Approaching the Great Perfection Simultaneous and Gradual Methods of Dzogchen Practice in the Longchen Nyingtig

Abstract

Preface ^ I ^HE TEN GREAT PERFECTION TEXTS that appear in this book are the I work of Rigdzin Jigme Lingpa. Although he died over two hundred ,JL years ago, in the long view of the Tibetan tradition he is a recent figure. In all four of the main schools his work remains of central impor¬tance for those who practice the Great Perfection. His Longchen Nyingtig cycle has been handed down through generations of practitioners as a com¬plete path to enlightenment, and many lineages for the authorized trans¬mission (lung) of these texts are still in existence today. While the Longchen Nyingtig is full of treasure texts, speaking with the impersonal and author¬itative voice of scripture, it also contains texts written as ordinary, yet still inspired, treatises on the Great Perfection. The individual voice of Jigme Lingpa is strongly present in these compositions. The reader cannot help but be struck by the urgency in his writing, and by his concern to com¬municate the true spirit of the Great Perfection to his audience. Although Jigme Lingpa did compose more scholarly treatises than these, he is best known as a representative of the yogic side of the Nyingma school, as one who wrote out of his own experience of meditation rather than intellectual knowledge. His writings have a colloquial style, with the quality of a per¬sonal instruction given from teacher to student, and I hope that my trans¬lations will carry some of this feeling of immediacy. When texts such as these are subjected to scholarly scrutiny, something— some would say the principal thing—is missed, and for this reason most readers might prefer to begin with the translations in part III, before turn¬ing to the discussion of them in part II. In my analysis of the texts I have tried to demonstrate how Jigme Lingpa constructs a coherent thesis using passages that seem to contradict each other when taken individually. These contradictions occur between two apparently opposed tendencies within Jigme Lingpa s writing. The first tendency emphasises the immanence of the enlightened mind in all sentient beings, and proposes that the realization of this immanence is itself the method by which all aspects of enlighten¬ment are attained simultaneously. The second emphasizes the distinction between the ordinary state of sentient beings, samsara, and its enlightened correlate, nirvana, and proposes that enlightenment is to be attained grad¬ually through various practices. Modern scholarship has usually approached these two tendencies as entrenched positions on one side or the other of polemical debates between different schools. However, both tendencies are present to some extent within each of the schools in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The great exponents of every school have found it necessary to mediate between these two extremes, and this is what we see Jigme Lingpa doing in his Longchen Nyingtig texts. I have tried to show how the difficult contradictions inherent in Jigme Lingpas incorporation of the Great Per¬fection into the Mahayana Buddhist path compelled him to employ a series of interpretive responses. As ever, I am humbled by the great range and depth of the Tibetan lit¬erary tradition. I am not one of those few whose encyclopedic knowledge begins to encompass the whole of the literature, but here I have attempted to trace the subtle lines of literary influence on Jigme Lingpa. Traditional and recent scholarly accounts of Jigme Lingpas literary sources have focused on the influence of the monolithic figure of Longchenpa, the fourteenth- century Nyingma scholar. The importance of Longchenpa to Jigme Lingpa is indisputable, yet other less famous figures emerge from the Longchen Nyingtig texts, including the seventeenth-century writers Tsele Natsog Rang- drol and Lhatsiin Namkhai Jigme. Neither of these two produced a large body of work, but both wrote pithy treatises for meditators in a contem¬porary and colloquial style that has a clear relationship to Jigme Lingpas writings. This relationship shows us Jigme Lingpa in a different light. He appears not just as a reformer who breathed new life into the doctrines of a figure from the classical period of Nyingma scholarship four hundred years earlier, but also as a teacher interested in the work of those in the recent past who presented the essentials of the Great Perfection in an acces¬sible form. I have also shown Jigme Lingpa as actively engaged with the different versions of the Buddhist teachings maintained by the other schools, particularly the Gelug school which dominated his homeland of Central Tibet. While open to the doctrines of the other schools, especially the Kagyii, he strongly opposed those who made false equivalences between the doctrines of different schools, and fiercely defended what he saw as the special characteristics of the Nyingma teachings. In short, I have tried to show that by presenting a particular way to prac-tice the Buddhist path Jigme Lingpa was not merely reviving the work done by Longchenpa. He drew together developments in the Tibetan tradition over the four centuries after Longchenpa and presented all this in a style unmistakeably his own. The popularity of the Longchen Nyingtig testifies to Jigme Lingpas success in this project, and central to this success is his rec¬onciliation of the contradictions between the simultaneous and the grad¬ual approaches to enlightenment.