Aro gTér Dzogchen and Tantra Teachings Wiki

Base of Dzogchen

4 min read

The Base of Dzogchen

The base (or starting point) of Dzogchen is the experience of nonduality. It is what ngöndro — whether Four Naljors or Tantric ngöndro — exists to deliver. Without it, Dzogchen methods are “merely affectations.”

Key Claims

  • Nonduality is the base of Dzogchen. “Emptiness is the base of Tantra. The nondual state is the base of Dzogchen.”
  • The requirement is minimal but real. “This experience may simply consist of a series of brief flashes — but the experience must be there or one will merely flounder.”
  • Self-existent, not tradition-imposed. The demand is “not imposed by Dzogchen as a Tibetan tradition — [it is] a self-existent demand. If one does not meet these self-existent demands, one will be barred from the path by the path itself.”
  • Primordial qualification holds anyway. Because the natural state is the primordial condition of the individual, “everyone is primordially qualified as having the requisite base.” Latent capacities from past-life experience mean the flashes can arise unpredictably.
  • Reached by the Lama’s recommended route. “If one wishes to practice Dzogchen, one has to arrive at its base — by whatever means is recommended by one’s Lama.”

Why This Is Not Elitism

The authors are emphatic: the base requirement is not a membership test and not a ranking of practitioners by attainment. It is a structural feature of the teaching. Dzogchen methods presuppose that the nondual base is at least occasionally accessible to the practitioner; if it is not, the methods have nothing to operate on. This is compared to sexual maturity (Khandro Déchen’s analogy): children cannot usefully imitate adult sexual behavior not because they are deficient but because the underlying base is not yet there.

If one has not reached the experiential maturity that encompasses nonduality — if only at the level of nascent tasting — then one cannot practice the outer form of the methods. (Khandro Déchen)

How the Base Is Reached

The chapter names two routes:

  1. Tantric Ngöndro — symbolic. The fourfold 100,000 practices. Characterized by the vehicle of Tantra.
  2. Four Naljors — nonsymbolic. The Sem-dé ngöndro of the Aro gTér cycle. Characterized by the vehicle of Dzogchen.

Both, practiced to fruition, deliver the practitioner to the nondual base. The Lama’s instruction determines which route.

Other routes exist — “there is no fixed, conceptually based law that dictates the exact nature of what will bring a person to the necessary base of experience. Different traditions make different requirements.”

The Base’s Status Relative to the Path

  • The base is not full enlightenment. It is the experiential condition under which the Dzogchen methods can be practiced as Dzogchen.
  • The base is the target of the Four Naljors (Ch.1 footnote 4: “The starting point or base of Dzogchen is the experience of nonduality, and this is the goal that is attained through the Four Naljors”).
  • The path that opens from the base is the remainder of the Dzogchen curriculum: the deepening through Sem-dé, on into Long-dé and Men-ngag-dé, toward stable abiding in the natural state.

Relation to Mi-thogpa

Ch.1 footnote 1 identifies emptiness in this context with mi-thogpa — the state without thought. Experientially, the Tantric base (emptiness) and the Dzogchen base (nonduality) are not strangers: the nondual taste arises in mi-thogpa, when thought’s occlusive monopoly on cognition thins.

Graph View

Backlinks