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A Trackless Path
18th century Tibetan mystic Jigmé Lingpa wrote a number of poems on the practice of Dzogchen, one of the great wisdom traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. In A Trackless Path renowned translator and teacher Ken McLeod offers a beautiful and evocative translation of one of these poems. Illumined by his own lucid commentary, McLeod makes this ancient poem relevant and accessible to today's seeker.The Jigmé Lingpa poem has three how conceptual thinking corrupts deep contemplative practice; the timeless freedom of direct awareness (the Buddhist equivalent of gnosis in Christianity); and subtle errors one often makes in this practice and how to correct them. McLeod's book is likewise divided into three sections. The first is a thoughtful introduction to the text and McLeod's relationship with it; the second is his beautiful and evocative translation of Jigmé Lingpa's poem; the third and main part of the book is his verse-by-verse commentary through which he illuminates the meaning of the poem. McLeod is clearly writing (and writing clearly) for the seeker in today's world who is called to pursue the awareness that Jigmé Lingpa describes.McLeod's lucid practice-oriented commentary is enriched by the seamless interweaving of experiences from his own spiritual journey. What emerges is a picture of a person who felt a profound calling to pursue contemplative practice and the direct and personal ways he found to meet the challenges and he encountered. With great clarity, McLeod communicates the central theme of the poem - namely, that when you rest and do nothing, you find the wisdom of the ages present within you. This is a book for the practitioner of any contemplative tradition--Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism or non-dual awareness.
- GenresBuddhismSpirituality
140 pages, Paperback
Published July 8, 2016
41 people are currently reading
249 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 11, 2016
By accident, I had just finished reading Sam Harris' 'Waking Up - a Guide to Spirituality without Religion' when Ken McLeod's 'A Trackless Path' reached me. Harris' book had quite unexpectedly turned out to be - among many other things - a book on Dzogchen, which is also the source matter of Ken McLeod's book. There are several seeming similarities. Both authors have studied with reputable Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahamudra masters. Both write very openly and personally about their own experiences. Both are looking beyond a superficial, utilitarian understanding of spirituality and meditation. And both come to the conclusion that in the end, this is not about metaphysical assurances but about a living experience, which is ultimately a mystery.
But there the similarities end. 'A Trackless Path' is quite a different, much deeper and more serious book. Rather than being an introduction or overview, it aims to lead the reader on the path of experience itself.
When you read this book, you do not just read a book written by Ken McLeod. You are actually meeting him, and through him, Jigmé Lingpa, the author of the Tibetan root text. This may sound esoteric. But it actually has something to do with the special style of Ken's translations and commentaries, which he has worked on over the last decades. He understands the work of a translator as translating an experience, making it possible for the reader to experience what the translator has experienced when reading the original.
This is quite different from preparing a scholarly, linguistically correct translation. When it works for you, it is extremely powerful.
'A Trackless Path' is a root text by Jigmé Lingpa and commentary by Ken McLeod on Dzogchen and Mahamudra, generally considered the pinnacle of the Tibetan meditation tradition. These two are ultimately the same, as Ken explains, but evolved in different schools and teaching styles. When studying these topics with Tibetan teachers, one is usually exposed to a full load of cultural and scholastic baggage that has built up over the centuries, as well as a large amount of so-called preliminaries. The sheer amount of ‘stuff’ one has to go through in most Buddhist traditions conveys an impression almost of helplessness, like saying: We don't really know what will work for you, but some of this might. There is always the promise, the more you study and practice preliminaries, the easier the final step into 'real' meditation will be.
After 40 years, I have come to be somewhat doubtful of this assertion. Not that a lot of meditation and effort is not necessary. But along such a gradual path, with its often demotivating concept of 'Accumulating the accumulations', a vital truth tends to be forgotten. Which is: At the heart of Buddhism lies an experience, not a doctrine.
But the human mind has an astonishing capacity to reify experience into concepts, "inventions", as Jigmé Lingpa calls them. Therefore every generation, in every culture where Buddhism is taught, has to be reminded of this simple truth. Ken McLeod and his new book 'A Trackless Path' is giving us this compassionate reminder.
Ken McLeod is not just a scholarly translator, he is also a Western Buddhist teacher with decades of experience in leading people in meditation, who has gone through intense traditional training under the highly revered Kalu Rinpoche, as well as through his own ups and downs and difficulties. But most importantly, he is somebody who is personally following this trackless path to the mystery, and lets the reader participate in his own quest. His passion for 'this knowing', as he calls it, is contagious and empowering.
Therefore in a sense the whole book is only about one simple topic, one specific movement of the mind. Again and again Ken points us to this simple movement of looking at the place of experience itself, and resting in the shift of experience that then occurs. And repeating this over and over. Then, as Ken likes to write, "new possibilities open up". What it leads to may not be the sparkling 'enlightenment' people are looking for. It can nevertheless change your life.
Jigmé Lingpa's root text and Ken's commentary together are a living manual for this path.
This is not necessarily easy to understand. It is "simple, but not easy". Obviously one of the possibilities of going wrong here is to misunderstand this simplicity for an easy ride. Neither this book, nor the 'trackless path' it outlines, are easy. This book is actually full of the ways in which you can go wrong. If you become too self-confident, you will make all the mistakes Jigmé Lingpa's poem cautions about.
Though this is not a casual or easy read, I am heartily recommending it for everybody who has meditated for some time and still is not enlightened.
From my meetings and conversations with co-meditators over the decades, I get the impression that many are caught at the stage of 'being mindful of what is happening'. Perhaps this is a useful way to start, but after a certain point there is no further progress, and year after year their meditation stays the same.
'A Trackless Path' points out where you should be really looking at in meditation. On the way it clarifies many topics that tend to be misunderstood, such as Buddha nature, the Awakening mind (bodhicitta), karma, etc. At the same time Ken is not denouncing the original tradition, or branching out into his own tradition, as some modern teachers do. On the contrary, his immense respect and admiration for the lineage of this teaching can be felt everywhere, and for me that generates a sense of trust in myself.
There are a number of caveats that one might mention. First, there is Ken's straightforward warning in the introduction: "If you think this awareness will make you a better person or improve your life, then I suggest you close this book now and throw it away." On the conventional and utilitarian level, there is nothing to be gained here. On the contrary. This approach is almost the opposite of the 'Mindfulness movement' and the ubiquitous effort to apply 'meditation' as a self-improvement technique.
I am reminded of Friedrich Schleiermacher's "On Religion" (1799), the central statement of which is that 'real' religion is different from everything people think about it, has absolutely no purpose and function in conventional life, and consists of nothing but "Anschauung" (= looking!).
Secondly, if you do not have several years of meditation experience, the book might not make too much sense for you yet. If you don't have much experience in meditation, and if you have never read a book by Ken McLeod before, it might be better to start with his systematic manual 'Wake Up To Your Life', or the beautiful 'Reflections on Silver River'.
And thirdly, if you have not personally met a teacher from the Dzogchen or Mahamudra traditions and spend some time with her or him, I am not sure if it would 'work'. I'm not necessarily speaking about receiving formal 'pointing out' instructions, but about physically, viscerally getting to know a person who is living from that inner knowing, and letting this way of being enter into your bones.
The last caveat I am even less sure about. But I have a sense that this approach, this focus on a 'knowing', this "Vision Experience of Ever-present Good" (the Tibetan title of the root text), may lead some people to become imbalanced in their development. Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism is always trying to balance selflessness and universal compassion with knowing and wisdom. Certainly compassion is mentioned here, as a natural outflow of 'this knowing', and in a very poignant and moving passage. But thinking more of others, and less of oneself, is a lifelong training and effort, made necessary by our natural, built-in, tenacious tendency to look after ourselves first. For this reason, we have training paths such as the 'Lojong' (Heart/Mind Training) which is the basis of several of Ken's other books ('Great Path of Awakening', 'Reflections on Silver River'). In the Lojong mind training the central practice of this book, the looking-and-resting, is constantly balanced with straightforward, direct exercises to counter egoistic thinking - almost like behavioural therapy.
I am not sure how this fits with the 'result path' orientation of the 'Trackless Path'. Maybe not everybody needs behavioural therapy. I do.
Personally I am deeply grateful for this book. It has pointed me back to the 'Trackless Path', to the yearning for 'this knowing' which originally started my quest in my teens. I left it decades ago for the fool's errand of constantly searching for somebody or something to show me the path. Now I am looking again for myself, and trust that Ken is right:
"Where that may take you, what may become of you, I have no idea, but I can say this. No matter what the difficulties, no matter what the challenges, if you listen deeply to what calls to you in this poem and go where it leads you, I doubt very much that you will have any regrets." (Ken McLeod, A Trackless Path)
But there the similarities end. 'A Trackless Path' is quite a different, much deeper and more serious book. Rather than being an introduction or overview, it aims to lead the reader on the path of experience itself.
When you read this book, you do not just read a book written by Ken McLeod. You are actually meeting him, and through him, Jigmé Lingpa, the author of the Tibetan root text. This may sound esoteric. But it actually has something to do with the special style of Ken's translations and commentaries, which he has worked on over the last decades. He understands the work of a translator as translating an experience, making it possible for the reader to experience what the translator has experienced when reading the original.
This is quite different from preparing a scholarly, linguistically correct translation. When it works for you, it is extremely powerful.
'A Trackless Path' is a root text by Jigmé Lingpa and commentary by Ken McLeod on Dzogchen and Mahamudra, generally considered the pinnacle of the Tibetan meditation tradition. These two are ultimately the same, as Ken explains, but evolved in different schools and teaching styles. When studying these topics with Tibetan teachers, one is usually exposed to a full load of cultural and scholastic baggage that has built up over the centuries, as well as a large amount of so-called preliminaries. The sheer amount of ‘stuff’ one has to go through in most Buddhist traditions conveys an impression almost of helplessness, like saying: We don't really know what will work for you, but some of this might. There is always the promise, the more you study and practice preliminaries, the easier the final step into 'real' meditation will be.
After 40 years, I have come to be somewhat doubtful of this assertion. Not that a lot of meditation and effort is not necessary. But along such a gradual path, with its often demotivating concept of 'Accumulating the accumulations', a vital truth tends to be forgotten. Which is: At the heart of Buddhism lies an experience, not a doctrine.
But the human mind has an astonishing capacity to reify experience into concepts, "inventions", as Jigmé Lingpa calls them. Therefore every generation, in every culture where Buddhism is taught, has to be reminded of this simple truth. Ken McLeod and his new book 'A Trackless Path' is giving us this compassionate reminder.
Ken McLeod is not just a scholarly translator, he is also a Western Buddhist teacher with decades of experience in leading people in meditation, who has gone through intense traditional training under the highly revered Kalu Rinpoche, as well as through his own ups and downs and difficulties. But most importantly, he is somebody who is personally following this trackless path to the mystery, and lets the reader participate in his own quest. His passion for 'this knowing', as he calls it, is contagious and empowering.
Therefore in a sense the whole book is only about one simple topic, one specific movement of the mind. Again and again Ken points us to this simple movement of looking at the place of experience itself, and resting in the shift of experience that then occurs. And repeating this over and over. Then, as Ken likes to write, "new possibilities open up". What it leads to may not be the sparkling 'enlightenment' people are looking for. It can nevertheless change your life.
Jigmé Lingpa's root text and Ken's commentary together are a living manual for this path.
This is not necessarily easy to understand. It is "simple, but not easy". Obviously one of the possibilities of going wrong here is to misunderstand this simplicity for an easy ride. Neither this book, nor the 'trackless path' it outlines, are easy. This book is actually full of the ways in which you can go wrong. If you become too self-confident, you will make all the mistakes Jigmé Lingpa's poem cautions about.
Though this is not a casual or easy read, I am heartily recommending it for everybody who has meditated for some time and still is not enlightened.
From my meetings and conversations with co-meditators over the decades, I get the impression that many are caught at the stage of 'being mindful of what is happening'. Perhaps this is a useful way to start, but after a certain point there is no further progress, and year after year their meditation stays the same.
'A Trackless Path' points out where you should be really looking at in meditation. On the way it clarifies many topics that tend to be misunderstood, such as Buddha nature, the Awakening mind (bodhicitta), karma, etc. At the same time Ken is not denouncing the original tradition, or branching out into his own tradition, as some modern teachers do. On the contrary, his immense respect and admiration for the lineage of this teaching can be felt everywhere, and for me that generates a sense of trust in myself.
There are a number of caveats that one might mention. First, there is Ken's straightforward warning in the introduction: "If you think this awareness will make you a better person or improve your life, then I suggest you close this book now and throw it away." On the conventional and utilitarian level, there is nothing to be gained here. On the contrary. This approach is almost the opposite of the 'Mindfulness movement' and the ubiquitous effort to apply 'meditation' as a self-improvement technique.
I am reminded of Friedrich Schleiermacher's "On Religion" (1799), the central statement of which is that 'real' religion is different from everything people think about it, has absolutely no purpose and function in conventional life, and consists of nothing but "Anschauung" (= looking!).
Secondly, if you do not have several years of meditation experience, the book might not make too much sense for you yet. If you don't have much experience in meditation, and if you have never read a book by Ken McLeod before, it might be better to start with his systematic manual 'Wake Up To Your Life', or the beautiful 'Reflections on Silver River'.
And thirdly, if you have not personally met a teacher from the Dzogchen or Mahamudra traditions and spend some time with her or him, I am not sure if it would 'work'. I'm not necessarily speaking about receiving formal 'pointing out' instructions, but about physically, viscerally getting to know a person who is living from that inner knowing, and letting this way of being enter into your bones.
The last caveat I am even less sure about. But I have a sense that this approach, this focus on a 'knowing', this "Vision Experience of Ever-present Good" (the Tibetan title of the root text), may lead some people to become imbalanced in their development. Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism is always trying to balance selflessness and universal compassion with knowing and wisdom. Certainly compassion is mentioned here, as a natural outflow of 'this knowing', and in a very poignant and moving passage. But thinking more of others, and less of oneself, is a lifelong training and effort, made necessary by our natural, built-in, tenacious tendency to look after ourselves first. For this reason, we have training paths such as the 'Lojong' (Heart/Mind Training) which is the basis of several of Ken's other books ('Great Path of Awakening', 'Reflections on Silver River'). In the Lojong mind training the central practice of this book, the looking-and-resting, is constantly balanced with straightforward, direct exercises to counter egoistic thinking - almost like behavioural therapy.
I am not sure how this fits with the 'result path' orientation of the 'Trackless Path'. Maybe not everybody needs behavioural therapy. I do.
Personally I am deeply grateful for this book. It has pointed me back to the 'Trackless Path', to the yearning for 'this knowing' which originally started my quest in my teens. I left it decades ago for the fool's errand of constantly searching for somebody or something to show me the path. Now I am looking again for myself, and trust that Ken is right:
"Where that may take you, what may become of you, I have no idea, but I can say this. No matter what the difficulties, no matter what the challenges, if you listen deeply to what calls to you in this poem and go where it leads you, I doubt very much that you will have any regrets." (Ken McLeod, A Trackless Path)
August 7, 2025
Fantastic.
I hung on every word.
Everything Ken McLeod writes is precious and worth reading.
5/5 ⭐️
I hung on every word.
Everything Ken McLeod writes is precious and worth reading.
5/5 ⭐️
Read
March 9, 2020I was hoping to gain the feeling of what it's like to be a meditator chasing something.
There's an experiential distance
This quote really resonated.
"Don't go into what arises, Be what knows the arising"
Then you get this feeling of vastness.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There's an experiential distance
This quote really resonated.
"Don't go into what arises, Be what knows the arising"
Then you get this feeling of vastness.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
March 6, 2017
“The best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you whether you know it or not. This means a deep awareness of your true inner identity.”Quentin Meillassoux, a philosopher with whom I have virtually zero familiarity and am thus liable to radically misinterpret (a ludic activity in itself), proposes a theistic atheism: believing in God precisely because he does not exist. Taking this at face value, with none of the philosophical context, I find this counterintuitive idea very charming and empathize with it completely.
-Father Thomas Merton
Firstly, it’s definitely true that there’s no big man in the sky dictating the fate of the universe. I think I knew that much as a four-year-old. But nowadays, as the piecemeal nature of my identity insists on making itself more and more glaringly obvious, I’ve realized that I derive a significant amount of my personality, motivation, and inspiration from myths and fictional characters. For example. My idealism comes straight from our ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote, my flirtatious nature is inherited from the original casanova Don Juan, and my propensity to decapitate horses and leave their bleeding heads under the bedsheets of people who refuse to follow my bidding comes from none other than the famous Don Corleone.
You see I don’t really exist, “I”’m just a mishmash of historical circumstances, rehashed ideologies, and imaginary people. The last part is the most important. Jesus, Buddha, Uranus, Martin Luther King Jr., the more gods I have to believe in, the better. Feed them to me, let me freebase them directly into my soul; I’ll only be complete once every possible fiction in every possible world is part of my personality. Seems like it’ll take several lifetimes, so unless artificial general intelligence speeds its butt up and transhumanizes me into the metaverse, I’m going to be one sad camper because according to the CDC the lifespan of the Typical American Male averages 80 years. Which, given my progress bar is already past 25%, is definitely not enough time for me to immanentize the eschaton.
What I really need to do is change the actuarial tables, not by hauling my gatling gun to the IRS with a gatling gun and holding down the office but by futzing with the fundamental mathematical laws of the universe such that the Typical American Male lives to be Busy Beaver 8. Which, sadly (there’s that word again), doesn’t seem like something I can do without my Singularity powers, which my fictional gods ain’t gonna bring about; I need God god. The other option is Eternal Return à la Eliade to the Sacred of bicameralism, aka zombification.
Analyze that, Lacanians!
In the meantime, I have A Trackless Path by Ken McLeod, a valiant effort to instantiate the phenomenology of nonexistence, the flipside Jungian shadow of all-existence.
“In a space beyond all complications and effortWhat does it feel like before you are born? What does it feel like after you die? Any answer by definition cannot be experienced, for they presuppose experience, which presupposes existence. Nevertheless their impossibility precludes neither their imagination nor their pseudoexperience, which locates itself in nirvana and suchlike “awakened” states so compellingly that they impel their pseudoexperiencers to write about it.
Lies a great treasure – no thought, no thinking.” [p.25]
It isn’t too much of a stretch, given that we have concepts like neuroplasticity and McLuhan’s media theories, to claim that religious practice can induce mental states that are distinct in character, and not just merely but significantly so, to those surrounding our lives’ other aspects. More elastic is the notion that these aretes can be attained through specific instruction, and most tensile of all the stated accords of various gurus, who while they claim common vocabulary (we are enlightened) almost certainly experience different phenomena not—if they are experiencing anything at all—just in degree but in character. Any wonder, then, is it that charlatans litter the field like beachgoers litter the ocean?
Regardless, anyone who reads David Graeber (as does McLeod) cannot, in my eyes, be totally adrift in la la land, thus (perhaps a little begrudgingly) I open myself to whatever wisdom he hopes to translate through the long-deceased poetry of Jigme Lingpa.
“The language of poetry—the language of metaphor, allusion and awe—then gives way to the language of philosophy—definition, distinctions and reason. Reification takes place. An experience becomes a memory and then an idea. Unnoticed, it becomes a belief and then an ideology.” [p.113]I’m with you there, Ken, and the Athenian Council was right: Socrates was a total huckster. Needless to say he will not be joining my pantheon.
September 24, 2017
Contrary to what one would expect from a commentary of a poem, Trackless Path is non-technical, straightforward reading, although by no means light or entertaining.
The book is a kind of guide to Jigme Lingpa’s method, officially dzogchen, but approachable and useful for anyone with enough experience on “open awareness” or mindfulness meditation. (My background is mostly vipassana and psychology.)
The book is not a general mediation guide, it just describes a certain type of practice in detail. It may be hard to understand without some meditation experience. It has a strong experiential or intuitive flavor, yet it feels clean and simple.
By practice style, the closest match within vipassana is probably Sayadaw U Tejaniya.
The book is a kind of guide to Jigme Lingpa’s method, officially dzogchen, but approachable and useful for anyone with enough experience on “open awareness” or mindfulness meditation. (My background is mostly vipassana and psychology.)
The book is not a general mediation guide, it just describes a certain type of practice in detail. It may be hard to understand without some meditation experience. It has a strong experiential or intuitive flavor, yet it feels clean and simple.
By practice style, the closest match within vipassana is probably Sayadaw U Tejaniya.
March 30, 2023
This is another book, like Reflections on Silver River, which Ken has said he wrote in part in the hope of inspiring an experience in readers. It's a translation and commentary, verse by verse, on a teaching poem by a medieval Tibetan mystic named Jigme Lingpa on the practice of Great Completion, also known as Dzogchen.
Some verses seem like locked doors to me. Others are inspiring, and still others are just confusing, or seem like they reflect someone else's problem, but not mine. As with the experience of reading Reflections on Silver River, it's interesting to watch my own reactions to what he wrote. The way Ken points isn't really my path, just a path (and Ken also writes that that's his intention anyway), but it's always fascinating.
Some verses seem like locked doors to me. Others are inspiring, and still others are just confusing, or seem like they reflect someone else's problem, but not mine. As with the experience of reading Reflections on Silver River, it's interesting to watch my own reactions to what he wrote. The way Ken points isn't really my path, just a path (and Ken also writes that that's his intention anyway), but it's always fascinating.
June 27, 2025
An incredible book for people practising or interested in Dzogchen and Mahamudra. There is a lot of wisdom here, expressed with a clarity which is uncharacteristic of these sorts of texts. I anticipate coming back to this many times over my life.
“Therefore, having loosened the knots of expectations,
Let go of outlook’s razor-edge and rest.
Step out of deep practice’s cozy cocoon and rest.
Break out of behavior’s constricting conventions and rest.
Throw away expectations for dramatic results and rest.”
- Jigme Lingpa’s Timeless freedom in great completion (translated by Ken McLeod)
“Therefore, having loosened the knots of expectations,
Let go of outlook’s razor-edge and rest.
Step out of deep practice’s cozy cocoon and rest.
Break out of behavior’s constricting conventions and rest.
Throw away expectations for dramatic results and rest.”
- Jigme Lingpa’s Timeless freedom in great completion (translated by Ken McLeod)
August 9, 2022
Unexposed
This path has know grounding for physical treading and you will find knowone traveling with you, it is a path for those who may embrace its lonely invitation and cognize its nurturing, being alone has merit as it does not invite... outside contamination hear
This path has know grounding for physical treading and you will find knowone traveling with you, it is a path for those who may embrace its lonely invitation and cognize its nurturing, being alone has merit as it does not invite... outside contamination hear
January 18, 2020
An absolutely priceless book
Ken McLeod has done it again. An absolutely wonderful book which I'm sure I'll be referring to my whole life.
Ken McLeod has done it again. An absolutely wonderful book which I'm sure I'll be referring to my whole life.
May 13, 2020
Beautiful. Pithy. Clear. The kind of book that one reads over and over. Pairs well with Tao Te Chaing.
September 13, 2020
Insightful and helpful
Shines a light on a trackless path. I’ll be returning to this again and again. Grateful to have found such a reference.
Shines a light on a trackless path. I’ll be returning to this again and again. Grateful to have found such a reference.
December 10, 2024
(paraphrasing) "Your only instructions are to simply settle. After a few weeks, I started to squirm."
July 3, 2025
I love this book. The audiobook in particular is phenomenal. His voice is such a great complement to the text.
May 8, 2024
The last book on Buddhism or Dzogchen you will ever need.
October 9, 2017
Ken's book is my favorite one on Dzogchen. It reads well, the text is clear and personal, and Ken's explanation of the text of Jigme Lingpa's 'Revelations of Ever-present Good' is truly outstanding. Very few books on Dzogchen touched me so deeply in recognition and realization as this one.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews