The Indian antecedents for what has become known in Tibet as rdzogs pa chen po, the Great Perfection, grew out of a trenchant skepticism toward the liberative effectiveness of the ritualized Buddhist practice we now call Vajrayāna, as well as skepticism toward the grand vision of liberation over three incalculable eons that we find in mainstream Indian Mahāyāna. This skepticism has been carried forward by Tibetan adherents of the Great Perfection tradition to the present day, even while many of them are also fully engaged in Vajrayāna ritualism.
The fundamental argument of the Great Perfection in all its expressions is that awakening is not the result of cause and effect and cannot be achieved through effort. The Great Perfection takes quite literally the Buddha’s description of awakening found in the Lalitavistara Sūtra that buddhahood is peaceful, uncompounded, pure, free from all proliferation, and blissful. Accordingly, awakening is something to be discovered in the direct perception of dharmatā rather than generated through causes.
Between the introduction of the Great Perfection to Tibet in the last quarter of the eighth century and the second influx of Buddhism from India during the latter part of the tenth century and the eleventh century, the communities in which the Great Perfection teachings spread were very active, given the evidence of the large number of texts on the Great Perfection that can be dated before 1200 CE. Following this, during the period of Buddhist institutional reconsolidation, which began during the eleventh century, Tibetans would choose whether they continued with the indigenous expressions of the Dharma that grew out of the early diffusion of Buddhism in the eighth and ninth centuries (Nyingma and Bön) or abandon these for newer forms of Vajrayāna imported to Tibet, such as those flourishing in the Indian monastic universities of Vikramaśilā, Nālandā, Somapura, and elsewhere, such as the Buddhist communities in the Kathmandu Valley and Kashmir. A prime example of this is Khön Könchok Gyalpo’s (1034–1102) tentative abandonment of the Khön clan’s hereditary teachings in favor of the Hevajra and Cakrasaṃvara teachings newly imported to Tibet. The eleventh century also witnessed the rise of the Bön tradition as a viable tradition, even if politically and socially isolated, whose principal Great Perfection teaching is the Aural Lineage of Zhang Zhung.
The evidence suggests that Tibetan Great Perfection adherents did not passively wait out the chaos brought about by the collapse of the Tang dynasty and unrest in Central Asia due to Arab military adventures in the region. This is quite clear, given that Great Perfection texts, tantric rituals, and Chan literature were found side by side on the outskirts of the Tibetan empire in the Dunhuang caves, which were closed in the early eleventh century. In various places in Tibet and Kham, tantric lineages such as Vajrakilāya were actively practiced, and Tibetan adepts such as Vairocana, Yudra Nyingpo, Nubchen Sangyé Yeshé, Aro Yeshé Jungné, and so on, were active in promulgating the teachings of the Great Perfection as a tradition divorced from and superior to the ritualized forms of tantric Buddhism brought to Tibet with royal support during the imperial period. The Great Perfection literature we have received clearly reflects the indigenous interests and needs of a community of Tibetan scholars and practitioners whose time is obscure to us and to Tibetan historians due to internal and external military, political, and social upheaval in and around Tibet between 840 CE and 970 CE.
The Great Perfection’s own narratives across all genres consistently report that the Great Perfection teachings were regarded with trepidation and fear by Tibetan religious and secular elites. The background for this anxiety is the famed Samyé debate between the Indian paṇḍita Kamalaśīla and the Chinese bhikṣu Hashang Mahāyāna, which led to the Tibetan elite’s adoption of the gradualist position of Indian Buddhism as the state-sanctioned form of Buddhism in toto. Consequently, the Great Perfection was promulgated within a limited circle of practitioners who were not afraid to explore the buddhahood that was free from a cause and who had the religious maturity not to use it as an excuse for blatant antinomian conduct.
To contextualize the Great Perfection with the Nyingma school, the latter defines six grades of tantras: a class of three outer tantras—kriyā, ubhaya, and yoga—which lacks a completion stage and mainly focuses on ritual, and a class of three inner tantras—mahāyoga, anuyoga, and atiyoga—which mainly focuses on samādhi. The Nyingma school places tantras such as the Guhyasamāja, Guhyagarbha, and so on, within the category of mahāyoga, which places great emphasis on a gradual process of creation, the imagined construction of a celestial mansion and its deities.
In particular, the Guhyagarbha is considered the basic tantra of the Nyingma school because its thirteenth chapter describes the state of the Great Perfection. Based on this fact and other sources, some Western historians conclude that the Great Perfection did not originally exist as an independent tradition and attempt to locate its origin in this source text, framing the Great Perfection principally as a development of the early reception of the mahāyoga class of tantras. However, they will readily admit this assessment does not find support within the earliest extant commentaries of the tradition of the Great Perfection itself. This view, common among Western historians, is in stark contrast with the traditional Nyingma view, which characterizes the Great Perfection as an independent tradition from the start, with its own texts, lineages, and traditions.
"The meaning of the Great Perfection cannot be reached through exercises in intellectual analysis."
Some of this confusion stems from the fact that the Great Perfection tradition can and does utilize the appearance of Vajrayāna ritualism in conferring empowerments. However, unlike the traditions of mahāyoga and anuyoga, the Great Perfection does not depend on such rituals for its transmission. Instead, the Great Perfection depends on an indispensable transmission of a type of empowerment called “the potentiality of vidyā empowerment” (rig pa’i rtsal dbang), during which the student is introduced to the state of the great perfection through words, symbols, and ultimately through joining the teacher in the same state of knowledge (vidyā). This knowledge is not an ordinary kind of knowledge; rather, it is knowledge of the pristine consciousness that forms the basis for one’s continuum.
Another difference between the Great Perfection and other systems generally classified under the rubric of Vajrayāna is that its underlying theory connected with the basis of purification, purifier, and the result of purification is completely different from that found in the standardized system of four empowerments derived from the later Indian tradition. In general, the basis of purification in mahāyoga is the impure five aggregates, twelve sense bases, and eighteen sense elements. The purifier of the basis of purification is the sequence of visualizations of the maṇḍala that the practitioner runs through systematically. The result of purification is the actualization of the transformation of the impure basis, the sentient being, into a fully awakened buddha. Since the view of the Great Perfection is that all phenomena of the aggregates, sense bases, and sense elements are intrinsically pure from the beginning, the basis of purification is the ignorance (Skt. avidyā, Tib. ma rig pa) that does not recognize this fact. The purifier is direct introduction into this knowledge (Skt. vidyā, Tib. rig pa) by a qualified guru and practicing that knowledge as the path. The result of purification is recognizing one’s innate state of buddhahood.
Lastly, there is a difference regarding deity practices. While Great Perfection cycles do have Vajrayāna deity practices connected with them, those typically exist as ancillary practices for longevity, removing obstacles, and other secondary considerations supportive of the practice of the Great Perfection itself. Thus, the Great Perfection cannot be reduced to merely a branch of Vajrayāna ritualism, especially because of the trenchant critiques the core texts of the Great Perfection make of Vajrayāna methods and goals.
Nor can we reduce the Great Perfection to merely being the culmination of the process of the creation stage and the completion stage. The creation stage amounts to generating and identifying with a complex maṇḍala or even a simple form of a deity such as Avalokiteśvara. The completion stage focuses on dissolving that maṇḍala or deity into the empty mind essence to eliminate self-grasping and includes practices like so-called “inner heat yoga,” various kinds of prāṇāyāma, and even erotic practices. Jamgön Kongtrul, the nineteenth-century doyen of the nonsectarian movement, noted that the Great Perfection cannot be considered a mere add-on to the process of these two stages:
Here, the basis of the stage (rim) of the meditation of atiyoga,
the pinnacle of the nine yānas, is not the culmination of
creation (bskyed), completion (rdzogs), and great completion
(rdzogs pa chen po). When inferred from the term, mahāsandhi
[rdzogs pa chen po] should be translated as mahāsamādhi or
mahādhyāna, meaning that all phenomena of saṃsāra and
nirvāṇa are unsurpassed, self-arisen pristine consciousness
within the dimension of the sole reality, which transcends the
intellectual siddhāntas of the eight lower yānas.
Thus, the insistence of some in asserting that the Great Perfection must be grounded in the mahāyoga tantras translated during the earlier diffusion of Buddhism into Tibet serves only to erase the indigenous voice of this tradition as a whole. When Great Perfection exponents identify the Great Perfection as an independent tradition apart from the ritual traditions of the yoga and mahāyoga tantras, it should be taken seriously.
Moreover, Western academic interest has focused primarily on divining the philosophical underpinnings of the Great Perfection tradition, without acknowledging that the Great Perfection tradition itself eschews the kind of intellectual analysis Western attention is focused upon. Over and over again, practitioners and authors of the Great Perfection tradition tell us that the Great Perfection is not a philosophy and that the meaning of the Great Perfection cannot be reached through exercises in intellectual analysis. The eleventh-century master Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo tells us in his Introduction to Mahāyāna Systems that while the Great Perfection cannot be proven through syllogistic reasoning, neither can it be negated through that same reasoning, summoning the arguments raised against epistemological argumentation by Nāgārjuna. However, the Great Perfection tradition is not anti-intellectual, and its primary and secondary literature devotes some attention to pointing out the deficits of other traditions, non-Buddhist and Buddhist. The purpose of these critiques is to eliminate unwarranted conceptual proliferation, following the tradition of Buddhist siddhānta literature in general.
The primary distinction that the Great Perfection draws between itself and the Buddhism of the yānas is based on the difference between inference and direct perception. The Great Perfection tradition holds that the approach of the Buddhism of the yānas is inferential and analytical, and thus intellectual and conceptual. Since the Great Perfection itself is based on direct perception, it is nonanalytical—thus beyond the intellect—and therefore nonconceptual.
The Great Perfection tradition does not oppose sūtra or Vajrayāna practices. It shares the same existential goal as all Buddhist traditions: ending rebirth caused by affliction and karma. Rather, it opposes the idea that the meaning of the Buddha’s awakening can be reached by relying upon effort and perceiving awakening as a result born of a cause. Nevertheless, in the Cultivation of Bodhicitta composed by Ma.juśrīmitra, one of the five Great Perfection texts brought to Tibet by Vairocana during the late eighth century, there is a reference to an indirect approach for discovering the meaning of the Great Perfection. Great Perfection adepts understood that not everyone can directly enter the knowledge of the state of great perfection beyond cause and result and thus some need a more gradual approach.
"The great bliss of bodhicitta is the root of the Dharma able to expel all illness of bondage."
The interest in resorting to apotropaic and erotic rites found in cycles connected with Vajrakilāya, Guhyagarbha, and so on, does not contradict a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of the cause-and-result approach to Buddhist liberation. As Rongzom notes in the Introduction to Mahāyāna Systems:
The path sought with methods involving effort should be
taught to those who are unable to abide in the approach of the
Great Perfection just as they are. However, that path should
also be connected with the view of the Great Perfection. Why?
Because the great bliss of bodhicitta is the root of the Dharma
able to expel all illness of bondage.
Although a nod is given here to people of lower caliber based upon their inability to readily discern the state of the Great Perfection, the cause-and-result approach of the eight or nine yānas is regarded as merely palliative and ultimately must be seen to be false and abandoned. The subitist rhetoric of the Great Perfection, widely regarded as subversive, panicked Tibetan elites both during the imperial period, leading to the exile of Vairocana, and later at the beginning of the second influx of Indian Buddhism into Tibet. It remains a cause of institutional anxiety to the present day, with the widespread exportation of Vajrayāna to the West.
It should be observed that skepticism about the necessity of practicing the two stages was also quite evident in India as well as Tibet, even in the eighth and ninth centuries. A group of such skeptics—Śrī Siṃha, Padmasambhava’s guru Bhikṣuṇī Nandi, and the Blue-Skirted Paṇḍita, a favorite villain of Tibetan historians—is singled out in a text by the mid-tenth-century Indian scholar Manjuśrīkīrti as an Indian movement that considered the creation stage unnecessary at best. This skepticism is also evident throughout the dohās of mahāsiddhas such as Saraha, Tilopa, and Virūpa and in the circle of Maitrīpa and his students.
In addition to the charge of subitist heresy, we can much better understand the polemical reaction to the Great Perfection during the imperial period and from the eleventh century onward if we begin with Lha Lama YeshéWo’s decree, Refutation of False Mantra (Sngags log sun byin). These later polemics systematically targeted the Great Perfection as an indigenous movement lacking satisfactory sources in Indian Buddhist traditions, criticizing it alongside the deviations attributed to the Blue- Skirted Paṇḍita, Ācārya Marpo, and other villains of Tibetan history.
The influential eleventh-century translator Gö Khugpa Lhetse claims in his Refutation of False Mantra that Vairocana forged the five earlymind series texts, stating that when the forgery was discovered, Vairocana was exiled by the king and ministers to the kingdom of Gyalrong in east Tibet. Gö accusesNub Sangyé Yeshé of composing many false teachings and similarly targets Aro Yeshé Jungné. The thirteenth-century translator Chag Lotsawa echoes these complaints, claiming that Vairocana composed the five early mind series texts motivated by pride, asserting in general that these early adepts were conflating non-Buddhist and Bönpo tenets with Buddhist tenets, thereby creating false doctrines. Chag Lotsawa also targets the Chö of Machik Labdrön, illustrating that from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, elite Buddhist scholars also held newer indigenous forms of tantric Buddhism, as well as the Great Perfection, in extremely low regard. These polemics stifled the open dissemination of the Great Perfection movement, especially from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, and forced its adherents underground, who then pretended to observe the norms promulgated by Tibetan exponents of newfangled Indian Vajrayāna.
As the mainstream Buddhist institutions in Tibet forged ahead receiving and formulating the Buddhism of the day as it was found by them in the monasteries and universities of India that flourished during the Pāla dynasty, some tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-century Great Perfection adherents responded with their own polemics. These rebuttals were largely ignored, and the works of these authors barely survived, quickly subsiding into obscurity. Religious movements generally only rise to prominence with the support of the elite, the Great Perfection being no exception to this rule. The Great Perfection only began to regain respectability during the fourteenth century due to the patronage of important and wealthy religious figures such as the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé, Tai Situ Changchub Gyaltsen, and others.
An unfortunate side effect of the derogation of the Great Perfection tradition from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries was the loss of so much of its early literature. However, despite the general institutional hostility observable in the Kadampa, Sakya, and even Kagyü traditions toward the Great Perfection in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the Great Perfection tradition was preserved through the promulgation of several subaltern strands of aural lineage traditions isolated from and largely invisible to the main centers of institutional Buddhism. Despite the efforts of the so-called “nonsectarian movement” in modern times, hostility, indifference, and skepticism toward the Great Perfection has hardly abated among the larger Tibetan Buddhist institutions, apart from the Nyingma and Bön traditions, and its own narratives have met with skepticism.
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Experience for the first time in English the aural lineage of the Great Perfection Dzogchen tradition, expertly brought to life by the practitioner and translator Ācārya Malcolm Smith. Longchen Rabjam, or Longchenpa as he is popularly known, stands as one of the great Nyingma masters of Tibetan Buddhism, producing a wealth of texts in the Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, tradition. This volume presents eight texts found in two collections of Longchenpa’s writings—the Lama Yangtig and the Zabmo Yangtig. These texts record a special experiential tradition of Great Perfection teachings by Chetsun Sengé Wangchuk to a single student in the eleventh century, a tradition passed down mouth-to-ear, one student at a time, until it was set down in writing by Longchenpa in the mid-fourteenth century. Yoga of the Natural State: The Dzogchen Aural Lineage is an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in Great Perfection theory and practice.
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