Last week, I had the opportunity to teach a session at Olmo Ling. We worked through the drumming techniques used in the Chod practice. The chants of the Chod practice have a strong structure, centered on two "Feasts" where we visualize offering up own physically dismembered corpse.

Such formal and complex visualizations are part of the tantric path, where the obstacles to enlightenment are transformed. Often quickly, perhaps within the course of a single lifetime.

But what is a practice? Check out this poem, by Emily Dickinson.

The Props assist the House

  Until the House is built

  and then the Props withdraw

  And adequate, erect,

  The House support itself

  And cease to recollect

  The Augur and the Carpenter -

  Just such a retrospect

  Hath the perfected life -

  A Past of Plank and Nail

  And slowness - then the scaffolds drop

  Affirming it a Soul.

It's like a pith instruction, this poem. A Pith instruction is a lifetime of teaching and practice - meditation and observation - distilled into a single phrase. It is guidance, imagery, and support for the practitioner.

So then, point by point through the poem, taking Emily to Tibet:

And then the Props withdraw. The meditation practices are of the mind. Even the deities, the images of the practices, are impermanent, delusion. Are the deities real? What is "real" meant? Our visualization, or the inherent existence of the deities, is impermanent. Without form. A Prop.

House support itself I don't understand why the House "support" itself, rather than "supports": (Perhaps a koan of declension). But this self-supporting structure is at home in the foundational view of reality. What is that view? That's the question, isn't it. At the least, we are in the manifest, the born.

And cease to recollect // The Augur and the Carpenter. This line intrudes a bit. I wonder if I'm mis-reading the word, "Augur", and that maybe there's some old fashioned tool, like a level or a sextant. There could be a perfectly contemporary tool, like a hammer or a chisel, and it would still sound medieval and alien to me. So probably not the best person to read through this line. Except I'm pretty sure an augur castrated bulls on temple steps in old Rome.

- Just such a retrospect // Hath the perfected life- There's a break in the poem at the hyphens. The hyphens...a Dickinson fetish...marks the break between birth and death. What is that break? Time spent on earth, time spent living - life is wrapped in those hyphens. But such an oblique reference, such emotion left intuited. The blood of childbirth, blood remaining after the augury?

A Past of Plank and Nail // and slowness This really is a perfect description of the practices. Basic, essential, mundane. Workable. Tools. Practice is. Practice does. Even Not Practice is a Kind of Practice.

The foundational practices in Bon are called Ngondro and include prayers to acknowledge the teacher, the teachings, the heart of compassion. To consider impermanence.

One version of the refuge chant as we have been taught at Olmo Ling is translated:

Root lama magnificent source of the three bodies

Buddhas of the three times, the principle saviors of 

sentient beings

The statues, stupas and scriptures are the Buddhas 

and their teachings

Compassionate beings of the ten directions are the 

lamps on the path of liberation

We now and take refuge in these four supreme sources of refuge.

A stupa is a sacred building constructed to a precise blueprint, with meticulous care taken to use all appropriate materials. When I chant the "lamps on the path of liberation" I see a beautiful trail of oil lamps leading to a monastery on the sacred mountain. In another chant, the Mandala offering, we say:

On  the foundation of the five elements Mount Meru 

and the seven golden Mountains

Including the external and internal precious objects of the four worlds and eight continents

And millions of universes, decorated with the sun andmoon

Please accept and bless as I offer these from the 

core of my heart

Traditional lamps in Tibet use yak butter to light the wick, with a rich evocative smell against the darkness of the high sky. This imagery, and these words - they are the repeated patterns that train the mind. A still body is refuge for the mind. A still mind is refuge for the awakened consciousness. This is the perfected life, isn't it?

then the scaffolds drop And don't they for all of us. Impermanence. The young prince Siddhartha saw a sick man, an old man and a dead person. He saw the scaffolds falling.

Affirming it a Soul The word soul is rough. I mean rough in the sense of unfinished, partial. Perhaps there is an aspect of us that is unchanging.... but I don't even now what kind of language to use to say that I don't know. It's moments like this that I wish I could talk to Abraham Lincoln about Emily Dickinson.

So there it is, a a few longer words about a short poem. The perfected life - implied, in retrospect - with birth and death, each being an architectural moment for the awakening mind.