Note

Dissatisfied with Dzogchen

Dzogchen, a way of being and understanding that emerged from Tibetan tantric Buddhism, has been enormously influential for my work as well as my life. Recently, I've become dissatisfied with a gap in it, though. What's missing is support for practical action.

Dzogchen means "great completion" in Tibetan. It takes the view that you are always already completely enlightened. Since you probably think you aren't, it has ways of noticing that, after all, yes you are.

The original version of Dzogchen, called semde, emphasized the equanimity of enlightenment, and the state of rest after having achieved it. There's nothing more to do; no more meditation, no more tantric rituals, no more studying obscure texts, no more fighting your emotions. You are completely done.

This quietism is unsatisfactory for me. You could get a lobotomy and it might have much the same effect, so far as anyone could see from the outside. This was eventually recognized in Tibet, and canonical sources agree that semde tends to nihilism. (I love semde, but there is a deficiency here.) If everything is equal, then everything may seem equally meaningless. And, there's no reason to act. Buddhas are supposed to be useful. Buddhas that just rest are no good.

For Buddhism, nihilism is the denial of form, i.e. specifics, with overemphasis on emptiness, which includes sameness. The opposite is eternalism, an overemphasis on form and denial of emptiness.

Partly in response to the nihilism of semde, a later branch of Dzogchen (menngagde) restored an emphasis on form. I find that unsatisfactory too. It tends to eternalism. In the spiritual domain, that manifests as metaphysics and mystical woo. I'm allergic to that stuff. Although menngagde talks about action, the specific activities it promotes are non-credibly magical. Some are rituals that make little sense in our cultural context. The others are weird ways of inducing personal hallucinations, which may be entertaining, but not useful to anyone else, and therefore not interesting to me.

Effective practical action was a big part of the job for high-status Tibetan lamas. They led large organizations and were major political actors in secular conflicts. They were often responsible for building and maintaining civic infrastructure. They practiced, taught, and wrote textbooks on all the topics of the mundane sciences and humanities available in a Medieval culture.

It seems clear that their spiritual practice prepared them for these practical roles—but I have found nearly nothing written about that. I suspect that the meta-level know-how was transmitted orally through apprenticeship, and was not considered something it would be proper to write about. This meta-know-how is probably now almost entirely lost, which is a great shame.

There's a third branch of Dzogchen, longde, that is intermediate between semde and menngagde. Logically, that would make it porridge that is not too hot and not too cold—emphasizing the inseparability of form and emptiness without favoring either, falling into neither nihilism nor eternalism.

Unfortunately, longde is kind of a mess. It's a "wastebasket taxon" that all the Dzogchen material that wasn't clearly either semde or menngagde got tossed into, nearly a thousand years ago. It hasn't, after all, got a coherent story on form and emptiness. And, as far as I know, it has nothing to say about practical action either.

Probably partly because it's a mess, longde went essentially extinct for many centuries. That means one can get away with casting vaguely-similar new stuff as "longde," and no one can really argue with you. Longde was revived by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche about fifty years ago, and there's now a handful of other people who teach it (or anyway teach various pretty different things they call "longde").

This represents an opportunity. Perhaps one could construct a version of longde that that has a realistic take on practical action: neither the nihilistic inaction of semde, nor the eternalistic ineffectual magical action of menngagde.

In a sense... that's what I'm attempting in my work on meta-systematicity.