This deep poem of meditative experience by the eighteenth-century religious leader Jang-kya Röl-pay-dor-je, together with the intricate and even thrilling exposition by his closest disciple Kön-chog-jig-me-wang-po, takes you into your own inner enlightenment—the primordial ultimate reality residing within, unrecognized. This is the inwardly abiding emptiness of inherent existence, called in the poem “aged mama.” The hope, our hope, is for the “elder brother’s” guidance in implementing the reasoning of “father” dependent-arising to open the mind to aged-mama-emptiness to protect us from the frights of self-deception. When we take all these phenomena around us, including ourselves, as they appear, we miss their actual nature, and in this sense, mama wears masks of deception, and is a liar.

Assuming a modest posture, Jang-kya hopes that he will be protected from the horrors of cyclic existence by relying on his elder sibling to utilize dependent-arising in analytical meditation as reasoning to reveal that phenomena such as ourselves are empty of existing from their own side. Kön-chog-jig-me-wang-po’s Commentary releases the full import of these meanings, opening the way for their impact to hit.