The Cult of Tara

WORSHIP 141
Now at this point the basic Clear Light appears to all beings,
but it is only some fewyogins possessed of understanding who can
now "have the mother meet the son"—join this basic Clear Light
to the "Clear Light of the Path" [which he knows from his contemplations
during life] and instantaneously pass upward, to manifest
the nonarising Dharma Body and to serve the countless aims of
beings with a Body of Bliss and a Body of Transformation. To
manifest thus miraculously the three bodies is to be a Buddha.
It is for this reason that there is profit in gaining a human body,
and it is very important to experience therewith the counsels of
the profound path. The actual Clear Light arises to all beings,
but they do not understand it, and they flee from it in terror.
"In the process of rejecting one's ordinary aggregates to acquire
a divine body," writes Tsongk'apa, "we have found that it is necessary
to contemplate in accord with birth, death and bardo. The
highest paths of the Process of Perfection too are a practice quite
similar to this: so on the occasion of the latter Process as well one
awakens in one's stream an understanding of Emptiness which is
like the process of death, based on the strength of the yoga of
'channels, winds and drop': and to arise therefrom one must know
the ritual of generating a deity ' arisen as a body which is in Innate
Union with illusion.'" 203
And thus Ngawang zangpo continues his
discourse on the Clear Light, the ontological insight granted by the
magical reenactment of the stages of death:
There are thus four stages in the formation of appearances,
which are inversions of the developing realization of the Clear
Light; but no matter how they occur—in large or small context,
persisting for longer or shorter periods of time—the practitioner
should apply to them the following instructions, which constitute
a method for experiencing the Clear Light alone.
Just after there is formed, in the first moment, an appearance
of a male or a female, and so on, as an object of the six sense
faculties (which are themselves neutral in terms of deciding whether
the object is form or Emptiness, good or bad), he knows that the
event is something that is formed unceasingly from his own innate
mind; he should remember to abandon any mental construct that
imposes "reality" upon it. By holding to this mindfulness the
appearance of the perceptual object becomes "uncontrived,"
without the addition of his own constructs. It thus becomes a
"deep contemplation of mindfulness," "knowledge," the Dharma
Body, or the Clear Light; at this stage an event appears as the
Clear Light; it is called the "deep contemplation of Emptiness."
By forming an appearance or thought as the Clear Light, the
practitioner does not take it to be or act as if it were either good