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The Philosophical Foundations of Classical rDzogs chen in Tibet
Although the past three decades have witnessed a surge of interest, both popular and academic, in the syncretistic Tibetan tradition known as rDzogs chen (“Great Perfection”), there has been little to date in the way of critical study of its philosophical foundations or key doctrinal developments. A noteworthy case in point is the absence of any systematic appraisal of rNying ma (“Ancient Ones”) views on the nature of mind that traces their evolution and complex relationships with Indian Cittamātra, Madhyamaka, Pramānavāda, and Vajrayāna views. rNying ma contributions to the understanding of human consciousness merit attention not only because of their intrinsic interest and relevance to contemporary philosophies of mind but also because they provide an indispensable key to understanding this tradition’s complex Systems of thought and practice. As a tentative Step toward at least defining the parameters of this crucial but neglected field of inquiry, the following work investigates the nature and significance of the distinction between dualistic mind (sems) and primordial knowing (ye shes), and the related distinction between the all-ground (kun gzhi) and dharmakäya (chos sku), as these two are presented and defended within Tibetan rDzogs chen traditions between the 8th and 14th centuries. In taking a synoptic view of these philosophical developments, my aim has been to trace the conceptual genealogies of the distinctions and examine how they were shaped by, and reciprocally shaped, the scholastic and contemplative milieux in which they emerged. From their origins as spiritual instructions (man ngag) transmitted by early, mostly Indian masters of the Royal Dynastic Period (610-910), through their defence and articulation within wider contexts of Buddhist doctrine and soteriology by scholar-adepts of the Period of Monastic Hegemony (1249–1705), the distinctions emerge as formative elements of rDzogs chen theory and praxis.
- GenresBuddhismPhilosophy
369 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
12 people want to read
About the author
David Higgins
4 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Higgins received his doctorate from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland in 2012. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Tsadra Foundation with a project to translate the Eighth Karmapa's commentary on the Madhyamakāvatāra into English. Prior to this, he was a Post-doc Research Fellow in the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna where he was exploring the relationship between Mahāmudrā and Madhyamaka philosophies in Bka’ brgyud scholasticism during the post-classical period (15th to 16th centuries). His research interests include Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and epistemology with a particular focus on Bka’ brgyud Mahāmudrā and Rnying ma Rdzogs chen doctrinal systems. His doctoral thesis was published under the title Philosophical Foundations of Classical Rdzogs chen in Tibet: Investigating the Distinction Between Dualistic Mind (sems) and Primordial knowing (ye shes) (Vienna, WSTB no. 78, 2013).
David Higgins received his doctorate from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland in 2012. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Tsadra Foundation with a project to translate the Eighth Karmapa's commentary on the Madhyamakāvatāra into English. Prior to this, he was a Post-doc Research Fellow in the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna where he was exploring the relationship between Mahāmudrā and Madhyamaka philosophies in Bka’ brgyud scholasticism during the post-classical period (15th to 16th centuries). His research interests include Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and epistemology with a particular focus on Bka’ brgyud Mahāmudrā and Rnying ma Rdzogs chen doctrinal systems. His doctoral thesis was published under the title Philosophical Foundations of Classical Rdzogs chen in Tibet: Investigating the Distinction Between Dualistic Mind (sems) and Primordial knowing (ye shes) (Vienna, WSTB no. 78, 2013).
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March 16, 2026
In my many years of reading about Tibetan Buddhism, David Higgins is easily one of the most well-read, articulate, and theoretically-sophisticated western interpreters of the tradition I've ever encountered. I see this study of Dzogchen as probably the most significant work on the topic to appear since Samten Karmay's trailblazing study of 1986, and think it will be of enormous value to any interested advanced student.
The work examines three fundamental problems in Dzogchen doctrine: the distinction between ordinary mind (sems) and primordial wisdom (ye shes); the distinction between the afflicted mind-basis of individual experience and the pristine dharmakaya; and the distinction between sudden and gradual conceptions of the path. Note that these all stem from the same root problem, which is how one distinguishes between our conventional accounts of the world, premised on our sense of things existing as discrete, finite entities characterized by various features and capabilities, and the exalted yogic apprehension of all phenomena as the self-arisen display of appearance and emptiness, beyond the extremes of existence and non-existence.
Higgins has spoken elsewhere of the problem of the two truths in the Dzogchen context and has made an enormously interesting and stimulating argument that the conventional and the ultimate must be understood as fundamentally of different logical types. While Tsongkhapa emphasizes the complementary character of the two truths as two different ways of cognizing the same entity or base, classical Nyingma masters like Longchenpa emphasize the fact that positing the two truths in this way is itself a conventional distinction. It is a commonplace of Dzogchen scripture that samsara and nirvana are both equally false appearances that arise from the ground beyond the two extremes, and this is fundamental to the way Nyingmapas understand the nature of ultimate truth - it is not a mere emptiness, as Tsongkhapa and his followers argue, but the foundationaless foundation of any conceivable experience, a mysterious self-arisen luminous display that we mistake for a world composed of ten thousand things.
This cardinal implication that Higgins derives from this framework is that in the Dzogchen view, conventional truth necessarily derives from an inexpressible ultimate that is its inexpressible source. In this sense, viewing ultimate truth as a non-deceptive cognition of the true mode of abiding of a phenomenon is to necessarily retain the essentially representational structure of our understanding of cognition - that we are subjects who know objects - and to simply say that ultimate truth and convetinoal truth are correct and incorrect cognitions of an object. This preserves the essential subject-object representational structure of experiences, which is the very structure that a correct understanding of ultimate truth should displace.
In Higgins's view, then, to better understand what is meant by ultimate truth in Dzogchen philosophy, we can appeal to Heidegger's conception of "disclosure" as a deeper kind of truth than the representational model of truth that preoccupies most western philosophers. In the light of being, we can let beings be instead of always already determining their structure in advance according to our model of conscious subjects.
In the three sections of the book, Higgins makes parallel arguments for the three topics of his analysis. In the first (and, in my opinion, most valuable) section of the book, Higgins examines the roots of the Dzogchen distinction between afflicted conceptual consciousness and an innate primordial objectless awareness, and argues that because of the way Nyingmapas understand the two truths, ultimate truth cannot be an object of ordinary consciousness - nor can it be a consciousness that is brought about through causes and conditions in the conventional sense. Otherwise, its object would necessarily be cognzied as existing within that framework. Higgins provides an extremely knowledgeable general survey of some of the countless ways that Nyingma authors have articulated the distinction between such ultimate consciousnesses and ordinary apprehension.
In the second part of the book, using a similar logic, Higgins performs a sweeping intellectual history of the ways classical Dzogchen authors have distinguished between the pure and impure basis of consciousness. Because the philosophical core of the argument had already been made in this preceding part, I found this section to largely be of interest on the level of intellectual history. Because Nyingma literature frequently expounds long sets of synonyms, the differences between different terms for this distinction range from "slight" to "non-existent", and chiefly what we see is a history of how the rhetoric evolved over time, reflecting different scriptural inputs, new translations, and new interlocutors and interpretive priorities.
The third section applies the book's basic problematic to the soteriological problem of sudden versus gradual enlightenment. On the interpretive level, Higgins breaks little new ground, and essentially argues that the progressive stages of practice are generally interpreted by the tradition as clearing away obscurations to a luminous wisdom that is already there so that it can be more easily registered.
Then the book offers critical editions of short, relevant translations drawn from Longchenpa, Jigme Lingpa, and Yonten Gyatso.
This book contains enormous virtues of intellectual clarity and rigor, and does an incredibly good job in identifying what is at stake in these various arguments, and tracing out their historical development in the works of many great authors, all of whom have only seen tiny fractions of their collected outputs translated into English. As noted before, Higgins is incredibly erudite, and he writes with confidence and authority regarding the work of numerous difficult authors who worked over a span of centuries.
If there is one fault I could find with the book, it is that the concept of "philosophical foundations" that we see in the title remains unproblematized, and I think this is a serious omission. No Dzogchen author would have regarded what they were doing as philosophy - every single one of the works he cites would have been understood as either a practice text or ancillary to practice texts. I found it highly significant that Higgins does not even mention that fact that almost every source he quotes is traditionally restricted and requires an empowerment. This is an extremely conspicuous fact to simply pass over in silence in a book of this degree of rigor - a book which, for example, includes a well-researched and detailed footnote explaining the history and evolution of the simile of the seven blind men describing an elephant when it occurs in passing in one of his citations.
One reason Dzogchen texts are restricted is because they are not written for people to read and think about in a dispassionate way, they are 100% intended by the authors to be brought alive in a living context of interpretation and practice, and the restrictions placed on them body forth the actual praxis-dimension that is regarded by the tradition itself as in no way incidental to what the texts mean and how they are to be understood on a basic level.
I am reminded of Jeffrey Hopkins explaining that he named his first opus Meditation on Emptiness to throw down the gauntlet, in a way, because prior to his work, every single western text on Madhyamaka treated it as a kind of philosophy aimed at refuting other views. In the high scholarly register of this work, which echoes the tone of much of the great work coming out of Europe in the last few decades, I worry that scholarship is slipping back into the bad old days of regarding Buddhist doctrine as something that can be understood as a kind of disembodied philosophy which can be engaged in isolation.
That being said, as I mentioned before, I think this is clearly one of the great works on Dzogchen to appear from the western academy thus far, and it is extremely worth reading. I would highly recommend it to any interested student of the subject.
The work examines three fundamental problems in Dzogchen doctrine: the distinction between ordinary mind (sems) and primordial wisdom (ye shes); the distinction between the afflicted mind-basis of individual experience and the pristine dharmakaya; and the distinction between sudden and gradual conceptions of the path. Note that these all stem from the same root problem, which is how one distinguishes between our conventional accounts of the world, premised on our sense of things existing as discrete, finite entities characterized by various features and capabilities, and the exalted yogic apprehension of all phenomena as the self-arisen display of appearance and emptiness, beyond the extremes of existence and non-existence.
Higgins has spoken elsewhere of the problem of the two truths in the Dzogchen context and has made an enormously interesting and stimulating argument that the conventional and the ultimate must be understood as fundamentally of different logical types. While Tsongkhapa emphasizes the complementary character of the two truths as two different ways of cognizing the same entity or base, classical Nyingma masters like Longchenpa emphasize the fact that positing the two truths in this way is itself a conventional distinction. It is a commonplace of Dzogchen scripture that samsara and nirvana are both equally false appearances that arise from the ground beyond the two extremes, and this is fundamental to the way Nyingmapas understand the nature of ultimate truth - it is not a mere emptiness, as Tsongkhapa and his followers argue, but the foundationaless foundation of any conceivable experience, a mysterious self-arisen luminous display that we mistake for a world composed of ten thousand things.
This cardinal implication that Higgins derives from this framework is that in the Dzogchen view, conventional truth necessarily derives from an inexpressible ultimate that is its inexpressible source. In this sense, viewing ultimate truth as a non-deceptive cognition of the true mode of abiding of a phenomenon is to necessarily retain the essentially representational structure of our understanding of cognition - that we are subjects who know objects - and to simply say that ultimate truth and convetinoal truth are correct and incorrect cognitions of an object. This preserves the essential subject-object representational structure of experiences, which is the very structure that a correct understanding of ultimate truth should displace.
In Higgins's view, then, to better understand what is meant by ultimate truth in Dzogchen philosophy, we can appeal to Heidegger's conception of "disclosure" as a deeper kind of truth than the representational model of truth that preoccupies most western philosophers. In the light of being, we can let beings be instead of always already determining their structure in advance according to our model of conscious subjects.
In the three sections of the book, Higgins makes parallel arguments for the three topics of his analysis. In the first (and, in my opinion, most valuable) section of the book, Higgins examines the roots of the Dzogchen distinction between afflicted conceptual consciousness and an innate primordial objectless awareness, and argues that because of the way Nyingmapas understand the two truths, ultimate truth cannot be an object of ordinary consciousness - nor can it be a consciousness that is brought about through causes and conditions in the conventional sense. Otherwise, its object would necessarily be cognzied as existing within that framework. Higgins provides an extremely knowledgeable general survey of some of the countless ways that Nyingma authors have articulated the distinction between such ultimate consciousnesses and ordinary apprehension.
In the second part of the book, using a similar logic, Higgins performs a sweeping intellectual history of the ways classical Dzogchen authors have distinguished between the pure and impure basis of consciousness. Because the philosophical core of the argument had already been made in this preceding part, I found this section to largely be of interest on the level of intellectual history. Because Nyingma literature frequently expounds long sets of synonyms, the differences between different terms for this distinction range from "slight" to "non-existent", and chiefly what we see is a history of how the rhetoric evolved over time, reflecting different scriptural inputs, new translations, and new interlocutors and interpretive priorities.
The third section applies the book's basic problematic to the soteriological problem of sudden versus gradual enlightenment. On the interpretive level, Higgins breaks little new ground, and essentially argues that the progressive stages of practice are generally interpreted by the tradition as clearing away obscurations to a luminous wisdom that is already there so that it can be more easily registered.
Then the book offers critical editions of short, relevant translations drawn from Longchenpa, Jigme Lingpa, and Yonten Gyatso.
This book contains enormous virtues of intellectual clarity and rigor, and does an incredibly good job in identifying what is at stake in these various arguments, and tracing out their historical development in the works of many great authors, all of whom have only seen tiny fractions of their collected outputs translated into English. As noted before, Higgins is incredibly erudite, and he writes with confidence and authority regarding the work of numerous difficult authors who worked over a span of centuries.
If there is one fault I could find with the book, it is that the concept of "philosophical foundations" that we see in the title remains unproblematized, and I think this is a serious omission. No Dzogchen author would have regarded what they were doing as philosophy - every single one of the works he cites would have been understood as either a practice text or ancillary to practice texts. I found it highly significant that Higgins does not even mention that fact that almost every source he quotes is traditionally restricted and requires an empowerment. This is an extremely conspicuous fact to simply pass over in silence in a book of this degree of rigor - a book which, for example, includes a well-researched and detailed footnote explaining the history and evolution of the simile of the seven blind men describing an elephant when it occurs in passing in one of his citations.
One reason Dzogchen texts are restricted is because they are not written for people to read and think about in a dispassionate way, they are 100% intended by the authors to be brought alive in a living context of interpretation and practice, and the restrictions placed on them body forth the actual praxis-dimension that is regarded by the tradition itself as in no way incidental to what the texts mean and how they are to be understood on a basic level.
I am reminded of Jeffrey Hopkins explaining that he named his first opus Meditation on Emptiness to throw down the gauntlet, in a way, because prior to his work, every single western text on Madhyamaka treated it as a kind of philosophy aimed at refuting other views. In the high scholarly register of this work, which echoes the tone of much of the great work coming out of Europe in the last few decades, I worry that scholarship is slipping back into the bad old days of regarding Buddhist doctrine as something that can be understood as a kind of disembodied philosophy which can be engaged in isolation.
That being said, as I mentioned before, I think this is clearly one of the great works on Dzogchen to appear from the western academy thus far, and it is extremely worth reading. I would highly recommend it to any interested student of the subject.
Displaying 1 of 1 review