Practicing the Great Perfection: Instructions on the Crucial Points

by Shechen Gyaltsap IV, Padmakara Translation Group (Translation)

A collection of essential instructions on the practice of Dzogchen, or The Great Perfection, from one of the great early 20th century Buddhist masters.

Shechen Gyaltsap (1871-1926) was widely recognized as one of the greatest meditation masters and most compassionate bodhisattvas in the history of Tibetan Buddhism. He lived a life of complete devotion and commitment to monastic discipline and study, and became the root teacher of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who said of Shechen Gyaltsap's teachings that they were "worth more than all the gold in the entire world."

This collection, intended for the advanced Buddhist practitioner who has received initiation from a qualified master, provides the essential instructions of Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, practice. Written with a clear simplicity that belies their profundity, the teachings give practical and pointed advice on how students should meditate and behave in ordinary life. The work begins with an extensive reflection on the problem of self-clinging and the analytical meditation designed to uproot it, and proceeds to more specific instructions for the mind practice itself.

Genres: Buddhism

176 pages, Hardcover

Published June 2, 2020

About the author

Gyurme Pema Namgyal (Tib. འགྱུར་མེད་པདྨ་རྣམ་རྒྱལ་, Wyl. 'gyur med padma rnam rgyal; 1871–1926) was a lama of the Nyingma and Sarma schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the fourth Shechen Gyaltsab (Tib. ཞེ་ཆེན་རྒྱལ་ཚབ་, Wyl. zhe chen rgyal tshab), or ‘regent’ of Shechen Tennyi Dargye Ling monastery—one of the Six "Mother" Nyingma Monasteries of Tibet—recognized as the incarnation of Pema Sangak Tenzin (Wyl. padma gsang sngags bstan 'dzin chos rgyal; 1760–1817) by Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo.

He was the root teacher (tsawai lama) of Dilgo Khyentse, and one of the principal teachers of Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö.

Reviews

[André Pais]

Review by Clarke Warren (https://www.chronicleproject.com/like...)

Shechen Monastery in Kham, Eastern Tibet, now in exile in Nepal as well as revived in Tibet after its destruction at the hands of the Chinese communists, is a matrix of profound spiritual realization, immense learning, and brilliant creative expression. It was founded in 1695 by Shechen Rabjam Tenpé Gyaltsen. It is both a vital center of the Nyingma tradition and its Dzogchen teachings, one of the six most major centers of Nyingma in Tibet, as well as a focal point of the Ri-mé, non-sectarian movement which was ignited in 19th Century Tibet. Great past and recent teachers who were spawned at Shechen include Shechen Kongtrül Rinpoche, Khenpo Gangshar, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Rabjam Rinpoche, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, and many others. If you include all those who were or are students of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the tally widens to include a great span of current Tibetan Buddhist teachers, including His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. This book is a collection of translations of one of Shechen’s great teachers, Shechen Gyaltsap Gyurmé Pema Namgyal (1871-1926).

Now, as a steady stream of previously inaccessible resources find their way out of Tibetan contexts and into Western view, the roots of Shechen Monastery’s great contributions to Buddha Dharma are surfacing, in this case thanks to the fresh translations by the Padmakara Translation Group. With the publication of PRACTICING THE GREAT PERFECTION, we can taste the spiritual essence and brilliance of the Shechen tradition that has given rise to so much powerful contemporary Buddhist expression, and indeed to realization in many. Shechen Gyaltsap Gyurmé Pema Namgyal, even if one is not familiar with him, can immediately be appreciated as the root teacher of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. If you are a Buddhist practitioner, reading Shechen Gyaltsap is like being brought into a room to meet your great great grandfather, and simultaneously being introduced to who you are as a member of a vast family lineage. If you are not a Buddhist practitioner, you are introduced to the brilliance and directness of a tradition that arose out of complete honesty, clarity and awareness in encountering life and the world without pretense.

Changling Rinpoche, a current gem of Shechen, a student of Dilgo Khyente Rinpoche, and the abbot of the Shechen monastic college (shedra), was explicating the necessity and essential role of contemplation for the Buddhist path and practitioner. He noted that though intensive meditation retreat over a long time has certainly been the source of so many realized masters, at Shechen there were many who arrived at realization by contemplation of seminal Buddhist texts, without going into extended meditation retreat. The profound expression of such teachings blossomed as realization in those who probed their depths and took them utterly to heart.

As Shechen Gyaltsap writes, “Regarding the implementation of the actual practice on the path, there is, generally speaking, the analytical meditation of the panditas and the resting meditation of the kusäli yogis. These two paths are taught according to the mental aptitude of the practitioner concerned.” It is clear that both of these are equally valid and potent paths to realization. Shechen Gyaltsap identifies both of these approaches as meditation. As has been said, to be effective the path requires both intellect and intuition, and each of these approaches offers both to full measure.

In reading this volume of Shechen Gyaltsap’s writings, despite my merely floating on the surface of their immense depth like a water strider on a vast ocean, it is penetrating to consider that these very pith instructions were exactly what ignited realization in those Shechen practitioners who thoroughly contemplated and penetrated them.

This volume is thin, a mere 152 pages, but is anything but a quick read. Each chapter is so drenched in both meaning and invaluable instruction that one could spend years (or life times) sifting its content gradually into finer and finer grades, in tandem with one’s evolving understanding and meditative insight. As much of it is mostly directed to advanced practitioners, one can aspire to reach the level of comprehension and insight they embody. Meanwhile, much of it is immediately applicable and immensely helpful to one’s current practice and understanding.

In preparing to read and review this book, I simply could not just read it through and come to a summary view of it. It took me much longer than I anticipated, for which, in the end, I was grateful. I had to live with the book, practice with the book, eat with the book, sleep with the book, dip into it deeply then depart from it, then dip again, like the first few years of a marriage, or like a dolphin flying and diving along the bow of a great ship. The style and content of the book mandate this. It conveys directly the teachings of the most profound Buddhist view and practice, from the vantage point of their realization. Given that, the best attitude with which to approach the book is with utter humility.

The introduction to the book provides a portrait of Shechen Gyaltsap Gyurmé Pema Namgyal, whose principal teachers included Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, Jamgön Kongtrul, and Jamgön Mipham Gyatso. It briefly chronicles his early life indications of being a highly unusual and intelligent boy who was recognized very soon as the rebirth of the previous Shechen Gyaltsap. It cites his natural adoption and strict adherence to a life of monastic discipline, meditative retreat and exhaustive study. Through intensive single-minded retreat and study, his life blossoms as the natural and complete coincidence of realization and brilliant scholarly insight and expression. His example, indeed, is an example of what it means to be scholarly in the practice tradition of Buddhism, and how that does not exactly correspond to what it means to be scholarly in the modern West, or, for that matter, in more purely intellectualized systems of Buddhism.

Two of the ten documents translated are centered in doctrinal clarification, and display the utter mastery that Shechen Gyaltsap has of all the strands of Buddhist philosophy, schools, and stages. But it would be an error to label them as mere intellectual expositions, as they link the expressions of the general Buddhist and Dzogchen views directly to the meditative insights and realizations from which they originally arose, and to which they must return.

The rest of the translated documents consist of instruction in meditation and life, through the direct pointing out of the nature of mind known as cutting through (Trekchö). They are, as the first chapter, The Brilliant Lamp says, “a summary of the crucial points of mind practice.” Cutting through/Trekchö practice involves both formal meditation and everyday life, relating both directly to one’s mind and to one’s experience of and in the world.

The first chapter, The Brilliant Lamp: A Summary of the Crucial Points of Mind Practice, starts by providing the basis of all Buddhist practice, the deconstruction of the doggedly stubborn belief in a self… one’s self. The text leads one skillfully through the various assumptions, gross and subtle, that one maintains to support the pretense that one really exists, the very source of all suffering, and guides one through their deconstruction. The text then addresses the fixation of regarding other/appearance as solid and real, following through the various doctrinal expositions of emptiness, (Cittamatra, Madhyamaka, Mahamudra). It then leaps to the recognition of the nature of mind itself as awareness according to Dzogchen, as pointed out by one’s teacher. And the purity of the world of appearances when seen for what they are free of fabrication, as the expressions of wisdom, the luminosity of the non-dual mind/world. Thus the exposition traverses the entire range of Buddhist view and insight, finally exploring and celebrating the parameters and qualities of non-dual wisdom, enlightenment itself. The chapter ends with a brilliant song, which coalesces the entire range of Dzogchen view and practice into an eloquent, melodic instruction.

The next translation, An Instruction for Khenpo Jigme Drayang, addresses the question of how to maintain meditation in one’s practice and in post-meditation. Here he cites a few of the more traditional antidotes to ego-clinging, then turns to their dismissal with his injunction for a more direct approach. “At this level (the various antidotes to ego clinging) there is no exposition of the crucial point of the path whereby desire or aversion spontaneously subsides in awareness.” He then proceeds to set out how to use ordinary defilements as the path. In the mix of presenting the crucial points of how to do this, he provides what he calls a slight contrast between Mahamudra and Dzogchen, clarifies those shades of approach, then concludes that they are equal in touching the crucial point, “the realization of the truth of the dharmata.” He guides one through various approaches to emptiness and appearance, according to Madhyamaka, Mahamudra and Dzogchen, through distinctions of delusion and reality, and emphasizes the necessity in Dzogchen to distinguish dualistic mind from insight, or the actual nature of mind. Along the way he quotes various lineage pith statements. He skillfully leads one into subtler and subtler levels of non-duality, unconditionality and non-conceptual insight. For instance, at one point he observes, “One may therefore be deluded, but one is deluded in the state of ultimate reality. One may gain liberation, but one does so in the state of ultimate reality.”

Shechen Gyaltsap’s style is precise and skillful, fluidly leading from point-to-point, view-to-view (Shravakayana, Madhyamaka, Yogachara, and so on), meditation experience to deeper meditation experience, yet it does require a strong degree of rigorous attention and prior knowledge of terms and views. It is not necessarily an easy read, but very worth the effort, and as you read through, the effort sharpens itself as the rhythm of the explication unfolds.

The crescendo and conclusion of the chapter An Instruction for Khenpo Jigme Drayang is in introducing the words of, Sherab Yarphel, one of the “thirteen siddhas (completely realized masters) of Shechen.” He is also considered the immediate prior incarnation of Jamgön Kongtrul the Great. This is a treasure within a treasure, like Russian nesting eggs, that continues more thoroughly later in the book (The Teachings of Sherab Yarphel and More from Sherab Yarphel) with rare and indeed perhaps the only words to have survived from this Shechen siddha. Shechen Gyaltsap then folds in instructions from other illustrious Shechen masters. We are being led from whatever fresh and vital contact with contemporary teachers that may have magnetized us to practice and study, to the roots of that freshness in the timeless brilliance of a realized tradition.

The next translated text, A Pith instruction on the Great Perfection for Beginners, is promising in title for a more simple presentation. To some degree that proves true for a few pages, yet at some point, after providing a trove of useful direction for launching into meditation, it dives into a more fruitional treatment of shamatha and vipashyana, from a Trekchö perspective. It seems to be a hallmark of Dzogchen that even the most basic, beginning instruction is infused with the fruition of the entire path, without even trying to do so. The text adds to the mix the utter necessity of devotion to one’s teacher, and to how to practice in sleep. In brief, he follows a trajectory of conceptual meditation opening up to non-conceptual meditation, in which all occurrence, negative or positive, is the expression of wisdom already, needing only to be recognized. It’s a Dzogchen injunction to “get down to brass tacks”

The book continues with Answers to the Questions of Khenpo Jigme Drayang. This is the same Jigme Drayang who elicited the previous exposition with his name attached. The chapter explores the origins of delusions, and their resolution in the recognition of appearances as the expression of primordial wisdom, or “the display of the ground”. This and much of Shechen Gyaltsap’s work reflects and echoes the Aspiration of Samathabhadra, the famed seminal song intoned by the primordial buddha Samathabhadra/Kuntu Zangpo. Not a bad, in fact an all-good, endorsement!

It is worth keeping in mind that if one cannot follow or fathom everything that is being discussed in this display of Dzogchen virtuosity, it may be because the discussion is between two highly accomplished yogi/scholars, and not necessarily made for prime time. (As the texts only record Shechen Gyaltsap’s responses, one can only imagine what the questioner contributed to the exchange!) It is a very subtle and sophisticated communication, worthy of being read several times over. But it does provide the opportunity to fine tune one’s sensibilities and follow the conversation to depth, as far as one is able. Just follow the signs to the primordial ground and reemerge through cognitive potency as the display of self-arisen primordial wisdom, and you will be fine!

Given the fine-tuned and precisely laid out instruction and explanation with which Shechen Gyaltsab lays out the view and path of Dzogchen, he nonetheless admonishes one not to get hooked into intellectual fixation with it all. “One should understand, however, that to entangle oneself in the fetters of the views and meditations—described in intellectual terms in the tenet systems—is to create nothing but difficulty for oneself, like silkworms trapping themselves in cocoons of their own silk.”

Shechen Gyaltsap continues in this vein, leveling direct admonition against the appropriation of Dzogchen practice itself in a conceptual way, even criticizing a distorted approach to the seminal Dzogchen practice of distinguishing sem (dualistic mind) from rikpa (wisdom awareness) if it is approached devoid of inner experience and devotion: “…they claim that it is only when something bad (which they refer to as the ‘ordinary mind’) is eliminated that something clear and limpid called ‘awareness’, or rikpa, will be obtained. And they cling to the luminous and empty state of mind between two thoughts, with mouth gaping and eyes staring into space—their mental sight at the mercy of their wind energies. The end result is that they fail to accomplish the Great Perfection and succeed only in disturbing their life-wind. They do not know—they do not understand—anything!”

Without going into detail, the succeeding chapters of the book consist of shorter pith instructions, which as with the earlier chapters elucidate the view of Dzogchen in fine-tuned synchronization with the experiences and insights of meditation…not as though they were ever separate. Each of the instructions carves further facets onto the diamond of practice and insight. And offers down to earth practical advice, like, “…the so-called transmutation of the five wisdoms is but another way of saying that, by watching the nature of whichever of the five poisons occurs, it will subside. It will vanish, leaving no trace.” (from An Instruction for Yinor) What better advice for how to deal with a klesha attack!

There are some precious jewels in Shechen Gyaltsab’s writing that provide a panoramic clarity about the entire spiritual path as well as demonstrate the substrata of the Ri-mé (non-sectarian) attitude and approach of inclusiveness of all the Buddhist teachings. Not as any attempt to make them all into one, but to include and appreciate the sheer diversity of Buddhist paths and teachings as the vast display of wisdom and skillful means. As observed in The Brilliant Lamp, “Consequently, for a practitioner who has accomplished the Great Perfection, there are no higher or lower vehicles, no swift or slow paths, no virtuous or non virtuous actions, and so on. There are no qualitative differences. Everything is fully included, perfected, open and free, in the state of the single, self-arisen primordial wisdom. This is precisely why it is called ‘perfection’. And because the ground to be realized, the path to be traversed, and the result to be attained are none-other than the self-arisen primordial wisdom, it is ‘great.’ The meaning of the term ‘Great Perfection’ is thus explained.”

These pith instructions join a growing literary and spiritual treasury, translated into Western languages, of teachings which spontaneously arose in direct response to specific people and their questions about how to live, meditate, and understand. Similar works have been made available in recent years from Khenpo Gangshar and the early years of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in Tibet. And indeed one should recall that the songs of Milarepa were responses to particular people and situations, and not general dharma discourses. These are perhaps the most vital of teachings for their most direct and personally tailored cut of instruction. They are like walking into a room with Shechen Gyaltsap to have a personal interview about one’s practice and life. And though they may have been so personal, precise, and helpful in a particular situation for a particular person, they nonetheless simultaneously link the individual’s disposition and understanding to the entire cosmos of practice, lineage, and realization. They are simultaneously personal and universal, vitally relevant for generations to come…which means the likes of us.

(continues...)

[James]

"Utterly delightful pith instructions!"

This is a remarkable book in a field that has become literally inundated with books (both in the distant past and present). It’s like a teacher’s teaching guide; full, detailed and complete but also lean and uncluttered without redundancy or fluff. Of course this is mostly a reflection on the author’s skill (not to mention a reflection on the subject itself!), but a big part of this book’s success in presenting the material is the way it is clearly translated. As a plus, it is also a very finely published book.

Over and over again this collection of texts (ten compositions by the author, Sechen Gyaltsap who lived from 1871-1929, and was one of Dilgo Khyentse’s root teachers, in response to various student’s requests) hits the nail on the head with pointing out instructions that leave nothing unclear or uncovered.

“If one does not succeed, through study and reflection, in removing all misconceptions concerning the profound meaning, the fundamental nature of phenomena, or if one has not had a decisively effective experience of this fundamental nature through the reception of the teacher’s blessings, then no matter how Madhyamaka, Mahamudra, and Dzogchen are explained, they will be of no benefit. For these explanations go no further than an intellectual view and do not become the authentic path. If, on the other hand, one understands correctly and has profound certainty, unfettered by doubt, with regard to this true and fundamental nature, one will not depreciate Madhyamaka and Mahamudra – preferring the Great Perfection as something superior to them, for in their very nature they are all equal. Moreover, all vehicles, starting from the most inferior eternalist and nihilist views of the non-Buddhist schools and going right up to the highest view of Ati yoga, are the expression of the one and only self-arisen primordial wisdom. This is to say that they are all perfectly included within it. And this is why – using the words in their literal sense – one speaks of this wisdom’s “great perfection.” One should understand, however, that to entangle oneself in the fetters of the views and meditations – described in intellectual terms in the tenant systems – is to create nothing but difficulty for oneself, like silkworms trapping themselves in cocoons of their own silk.” (p. 38-39)

“Therefore, one should not get bogged down in too many elaborate reflections about samatha and vipasyana, the ordinary mind, and awareness. The mind should not be focused too strenuously. Instead, the main thing to remember is that if, with respect and devotion to one’s teacher, one can simply leave the ”plain and ordinary mind of the present moment” (tha mal gyi shes pa), the state of fresh awareness, to itself in its natural flow, and if one is able to disregard, without and concern, whatever experiences occur, this itself is the most profound experience of all.” (p. 45)

And, quoting Sherab Yarphel (“the great siddha of Shechen”);

“For the view without a center and circumference,
Supreme is meditation that is free of reference.
For action that is targetless,
Nonattatinment is the supreme fruit.
To have no view – this is the supreme view.
To have no meditation is the supreme meditation.
To have no action is the supreme action.
These three “supremes” inseparable are said to be the highest fruit.” (p.48)

[Gustavo Munoz]

Advice and pith instructions as their best. Written by the root guru of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, these texts are a truly jewel for the practitioner of Dzogpa Chenpo. Hopefully a lot of real practitioners come to know this collection of texts.

[Everett Grandy]

know more wandering

one may take refuge in what has been pinned here... as such unobstructs ones contemplative prowess leaving integrity of ones intent in witness

[Nikko]

Its difficult to convey just how important and helpful this slim volume by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s root teacher is. It is extremely good. For those with a connection to the Nyingma tradition, it’s pure gold.

Note: I am associated with Shambhala Publications, but this is an objective review!