# Prof. David Francis Germano - "The Great Perfection (rdzogs chen)"

**Channel:** Rangjung Yeshe Institute
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUpSXGu-aa8
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/uUpSXGu-aa8

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Introducción y presentación del ponente
- 3:21 — Qué es la Gran Perfección
- 10:12 — Problemas para escribir su historia
- 19:50 — Tradición como mundo de vida
- 25:07 — Nombres y series de Dzogchen
- 30:16 — Fuentes textuales y tantras clave
- 39:14 — Cosmología y mundos sagrados
- 43:58 — Agentes metafísicos y linajes
- 51:39 — Narrativas del origen y fin
- 54:26 — Iconografía e iniciaciones
- 59:26 — Filosofía elemental de Dzogchen
- 1:03:32 — Awareness, muerte y liberación
- 1:07:43 — Ética, práctica y actividad búdica
- 1:11:34 — Cierre de la exposición principal
- 1:12:57 — Preguntas sobre libros y autenticidad
- 1:31:25 — Preguntas sobre fuentes e historia
- 1:39:13 — Experiencia en comunidades tibetanas
- 1:47:12 — Debate final sobre origen y visión

## Transcript

**[0:00] Speaker A:** So today we have the great pleasure of having Germano talk with us about his research on Dzogchen. So just to give a little bit of information about David Germano, although many of you know him, I've quoted him in their papers. So, David Germano teaches and researches Tibetan and Buddhist studies at the University of Virginia where he is a professor, as well as directs the Tibetan Center. He has lived for years in Tibetan communities where he has studied Buddhist philosophy and contemplation, extensive community engagement work.

**[0:48] Speaker A:** His personal scholarship has focused on the the Great Perfection tradition and its many dimensions. So for over a decade, he led large scale exploration of contemplative ideas, values, practices in relationship to scientific frameworks and creative application in higher education in service of facilitating student flourishing. I'm thinking, Sanjay, that might be a good reference for you for your paper. Yeah. All right.

**[1:21] Speaker A:** Currently he leads the Generative Contemplative Initiative, which explores contemplation as a generative human capacity with distinctive lexicon, grammars and context, and considers how we can design better contemplative futures. And this is very pertinent for our education here since we have a contemplative education. So thank you for coming and welcome.

**[1:52] Speaker B:** Okay. Well, thank you so much, Diane, for that kind introduction. And it's really great to be here today at Rangchung Yeshay. I think this was in fact the first Tibetan monastery I ever stepped foot in, which was a long time ago. But it's great to be back here and see so many people studying Tibetan and Buddhist forms of knowledge.

**[2:12] Speaker B:** Now, my talk today is going to be a little different from a typical academic talk. It's not so much a reasoned argumentation as it is a kind of set of reflections for me that have accumulated over the years of living and working and thinking and meditating with this specific tradition of Tibetan Buddhism named the Great Perfection, or Sokchen Sokpachembo. And in particular, I'm just going to think a little bit about what it means to be a tradition or what it means to be a life world in a particular tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

**[2:52] Speaker B:** Sorry, this is going to be a little challenging for me because these controls are still sitting on top of my presentation.

**[3:05] Speaker B:** Sorry, I.

**[3:13] Speaker B:** Man try to move them down. Okay, sorry about that.

**[3:21] Speaker B:** So we'll start with what is the Great Perfection? What is Socjin? I know that people in the room run the gamut from those who know this very well and those who maybe know nothing at all. And so I'm just going to give you the briefest of orientations before we Go way off the deep end for. For an. Oops, I gotta get my clock started. So I kind of keep on time. Just a second.

**[3:52] Speaker B:** Sorry.

**[3:57] Speaker B:** Okay, so what is the Great Perfection? In the long history of Buddhism across Asia, there's been a persistent strand in different geographical regions of traditions that value the ideas and practices of effortlessness, non conceptuality, spontaneity, self emergence, the very term that governs this institute, Rang Chun, and instantaneous realization. These traditions tend to focus on the nature of mind and stressing what is most essential, criticizing extraneous elaborations according to them, in philosophy, ritual and meditation. And the most famous or potentially infamous of these traditions have been the Great Seal or the Mahamudra Tradition, which developed in India and then further developed in Tibet, the Meditation tradition in China and Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Chinese Chan or Japanese Zen, and then the Great Perfection Tradition, or Tsokpa Chimpo, which developed above all else in Tibet itself. Now, the historical record shows evidence of the Great Perfection in the late 8th century Tibet in a variety of texts that initially evoke the natural purity of the enlightened mind of Bodhicitta and this luminous Buddha nature which is present in all living beings.

**[5:25] Speaker B:** And as a consequence of that stress, it critiques the artificiality and the questionable utility of Buddhist ritual, Buddhist meditation, Buddhist ethics, Buddhist philosophy. And so the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism came to consider the Great Perfection, which in one way is synonymous with ata Yoga, and in other ways is not, as we'll talk about in a moment, as the pinnacle of all of their traditions and in their traditional ranking of these different vehicles, these self contained sets of theory and practice that could take someone from ordinary existence or Samsara to extraordinary existence or Nirvana, they had a classic ninefold ranking, from early Buddhism to ata Yoga or so, with Sochen being the ninth and culminating vehicle of all nine. And this was also true in the Bumpo tradition of Tibetan religion and philosophy. And we've also seen adherence over time in Tibet to the Great Perfection in other sectarian traditions, although primarily it's been the Nyingma and the Bumpo traditions, the Third Karmapa, Rang Chung Dorje being a particularly famous example, and the Fifth Dalai Lama in the Gluc traditions being another famous example of an inherent from outside the Nyingma and Bumpo traditions.

**[6:53] Speaker B:** Now, I want to go over a few kinds of problems when we're trying to think about the history of the Great Perfection or the history of Dzogchen, because from the 8th century until the 21st century, today it's gone through a series of stunning transformations. And people will tell you, oh, this is so. That's so. But I can tell you that when we look at sokchen in the 8th century or the 11th century or the 14th century with the great Nyingma, Saint Longchampa, or later in the 18th century with Jigme Lingpa, or in the 21st century, these are profoundly different traditions in terms of thought, in terms of practice, in terms of orientation. And so we start with this problem of just extreme diversity.

**[7:44] Speaker B:** Diversity, meaning the philosophy is different, the cosmologies are different, the rituals are different, the meditations are different. And so that's a kind of key animating issue for this talk today. Namely, what binds all these together? How do we make sense in writing a global history, over 1400 years, of a tradition that goes through so many changes over time? And in particular, I'm going to focus on a specific tradition of the Great Perfection, because there are many and each one has a different name.

**[8:17] Speaker B:** And sometimes those names will say, oh, this is much better than the Great Perfection. And then later we say, oh, that's the Great Perfection. But when you look back at their own text, they say, no, we're better than the Great Perfection. I mean, everybody's always better than someone in Tibetan Buddhism. So.

**[8:32] Speaker B:** But I want to look at the Ningtic tradition, which is translated in different ways. Sometimes people translate as heart drop, sometimes I translate as the seminal heart. But that tradition emerged in the 11th century in Tibet and came to be the dominant tradition throughout time. Even if you don't see the name itself, it dominates all forms of the Great Perfection by the 14th century and right into the present.

**[9:00] Speaker B:** Now, these striking transformations that happen are not typically acknowledged by contemporary Tibetan authors or Tibetan teachers or Tibetan teachers and authors. Over time, sometimes you'll see references to, oh, practices have been discontinued or texts have been lost or transmissions become attenuated. But there's not really a great Tibetan history that just sits down and says, oh, this fundamentally changed, that fundamentally changed, and tries to make sense of of all these changes. In addition, these extraordinary innovations of the Great Perfection are largely deferred to Indian agency. The claim is that all of this happened in India and Tibetans did very little.

**[9:45] Speaker B:** That's not my view at all. In my view, one of the really beautiful, powerful, compelling things about the Great Perfection is how profoundly Tibetan it is. Tibetan in so many ways, of the Tibetan soil, of the Tibetan imagination, of the Tibetan language, of Tibetan culture. It's not something that transcends those. It's something that was born of those and makes sense in that context.

**[10:12] Speaker B:** And so I'm going to give you Basically, I think 16 or 17 different dimensions of the great perfection. And keeping in mind that the broader goal is to think about what constitutes a tradition in its fullest form. And so a few of these problems, in addition to the kind of extreme diversity, is doxographies. Now doxography literally means writing the view and it's a term that we use to translate often this Tibetan word for drupta, where you rank different Buddhist, philosophical and practice oriented systems into a kind of inferior to superior. And so the Nyingma tradition has many different doxographies of different great perfection traditions.

**[11:01] Speaker B:** And I'm going to go through those in a second. And they have different names and they rank, oh, this is the most important. Sokchen's the best or so's inferior. ATI is best, but ATI is inferior. Yangti is better than ati, et cetera, et cetera. So many different names. The problem with this, in addition to all these different names is you can't trust any of them. Why can't you trust them? Because the doxographies are often fabricated. They're way after the fact.

**[11:28] Speaker B:** They're like three centuries later, someone trying to make sense of what happened in the 11th century. Think about what's going on right now in the 21st century and someone in the 24th century trying to make sense of it. Well, that's what we're seeing with doxographies. People hundreds of years later is trying to make sense of the historical record and say, oh, this is cool, is called this, this is called that. Then you look back at the actual text that talk about these traditions and they never use those names.

**[11:56] Speaker B:** So doxographies are inherently limited, they're important to understand, but they're contrived, they're fabricated, they're after the fact often, etc. Etc. Now then there's the standard problem for anybody who works in the kind of ancient Tibetan past, which is we have so many unknown figures, so many lost texts, so many opaque context. Who were these people, what were they doing, what did they care about? And then so much limited scholarship.

**[12:27] Speaker B:** Now when I first came to Nepal, believe me, that was limited scholarship. I mean, there were no dictionaries, There were no PDFs, there were no recordings of things. There were all, none of these translations were present and so forth. And like it was just insane. I mean, you had to sit there and just, you're like, what is this, and you had so little to draw upon. Now you have a wealth to draw upon, and yet it's still extraordinarily limited compared to what we have in the Tibetan historical record. And that's particularly true as you go back in time. So when you go back to one of my periods, 11th and 12th century, so many texts have been lost. We know so little about the individuals involved in, and we know so little about the context. And so when we try to reimagine and recreate and kind of re understand these life worlds of these traditions, we're inherently limited in our work.

**[13:21] Speaker B:** Now, another great problem with doing this kind of global history of a tradition like Dzogen is the treasure tradition, this tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, particularly among the Ningma sect, where the idea is that there was so many traditions and texts and so forth in the 8th century, in the early 9th century, in the imperial Tibet period, and these texts weren't transmitted to anyone, and they were concealed in the Tibetan earth and in the soil of Tibetan minds, who then later in reincarnated form, would retrieve these treasures from the Tibetan landscape or the Tibetan mind and so forth Tibetan bodies. The problem with these is then, if you take them at face value, what you have is a completely flattened history. You have hundreds of years in Tibet of the development of these traditions that have all been flattened to Indian agency in the 8th century.

**[14:19] Speaker B:** And so often it's not even like many of the texts we have, they're anonymous. Like, we don't even know who was supposed to have written them or revealed them or transmitted them.

**[14:29] Speaker B:** And so they just circulated anonymously for many years. Texts would just show up and they would be introduced in the 10th century, 11th century. And then often you have texts where the colophons have. I mean, colophons, you know, these little pieces of the text that come at the end of the text and tell you, like, who wrote this, who transmitted this, who revealed this, etc, completely unreliable. I mean, if you look at the historical record, you'll find this is a treasure revelation.

**[14:56] Speaker B:** The same text, treasure revelation. The colophons are all completely different. And so colophons are often changed constantly over time. They're subjects of competing attempts to package the revelations and to explain where they come from and so forth. So colophons are a very complex thing.

**[15:17] Speaker B:** And so one of the things that I did, like, initially everybody was saying, oh, who cares? It's like the great minds, like, you know, a public broadcasting special where all these people show up from different periods and just talk to each other. But I believe in time, I believe in history. I believe in the value of understanding what Tibetans were doing and who they were and what their agency was and what they were reacting to and what they cared about. And so retrieving that picture is an extremely difficult one.

**[15:45] Speaker B:** And it's also difficult to do in the face of treasure revelations without just taking an arrogant attitude, which I won't mention names, but I can think of names in my mind of people who have done that, who just say, oh, what a bunch of charming rogues, you know, these treasure finders and so forth. But we all know they just made this stuff up. And so we'll just ignore all that and just figure out what the dates and times and so forth are and reconstruct it. I think that's, that's a foolhardy venture and certainly one that's deeply colonial and imperialistic in character. So how do you balance these two things? Trying to respect the traditional and its own self understanding and very different practices of authorship and transmission and so forth, while also respecting the kind of desire to do historical work and understand who Tibetans were and what they were doing over time.

**[16:41] Speaker B:** Another problem is the remixing of text. You're all familiar with the notion of remixing. I mean, Tibetans in general and Nygmas in particular remix the hell out of their text. And so you often think like, oh, it's incredible, Longchamp is so incredible, or this figure is so incredible doing such interesting work. And then you find out that someone else wrote that 400 years ago and all the person that you thought was so incredible was doing was remixing it. Sometimes that means reproducing it. Sometimes when I get really frustrated, I think it means reproducing with errors, you know, but sometimes it's a creative reproduction, it's like 50, 50 or sometimes it's a 9010 to 10% is the 10% of errors or 10% of their own original contribution. So it's extraordinarily difficult to figure out who actually did what, when, when was the genesis of these ideas and practices.

**[17:36] Speaker B:** And we're, we're often just so tricked by thinking, oh, I read this and I was so compelled by it. And so he, he did it or she did it. Then you find out that no, there's this endless tracing back of that text, not just the ideas and practices, but the actual text. And so that's another challenge in doing this work. Then the final two issues are, as I mentioned, the seminal heart. I remember once a famous Scholar told me, oh, you're such a Seminal heart fascist or something, you know, you think everything about the Great Perfection is the seminal heart.

**[18:07] Speaker B:** And I was like, where do I start? It's because it's true, because the Seminal heart was born in obscure circumstances in the 11th century and completely took over the Great Perfection tradition. There is no Great Perfection tradition from the 14th century onward that wasn't touched and shaped and formed by it. So reconstructing that history, then finally there's external. Gotta move this control again, there's external circumstances and influences.

**[18:42] Speaker B:** The Nyingma and the Boon traditions deeply intertwined with each other. Anybody who says otherwise, it's just ideology. I mean, when you look back at the historical record and you look at early Bunpo Sokchen text and early Nyingma text, this is a single tradition, a tradition with differences for sure, but one that has profound sharing in so many ways of actual text, of practices, of ideas, of terms and so forth. And the other one, of course, is Sarma, the. The kind of new traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, 11th century, which are explosively growing and bringing all these new Tantric ideas which are deeply influential for the creators of Dzogchen 11th and 12th century, they just don't acknowledge it.

**[19:26] Speaker B:** They don't say, oh, having read the Hevajra Tantra, I'm going to do this. And yet it's clearly exactly what they did. They looked at the Hivajra tantra, the Chakras and Vara tantra, the Kalachakra Tantra, above all, an extraordinarily influential document for the Ningma tradition, even though they never talk about it. And so there's all these hidden external influences that are happening as well.

**[19:50] Speaker B:** Okay, with that in mind, I'm going to ask this question over the course of the Next, I guess 43 minutes is what I have left, which is what is a tradition?

**[20:05] Speaker B:** What is a life world? There are many different words we can refer to in Tibetan. There's words like Luke, which means a system or a tradition, a Guba lineage, a Takeba, a self contained vehicle that takes you from Samsara to Nirvana, a Chuluk, a system of Dharma sect, a Drupta, a tenant system, etc, now when you study philosophical systems in, in Tibetan Buddhism, like you often do here at Rangchung, Yeshay, Madhyamaka, Yogachara, Abidharma, it's very easy to be tricked into thinking, oh, it's just a philosophical discourse. And I can just understand the philosophical discourse. That's a completely diluted way to think. I'M so sorry. Like all of these things have. Are part of a broader life world. And that life world is complex and has so many different elements to it, parts of the body, of society, of cosmology, et cetera. And when you re.

**[20:59] Speaker B:** When you study the Great Perfection, it's very hard. That is impossible, if you actually know the language and study the tradition, to not see that that's the tradition. It's not simply the practices, it's not simply the nature of mind or some philosophical discourse. It's all these different dimens. And that's really what my presentation is about. I'm going to give you. I can't remember 15, 16, 17. If I don't get to the end, who cares? Because at one hour I'm going to finish this talk. I'm going to go as far as I can.

**[21:31] Speaker B:** So first of all, we have labels of identity. The tradition calls itself something, it names itself something. And we're going to go through the different ways in which the Great Perfection tradition named itself, including not calling itself the Great Perfection, and these doxographies, these ways of creating different schemes about how the different sub traditions are related to each other. Number two, Part of that tradition of Tibetan Buddhism is the scriptural bases. What are the scriptures that they call authoritative? What are the literary genres that drive their textual creation? Number three, what are the lineages? What are the transmissions from divine Buddhas into a lama today? And who are the primary agents, spiritual agents, human agents, non human agents? Number four, who are the institutions or what are the institutions and groups, the monasteries, the clans, the social groups that govern this tradition?

**[22:27] Speaker B:** Number five, what are the narratives, what are the stories that are absolutely essential to these traditions? Number five. Six. Sorry, what are the cosmologies? How do they understand the universe?

**[22:40] Speaker B:** One of the interesting things about the Dzogchen Ningti tradition is they created their entirely unique, different cosmology. Little obscure group in the 11th century starts producing text and says, and here's an utterly different way to understand the history of space and time.

**[22:58] Speaker B:** Number seven, who are the key metaphysical agents? Kind of going back to that first one, but focusing on non human spiritual agents, Iconographies, what are the artistic traditions, sculpture, manuscripts, visual arts? What are the initiatory systems? Number 10. What are the ethical systems, vows, commitments, conduct?

**[23:25] Speaker B:** Number 11. What are the theories and philosophies? Just one of these many interlocking strands? Number 12. What are the rituals and meditations, the spiritual practices?

**[23:35] Speaker B:** Number 13. What are the thanatologies, the ways of understanding death and dying and rebirth number 14, what are the models of Buddhahood? And number 15, what are distinctive terminologies? So I'm going to briefly look over every one of these 15 with regards to the great perfection, to give you some sense of the life world of Dzogchen over time and its diversity and its scope and its reach. And, you know, one of the things to go back to that idea of these traditions like Mahamudra so and Chan, and the way they talk about simplicity and non conceptuality and, you know, scholasticism, so contrived and fabricated and so forth.

**[24:16] Speaker B:** When you look at the history of Dzogchen, there are tens of thousands of pages about complex philosophies and complex rituals and meditations and thought systems and initiatory systems and narratives and everything else. So don't be fooled. And so the question is not like, how can you just strip everything down to nothing, but rather, how do you navigate this complex tension between simplicity and complexity without being overwhelmed by complexity, and yet without just becoming this kind of threadbare, austere simplicity, which really sounds a lot like life? And that's the story of Dzogchen. It's a story of simplicity and complexity, not a story of just simplicity.

**[25:07] Speaker B:** So I don't really need to look at my notes, but doxography. So, Silk Chen, one of the many problems is it has so many different words that historically it was used to refer to itself. And so. So yoga for different traditions, they'll just say, oh, there's this tradition of something, and they'll put a person's name or a geographical region or whatever, or they'll often use the word series or cycle, and often they'll use the word vehicle. Like, we often think the great perfection is just one vehicle. It's the ninth vehicle. Look, back in the historical record, there were many vehicles. They would say, oh, the son vehicle, the UTI vehicle, the ATI yoga vehicle. And they would say, oh, this vehicle is better than that vehicle. And sometimes you're left wondering, God, how many vehicles do you need?

**[25:56] Speaker B:** Or were these vehicles even real? And sometimes it's not clear they were real, but sometimes it's very clear they were real. Real meaning people were actually transmitting them and they had distinctive text and distinctive practices. Now, the earliest tradition comes to be called the mind oriented. It's this tradition of dzochen in the 8th century and 9th century that focuses more on.

**[26:19] Speaker B:** On the enlightened mind or bodhichitta, or the nature of the mind. And it's not always totally clear what its practices are or what its constructive Thought is and so forth. And its sub traditions are generally called just traditions like the, the Boda tradition, you know, or the Karma Yeshay tradition and so forth. But over time, in the 9th century, 10th century, 11th century, 12th century, so goes through all these rapid transformations and they begin to organize them as early as the 11th century into the idea of three series. The earliest tradition called the Mind series, the middle level tradition called the Space series. And the latest, the most complex, cutting edge tradition, the one with the most incorporation of Tantric ideas and practices and theories, the one I'm going to talk about today called the experiential precept series. And within these, within the experiential precept series, you have more phases of different kinds of Dzogchen, the outer cycle, the inner cycle, the secret cycle, the unsurpassed cycle.

**[27:23] Speaker B:** And the unsurpassed cycle is identified with the Ningtic tradition. But all these others have their own scriptures, their own ideas. And you can kind of trace the historical development of these and you can begin to see what do they care about?

**[27:37] Speaker B:** What are they responding to. I mean, sometimes, sure, you could look at it and say they're just arguing over power, privilege and lineage, but often they're arguing about compelling issues, issues that there were sincere disagreements about, about the nature of mind or the nature of practice or whether we should even have these things in. So one of the most famous Nyingma figures in the history of Tibet, nangrel Nima Wuser, 12th century, like a towering figure, he created the Padma Sambhava literature, He created the Avalokiteshvara literature, he created the literature of the Tibetan imperial period. He created in foundational ways the Maha Yoga tradition of Ningma Buddhism. And he was an apostle of a particular type of Dzogchen, which he called Chiti, which means the crown pith.

**[28:28] Speaker B:** And for him so did not need all these complex meditations that are so dominant later on, did not need all these complex philosophical discourses. He was like, keep the blood and violence and sexuality and eroticism and meditative techniques out of Tokechen. Wasn't that he was critical of them. He was a Maha Yoga figure first and foremost. And so there was lots of like sublimation of violence and sexuality and death into these complex rituals and subjugatory practices and so forth. But he felt so was something that should be kept clean of those. And yet other figures in the 12th century completely disagreed. So there were compelling differences of vision. And so we have this other organization, a different organization into ATI Chiti, and Yangti, the three piths, which, as I said, Nangwel. Nima Wasser was a big advocate of the Chiti tradition in the 13th century.

**[29:26] Speaker B:** One of the greatest Ningmapas, Guru Chuki Wangchuk, was an advocate of the Yangti tradition, but it turns out that he was also someone who was secretly reflecting influences of the Ningtik tradition. And then within these, there's also all these further complex ones. It's just a very. Like. Just the very shallow surface. The Brahmin tradition of Tibet, of Dzogchen, the. The black pith tradition, the Yangtinakpo, which became very important later for the dark retreats and so forth, and so many others. It's just really endless. And again, the idea that they're all soak Chen, that's a later retroactive fabrication that we make in the time period. People were saying, no, we're not so chin. We're this. And later we say, oh, it's all so.

**[30:16] Speaker B:** So number two, scriptural basis. What's the scriptural basis of the tradition? I mentioned the problems with kind of textuality. One is citation. You know, we often think, God, look how learned this person was. He read so many books. No, no, no. It's called the recycling of citations.

**[30:34] Speaker B:** Tibetan authors constantly recycled citations. And it's very clear they didn't read the book in question. And so we don't know. Just because someone cites something that they read the book, it just means they read a book that cited something that may or may not have read the book. They may have been citing someone else who cited something else, who cited something else. And it was like 500 years ago someone read that book. Also intertextuality, like I mentioned so often you find, like, pages, chapters, whole books that end up being intertextuality from centuries ago. So it's nothing at all to do with the 15th century, except that they still found it current. Rather, the genesis was in the 12th century and unacknowledged influences. One of the characteristics of Dzogchen Tantras is what's called the double introductory scenario.

**[31:21] Speaker B:** You know, all Buddhist sutras and tantras begin with an introductory scenario. It's the narrative scene set, you know, in early sutras. It's like the Buddha was traveling in Varanasi and this situation happened and these people were present, and the time was this time in his life. And here's the teaching he gave. It's called the five Sublime excellences.

**[31:42] Speaker B:** And over time, they preserve that idea. In the Tantras and later sutras, the Mahayana Perfection of Wisdom sutras. And they constantly would say, let's start the sutra by telling you, who is this teacher? Which Buddha is talking and where was the Buddha talking? Even if it was not in India and it was some pure land. And when were they talking and who were they talking to and what was the teaching? One of the special things about Soak Chen tantras is they have two of these. One is called the ordinary and one is called the extraordinary. The ordinary introductory scenario is the one that we recognize. And the extraordinary one is the Buddha just talks.

**[32:20] Speaker B:** Bang. No. No conventional audience, no conventional time, no conventional place. He just. Or she does bling.

**[32:30] Speaker B:** So they have both of these introductory scenarios. One of the literary genres now, the early tradition of the Great Perfection was collected together as the 18 mind series text. Initially pretty short text that were kind of infamous for too much rejection and too much positivity. It's like one of those things where you just can't win because other Tibetans would say, oh, you guys reject way too much. Like all this. No, no, no meditation, no ethics, no this, no that, et cetera. And others were saying, oh, you guys accept way too much. All this luminous, positive, Buddha nature stuff. So they paradoxically got rejected. Got rejected for both sides. Too much negativity, too much positivity. So the 18 mind series text. But one of the important things is this is like an organic growth industry. It wasn't like there were just 18 texts. It was like there were 18 titles.

**[33:25] Speaker B:** And they kept changing the titles. They kept getting longer and longer and more and more versions of each one of these texts. So it was like a, a family of, of things. And why 18? Because 18 is what tantric Buddhists did all across asia in the 7th, 8th, 9th century.

**[33:43] Speaker B:** All the tantric cannons were 18 fold. They just never agreed on the contents. But everybody knew a Tantric scriptural canon make it 18 fold. So Tibetans collected these together into the 18 mind series text in the 9th century. And then this all culminated maybe in the 9th century. Early. Probably in the late 9th. Late 9th. No, no, 10th century. The all Creating King.

**[34:08] Speaker B:** This was the, this was the culmination of early Dzokchen and many of the early 18 mind series texts we got incorporated into the All Creating King as chapters like verbatim. Again that intertextuality. And the All Creating King is, is really the, the great scripture of the early Dzocchen tradition. One that, you know, the kind of Tantric influence is still limited. You don't have much detail about meditative techniques and practices.

**[34:35] Speaker B:** And it just reflects this kind of strong negative rhetoric of transcendence, transcendence of meditation, of ethics, of philosophy, but also this strong evocation of a luminous divine Buddha nature in all life. And then we have a series of intermediary texts, the All Radiant Nucleus. The Tikle Kun Cell is a really essential text that's kind of a stepping stone to the Ningti tradition. And then we have the Ning Tik tradition itself. In the 11th century, initially gathered as 17 tantras, but that inexorable minimum to have 18 quickly manifested.

**[35:14] Speaker B:** And so they added one upon the black fierce lady Trimanakpo, an 18th tantra to form 18. So sometimes you hear 17, sometimes you hear 18. Then there was a body of commentarial literature called Vimalamitra's Seminal Heart, or Vimalamitra as an intique. Vimala Mitra was this great figure who was Indian figure in the 8th century, maybe early 9th century, who was supposed to have come to Tibet and was supposed to have hidden many of these texts. And so the early commentarial literature in 11th, 12th century Tibetan all gets collected together in this Vimal Mitra Seminal Heart.

**[35:52] Speaker B:** And in it, it's not just commentarial literature. We have two new tantras. One is called the Soul Son of the Buddhas, incredibly influential Tantra. And the other is called the Great Array, the Great Transcendent Array, Atikipa Temple, a second really critically important tantra that's only found in here. And you have this famous genre of Dzochen literature called the Last Testaments, where Buddhas and saints will disappear in light.

**[36:20] Speaker B:** And then everybody's very unhappy, oh, where'd you go? What are you doing? And then a hand will come back out and say, here's a precious text, my last testament. And they go, oh, thank you so much. And so we have these last testaments of the Buddhas and of figures like Garab, Dorje, Padmasimbhava, Vimatra and so forth.

**[36:37] Speaker B:** And one of the governing literary genres of the tradition are the 11 Adamantine topics. It's this scholastic, philosophical, incredibly powerful philosophical framework that I'll talk about shortly. And then in the early 14th century, we get a really important tantra called the Long Cell or the Radiant Matrix, which for the first time ever links Padma Sambhava to the Ningtic tradition. It's important to realize Padma Sambhava had nothing to do with the Ningti tradition prior to the 14th century. Zero he's never referred to.

**[37:13] Speaker B:** It's only in the 14th century, that suddenly it explodes. And it explodes in the early 14th century with a very obscure cycle that came to be dominant in Tibet called the seminal heart of the Dakinis, the Khandro Ningtik, discovered by a very obscure person named Sultram Dorje, or Rin Dorje, who died very early age under mysterious circumstances. I used to call him the Robert Johnson of Tibetan, famous American blues figure, who also died under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind some very powerful music.

**[37:50] Speaker B:** And the Khandro Ningtik has actually new tantras in it, six new tantras, very important expansion. And then we have the Yangtinakpo tradition that appears in the 14th or 15th century. Incredibly innovative tradition that's still transmitted today and is famous for its dark retreats and its very innovative approach to dark retreats. And then, of course, in the 14th century, we have the towering figure of the Nyingma tradition, Longchampa, who wrote his Seven Treasures and also compiled the earlier traditions with his own extensions into what's called the four part seminal heart, which you'll find this very frequently in Tibet. You know how many parts there are in the four part seminal heart.

**[38:33] Speaker B:** 5. Yeah, it wasn't that he couldn't count, but that his people always want to add stuff in. So. And then we have the little bit later in the 14th century from Rinzen Gudem, he reveals the Gongpa Zangtel that integrates the Padmasambhava tradition with the Vimalamitra tradition, with the earlier mind series traditions called the Vairochana traditions. Vairochena, though being a Sanskrit name, was a very important Tibetan Translator in the 8th and 9th century, associated with the early Silk Chen transmissions.

**[39:05] Speaker B:** And then there's the Longchen Ning Tik, which is the dominant Silk Chen cycle in today's world, by Jigmei Lingpa at the end of the 18th century.

**[39:14] Speaker B:** And then, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that's just a very small view. Oops. So I think this is the cosmology section, but I can't see the title. So anyways, so the really interesting thing that I found out at some point, because I initially, I came here to nepal back in 1986 for the first time, and the way I got involved with Silk Chen was when the first day I started studying Tibetan, which was the University of Wisconsin, someone had a book in their hands, and I was like, what's the book? And he said, oh, it's just this translation of this Tibetan text. And it turned out it was a translation of Longchampa's Relaxation into the Nature of the Mind. And so I picked it up, I looked at it for exactly 30 seconds, and I said, oh, that's what I'll study. And in fact, I did.

**[40:04] Speaker B:** So, you know, it's always been like that, just 30 seconds, make a decision, then stick with it. So for better or for worse. So for many years, I studied Silk Chen and I thought, it's about philosophy, it's about the meditation. I was really focused on those two things. And I spent years just I would, because there were no PDFs, I would lug like a hundred pounds of books all across Nepal and India, then eastern Tibet and so forth, trying to find these great teachers.

**[40:31] Speaker B:** And one of the things I gradually began to understand is how important the narratives are, how important the cosmologies were, that in fact, when Soen Ningtik emerged in the 11th century, they spent hundreds of pages articulating a totally different understanding of the world of the the names of places, the names of world systems, the epochs of time, what happened from Ian to Eon, and so forth, like an entire cosmology fully articulated in the 11th and early 12th century. And one of these is a story which I'll briefly get to, about the presencing. Like when you start from the. What they call the ground of being, which is the nature of reality. And reality unfolds.

**[41:16] Speaker B:** It unfolds in what's called the ground presencing. The ground appearancing, and the manifestation it takes form in is pure Lands, enjoyment body, pure lands of the Buddha's enjoyment body. And so you have this vision of a cosmology where the reality body, pure lands are in the top, in the cloudless sky. Across the horizon are the enjoyment body, pure lands. Below that are the emanational body Pure Lands, the Nira body, pure lands. Below that are the six realms of Samsara. And this is the beginning of the universe. It's how the world reality unfolds. And we'll get back to that in a second. But that's another vision of this cosmology.

**[41:55] Speaker B:** The seminal heart cosmology I'm talking about is far more particular, far more quirky and unique and detailed with names and places and so forth. And part of that is it articulates in the 11th and 12th century, these 13 world systems in which Silk Chen manifest that have these precious dust, like the surface of these worlds is coated by gold dust and turquoise dust, which is this word tell. And there's also this idea from the Avatamsika Sutra, where Vairochina has this vast cosmological body and this vast cosmological body in his hands. He holds 25 world systems stacked above his begging bowl. And the 13th, I think it's the 13th is our world system.

**[42:43] Speaker B:** And that's something embraced by the Great Perfection tradition. And then of course, there's these pure lands, and there are specific pure lands that are unique to the Son Ningtik tradition. And this is just an image of a kind of, you know, pure land with Amitabha. And then another part of the cosmology is so is so deeply bound up with the treasure tradition. And, you know, we focus on the treasure tradition as about Padma, Sambhava and Vimalamitra and all these miraculous stories of them hiding treasures in the 9th century, 8th century in Tibet and how people reveal them and so forth. But it's really part of a much deeper tradition in Tibet. A tradition in Tibet that you find reflected in nomadic communities in ancient wedding rituals all across Tibet. Namely, land is agentive. It's something shared by Tibetan culture with other indigenous cultures all across the world.

**[43:35] Speaker B:** The idea that the land is animated, that it's.

**[43:39] Speaker B:** That it's water, that it's forest, that it's mountains are things we can speak to. And there are treasure traditions way outside the Ningma tradition that have to do with shidoks, with sovereign mountain deities that own communities and the communities speak to and that leave treasures for them. So that's the cosmology, that's the framework in which these things are happening.

**[43:58] Speaker B:** And there are so many pre Buddhist cosmological references in early Sok Chin number four. See, now I got to speed up because we have, remember, we have 15, 16, 17 metaphysical agents, Buddhas and bodhisattvas. At the heart is the Dharmakaya, the reality body of the Buddha, the all good one, Samantha Badra, that we'll talk about in a moment. The enjoyment body manifestation of the Buddha. The primary one is Vairochana in his cosmological form, where he's vast and cavernous and billions of worlds are arrayed in his begging bowl and in the pores of his skin. There's the five Buddhas, very important in SO traditions. The peaceful or the serene and fierce mandala, the hundred peaceful and fierce mandalas that people have heard about manifesting upon death and located in the body.

**[44:46] Speaker B:** There's the 12 emanations of Vajradhara, a unique Ning Tik thing, a wide variety of other Buddhas. There are linkages over time Where a Valukateshvar is dominant or Manjushri is dominant, Vajrapani, as always, plays an important role as the redactor of secrets in the 12th century and 11th century. The most important tantra of all in the history of Dzogchen is called the Unimpeded Sound Tantra, the Dra Telgir. And there you have a variety of metaphysical agents. The Hindu deities Brahma and Vishnu play important roles.

**[45:19] Speaker B:** The Kala Pinka bird. There are divine children who play a critical role in, in the tradition. There are Buddhas across the 25 worlds, each one with their own names. And then there are the immortal presences of Vimala, Mitra and Badmasambhava. One of the unique doctrines of the Tsokcha Ningtik tradition is that people can transcend death, not disappear in rainbow bodies, but transfer their body into what's called the great transference body and just persist as presences across time and space.

**[45:51] Speaker B:** And Vima Almitra and Padmasambhava are said to be two such people, which means that when people have visions of them, they're actual visions of continuing agency, not simply recollections of the past or something from a pure land that's distant. And then you have of course, the Kinis, female spiritual figures that play a very critical role. Early ON in the 11th century we have the Black Fierce lady that forms the 18th tantra. In the 13th century we have a gender revolution of types where the Condro, the seminal heart of the Dakinis, focuses on women, focuses on women's prerogatives and privileges and, and the makes the Yeshay Tsogel in the past as a critical figure or La cham pema cell, this figure of the emperor Trison Datsun, who is the person who actually gets the transmission from Padma Sambhava of the seminal Heart of the Dakinis. And then Remanifest, predictably as a man in the 14th century and reveals it, and then gets reincarnated again as Longchampa himself.

**[46:56] Speaker B:** And then you have the treasure guardians. These are the three great treasure guardians of the Ningtik tradition. Dorje, Lakeba, Ekajati and Rahula. And then there's the warrior God Gesar of Link, who my four year old son who can't be here today because he's sick. He loves Gesar, he knows all the Gesar episodes and generals and everything, but I haven't told him that in the 19th century Gesar gets Dzochen.

**[47:19] Speaker B:** And so there's this very famous episode from the 19th century called the Hell episode, where Gesar goes to hell. And it turns out it's all about soen. So metaphysical agents, number five institutions and groups. We have individuals, the like. You have the wrong tradition, the long tradition, wrong Zhiki Sampo in the 11th century, Long Champa in the 12th century.

**[47:40] Speaker B:** We have clans that maintain Silk Chen traditions. The most important early clan in the 11th and 12th century was the Zur clan, very prominent Nyingma family back then. Then you have geographical traditions. They'll say, oh, that's the eastern Tibet tradition of so Chen, or that's the central Tibet tradition of son. You have tantric priest family lineages where spirituality is like a biological charisma that goes from the, you know, father and mother to the son and daughter.

**[48:10] Speaker B:** And you have yogis, which is called kusulu in these early traditions. And so in the prior to the 14th century and even in the 14th century, silk chen is first and foremost, not the monastic tradition that of course changes dramatically over time.

**[48:27] Speaker B:** And then there's, of course, issues with gender that we could talk about. But then there's also monasteries that increasingly over time get more and more important in Central Tibet and eastern Tibet. But in the early time, monasteries are not key players in the 11th century, 12th century, much less before that. And then you have the treasure traditions like the northern treasure tradition. So these are all kind of corporate entities in a way that play important roles in the great perfection tradition.

**[48:54] Speaker B:** And then you have lineages. The tradition famously articulated in 11th and 12th century this notion of three transmissions that the Buddhas transmit from mind to mind with no words, no symbols, that the great Indian saints, the so called vidyadharas or the awareness holders that they transmit through symbols without elaborate words. Then finally you have the Tibetans who transmit, you know, verbal instructions, speech to ear and so forth. And it starts with Kundu Sampo, the original Buddha, the primordial Buddha. Although he's not totally primordial because he has a career.

**[49:32] Speaker B:** It's just very short. It's like three seconds short. You know, the world manifests. There's a. There's a manifestation, there's an incipient cognitive capacity to reflect.

**[49:43] Speaker B:** And he's like, yeah, okay. Oh, recognize, done, liberation. That's his career, but it's a career nonetheless. He's not really a primordial Buddha in the sense of he was there at the beginning of time. He was there at the beginning of time originating. But it took him a couple of seconds to fully grasp the results. So they say he's The Buddha who became a Buddha without doing the slightest bit of good.

**[50:09] Speaker B:** Cosmological Buddhas I mentioned the Vairochina Buddhas. They're called the overflowing ocean bodies. And it's not just Vairochina. Every great Buddha has an overflowing ocean body where they appear like in vast form and they host galaxies and cosmos in their bodies. The 12 emanations of Vajradhara, the three sources of the teaching. Very famous one, 11th century, 12th century. This is the idea that so emanates not from Buddhas, but from a statue, a book and a Vajra that fly around the universe, emitting out the great perfection in a variety of forms. So much to say about that. And then there's these great Indian saints. This is the core Neemtique lineage in India.

**[50:52] Speaker B:** Garab Dorje started it. Manjushri Mitra, Mitra, Sri Semha, Janana Sutra and then Vimalamitra and then the Tibetan Vairochina. Very important for early Dzogchen mind traditions. And then later by the 14th century we get Padma Sambhava, Yeshay Sogel, Lachan pemacel and his 25 disciples. Reincarnating become dominant and they're relevant to tsokchen in the 11th and 12th century, but not the Ningtik tradition. It's the 14th century that they get associated with the Ningtik tradition. And then of course again we have these Dakinis and these land based spirit guardians that play really critical roles as custodians of the tradition. And then a variety of Tibetan, Tibetan transmissions over time.

**[51:39] Speaker B:** So narratives, it's going to get a little repetitive. The Primordial Buddha, Kundu Sampo, that when out of nothing, something comes in that moment.

**[51:47] Speaker B:** Kundu Sampo is this, they say one ground, two paths. The one ground is the ground of reality. The two paths are that when that ground manifests into these divine appearances, there's two pathways that open up. Recognition and non recognition. If you recognize itself, you become liberated. That's the path of the all good. If you fail to recognize, that's the beginning of Samsara, the cosmological Buddha narrative. The 12 emanations of Vajradhara narrative. This idea of there's a long story about how the Son traditions rise and fall, rise and fall in different world systems goes on and on. Very complicated passages.

**[52:31] Speaker B:** The three sources of the teaching. I mentioned this idea that saints disappear in light, disappear in rainbow colored light, just vanish and then leave behind the Last Testament. Really important narratives that they extend over and over, over time they write more and more variations of this. The concealment of revelation of treasures, such an important narrative, Indian and Tibetan prophecies, the writing of life stories, but also the prophetic indication of these lives. I don't know what's down there. Sorry, I can't see it. Let's see. Oh, the end of time. And then there's a story about in son, about the end of time. So there's a story about the beginning of time.

**[53:13] Speaker B:** How does the world begin? How do we go from nothing to something? There's a whole elaborate story about it. And there's an elaborate story about the end of time. What is the end of time? You may have wondered this. All these Buddhas, all these Bodhisattvas, so skilled, working so hard for so long, don't they ever finish? Don't they ever liberate every single living being? Well, in the Tsokchen tradition they do. And so what happens?

**[53:36] Speaker B:** What happens when the final Buddha liberates the final sentient being? And they tell a story that when that happens, all the emanation bodies swirl into the enjoyment bodies of a Buddha. All the enjoyment bodies of the Buddha swirl up into the reality body of the Buddha. The reality body of the Buddha swirls up into the expanse of reality, the Dharmadatu. And then the Dharmadatu swirls up into primordial knowing.

**[54:04] Speaker B:** Yeshay Janana and then they say, yes, all there is is primordial knowing. And it stays that way for a long time. And you know what happens after a long time?

**[54:19] Speaker B:** A current, a wind of primordial knowing stirs and it all starts over again. I'll leave with that thought.

**[54:26] Speaker B:** Okay, number eight iconography. There's Kundusampo. There's the mandala of peaceful and wrathful deities. The wrathful up above the peaceful below with Kundusampo at the heart. There's Yeshay Tsogel, the 8th century Tibetan figure who plays such an important role in the 14th century Khandro Ningtik.

**[54:49] Speaker B:** There's a Padmasambhava centric Longshan Ningtik assembly tree representing the tradition. And here's the great Indian figures, Garb Dorje, Sri Simha Vimalamitra, the succession of lineages in India. And here's some of the great Ekajati and the kind of lion faced guardian figure. And then cosmological figures. This is Vairochina's body with the worlds of existence written on it.

**[55:16] Speaker B:** And then meditation murals. This is the great meditation mural of Dzocchen practice and Vision that's in the Lukang temple behind the Potala palace in Lhasa. And these are manuscripts that show the various details of visionary presences in these practices. And these are the assembly trees of preliminary practices that later became so important, showing the different llamas and deities and so forth that you visualize and prostrate to. So, initiations.

**[55:45] Speaker B:** Now I really have to watch the time. So initiations. I definitely want to do this one. Then I'm going to start skipping. So in Tantric initiations, you have four great empowerments.

**[55:56] Speaker B:** Ultimately, there's the vase Empowerment, the secret Empowerment, the wisdom empowerment, and the word empowerment. And these model three different meditative regimes. And the fourth one is a little bit mysterious, and it's the one that the point takes, the point of departure for the great perfection. And so you find these four empowerments. But in the early Ning Tik tradition, you find a totally different initiatory system that has nothing to do with empowerments, nothing to do with these empowerments that you find in every other Buddhist tantric system.

**[56:26] Speaker B:** So the vase empowerment is this very elaborate ritual practice that's modeled upon Indian imperial coronation ceremonies. And so it's very ritual. It represents the kind of early ritual focus of deity yoga in Tantric Buddhism. And then the secret and wisdom empowerments represent the later, more radical forms of tantra that try to transmute experiences of violence and sexuality and so forth and other transgressive experiences. So in this case, it's modeled upon these erotic meditations.

**[57:02] Speaker B:** And then the fourth empowerment is one that sometimes gets called the fourth empowerment, and sometimes it gets called the verbal empowerment or the word empowerment. It's a little bit unclear what the fourth empowerment is. Sometimes. Sometimes it's like a decoding of the previous two empowerments tries to explain that all that erotic symbolism is really about Buddhist philosophy and realization and so forth.

**[57:23] Speaker A:** Forth.

**[57:24] Speaker B:** And sometimes it's about showing aesthetic symbols like a peacock feather or a crystal ball, trying to convey the. The simplicity of the nature of the mind after all these other complex rituals. And so in. So one of the innovations they did is they added a fifth empowerment called the Empowerment, to the dynamic manifestation of awareness, which I'm not going to get into right now. And they also kind of reinterpreted the four empowerments in terms of elaborateness or simplicity.

**[57:54] Speaker B:** They said the first empowerment is elaborate. The next one is relatively simple. The third one is extremely simple, and the fourth one is extraordinarily simple. But the really interesting thing is they focus on. Initiate on introductions instead of empowerments in the 11th and 12th century, they talk about introductions. Now in contemporary times, this is very common. In Silktrin traditions they call it the introduction to the nature of the mind. And it can be kind of a little ritual that a teacher does for you, that tries to get you to existentially have a sense of the nature of the mind. Or it could be kind of more in life. Like there'll be stories of someone beating someone and, you know, trying to get them to realize the nature of mind.

**[58:34] Speaker B:** But in these traditions, we have 21 introductions. And they're very. They're not super complicated, but they're really interesting. They're totally focused on aesthetics. They use different kinds of symbols.

**[58:48] Speaker B:** Like you'll have someone dress up and with the bone ornaments, or you'll put eggs on a horsetail, like to make a string of eggs on a horsetail. I'm not going to go into why, but they're all introducing you to the nature of the Tsok Chen Ning Tik visionary meditation practices. But there's 21 different kinds of introductions, a totally alternative initiatory scheme, one that did not thrive over time and ultimately kind of lapsed back into these four initiations, with the empowerment to awareness's dynamism of a fifth, but an entire different system in the 12th century that no longer is really practiced.

**[59:26] Speaker B:** Okay, theories as philosophies. This is the last one I'm going to really give in detail, then I'll just really skip.

**[59:32] Speaker B:** So what's the theory and philosophy of Dzogchen? Well, one way, for example, in Rongzhong tsur ki Sampo's 11th century famous corpus, or Longchampa's kind of lighter corpus that's more focused on Mahayana work or Mipam and his work in the 19th century, which formed the foundation of all these academic colleges you find today in Nyingma monasteries, there's this idea of Soquechen as kind of a meta perspective, a style of reading, a way that you can interpret other things so that you can look at Madhyamaka or Yogachara or Prajnaparamita or Abhidharma or whatever, with this Sokchen perspective or way of interpreting or way of exegeting. But another, more interesting way that so developed is what some people have called philosophical Vajrayana. Much of Vajrayana is not philosophical. There's no philosophical discourse, really. I mean, they have ideas, they have symbols, but it's much more about practice of different kinds, rituals, meditation, herbs and so forth.

**[1:00:33] Speaker B:** But in Tibet, in the 11th and 12th century, 13th century, and particularly with Sokchen, you get the emergence of philosophical tantra, tantra, Vajrayana. Buddhism becomes the basis of distinctive philosophical developments that reimagine the great topics of Buddhist philosophy, epistemology, how do we understand knowledge, the nature of emptiness, the nature of the body, the nature of the mind, idealism, the nature of Buddhahood. And in particular in early Sokchen, it's very elemental. You cannot understand early Dzogchen without understanding earth, water, fire, space and wind.

**[1:01:13] Speaker B:** And that doesn't mean just oh yeah, I get fire, earth, etc. It's a very complex system. It's bound up with astrology, it's bound up with embodiment, it's bound up with very complex theories, all of which disappear over time. But in the 11th and 12th century, you cannot understand Sokchen Ningtik whatsoever without it. So the architectonic discourse, the 11 topics I mentioned that Longchampa uses, but go back to the 11th century, 17 tantras, really briefly. The ground, the ground of being. What is the ground of being? What exists before anything exists? What's the final nature of emptiness? It's Buddha nature, Buddha nature and emptiness. But Buddha nature is threefold. There's the Dharmakaya, the Sambhogakaya, the Nirmanakaya, which are called the empty essence, the radiant nature, and the pervading compassion. That all three of these are coterminous. Emptiness is not more important than radiance, it's not more important than compassion.

**[1:02:12] Speaker B:** All three of them inherent. The fabric of the universe. And the fabric of the universe is inherently dynamic, it's effervescent, it's constantly, perpetually erupting in manifestation. And as it erupts, it's a divine manifestation of these pure lands. And yet two pathways open. Because once you get manifestation, you get the possibility of error.

**[1:02:34] Speaker B:** And that's the second topic. If you don't self recognize all these appearances, you have ignorance. And ignorance is the error. It's the error that's the basis of samsara. It's the basis that unfolds into human or into the agency of life. What is the agency of life, otherwise known as karma? It's acceptance and rejection. We create false boundaries of individual selves, of collective selves, through rejecting certain things and accepting other things. We do it biologically, we do it emotionally, we do it cognitively, we do it socially, and so we construct samsara. Despite that, there is a pervading divinity.

**[1:03:12] Speaker B:** The Buddha nature remains throughout all forms of life, even in Samsara even in cyclic existence, even under the conditions of ignorance. And it is not inert, it is effervescent. It is constantly, dynamically manifesting in our body every single second of our lives. That's the Sokchen tradition.

**[1:03:32] Speaker B:** Where is it located? In the human. In the human body. And so they tell a story that the Dharmakaya is present in the heart of all living beings, this nucleus of awareness that is empty and essent, radiant in nature, pervading and compassion. And that nucleus of awareness manifests in the heart as 42 peaceful deities and 58 wrathful deities in the brain. And it's perpetually pervading us despite our failure to recognize it. And there are channels through which it courses in the body. We have bodies of light every second. And there are my stops, I have to wrap up. And the gateways are the sensory gateways of our ears and eyes, through which this flows into the external domain through which we experience it. And there are unique contemplative practices, not contemplative practices that involve kind of fabricated, contrived, I must do this, script this, and so forth.

**[1:04:24] Speaker B:** But Rang Chun Yeshay, the name of your institute, self emergence. How do you let this inner luminosity that you're not aware of, that the tradition tells you is constantly effervescent, constantly manifest dynamically? How do you become aware of it? What does a practice look like when visionary self emergence is at its core? And then there's the story of signs and measures. Because if your meditative practice focuses less on techniques and more on unfolding experience, you need signs and measures to help, you know, like, am I going in the right direction? In the wrong direction? And then there are the story of death. How is dying and death, the intermediate phases? How are those opportunities for recognition?

**[1:05:08] Speaker B:** Because in death, the same thing happens that happens at the beginning of the world. In the dematerialization of our body, our inner Buddha nature manifests. And we see peaceful and wrathful deities in the moment of death and in the successive days. And if we recognize, like Kundu Sampo, we can become liberated. If we fail to recognize, that begins to recede. And we slowly begin to recreate Samsara. And we're reborn. And finally, the nature of, of. Of the Buddha, which. Oh, I got to get that.

**[1:05:39] Speaker A:** There, there.

**[1:05:39] Speaker B:** Okay. And then the last part of this, if I can get this to showing there is. When I say Buddha nature is active, it's active in every single system within its philosophical structure. It's active in the origins.

**[1:05:57] Speaker B:** How does the world begin? The nature of reality is a divine Buddha nature that manifests because a current of primordial knowing stirs cosmology. How do we think about the structure of the world? We have impossibly vast Buddhas like Verona that hold our world. And we have impossibly intimate Buddhas inside our heart that generate us. Embryology. How do we get generated as children in the mother's womb. In the mother's womb, there are two eyes, two Buddha eyes. A Buddha eye of the elements and a Buddha eye of the lamps. The Buddha eye of the elements guides the development of the embryo over nine months in the mother's womb. The Buddhahood of the lamps guides the embryo's spiritual development at every point. The driving agency of life is Buddhas, not karma. Karma is secondary endurance. Once we're born, our minds, our psychology, our bodies, physiology, our epistemology, how we know the world.

**[1:06:54] Speaker B:** In each one of these cases, the driving agent is Buddhas.

**[1:06:59] Speaker B:** And finally, soteriology. How do we become liberated? Not through our kind of minds that conceptually map out a system and say, do this and do that, follow this technique, but to create the conditions for the inner deep nature of our mind. The nature of our mind is not emptiness. The nature of our mind is empty in essence, radiant in nature and dynamic and care.

**[1:07:22] Speaker B:** The deepest nature of our mind is dynamically, spontaneously active constantly. And that needs to be liberated in meditative practice for us to be saved to us to be liberated in thanatology. What happens in death, the Buddha manifest. What happens in eschatology, the end of times, again, the Buddha manifest.

**[1:07:43] Speaker B:** Okay, so I'm just going to show you these slides. We don't have time to talk about them. This is just a review of what ethics and commitments and vows look like. The one thing I'll stress to you is that one about the four great commitments. Long Champa, One of his greatest works is called the Treasure of the Abiding Reality, where he structures it on four great commitments. You know, this word commitment or samaya is the word that's used in tantric practices about the ethical obligations that are triggered by being initiated into a mandala, like a commitment to the deity, a commitment to the teacher, a commitment to your fellow brethren.

**[1:08:19] Speaker B:** He says there are four great commitments, and those are the commitments of reality. They're the commitments of reality to us and the commitments we have to fulfill to reality. And what are they? Absence, simplicity, singularity and spontaneity. And he structures the entire book on this. An extraordinary book, spiritual practices. You know, I could just talk forever about that. But these are just a little picture of the broad variety of spiritual practices that govern the early Ningti tradition that focuses on self emergence and sensory experience.

**[1:08:58] Speaker B:** And then thanatology. As we talked a little bit about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, many of you have heard about that's a token text. It's just 100. It's oak chin text. It just got packaged in a certain way that became very popular for treating people who are dying and. And dead. So, and, and the key innovation of the Tsok Chen Ning Tik tradition is called the reality Bardo, the reality intermediate phase, the idea that upon dying, Buddha's self disclosed to us in a series of days after death and before rebirth. That was introduced by the Chok Chen ning. Take tradition 11th century, and it became this dominant idea in Tibet.

**[1:09:38] Speaker B:** So, and then models of Buddhahood, this idea that Buddha nature is radically active in our life right now, every second, whether we recognize it or not. This idea of rainbow bodies and great transference bodies, this distinctive way of thinking about how enlightenment can take place. When they talk about Buddhas, they talk about them in two forms. The enlightened bodies of Buddhas and the primordial knowings of Buddhas. And there's different schemes. The five, the three and the two forms of primordial knowing. The five enlightened bodies, the three enlightened bodies. There's the Samantha Badra, that story. There's the cosmological Buddhas, there's the serene and fierce Mandala, the 12 emanations of Vajradhara. And finally, the most important point I would make here is that Buddhas.

**[1:10:25] Speaker B:** This is my own expression, but I think it's pretty true to the tradition that Buddhas and their activity are not karmic hangovers. They critique people like Chandra Kirti. I know one of your favorite subjects here, but there's a passage in Longchampa where he says, this is not like that. Because what he says is that often in Mahayana Buddhism, they depict Buddhas as if the only reason that they do anything to help living beings is because before they became a Buddha, they made lots of prayers. Like, you know, all these prayers, like I pray to say, you know, help liberate all living beings and so forth. There's this karmic momentum that survives into becoming a Buddha and just drives you to. To. To work towards others. Or they have these relationships with other people who need, who still suffer in Samsara. And their suffering elicits the presence and the activity of a Buddha.

**[1:11:17] Speaker B:** That is not the sokchen ning take tradition. The Son ning take tradition is reality is dynamic. Buddhas are dynamic. It just is what it is. Buddhas act because that's what reality does.

**[1:11:29] Speaker B:** Buddhas are inherently dynamic, inherently present.

**[1:11:34] Speaker B:** And that is pretty much the end of my presentation. These are just a variety of Tibetan terms that are distinctive to tradition and help you kind of reconstruct the history by looking at when these terms appear and how they're used and so forth over time. And I'll just gesture towards this, I'm not going to go into detail, but I'll just leave this slide here. This is just a quick thumbnail sketch of looking from the 8th century to the 21st century, of what happens in each century.

**[1:12:05] Speaker B:** Like, each one of these could be a long lecture like, who are the key people? Who are the key texts? What happens in that century? What's really distinctive? What's really interesting?

**[1:12:14] Speaker B:** What do people care about in that century? Why is Jigme Lingpa so into sadness? You know, why is the dark retreat become so pivotal for certain figures in the 15th century and so forth? Why in the 19th century to silk Chen, honestly, kind of recede. And what becomes really important is Mahayana, Scholasticism and these son flavored ways of thinking about Buddhism as opposed to so in its own unique, distinctive, dense set of ideas and narratives and practices.

**[1:12:43] Speaker B:** So anyways, that's the end of my presentation, so thank you so much for bearing with me.

**[1:12:57] Speaker A:** Are you in for questions?

**[1:13:00] Speaker B:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I can talk endlessly. Long past, you want to listen.

**[1:13:07] Speaker A:** All right, so is there any comments or questions coming from the ground?

**[1:13:20] Speaker B:** There's one behind you.

**[1:13:38] Speaker C:** Hello.

**[1:13:40] Speaker B:** Thank you. Professor Germano, I just wanted to ask, do you have a book where we can study, you know, all your deep researches?

**[1:13:50] Speaker B:** You know, that that's, that, that's kind of a well known joke. So I was, I was asking seriously, though, not as a joke. Yeah, no, yeah. And I, I know I'm just telling you it is a joke, but even though you're serious. So I.

**[1:14:02] Speaker B:** The joke is that I have many books, but none of them are accessible. So I can tell you why briefly. But I wrote like four books many, many years ago. And one was, I translated Longchampa's the Treasury of Words and Meanings long before anybody else translated it. And I completed that and I wrote three other books. One book was about the Khandro Ningtik, the seminal heart of Dakinis. One book was about the history of Token, and one book was about the kind of philosophy and practice of dzogchen and there was one problem with those books, which was there was a set of commentaries on the 17 tantras that I couldn't find. It was so irritating. I mean, I spent something like 15 years looking for it. So I thought, okay, I'm not going to find it, so I'll just finish these books and be done with it.

**[1:14:55] Speaker B:** And that same year, the damn books appeared in Eastern Tibet. And there were thousands of pages, and they were very difficult. Thousands of pages. They weren't things that I could just pick up and go, got it. You know, And I felt like, oh, I don't want to publish the books. I should read all those books first. And at that point in my life, I also did a little bit of a. I wouldn't call it a detour, but I call it a primary tour. But I decided that I should be doing something on the behalf of Tibetan communities. And so I spent the next couple decades of my life working in Tibet, focused on the needs of Tibetan communities. And so I never got back to those books.

**[1:15:35] Speaker B:** And so for about four years ago or so, I started to kind of work on them. But I made another mistake. And, you know, one of the. One of the problems is, yeah, I have too many friends who want to write books together. So, like, James Gentry and I started to write a book on Dark Retreats.

**[1:15:50] Speaker B:** And Kempo Yeshay, who was a seminal figure in the history of this institute, he and I decided to write a book on the Vimal Mitra seminal Heart. None of these were the books I wrote. So now I'm trying to finish the old books and write the new books. So I. I hope, unless I die or something, which is always possible, that in the next couple of years I'll start to manifest those books.

**[1:16:11] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[1:16:12] Speaker B:** And one last question is, like, where. What is the source, primary source for studying about 21 introductions and the elemental thoughts, like which tantras have these two ideas. Yeah. So that one is one I've translated and written a lot about. So I think that one will probably manifest more quickly.

**[1:16:28] Speaker B:** I'll probably just publish that in the next year or so. It's the. In the 17 tantras, there's one that's called the Notra Trepegu, the Introduction Tantra, and that's the primary place you find it. The second place you find it is the Mirror of Vajrasatva, the Dorje Sempe Melong Tantra. And then you find extended treatments of it in Longchampa's Take Chokesu, his Treasury of Supreme Vehicles.

**[1:16:55] Speaker B:** And you find in a few other places, too. But in the Llama Young Tik, there's a text on it as well of Longchampa period of Bazar would be the. Would be related to the same day, same day cycle. No, no, no. This is all about. So, okay, yeah. The vast majority of my presentation was about the soccer tradition. All right, so both of those tantras are in the 17 tantras.

**[1:17:21] Speaker B:** I think you had your hand up.

**[1:17:26] Speaker A:** It's okay.

**[1:17:26] Speaker B:** Maybe it's too long. You're not to waste time because usually it says that Zan translate Mahasandi in Sanskrit.

**[1:17:32] Speaker A:** You never said mahas even once in this class. You only mentioned ATI yoga.

**[1:17:38] Speaker A:** And I also have opinion of the Sensoris at rest. Professor Matias, he said it's not attested in Sanskrit.

**[1:17:45] Speaker B:** So what's your opinion about Mahasandi as

**[1:17:47] Speaker A:** a Indian prototype of duction?

**[1:17:50] Speaker B:** Yeah, well, Jake back there has written about early uses of the word the great perfection.

**[1:17:58] Speaker B:** So what we do know is that the expression sokchen appears in Tibetan in texts that are clearly translations of Indian originals. So I have not spent any time at all thinking about the reconstruction of the Indian term that might correlate to that expression. Because for me, Silk Chen is inherently a Tibetan tradition. I mean, if you know me, you'll know that I have a couple of great loves in my life besides individuals, and one is for Tibet and. And one is for Buddhism.

**[1:18:33] Speaker B:** And where those two intersect most powerfully for me is really in the Tsokchen tradition where I study the sokchen. What I see is irretrievably Tibetan imagination. I see Tibetan landscapes, I see Tibetan lives. I see Tibetan language. I see Tibetan, Tibetan, Tibetan, Tibetan.

**[1:18:52] Speaker B:** Because that's. That's true. That's reality. And now at the same time, I remember once at the American Academy of Religions many years ago, I gave a talk that was a little bit. And then that 9 context in which Buddhahood is creative that I told you I gave a talk like that, that that paper is actually published in a book called Living Treasure, so you can read that.

**[1:19:14] Speaker B:** But I gave that presentation and a dear friend who's a senior figure in. Well, I'll tell you who it was. It was Jose Cabazon, who was one of my oldest friends in Tibetan, you know, Buddhist scholarship. And at the end of the talk, he was like, God, what's left? You know, or what's next? I mean, I think it was kind of like, that is so far out and so far away from Indian Buddhism. I mean, I thought that was Kind of what he was saying, and that's a very common reaction, and I think it's totally untrue. This tradition is so deeply indebted to India, to Indian Buddhism. We don't have to think about Taoism or Kashmiri Shaivism or, or high altitude living in Tibet or something to understand where this synthesis, I've told you, comes from. If you really understand it deeply and you look at India in a different way than we often look at Indian Buddhism, I think you will see that this is a natural extension and sophisticated reimagining of fundamental Buddhist forms of practice, philosophy, narrative, etc.

**[1:20:21] Speaker B:** That are all over Indian Buddhism. So, for me, on the one hand, this is fundamentally, foundationally Tibetan, but it is a Tibetan way of thinking about Indian Buddhism. And that's, to me, just so clear when you read the materials. And so when people think it's just like, so crazy, what that really tells us is the impoverished way we've understood Indian Buddhism. That's the core.

**[1:20:47] Speaker B:** So that's not a good answer to your question, but that's the answer I have.

**[1:21:00] Speaker C:** From the Ninthic traditions. Then if, if, you know, we have this Vimana, which comes from Vimalamitra, who is from India. I, I don't think I understand completely what you say when you mean that Dzogt is a. To you, it's a Tibetan tradition.

**[1:21:16] Speaker B:** Well, this is where I get in trouble from.

**[1:21:21] Speaker A:** Yeah,

**[1:21:28] Speaker B:** I, I famously got into trouble answering a question like that. So I'm just trying to think like, You know, there are some things that are very hard to say across cultural boundaries, and one of those is, is almost inevitably going to be about religion. And so most people here are deeply interested and committed to Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan forms of knowledge and so forth. And, and I applaud that. I am deeply committed to Tibetan forms of knowledge. Tibetan lives both historically and in contemporary times. But that doesn't mean that I don't have my own mind and my own sensibilities and my own thoughts. And I think it's almost impossible for me to talk to a very traditional Tibetan lama and communicate those thoughts and those sensibilities in a way that maybe conveys what I think of as my own integrity. So there's lots of Tibetan llamas I can speak with very easily.

**[1:22:34] Speaker B:** They're mostly my same age.

**[1:22:36] Speaker B:** I'm old now, so they're old, too. But one of those is around the issue of how Tibetans understand authenticity and lineage and history, which really, if you pull back from your own commitments, it's just like we find in Christianity and Mormonism and Taoism and Confucianism and Islam and all the religious traditions around the world. It's the same dynamic. So when I'm doing this work, I'm trying to both respect and understand the Tibetan life world and not to pretend like their life world, historically or even in now, was our life world. Not even to assume that we have the same life world. But I was born in the United States of America. I was raised there. I mean, I came to Tibetan language and Tibetan places and Tibetan people as a 21 year old. Almost every one of my adult teachers was Tibetan. So.

**[1:23:36] Speaker B:** But when I think about these, my sense of authenticity of the lineage is not predicated upon believing that Vimalamitra wrote this or that or that Indians created this or created that and so forth. It means nothing to me. Like, in terms of authenticity, I mean, you could tell me that Vimal Mitra didn't write a word and everything was written by some 13th century Tibetan woman, just as beautiful, just as powerful, just as compelling for me, just as authentic for me. But for a Tibetan, historically, that's death. To say that these traditions were originated in a Tibetan world, in a Tibetan mind, in a Tibetan heart, in a Tibetan landscape, in the polemically charged world of Tibetan Buddhism, that was the same thing as saying, our lineage is bankrupt.

**[1:24:29] Speaker B:** Our lineage has no credibility. Our lineage has no authenticity. So that's one way of answering that question. The other way of answering that question is, we don't live in the same worlds. None of us do.

**[1:24:42] Speaker B:** I don't know most of you. I don't know what world you grew up in. I don't know your cosmologies, your values, your. Your life world. And you don't know mine.

**[1:24:52] Speaker B:** And like, I often think, like, yeah, okay, we're all in one world. Maybe we're all the same in some fundamental empty essence, radiant nature, all pervading care of reality, but we are never the same. And, you know, when you look at the two forms of wisdom in Buddhism, one is the wisdom of sameness, and the other is the wisdom of difference. And we need to appreciate the wisdom of difference. We need to appreciate that Tibetans had a different way of experiencing the world. A different sense of bodies, a different sense of self, a different sense of identity, a different sense of knowledge, a different sense of all sorts of things, of the world, of the structure of the world, of the agent of nature, of the land, et cetera. It's not our world. In the 21st century, wherever you were born and raised, it's certainly not the Euro American world.

**[1:25:42] Speaker B:** And so we have to appreciate that difference. And so to just say, like, oh, Vimala Mitra didn't write this. Some guy in the 13th century wrote that. That's like to just jump over vast differences. Does that make sense? But at the same time, I know these texts are Tibetan. I know they're the product of Tibetan imaginations, of Tibetan language, of Tibetan forms of knowledge.

**[1:26:09] Speaker B:** Does that mean they didn't come from Vimalamitra? No, I wouldn't say that. That's a totally different question. You have to understand how Tibetans understood Vimalamitra, how they understood identity, how they understand death, how they understand reincarnation, how they understand vision, how they understand the ontological reality of self. There's so many things you have to understand.

**[1:26:28] Speaker B:** You can't just say that means Vimal Mitra didn't write them. Who is Vimalamitra? Right. Who? Who?

**[1:26:37] Speaker B:** Oh, that was a. Who are you? Yes. Anyways, okay, that was a rock song.

**[1:26:45] Speaker B:** So I'm not going to give you a simple answer that says, like, oh, this Tibetan in the 12th century just wrote that text and said it was Vimal Mitra's. But I will tell you that these are inherently, foundationally Tibetan. And just saying that Vimal Mitra, Padmasimbaba didn't do this, didn't do that, that's to reduce those figures to some other culture's understanding, which I will not do.

**[1:27:10] Speaker C:** I don't know if I asked my question in a good way.

**[1:27:13] Speaker B:** In a way, good way, fine way.

**[1:27:16] Speaker C:** Because I actually meant to ask that, so far as I know about the history of, you know, vimantic. It comes from, like, all the lineage holders until Vimalamitra came from India. Yes. And then you today were talking about how it's a. It's a Tibetan tradition. Yes. Yeah, that's a bit confusing for me.

**[1:27:35] Speaker B:** I totally understood your question and I totally tried to answer it. Okay, let me. Let me give you a different. A different person's answer, and maybe you could think about it afterwards and contrast it to my answer.

**[1:27:49] Speaker B:** Michael Aris, very great British scholar who's passed away sadly, wrote a book called the. What was that book called? Hidden Treasures. Was that the name of the book? And Secret Lives.

**[1:28:02] Speaker B:** And part of the book was about Pema Lingpa, who is the greatest treasure finder, really incredible figure in Bhutan. And he was someone who saw himself as the reincarnation of Longchampa. And so he produced all these treasures that, of course, his claim was that he was revealing these treasures that came from people like Vimatra, Padmasambhava in particular, et cetera. And so that the actual composition of these went back to the 8th, 9th century. India was nothing to do with Bhutan and so forth.

**[1:28:32] Speaker B:** And what Michael Aris said at the beginning of the book, as I remember, was, okay, come on, we all know what's really happening here. We all know that this guy is a very charming, charismatic rogue. I think he's even said that or Charlton or something like this. And he just made the stuff up and he credited it back to India and these 8th century 9th century figures for authenticity and legitimacy. In fact, he was a very skilled craftsmen. We know that. And so he made these things up that he claimed were objects that came from the imperial period past. And the whole book kind of unfolds like that. And I mean, I have great respect. I did not know him as a man.

**[1:29:08] Speaker B:** I had great respect for him as a scholar. And that book, I thought was just. No, I thought it was such a bad book. Why? Because there's so many ways it's wrong.

**[1:29:23] Speaker B:** The book just did not respect at all the nature of the fact that the Bhutanese understanding of self, the Bhutanese understanding of reincarnation, the Bhutani's understanding of time and historicity and so many other things is not Michael Eris's British, British white guy's thoughts in the latter half of the 20th century. And so to just say, don't we all know this? And then collapse that difference struck me as just incredibly, deeply problematic and imperialistic. So at the same time, to just say, like, oh, I'm not going to say anything at all about this issue because it offends religious sensibilities, just like it does in Mormon. I mean, Mormons have their own story. Jews have their own story. Muslims have their own story. They all have their own story, just like Tibetans have their own story. We just have a tendency to, like, dismiss everybody else's stories and accept our stories.

**[1:30:20] Speaker B:** So I guess what I'm trying to say is that these traditions and texts are inherently a product of Tibetan lives and Tibetan soil and Tibetan land, in my perspective.

**[1:30:34] Speaker B:** And that does not mean that I'm going to say something like Michael Aris, because our subjectivity is not their subjectivity. Our sense of life and death and identity and the, The. The. The reality of vision and the reality of emanations and so forth is not theirs. And I don't prioritize what used to be mine over Tibetan understandings of the world and self and subjectivity. And life and death. All I want to say is reclaimed the agency and the beauty and the profundity of those Tibetan lives that somehow get lost when we tell these simple stories about, oh, it's an Indian origin tradition and so forth. So I'm not sure if that helps, but it's really a complex question and the answer is nuanced.

**[1:31:25] Speaker C:** Yeah, thank you for the answer.

**[1:31:49] Speaker B:** Hi. Firstly, nice to see you for the first time after 30 years. And this is the first that I've heard about the one thing you mentioned about that there are accounts of the end of time and what happens. And that's. That's very fascinating. And it's one question that's always plagued me somewhere in my mind for decades. So I was wondering where. Where I can read more about that particular subject because I've never found that anywhere before.

**[1:32:29] Speaker B:** Oh, I'm sorry, did I miss the question?

**[1:32:32] Speaker A:** Huh?

**[1:32:32] Speaker B:** What was the question? You mentioned that there are descriptions. Oh, you're asking me, you're asking me where they are?

**[1:32:42] Speaker A:** Yeah.

**[1:32:42] Speaker B:** Like where can I find that? Yeah, they're the. The kind of locus classicos for that is the draw telgir, the sound of unimpeded Tantra and its commentary attributed to Vimalamitra. And then the place where it gets discussed by Longchampa is in the take choke, the treasury of the Supreme Vehicle in an early chapter, the third or fourth chapter.

**[1:33:10] Speaker B:** If you email me or WhatsApp me, I can give you the precise references. Okay, thank you.

**[1:33:23] Speaker C:** Because there were some questions still online. If maybe like four, about four.

**[1:33:32] Speaker B:** I can give a short answers. I mean, I do do short answers.

**[1:33:37] Speaker C:** All right, so then the first question is, what is the difference between Rigpa and Buddha nature?

**[1:33:46] Speaker B:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**[1:33:53] Speaker B:** So that's not a short answer, but I'll give you just a really short couple of thoughts. So one thought is when I think the question would be like, they use this word the ground, or she. And then they have the word Buddha nature. And then they do use the word rigba or awareness. And sometimes when they say the ground, which is another way of talking about Buddha nature is empty, in essence, radiant nature, pervading care. Those are the three aspects of the ground. It's the three aspects of Buddha nature because it's. The Buddha nature is Dharmakaya nirmanakaya. When they say that, sometimes they gloss the.

**[1:34:35] Speaker B:** The.

**[1:34:37] Speaker B:** The. The all pervading care. The third aspect as a nucleus of awareness. And so sometimes I think that really the third category is also about intelligence or awareness, that reality is empty. It's Radiant, and it's aware, it's intelligence.

**[1:34:54] Speaker B:** And sometimes that comes out in the tradition when they talk about the relationship of the expanse, the datu, the dharma, datu and rikba, or awareness. And so they talk about the relationship of the expanse and awareness. And that's a way of meditating on the kind of way in which emptiness and awareness are deeply intertwined with each other. And emptiness is not prior, emptiness is not more important, but rather rigpa and emptiness together form and a kind of non dual intertwined character of the nature of reality, or dharmata or chuni. So the other thing I'll say is that when they talk about the Buddha nature in the heart in different contexts, they will synonymously use the word rigba, or awareness.

**[1:35:40] Speaker B:** So awareness is in the heart, Buddha nature is in the heart. And they're manifesting in the form of these serene deities or Buddhas and this luminosity that spills out. So next question.

**[1:35:54] Speaker C:** Why did you come to Nepal in the first place?

**[1:35:57] Speaker B:** Yeah.

**[1:35:58] Speaker B:** Well, I came to Nepal in the first place because When I was 21, I finished my undergraduate education and I was like a deadbeat. I had no plan. And so I was thinking, God, what should I do with my life? And I thought, maybe I'll go to creative writing school. Maybe I'll go study Continental philosophy, or maybe I'll study Buddhism.

**[1:36:18] Speaker B:** But I never met a Buddhist. I took two Introduction to Eastern Religions classes. I didn't really know anything. And so over the years, somehow I read llama Govinda's the Pilgrim of the Way of the White Clouds, and I thought, I'll do Tibetan Buddhism. And so that's how I ended up, because I had no money.

**[1:36:37] Speaker B:** So I had to go to graduate school to get money to go to Asia. If I'd had money, I just would have gone to Asia. I didn't have money. So I went to graduate school to go to Asia. And so I had a friend named Chad Leach who had spent a lot of time in Nepal. He was in the doctoral program. And so he and I, at the end of my first year of graduate school, went together to Boda. And that's how I first came to Nepal. And why. So I was already studying Tibetan language and kind of committed to studying Tibetan Buddhism for reasons that remain obscure.

**[1:37:04] Speaker B:** I was not one of these weird children who's like, Himalayas, no, mountains, Buddhas. Just didn't occur to me. But, you know, from the age of 21, it became a passion. So question 3.

**[1:37:15] Speaker C:** What is the evidence for Padma Sambhava as a Historical person.

**[1:37:20] Speaker B:** Well, you know, Jake Dalton back there in the back would be a much better person to answer that question. I mean, there's been a lot of research and it's probably not a question that's like super interesting to me. I mean, it's interesting for sure, but it's not a question I've done any primary research on. My interest has been more in Padma Sambhava as he appears in the 11th century, 12th century, 13th century, 14th century onwards, rather than kind of delving into the historical materials about who this figure was and what his profile was. What I will say is that most of our evidence towards him in the very early times points to someone who's strongly associated with Maha Yoga and ritual subjugation of land based deities and so forth.

**[1:38:06] Speaker B:** And his strong correlation or connection to Tsokchen is really more of an evolving development over time. The other thing I'll say is that the treasure tradition is not dominated by Padmasimbaba at all. That is also a process over time. He becomes dominant by the 14th century, but in the time period which I do a lot of work in the 14th century because Longchampa was my original love. But in the 11th and 12th century, Padmasambaba is not more important than other figures. He's not more important than Vimalamitra, for example. So that development over time is more what I focused on and less like what are the little pieces of information we have about him in the very early time of like late 8th century, early 9th century. Fourth and final question.

**[1:38:54] Speaker C:** Is this a final one? Because since then, three other questions have appeared.

**[1:39:03] Speaker B:** What?

**[1:39:04] Speaker C:** Since we announced that there were four questions, three more questions appeared online.

**[1:39:08] Speaker B:** Okay, I can answer if you want.

**[1:39:10] Speaker C:** Yeah, all right, thank you very much.

**[1:39:13] Speaker C:** Can you please say more about your 20 years in Tibetan communities?

**[1:39:17] Speaker B:** About what?

**[1:39:18] Speaker C:** Your 20 years in Tibetan community?

**[1:39:22] Speaker B:** Yeah.

**[1:39:23] Speaker C:** Well,

**[1:39:27] Speaker B:** I'll say that almost all my main teachers, except for my first teacher, have been Silk Chen teachers in one form or another. My first teacher was actually a Galua Geshe Lundrup Supa, who was a very great Galupages who read Soak Chen text with me. But he was definitely not a son teacher. So. So one of the things that really impacted me in all of my teachers, for example Kempo Sara Chodrak, a very great Kenpo from Sokchen Monastery, or Kempo Senam, the great Derge figure who was a doctor and Tibetan Lama in the Lhasa in his later years, or Campo Jingmei Punsok from Larungar, or even Kempo Achuk who I briefly studied with in Yachengar.

**[1:40:14] Speaker B:** What really impacted me on all of those figures was they were profound agents of social change, profound agents of social benefit to others. In fact, going back to that question that you asked me about Vimal Mitra and so forth. So my teacher, Kempo Jime Punso, was the most famous treasure revealer, I think, of the latter part of the 20th century. And when I first heard about him, it was all these stories about always, you know, texture coming from the air and he's having these past life memories of Padmasambhava and all these other things and so forth. But when I came to meet him and I came to know his students and hear his stories and so forth, the thing that left the deepest impression on me was after the Cultural Revolution, when so many Tibetan people were so unsettled because of death and disruption and so forth, he traveled all across Tibet and he reconnected these communities to their densely Tibetan and Buddhist realities.

**[1:41:13] Speaker B:** Not by saying, hey, study Madhyamuka, Alamkara, you, or do this meditation practice, but rather he told stories. He connected them to the land in which they lived. He told them stories about that cave, that mountainside. He told them stories about land based deities and how to interact with them and so forth. He reconnected this whole generation of unsettled Tibetans in a profound way back to their realities. He restitched them to uniquely specific Tibetan worlds in ways that, that had extraordinary implications for their well being and their future. And I could tell other stories about other Tibetan llamas like that. So that left a huge impression on me, the idea of interpreting the transformation of awareness in terms of the transformation of the awareness of young children in high schools or elementary schools or whatever it may be. So I got the thought that that's what I should do.

**[1:42:08] Speaker B:** And so in my own, a completely inadequate way, from 1999 until present, I have spent more of my life doing that and less on scholarship.

**[1:42:18] Speaker B:** And so I've done a lot of work over the years with entrepreneurship, social innovation, participatory knowledge projects and other kinds of things in Tibet in particular.

**[1:42:31] Speaker C:** Thank you. Then the next question is. Just a second. Can you please say more about the influence of Kalachakra on the Great Perfection? And any references to. Follow this up please. I am particularly interested in cosmology.

**[1:42:47] Speaker B:** Yeah, well, so there is a volume that James Gentry is, is putting together now, Stanford. We had a conference at Stanford a year and a half ago or so about the Kalachakra and so traditions. And so he's creating a volume I think with Michael Sheehy out of those papers and so that should come out maybe in another year and a half and so forth. So that'll be one place to look. I don't know that there's a whole lot that's been written that's good and substantial about the subject. But to me, the Kalachakra, it's really important to understand that people think the Kalachakra was just born and it's a static thing. It's not a static thing. It's changing constantly.

**[1:43:27] Speaker B:** And so Kalachakra was an Indian thing in origin for sure, but it was in Tibet from a very early time. And its development as a real tradition in Tibet is a product of those thousand years and it's constantly changed over time. And I think the Kalachakra clearly has been influenced by Dzogchen without a doubt over that thousand year history. But when you look at the 11th century and you see that the Kalachakra is being transmitted inside Tibet and at the same time you see the Song tradition emerging at the same time period, you see some very stunning parallels that clearly reflect a lot of entangled influences. So on the one hand, the dark retreat and the sky gazing, those are in the dark, those are in the Kalachakra, they're in the Sokcha Ning Tik tradition in the 11th century.

**[1:44:17] Speaker B:** Number two, the idea of stories of divine cosmogonies and divine eschatologies in both sides, the narrative connection is unmistakable. Also elemental theory. Now, the particulars of elemental theory, water, fire, wind, space, etc in the Ningtic tradition, in the Kawa Chakra tradition, are very, very different. But the elemental focus of both traditions is unmistakable. Another parallel, the primacy of Yeshe or primordial knowing as a generative, creative, dynamic agent from the beginning to the end of time is unmistakable in both traditions.

**[1:44:59] Speaker B:** The idea of the importance of spontaneous, spontaneous visionary apparitions in contemplative practice, unmistakable on both sides of the tradition. The parallels are extensive. So that's what I could say right now.

**[1:45:15] Speaker C:** Thank you very much. The next question is, don't we need certain ability to remain in Rigpa to practice ATI or Chiti or Yangti

**[1:45:27] Speaker B:** to

**[1:45:28] Speaker C:** practice ati, Chiti and Yangti.

**[1:45:30] Speaker B:** Oh, oh, okay, yeah, that's better of a question for like a llama. But you know, certainly I think what that person is alluding to the importance of having a kind of balanced capacity to remain in the state of, of awareness, that is not engaging in karmic activities of acceptance and rejection and so forth, and essentially Tap in to that deepest nature of the mind, which is empty in essence, radiant nature, pervading in care. And also, I think Ratna lingpa in the 15th century adds and vast in wisdom, that's he has a fourth one, that that capacity is. Is central to all those traditions, but the way they talk about rigba, or awareness, and is somewhat different. And I think what's really unique about the Ning Take tradition in particular is the both the stress on how dynamic awareness is and how constantly it's expressing and manifesting, and the detailed way that it accounts for that in practices as well as in thought.

**[1:46:40] Speaker B:** That's what's really distinctive about it. But yes, I do agree that it's shared, and I didn't stress so much the commonalities, but I can definitely tell a story that weaves all these traditions together and shows their commonalities, even as they're very different. To give you a snapshot, 11th century, it's all about the elements.

**[1:46:57] Speaker B:** 14th century, Longchampa knows that stuff, but honestly, he doesn't really care that much. 17th century, 18th century, it's just not part of Jeep Mei Lingpa, 21st century, nobody even knows about it.

**[1:47:12] Speaker C:** Okay, thank you. And then this is the final question.

**[1:47:17] Speaker C:** When you say that the great perfection is Tibetan imagination, how would you define the great perfection? Great perfectionists often claim that there are influences of the great perfection in the sutras, essentially arguing that there are references or teachings of the great perfection within them. Wouldn't you then agree that all of Buddha's teachings could be considered part of the great perfection? From a great perfectionist's perspective, how can you assert that the great perfection is entirely a Tibetan invention?

**[1:47:50] Speaker B:** Well, I didn't say entirely Tibetan. I never used the word invention, first of all. So the, the story that I tried to tell is that, sure, you can take that perspective. It's kind of the essentialist perspective. Say, what's the essence of the Dzogchen? Let's look for the essence of the Dzogchen in Mahayana or Abhidharma or Cheetah Matra or whatever it might be and so forth.

**[1:48:15] Speaker B:** My whole presentation was a different perspective. It was a one that says, hey, nothing wrong with doing that. A lot of llamas these days will say, let's go for the essentials, let's go for the nature of mind and so forth. All this stuff isn't necessarily important. I happen to think it's very important, the.

**[1:48:31] Speaker B:** The entirety of the tradition. And Tibetans obviously agree with me because they spent a lot of Time and energy, not just writing books, but also living lives and oral embodied transmissions and so forth. They obviously agreed with me that this was important. It was important to them, this full dimensionality of the tradition that isn't just about the essence that you can find in prajnaparamita or yogachara, luminosity of mind or madhyamaka critiques and so forth. This full dimensionality, the stories they told, the cosmologies, the ethical systems, the initiatory practices, the elemental theory, the intricacies of thought, the way they thought about the body's channels, the way they discussed the nature of the relationship of an ordinary mind to an extraordinary mind, their accounts of Buddhahood, their accounts of dying, like those things mattered to the greatest Tibetan lamas in the history of.

**[1:49:25] Speaker B:** Of the tradition. And so that's one response. The second response is, I totally agree, which is in the sense that I think the Dzogchen Ning Tik tradition is not entirely born of the Tibetan imagination. Like it would not be possible without the Indian imagination. And the Indian embodied reality of Indian Buddhism in all these different dimensions, in monastic living, in Tantric Sita's lives, in the prajnaparamita discourses, and the practice of shamata and vipassana, all these things from India made possible what Tibetans did with sokchen.

**[1:50:06] Speaker B:** So I would never say it was entirely the product of the Tibetan imagination, but it was born as the synthetic retelling and reimagining and re. Embodying of all these different strands of Indian Buddhism on Tibetan soil, in a Tibetan space, in Tibetan hearts and minds and so forth. And there's nothing more profound in India than you're going to find in Tibet, period.

**[1:50:42] Speaker B:** You know, profundity is everywhere. I mean, that's. I'll just. I'll leave that with that, which is. I learned that in my life very kind of late, because I always think llamas were the most profound things ever. I was always, like, searching for llamas. I had these big pounds of books. There you are, James. I was looking for you before. So.

**[1:51:00] Speaker B:** And at one point, I remember I was doing this project in. It was a 2000 with National Public Radio in the US we were going around documenting Tibetan folk music. And we were in a place called Basum, so. Which means Three Rock Lake, a little bit to the east of Lhasa, where people don't speak Tibetan, they speak Ba language. They call themselves the Ba people, but they sing in Tibetan, one of those things.

**[1:51:22] Speaker B:** And so we were looking for this woman, just an ordinary woman from the village who's supposed to be a beautiful singer. And we found her coming back from doing some harvest work. And she sang these songs for us. And I remember it was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I just had this extraordinary experience of verticality and horizontality.

**[1:51:41] Speaker B:** That she was so grounded in the language and the place and the land and the people. And there was so much beauty and profundity in what she was singing about. And so many connections across the plateau. And I remember thinking, it doesn't get any more profound than this. That's pure vision.

**[1:51:58] Speaker B:** That's the ability to see everywhere. Everywhere, Every place. America. Louisville, Kentucky. Charlottesville, Virginia.

**[1:52:07] Speaker B:** Varanasi, India, you know, Abu Dhabi, just wherever. And to just meet people and to be able to appreciate their profundity and not see someone else as more profound. I mean, that to me is. Is pure vision. So for me, I've tried to cultivate pure vision with Tibetans.

**[1:52:23] Speaker B:** And that's what I was trying to express today. It's just my appreciation of their profundity and their beauty and their capacity for transformative, extraordinary ways of living in this world and conveying it to others. So thank you.