Lama Surya Das - Natural Radiance: Awakening to Your Great Perfection

I first traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1971. My purpose was to find answers to my many questions about the meaning and purpose of human existence. When Lama Thubten Yeshe accepted me as a student, I began to study and practice the 2,500-year-old teachings of Buddhismin particular, Tibetan Buddhism.

In the years that followed, I had the good fortune to meet and study with some of the great teachers of our time: among them Kalu Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Deshung Rinpoche, the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I also studied with many yogis and Hindu gurusnotably, Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaji), who named me Surya Das (servant of the sun[light]). I spent ten years studying and practicing in the Himalayas, then completed two consecutive cloistered three-year Dzogchen meditation retreats under Khyentse Rinpoches guidance in France.

During this time, I received a wealth of authentic, life-changing teachings, initiations, and pith instructions from all four major Tibetan lineages. But, ultimately, the teachings that spoke to me most strongly transcended all doctrinal and technical variations. These were the Dzogchen (natural perfection) teachings, which first appeared in India in 200BCE and migrated to Tibet 900 years later. It is in this tradition that I became a lineage holder, and it is this practice that I mainly teach.

Dzogchen is naked awareness practice, which is to say that it does not depend on images, cultural forms, or outer accoutrements. Dzogchens unique message is that we are, by nature, all buddhas, for whom enlightenment is possible within this lifetime.

Lama Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thaye has said of Dzogchen:

Through the practices taught in this program and the guided practices included on the enclosed CD, you will directly experience your own buddha nature and learn that it is available to you in every momentand that you can awaken to it simply by recognizing how it already exists in your life. Of course, to come to know this under-lying truth for ourselves most often takes considerable spiritual study and practice as we travel along the liberating path known as the path of awakening, the great way of freedom and enlightenment.

Dzogchen is considered to be the summit of all the nine vehicles or approaches of Buddhism. Thus, it is called Ati (Peak) Yoga or Ati Yana, the Peak Vehicle, or Maha Sandhi, the Complete Perfection or the Consummate Teaching. Over the centuries, Dzogchen has traditionally been a secret teaching, for initiates only, since this advanced teaching is the direct route to enlightenment, providing immediate access to the ultimate reality, including the totality of innate wakefulness without many steps, studies, purifications, preparations, or gradual practices. Thus, it is known as part of the renowned Shortcut of the Vajrayana (indestructible vehicle), the Tantric path of Buddhism. It has been called the practice of buddhas, not ordinary beings. When you practice it, you activate and participate in your own buddhaness, right here and now.

Guru Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, predicted that Dzogchen would be the teaching for a future time when there are dangers in abundance, when peoples faculties are keen, and time is short. What better time than now? In our secular, postmodern age, people of the highest capacities are interested inand searching forthe final word on enlightenment. These direct teachings of naked awareness and pointing-out instructions directly reveal the radiant face of immanent buddhaness and the inherent freedom and perfection of being that is the natural state of enlightenment.

Thus the veil of secrecy has been lifted, and Dzogchen has been taught in several countries by modern masters, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Namkhai Norbu, and others, even to people who have not previously studied much Buddhism. My late teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche used to say, Bring the scientists; they have the sharp capacities to be able to understand these naked teachings. Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, one of Tibets greatest lamas, who just recently passed away in eastern Tibet, was famous for saying publicly on many occasions: This is the time of Dzogchen.

My own teacher and personal mentor, the late Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche, used to say, The Dzogchen view and meditation is in accord with all practices, and is supreme. The view of Dzogchen will enhance any relative practice, Buddhist or otherwise. He told me to be fearless in teaching it to those who seemed ready in the West, and we taught together and led Dzogchen retreats on many occasions. During the 1980s, when he was living in France, he often saw people riding on the Metro in Paris who he thought could be woken up with a single sentence of Dzogchen teaching, if he only had the chance to communicate with them. He taught that Dzogchens introduction to our naked awareness as the genuine buddha is a teaching for today, a practice stripped of rituals and elaborations, religion, history, philosophy, cosmology, and cultural trappings. It is what the late great Nyingmapa leader and Dzogchen master and visionary His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche used to call the panaceiac wisdom-essence, the single knowing which liberates all.

Emaho! is the shortest Dzogchen teaching. The word means wondrous, amazing, far-out, fantastic. It expresses the joy and wonderamazement, reallyof discovering within ourselves and our world the radiant splendor of our innate natural state directly perceived by our own eyes, the great completeness, wholeness, and oneness of all that is. As the fourteenth-century Dzogchen master Longchenpa sang, Since things are perfect and complete just as they are, beyond good and bad, without adopting and rejecting, one just bursts out laughing! May the Dzogchen meditation practices in this program become a practice path that will deliver you to such joyous freedom and delight. Emaho!