Rich offerings to explore

I was at the seminar in 1971 that constitutes the first part of Transcending Madness, but remember little of the specifics. It was a subject that the Vidyadhara emphasized in the first few years he taught in North America, but as far as I know, did not much come back to later. There is now a lot of material in English on the six bardos from different teachers, and I thought I had a reasonable understanding of the subject when I picked up Transcending Madness to prepare for Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche's seminar.

Wrong. I read it with Post-its in hand, and found I was averaging three to four a page; one that usually said something like "Wow!!!," and the other two or three that had some equivalent of "Huh?" A journey through the vivid moment-to-moment details of lived experience in the bone, with abrupt mind-twisting turns into a vast perspective. I read it several times and felt I was no closer to any graspable understanding, but I was having a great time.

It was a momentous occasion to see a teacher as accomplished and widely respected as Dzongsar Khyentse Rinoche take the Vidyadhara's material as a root text to comment on. To my hearing, Rinpoche commented on the text in two ways. One was by repeatedly expressing his appreciation for how "amazing" it was, how every sentence was full of profundity, how it should be read five times, and how the Vidyadhara's use of English gave Khyentse Rinpoche a greater understanding of what he himself had been taught in Tibetan.

And then, in his talks and long question periods, Rinpoche didn't so much comment directly on the details of the Vidyadhara's presentation, as present and demonstrate the principles of non-duality, innate wisdom, resting in the nature of mind and not taking yourself so seriously that are the background to understanding the Vidyadhara's material further.

So we have incredibly rich offerings to explore here. May it be of great benefit for ourselves and others!

Michael Chender