DFS Demo Recitations
Prairie dogs reciting The Dragonfly Sutra
Demo 1: The First Four Lines:
Sample: With Diva 19 November 2019:
Demo 2: The Sixth line, to the Comma:
Demo 3: Lama Luv Mutt Goes to the Ninth Line:
§ Explanation of how the recitation is “staggered” into sets of single or combined lines:
Begin always by introducing yourself formally to the Sutra: “Tathagate, the beat of wings.” By reciting the first line you subliminally cue your NLP for the recitation. It activates the Sutra. Once this is working, the memorization of the Sutra will automatically commence upon your reciting this line.
- The first four lines
- To the sixth line, the middle line, stopping at the comma
- The completion of the sixth line, after the comma
- The seventh and eighth lines, together
- The ninth line
- The tenth line
- The eleventh and concluding line
That is how to recite the Sutra for optimum benefit.
DFS is not your ordinary mantra. Rather, it is a tool of instruction for those who use it: the Sutra instructs. Optimally, every session of recitation can teach you something about how your mind works and how the mind works. Difficulty, hesitation, or clumsiness in repeating the lines teaches you that you have little mastery of the mechanism of the mind. You handle it awkwardly, as if struggling with how to work an hand-cranked eggbeater, an electric drill, or a golf club. This incompetence will be obvious.
In this instance, the Sutra teaches you immediately that you lack mental skill and agility in operating the mechanism of the mind. Doing so, it clears your ignorance and prepares you to learn how to work your mind. Ignorance in this case may be defined as being oblivious to how poorly and sloppily you run your mind. This realization can be, and ought to be, truly humbling.
On the other hand, there are certainly bound to be cases where participants can repeat the first four lines on the initial run through the recitation, and then consistently recite all four lines. And so? What does that indicate? What is to be learned if this is the case for you? Immediate ability to recite the four opening lines without the least hesitation in retaining them is no indication of a desirable state of your mind. On the contrary, it teaches that your mental function is “locked on rote.” It shows that you are easily prone to rote learning, programmed to mindlessly repeat what you are told. The challenge you then face in using the Sutra is to release your mind from the learned settings that dispose you to rote, that is, to mindless repetition without the benefit of distanced self-observation (irony) or the measure of critical suspension, questioning what you assume to know.
Be advised that the second case, facility in retaining the lines, is more challenging to overcome in order to benefit from the Sutra. In that case, ignorance resides in the presumption that you have some degree of mental mastery, rather than, as in the first case, in failure to see that you lack such mastery, and admit mental incompetence.
The illusion of mental competence can be the stronger deterrent to practice with the Sutra than ignorance of mental incompetence.
Counting to one: “What directs your attention to the productions of your mind is not a product of your mind.” This mysterious what is rigpa. There is nothing to analyze, ponder, or figure out about rigpa. It is simply a term—it could as well be hoopla, mojo, or mambo. Do not attempt to figure out what rigpa is. The Sutra instructs you in how to observe it. Detect it in immediate operation. Period.
§ “There is no way of achieving Buddhahood other than letting your mind be free to be itself.”
Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism by Chang Chung-Yuan
JLL: It must be added that “achieving Buddhahood” in this way is non-attained realization, not something you reach by meditation or any practice calculated as a means to an end. The book cited above presents dozens of instances of conversations among Zen masters and between masters and students. In some instances, these conversations are occasions for satori, sudden enlightenment. In no case however does the one who experiences satori come to it as a result of meditation or other practices. And these anecdotes describe monks who practice meditation rigorously, in severe conditions, often for many years! Yet satori, when it happens, does not come as a result of their efforts in meditation. It comes spontaneously, without effort. And only in that way.
Frog plunging into a pond: typical of spontaneous natural events cited in Ch’an and Zen anecdotes, illustrating what happens at the moment of satori, sudden illumination.