8/13/2019 Keith Dowman - Garuda

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| DZOGCHEN |

The Garuda 

Dzogchen is 'The Great Perfection', the apogee of Tibetan TantricBuddhist meditation accomplishment. It is the Buddha's enlightenment inrainbow light.

Dzogchen is also a path of existential praxis which is the quintessence of 

all Tantra. But it cannot be taught or learned. Either you get i t or you don't.It is the school of Buddhism with greatest affinity to the sanity of twenty-first century mystical aspiration.

 A sign of Dzogchen is the Garuda, a mythical bird, Khyung or Kading inTibetan, an ancient sun-god, the celestial bird sometimes with humanface.

 

'All thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky'

 

The exposition of Dzogchen is conventionally expressed in terms of 

Vision, Meditation and Action. The mystical jargon is highly abstractand abstruse. One of the great masters of Dzogchen in this century,Kyapje Dunjom Rimpoche, expressed the vision of Dzogchensomething like this:

'The first thing is Dzogchen vision which sees what really is -- the nature of mind

itself. This is the natural state of being, where the mind makes no distinctions and

 judgments. This state of awareness is called rigpa. Rigpa is naked awareness of 

the wholistic here and now. We cannot actually express this awareness and there

is nothing to compare it to in order to describe it. It is certainly not the ordinary

state of emotional confusion and conflicting thoughts, but neither is it nirvanic

cessation. This state cannot be produced or developed, and on the other hand it

cannot be stopped or extinguished. We can never be free of it and nor can we

fall into error in it. It is impossible to say that we actually exist at that moment butwe cannot say that we do not exist. This experience is neither of infinity, nor of 

anything specific.'

'So, to be brief, because the nature of mind, the Great Perfection, rigpa, cannot

 be established as any specific thing, state, or action, it has the original face of 

emptiness which makes it pure from the beginning, all pervasive and all-

 penetrating. Because the unobstructed lustre of Emptiness and the entire gamut of 

experience whether confused or transcendant are like the sun and its rays,

Emptiness is experienced positively as everything and anything whatsoever and it

has the intrinsic nature of non-dual awareness of the spontaneously arisen

universe of pure quality. For this reason the recognition of the presence of what

is, as the primordial natural state of being, the Real Self of the Three Buddha

Bodies, intrinsic awareness as the union of light and emptiness, is called the visionof the inconceivable Great Perfection.'

On the Dzogchen page the nature of Dzogchen is described by various adepts

through the ages.

 

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