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Newsgroups: alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan Path: shell.portal.com!svc.portal.com!sdd.hp.com!news1.best.com!sgigate.sgi.com!nntp.coast.net!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!btnet!news.compulink.co.uk!cix.compulink.co.uk!usenet From: johnc@cix.compulink.co.uk ("John Cleaver") Subject: Re: Shamata/Vipassana vs. Dzogchen. Message-ID:Organization: Compulink Information eXchange References: Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 09:05:50 GMT X-News-Software: Ameol32 Lines: 54 >flipdanc@speakeasy.org writes: > I would like to know the fundamental differences between > Shamata/Vipassana meditation techniques and Dzogchen in > Tibetan Buddhist practice. As I understand it: Shamata is calm abiding, and also refers to any of a variety of techniques for achieving that calmness. The quiet mind becomes suceptible to insight, which is Vipassana. Dzogchen is a complete system of tantric meditation and view, involving both formless and visualisation practices, as well as preliminary practices. All tantric Buddhist practices require an abisheka, in which the lama exposes to the student the nature of mind. The rest of the practice involves stabilising and strengthening what the lama showed. Dzogchen view can be quite startling - Dzogchen teaching presents subjects like abidharma, the five skandhas, the structure and origin of confused mind, the nature of perception and so on, in an unusual way. Higher-level Dzogchen meditation instruction sounds a lot like Mahamudra instruction; the student is directed to 'rest the mind without doing anything'. However, prior to this the student will have recalled the realisation associated with the abisheka, and it is in this realisation that the mind rests. This sounds like calm abiding, but it is different - calm abiding is a fairly ordinary state of mind, in which the constant stream of internal chatter has been slowed down a bit. Formless tantric practices are much more profound, and depend on a degree of realisation of emptiness; the instruction is very simple, because there is not very much you can say about them. When texts try to be more specific, the results are often rather odd, symbolic, and hard to make sense of. Dzogchen is sometimes accused of being non-Buddhist, because it can be interpreted as asserting the existence of an absolute, and because it may have origins outside the Buddhist tradition. Even proponents say that Dzogchen is not specifically Buddhist, and is not the property of any one religious tradition. A form of Dzogchen is practiced by the followers of the Bon religion, the animist tradition practised in Tibet before the introduction of Buddhism. Dzogchen is practised by followers of all Tibetan traditions, but it is the special responsibility of the Nyingma tradition to preserve the Dzogchen teaching lineages. I've never come across a modern book on the Dzogchen tradition that does more than scratch the surface - everything I've read (other then terma texts, most of which aren't modern) seems to be an attempt to point to the nature of the profound realisation at its heart, a project that is ultimately doomed to failure. I've hardly seen anything printed about Dzogchen view or the Dzogchen glosses on abidharma. Jack.
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