Yoga of the Natural State

The Dzogchen Aural Lineage

Yoga of the Natural State will be released on December 9th. It is already available from Wisdom Publications, as a hard copy or an ebook.

Here is an extract from the Introduction:

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.