– Palden Sherab, Tsewang Dongyal
In the Dzogchen teaching, “earth” or “bhUmi” symbolizes the Ground or Base. What is the ground of both samsara and nirvana? It is primordial wisdom, or in Dzogchen terms, rigpa. So rigpa is the ground from which everything emanates. Samsara and nirvana (the enlightened state) are not really distinct from each other. When we realize the rigpa nature, we are enlightened beings. When we don’t realize this nature, we are in samsara. For that reason, the Prayer of Kuntuzangpo by Padmasambhava says, “If you recognize rigpa, you are enlightened beings. If you don’t recognize it, you are deluded beings.” So knowing and not knowing rigpa is really the borderline between enlightenment and delusion and between buddhas and sentient beings. Knowing rigpa, we reach enlightenment; not knowing rigpa, we stay deluded. So the Ground in Dzogchen is this innate awareness, rigpa.
– Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
Our mind is primordially in the state of Rigpa. Whatever state of mind we go through, whether it is a very heavy experience of ignorance or a very outrageous emotion of anger, we have never moved from the state of rigpa. Our mind has always been in a state of rigpa, but we don’t realize it all the time.
When we don’t realize it, there is no continuity of the experience. The non-conceptual experience of rigpa, the flash of the wisdom of rigpa, is constantly interrupted. That interruption is what is called “covering”. Realization is when we totally overcome that interruption so that the experience becomes one continuity. In more Mahamudra terms, Milarepa said that between two conceptual discursive thoughts, you experience non-conceptual wisdom. There is a moment of non-conceptual wisdom in between thoughts. We don’t realize that, we just miss it all the time.
Once we have a flash experience of rigpa, we gain a deeper faith and confidence in this path, in this teaching, and in this realization. Then it is not a theory anymore, it is a firsthand experience. While that flash experience may just happen to some people, normally it doesn’t. That flash experience comes from the “pointing out” that you receive from your own Guru. Then, you will have certainty. In the Dzogchen tradition, it is through combining our devotion, which is our trust and confidence in this inconceivable rigpa and in the lineage masters of rigpa, with the transmission called the rigpa pointing out empowerment – that we experience a flash of rigpa. This doesn’t mean that our experience of rigpa won’t be interrupted from then on. If we nurture that flash, which has been given birth in our mind, it can be developed into a full-grown youthful experience of rigpa.
The actual non-conceptual state of our experience of rigpa comes from devotion. We could say that the experience of rigpa is the realization of the Guru. When we put our confidence, devotion, and trust in our Guru, when we listen to his instructions and totally “click” into that state of instruction, then we experience the naked structure of rigpa. Therefore, devotion plays an important role in experiencing rigpa.
Devotion, in some sense, can be taught. It can be explained the way compassion is explained. We talk first about dualistic compassion. Dualistic compassion is seeing someone suffering, therefore you feel compassion. That leads us to the state of ultimate compassion, the compassion of the Buddhas, which is non-referential and beyond duality. Similarly, we could say there is a conceptual aspect of devotion and, at the same time, there is a non-conceptual aspect of devotion that is generated through a conceptual devotion. At a certain point, if your confidence begins to manifest greater mindfulness, greater awareness, then with the process of devotion, confidence manifests fully and completely. That fullness of the manifestation of confidence may not be any different from the experience of rigpa.
– Drubwang Rinpoche, Sogyal Rinpoche
A Vajrayana practitioner is not supposed to criticize emotions as something awful. Rather, one should let go of the grasping within emotion and recognize its pure quality, using the strength of the emotion to recognize rigpa. But the emotion must be liberated through this process. What does it mean for an emotion to become liberated? It doesn’t mean we prevent emotion from arising, like closing the door. Nor does it mean we should take hold of whatever arises, whatever unfolds, with a clinging to “I”. Rather, just allow it to dissolve, dissolve, and again dissolve; then the energy in the emotion becomes full-fledged, fully blossomed. This most vital point – that the emotions are the five wisdoms – is an extraordinary, unique feature within the Vajra Vehicle of Secret Mantra. Failing to understand this point can become a grave mistake. But when you really understand it, there’s major progress from trying to suppress the emotions, trying not to feel. The main quality of Vajrayana is how to deal effectively with emotions.
Now, while you don’t suppress an emotion, there is no benefit from just getting carried away by the emotion and doing whatever it says. It would be very easy to just kick back and surrender to the emotions, but that is not the Dzogchen way. Say you leave the door to your house wide open, and fifty emotions March in. The emotions tell you, “Get up now. Let’s go rob that bank! You have to come along”. If you reply “Okay, no problem! I’ll join you,” you’re finished. The Dzogchen approach is not to fight with the emotions, true, but you don’t obey them either. This is entirely different from closing your doors and windows and pretending not to be home when the emotions come knocking. So what do you do? Just let the emotions come right in. You’re sitting down, and they each point a rifle at you, saying, “If you don’t come with us, we’ll shoot!” What do you do? If you let yourself get overwhelmed and join forces with the emotions, you are no different from an ordinary person. And if you try to prevent them from entering, by closing all the doors and windows, then there’s no adornment, you’re just sitting there all alone, like in Shamatha. We need to allow rigpa’s natural strength to be fully present. Faced with rigpa’s natural strength, fully manifest, all the emotions lose their power and become part of rigpa.
To truly liberate emotions through the practice of rigpa, you have to make sure that you have recognized rigpa to begin with. Recognizing your own nature basically means that the dualistic mind is introduced to itself, to its own basic nature, which, as you have heard by now, is empty in essence and cognizant by nature. You must also have heard that these two cannot be separated in any way whatsoever; they are an indivisible unity. Cognizant nature means a natural intelligence, alertness that is simply present, completely aware of what happens. Rigpa is not a dim-witted, vacant state of mind. It is not absentminded, unaware of what is going on. Nor is it a conceptual manner of being aware. There is a certain presence in rigpa, but that mindful presence is not made deliberately. It is intrinsically present together with this empty essence. It is simply a matter of this state knowing itself.
Let me illustrate this point with a candle and its flame. Let’s say there is no electricity in the room, only a lit candle. Do you need to turn on a flashlight to see the flame? No, the flame is self-illuminating. You could say it has two aspects: it illuminates the darkness, and it illuminates its own flame. But take this chant book in my hand, do you need a flashlight to see it? Yes, because it is not self-illuminating. To see the chant book you need two things: the flashlight and the book; just like you need a subject and object to conceptually know something. But rigpa is entirely different. Rigpa is self-knowing natural cognizance. It’s as if a flame could know itself.
The pointing-out instruction for recognizing mind essence involves a dualistic mind being introduced to itself. Mind is led to know its nature. We are told how to recognize our empty cognizance. To put it in a nutshell: your basic state of mind is not another state to arrive at later. This present way of experiencing simply acknowledges that it is actually empty in essence and, while not losing track of being empty, is still able to perceive and to function.
This mind is supposed to recognize its emptiness, but not as an object. The moment this mind recognizes emptiness, rigpa is an immediate actuality. If this cognizance sees its own emptiness as a separate object, then there is duality in that the knowing becomes the subject, with emptiness as its object. That is the opposite of recognizing rigpa. The moment of rigpa is alert, casual, spontaneous, not meditating, not keeping hold, not rejecting. All five senses are open, it is not a thing but a beautiful, fresh moment.
– Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
Two types of rigpa are defined in the context of practice. Although only a conceptual division, it is helpful in instruction. The first, the base rigpa, is the pervasive foundational awareness of the base. Every being that has a mind has this awareness, buddhas as well as samsaric beings, as it is from this awareness that all minds arise.
The second is the arising innate awareness of the path, which is the individual’s experience of the pervasive awareness. It is called path rigpa because it refers to the direct experience of rigpa that yogis have when they enter the practice of Dzogchen and receive the introduction, initiation, and transmission. That is, it is not realized in experience until the practitioner is introduced to it by the Master.
The potential for path rigpa to manifest lies in the fact that our minds arise from the primordial awareness of the base. When the primordial awareness is known directly, we call it innate awareness, and this is the path rigpa that the yogi knows. In this context, we refer to the primordial awareness as rigpa, and the rigpa that arises on the path as rang-rig. The first is like cream and the second is like butter in the sense that they are the same substance but something must be done to produce the butter. This is arising or path rigpa because we enter it, then leave it and fall back into the moving mind. It is intermittent in our experience. But rigpa is always present – the primordial base rigpa is presence, neither arising nor ceasing, whether we recognize it or not.
– The Life and Teachings of Adeu Rinpoche
Recognizing the empty quality means that you experience the empty identity of rigpa, which includes essence, nature, and capacity. In other words, you recognize rigpa as it is. This is indispensable because you cannot train in what you have not recognized.
Training in the perceiving quality means that whatever objects appear to your field of perception, whatever takes place, sights and sounds, and so forth, are experienced as thoughts going out towards objects. What we usually believe to be objects, in our field of experience, are just projections of existence onto something that actually has no other subsistence other than being a perception. Understanding the emptiness of an object is simply letting go of ascribing a false existence to it. This is called sealing perceptions with emptiness or affixing the mudra of emptiness onto perceptions.
Having recognized rigpa to be empty, then training with perceptions means recognizing that all perceptions are also empty. In other words, you recognize perceptions to be what they actually are and you no longer attach a fictitious reality to them as if they were real, concrete, external things. When training in emptiness, whatever unfolds from the non-existent happens as an empty appearance free of grasping. In short, to train in the perceiving quality is to recognize the essence of the mind within any appearances that arise.
When Milarepa received the pointing-out instruction from Marpa, he showed that perceptions are mind, that mind is empty and emptiness is dharmakaya – in other words, the mind and what it perceives are not separate at all; they are a unity. In Vajrayana, the perceived represents the male aspect while the empty represents the female aspect. Also called means and knowledge, prajna and upaya, these are always seen as being an indivisible unity.
[Student] What are some of the stumbling blocks in the practice of rigpa?
[Rinpoche]: The most common stumbling blocks to maintaining the continuity of rigpa are the temporary experiences of bliss, clarity, and non-thought. Let’s take bliss as an example. This is when you are practicing and supposedly training in the natural state, but it has actually shifted into being a cozy state of shamatha where you feel extremely good. You get the feeling that, “I don’t want to spill the soup because if I move, maybe I will ruin this state”. It feels very comfortable, very smooth, very clear, and undisturbed. Being in such a state is so enjoyable that you don’t even want to move a knee or arm, afraid that even the slightest movement will wreck that state. This is a sign that the mood of shamatha has saturated the state of rigpa and taken it over.
If this happens, you should totally disown that state. Instead of clinging to the meditation like a precious possession, you should toss it away. There is a statement that the mountain boulder improves by falling. It falls from a great height, clashes with stone, and gets polished and purified. Likewise, rushing water becomes fresher and purer as it flows downstream. In the same way, the yogi’s meditation is improved by destruction; repeatedly destroying the meditation state improves it.
The indication that one has slipped into shamatha is a sense of being attached or fascinated. Clinging, one goes astray. Rigpa is without clinging to anything whatsoever. It is wide open and clear whereas Shamatha doesn’t have the lucidity to it. In some of his songs, Milarepa says that bliss, clarity, and non-thought are like the dregs of the view and should be thrown away. In other songs, he says that bliss, clarity, and non-thought are like the summit of the view. How are these two seemingly contradictory statements reconciled? In the first case, these are like the cozy mood of shamatha and so nothing more than a product of grasping mind. So of course such a state should be dispensed with and not clung to. However the natural state, the essence, itself is also blissful, clear, and free of thought, yet these qualities cannot be dispensed with because they are intrinsic to the natural state. The difference is that at the stage of one-pointedness, one still clings to these temporary experiences; whereas in the next stage of Simplicity, they are recognized to be the characteristics of the natural state which is not only blissful, clear and free of thought but also free of all clinging and grasping.
[Student] How does one clearly distinguish the awakened state of rigpa from a temporary experience of clarity?
[Rinpoche] The difference is quite straightforward. Temporary experiences are transitory and hence change, they come and go, whereas rigpa doesn’t fluctuate. Most temporary meditation experiences occur in the stages before you have attained stability in rigpa. When there is steadiness in rigpa, that steadiness doesn’t get lost no matter what may unfold. You do not become caught up in any temporary experiences and they just naturally dissipate, like mist clearing. If on the other hand, you are still unstable, then of course you will occasionally tend to get caught up in various experiences and moods.
– Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
So how do we do rigpa? Is it by meditating? The question arises, “Then what is there for me to do? Rigpa is just automatic and natural. There is nothing I have to do about it. I am told that anything I try to do is just conceptual – so what do I need to do?”
Our task here is to first recognize the essence or rigpa itself. We don’t need to do anything about rigpa after that. Rigpa does not require our assistance. All we need to do is refrain simply from accepting the invitations that come along to be distracted, to disturb rigpa. We simply refrain from accepting such disturbing requests, again and again. That is our task. We do not need to improve rigpa. Let’s say there is a glimpse of recognizing the awakened state that is rigpa. There is no way we can expand it, even if we try to. Trying to do anything to it just covers it up more. Some people misunderstand this point. They think, “I should get rigpa, hold rigpa”. If they try to do that, though, the non-dual state will never last. That is how it is.
The phrase is undistracted while not meditating because if our meditation is conceptual, we are by definition distracted, in the sense of ordinary people who are always distracted. Usually, in order to not be distracted, we try to keep mindful right? What is it that maintains shamatha, the state of mental stability? The best way is mindfulness, right? To keep undistracted in shamatha, we remain mindful. The main purpose of mindfulness is to be undistracted. The Dzogchen perspective is different, and in fact, this is one of the main distinctions between shamatha and rigpa. Rigpa, of course, needs to be undistracted as well, but the rigpa that needs to be kept undistracted by means of mindfulness will only turn into a conceptual state. Here there seem to be two possibilities: being undistracted by keeping mindful and being undistracted without trying to keep mindful. Rigpa’s type of undistractedness is the latter; it is not kept by being deliberately mindful.
The Dzogchen teachings actually mention four types of mindfulness: deliberate mindfulness, effortless mindfulness, true mindfulness, and supreme mindfulness. Briefly, however, we can operate with just two types: deliberate and effortless, one for Shamatha and the other for Dzogchen. Deliberate mindfulness is used in shamatha training, while effortless mindfulness is during vipashyana, in the Dzogchen sense. From a Mahamudra perspective, true mindfulness is during one taste, while kinglike supreme mindfulness is during non-meditation.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
What is meditation in Dzogchen? It is simply resting, undistracted, in the View, once it has been introduced. Dudjom Rinpoche describes it: “Meditation consists of being attentive to such a state of Rigpa, free from all mental constructions, whilst remaining fully relaxed, without any distraction or grasping. For it is said – meditation is not striving, but naturally becoming assimilated into it”.
The whole point of Dzogchen meditation practice is to strengthen and stabilize rigpa and allow it to grow to full maturity. The ordinary, habitual mind with its projections is extremely powerful. It keeps returning and takes hold of us easily when we are inattentive or distracted. As Dudjom Rinpoche used to say, “At present, our Rigpa is like a little baby, stranded on the battlefield of strong arising thoughts”. I like to say we have to begin by babysitting our Rigpa, in the secure environment of meditation.
If meditation is simply to continue the flow of rigpa after the introduction, how do we know when it is rigpa and when it is not? I asked Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche this question, and he replied with his characteristic simplicity: “If you are in an unaltered state, it is rigpa”. If we are not contriving or manipulating the mind in any way, but simply resting in an unaltered state of pure and pristine awareness, then that is rigpa. Rigpa is a state in which there is no longer any doubt; there is not really a mind to doubt, you see directly.
The tradition of Dzogchen is one of extreme precision, since the deeper you go, the subtler the deceptions that can arise, and what is at stake is the knowledge of absolute reality. Even after the introduction, the masters clarify in detail the states that are not Dzogchen meditation. In one of those states, you drift into a no-man’s land of the mind, where there are no thoughts or memories; it is a dark, dull, indifferent state, where you are plunged into the ground of the ordinary mind. In the second state, there is some stillness and slight clarity, but the state of stillness is a stagnant one, still buried in the ordinary mind. In a third, you experience an absence of thoughts but are “spaced out” in a vacant state of wonder. In a fourth, your mind wanders away, hankering afterthoughts and projections. None of these is the true state of meditation, and the practitioner has to watch out skillfully to avoid being deluded in these ways.
The essence of meditation practice in Dzogchen is encapsulated by these four points:
1. When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet arisen, in that gap, in between, isn’t there a consciousness of the present moment, fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair’s breadth of concept, a luminous, naked awareness? Well, that is what Rigpa is!
2. Yet it doesn’t stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn’t it? This is the self-radiance of that rigpa.
3. However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the chain of delusion and is the root of samsara.
4. If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated.
The practitioner discovers, and this is a revolutionary insight, whose subtlety and power cannot be overestimated – that not only do violent emotions not necessarily sweep you away and drag you back into whirlpools of your own neuroses, but they can also actually be used to deepen, embolden, invigorate and strengthen rigpa. The tempestuous energy becomes raw food of the awakened energy of rigpa. The stronger the emotion, and the more flaming it is, the more rigpa is strengthened. This unique method of Dzogchen has extraordinary power to free even the most inveterate, deeply rooted emotional and psychological problems.