Translator’s Introduction

IT SHOULD BE STRESSED at the outset that the author of The Great Secret of Mind,

Tulku Pema Rigtsal Dorje, is a fully ordained Buddhist monk. Not only is he a
bhikshu, he is also the abbot of a large, functioning monastery integrated into the
social fabric of the Himalayan society that it serves. He has in his charge 150 young
and not-so-young monks who look to him for guidance on the Dzogchen path
within the frame of the Nyingma school’s religious training. He is also the guiding
light of a group of tantric yogins and ngakpas who received Dzogchen instruction
from his father, a highly respected tantric yogin from a Khampa family that had
settled in the Mount Kailash area and built a monastery there (Namkha Khyung
Dzong) in the early part of the twentieth century. Further, Pema Rigtsal is steeped
in the Tersar tradition of Dudjom Rinpoche Jigtral Yeshe Dorje, another of his root
gurus, who was very much concerned with the integration of the monastic and the
tantric ethos, and thus emphasized the teaching of the three disciplines—monastic,
bodhisattvic, and tantric—as unified and noncontradictory. But it is as a Buddhist
monk whose discipline is derived from the Buddha’s vinaya and abhidharma that
Pema Rigtsal teaches Dzogchen.
Tulku Pema Rigtsal’s background is important for a number of reasons. First, he
is one of the last Tibetan tulkus to receive the benefit of a full traditional training
without the interference of Chinese Communist authorities or the distraction of
popular Western culture. He is one of only a handful of tulkus who run
monasteries in the traditional manner, while ministering to the local community
that created them. The Western Nepali-Tibetan borderlands in Humla provide that
opportunity. Pema Rigtsal received a comprehensive academic training from
several highly regarded khenpo scholars in Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, India, and also
Tibet. This not only gave him grounding in the tradition of the Mahayana sutras
but also, in India, opened up a window on the modern, western world. To
counterbalance that sutric education and to plunge himself deeply into the strictly
Tibetan cultural aspect of Vajrayana, he spent seven years in Tibet, five of them at
the Dzogchen Gompa in Kham. In that way, he is a tulku who combines the
qualities of a Buddhist pandita-academic, comfortable in monasteries, with those
of a yogin-meditator who knows the rigors of retreat in a snowline hermitage. He
has utilized the fruit of this education to teach buddha-dharma, in general, and
Dzogchen, in particular, in Southeast and East Asia. He has thereby confronted the
quandaries of Vajrayana praxis in the modern world and has arrived at various
important conclusions regarding them. Finally, he is a Buddhist monk practicing
Dzogchen, and that identity has brought the paradoxical complexities of sutra vis à
vis Dzogchen into clear focus.
This book may appear at first sight, therefore, to be a textbook of graduated,
progressive Dzogchen. With its accent on sutric Mahayana Buddhism, it may seem
to be written for monks of the Nyingma school. But if we were to sieve out the