The Ngondro Preliminary Practices

Within the path of dharma there are some teachings called the Preliminary Practices and there are other specific practices, but all in all they are the entire noble eight-fold path. Some are more grounding practices, they are the fundamental practices and they are undeniable. You can't skip the preliminary practices and just think that you can do some high sounding tantric practice or a meditation on emptiness. People think that they know emptiness, the nature of the mind and they stare in the sky and they don't know how deluded they are. If you look in the sky it looks pretty empty, however your mind is very difficult to detect. To begin with you practice the fundamentals and it will bring up the delusions. The preliminaries are the detergent that brings out the dirt and it is good to deal with the delusions.
Ngondro means preliminary but that is really an understatement because Ngondro is the practice and the rest are just the different flavours put on top. White Tara, Vajrayogini and so forth, they all hinge on these six practices. They all include refuge and prostrations, bodhicitta, guru yoga, mandala offering and Vajrasattva the purification of negative karma. All of these practices whatever they are all different flavours, but the main thing that holds all of these things together so that they are worthy to have a flavour at all is the Ngondro practice. It is the very thing that holds the structure of the practice and it is this that actually transforms the person doing the practices.
It is in the context of the four noble truths and the eight-fold path that you have to understand Ngondro. It will give you a good solid daily practice and then every time you go on retreat you will deepen these very practices. You will feel so well provided for; you will have the provident fund for your future spiritual journey once you have understood the Ngondro practices and received the transmissions.
You have to receive the teachings, the transmission and the necessary initiation. You receive the teachings directly from a teacher who he himself has completed the retreat, as not everybody can teach Ngondro. Vajrayana practices are all oral transmissions, meaning that someone who has only heard a Ngondro teaching is not then empowered to give Ngondro teachings. You have to have the authority to teach Ngondro and nobody gives the authority unless you have finished the Ngondro yourself. If you finish Ngondro particularly in a strict retreat, then you can teach Ngondro and give the transmission, because then it carries the weight of the respectability of the effort that this kind of practice actually carries. Ngondro is not difficult to teach as long as your practice supports it; this is very important, it is the long breath of the teacher and the disciple always receives it directly through the teacher.
You can't do Vajrayana practices unless you receive the lung transmission, even for the six syllable mantra of Avalokiteshvara you must have at least received the lung of the mantra. Lung means the reading transmission, you have to hear the sound of the mantra spoken and read to you specifically by a practitioner who holds the reading transmission, meaning the oral lineage from his teacher. Likewise, for Ngondro you need to receive the teachings and the initiation. Wang, lung and ti in Tibetan,' wang means the initiation, lung is the transmission which is the reading and the oral transmission and the ti is the actual understanding, the know how instructions of the practice. If you have the wang, lung and ti then you can practice. You know what you are practising as you received the teachings, you know the text, you have the oral transmission and you have received the initiation. You have clarified any doubts or questions that you might have had and then you are well and truly ready to embark on the practice on a regular basis.
The Ngondro practice is to forgive our past and all of the objects of the past. You take it slowly step by step and try to digest what this is for and why you have to do it. There are a lot of negative habitual patterns that you are trying to break and this is what the practice is all about. When you try to break the patterns resistance usually comes and that is the nature of the practice. Moreover, that is the strength of the practice, it is how safe you feel and that no matter what you have to do you do not lose yourself, but you come out better as a result of it. Therefore, you know the purpose, you are not doing the practice and not knowing why you are doing it and that is the role of the teachings.
In the Vajrayana practices the prostrations are so good because if you do some prostrations you have a feeling of doing something. In sitting meditation sometimes you sit there and really you are just dozing off without the eradication of any delusions. That's why preliminary means preliminary to Calm Abiding, to Vipassana and let alone to Vajrayana with generation stage and chakra practices. If you don't have the horse what is the point in describing the cart? Firstly we have to talk about the horse and necessarily putting it before the cart. If you bring a horse you ask where is the cart and if you don't have a horse what is the point of the cart. There are a lot of cart collectors without looking for the horse to draw it.
Some people do many ten day meditation retreats on Vipassana and Calm Abiding. These are beneficial rather than not doing anything at all and yet the devotional aspect of the practices is not there, as if it is going to hurt people, as if it is not going to benefit them. It is amazing and so presumptuous to think that the very fundamentals of the teachings are not made known and then just showing this profound bit of staring at the mind or whatever. It is presumptuous to think that you can lead people anywhere but not give them the very substance to support them. That is why it is important to highlight the fundamental practices rather than the high teachings. They call it the highest tantra teachings or the once in a life time teaching, Ngondro is not a once in a lifetime teaching. We never say that Ngondro is a once in a lifetime practice, Ngondro is an everyday practice. People try all sorts of esoteric practices and then they realise that they can't move forward unless they have these very preliminaries. They have all kinds of high sounding teachings; the innermost teaching they call it but where is the innermost if you don't have the outside that holds it together and that's why the preliminary practices are very important.
Take the opportunity to resolutely learn and dedicate these practices for yourself and all sentient beings, because the benefit is inestimably inexpressible. You can't express the benefit of doing this practice and the benefit only arises when you know what you are doing. If you know the why, the how and the what for of this practice then it becomes like a medicine, the medicine for greed, hatred and ignorance. Each of the preliminary practices is a direct remedy for one of the root defilements; and when you practice you will see how your effort is really rubbing those defilements away.
At the very beginning of the practices your defilements become more manifest. The practices cause your defilements to become more manifest than what you would like to know and that is exactly what you want. When you wash your dirty clothes you have to see the dirt come out and you should be relieved at seeing this as you then know that you have a really good detergent. What is the brand? OMO, it's very good and next time I'm going to get that. You have to know the brand of the detergent and that is the Vajrayana preliminary practices.
We are not talking about this life's negative karma; because of course in this life we have been very good. We are talking about way, way back when we were never aware that we were bad. It is those negative habitual patterns that are completely changed; it is by doing this practice that a transformation occurs. Nevertheless, you have to wash it first and then the dirty shirt that you nearly threw away is now so clean it looks like brand new. It only needs a new button, otherwise it is just like a brand new shirt and you nearly threw it away. Thank goodness you now know that the cleanness of the shirt is not part of the dirt, it was just hiding beneath the dirt and the shirt that you thought was too dirty is now ready to wear.
This is what refuge is, it means that you didn't do the unsafe thing which was rejecting yourself; you did the safe thing which was caring for yourself. Like a beautiful meal every time you give it to yourself you like it; and every time you practice you feel that it is a beautifully cooked meal and you are serving that to yourself everyday. Then you will see how much gratitude you will have, you don't know how to estimate it. When you find yourself doing that everyday you won't be resentful of that you will be thankful. A well fed person looks rejuvenated, they are not emaciated or frail and they don't falter because they are strong, firm and healthy and the Ngondro practice is for that, it is for your spiritual health and wellbeing.
A physician aims to cure the illness of the patient; the Buddha is a physician and his medicine is for the benefit of the people who practice his teachings. That is what is so inspiring, what he did before he taught. There was no teaching before he did it, so everybody after him can have the confidence to repeat that experience because he did it himself. In addition, it is not that he did it and then just simply theorised it to give you a formula whether it works for you or not. He tried, practiced and perfected it and that is why he is Samyaksambuddha, the perfectly Enlightened One. Not the half Enlightened One, not the half-baked one he is the fully Enlightened One who taught these teachings.
These teachings came directly from the Enlightened Ones; some particular flavour will definitely manifest through the contemporary influences. Otherwise the very message that you find so insightful and so perfect could only come from an enlightened mind and it could only reach to beings that need to hear just that. The Enlightened Ones don't need to hear these teachings or do the practices, only those who are not quite enlightened need to do these things and how wonderful it is that you have this opportunity. Therefore, you should be thankful to your parents, to your loved ones and to your karma in general and then dedicate that every single day. Dedicate what you have done before you forget the merit, bundle it together, put into a single whole and then give it for the benefit of all sentient beings.
To practice the preliminary foundations you need faith and diligence with which to accumulate your merits, merits meaning faith. If you have faith and kindness you have happiness. When you practice generosity you are not only happy to practice it but it also makes other people happy. If you are tolerant even distressing situations you easily resolve; in Buddhism we call these merits. The preliminary foundations help you to develop and accumulate these wholesome characteristics. You can say that this person is pleasant in character and that pleasant characteristic then becomes a source of happiness. They have the wholesome qualities of kindness, willingness, generosity, tolerance, faith and devotion in a simple contented way. All of these things are merits, merits are not always so easy to understand but I think these things we do understand, so we want to accumulate all of these wholesome factors.
The design of Ngondro is to help you to cultivate these contributing factors for your happiness, for instance doing prostrations is a meritorious practice. You are cultivating humility, devotion and faith to the teachings and when you are doing the prostrations you have a lot of respect for yourself and for what you are doing because you have entrusted yourself to the practice. When you accumulate merit such as by devotion and paying homage, it purifies the negative karma of arrogance, attachment to the body and the pride of why do I need to do this. This is based on your own unwillingness, lack of devotion, scepticism, idleness or perhaps another reason. Consequently, it purifies your negative and opposing factors and cultivates beneficial factors, so that is the overall aim of Ngondro.
In order to grasp the essence of this precious human life you have to realise how you can extract the essence of this life which is happiness. You can only have happiness in your life if you are able to create those wholesome, positive and meritorious factors. If you do good things in your life you are happy and not only while you are living but also when you die. You don't regret your life, you feel thankful for this life for the duration and the nature of the life that you have had. You are thankful even at your death, there is this positive factor of thank goodness that I've lived this long when so many others don't. Therefore, you are more than willing to go and you don't think that it is too early or too inconvenient. Sure you have a few things to do but they were never meant to be and so you don't feel that death is a problem for you.
When you have the merits you don't fear death you feel ready for dying, in fact sometimes you are surprised that death hasn't already come because you have done enough good things in your life. Instead of fearing and trying to postpone death you feel privileged to have lived the life that you have had and did the things that you did. There are wonderful, generous contributions that you have made; so who else can thank you if you don't do it. If you have merit you are like that, you are so happy, nothing is ever too small to not be thankful about it. Because your mind is so full of positive things, you can see the goodness in everything and that is a merit.
The preliminary practices help you to extract the essence of life, to make your life meaningful. What do you need to do to grasp the essence of this precious life? Ngondro will help you to distil the essence of life. Ngondro crystallises and focuses your mind and it stops the dissipation of energies. The time you lose in doing this and that, going here and there, all of those things that don't give you meaning, you slowly trim them down and stop doing them. Then you can focus your energy on the very meaningful things in life, where you are happy and very contented. Generally, all Buddhist practices when you do them they make you feel so worthwhile. Just to do it focuses your energy and you never think about the time that you give everyday in the evening or the morning and you never feel that this is taking your time. This is the time that you give and that you have no regret in giving it and you feel so happy that you do. Moreover, all of the other aspects of your life now become more meaningful, no matter what you do you are not wasting time; therefore it is extracting the essence of life. You don't feel misplaced, you don't feel ill-timed because your mind is now like an irrigation canal, the water is flowing in the pipe and it is not flooding all over the place and being wasted. According to the teachings when you are practicing Ngondro it helps your mindstream to flow through the canal to be able to follow the guidance of the teachings.
Ngondro has a function of helping us to create wholesome beneficial factors by uprooting and purifying the negative habits of our afflicted mind, this is the mind that invites negative thoughts and indulges in them. Therefore, the design of the uncommon preliminary practices is to accumulate merit and to purify negative karma and defilements. The common preliminary practices are the fundamental teachings of the Buddha on the four noble truths, which teaches you about the unsatisfactoriness of worldly existence.