Dahlby Mark - The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

A well-known saying in Tibetan states, One should explain the lineage and the history in order to cut doubt about the authenticity of the teaching and the transmission. Therefore, I begin this book with a short story of my life.

I was born shortly after my parents fled the Chinese oppression in Tibet. Conditions were difficult and my parents placed me in a Christian boarding school, where they hoped I would be cared for. My father was a Buddhist lama*, my mother a practitioner of Bn*. Some time after, my father died. Eventually my mother remarried a man who was a Bn lama. Both he and my mother desired that I live within my culture, and when I was ten years old I was taken to the main Bn monastery in Dolanji, India, and ordained as a monk.

After living in the monastery for some time, I was recognized by Lopon (Head Teacher) Sangye Tenzin Rinpoche as the reincarnation of Khyungtul Rinpoche, a famous scholar, teacher, author, and meditation master. He was well known as a master astrologer, and in western Tibet and northern India was famous as a tamer of wild spirits. He was widely sought after as a healer with magical abilities. One of his sponsors was a focal king of Himachal in Northern India. This king and his wife, unable to bear children, asked Khyungtul Rinpoche to heal them, which he did. The son that they bore and raised is the present day Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh, Virbhardur.

When I was thirteen, my kind root master, Lopon Sangye Tenzin, a man of great knowledge and realization, prepared to teach one of the most important and esoteric teachings in the Bn religion: the Great Perfection ( Dzogchen*) lineage of the Oral Transmission of Zhang Zhung (Zhang Zhung Nyan Gyud*). Even though I was still young, my step-father visited Lopon Rinpoche and asked that I be admitted to the teachings, which would take place every day for three years. Lopon kindly agreed, but asked that I, along with the other prospective students, bring him a dream from the night before the teachings were to begin, so that he might determine our readiness.

Some of the students remembered no dream, which was considered a sign of obstacles. Lopon had them begin appropriate purification practices and delayed the beginning of the teaching until each student did have a dream. Dreams of other students were taken as indications that they needed to do particular practices to ready themselves for the teachingsfor example, doing practices that strengthened their connections to the Bn guardians*.

I dreamt about a bus circumambulating my teachers house, although there is actually no road there. In the dream, the bus conductor was my friend and I stood beside him, handing out tickets to each person that boarded the bus. The tickets were pieces of paper that had the Tibetan syllable A written on them. That was in the second or third year of my education at Dolanji, when I was thirteen years old, and at the time I did not know that A was a symbol of major significance in Dzogchen teachings. My teacher never said anything about the dream, which was his way. He made little comment about what was good, but I was happy as long as I was allowed to come to the teachings.

It is common, in Tibetan spiritual traditions, for dreams of the students to be used by the teacher in this fashion to determine if it is appropriate for a student to receive a particular teaching. Though it would be some time before I began to study and practice dream yoga, this incident was the beginning of my interest in dreams. It strongly impressed on me how greatly dream is valued in Tibetan culture and in the Bn religion, and how information from the unconscious is often of greater value than the information the conscious mind can provide.

After the three-year teaching, which included numerous meditation retreats with my fellow practitioners as well as many retreats that I did alone, I entered the monastic Dialectic School. The program of study normally takes nine to thirteen years to complete and covers the traditional training. We were taught the common academic subjects, such as grammar, Sanskrit, poetry, astrology, and art, and also learned the uncommon subjects: epistemology, cosmology, sutra*, tantra* and Dzogchen. During the monastic training, I was exposed to a number of teachings and transmissions on dream, the most important based on the texts of the Zhang Zhung Nyan Gyud, the Mother Tantra, and of Shardza Rinpoche.

I did well in the training and when I was nineteen I was asked to begin teaching others, which I did. Around the same time I wrote and published a summary of the biography of Lord Shenrab Miwoche*, the founder of the Bn religion. Later I became the president of the Dialectic School and held that position for four years, and was very involved in shaping and developing the school. In 1986, I received the Geshe degree, the highest degree awarded in Tibetan monastic education.

In 1989, at the invitation of Namkhai Norbu Rinpoches Dzogchen Community in Italy, I traveled to the West. Although I had no plans to teach, I was invited to do so by members of the community. One day I was passing out small pieces of paper to be used in a meditation on concentration. Each piece of paper had the Tibetan syllable A written on it. Right then the dream from fifteen years before, in which I passed out the same paper to people getting on the bus, came back to me. It was as if it hit me on the head.

I remained in the West and in 1991 was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to do research at Rice University. In 1993, I published my first book in the West, The Wonders of the Natural Mind , in which I tried to present the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) teachings in a clear and simple way. In 1994 I was given a grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue research on the logical and philosophical aspects of the Bn tradition, in collaboration with Professor Anne Klein, Chair of Religious Studies, at Rice University.