The Great Secret of Mind

was incipiently blossoming could be infused by its illuminating spaciousness and
awareness.
Westerners gazing closely at Tibetan monasticism, while retaining deep respect
—even to a fault—tend to perceive it as a kindergarten stage. The cultural function
of the monasteries has changed in the refugee society (although not much in
Tulku Pema Rigtsal’s gompa), becoming the means whereby the traditional
culture is conserved and sustained particularly through the education of boys who
have no initial intention of becoming monks but who cannot afford, or do not
possess, the means of attaining a Western-style education in a modern institution.
But the epithet “kinder-garten” not only denominates the function of educating
and socializing children, but also the training of the few monks, whose karma is
suited to a lifetime of study, recollection, and meditation, in the Mahayana sutras,
in Buddhist logic, in spiritual aspiration, in physical and moral training, and in the
priestly functions, such as sanctifying rites of passage.
It is unfortunate that certain ancient Buddhist monastic and atavistic Tibetan
attitudes are conserved in the monasteries. Faint traces of these attitudes peer
through Pema Rigtsal’s anecdotes in his text. Buddhist societies have always
upheld the superiority of the monastic ideal and its necessity, and monks of course
are the first to support such a view. Denigration of the lay option and the “sadhu”
mode follow automatically. The superior and slightly disparaging attitude toward
women—including nuns—is sometimes painfully felt, by feminists in particular.
Materialism and its financial status-structured hierarchy is presented—and
disdained—as a particularly Western affliction, while it should be evident by now
that Asia, in general, and Tibetans, in particular, are plagued with gross
materialistic attitudes. Such attitudes are held in the first place due to naïve
adulation of the high technology developed in the West and only recently available
in Asia, and in the second because wealth and conspicuous consumption are seen
to indicate the favor of the gods—and therefore merit and virtue—among the
wealthy.
So, finally, The Great Secret of Mind contains secret Dzogchen precepts hidden
among excerpts from a manual of sutric Buddhism together with some gems of
tantric instruction. Some readers will understand the sutric path of monasticism in
which Tulku Pema Rigtsal is situated as the cultural context, and Dzogchen Ati as
the mystical experience unfolding within it, unmarked by monasticism. To put it
another way, consonant with Mahayana dogma, the temporal sutric path provides
the form and the Dzogchen view-cum-meditation the emptiness. The sutric path,
determined by karma, provides the time-space context, which in timeless
awareness of the here and now becomes the pure presence of Dzogchen. The
lesson in this for the post-Renaissance, post-Reformation West, where religious and
lay cultures have been confounded for several hundred years, and in the
developed Far Eastern societies into which those attitudes have been transposed, is
that Dzogchen yogins and yoginis are completely anonymous, free of any attribute
by which they could be recognized. Their activity cannot be defined. Their
behavior cannot be described. Their conduct does not accord with any agenda.
They wear no badge, or hat, by which they can be labeled or compartmentalized.