The origins of the Great Perfection
The origins of the Great Perfection movement, so important in the later Tibetan tradition, have proved very difficult for modem scholarship to establish. The genuinely early texts available to scholars are like the few remaining pieces of what was once a large puzzle.
Inquiries into the early history of the Great Perfection have, of necessity, been rather like placing these pieces into an arrangement that merely suggests the larger whole.
Because of the scarcity of pieces, a certain amount of guesswork has had to be employed in their arrangement. Here I hope to add some more of the puzzle’s lost pieces, rearrange the existing pieces somewhat, and produce an impression of the original whole. This arrangement will inevitably be refined or thoroughly reshuffled in the future, as further pieces are found.
The earliest Great Perfection texts to be translated and made available in Tibet were those now known as the mind series (sems sde). Later developments in the Great Perfection brought far more complex doctrines and practices, but the early mind series texts stayed close to one central theme: the immediate presence of the enlightened mind, and the consequent uselessness of any practice that is aimed at creating, cultivating or uncovering the enlightened state.
David Germano has coined the useful phrase “pristine Great Perfection” to refer to this kind of discourse. The largest and most well known of these texts is the Kun byed rgyal po’i mdo, in which one finds a rejection of the elaborate imagery and practices associated with the tantras.
1I would like to thank Jacob Dalton. Matthew Kapstein and Tsuguhito Takeuchi for sharing their unpublished work with me. which contributed significantly to the development of this paper. Harunaga Isaacson provided some very useful references to the Indic tantric literature, and Jacob Dalton pointed out many significant Tibetan sources.
As early as the ninth century, there was a recognizable form of the Great Perfection with much in common with the mind series. This is proved by certain Tibetan manuscripts found in the Dunhuang library cave, walled up in the early eleventh century. In the collection of these manuscripts at the British Library, Samten Karniay discovered two texts which looked very much like mind series literature: ITJ 594 and 647.
The Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts in the British Library’s Stein collection have the prefix IOL Tib J (an identification which has changed somewhat over the years, and largely been ignored by scholars who usually prefer to refer to the manuscripts with the prefix "Stein Tibetan”). The corresponding manuscripts in the Bibliotheque nationale de France’s Pelliot collection have the prefix Pelliot tibetain.
I have abbreviated the former to ITJ and the latter to PT.] The first of these texts has the title sBas pa’i rgum chung; it includes a preamble in which the author is identified as Buddhagupta, and the category of the text as Atiyoga.
The second text, Rig pa’i khu byug, employs terminology familiar in the early Great Perfection. Karmay 1988. chapter 2. ITJ 647 text appears as the first in the list of eighteen as the Rig pa 'i khu byug. In the Kun byed rgyal po this text has the title rDo rje tshig drug. As Karmay has shown, the six lines of the root text also appear scattered throughout other scriptures from the corpus of Atiyoga. These two finds seemed to confirm that the mind series, as we know it now, is a fair representation of the kind of thing that was being called rdzogs chen in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Karmay, however, suspected that the Great Perfection might have been more intimately linked in this early period with meditation techniques focussed on deities and their mandalas known as the development stage (bskyed rim) and sexual practices known as the perfection stage (rdzogs rim), in other words, the whole milieu of texts and practices known to the tradition as Mahayoga.
Karmay looked at a text from the bsTan ‘gyur called Man ngag It a ba’i phreng ba, attributed to Padmasambhava, which discusses the practices of the deity yoga from the standpoint of the Great Perfection. Karmay 1988. chapter 6. David Germano has also argued that the early Great Perfection derived in part from Mahayoga, and in part from a strand of thought represented by the early mind series texts.
As evidence for the Mahayoga influence he cited passages in the one of the fundamental scriptures of the Mahayoga, the Guhyagarbha tantra, which employ the term rdzogs chen in relation to the idea of the immediate presence of enlightenment. Germano 1998. pp. 212-218.
Thus both Karmay and Germano have suggested that the Great Perfection developed through the intermingling of the literature of two traditions. The first of these is the pristine ritual-free discourse of the authors of the earliest mind series texts, siddha-style yogic practitioners.
The second is the elaboration of the Great Perfection as the culmination of ritual practice by commentators on the Mahayoga tantras. In fact, as I will argue below, although we do find these two kinds of literature in the early days of the Great Perfection, this does not in fact entail the existence of two separate traditions.
In the following pages I trace the evolution of the rdzogs chen term itself, and the parallel evolution of “Atiyoga”, the scriptural category and so-called vehicle (they pa) which came to be synonymous with the Great Perfection.
Most of the sources for this discussion are texts from the library cave at Dunhuang, which date from before the cave was sealed at the beginning of the eleventh century. Though available to scholars for the past century, most have never been studied before. I also examine the work of two Tibetan writers involved in the creation of the Great Perfection in Tibet, the ninth-century tantric exegete gNyan dPal dbyangs and the tenth-century redactor of teachings gNubs chen Sangs rgyas ye shes.
Through these enquiries I hope to shed some light into the obscure regions in which the Great Perfection scriptures were created. In the following pages. I use the phrase "Great Perfection” to refer to the tradition, and the Tibetan rdzogs chen to refer to the term itself. Furthermore. I refer to the early texts of the Great Perfection as "the mind series” (a translation of sems sde). Although this usage is anachronistic in that sems sde itself does not appear in any pre-eleventh century text (in some early texts the classification is sems phyogs. but this term has also not been found in any pre-eleventh century text), I have employed "the mind series” as a useful label for this group of texts and the early form of Great Perfection discourse that they contain.
