1001Philosophers

Tilopa Quotes on Mind

Tilopa (c. 988–1069), the Indian mahāsiddha whose transmission of the Mahāmudrā teachings through his disciple Nāropa supplied the founding doctrinal and lineage source for the Tibetan Kagyü school, gave Indo-Tibetan Buddhism one of its most distilled statements of the philosophy of mind in the Six Words of Advice (the Mahāmudrā Upadeśa). The framework presses the case that the ordinary mind, rightly recognized, is itself the buddha-mind — luminous, non-conceptual, spontaneously self-arising — and the corresponding meditative instruction ("don't recall, don't imagine, don't think, don't examine, don't control; rest") supplies the practical method through which the recognition is sustained.

Quotes

  • Attributed to Tilopa:

    “Do not recall, do not imagine, do not think, do not examine, do not control; rest.”

  • Attributed to Tilopa:

    “The mind in its natural state needs no improvement; recognize it, and the path is complete.”

  • Attributed to Tilopa:

    “What the rational mind cannot grasp, the realized mind has never lost.”

  • Attributed to Tilopa:

    “Awareness without an object is the secret of the great seal.”

  • “No thought, no reflection, no analysis, No cultivation, no intention; Let it settle itself.”

    Six Precepts" of Tilopa, quoted in Powell Zen and Reality (1975), p. 72
  • “Without mind, without meditation, without analysis, without practice, without the will, let it all be so.”

    Six Precepts of Tilopa, quoted in A.S. Kline's Like Water or Clouds - The T’ang Dynasty and the Tao (1947)