Mahamudra, the Great Seal

Mahamudra instructions proceed by direct examination of experience rather than by philosophical argument about it. A practitioner is first led to settle the mind in a calm, undistracted state, and is then instructed to search that settled mind for a location, a color, a shape or a boundary, an inquiry that consistently finds nothing at all to seize on or point to. What the search discloses is described as the union of clarity and emptiness, mind's cognizant, aware quality and its complete lack of any findable substance experienced together as one and the same fact rather than as two separate observations laid side by side. The teaching is central specifically to the Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism, among whom it functions as the culminating instruction of the entire path of practice, though a broadly comparable pointing out instruction exists under other names in other Tibetan traditions, including Dzogchen within the Nyingma school. It is transmitted in two recognized forms, a tantric form embedded within deity practice and requiring the corresponding empowerment, and a sutra form that can be given to a student who has not yet received that tantric empowerment, a distinction that governs who may receive which version of the instruction and in what sequence.

The teaching's own lineage traces it to the Indian tantric adept Tilopa, who is said in traditional accounts to have received it directly through visionary experience rather than through an ordinary chain of textual transmission, and who passed it to his student Naropa after subjecting him to a famous series of difficult trials. Naropa in turn taught the Tibetan translator Marpa, who made several journeys to India specifically to receive the instruction and carried it from there into Tibet, teaching it in turn to his own student Milarepa, whose disciples founded the various Kagyu lineages that carry the teaching down to the present day. That chain places mahamudra within a wider current of tantric instruction that moved out of the network of Indian Buddhist siddhas, wandering adepts who often operated partly outside formal monastic institutions, and into the more monastically organized setting Tibetan Buddhism developed as it received and systematized Indian material over the centuries that followed. The historical record of the earliest links in that chain rests substantially on hagiography rather than on independent outside documentation, which is itself typical of how tantric lineages generally are remembered and transmitted rather than a peculiarity of this teaching alone.