Guru yoga

Guru yoga is the practice of mixing your mind with the mind of the teacher, so that you come to recognise your own awakened nature. In Tibetan it is lamé naljor, "union with the lama". It is the fifth of the special preliminaries of the Ngöndro, yet Nyingma teachers rarely treat it as simply the last item on a list. Many call it the heart of the whole path.

Why a teacher at all?

This is usually where Western students hesitate. We were brought up to think for ourselves, and here is a practice built on devotion to another human being. The hesitation is healthy. Blind faith was never the point, and the tradition itself tells students to get to know a teacher well, for years if need be, before committing to that relationship.

And the guru of guru yoga is more than the person sitting at the front of the room. In the Nyingma tradition the teacher is usually visualised as Guru Rinpoche, who gathers every buddha and the whole lineage into a single form. In that image your own teacher and Guru Rinpoche are not two. In the end they are not separate from you either. What you seem to be praying to out there is the awake quality of your own mind, which you have simply not noticed yet.

So why take the long way round, through someone else? Because a mind caught up in its habits is very bad at catching itself out. Someone who has already seen can point. Devotion is what lets the pointing land.

The practice itself

In the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro you visualise Guru Rinpoche in the space in front of you, radiant, surrounded by the masters of the lineage. You pray to him and recite the Vajra Guru mantra, over and over.

Then come the four empowerments. Light streams from his forehead, throat and heart to the same places in you, purifying body, speech and mind. The fourth empowerment clears the subtlest traces of all three at once. At the end Guru Rinpoche melts into light and dissolves into you, and you stay there for a while without doing anything in particular. There is no teacher outside any more. Nor is there anyone inside still trying to get somewhere.

Those last few minutes are where Ngöndro and Dzogchen meet. In this tradition the nature of mind is not something you work out. It is recognised through the blessing of the lineage, and guru yoga is how you open yourself to that blessing. Which is why practitioners keep coming back to it long after they have stopped counting.

Guru yoga completes the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro, which we study and practise together at Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling every Saturday in Hoofddorp. On Guru Rinpoche day, the tenth of the lunar month, the same connection is at the centre of our tsok.