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Newsgroups: alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan
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From: johnc@cix.compulink.co.uk ("John Cleaver")
Subject: Re: Shamata/Vipassana vs. Dzogchen.
Message-ID:
Organization: Compulink Information eXchange
References:
Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 09:05:50 GMT
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>flipdanc@speakeasy.org writes:
> I would like to know the fundamental differences between
> Shamata/Vipassana meditation techniques and Dzogchen in
> Tibetan Buddhist practice.
As I understand it:
Shamata is calm abiding, and also refers to any of a variety of
techniques for achieving that calmness. The quiet mind becomes suceptible
to insight, which is Vipassana.
Dzogchen is a complete system of tantric meditation and view, involving
both formless and visualisation practices, as well as preliminary
practices. All tantric Buddhist practices require an abisheka, in which
the lama exposes to the student the nature of mind. The rest of the
practice involves stabilising and strengthening what the lama showed.
Dzogchen view can be quite startling - Dzogchen teaching presents
subjects like abidharma, the five skandhas, the structure and origin of
confused mind, the nature of perception and so on, in an unusual way.
Higher-level Dzogchen meditation instruction sounds a lot like Mahamudra
instruction; the student is directed to 'rest the mind without doing
anything'. However, prior to this the student will have recalled the
realisation associated with the abisheka, and it is in this realisation
that the mind rests.
This sounds like calm abiding, but it is different - calm abiding is a
fairly ordinary state of mind, in which the constant stream of internal
chatter has been slowed down a bit. Formless tantric practices are much
more profound, and depend on a degree of realisation of emptiness; the
instruction is very simple, because there is not very much you can say
about them. When texts try to be more specific, the results are often
rather odd, symbolic, and hard to make sense of.
Dzogchen is sometimes accused of being non-Buddhist, because it can be
interpreted as asserting the existence of an absolute, and because it may
have origins outside the Buddhist tradition. Even proponents say that
Dzogchen is not specifically Buddhist, and is not the property of any one
religious tradition. A form of Dzogchen is practiced by the followers of
the Bon religion, the animist tradition practised in Tibet before the
introduction of Buddhism.
Dzogchen is practised by followers of all Tibetan traditions, but it is
the special responsibility of the Nyingma tradition to preserve the
Dzogchen teaching lineages.
I've never come across a modern book on the Dzogchen tradition that does
more than scratch the surface - everything I've read (other then terma
texts, most of which aren't modern) seems to be an attempt to point to
the nature of the profound realisation at its heart, a project that is
ultimately doomed to failure. I've hardly seen anything printed about
Dzogchen view or the Dzogchen glosses on abidharma.
Jack.
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