You are the professional and I the dabbler – I am afraid I must wait on you!
N.

Anuyoga seems to have developed independence even later than Atiyoga. It is absent from Vilāsavajra’s commentary on the Guhyagarbha’s chapter thirteen, on the stages of tantric practice (Q.4718: 186b), and it is similarly absent from the treatment of the levels of empowerment in Sūryasiṃhaprabha’s Guhyagarbha commentary (Q.4719: 224a–224b). In the doxographical texts IOL Tib J 656 and Pelliot tibétain 644 it is the same as Atiyoga in having no specific meditative or ritual content, while according to IOL Tib J 656 the practice of Anuyoga is the same as Mahāyoga: union and liberation (sbyor sgrol). Moreover it seems that Anuyoga was not given any specific scriptural content until much later than was the case with Atiyoga. While Gnubs chen Sangs rgyas ye shes seems to have been instrumental in defining a group of texts as Atiyoga scripture in his Lamp for the Eyes of Contemplation, no specifically Anuyoga texts are mentioned there. The Sutra Gathering all Intentions, which was to become one of the central Anuyoga scriptures was well known to Gnubs chen, who wrote an extensive commentary on the text, but in the Lamp for the Eyes of Contemplation, he uses it solely as a source for his Atiyoga chapter, suggesting that it, like the other sources in that chapter, should be considered an Atiyoga text.

As for the sutra references to concepts from Dzogchen — they could well be significant for further research into the literary/historical development of the tradition, but I haven’t had time to look into them. Perhaps you would like to…

S.

Thank you for your kind reply – I especially liked the compliment for the writing!

May I ask for two clarifications of the material here?

1. You frequently speak of the generation and perfection stages and how the term rdzogs chen is found in this Mahayoga context. How then does this fit in with the present day association of Mahayoga being principally associated with the generation stage and Anuyoga with the perfection stage. It sounds like Maha and Anu also at an early date had not differentiated out. Is this correct?

2. If so when did Anuyoga tantras first arrive?

3. Lastly, someone calling them self “Dab” wrote to you in this section in Jan. about Sutra references to Dzogchen and Atiyoga and you wrote back very excited.

Please can you explain why this was important enough for you to think it might cause a rewrite of the early history and what you decided once you had a think about it?

That’s it – no more questions.
Thanks, N.

Thank you for an immensely thoughtful (and might I say well-written) comment. You’re quite right that Westerners learning about the tradition have a tendency to gain an overall view of the teachings and their structure and assume, in effect, “thus it has always been.” Academics on the other hand are always looking for change, and the emergence of new ideas.

I think it’s useful look at the way Tibetans approached their own Buddhist tradition. Despite an immense reverence for the source of the teachings, they also accepted that the teachings would change to suit the times. That, for one thing, is the raison d’etre of the terma tradition. Even if we trace these developments back to Padmasambhava, the planned emergence of terma over the centuries remains a program of change over time.

It’s true as well in the more conservative schools. What was Tsongkhapa’s version of Madhyamaka if not ground-breaking – and acknowledged never to have existed in India. The Sakyapas developed the vast Lamdre literature around a few core verses, and then split the teaching method into forms never heard of before: slob bshad and tshogs bshad. And so on.

I could respond at much more length to your various points, but I’ll just say that I agree with almost all of it. Yes, what I’ve said here on this site and in my article – though it’s by no means definitive! – is no so far from what the tradition says. I don’t see much merit in those attempts to hook Dzogchen up with Chan or other vaguely similar contemplative traditions.

S.

We have exchanged ideas before out of this context but I thought I might take courage and enter this pool.

As you know my day job is psychoanalysis and so it is of interest to me to observe my own and perhaps others anxiety around the subject of the origins of rDzogs chen – it is almost as if the possibility that it as a discrete vehicle, only emerging somewhere around late ninth/early tenth century, threatens the authenticity of the teaching and by extension our refuge within it.

I have been reading very carefully your arguments for the roots of the term rdzogs chen in the Mahayoga tantra and initially I too was threatened. For those of us who have studied with Dzogchen teachers like Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, we have been ‘brought up’ on the traditional diet that the teachings are of great antiquity and somehow I suspect this makes us feel that the teaching is therefore real and true – while the opposite – a teaching relatively newly minted – has the opposite emotional effect. “It’s just made up.”

This leads to my second psychological observation. It was only by reading your work very carefully did I realize that what you are saying (assuming I have understood properly) is actually not so very different from what the tradition implicitly says itself. That it was less threatening then it initially seems to one wedded to the traditional accounts.

Does the tradition not actually say that Padmasambhava taught Mahayoga and reserved a special precept (man ngag/upadesha) for a smaller group of students?

And also that the teachings that are now called the Mind and Space Series, traditionally assigned to Vimilamitra and Vairochana, existed within a lineage of teachers coming from India and continuing in Tibet. That those in these lineage’s were not exclusively practitioners of what we now know as either Maha, Anu or Atiyoga. That they were, as many people are now, initiated into several different practices.

I also think that we knew – although this was not made explicit – that the teaching has always been in a process of evolution. That parts that we take for granted like the nine vehicles and the distinction between ‘transformation’ and ‘self liberation’ had not always – from the beginning of time – been so. Of course we did because this is just common sense if we think about it – and it is what Buddhism itself teaches. Everything is transitory and arises from causes and conditions.

However what none of us has thought to recognise was that the very name of the teaching itself was also part of that process of change – that the names Dzogchen and Atiyoga were applied at a later date to a teaching that was characterized by the pointing out of the nature of mind by a master to a disciple based, not so much on scriptural authority, but on the authority of their own realization.

Effectively – and this is my main point – I realized I had unconsciously projected all sorts of assumptions onto the teaching that it actually did not claim for itself. It had never said it had always been called Dzogchen or Atiyoga. It had never said that the three series of teaching had always been organized as they are now. It had never said that the term ‘rdzogs chen’ had not been used differently in tantric contexts. And it had never said that it had not found at a later date that the name ‘Great Perfection’ would suit its more ancient insights and methods just fine. I had just unthinkingly assumed that this had always been so and finding that the name, organization, discrete identity and its process of entering the written word took time to evolve I almost forgot for a moment that none of this invalidated the immediate presence of intrinsic awareness that someone, somewhere had once discovered and then passed on to someone else.

Of course I have strayed here from simply sticking with the few pieces of the jig saw puzzle that we still have. However I still think it a valid way of thinking about what ever it was – the ‘pristine Great Perfection’ that came up from India or perhaps across from Zhang-zhung. The way people create new understandings is by having an intuitive insight and then casting around for something to borrow language from which they then adapt. As time goes by this language becomes their own and its meaning evolves and in more time this language evolves further. None of this challenges your or others theories but it does say that the primary material is not actually the Dunhuang manuscripts or something from the Nyingma collections but something more ghostly, the presence of the vivid transmission, variously named, of often unknown adepts which we can only glimpse by inference.

Best wishes, Nigel

David

My sentence was only paraphrasing Namkhai Norbu’s position in Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State. In the context of the historical authenticity of Dzogchen, Namkhai Norbu writes: “But the practitioners of Dzogchen have never had any interest in forming a sect, or in defending themselves and getting into arguments with others, because the principle thing in Dzogchen is the state of knowledge, which is not concerned with externals.” By “externals” I think he means the evidence for “authenticity”, such as original Indic texts…. This is found in the introduction to Part II of the book, p.46 in my copy, which is published by Arkana (1989).

Thanks for your vote of confidence!

I have just skimmed Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State, and didn’t find it. Was this in that book? Might you supply a page reference? (I have the original edition, not the Snow Lion one — maybe the pagination is different, so if you have the later edition, perhaps you could give a chapter and context.)

Or was this elsewhere in print? Or is this oral transmission / personal communication?

Many thanks. And thanks for the great blog!

David