IN MOST TIBETAN sources, including Mind Training: The Great Collection, the short text Leveling Out All Conceptions is attributed to Serlingpa, the teacher from whom Atiśa is said to have received the instructions on mind training on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It is difficult to determine how far to accept this traditional Tibetan attribution. In the colophon at the end of commentary, this attribution appears to have come from an account given by Master Atiśa. The text itself has a decidedly authoritative voice, and its literary style suggests a certain antiquity. Interestingly, if the attribution to Serlingpa is correct, it suggests that this teaching was given at the behest of Atiśa as he was planning his journey to Tibet, and the expression “barbarian borderlands” it mentions was probably meant to allude to Tibet.
As its title suggests, the centeral theme of this short text seems to be challenging our habitual thought patterns and their underlying assumptions. The work opens with what might be understood as the four principal objectives of a spiritual practitioner: (1) leveling out all conceptions, (2) engaging the forces of all the antidotes, (3) concentrating all aspirations into a single point, and (4) seeking the path where all paths converge. A key injunction in leveling out all conceptions is to engage the antidote the moment a conception arises. As made clear in the commentary, this means we do not allow ourselves to be swept away by the undertow of habitual thought processes. We are admonished instead, in stanzas 3–4, to respond to thoughts decisively through applying four antidotes, or recognitions: that all adversities are spiritual teachers, that nonhuman agents of harm are emanations of the buddhas, that sickness is a broom that clears away negative karma and defilements, and finally, that sufferings are displays of the dharmadhātu, the expanse of ultimate reality. In these instructions, we find unmistakable expressions of the classic mind training injunction to transform adversities into the path of enlightenment.
Stanzas 5–6 instruct us to move beyond transforming adversities to a more radical practice where we deliberately invite in what we normally take to be intensely adverse conditions. Mind training here counteracts pleasure, which, when not offset, often leads to excessive attachment. It is also a “successor to misery” in that you use mind training to deliberately aggravate your suffering to gain greater benefit from it. In addition, mind training can be like a charm that attracts additional misfortune to fuel your practice. Finally, mind training is like a single genuinely meaningful wish that puts a lid on all the myriad utterly meaningless ones we generate.
In stanzas 7–8, we are then exposed to the heart of lojong, radically transforming our habitual self-centeredness to a compassionate, other-centered stance, both in our basic attitude and in our actions. Although the commentary explicitly mentions only the taking of others’ suffering, which is the “taking” aspect of tonglen (giving and taking), that it is tonglen practice that is being referred to here is quite clear.
Finally, stanzas 9–10 present the instruction on how to bring the understanding of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality, into our practice. Speaking in terms of what it calls the “four aspects of the sealing of emptiness”—(1) casting away decisively all conceptions rooted in subject-object duality, (2) letting go of all conceptions with ease within the sphere free of conceptual elaborations, (3) dismantling thoroughly the temporal sequence of thoughts so that they do not form a causal chain, and (4) letting our mind rest in its natural state without any reification or denigration—the text presents a succinct and unique way to sever our attachment to habitual thoughts and perceptions. Although the commentary does not state this, the final section of this text has unmistakable resonance with the teachings of the dohā songs of realization, especially those of the Indian adept Saraha, which Atiśa clearly knew. Both the mind training texts and the dohā teachings emphasize eliminating all forms of conceptualization.
Thus stanzas 7–10 presents what is, in the language of the Seven-Point, the “main practice” of cultivating the two awakening minds—conventional awakening mind, which is the altruistic aspiration to achieve buddhahood for the benefit of all beings, and ultimate awakening mind, the direct realization of emptiness.
Mind Training: The Great Collection contains an interesting if somewhat mythologized account of Atiśa’s long sea voyage to Sumatra to meet with Master Serlingpa. Apart from this account, few texts provide any clear depiction of Serlingpa. That he was a Buddhist scholar of great stature in the tenth and eleventh centuries remains beyond doubt,117 but most of what we know of the life of Serlingpa, whose personal name is Dharmakīrti, comes largely from the biographies of Atiśa composed by Tibetan authors.
For example, the “standard biography” of Atiśa by Chim Namkha Drak (1210–85) provides such details as his pre-monastic name, his arousal of faith in the Dharma as a result of coming face to face with a statue of the Buddha, his subsequent visit to Bodhgaya, the name of his Indian teacher, and so on. Given the specific nature of these details, it appears that Chim had access to some earlier source, most possibly Naktso Lotsāwa’s Great Narrative, which is no longer extant. Naktso spent many years with Atiśa, often serving him as the Tibetan half of a translation team, so the accounts related to Atiśa’s teachers could easily have come from Master Atiśa himself. Indeed many of the six texts attributed to Serlingpa in the Tibetan canon were translated by the team of Atiśa and Naktso.
So, regardless of how much of the narrative of Atiśa’s voyage to Sumatra and his subsequent tutelage under Serlingpa in the later biographies is true, there is little doubt that Serlingpa’s teaching on the awakening mind forms the core of Atiśa’s mind training instructions.