The first Tibetan Buddhist retreat I attended, right out of college, was an intensive weekend at Tarthang Tulku’s Nyingma Institute in Berkeley in the fall of 1972. The retreat concluded on a most auspicious note, with the arrival of none other than Dudjom Rinpoche, the head of the Nyingma lineage. As a friend visiting from upstate exclaimed afterward, “My first day in the Bay Area, and I get to meet the holiest man in the world!”
Dudjom Rinpoche (1904–87) was a towering figure in twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhism whose many activities included helping the Tibetan exile community through the transition to diaspora and writing his authoritative history of the Nyingma school. He himself was the “mind emanation”—an incarnation or tulku—of Dudjom Lingpa (1835–1904), an extraordinary lama from Tibet’s northeastern nomad lands. Subject to visions of divine beings (especially Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyel) from the age of three, Dudjom Lingpa became a charismatic teacher, treasure revealer (tertön), and celebrated author who was eventually recognized as an emanation of, among others, the Buddha’s disciple Shariputra, the great adept Saraha, and Khyeuchung Lotsawa, one of Padmasambhava’s twenty-five key pupils. He never became a monk and spent much of his life as a peripatetic yogi, traveling throughout Tibet and, it’s reputed, beyond, to various buddha realms and pure lands. At the end of his life, he is said to have passed into the distinctively tantric “rainbow body” by which an enlightened being may exit the world. His many sons and disciples shaped early twentieth-century Nyingma. And his voluminous writings—including a famous autobiography (A Clear Mirror), various treasure texts in the so-called “New Terma” tradition, inspiring spiritual songs, and lucid meditation manuals—are as influential today as when they were composed.
Dudjom Lingpa’s importance, even in the twenty-first century, is due in part to the eloquence and effectiveness of Dudjom Rinpoche, who explicitly preserved and extended his predecessor’s work. It is also due in part to recent efforts by the revered Nyingma master Gyatrul Rinpoche and the accomplished American translator, writer, and teacher Alan Wallace to bring his teachings to a wider audience. Their collaboration has now culminated in the publication of Heart of the Great Perfection, Wallace’s superb collection of English translations of Dudjom Lingpa’s “Pure Vision” writings on Dzogchen, the central theory and practice of Nyingma. Unlike termas, which are long-hidden texts found in physical locales or the tertön’s mind, Pure Vision texts are directly received by a master while in a visionary ecstasy or dream.
When issued in its entirety, Heart of the Great Perfection will comprise three volumes totaling almost a thousand pages, which any serious student of Dzogchen will want to own. Volume one, under review here, contains the seminal Sharp Vajra of Conscious Awareness Tantra; a commentary on it entitled the Essence of Clear Meaning by Dudjom Lingpa’s disciple Pema Tashi; a text exploring the same terrain from a different angle called The Enlightened View of Samantabhadra; and a fascinating work full of visionary reports and meditation advice entitled The Foolish Dharma of an Idiot Clothed in Mud and Feathers. Volume two will focus on Dudjom Lingpa’s Buddhahood Without Meditation and two related texts by Sera Khandro, perhaps the most accomplished female lama of the twentieth century and consort of Dudjom Lingpa’s son, Drime Özer. Volume three will be devoted to a translation of the Vajra Essence, a fully expanded version of the teachings first broached in the Sharp Vajra.
The key to ascending through the eight phases is to appreciate and settle into the Dzogchen perspective on reality.
The set of practices around which every text in volume one pivots (except The Foolish Dharma) is an eight-step process, revealed to Dudjom Lingpa by the primordial buddha Samantabhadra. It takes the practitioner from devotion to a spiritual master, through calm abiding (shamatha) and insight (vipashyana) meditation, to such mystical practices as "cutting through" (trekchö) and "direct crossing over" (tögel), all the way to buddhahood and the rainbow body. The key to ascending through the eight phases is to appreciate and settle into the Dzogchen perspective on reality, according to which the fundamental nature of ourselves—and the cosmos—is our inner pristine awareness (rikpa), also described by terms such as buddhanature, the dharma-body of a buddha, or pure, absolute space.
