Prayer Wheels and Tsa-Tsas and Beads, Oh My!

Well, I've had a week to process my interaction with Rinpoche and I'm still on TILT ... I've been reading like a house afire and the more I learn the less I know.

I'm sort of back to the ostensible subject of this blog, ngondro, the preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism.  Preliminary to what, you might ask?  Well, I'm not exactly sure.  The textbook answer would be, preliminary to practicing Vajrayana, the Diamond Vehicle, also known as tantra -- and yet when I read Rinpoche's published correspondence with his students, many of them to whom he's giving advice on ngondro practices have already received various and sundry Vajrayana empowerments.

The more I learn about ngondro the bigger it seems.  In the Gelugpa tradition, to which Rinpoche (and the Dalai Lama) belong, there are four "ordinary preliminaries" and five "extraordinary preliminaries".  [My reference-at-hand here is Geshe Rabten, The Preliminary Practices of Tibetan Buddhism (Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1974).]  The "ordinary preliminaries" are subjects for meditation, specifically:

1. the Perfect Human Rebirth
   
2. Impermanence and Death
   
3. the Law of Karma
   
4. the Misery of Samsara.
   

The "extraordinary preliminaries" are practices, each of which is to be performed at least 100,000 times:

1. Taking Refuge and Generating Bodhicitta
   
2. Confession of Downfalls and Prostration to the 35 Buddhas
   
3. Vajrasattva Sadhana
   
4. Offering of Mandalas
   
5. Guru Yoga.
   

My feeble understanding is that meditation on the ordinary preliminaries is supposed to lead one to the spontaneous realization of shunyata (emptiness), and performance of the extraordinary preliminaries is supposed to purify one's old negative karma sufficiently for the Vajrayana to lead one to enlightenment in a single lifetime.  One of the lineage gurus (Padmasambhava?  Je Tsongkhapa?) is said to have completed the process and achieved enlightenment in only three years -- but I'm sure he was a full-time retreatant with no rent to pay and no day job  LOL

The more I read, the more I conclude that 100,000 of something basically means "start doing this every day, NOW, and continue until they feed you to the vultures."  In his correspondence, Rinpoche gives students huge numbers of repetitions to do and then turns around and says, don't worry about the numbers, just start and keep on keeping on.

So I shall make haste slowly.  Start with the 35 buddhas, get that safely in place, then add the Vajrasattva practice.  I hope.