kingdom.” Karmic causality is beyond the intellect to comprehend or calculate. It is
impossible to explain it here. Until the thoughts of sentient beings cease, karmic
causality will prevail. In The Wish-Fulfilling Treasury, Longchenpa says,
The mind sets the pattern,
And mind accumulates karma,
Mind projects appearances,
And mind applies labels.
Strive to subdue delusive mind.Those who enter the natural state of Dzogchen are not themselves affected by
karma and can therefore explain the particular karmas of the conventional world,
disciples, and ordinary beings. They can become the teacher of the inevitable
repercussions of karma, wise in describing the stages, paths, and cause and effect.
It was during the first turning of the wheel that the Buddha, our teacher, taught
karmic cause and effect, giving us provisional instruction in the presentation of
the four noble truths. Some may think that the provisional teaching is not even
conventionally true and that the Buddha was actually deceiving his disciples, but
that is a seriously wrong-headed way of thinking. Until mental concepts and
mental events vanish into spaciousness or disappear in the natural state of
Dzogchen, the mind is not exhausted. Until the mind is exhausted, the five
poisonous emotions that depend upon it will inevitably arise. Sentient beings in
their environments will be created continuously, like pots flying off a potter’s
wheel: good karmic effects will eventuate in the upper realms of samsara, the
realms of the gods, titans, and men, and bad karmic effects in the lower realms,
those of the hells, hungry ghosts, and animals. For that reason, so long as there is a
mind, we are tied to samsara, where the laws of karma are established. So long as
beings exist, it is certain that causes gave them birth and their present actions
produce effects. In his Ornament of the Middle Way, the abbot Shantarakshita said,
Depending upon causes before and before that,
After and after that, effects will arise.Just now we need to train in both the formal and informal contemplation of
Dzogchen and dissolve all the conceptual elaborations of mind. Then one day the
mind that grasps at all phantoms will be completely exhausted, and when light-
forms of primal awareness arise, there will be no causal interference, in the same
way that the sky remains unaffected when we throw colored powders into it. Since
there is utterly no desire for, or hatred toward, material objects any more, and
there is no attachment to causation or to samsara or nirvana, we develop strong
trust in the inevitability of relativistic moral laws and become wise in showing
them to others.
Some contemporary teachers of Dzogchen, without differentiating between
formal and informal contemplation, state categorically that karmic cause and
effect does not operate in Dzogchen and that that is the special characteristic of it.
This is not only self-deluding but destroys the seeds of faith in others. Be careful of