The Great Secret of Mind

karmic conditioning—or rather the reconditioning of the mind—proceeds over
many lifetimes or for eons. In the valleys of Tibet, therefore, Buddhist religious
activity was the form demonstrated by Dzogchen yogins and yoginis, particularly
before the Chinese invasion, when Tibet’s political structure was theocratic. In the
Himalayan borderlands—in Dolpo for example—farming or yak herding may be
the principal activity of the Dzogchen yogin. In the exiled refugee community, he
or she may be a doctor or a priest, a trader or a farmer, an artisan or shopkeeper.
The three-in-one ideal that Dudjom Rinpoche has taught, particularly in his
commentary on Ascertaining the Three Vows by Ngari Panchen, is predicated upon
the assumption that the yogin has been inducted into the three levels of Tibetan
Vajrayana praxis. These three consist of the sutric ordination that comes with a
disciplinary codex, the bodhisattva vow of the perfection of wisdom, and the
tantric samayas that imply the predominance of primal awareness. These three
sets of vows may be related to outer, inner, and secret levels of practice. The
monastic training is the outer; the flexible, superior moral training is the inner;
and in secret the tantric samaya vows are sustained. These three levels are
integrated into a single lifestyle and religious persona that we can identify in the
Nyingma yogin whether dressed as a monk, layman, or ngakpa. The activity of this
society of religious practitioners constitutes the culture of the Nyingma school, and
the praxis of this culture is independent and continues whether or not it is
illumined by the Dzogchen view. If it is indeed infused by the Dzogchen view,
then it becomes the karmic form presented by the spontaneity of the view. The
culture becomes the karma that is infused with light and awareness and
eventually is exhausted in the rainbow body or body of light. If the Dzogchen view
as an existential reality has not yet suffused that culture, then, as mentioned
above, the individual cultivates the cultural form with the certainty of progressing
along the path of the bodhisattva and refining the karma that may lead to a higher
rebirth.
It seems evident and of huge importance to the vitality and continuation of the
essence of the Tibetan tradition—Dzogchen atiyoga—that it should not become
mixed up with culturally specific qualities and modes. If Dzogchen remains a
factor of Vajrayana while Vajrayana remains a bundle of quasi-shamanic Central
Asian concepts and quasi-Hindu tantric rituals and concepts, it continues to be
unattractive and irrelevant to the contemporary global mainstream of science and
technology. Some lamas of the tradition, particularly Dudjom Rinpoche and
Dungse Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, showing the qualities of flexibility and incisive
responsiveness that demonstrate their mastery, adapted the traditional forms of
teaching and exposition to the needs of their Western disciples. With the difficult
recognition that Westerners were not to be monks or religious practitioners in the
Himalayan mold, the realization dawned that Western spiritual culture (and
particularly the hippie culture that greeted the refugee lamas in India) needed
only a minute shift of aspiration to allow the magic of the Dzogchen view to work.
These masters saw no need for Western cultural forms to be radically changed and
transmogrified into some kind of Tibetan clone-culture, but rather, by a simple
redirection toward the ideal of Dzogchen, those in whom the natural state of being