BUDDHISM IN THE TIBETAN CULTURAL AREA 279practices-such as Tantric rituals centered on native Tibetan deities-for
which no Indian texts could be cited as precedents. The question of how to
meet the challenge of the reform movement's new standards and at the same
time hold on to their old traditions brought these lineages together into two
broad camps that eventually developed into two loosely organized lineages of
their own. One was the Bon lineage, which declared itself a separate religion,
maintaining that the Sakyamuni of the reform movement was an impostor
Buddha, and that they held the lineage of the true Buddha, named Shenrab
(gShen-rab, Best of Holy Beings), a native of a land to the west of Tibet called
Ta-zig (present-day Tadjikistan?). Thus they had no need to justify their tradi-
tions as coming from India and were able to develop a tradition that is an
unabashed amalgam of Buddhist teachings-generally following the
Yogacarins-and older shamanic beliefs, including a myth of the universe
being created from light (Strong EB, sec. 7.2).
The other camp, which accepted that they and the reformers worshiped
the same Buddha, called themselves the Nyingma (rNying-ma, Ancient)
school. This school maintained that its allegedly apocryphal texts were actu-
ally authentic in that they had been hidden by Padmasambhava and later dis-
covered by spiritual adepts. Thus the Nyingmas reopened the old controversy
that had split the Sthaviras and Mahasanghikas (see Section 3.2.1) over what
constitutes an authentic transmission. In the long run, the Nyingmas won the
battle in Tibet, for the tradition of termas (gter-ma)-hidden treasure texts re-
putedly placed underground, underwater, in the sky, or in "mind" (conceived
as the Dharmakaya)-spread to other schools as well. In the eyes of some, ter-
mas discovered by tertons (gter-ston), or treasure-finders, were a more pro-
found transmission than texts with an established historical pedigree. At any
rate, termas provided the mechanism whereby new teachings could be ac-
cepted as authentic in a culture obsessed with lineages and precedents.
The primary Nyingma terma of this period was the Mani Kabum (Mal).i
bka' 'bum), which set forth the eclectic proposition that all interpretations of
the Buddhist path were equally correct, and that all altered states of conscious-
ness realized at the ends of these paths were equivalent. It also set forth a sys-
tem-which was to influence all subsequent Nyingma thought-whereby the
Unexcelled Yoga level ofTantra was divided into three sublevels, with the
Nyingma/Bon form of meditation, Dzogchen, forming the highest of the
three.
Dzogchen, unlike more standard methods of Buddhist meditation, asserted
that Awakening wasn't "brought about" at all. Awareness in and of itself, the
Nyingmas claimed, was already innately pure and nondual, and all that needed
to be done in order to realize its innate purity and nonduality was to let
thought processes come to a stop. The approach they prescribed was thus one
of spontaneity and nonstriving, effortless abiding with the "Primordial Basis."
They offered no analytical path for how to accomplish this, however, for they
said that any analysis would simply add to the mind's thought processes.
The obvious parallels between the Dzogchen and Ch'an doctrines of spon-
taneity have caused some scholars to assume that Ch' an was the source for the