Khenpo Kathar Rinpoche
Responding to a question of a student who is unable to gain any meditative stability and is worried about how to handle the bardo transition:
There are definitely means and instructions that will enable you to develop the type of stability that is needed to successfully traverse the bardo. As you indicated in your question, we all want to achieve this kind of stability.
It is not necessarily achieved by practicing a large variety of techniques, but by properly implementing any one complete technique of practice.
Visualizing your body as the deity Chenrezi, repeating the mantra OM MANI PADME HUNG, and dissolving the appearance of the deity into emptiness at the conclusion of the session are the three techniques by which you can achieve the necessary stability for traversing the bardo.
The phase of the meditation where you withdraw or dissolve the appearance of the deity is how to cultivate familiarity with the clear light so that you can recognize the dharmakaya at death.
Meditating upon your body as the body of Chenrezi is how you can gain the ability to achieve liberation as the sambhogakaya in the second phase of the bardo.
Repetition of the mantra OM MANI PADME HUNG is how you can learn to view all sound, including the sounds that appear in the bardo, as mantra.
Furthermore, the motivation of great compassion with which you perform the whole practice is the basis for the altruistic aspiration to reborn as nirmanakaya for the benefit of others, which is the key to traversing the third phase of the bardo, and doing this one complete technique will achieve all that you need.
In contrast, knowledge of a large number of techniques without gaining stability in any one of them will not bring this.
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Responding to a student’s question on how to prepare for death with a good amount of confidence:
I am a lot older than you are and so I’ve got more to worry about. Therefore this is of great concern to me too, so I’ll tell you what I really think. The single best preparation that you can have for dying is to recite the mantra OM MANI PADME HUNG.
If you make the commitment to yourself, “I will recite 100 million OM MANI PADME HUNG,” whether or not you complete it in this life, from the day you make that commitment until the day you die, this will have a great effect on you, and you will have tremendous benefit.
As for what you meditate on, you should always visualize above your head either the Buddha Amitabha or the Bodhisattva Chenrezi, it does not matter which. Just think that the deity is the embodiment in one form of all sources of refuge and especially of all of your spiritual teachers. Continually visualize them there, above your head, day and night, and resolve that at death your consciousness will dissolve upward into them.
What you meditate on and visualize is your teacher in the form of Amitabha or Chenrezi above your head and what you recite is the mantra OM MANI PADME HUNG. That is the best preparation.
