DEFINITIVE AND PROVISIONAL TRUTH IN TANTRA AND DZOGCHEN
I’d like to talk about non-theism with reference to the Nyingma school of Vajrayana and Dzogchen Buddhism—my own tradition of choice. Vajrayana and Dzogchen might be refreshing to contemplate for those who are spiritually homeless or have fallen out of theism, materialism, and atheism, or for those who have failed to find meaning in the present meaning crisis.
Vajrayana is both a non-dual and a mystical wisdom school. However, its mysticism has nothing to do with ‘two world mythologies’ or life-denying gnostic dualism. In Dzogchen— the so-called ‘king of the views’ or ‘the great perfection’—there is no great chain of being or emanationist ladder to God, there is only the ‘nature of mind’ and ‘what is always already the case’—the divine ground pervading all the apparent divisions, dualities, and appearances. The universe has ‘one taste’, as the Mahamudra teachings tell us.
Still, there are provisional hierarchies of values and practices in every tradition. And to say ‘one taste’ is a most pretentious contrivance if this is merely intellectual talk. A story I once heard illustrates this point. A spiritual pandit was waxing poetic about about the ‘one taste’ of all existence to a great master of Dzogchen. The master picked up a piece of dog shit and took a bite and offered it him. He recoiled in horror and realised his insufficiency.
We should be careful not to mix up our fantasies of definitive or absolute truth, with actual realisation, or the need for spiritual work. On the other hand, it is a good idea to create an intellectual framework with the most exalted view. And a progressive and very challenging provisional path is necessary to ‘remove the veils’. Furthermore, Dzogchen does not flatten out of distinction or differences: even if the world is one taste, chocolate still tastes like chocolate and life can be pleasurable or bittersweet.
Dzogchen is said to be the highest view, the peak of the mountain, but is also, paradoxically, the ground; it is the panoramic view but also the basis. The practitioner holds this paradox: that while you practice stages of growth, you know that they are contrivances and skillful means (upaya), and that the absolute has no form whatsoever.
Tantra is said to be the basis of Dzogchen. And tantra make use of a most baroque assortment of deities, prayers, mantras, yogas, and esoteric technologies. Its mystical practices could be described as trans-rational and even magical. It has been said that there are 83,000 tantras. Compare this to Zen, which has only a few methods—like eating, walking, sitting meditation etc. Also Zen is fully rational in its methodologies, whereas Vajrayana is trans-rational. Still like Zen Vajrayana can also be pithy and direct and doesn’t have the life-denying or fatalistic qualities of some Indian spiritual traditions. No-dual Tantra/Dzogchen may be rooted in hard core mysticism, but it is not other-worldly.
In terms of definitive and provisional truth—Traktung Khepa has said that all systems—and indeed religions themselves—are fundamentally provisional. That is because most of us are pretty ignorant and deluded and can’t handle the definitive truth directly; therefore we need a gradual path, provisional lies, and tantric trickery to goad us on to the truth. If we really knew ‘the terror of the situation’ as George Gurdjieff famously put it, we might freak out. Genuine mystical practice requires a certain confrontation with the real and a spiritual crisis which we must traverse to meet the brilliance of the Tantric and Dzogchen views.
We can also ask ourselves: why bother with stages of practice and levels of understanding if the divine is ‘always already the case’ and can’t be accessed through effort or contrivance? The answer is: to remove obstacles. Provisional practice is about removing the veils again, not adding anything to reality. As Carl Jung once said: we need religions to protect us from God; in other words, we need to practice so that we can go beyond contrivance, to cultivate virtuous habits, so that we can go beyond the habit field entirely, in the words of Tantric master Thinley Norbu. God appeared to Moses as a burning bush because Moses was not prepared for the full gestalt of the divine. The destruction of the limited self is actually the point, but most of us need intense preparation to meet the spiritual fire.
The word ‘divine’ which I am using here, tends to be associated with belief in a creator God. But what many people either don’t know—or are profoundly irritated by—is the fact that there are some traditions like Buddhism that are actually non-theistic. Buddhists don’t believe in a personal or creator God and yet they still worship—and ultimately try to embody—the divine. Sometimes non-theists use ‘God language’ but they don’t consider divinity to be something that can be named, contained, described, or considered a personal ‘being’. In Thinley Norbu’s book White Sail, he tells us that Buddhism is neither an eternalism, which attempts to reify and mythologize god—or nihilism, which denies the existence of divinity.
The divine, in non-theistic traditions, is said to be neither being nor non-being; it is rather a mystery beyond ordinary designation or mythology. In the west, we find this view in the apophatic mysticism of esoteric Christianity, Sufism, and some schools of Hinduism—which claim that the knowledge of the divine can only be understood through negation—‘isness’ can only be understood through ‘is not’. And yet, although many mystical traditions still use God language as a metaphor, they could be said to be non-theistic in their apophatic approach (See Maester Eckhart).
The ultimate result of the greatest mystical traditions is said to be the same, even if the practices are wildly different. (That is to not to say different religious technologies lead to the same place—they don’t. Not all roads lead to Rome). Also we should remember again that an intellectual understanding is very different from the radical transformation of being that mysticism proscribes.
This has been illustrated through the story of Naropa the scholar and the ugly old witch who appeared to him one day. When she asked Naropa if he understood the words he was reading in tantric various texts, he replied: “I understand the words but not the meaning.” The old witch was so pleased that he was such an honest and modest scholar that she transformed herself into a beautiful dakini—or feminine deity. However, in Naropa’s state of elation and perhaps sexual excitement (some men will say anything to get a woman into bed) he changed his tune and said, ‘actually I do understand the meaning’. The beautiful dakini immediately turned into an ugly old hag again. The point of the story is: reality changes according to our view. Realising what a fake and limited view he had, Naropa gave up his tenured professor status and threw away all his reference books to become a wandering yogi, in search of Tilopa, who was a proper master who could teach him the actual phenomenology of the path.
Buyer beware: I may parrot words about Tantra and Dzogchen but I am no authority on their meanings. You need actual masters to get beyond the descriptive philosophical talk, because what is transmitted is largely non-linguistic and trans-rational. I might talk even talk about Dzogchen using some of the right words (although that is very tricky too, and I will undoubtedly fail) but if I told you that I understood the meaning, since I’m not a very good liar, you might get ugly. In other words, I can only give you an intellectual outline of the view which is extremely limited. My purpose in doing so is twofold: to clarify and articulate the view for myself, and expose this very rare path to others, who may not have heard about it or may have misunderstandings about non-theistic mysticism.
So with the further provision that we can’t really practice or understand Tantra or Dzogchen without a qualified master—let’s give a quick outline of the Nyingma tradition. It should be also said that I am merely reiterating what I have learned from Dzogchen and Mahamudra masters I have met along the way. All errors are of my own, because these teachers, it seems to me, hold a definitive view—which means they embody these teachings fully.
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According to the Vajrayana tradition there are three turning of The Wheel of Dharma—and Dharma means truth. Hinayana is the lesser or narrow vehicle—yana means vehicle. Mahayana is the greater or open vehicle. Finally Vajrayana is the diamond or the indestructible vehicle. And these 3 vehicles are divided into 9.
The first two are within the Hinayana and are about renunciation and self-discipline, or giving up bad habits and behaviours. On a basic level, Hinayana is the straight and narrow path, and about overcoming psychological pain. It begins with a sense of weary dissatisfaction with the ordinary world—and with the first noble truth, or Dukka. Discovering Hinayana is like discovering AA. All of us are addicts in one way or another—our human world is largely based on the vicissitudes of the ego and its hopes and fears. The goal of the Hinayana is to disentangle this heap of illusions and habitual addictions called the self and to attain individual liberation through understanding the way out of suffering outlined in the 8-fold path (which we won’t go into here).
The first vehicle of Hinayana is called the ‘listening vehicle’ which means to listen and study dharma, a scholarly approach. The next vehicle is of solitary realisation, embodied by the Arhat who realises nirvana, beyond the marks of impermanence, suffering, and no-self. But nirvana and no-self are not the end of the story—each of the vehicles transcends and includes the previous vehicles. The limits of hinayana are understood but the truths are not forgotten or excluded in the ‘higher yanas’. Sutra, or the lower three vehicles, is a necessary basis for Tantra and Dzogchen—the higher six.
The second turning and third vehicle, or The Mahayana, is deeper and more radical than the first. It introduces love, compassion, and self sacrifice—beyond mere self-transcendence or the extinction of desire. There is an altruistic attitude in the Mahayana, a willingness to help others go beyond suffering and to develop wisdom and compassion—which is exemplified by the hero mythology of the Bodhisattva. The bodhisattva is a romantic and perhaps an eccentric warrior who practices the two aims—the liberation of self and the liberation of others. He or she makes a vow to ‘save all sentient beings’—to do the impossible and move mountains, in other words.
In terms of philosophy, the Mahayana contains the teachings of emptiness, which are the basis of Tantra. The 8 consciousnesses it describes: the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, ego, and collective consciousness (or the alaya storehouse consciousness) are said to be fundamentally empty—and all phenomena are said to be empty of any independent existence. Nagarjuna, the greatest logician of Buddhism, argued for a middle way between annihilation and eternalism (or platonic forms)—relentlessly deconstructing both affirmative and negative views of reality.
This brings us to the Tantric path, in which a mere emptiness or void is insufficient. The tantric view adds ‘wisdom awareness’ or the luminous and expressive aspect of existence to emptiness. Emptiness and luminosity, space and energy, openness and expressiveness, form and emptiness, the male and female principles are a singularity in the tantric view. This non-duality is famously symbolised by the yab/yung, or the male and female deities in full and glorious sexual embrace (tantricas are definitely not sexually phobic!). In sexual union lovers are ‘not one’ because they retain their distinctiveness; they are ‘not two’, because they are fully conjoined in the love embrace—a perfect metaphor for non-duality. Sexual metaphors—and actual sex-magic—are used and practiced in tantra; passion and aggression are alchemically transformed rather than rejected as in Sutra. Tantra takes the poison and dualistic conceptuality and desire and transforms it into wisdom.
The first three tantric vehicles, called the outer tantras, contain elaborate practices of conduct and purification rituals of all kinds. The three inner tantric vehicles include what are called the generation and completion phases of practice. Traditionally one cannot start these without intensive preliminary practices, where one offers 111,000 prostrations, 111,00 mandala offerings, 111,00 100 syllable mantras, and then does Guru Yoga practice, which links the student to the mind of the enlightened master.
In generation phase, one practices visualisation, mantra, and one pointed concentration on various peaceful and wrathful deities, often in sexual union. These visualisations continue until one has developed ‘stable clarity’ in the deity, which means that one can visualize oneself as a deity all the time. The tantrica literally replaces the psychosomatic perception with a more exalted perception, so that, in the words of Thinley Norbu, ‘perception becomes deity’ or divine. The goal is to go beyond the notion that there is anything ordinary about existence at all—and everything is seen to be of the nature of the divine. Of course, there is the danger of psychosis and inflation here: and one could use these practices to become the ‘Rudra’, or the ultimate egomaniac. It must be understood that the Vajra pride and baroque Napoleonic splendor that one cultivates in Tantra is not about the human personality. Tantra is not mere psychology.
The completion stages have more to do inner Yogas, including dream yoga, sexual yogas, and hatha yogas, where one works with winds, inner channels, and energetic essences of the male and female principles. These are more subtle than generation phase practice, and less involved in elaborate visualization. The work with is primarily with the subtle or etheric body.
Finally, the summit of the mountain is the Ati or the Ultimate teachings—Dzogchen again. Dzogchen works with primordial wisdom energy (rigpa or gnosis) directly. One translation of Dzogchen is ‘utter completeness’, a stateless state where nothing needs to be rejected or gained. Less dramatically, Chogyam Trunpga called it the ‘old dog’ stage, or ‘non meditation’ where nothing needs to be done. Dzogchen is expressed as a total spontaneity or crazy wisdom, but not of the banal ordinary kind. Enlightened spontaneity is not ordinary hippy spontaneity in the least bit—it is based in divine realization. Dzogchen is not for neophytes or spiritual dilettantes!
As soon as you enter tantra—which is inseparable from Dzogchen in this tradition—all vehicles of the path could theoretically be practiced with a Dzogchen point of view; you could practice hinayana discipline from a Dzogchen perspective for instance. This is why it is called the ‘resultant view’—in which you, paradoxically, begin with the result, or what is ‘always already the case’ again. Of course, deluded people who claim to be ‘already enlightened’ use Dzogchen to justify assholery or hedonism; however, what they forget is that the ground of Dzogchen is still wisdom, compassion, and emptiness. Tantra and Dzogchen are literally impossible without a Sutric ground. While Dzogchen is considered the ultimate view, it contains all the other views within itself, breaking down the linearity of the progressive path.
Practically speaking, even if we cannot practice Dzogchen, we can still develop a provisional understanding. Chogyam Trungpa would introduce Dzogchen elements into beginner practices for instance. You can go back and forth and up and down the snakes and ladders of the path. For instance, if you are useless at Dzogchen practice, you can practice Tantra; if Tantra doesn’t work, then you can fall back to basic Sutra. In fact, some sadhanas (tantric practices) have elements of all vehicles simultaneously. However, lower sutric stages cannot understand and are often hostile to Tantra and Dzogchen, while the highest view includes the lower ones.
The point here is, we should practice what works best for us and corresponds to our needs. If we are honest with ourselves, most of us could use some good old renunciation and sutric discipline—and should practice a lot of Mahayana wisdom and compassion before we dare get into the experiment of tantra or make the mistake I am making in talking about Dzogchen.
Let us conclude by mentioning a Dzogchen vow called Three Terrible Oaths of Dorje Trollo: Whatever happens; may it happen! Whichever way it goes; may it go that way! There is no purpose! A misunderstanding of this could lead to ultimate nihilism and despair, however one who has a taste of the path knows that this is not gloomy existentialism at all but an ultimate affirmation. The paradox is that while we work with practices, technologies, and provisional goals, Dzogchen tells us there is just reality as it is, without any architect. But that reality is not a mere nothingness which denies appearances, but a mysterious ‘divine ground of being’ and a ‘meaning saturated field’. The meaning can’t be found in any purpose, but only in its own playful effulgence expression.
In any case, this has been a very brief overview of a non-theistic approach to divinity, as expressed in ‘old school’ Tantric Buddhism. To talk more about these matters please join me at our Parallax spiritual book club which starts Sunday January 9th, at 10am. RSVP here:
Sources and inspiration:
T.K. An Opening Lotus of Wisdom: Topics in Vajrayana, Vol. I. 2021.
Trungpa, Chögyam. The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness: The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma, Volume Three. Edited by Judith L. Lief, Shambhala, 2013.
Norbu, Thinley. White Sail: Crossing the Waves of Ocean Mind to the Serene Continent of the Triple Gems. Shambhala, 2001.
Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite. The Divine Names, and, Mystical Theology. Milwaukee :Marquette University Press, 1980.
Smith, David Chaim. The Thirty-Two Keys: A Working System of Contemplative Mysticism. Edited by John S. Rolfe, David Chaim Smith, 2020.
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