Courses / Fall 2014 Shamatha, Vipashyana, Dream Yoga, and the Experience of Pristine Awareness in the Great Perfection Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism /

42 On the Nature of Ultimate and Relative Bodhicitta

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Fall 2014 Shamatha, Vipashyana, Dream Yoga

B. Alan Wallace
21 Aug 2014 – 16 Oct 2014
Thanyapura Mind Centre, Phuket, Thailand

This eight-week retreat will focus on three of the six transitional processes, namely:

  • the Transitional Process of Living, with teachings on śamatha and vipaśyanā,
  • the Transitional Process of Dreaming, with teachings on dream yoga, and
  • the Transitional Process of Meditation with teachings on Dzogchen meditation.

All these teachings will be based on the text The Profound Dharma of The Natural Emergence of the Peaceful and Wrathful from Enlightened Awareness Stage of Completion Instructions on the Six Transitional Processes, an “earth terma” of teachings by Padmasambhava, revealed by Karma Lingpa in the fourteen century.

The English translation of this text has been published under the title Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos, with commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche and translated by B. Alan Wallace.

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B. Alan Wallace, 15 Sep 2014

At the beginning, Alan announces that from now on there will be more time for questions/discussion in the afternoon sessions. Then he starts the meditation, continuing with pointing-out instructions from Natural Liberation. After the meditation Alan explains one crucial sentence from the text. As he explains that sentence, he touches upon the different understanding of ultimate bodhicitta in the Sutrayana tradition and Dzogchen. In the Sutrayana tradition ultimate bodhicitta is understood as realizing the emptiness of all phenomena and relative bodhicitta as the desire to achieve awakening for the sake of all sentient beings. Now, whereas in the Sutrayana ultimate bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta both have to be cultivated and balanced out (like the left and the right hand) in order to avoid any extremes, Dzogchen once again refrains from that effort. In the Dzogchen tradition you “simply” release all grasping onto your identity as a sentient being and thereby practice from the perspective of a Buddha. From that point of view, achieving ultimate bodhicitta then means that you realize rigpa - which includes the realization of emptiness. Therefore, no cultivation of relative bodhicitta is needed! You don’t need to find a balance, to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing since your knowing goes beyond the split of a right and a left hand. Alan then finishes by taking into account the loving-kindness practice that we did in the morning and connects that to his considerations.

Questions: 1) How do you practice critical analysis while keeping the pure view? 2) Concerning intersubjective invariants: Does the vision of e.g. the Dalai Lama (really what you see) only depend on the level of your purity? That is, would an equally pure Buddhist monk, an alien and a dolphin see the same thing when they looked at the Dalai Lama? 3) Given that there are as many universes as cognitive frameworks of reference, does that mean that all cosmological theories are equally valid?

Meditation starts at 2:19

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