Chapter 9Meditation and Recitation of Vajrasattva

There is a quiet, honest moment that comes to every practitioner on the spiritual path. It arrives not with fanfare but with a kind of inner reckoning---a growing awareness that we carry within us the accumulated weight of countless unskillful actions, broken promises, and habitual patterns that cloud our deepest nature. We may have glimpsed something luminous in meditation, tasted a freedom that felt utterly natural, and then watched it recede behind the fog of our own confusion. It is at precisely this juncture that the practice of Vajrasattva becomes not merely useful, but essential.

Patrul Rinpoche places this teaching early in the extraordinary preliminaries for good reason. Before the more advanced practices of the Vajrayana path can truly take root, the ground must be cleared. He uses the image of a mirror: if you want to see a clear reflection, you must first wipe the surface clean. Our buddha nature---that primordially pure awareness at the heart of every being---is never actually damaged or diminished. But it is obscured, hidden beneath layers of negative actions, disturbing emotions, conceptual fixations, and deeply ingrained habitual tendencies. These obscurations are like thick clouds concealing the sun. The sun has not gone anywhere, yet its warmth cannot reach us.

The teachings describe four types of obscuration. Karmic obscurations arise from harmful actions---both those that are inherently destructive, like taking life, and those that violate specific commitments we have undertaken. The obscurations of negative emotions are the afflictive mental states---attachment, aversion, ignorance---that drive those actions in the first place. Conceptual obscurations are the subtle habits of dualistic thinking that keep us believing in a solid self confronting a solid world. And the obscurations of habitual tendencies are the most refined veils of all, the deeply buried imprints that perpetuate the cycle of confused perception life after life.

Among the many methods the Buddha taught for purifying these layers, the meditation and recitation of Vajrasattva stands supreme. Of the entire vast pantheon of peaceful and wrathful deities, Vajrasattva embodies them all in a single form. When Vajrasattva was still on the path of awakening, he made a tremendous aspiration: that anyone who holds his name and practices his mantra would be purified of all negative actions and downfalls---and that until this promise was fulfilled, he would not attain buddhahood. Since he did attain buddhahood, we can have complete confidence that his promise holds.

Note on Vajrayana Practice: The Vajrasattva meditation and hundred-syllable mantra recitation described in this chapter are practices within the Secret Mantra Vajrayana tradition. Traditionally, engaging in the visualization, mantra recitation, and dissolution stages requires having received the appropriate empowerment (wang) and oral transmission (lung) from a qualified teacher. The explanations here are offered for study and understanding; those wishing to undertake the practice should first establish a proper relationship with a teacher within an authentic lineage.

The Liberating Power of Confession

One of the most encouraging truths in all of Buddhism is this: there is no negative action, however grave, that cannot be purified through genuine confession. Patrul Rinpoche is emphatic on this point, and the sutras bear it out with striking stories.

Consider the tale of Angulimala, the infamous "Garland of Fingers," a brahmin who fell under a terrible compulsion and murdered nine hundred and ninety-nine people. The weight of such karma seems almost unimaginable. And yet, through sincere confession and the application of antidotes, he purified those actions completely and attained the state of an arhat---a fully liberated being---within that very lifetime.

Then there is King Ajatashatru, who committed the unspeakable act of killing his own father. He too turned to confession, and through its power he attained liberation, experiencing the sufferings of the lower realms only for the briefest flash---the time it takes a ball to bounce once upon the ground.

Nagarjuna captured this beautifully when he wrote that a person who has acted carelessly but later becomes careful and attentive is like the bright moon emerging from behind clouds. The point is not that harmful actions are inconsequential. They are profoundly consequential. But the human capacity for transformation is greater still.

Yet there is an important caveat. Purification only works when confession is genuine---heartfelt, thorough, and structured around what are called the four powers. Simply mouthing the words "I confess" while your mind wanders to tomorrow's plans accomplishes nothing. And perhaps most critically, thinking "I can always confess later" while intentionally engaging in harmful behavior completely undermines the entire process. The door of purification closes when approached with cynicism or calculation.

As Milarepa warned: the purification will never work if you are merely going through the motions, your eyes and mouth occupied elsewhere while your mind chases other thoughts.

The Four Powers

Every genuine confession must include all four of these powers, applied together as antidotes. They are not steps to be followed mechanically but living qualities of heart and mind that must be authentically present.

The Power of Support

The power of support has two dimensions. Outwardly, it refers to the being or representation before whom you confess---in this practice, the teacher visualized as Vajrasattva. When you confess, you do so in someone's presence. You are not muttering into the void. You are opening yourself before an embodiment of awakened compassion.

Inwardly, and even more importantly, the power of support means taking refuge and arousing bodhichitta---the awakened heart that seeks enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. The Buddha taught that confessing negative actions without bodhichitta may reduce your faults, but it will not purify them altogether. Bodhichitta, on the other hand, has the power to purify all past misdeeds simply by virtue of its arising. Shantideva compared it to fire at the end of an age, consuming even the greatest mountains of negativity in an instant. He wrote that those weighed down with dreadful wickedness are instantly freed through generating bodhichitta---so who would not place their trust in it?

This is a profound point. The most powerful purifying agent is not the mantra alone, not the visualization alone, but the genuine wish to awaken for the sake of every living being. This altruistic intention transforms confession from a personal housecleaning into an act of universal significance.

The Power of Regret

The second power is a feeling of deep, honest remorse for the harm you have caused. This is not guilt in the Western psychological sense---not a corrosive self-hatred that paralyzes. It is more like the urgent alarm you would feel upon realizing you had swallowed poison. You would not sit around feeling bad about yourself. You would immediately seek the antidote.

Karma Chagme, the great scholar-practitioner, put it plainly: confessing without regret cannot purify anything, for past misdeeds are like poison within. So you must confess with shame, with trepidation, and with great remorse.

In practice, this means bringing to mind all the harmful actions you can remember---the lies, the unkindnesses, the broken promises, the moments of cruelty or indifference---and allowing yourself to feel their weight. You also acknowledge the countless harmful actions accumulated over beginningless lifetimes that you cannot remember but that nonetheless remain as imprints in your mindstream. You hide nothing. You hold nothing back.

The Power of Resolution

Having recognized the harm you have done, you now resolve never to repeat those actions, even at the cost of your life. This is not a casual New Year's resolution. It is a vow made in the presence of your teacher, in the presence of all the buddhas.

Patrul Rinpoche and his commentators are realistic here. They recognize that we may not be able to keep every commitment perfectly. The approach they recommend is practical and honest: begin by resolving not to commit specific actions that you genuinely can avoid. A layperson, for instance, might promise never to kill a lion or an elephant---creatures they would never encounter anyway---and still accumulate the merit of that resolve. Then gradually, promise by promise, you strengthen the muscle of moral discipline.

The key is sincerity. Nothing comes of abstractly reciting "I vow to stop" if you have no genuine intention behind it. Each promise should be backed by what the teachings call a "second iron commitment"---a pledge that even under extreme duress, you will not abandon your resolve.

The Power of Action as Antidote

The fourth power is the active application of positive deeds to counterbalance past negativity. This includes prostrations, rejoicing in the merit of others, dedicating your own sources of goodness to the enlightenment of all beings, cultivating bodhichitta, and resting in the natural state of mind.

Within this particular practice, the power of action as antidote takes the specific form of the Vajrasattva visualization and mantra recitation---the streaming nectar of wisdom and compassion that washes away obscurations. But Patrul Rinpoche also shares a wonderful story that reveals the deepest dimension of this power.

A meditator who was a student of the great Dagpo Rinpoche (Gampopa) once told his teacher that he felt regret about having earned his living by selling sacred texts. Dagpo Rinpoche told him to print books as an antidote. The student tried, but found that the work of printing created too many distractions. Disillusioned, he returned to his teacher and asked whether simply resting in the recognition of mind's essential nature might not be the most profound form of confession.

Dagpo Rinpoche was delighted. He confirmed that the student was absolutely right. "Even if you have committed negative actions as colossal as Mount Meru," he said, "they are purified in one instant of seeing that nature."

This points to something crucial: the ultimate purification is the recognition of the nature of mind itself. Alongside the specific practices of visualization and mantra, maintaining the flow of the unaltered natural state is the deepest antidote of all.

The Actual Meditation on Vajrasattva

With these four powers alive in your heart, you are ready for the practice itself. Patrul Rinpoche instructs you to see yourself in your ordinary form---not as a deity, but as you are, an ordinary being burdened by accumulated negativity. This is important. You begin from where you actually stand, not from where you wish you were.

The Visualization

Above the crown of your head, about an arrow's length into space, you visualize an open white lotus with a thousand petals. Upon it rests the disc of a full moon---not to indicate size, but to convey its quality: perfectly round, luminous, complete, like the moon on the fifteenth day of the lunar month. Upon this moon disc appears a brilliant white syllable Hum.

In an instant, the Hum transforms into your glorious root teacher appearing in the form of Vajrasattva---the sambhogakaya buddha, brilliant white in color, radiant as a snow peak illuminated by a hundred thousand suns. He has one face and two arms. In his right hand, held before his heart, is a five-pronged golden vajra symbolizing the unity of awareness and emptiness. In his left hand, resting at his hip, is a silver bell representing the union of appearance and emptiness. His legs are crossed in the vajra posture, and he is adorned with the thirteen ornaments of the sambhogakaya---five silken garments and eight jewels.

Vajrasattva sits above your head, facing the same direction as you. He embraces in inseparable union his consort, Vajratopa, who is also white. Their bodies are vividly present yet entirely without material substance---like reflections of the moon in water, like forms appearing in a mirror. Luminous, precise in every detail down to the pupils and whites of the eyes, yet empty of even a single atom of solid matter. No flesh, no blood, no organs---like a rainbow arching across open sky, or an immaculate crystal vase.

And this appearance is not inert. It is imbued with wisdom. Vajrasattva is identical in nature with your own compassionate root teacher, and his mind reaches out to you and to all beings with boundless love.

This visualization establishes the power of support.

The Mantra and the Stream of Nectar

In the heart of Vajrasattva, united with his consort, you visualize a tiny moon disc no bigger than a flattened mustard seed, and upon it a white syllable Hum as fine as if drawn with a single hair. Around this central Hum, the syllables of the hundred-syllable mantra are arranged in a circle, none touching one another, like the horns of cattle standing close together without becoming entangled.

As you recite the hundred-syllable mantra, you imagine that a nectar of compassion and wisdom begins to drip from each of those syllables---one glistening drop after another, like water melting from ice held near a flame. This nectar pours down through the body of Vajrasattva, emerges from the point of union of deity and consort, and flows through the crown of your head into your entire being. It flows simultaneously into all sentient beings everywhere.

Like a powerful stream washing away particles of earth, this nectar flushes out everything impure. Physical illnesses leave your body in the form of foul substances. Negative forces depart as insects and dark creatures. All harmful actions and obscurations pour out as black liquid, dust, smoke, and vapor---flowing from the soles of your feet, every pore of your skin, every opening of your body. The earth beneath you opens, and in its depths the Lord of Death, personification of your past karmic debts, waits with open mouth. All those to whom you owe karmic debts, all who seek redress---they receive this outpouring, and they are satisfied. Old scores are settled. Debts are repaid. The earth closes again.

Your body becomes transparent, luminous inside and out, a body of pure light.

During the recitation, if you cannot hold the entire visualization at once, you can alternate your focus: sometimes dwelling on the form of Vajrasattva, sometimes on the flow of purifying nectar, sometimes on your regret and resolve.

Dissolution and Completion

When you are ready to conclude the session, you visualize the entire universe---which you have been perceiving as a pure buddhafield---dissolving into the beings within it, who appear as Vajrasattvas of five colors. These deities gradually melt into light and dissolve into you. Then you yourself melt into light from the outside inward, and that light dissolves into the syllable Om at your heart. The Om dissolves into Vajra, Vajra into Sa, Sa into Tva, Tva into the elements of the Hum---each part dissolving into the next, ever more subtle, until at last the finest point of the syllable vanishes like a rainbow dissolving into space.

You rest in that state---simplicity free from any concepts or elaborations. No visualization, no mantra, no reference point. Just open, spacious awareness. Remain there for as long as you naturally can.

When thoughts begin to arise again, you see the entire world as the pure realm of Vajrasattva and all beings within it as Vajrasattvas. You dedicate the merit of the practice to the swift attainment of Vajrasattva's state for the benefit of all beings.

The Vital Importance of Undistracted Practice

Patrul Rinpoche is characteristically direct about what makes this practice effective. Reciting mantra without concentration, he says, is like soaking a rock at the bottom of the sea---even for an entire cosmic age, the water will never penetrate it. Mixing ordinary chatter with mantra recitation renders the whole thing impure.

He reserves some of his sharpest words for those who perform rituals professionally but without genuine presence of mind---lamas and monks who conduct ceremonies for the sick and the dead while gossiping, smoking, pushing prayer beads through their fingers as if making sausages, and glancing at the sun to see when they can wrap up for the evening. Such performances, he says, are not even a pale reflection of authentic practice, nor even the reflection of a reflection. A single recitation of any confession prayer, done once with perfectly pure motivation, would accomplish infinitely more.

For those performing ceremonies on behalf of the dying or the dead, the stakes are especially high. Beings in the intermediate state between lives can perceive the thoughts of others. If the practitioners conducting their ceremony are distracted, insincere, or motivated by attachment and aversion, the being in the bardo may develop hostility toward them and fall into lower realms as a result. Better to have no ceremony at all than one conducted with such carelessness.

The remedy is simple but demanding: undistracted presence, genuine compassion, and the sincere wish to help.

The Promise of Vajrasattva

The hundred-syllable mantra, Patrul Rinpoche tells us, is the quintessence of the mind of all the buddhas. To recite it one hundred and eight times without interruption purifies all violations and breaches and will save one from falling into the lower realms. This is Vajrasattva's own promise.

Even for advanced practitioners who maintain their commitments carefully, daily practice of the Vajrasattva recitation is essential. The tantric samayas are subtle, numerous, and extraordinarily difficult to keep in their entirety. Even the great Indian master Atisha acknowledged that, having entered the path of the tantras, he found himself accumulating small faults in rapid succession. And simply associating with someone who has broken their samayas---even drinking the water of the same valley---can create a kind of contamination.

Patrul Rinpoche illustrates this with the story of the accomplished master Lingje Repa, whose spiritual realization was so great that he left footprints in solid rock at the sacred site of Tsari. Yet even he, late in life, was visited by a disciple who had broken the samaya bond, and as a result fell ill, becoming delirious and losing the power of speech. If even such an accomplished master could be affected, how much more vulnerable are ordinary practitioners like ourselves?

The minimum daily practice, therefore, is to recite the hundred-syllable mantra twenty-one times while meditating on Vajrasattva. This constitutes what the tradition calls "the blessing of downfalls"---it prevents the effects of accumulated faults from growing or intensifying. One hundred thousand recitations will completely purify all downfalls. And the great teachers of the past used to say that those who protect others and make use of offerings should begin by completing ten million repetitions to purify the obscurations of speech. Many of Patrul Rinpoche's own teacher's disciples accomplished two, three, or even twenty million recitations, and not one of them failed to complete at least two or three hundred thousand.

The tantric vows, when broken, are said to be like a dent in an object made of precious metal---you can repair it yourself through confession, using the support of the deity, the mantra, and concentration. But timeliness matters. If you confess immediately, purification is easy. The longer you wait, the more the fault grows and the harder confession becomes. If you wait more than three years, the downfall is said to be beyond ordinary confession.

The old masters summed it up with characteristic simplicity: the best course is never to be sullied by negative actions in the first place. But if it happens---and it will happen, for we are human---it is vital to confess without delay.

This practice of Vajrasattva is called "the jewel which includes all" because Vajrasattva embodies every buddha, every deity, every mandala in a single form. To meditate upon him as inseparable from your own root teacher, and to recite his mantra with genuine presence, regret, resolve, and bodhichitta, is the most profound purification available to us. There is, Patrul Rinpoche assures us, no more profound practice than this.