The Three Qualifications
Roaring Silence Ch.1 names three human qualifications required to approach Dzogchen: humor, inspiration, determination. With these, the “impossibility of Dzogchen does not preclude the possibility of entering its living ethos.”
Humor
We need humor in order to avoid taking ourselves quite so seriously; we need to be able to laugh at the fact that we continually create our own unenlightened condition.
- Humor is what allows the practitioner to sit with the comedy of personal dualism.
- Specifically: humor is what allows a Lama to “conjure with” that dualism to the student’s advantage — without it, the relationship has nowhere to go.
- The opposite of humor here is not seriousness but self-importance — the inability to find one’s own unenlightened condition funny.
Inspiration
Inspiration can only arise out of the sense in which something is possible. We have to catch a glimpse of “something” or we have to catch a glimpse of “no-thing.”
- Inspiration is the suspicion that there is something to be discovered — or, equivalently, a no-thing to be discovered.
- Looking for information, picking up a book, attending a talk, reading these pages — all are already evidence of inspiration. You would not be here without it.
- What feeds inspiration is the practice itself: “the experiment of shi-nè.”
Determination
Determination is actually a mark of self-respect, a mark of innate dignity.
- Determination is what keeps the practitioner on the path once humor and inspiration have done their work.
- Framing: if one has glimpsed the possibility of something remarkable, “no one with the requisite potential is going to slink back to the degraded confines of a bland experiential suburbia.”
- Determination stems naturally from humor and inspiration — it is not a separate faculty to cultivate independently; it is what arises once the other two are in place.
Why These Three
These are human qualifications, not spiritual attainments. The authors do not ask the reader to have faith, be moral, be calm, be concentrated, or be wise. They ask for three dispositions that are already available to an interested adult. The surprising claim is that these three are sufficient to begin — because Dzogchen’s base is the primordial state of the individual, already present; what is needed is not acquisition but the courage and lightness to approach.
What They Are Not
- Not moral purity.
- Not ritual preparation (compare Tantric Ngöndro for a very different ordering).
- Not intellectual understanding — though the view will be encountered intellectually at first.
- Not devotion — devotion arises within the Lama relationship (see Testing the Teacher), which the qualifications prepare one to seek.
Related
- Shi-nè — the “experiment” through which inspiration is fed
- Base of Dzogchen — what the three qualifications prepare one to reach
- Testing the Teacher — what the Lama relationship requires once the qualifications have brought one to it
- Roaring Silence - 01 Sky and Mind — source