An excerpt from the guide to Dakini land
The outer Pure Dakini Land is beyond the world of ordinary experience. It is the pure land of Buddha Vajrayogini and Buddha Heruka. A pure land is a world free from true suffering. There is no place in samsara that is without true suffering because the samsaric environment in itself is a circumstance that leads to the experience of suffering. Ordinary beings are born into samsara without choice and experience discontent and misery all the time. But when we purify our minds, we purify our experience of the world and thus achieve a pure land free from all suffering.
There are different Pure Lands associated with different Buddhas. The Pure Dakini Land is similar to the Pure Lands Tushita and Sukhavati, except that the Pure Land of Heruka and Vajrayogini is the only one in which living beings can receive and put into practice the highest yoga Tantra teachings.
When those who are very old and sick reach the pure land through the guidance of Vajrayogini, they will no longer experience the sufferings of old age and disease. All signs of your old age will disappear and you will be transformed into sixteen-year-olds of great beauty and vitality who will enjoy an endless lifetime. All the pleasures you desire will appear spontaneously. They will never be born in samsara again unless they choose it for compassionate reasons. Anyone who reaches this Pure Land will receive teachings on the Supreme Yoga Tantra directly from Heruka and Vajrayogini and thereby quickly attain enlightenment.
The outer Pure Dakini Land can also be explained in terms of the personal experience of an individual practitioner. From this point of view, the outer Pure Dakini Land is attained by completing the generation level practices of Vajrayogini.
During our training in creation cost meditation we visualize our body as the pure body of Buddha Vajrayogini, our immediate surroundings as the mandala of Vajrayogini and our world as pure Dakini land. If we are ceaselessly engaged in generation level practice, the ordinary, impure appearances of our mind will gradually diminish and eventually cease altogether. Once we have attained a firm realization of the generation stage, we will only experience pure appearances and our world will be transformed into the Pure Dakini Land. The great teacher Tenpa Rabgye said that Pure Dakini Land is not a distant place, nor is it necessary to leave this world to reach it.
Pure appearances are only experienced by realized practitioners. It is generally accepted in both Sutra and Tantra that the world appears to our minds as faulty, imperfect and unsatisfactory because our minds are impure and defiled by delusions and their imprints. In the ornament for clear realization, the Venerable Maitreya says that the environment of living beings becomes the pure land of a Buddha when their mind becomes completely pure.
A pure land can only be achieved through purification of the mind. Even if we have reached the outer Pure Dakini Land through a firm realization of the generation stage, others will still appear to be ordinary, unclean beings. Ordinary people cannot know that another person is in a Pure Land because they do not know that person’s Pure Land and cannot share their experience with them. Someone once asked Milarepa in which pure land he had attained enlightenment, and Milarepa pointed to his cave. The questioner could only see a cold, empty cave, but for Milarepa that cave was pure land.
Because the minds of ordinary beings are impure, whatever appears to them is considered ordinary. As ordinary beings with ordinary appearances, we cannot experience anything but completely pure and perfect. Even an emanation from Buddha seems to us to be flawed. Because of the ordinary appearances we have, we consider ourselves and others imperfect, subject to defects such as disease and aging.
According to the Sutra teachings, holding on to oneself and the delusions that arise from it is the root of samsara. However, according to the teachings of the Secret Mantra, common appearances and common ideas are the root of samsara. The self-clinging that is recognized by the sutra practitioner is just a rough, common idea.
In this context, every being that is not a Buddha, every environment except that of a Buddha, every pleasure except that of a Buddha, and everybody except that of a Buddha is ordinary. The perception of these objects as ordinary, which arises from an impure mind, is ordinary appearance, and the types of spirits which the objects imagine in this way are ordinary ideas. According to the teachings of the Secret Mantra, common appearances are hindrances to omniscience and common ideas are hindrances to liberation. The common appearances and common ideas have many different levels of subtlety.
One of the main purposes of the practice of generative meditation is to give up ordinary appearances and ideas. We can give up the ordinary appearances by making the clear appearance that we are Vajrayogini, and we can give up the ordinary notions by developing the divine pride of being Vajrayogini. Because of our ordinary perceptions and imaginations, we experience an endless cycle of ordinary death, intermediate state, and rebirth.
This endless cycle is known as “samsara” must be broken. Through the stages of generation and completion stage of practice, we can purify the three ordinary states of death, intermediate state, and rebirth and thereby attain the three bodies of a Buddha.
