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Dzogchen

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Dzogchen

Dzogchen (Tib. rDzogs chen) means utter totality — also translated “great completion,” “great completeness,” or “great perfection.” It is the pinnacle of the Nyingma teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism.

Key Points

  • Utter totality is a term applied to the teaching, to the practice, and to the intrinsic condition of the individual — these are not three different referents but one.
  • Ch.5 gloss: “uncreated self-existent completeness.” Three words, each load-bearing: uncreated — not produced by practice (practice uncovers); self-existent — needing no reference point outside itself (Reference Points); completeness — not lacking, as the sense of incompleteness has no basis when sought directly.
  • The enlightened state is already there as the basis of what we are. “There is nothing to change — nothing to give up or alter in any way.”
  • The entire instruction can be given in five words: remain in the natural state.
  • The paradox: the natural state is so close, so accessible, so present, so simple that — for complex beings — it is unreachable by any means that resembles what we usually mean by “direct.” Hence the need for view, meditation, and action.
  • Three series of Dzogchen: Sem-dé (Mind series), Long-dé (Space series), Men-ngag-dé (Secret-instruction series). Roaring Silence treats the Sem-dé preliminaries.
  • The base must be reached to enter. Dzogchen has as its base the experience of nonduality — at minimum “a series of brief flashes.” Without the base, methods are “merely affectations” and the practitioner is “barred from the path by the path itself.” Ngöndro (symbolic via Tantric Ngöndro, or nonsymbolic via Four Naljors) is the route to the base.
  • Lion’s roar (seng-gé’i dra) is the metaphor for Dzogchen’s declaration of natural simplicity — self-existent proclamation of self-existent confidence, needing no reference points.
  • The Buddha of Dzogchen (first human teacher) is Garab Dorje; for the Aro gTér cycle, Yeshé Tsogyel holds this position.

Ch.7 — Limitlessness Beyond Oceanic and Individuated Experience

Ch.7 adds the sharpest single-sentence view-formulation in Part Two:

“The experience of enlightenment goes beyond both oceanic and individuated experience and enters into limitlessness, in which such distinctions are meaningless.”

Three structural specifications this adds to the Dzogchen view:

  • Not regression. Dzogchen is not a return to infantile merger (oceanic experience without individuation). “Nondual perception does not regress toward infantilism.”
  • Not oscillation. Dzogchen is not a balanced middle-point, skillful alternation, or dialectical synthesis that preserves the polarity. “Neither does it oscillate between polarized perceptions of reality.”
  • Limitlessness. Dzogchen is the register in which the oceanic/individuated polarity itself is meaningless — not because both poles are dissolved into a third but because the polarity was only ever an artifact of dualistic vision.

See Oceanic Experience for the polarity’s elaboration; Fluxing Web for the ontology in which the polarity’s dualism is foreclosed; Divorced Individuation for the specific pathology of ordinary adult perception within the polarity.

”Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form” — The Ch.7 Deployment

Ch.7 uses the Heart Sutra formulation to name Dzogchen’s alternative to the two conventional religious views (merge-with vs. eternal-separateness-from):

“This possibility is one in which form is emptiness and emptiness is form. In this possibility, patterns continually change. Form emerges from chaos and dissolves back into chaos — chaos and form dance a beginningless dance in which each reflects the other.”

Three points:

  • Dzogchen is a recognition, not a doctrine. The Heart Sutra formula is recognized as the case, not believed as the position.
  • Patterns continually change. The view is dynamic (the fluxing web).
  • Beginningless dance. Chaos and form dance beginninglessly — no origin-story, no creation, no starting point to explain the present.

Dzogchen View in Relation to Intellect

Dzogchen is not anti-intellectual but treats intellect as form — and therefore limited. Intellect is a sense (see Thought as Sense), not the headquarters of cognition. The view uses intellect to dissolve intellect’s monopoly on interpretation: “As soon as we integrate the view, the view disappears and becomes knowledge.”

The capacity for intellect itself arises from emptiness; to have free intellect one must move beyond intellect.

Pragmatic Stance

The view is tested in the laboratory of personal experience. The metaphor given in the Introduction: the pragmatism of lighting a fire — “no one ever got colder sitting in front of a fire. And no one ever succeeded in making a fire using pebbles and river water.” Dzogchen is a technology of being, not a belief system.

What Dzogchen is Not

  • Not a system of purification of a flawed self toward an improved self — there is no flaw to purify in this frame.
  • Not a philosophy to believe. “Belief in Buddhism is not required, nor for that matter is there a need to believe in anything” (re: shi-nè).
  • Not available through effort or struggle. Manipulation and struggle are precisely what obscure it.
  • Not attainable without transmission in its deeper practice — “the actual practice of Dzogchen will bear no fruit” without a qualified Lama.

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