The Great Secret of Mind

precept of nonaction necessarily engages, and although, from the outsider’s point
of view, a monk or bodhisattva may still seem to be striving on the graduated path,
internally the Dzogchen ethos has come to be the apex of his or her outlook,
presiding over any other approach.
What this boils down to in practice for the Tibetans is that if their initiatory
experience has not provided them with the Dzogchen view and its corollary of
nonmeditation, then they must be satisfied with the daily round of their religious
culture. Their religious practice may consist of the ascetic hermetic lifestyle of
yogins practicing the creative stage or the fulfillment stage. Or it may consist of the
lifestyle of neophytes practicing ngondro preparatory practices in a semiretreat
situation; of lay tantrika ngakpas performing endless rituals designed to attain
buddha or, more likely, to benefit themselves and others on a material plane; of
householders committed to their family and professional duties and deeply
engaged in their devotions and good works; or of sutric meditators who live a pure
lifestyle, ordained or not, engaged essentially in constant shamata or vipasyana
meditation. In old Tibet it could have been any of these styles of religious
occupation, all denominated as gradual methods leading to enlightenment. In the
Dzogchen view, however, they are merely forms of religious culture to be bathed
in the illumination that the Dzogchen view provides.
For all these religious people, Dzogchen is approached from outside and below
as a goal only to be invoked in prayer, a carrot extended beyond the donkey’s nose
to make him run. In H.H. the Dalai Lama’s famous exposition of Dzogchen at Lerab
Ling in France, for instance, he spoke mainly round about Dzogchen, describing it
from the platform of the graduated path. Naturally enough, from that point of
view, he stressed the cultural aspect of Dzogchen, the Vajrayana basis and
groundwork, the context of lama worship and devotion, rather than providing the
essential precepts of the view and meditation. Perhaps this emphasis on the
maturation of the student’s mind is derived from the necessity in the Tibetan
monastic environment to cultivate the untrained minds of Tibetan nomads and
farmers by means, for example, of the Madhyamaka dialectic. But reasoning does
not lead to the recognition of the nondual nature of mind. As Patrul Rinpoche
makes very clear in his The Three Incisive Precepts, the Dzogchen method is
grounded in experience. Those who cannot recognize what is immediately in front
of their nose here and now can, perhaps, recognize the clear light in the bardo of
reality. Otherwise, in both this life and the next, they should immerse themselves
in the religious culture of Vajrayana, in study of the sutras and Buddhist logic on
the progressive path of spiritual materialism. In this way the Dalai Lama is here in
line with the mainstream of Dzogchen teachers in the latter days in stressing the
relativist, space-time aspect of Dzogchen rather than its mystical nondual core.
The proponents of this sutric Dzogchen design their lives according to the
graduated path described by the Mahayana sutras, fill it with the ethos of the
bodhisattva vow, and strive on the difficult path of self-sacrifice. They may take
the logical step of ordination and practice tantric ritual in order to speed up the
process of attainment of their altruistic goals. In that arena the processes of karmic
causality are dominant and all-consuming, and the slow process of purification of