Approaching the Great Perfection

Simultaneous and Gradual Methods of Dzogchen Practice in the Longchen Nyingtig

Sam Van Schaik

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780861713707
• eBook ISBN: 9780861719129
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, is the highest meditative practice of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism. Approaching the Great Perfection looks at a seminal figure of this lineage, Jigme Lingpa, an eighteenth-century scholar and meditation master whose cycle of teachings, the Longchen Nyingtig, has been handed down through generations as a complete path to enlightenment. Ten of Jigme Lingpa's texts are presented here, along with extensive analysis by van Schaik of a core tension within Buddhism: Does enlightenment develop gradually, or does it come all at once? Though these two positions are often portrayed by modern scholars as entrenched polemical views, van Schaik explains that both tendencies are present within each of the Tibetan Buddhist schools. He demonstrates how Jigme Lingpa is a great illustration of this balancing act, using the rhetoric of both sides to propel his students along the path of the Great Perfection.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

1 Approaches to Enlightenment

The Great Perfection

This is the heritage left by the buddhas of the past, the object of accomplishment for buddhas yet to come, and the only pure path walked by the buddhas of the present day. Since the intellectual tenets of the other eight vehicles fail to reach it, it comes at the pinnacle of them all.

THIS IS THE WAY in which Rigdzin Jigme Lingpa (1730–98) describes the methods of the Great Perfection (rdzogs chen). The Great Perfection is a Buddhist approach to salvation, in a form only known to have existed in Tibet. From its earliest appearance in the eighth century C.E. it has survived to the present day. In the intervening centuries its literature grew into a vast range of texts, describing various different systems of the Great Perfection.

At the time when the first known texts of the Great Perfection appeared in the eighth century, Tibet had reached the zenith of its power as an empire, embracing much of Central Asia and parts of China. The Tibetan Empire came into being a century earlier through the military successes of the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo (609–49). Songtsen Gampo is also traditionally said to have been the first king to sponsor Buddhism in Tibet. At that time, Buddhism had to compete with indigenous religious practices and local deity cults which made its introduction as a state religion less than straightforward. Nevertheless, as the Tibetan Empire went from strength to strength over the two following centuries, Buddhism rose to become the major religious power within Tibetan borders.

The ascendance of Buddhism in Tibet was assured by the work of Songtsen Gampo’s great-grandson, King Trisong Detsen (756–97). This king, while continuing the military successes of his forebears, attempted to turn Tibet into a truly Buddhist country, on the model of India and China. Thus he invited the renowned Indian Buddhist scholar Śāntarakṣita to establish the first Tibetan monastery, with ordained Tibetan monks. He also invited exponents of the Buddhist tantras including the semi-legendary figure Padmasambhava, who taught tantric practice and perhaps the Great Perfection as well.

During the reign of Trisong Detsen great numbers of Buddhist scriptures were translated into Tibetan. A great range of Buddhist literature was translated from both Sanskrit and Chinese, including the most recent developments in the Mahāyāna. Monasteries were established based on the monastic rule of the Mūlasarvāstivāda school. At the same time the practices of the tantras, known as the Vajrayāna, were introduced and practiced by both monastics and laypeople. The lay tantric practitioner (sngags pa, Skt. māntrin) became a common figure in Tibet, and would remain so throughout the history of Tibetan Buddhism.

The early Great Perfection

The earliest Great Perfection texts are from the manuscript cache found in the Central Asian monastic complex of Dunhuang. During the ascendancy of the Tibetan Empire, Dunhuang was under Tibetan control, although both Tibetan and Chinese lived there as monks and passed through as lay devotees. The Dunhuang texts contain some of the fundamental features of the Great Perfection that remain in most of its various later forms. These essential features owe much to earlier Buddhist literature, in particular the doctrine of emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā) set out in the Prajñāpāramitā sutras and the understanding of the nature of the mind set out in certain other sutras, such as the Laṇkāvatāra. The following passage from one of the Dunhuang texts is a typical example:

It does not matter whether all of the phenomena of mind and mental appearances, or affliction and enlightenment, are understood or not. At this very moment, without accomplishing it through a path or fabricating it with antidotes, one should remain in the spontaneous presence of the body, speech, and mind of primordial buddhahood.¹

As this passage illustrates, Great Perfection meditation instruction points the meditator toward the direct experience of the true nature of reality, which is immediately present. This method is held to be superior to all others, which are said to involve some level of intellectual fabrication. This criticism applies to most of the practices encountered in Buddhism, from intellectual analysis to the use of specific meditation topics as antidotes to undesirable mental states. The exaltation of the Great Perfection above all other schools of Buddhist practice remains a theme throughout Great Perfection literature and can be seen in the eighteenth-century passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The identification of the Great Perfection as a distinct vehicle (thegs, Skt. yāna) of Buddhist tantric practice is present in these early texts. It is known as the vehicle of supreme yoga (Skt. atiyoga), overtopping all of the lower levels of tantric yoga.²

From this position as the ultimate system of Buddhist practice, the Great Perfection was used as an interpretive structure for the practices of the tantras, which were placed below it in the hierarchy of Buddhist systems. The rejection of any kind of path (lam), any conceptually fabricated form of practice, in these early texts—as seen in the passage above—often seems to put the Great Perfection in opposition to the various and complex paths of practice that were derived from the tantras. However it in fact existed as a way of approaching these practices, much as the doctrine of emptiness is used in the Prajñāpāramitā literature and the works of commentators such as Nāgārjuna, as a way of approaching the practice of the Mahāyāna. In both cases, although there is criticism of conceptually constructed practices, there is also a great deal of discussion of how to engage in those practices. Thus it is clear that the criticism is not to be taken as an injunction against engaging in the practices at all; rather the practices are contextualized within the higher perspective of nonconceptuality and nonduality.³

Thus the Great Perfection was not really a departure from Buddhist tradition. As well as the similarity to features of the Prajñāpāramitā sutras, there are other obvious influences from the Māhāyana sutras on the early Great Perfection. The true nature of reality alluded to above is also known as the basis of all (kun gzhi, Skt. ālaya), a term that appears often in the Laṇkāvatārasūtra and became fundamental to the Yogācāra school in India.⁴ In the early Great Perfection this basis of all is synonymous with the awakened mind (byang chub kyi sems, Skt. bodhicitta), which, as well as being immediately present, is the basis of all that manifests. This use of the term awakened mind is also derived from Yogācāra texts and their scriptural sources, such as the Sandhinirmocanasūtra.⁵

The early Great Perfection was also characterized by certain distinctive features, in particular a vocabulary that was later elaborated and developed into a technical terminology. Examples of this vocabulary in the early texts are gnosis (rig pa, Skt. vidyā), for the everpresent nondual and nonconceptual awareness, and spontaneous presence (lhun gyis grup pa), indicating—as in the passage quoted above—the immediate and unfabricated presence of “the body, speech, and mind of primordial buddhahood.” Equally important is the term primordial (ye nas), indicating that the awakened state has always been present, uncreated.⁶

The categorization of the Great Perfection as a distinct yoga goes back as far as the earliest known Great Perfection texts.⁷ The Great Perfection is classed as atiyoga, the highest of the three supreme forms of yoga. Below it are the practices derived from the tantras, classed as the two lower forms of inner yoga, anuyoga, and mahāyoga, although in fact the vast majority of tantric practice fell under the mahāyoga rubric. An eleventh-century Tibetan commentary on the different methods of Buddhist practice distinguished mahāyoga and atiyoga as distinct methods, but earlier texts indicate a less orderly state of affairs in which the characteristic approach of the Great Perfection was presented both in isolation from mahāyoga practice and as the means of engaging in it.⁸

The end of the empire and the new schools

In the 840s a new Tibetan king, Langdarma, was on the throne. Tibetan histories relate that he broke with the custom of supporting Buddhism (which had continued through the reigns of Trisong Detsen’s successors) and supervised the wholesale dismantling of the monastic structure that had been established and encouraged over the previous century. This is said to have been the cause of his assassination by a monk in 842, which ended the royal line and began the disintegration of the Tibetan Empire into small individual states. In the following century and a half there was little or no monastic presence in Tibet, but it seems that the lay tantric practitioners flourished and maintained the transmission of the tantras and their associated practices, including the Great Perfection.

By the eleventh century, certain local rulers in the state of Ngari in Western Tibet wished to see monastic Buddhism reestablished in their land and to curb what they saw as the excesses of the lay tantric practitioners.⁹ Their support resulted in the training of Tibetan translators in India, and the beginning of a new wave of translation activity. At their invitation, the Indian monk Atiśa Dīpaṃkaraśrījñāna (982–1054) came to Tibet and instigated a new wave of translation of Buddhist scriptures and commentaries. His disciple Dromtön (1002–64) established a new Tibetan monastic form of Buddhism known as Kadam. Atiśa’s legacy to Tibet was a form of Buddhism based on a graduated path that included tantric practice but put much more emphasis on general Mahāyāna teachings, especially the practice of compassion.

In the following years other schools developed. The Sakya based their tantric doctrines on the newly translated tantric cycle of Hevajra, the practice of which was structured by a doctrine called the Union of Samsara and Nirvana, a meditation-oriented interpretation of the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. The Sakya also became a monastic school with a highly scholastic el...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: SIMULTANEOUS AND GRADUAL
• PART III: TRANSLATIONS
• PART IV: CRITICAL EDITIONS
• APPENDIX I: The Structure of the Yeshe Lama (YL)
• APPENDIX II: Concordance of Common Words Relating to Mind and Mental Events
• APPENDIX III: List of Tibetan Proper Names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Wisdom