing of the Buddha Dharma.

The 100th Gaden Tripa Lobsang Nyima

February 12, 2004

Author's Introduction to the Revised Edition

I

n the seventeen years

since Diamond Key for Opening the Wisdom Eye was first published, the number of publications related to meditation and mindfulness has skyrocketed. As the practice of meditation has grown, more people may be experiencing its benefits, but there is also a risk of watering down and distorting the Buddha’s authentic teachings on the subject. This makes the original purpose of the book even more relevant today. Extensively revised, this second edition includes color photos to illustrate various concepts and objects of meditation, further clarifies difficult passages, and provides additional information.

The subject of this book is meditation as well as the Five Paths and Ten Bhumis. The Five Paths and Ten Bhumis are the complete spiritual road map for the attainment of Nirvana or liberation and Enlightenment or omniscience. The ultimate result of training in meditation is to lay the groundwork for the journey through the sequential order of the Five Paths and Ten Bhumis.

My intention and purpose in writing this book is to make a clear distinction between what meditation is and what meditation is not, and furthermore to present a clear understanding and proper method of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist meditation. With this I hope to remove many of the preconceived ideas about Buddhist meditation, which in its authentic form remains a fairly new concept and practice within the Western world and its culture.

At the same time, in conjunction with the presentation on Vipassana meditation, this book clearly explains the Buddhist concepts of subtle impermanence and emptiness, which are beyond the understanding or comprehension of the untrained, ordinary human mind.

The presentations on subtle impermanence and emptiness are based on the flawless teachings of the great third and fourth century Indian masters Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, and Dharmakirti. These masters’ teachings on subtle impermanence and emptiness are considered the most logically and scientifically accurate within Buddhist tradition.

Within Buddhism, Nagarjuna’s understanding of emptiness, and Dharmakirti’s understanding of the natural law of causality and the law of that-which-is-produced being naturally impermanent, are considered to be the highest and most profound understandings of reality.

With this the reader is invited to take a journey to the heart of mind and walk down the path of Enlightenment for the benefit of self and others.

Geshe Dakpa Topgyal

October 2020

1

Why Meditate?

T

here is more to

do with your human life than simply struggle for your day to day survival, which, by nature, is a very animal like way of existence, not at all the way a human being should live. You should not alternate your life just between work and worry. What is meant by there being more to do with your human life? It means that you should strive to realize your human potential, the most precious gift of human birth. You should strive to reach a higher spiritual evolution moving towards Enlightenment. You must live an ethical life and cultivate a meditational mind of wisdom realizing the reality of ultimate truth. Take these goals as your road map rather than relying on your own version of truth that you created, not knowing who you really are and what your potential truly is.

If you let yourself alternate between your busy life of work and worry while living in this human form, then you are misusing your human birth/life and only creating the intense causes of the existence of this intense life of samsara. Living this type of life would rob you of a precious opportunity.

Buddhism teaches the ways and means to realize your human potential without needing to live with a restrictive belief in something that you personally don’t know about. One of the means that Buddhism teaches is meditation. Meditation is an inner tool to discover your mind, your life, and the world around you. The harshness of the world and the painful experiences of your life (running after something or running away from something) are all caused by your mind failing to recognize its own creation, which is based on delusions, fantasies, confusion, and the mind-luring appearances of external objects.

Meditation is not a way or means to run away from the harshness of the world around you; rather, it is a way to see that the harshness of the world around you is created by your own mind. Meditation gives you the ability to stop your mind from making such a thorny world out of your external environment.

During your meditation sessions you should not be like a rabbit going to his hole to sleep or avoid danger that you don’t want to be confronted with. Going into meditation should not be a means to avoid family problems that you would rather not deal with.

In order for you to experience a happy life as well as a happy death it is necessary to understand the following:

how the mind functions;

what the mind creates;

how the mind projects its creation onto the world around you;

how these projected illusions of the world become real to you;

how this false belief in them as real develops into a painful emotional response of wanting and not wanting, liking and disliking; and finally,

how these types of emotions you live with interfere with your relationship with the rest of the world.

General Nature of the Ordinary Mind

How the Mind Functions

Your present mind is functioning on the basis of the active workings of your five senses and the sensory information they get from the world around you and from your own body. Your present mind’s knowing capability is very limited and restricted to your five senses. The mind’s unlimited and unrestricted knowing capacity is currently numbed, overwhelmed, and obscured by the density of thoughts, emotions, concepts, and ideas. As long as thoughts and emotions are in you, your mind’s knowing capability remains at the conceptual level with a limited, restricted, and selective search for something with constant rejection. In brief, your present mind is functioning under the dictations of delusions and latent habituation of seeing things in the way they appear to you or in the way they present themselves to you without room for questioning their validity. Your mind chases after your thoughts and acts accordingly.

Your present mind is constantly doing three things: 1) living too far in your past life experiences and often being too elated or being too depressed; 2) living too far in your future with hope, expectation, anticipation, fear, and the like; 3) constantly engaging in the thinking process, wanting to change your present situation due to seeing something as not quite right, even in your physical environment. For example, the placement of your furniture or paintings in the living room, the color of your bedroom walls, or the condition of your kitchen sink.

There is never a time when your mind rests in mere awareness without constantly doing one of those three. The reason why your mind is constantly thinking is because your mind is looking for full satisfaction. Your mind will stop thinking when it experiences full inner satisfaction arising from within you and not from external sensory objects. In general, your mind tends to think less about something when your mind is somehow happy and content with it. On the other hand your mind tends to think more about something when your mind is discontented. So, it is clear that the reason why your mind is constantly thinking is because it is not content, and therefore searching for satisfaction.

How and What the Mind Creates

The ordinary mind creates a quality of inherence, which does not exist as part of an object’s reality. Here inherence means a mode of something being capable to exist as, for example, a table, without depending on something other than the table itself. You think that table-ness or being a table has somehow already existed before you named an object a table due to your need of it as a table. This independent mode of being of the object is called inherent.

In reality, nothing exists as a table with the mode of being inherent. You only named it a table due to your need of it as a table. When your need of the object as a table is no longer there then the object no longer exists as a table for you.

However, the name table does not inject any new quality into that object. But that object