Graduated or Sudden…. duh? The crux of samsara is that your mind is not directly present within reality. Reality is present, but not your consciousness. That is immersed in a cloud of concepts, including notions of past and future, self and other, etc. Your habitual attachment and aversion to those concepts keeps your mind in perpetual turmoil. Voilà, you have created your own samsaric suffering. The question is: how can you undo that? When you follow a ‘graduated’ spiritual path, you still see yourself as separate from the here and now. You imagine that the fruition of enlightenment is ‘not here’ but will be reached somewhere else at a future time. Proponents of the ‘sudden’ path find fault with this approach. They hold that as long as you are clinging to a graduated practice, you will never reach its completion. You will remain trapped in a dualistic modality. In the ‘radical’ approach of Dzogchen we must jettison this sacrosanct assumption of a spiritual ‘path’. In other words, the Great Completion means just that: abandoning all dogma about stages of development, even the notion of praxis. The here and now is accepted just as it is. Ground, path, and fruition all have a ‘sameness’ (one-taste) beyond discrimination. Likewise, discriminating awareness is not something to be engineered in the future; it is the same awareness we started with, yet somehow liberated from those old attachments to thought and emotion. Thus, ‘practice’ is just another karma to be exhausted. Buddhists have been arguing for and against these graduated and sudden approaches for millennia. For some reason, they routinely square off into opposing camps and criticize each other. I find this utterly mystifying. It’s like arguing over which side of a PB&J gets the peanut butter, and which side gets the jelly. Really? If we could all just spontaneously achieve the Great Completion without any practice, there would be no samsara. We would all be flitting about like dakinis in the Buddha fields. But that is not an option for most of us. Buddha himself could give us the pointing out upadesha, but that glimpse of the nature of mind wouldn’t last five minutes amid the samsaric whirlwind of our cultural environment. So, there absolutely is a place for Shamatha, Vipashyana, Mahamudra, Rushen, and other Dzogchen preliminaries. That is how we plow the ground from which the seed of Buddha Nature will sprout into a Bodhi Tree. If you don’t do the plowing, you just get the same old field of weeds! On the other hand, we must be constantly vigilant against spiritual materialism. That happens when we become so attached to the laddered path that we just keep polishing the rungs of ritual and dogma. That may produce a powerful religious institution, but it won’t create any buddhas. And as it turns out, spiritual materialism is the sorry state of humanity in the 21st century. We have a small population of highly educated people for whom the old religions are little more than bronze age superstition. These folks are ready to ‘wake up’ to reality. On the other hand, we have untold billions of uneducated people so downtrodden that religious myths are all they have to buoy their spirits from day to day. Ironically, those very religions and their mutual intolerance of each other are largely fueling the violence that afflicts the world today. That is the motley face of samsara. And yet it is within this sea of human ignorance and misery that we Buddhists must try to achieve enlightenment. It was the same for Buddha amid the Vedic Brahmans and ascetics. It was the same for Saraha and Padmasambhava in the face of Hindu, Moslem, and animistic cultures. It was the same for the Sakyapas and the Karmapas in the face of Mongol invasions. It was the same for Jamgon Kongtrul and the Rimé movement in the face of sectarian wars. It is same for all Tibetans in the face of the current Chinese atrocities. Even in a relatively affluent country like America, we are witnessing a decline in tolerance as the middle class disappears and the so-called red states return to fundamentalist religion. In the Middle East, ISIS uses the promise of a purified Sunni Islam to justify the most heinous acts imaginable. In India, fundamentalist Hindu groups are conducting forced mass conversions of minorities to Hinduism. In Afghanistan and Pakistan you can be killed for carrying a Bible. Buddhists and Moslems are at war in Thailand. In West Africa, Christians and Moslems are massacring each others children in their classrooms. The example are too numerous to list. So at this juncture in the history of humankind, it is no great stretch to see organized religion as the greatest threat to the survival of our species. If you are looking for a catch phrase, you might say, “It is time to kill God before God kills all of us.” This urgency to disband those authoritarian religious institutions argues for radical Dzogchen, which in the minds of many teachers transcends all religion, including Buddhism. Using this approach all one needs is a guru who can transmit the introduction to the nature of mind. But just as many teachers will point out that the ‘introduction’ is just the starting point. There must also be a ‘thorough recognition’ of the nature of mind, and this requires ‘training up the rigpa’. Learning to ‘preserve the face of rigpa’ takes ‘practice’. It is a matter of bringing all of life’s obstacles to the path. So guess what; we are right back to the graduated path! A good PB&J requires both peanut butter and jelly. It doesn’t matter which comes first, but they both have to be there. So, for me these age old arguments over sudden path versus graduated path are a moot point. We need to encourage both, and we need to do it now while there are still some humans left to enlighten.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 17:41:42 +0000
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