Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

18 Timeless Rapture
focus and reveal an ever more subtle quality of experience as we meditate
on the pathways, circulating energy, and vital essence drops. In the first we
transfer our need for structures of identity to the clear yet insubstantial
forms of the deities, and in the second we gradually transcend the need for
any conventional support for identity at all. These meditative techniques
reveal our buddha nature and the complete freedom of awakened being.
In these songs we encounter the deities and techniques of the Shangpa
Kagyu as though they were cherished friends, as indeed they are for adepts.
While many creation phase deity configurations are shared by different
traditions, the specifics of the liturgy and the visualizations often remain
unique to each. The Shangpa tradition’s two principal deity configurations
are Wheel of Supreme Bliss and the combined configuration of the Five
Tantras’ Deities. Yet another deity of this tradition is Horse Neck. The
protector particular to the Shangpa Kagyu is the Six-Armed Awakened
Protector. Completion phase teachings include both the Six Doctrines of
Niguma and the Six Doctrines of Sukasiddhi. While the specific details of
these two vary, both comprise teachings on Fierce Inner Heat, Illusory
Body, Lucid Dream, Clear Light, Transference of Consciousness, and
Intermediate State. Most particularly, however, we encounter in the
Shangpa Kagyu what are known as Kyungpo Naljor’s Five Golden Doctrines.
These five are likened to the parts of a tree: the roots, Niguma’s Six
Doctrines; trunk, the Great Seal Amulet Box; branches, the Three Paths
of Integration; flowers, White and Red Sky Dancers; and fruit, Immortal
Body and Infallibile Mind. The songs’ references to such teachings are
inevitably inspiring; yet needless to say, if we wish to put them into practice,
we must receive formal transmission and follow the careful guidance
of a qualified teacher of the tradition.
The Shangpa Kagyu tradition made its way from Tibet and became
accessible to the world in the person of a tall, thin, and ageless lama known
as Kalu Rinpoché. Because of political tensions, he traveled from Kham
(eastern Tibet) to Lhasa in the early 1950s to confer with the His Holiness
the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa. In 1956 he accepted the invitation of the
queen mother of Bhutan to assume responsibility for a monastery in that
country. During the 1960s he moved to a small monastery in Sonada, near
Darjeeling, India. By the late 1960s Kalu Rinpoché’s presence had attracted
a number of Western students. By this time the Karmapa, who had taken
up residence at his monastery in Rumtek, Sikkim, was also accepting many
Western students. He asked Kalu Rinpoché, a highly respected yogi and