Introduction To...
Longchenpa's
- Maya Yoga - Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment -
a Book of Dzogchen Precepts
As the tradition of Dzogchen has gained ground in the
West, it appears to have produced two quite distinct
responses. At best, a recognition of the natural state of
being-the nature of mind as known in direct experience
of it-is induced. Taking 'the position of consequence',
yanking themselves up by their own bootstraps as it were,
those who know the Great Perfection simply by hearing an
introduction to it recognize the spaciousness of pure
presence.
Then another response, from people who
approach reality timorously, is awe and devotion. They
meet the lineage-holding lamas like petitioners in the court
of an oriental despot, knocking their heads on the floor,
begging for a crumb from the high table. Then transported
to a high level of radiance through the lama's grace, the
supplicant basks in splendour until the moment arrives to
return to the source for more.
The first response enables and enacts the immediate
recognition of radical Dzogchen while the second reaction
is a precursor of the gradual path of latter-day, elaborate or
cultural, Diogchen. The first relies upon existential
experience and the precepts of atiyoga contained in the
ancient texts and the second depends upon a relationship
with the father-guru, upon mahayoga meditation practi~e
and the religious life. In the first case an assumption is
made that the nondual awareness of pure presence is the
natural state of being and that nothing can be done to
attain what is already reality.
In the second case, the least
confident and most humble of our assumptions about
ourselves is that we are hopelessly lost in the mire of this
birth yet we have glimpsed a bright light out there, far
away in the distance, and we have identified an honest
guide able and willing to direct us on the path towards it.
The view on the second path-that we live in the relative
world of shadows and seek the absolute realm of light-is
in apparent discord with the radical Dzogchen view-that
we are already in that inexpressible nondual reality in
which absolute and relative are one. The difference seems
as basic as that between chalk and cheese; the gradual and .
the immediate paths are incommensurate.
In Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment Longchenpa
allays the suspicion that the gradual and immediate
paths are mutually exclusive, and that people from different
worlds entertain them. Rather, the difference appears to
be between different personality types recognising the
same reality but from different perspectives, describing the
same experience in radically different terms leading to
different responses and different approaches.
This distinction is surely quite superficial like the difference
between the two sides of a single coin. In the view of
Longchenpa in this treatise the gradual and the immediate
paths are the two sides of that same coin; they may be as
far away as the earth is from the sky but they complement
each other.
If mahayoga with its elaborate ritual meditation
practices of visualization and recitation is taken as the
method of partial fullfilment of the goal of the gradual path
and atiyoga is seen as the source of the precepts of
immediate realization, then likewise mahayoga and atiyoga
complement each other and on the graduated path may be
performed either in series or in parallel.
In The Trilogy of Finding Comfort and Ease, the first two volumes focus
upon mahayoga and elements of the gradual path while
Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment provides the
keys to immediate realization and the radical view. In this
introduction I have tried to highlight the atiyoga aspect.
The admission of the unity of gradual and immediate
allows the humility to admit to feet of clay and to the
function of purification. It also allows the confidence based
in the undeniable existential experience of Garab Dorje's
first incisive precept that is conducive to maintenance of
the secret praxis of maha-ati.
So this short treatise of Longchenpa is a manual of
primal awareness in the great Dzogchen tradition of
Tibetan Buddhism. It provides the precepts that may
instantly illuminate the buddha-reality that is our ordinary
everyday experience. It asserts that we are presently under
the spell of magical illusion and that by recognition of that
fact we are, instantaneously, released from a conceptual
cage into an enchanting reality that is pure pleasure itself.
This is a manual defining human life lived as enchantment,
where the ignorance of delusory samsara proves to be the
insight into the Great Perfection of illusion. We begin in
the heat of desirous attachment to our egoistic selves, and
merely through recognition of our deluded condition,
chilled out in the birthless and deathless space of reality,
we find respite and release in the magical display of our
everyday life.
The working title of this book has been Chilling Out in
Enchantment, a rendering of the Tibetan title that expresses
the name of the cool contemplation behind all our
moment-to-moment twenty-four/seven experience. It is
such contemplation that provides the sense of vast mystery,
exhilarating and uplifting, to release us from the heaviness
and density, the confusion and pettiness, of samsaric
existence.
That title also carries the sense of a resolution of
the dilemmas of dualism in a respite of relaxed, carefree
refreshment, basking in the sun of intrinsic awareness.
Through the precepts contained in this manual, published
as Finding Comfort and Ease in Enchantment in deference
to the scholars who have worked on the text before me,
we familiarize ourselves with the natural, illusory, state of
being, this state of wonderment, living a selfless phantasm
of sensory pleasure and aesthetic appreciation.
This book, therefore, is about the nondual reality of
Dzogchen as magical illusion, as maya, and I will use that
exalted, profound, vernacular Sanskrit word in this
introduction to evoke the magic and mystery, the light and
the love, of Dzogchen. Maya, then, is the very nature of
Dzogchen, nondual reality itself. In Finding Comfort and
Ease in Enchantment the Tibetan master Longchenpa-a
second buddha-in eight chapters of high Tibetan poetry
elucidates and evokes that reality while exhorting us to
recognize its immanence through the Dzogchen precepts
of atiyoga.
The precepts that govern the recognition of the
maya of everyday existence, the maya of ordinary mind,
are woven like a magic spell into the elucidation of the
eight famous analogies of maya collated by the great Indian
pandita Nagarjuna-another second buddha.
All our experience of life is like last night's dream; it is like a magic
show of an infallible master magician; it is like optical
illusion; it is like a mirage in the desert; it is like the
reflection of the moon in water; it is like an echo
reverberating between mountain crags; it is like a cloud
land which we call the city of the gandharvas; and it is like
an apparitional emanation, like a phantom or a ghost.
Thus this book is a manual of atiyoga that opens the door
into Dzogchen's nondual reality, the reality of maya - magical
illusion, happiness.
That concludes the Introduction to Lonchenpa's masterpiece... If you are true seeker , a yogi, a yogini, a monk, a priest, a shaman, a student, a healer, a existentialist, a buddhist, a christian, a muslim, jewish - or any other religious tradition - a psychonaut, a layman , an atheist, an agnostic , or beyond all labels, or just a man ... All those with the eye to see I entreat you to preface respectfully , composed on the coming new year to this masterpiece that showed me that before I even finished a a chapter of - It dawned that my deepest wish had always been true.
Longchenpa:
"To understand what the buddhas mean in their impeccable revelation
that all our experience has two dimensions of magical illusion,
I have distilled here the elixir of sutra, tantra and oral instruction.
Listen while I impart it to you in the light of my personal
experience. "
http://promienie.net/images/dharma/books/longchenpa_maya-yoga.pdf
(Link to Book In PDF format)
May this contribute to the Awakening of the Pure Mind of All Beings
With Love,
- The Blind Ass
Edited by The Blind Ass (01/01/17 04:03 AM)
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