The Pith Instructions

Reality can ultimately be resolved into a single unity, with three classes of beings: sentient beings who dwell in samsara, arahants who dwell in nirvana, and Buddhas who dwell in neither.

Reality, from the perspective of those beings caught in duality and conditioned existence, is based on ignorance — called ma-rigpa (unawareness) — and this is samsara. We might imagine a Buddha-like awareness surrounding a core of ignorance. All sentient beings, from the smallest to the greatest, possess Buddha-nature, yet it is obscured, like a candle whose flame is shrouded in smoke.

This same reality, when perceived by arahants, becomes nirvana — when their habit of referring to all experience as a function of “I” is extinguished. Thoughts and feelings may continue habitually, but they no longer hold weight for the arahant.

Buddha-nature, when fully realised, transcends both samsara and nirvana, for it is timeless, and the directionality of karmic forces becomes irrelevant. Here, awareness is based on rigpa — the pure knowing of primal awareness itself.

The Pith Instructions are guidance given by a guru to direct one’s awareness away from what is observed and toward that which is observing. They are profoundly simple — so simple that they can seem elusive. They are not strictly a meditation technique either.

The reason their definition resists precision is because they operate at the very edge of thought itself, like trying to recall the exact moment one falls asleep. Their field of operation lies opposite to habitual contemplative thinking.

There are three stages of practice:

  1. Recognition
  2. Practice
  3. Stabilisation or Buddhahood

One who has recognised Buddha-nature is likely already an anāgāmi or arahant; this correlates with these stages being able to develop the advanced practice of cessation. Buddha-nature is not seen with physical eyes but recognised through the dharma-eye — a progression of insights corresponding to the cutting of fetters.

Recognition involves mentally rejecting conditionality until all appears dreamlike. Through embracing the timeless nature of the dharmakāya — the inner, empty, sky-like awareness distinct from consciousness — it becomes possible to perceive the true dreamlike meaninglessness of phenomena.

Through practice, one learns to move awareness from conditionality and, by recognising the thinker behind one’s thoughts, those thoughts gradually cease. This process leads eventually to the cessation of all thinking and the emergence of primal wisdom — knowing free from the limitations of duality. A helpful analogy is the comparison of digital to quantum computing: the Buddha-mind is liberated from the dualities of sensation and cognition, which ordinarily reduce experience to discrete entities confined by time and space. The Buddha-mind abides ever-pregnant with universal awareness — spontaneous, immediate, unbounded by temporal or spatial reference.

Pith Instructions are those rare, direct teachings which point one directly toward one’s own Buddha-nature.

“The self-nature of seeing, hearing, awareness, and knowing is originally pure; it is not dependent upon causes or conditions. It does not rely on arising or ceasing, and is neither produced nor extinguished.”
— Śūraṅgama Sūtra, BTTS translation, Volume 1, Section 1