THE LAST TWO TEXTS can be seen as presenting complete formal mind training sitting meditations, one a “reviewing meditation” (shargom) of the key points of Atiśa’s Root Lines on Mind Training, the other a distinct formal meditative cultivation of compassion.
Mind Training in a Single Session, by the famed master of Sangphu Monastery Chim Namkha Drak (1210–85), is a beautiful example of how the central themes of mind training teachings can be meditated upon within a single session. This work is actually designed for use in a daily sitting practice, so that meditators can reinforce their practical application of mind training principles through their formal meditative endeavor.
The author of this short formal meditation, Chim Namkha Drak, was the seventh abbot of Narthang Monastery, one of the most important learning centers associated with the Kadam school. Among his teachers of mind training include Sangyé Gompa, the author of the lengthy Public Explication of Mind Training (translated in Mind Training: The Great Collection). Chim also wrote what later became the “standard” biography of Master Atiśa. Because of his repute, both as an authority on classical Buddhist thought as well as a master of meditative instructions, especially of mind training, he came to be highly revered across the various Tibetan traditions and acquired the epithet the All-Knowing Chim (Chim thamché khyenpa).
Glorious Virvapa’s Mind Training presents a special instruction on the meditative cultivation of universal compassion from the Indian adept Virvapa. The text cites first an eight-line quotation and later a six-line quote from Virvapa, which form the “root text” for this work. The practice of compassion presented here consists of two distinct yogas. The first is a unique approach called “the unparalleled yoga of compassion,” a practice that involves focusing specially on an adversary. This is followed by meditation on tonglen, or giving and taking, which the text calls “the yoga of root cause.” The instruction concludes with a meditation on the empty and illusion-like nature of all things.
Though attributed to Lo Lotsāwa, the source of the mind training instruction presented here is identified in its “colophon” as one Darpaṇa Ācārya, who, in turn, was presenting the thought of the Indian mystic Virvapa. If, as some Tibetan commentators suggest, Virvapa is the same person as Virūpa, the author of the root text of the Sakya Lamdré cycle of teaching, Vajra Lines on the Path and Its Fruits, our original author can be then placed sometime in the eighth century, for Virūpa is generally recognized to be the same person as the Indian Nālandā master Dharmapāla.
Lo Lotsāwa Sherap Rinchen was a Tibetan translator born sometime in the latter part of the twelfth century. He traveled to Nepal and India and received extensive teachings from many Indian masters and was also a student of the great Sakya Paṇḍita. Intriguingly, neither Darpaṇa Ācārya nor the Tibetan lotsāwa appear in the lineage of instruction given in the colophon. The final “me” in the colophon is Könchog Gyaltsen, second abbot of Ngor Monastery and one of the compilers of Mind Training: The Great Collection.