Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

After you finish prayers infused with the mind of awakening
And union with the spiritual master’s mind,
Think of your own body as the deity, appearance and emptiness.
The mind’s essence inseparable from the deity’s form,
Emptiness,
Was not seen, is not seen, and will never be seen by any buddha.
In this, there is no sickness, no death,
No existence or transcendence, no affirmation or denial.
Even if the transition [from life to death] goes badly
And your presence of mind declines,
Suffering at life’s end will be naturally purified
When you realize this for an instant,
Or recollect, hear, or are aware of it.
In the first stage of the intermediate state,
Clear light and the body of enlightenment’s perfect rapture,
Inseparable as the manifest body of enlightenment,
Will spontaneously accomplish others’ benefit unceasingly.
I have presented this, the buddhas’ immortal realization,
For the benefit of my most mature disciples.
By the virtue of this teaching,
May sentient beings whose numbers fill space
Realize the meaning of the wisdom of immortality.
A Sea of Blessings 121
This concludes the composition for my true heirs, my most mature disciples,
of Natural Liberation of Your Own Immortal Mind, by the noble
Virya Singha [Tsöndru Sengé]. I offered [to Sangyé Nyentön] five hundred
bags of barley, seven measures of gold, one dzo, and a bolt of fine cloth
from the southern Himalayan region to receive these teachings, and then
I cultivated their experience.