Verse 22: Appearances are mind; mind is beyond fabrication
Verse 22 of Gyalse Tokme Zangpo’s 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, from the section “Ultimate bodhicitta.” Below: the verse in three translations and what seven teachers say about it.
Open in the study browser →Appearances are your own mind. Mind itself primordially transcends elaborated extremes. Knowing just this, do not create concepts of perceiver and perceived. This is the way of a bodhisattva.
The practice of all the bodhisattvas is never to entertain concepts, Which revolve around dualistic notions of perceiver and perceived, In the knowledge that all these appearances are but the mind itself, Whilst mind's own nature is forever beyond the limitations of ideas.
Whatever arises in experience is your own mind. Mind itself is free of any conceptual limitations. Know that and don't generate Subject-object fixations — this is the practice of a bodhisattva.
Good thoughts and bad thoughts are both just thoughts; it's the body that needs food and clothing — "as for our mind, it does not need anything." Beauty is his test case: the flower's loveliness exists in the perceiving mind, not the flower; even grief at a parent's death is a thought without substance. Closes by asking the audience directly: drop the judging — wouldn't your suffering disappear?
His longest philosophical treatment (1974): contrasts Vijnanavada ("all phenomena are of the nature of mind") with Chandrakirti's Madhyamaka — things exist relatively through designation, but analysis finds no base; neither inherently existent nor nonexistent, since they still help and harm. Quotes the Seventh Dalai Lama's songs repeatedly ("I am a yogi of space without birth... a great liar"; "the union of the appearance and the void"). Change itself proves emptiness — the spring tree gone bare, the defiled mind able to become omniscient. Describes space-like meditation: rest softly in the moment when the appearance of true existence "suddenly collapses without support" — "Un-seeing is the supreme seeing." Then, disarmingly: "My understanding of these questions is not very good, but I am trying to improve."
Voidness = the total absence of impossible modes of existence. His example: perceiving someone as "a horrible person" — the seemingly external horrible object and the perceiving mind arise from the same karmic seed. But the mind is no truly existent projector either — "the mind itself is also devoid of existing as some truly findable entity." Why it matters for bodhicitta: problems aren't fixed in beings from their own side.
His home ground: outer objects are confused appearances from habitual tendencies, like dream phenomena, while mind has primordially transcended fabrication. Instruction for ordinary practitioners: analyze until genuine conviction arises that waking experience is exactly like dream experience — "if we believe otherwise, our desire to cling to a desirable object will increase, and our suffering will grow."
An unusually complete map of mind for lay students: perceptual mind (five senses), conceptual mind (we "see" only our thought of the table), emotional mind (seventh consciousness generating self-attachment), and the ocean-like alaya whose seeds project body and world — beings share a common world through common karma while each lives inside his own mind's world. Examining any thought finds no shape, color, or location: empty like a rainbow, yet luminous (even an ant knows pleasure from pain) — clarity and emptiness inseparable, beyond existence and nonexistence. Two supports for realization: systematic study and the blessings of lineage masters — without them, "like waiting for sunshine in a north-facing cave." Quote: "O Sariputra, absolute truth is only realized through faith."
Winter Retreat vv22–24 talk.
Split across Talk 8 and Talk 9, "Dissolving Fixations": all experience arises in mind, not externally; uses Douglas Harding's "headless" perspective and dream-lucidity analogies. His one visible Tricycle line: "There is no escape from your experience—this is your life!" Tricycle v22
the philosophical range is real — HHDL explicitly rejects the mind-only reading the verse's first line suggests, while KTGR and KS teach it from within Mahamudra/alaya frameworks. For the group, KS's mind-map is the gentlest on-ramp; HHDL's "un-seeing" passage the deepest water. Don't try to resolve the Madhyamaka/Mahamudra difference in one session — display it. ---
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche — The Heart of Compassion (Shambhala). A purchased book — no text is reproduced here.