Keith Dowman - Spaciousness: The Radical Dzogchen of the Vajra-Heart: Longchenpas Treasury of the Dharmadhatu

Spaciousness

The Radical Dzogchen of the Vajra-Heart

Longchenpas Treasury of the Dharmadhatu

Translation and Commentary by Keith Dowman

Revised Edition 2014

Dzogchen Now! eBooks

Published by Dzogchen Now! Books

2012 and 2014 by Keith Dowman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system or technologies now known or later developed without permission in writing from the publisher.

First edition published in 2013 by Vajra Publications, Kathmandu, Nepal

For digital information please visit: www.keithdowman.net

ISBN 978-1497340862

Cover design by James Moore and Martin Fernandez Cufre

Page of Unbounded Restriction

The view presented in the following pages is unlimited, boundless and universal. It can only bring benefit to human beings but some require protection. In order to optimize the benefit the following precepts should be observed.

For Vajrayana Dharma Practitioners: If you are committed either formally or informally to a graduated Dzogchen path, please do not read this text without the recommendation of your mentor. A good precept to follow is: Dont read it unless you are about to practice it!

For Academics: Intellectual discussion of this material is antithetical and counterproductive to its stated end. Please be aware that analytical and comparative study of it is commensurate to using the Koran as toilet paper alienation is inevitable. Be aware!

For Dzogchen Chatterers: You are in neither academic nor practitioner categories: you will know you are a chatterer when you find yourself talking or writing about it (on the web) to similarly intellectually motivated people who want to clear their doubts intellectually rather than existentially. For you, this material is a very slow poison.

For the Curious: If you find this text in hard print form, it would be wise to wrap it up and place it in an inaccessible place above the level of your head and remember it as the magical efflorescence of the heart. If you have it in digital form, delete it with a prayer: OM AH HUNG!

Dedicated to both the religious and secular dzogchen gurus of the age.

Table of Contents

Note on eBook Use

Current Kindle ebook formatting cannot present an aesthetic presentation of verse. Use of a small font and/or landscape mode provides longer lines and therefore easier reading.

Preface to the Revised Edition

I have taken the opportunity afforded by publication in America to edit the text again. Passing time has brought new insight and new word preferences. I have also edited out some phrases and sentiments that caused offence to believers in the suppositional buddhist approaches. We have changed the cover picture and increased the size of the font throughout. In all, this revised edition constitutes an upgrade.

Keith Dowman, 2014

Preface to the Kathmandu Edition

This translation may appear to some readers as a finished work of English composition reflecting Longchenpas Tibetan original. This is far from the truth. Longchenpas Treasury of the Dharmadhatu is a masterpiece of poetic mystical revelation and requires a mind of similar luminosity to render it into English. Longchenpa's major works comprise only a fraction of the mystical masterpieces of Tibetan Buddhism that require translation with a pitch of resonance and height of evocation similar to the King James version of the bible. We need western Longchenpas to rewrite this perennial mystical experience in an authentic language ringing true from the first word to the last. We have expunged a lot of the tired English argot that was contrived originally to translate the Mahayana sutras and shastras, but we still have a long way to go before Dzogchen texts shine in the great tradition of English poetry and of T.S. Eliot or Jack Kerouac and it is the poetry that matters as much as, or even more than, the philosophical content. The academics are necessary and useful, but our best hope for Dzogchen texts lies with the yogin-poets, even if that implies expanding the scope of transmission to include a far wider audience.

Does this approach vitiate the lineage in any way? Does it permit unscrupulous charlatan or psychopathic teachers to preempt the closed circle of Dzogchen lineage-holders in a susceptible, credulous, new age market? What of the new-age Dzogchen imitators who have obtained their knowledge from books and study? Should they be welcomed as homegrown, self-realized, nondualist Dzogchen adepts? Lineage in Dzogchen is synonymous with the ground of being, but is it the sine qua non for other nondual teachers? And then the issue of samaya: we must accept that subsequent to initiatory experience, until a student has assimilated and familiarized him or herself with the view, secrecy or at least discretion can be extremely valuable as a hedge against energy leakage and conventional, deleterious prioritization. Yet, since the heart-teaching is always self-secret, dissemination of the Dzogchen view and celebration of the great significance of nonmeditation need not be circumscribed by the teachers personal vow of secrecy. Due to poor presentation some recipients of the view may find their egos inflated by it; but for most recipients the view is ego-destructive and undermines and resolves the manipulative, dualizing intellect.

This is another, alternative, translation of the seminal Dzogchen text Chos dbyings mdzod , which is the Tibetan master Longchenpas masterpiece. The first publication of this work, in 2001, under the title The Precious Treasury of Basic Space, may yet prove to be a turning point in the history of Dzogchen in the West. A group of western Dzogchen practitioners, who had not absorbed Dzogchen in its oriental home, translated and published the supreme classical work of Dzogchen under the auspices of a rigzin-lama and with the assistance of khempo-scholars, but essentially inspired by their own existential understanding. Dzogchen was thus reclaimed by the people who need it from the caretakers who can no longer use it in the cultural context in which it evolved. Surely we should hope that Dzogchen retains a deep sacred place within Tibetan consciousness, but our principal aspiration is for Dzogchen to take root in the West and heal the deep rifts that Judeo-Christian dualism has created in the meta-structural consciousness of the People of the Book. In order for this to occur, the supra-cultural meaning of Dzogchen should be lifted by its existential bootstraps out of its monastic isolation and primping cultishness into the clear light of day, where it can be embraced by the existential and literary mainstream that is open to a nondual view of the world. This translation attempts to move literary Dzogchen exposition in that direction.

Dzogchen must leap out of the academies into the lives of the people on the ground who aspire to live it, or, rather, who are struggling to live it as through a glass darkly without the benefit of the heart-teaching. Governed now by an elitist group of linguists and sectarian, commercial publishers on one side and covens of secretive esoteric practitioners on the other, Dzogchen risks becoming lost in an impenetrable sectarian labyrinth. The religious history of Tibet had its own necessary religio-political logic that banished Dzogchen to a secret, underground status; the needs of the West surely require quite a different upshot.

Longchenpa's work, like this one, allows the possibility that scientists, the high priests of a post-Christian society, particularly the physicists, can recognize the apex of Buddhist thinking as a corollary of their own. Dzogchen texts and western commentaries should be accessible to psychologists particularly cognitive psychiatrists and Gestalt psychologists to physicists, particularly particle and quantum physicists, and philosophers. From East Asia, Zen, Chan and Taoism have created a profound wave of spacious, inseminating attitudes and vibration flooding through the thinking of many western disciplines Dzogchen is set to crown that tendency. A similar statement could be made about the influence of Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism upon the West; but Dzogchen will eclipse their influence because of the breadth of its view, the rationality and scope of its mysticism, the lucidity and clarity of its texts and the deep roots and vitality of its tradition.