Blue Sky, White Clouds

This has turned into a bit of a TL:DR. You have been warned. It is 50 years since I first formally took refuge in the Three Jewels and so became a Buddhist, receiving the name Karma Yeshe Dorje from Lama Chime Rinpoche. If I had but known then what I know now! Or if I had been blessed with a mentor who knew what I know now! But no. My karma was to grope. And grope I did, starting from no more than an adolescent sense that there must be something more. I hunted through supposedly occult magazines in a corner of the newsagent’s kiosk in the subway by Birmingham New Street Station, spent hours requesting musty copies of works on Theosophy, Spiritualism, mysticism, works by Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Brunton in the reading room of Birmingham City Library. I was familiar with those shelves in the back basement of Hudson’s University Bookshop that carried works on yoga, travelogues of central Asia and the pioneering translations of Evans-Wentz, though it was near Foyles in London that I first ...

First off, they are clearly not identical. In particular, dzogchen has a specialized and unique vocabulary in which words like “base” or “bodhicitta” have meanings distinct from their meanings in other Tibetan Buddhist literature and teaching. When studying or practising either, it’s really important to know which is which! And yet, they do have a lot in common. It is widely accepted that the “space division” and “mind division”, along with the first part of the “instruction division” of dzogchen (trekcho) have close parallels with mahamudra, while the final part of the “instruction division” (thögal), with its use of dark retreat and focus on “photic” phenomena is really quite distinct. Karma Chagme’s text, The Union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen, is very informative for those who want to go deeper. My point here is just to suggest an analogy: dzogchen and mahamudra are like a polka and a mazurka (not necessarily in that order). These are both European dances from similar musical cultures...