Unbounded Wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon, and the Logic of the Nonconceptual

by Anne Carolyn Klein, Tenzin Wangyal

In this book, Anne Carolyn Klein, an American scholar and teacher of Buddhism, and Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a rigorously trained Tibetan Lama who was among the first to bring Bon Dzogchen teachings to the West, provide a study and translation of the Authenticity of Open Awareness , a foundational text of the Bon Dzogchen tradition. This is the first time a Bon philosophical text of this scope has been translated into any Western language, and as such it is a significant addition to the study of Tibetan religion and Eastern thought. Klein and Rinpoche provide extensive introductory, explanatory and historical material that situates the text in the context of Tibetan thought and culture, thus making it accessible to nonspecialists, and an essential reference for scholars and practitioners alike.

Genres: Buddhism

424 pages, Paperback

Published April 20, 2006

About the author

Anne Carolyn Klein, Ph.D. (Religious/Tibetan Studies, University of Virginia; M.A. Buddhist Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison) is Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, where she was formerly Chair of the Department of Religion. In 2010, she received the title of Dorje Lopon as Lama Rigzin Drolma from her teacher, Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche. She is a co-founder of Dawn Mountain Tibetan Temple in Houston, Texas, where she remains a resident teacher.

Reviews

[André Pais · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book, from what I've read. Some excerpts follow, to give you a taste of its style and depth:

To understand reality,
one must understand delusion;
the two explorations are one.
Dzogchen reveals and revels
in the teeming variability
of a constant and undisrupted wholeness,
which, once recognized,
reverses the delusion that
it itself embraces.

~

Although both Dzogchen and Madhyamaka speak of emptiness, they differ in their actual understandings of this. Madhyamaka, according to many interpretations in India and Tibet, maintains that phenomena are empty of inherent existence. This emptiness, an unfindability of just such inherently or independently established phenomena, makes causation both possible and a mere convention. Unconditioned emptiness and conditioned causality have the same ontological status: both exist conventionally. However, emptiness is an ultimate truth because it is only true for an ultimate consciousness and because it does not get misrepresented to the senses. All other phenomena are conventional truths.

Authenticity's ontology is not premised on distinguishing ultimate from conventional, on determining which is deceptive in appearance or findable under analysis; for example, through the famous tetralemma of Nagarjuna or the sevenfold analysis of Chandrakirti. Its chief emphasis is on the unlimited reach and unconstrained holism of unbounded wholeness, the multiplicity of appearances consonant with this, and the availability of open awareness to itself as just such unbounded wholeness. In all these contexts, even when phenomena self-arise from wholeness to become manifest due to specific causes and conditions, there is neither coming together nor separation within unbounded wholeness. "No separation" is considered an even stronger connection than "union", a term so often found in tantra.

Dzogchen differs from sutra in that it does not investigate, as sutra does, whether things inherently exist. It simply investigates whether or not the mind exists. It does not ask whether this mind inherently exists or not but investigates whether color, shape, and so on are the mind. The tradition of Authenticity does not consider phenomena empty because they are unfindable; it sees all appearances as empty because they are one in essence with mindnature. This is pivotal to understanding Dzgochen's view of the authentic. Neither the merely empty nor the wisdom realizing it can be authentic in the way that, finally, our text will propose that reflexive open awareness is authentic to unbounded wholeness.

Prasangika Madhyamaka searches for objects or persons and does not find them, and in this way it realizes the lack, or emptiness, of inherent existence. This emptiness is a mere negative; a reason that negates inherent existence can get at it. (Geluk presentations are a particularly strong example of this position.) Further, whereas for Prasangika emptiness is definitely an expression of the middle way, in Authenticity the middle is found through avoiding any sort of definiteness. Conceptual processes, the via negativa alone, can neither access unbounded wholeness nor make open awareness of it manifest.

Although at various junctures in Authenticity unbounded wholeness, like the emptiness of Madhyamaka, is described in terms of what it is not, the text never rests with this but moves on to show that inclusion of various viewpoints, rather than the elimination of all of them via reasoning, is its way of understanding reality. This is a critical difference in our text's approach to the ultimate.

Being authentic with respect to unbounded wholeness thus requires not so much a superior logic as a more suitable subjective positioning. Although these two cannot be entirely separated, it seems fair to say that in contrast to classic Madhyamika emphasis on logic and the centrality in praxis and theory of the tetralemma analyses (catuskoti), Dzogchen emphasizes the subjective state of wisdom. After all, even though the existence of multiplicity, spontaneity, and bliss can be established through reasoning, they are not available to authentic recognition via reasoning.

~

Authenticity's logic breaks the mold of what students of Buddhist syllogistic logic or tenet systems might expect. It does not, like later Tibetan tomes of debate, configure itself into neat categories, nor does it stop to define its terms.

In these ways its organization is unlike either of the two well-known areas of Tibetan discourse with which we juxtapose it here, Madhyamaka and Pramana.

These latter systems are structured around the principle of two truths, ultimate and conventional. Dzogchen, by contrast, privileges a single, central principle, often referred to as unbounded wholeness.

The question of authenticity, of taking valid measure (tshad ma, pramana), has of course long been central to Buddhist reflection. Buddhist discussions of these matters inevitably trace themselves back to the groundbreaking work of Dignaga and Dharmakirti, names and works the Authenticity never even mentions.

Most literally, the Sanskrit term pramana and its Tibetan translation, tshad ma mean "measure." For a subject to take the correct measure of its object means that such a knower is valid with respect to what it knows. It is tshad ma. However, Bon and Buddhist Dzogchen texts that, like Authenticity, take an interest in the relationship between open awareness and delusion typically do not use the term tshad ma at all. And Authenticity shares with these texts the perspective that open awareness is not to be understood as a subject which takes proper measure of its object. To be tshad ma in the Dzogchen sense is not a statement about the relationship of a subject to its object. Open awareness is authentically present to reality, which is no different from itself. This is unbounded wholeness.

Thus, whereas the Dharmakirti tradition or Pramana literature by and large inscribes validity onto the grid of subject and object, the open awareness at the center of our inquiry here is not, according to an important interpretation we will feature here, a mind at all. It is an objectless subject, nonconceptual and nondual, that, according to some Dzogchen masters, is not even a consciousness.

*****

The view established through reasoning is not the authentic state of open awareness. That state must be described in ontological as well as epistemological terms; hence the conflation, experientially and philosophically, of unbounded wholeness with open awareness. Unbounded wholeness is how and what reality is. In that sense it is an ontological term. Open awareness, fully present to that state of wholeness, is the knowing of it. It is an epistemological unity; open awareness experiencing itself as unbounded wholeness.

*****

An important subtext of Authenticity is that reason and logic can, and apparently must, exist side by side with poetic, mythic, and other voices. These do not cancel each other out; they are not even presented as contradictory. Like notes in a chord, enriched when they sound together, each also retains its unique resonance.

*****

Here, however, authenticity will be located in open awareness itself, and all phenomena— whether objects of inference or direct perception—are the dynamic display of the unbounded wholeness that open awareness recognizes as its own nature.

*****

In some accounts, most famously those of Geluk epistemologies drawn from Dignaga and Dharmakirti, a practitioner's first task is to develop, rather arduously, correct inferential understanding of emptiness, which then allows her to access it directly. This, however, is not the goal of Dzogchen students. By definition, a direct perceiver of wholeness cannot be a conceptual mind. Direct and conceptual ways of perception are distinct; one is not the other and each have their own defining characteristics.

Authentic knowers, like all other kinds of consciousnesses, must in Dzogchen be dissolved via the open awareness which alone can directly experience reality. This awareness is neither a dualistic mind nor, technically, a consciousness at all. In this sense, the very idea of taking the measure of an object undermines, and is undermined by, the prin-ciple of unbounded wholeness. In the same way, a measuring mind—whether conceptual or nonconceptual—cannot authenticate unbounded wholeness.

*****

When Madhyamaka calls emptiness inexpressible and unthinkable, it is referring to the structural inability of language to describe nondualistic reality. The emptiness experienced by its practitioners is famously inexpressible. Whereas in Madhyamaka the realizer of emptiness is a consciousness, and therefore an impermanent thing, open awareness is not, in this interpretation of Dzgochen, a consciousness, rather such authentic open awareness is an emptiness. Inexpressibility here points not only to the limited capacity of conceptual or linguistic consciousness in relation to the ultimate, wholeness, but to its dissolution in the face of it and ultimate identification with it.

Even more pointedly, Lopon Tenzin Namdak observes that reflexively authentic open awareness refers to an inseparability of subject and object. Unbounded wholeness and authentic open awareness are one essence. Therefore such open awareness is not, as in classic discussions of logic or epistemology (pramana), a case of a subject validating or being valid with respect to an object.

Reflexively authentic open awareness is itself a union of the clear and empty, for which reason it is also known as the base, the authentic state toward which the other two authenticators, scriptural and essential precepts, are directed.

~

No ultimate exists apart from the immediacy of unbounded everything, though this is not obvious to untrained and inauthentic perception. For Authenticity, the challenge is to express a wholeness from which nothing is excluded, even while recognizing that words and reasonings, by their very nature, always exclude something. Hence, in part, the occasional recourse to more mythically oriented poetry. Reasoning's abstraction arguably differs from myth's concreteness in that the latter does not so clearly operate by way of exclusion or isolation.

*****

Dzogchen practitioners, initially using minds and methods constructed along the binary of subject and object, must break both those tools and the delusion they are intended to disarm. Hence "authentic methods" are required that do not further rely on delusion and dualism. Reasoning, for all its merit, replicates elements of both. Consequently, Authenticity will move from a concern for the correspondence between subject and object to a sheer awareness of awareness, a move from truth to being true.

*****

While both Dzogchen and Pramana inquire into the nature of knowing, Dzogchen explicitly sees itself as inquiring into the nature of an all-encompassing subjectivity: a playful and open plurality is more truthful than a limiting certainty. Pramana inquiry is generally interested in a subject's ability to take the measure of its object fully and correctly; its assumption is that there is a correct measure to be taken. In that case, certainty and definiteness are appropriate. Thus, for example, in Geluk exegesis, founded as it is on the principles of pramana, even in a nondualistic direct cognition of the ultimate, emptiness, there is an observing subject. The subject is not experientially distinct from the emptiness with which it is "like fresh water poured into fresh water," but it is epistemologically and philosophically distinguishable from it.

*****

Thus, mindnature, the base that is unbounded wholeness, is a source whose intrinsic diversity is displayed by the multitudinous appearances that emerge from it, much as distant smoke signifies the presence of a yet unseen fire. The metaphor breaks down, however, in that unbounded wholeness, unlike fire, is not a conditioned phenomenon and thus not a cause of that which rises from it. Though not its cause, unbounded wholeness is its source.

*****

Reasoning, then, structured to take the measure of specific phenomena, fails to ascertain the multifarious whole. Reasoning, after all, does not simultaneously point in many directions; it is premised on definiteness, valued for bringing closure, and is inadequate to the unbounded, undecidable nature of reality. Still, even though unbounded wholeness's crucial quality is openness, and even though it is in some sense incommensurable with reasoning, unbounded wholeness does not stand in opposition to reasoning. In this sense, Dzogchen and Pramana processes operate simultaneously and in the same location, without ever being conflated. After all, if reasoned logic were excluded from this openness, claims of wholeness would be undone. In this way, wholeness proves multiplicity as much as, in Authenticity's words, multiplicity proves wholeness. Thus, indefiniteness abounds.

*****

... reasoning points to unbounded wholeness in much the same way as every existent thing does—if one understands that thing as dynamic display. Unlike other displays of wholeness's diversity, however, reasoning has the added characteristic of identifying, and in this sense of moving to authenticate, the unbounded wholeness in which it participates. The reasoning of Authenticity is best un-derstood as functioning in both of these ways, suggesting the extent to which Dzogchen and Pramana perspectives again are in confluence, one streaming through the other without necessarily disrupting either.

*****

Authenticity's emphasis on perspective is crucial to its style of argument. The point is that the dynamic display of unbounded wholeness can itself be either permanent or impermanent, depending on the perspective taken. Authenticity states that unbounded wholeness is a non-thing and thus permanent, yet from the viewpoint of its own dynamic display it is an impermanent thing,

... a touchstone of reality is that it cannot be fully characterized in any one way. Dynamic display includes everything other than the base, unbounded wholeness. Even subtle phenomena such as unconditioned space and the Buddha's nature dimension (svabhavikakaya) are all dynamic display from the base

*****

In Authenticity, as for Dzogchen in general, any appearance participating in a subject-object dyad is a conventional truth. Expressing a view that is also held in the early Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita) literature, we read:

Regarding this, any appearance associated with subject and object is a conventional truth. An ultimate truth such as open awareness is not [in Dzogchen] associated with either subject or object. Therefore, the appearance of all signs of conventionalities are conventional. The pacification of all signs of elaboration is ultimate.

Although the principle of the two truths does not govern its presentation, Authenticity does occasionally use the term "conventional" or "ultimate." Only authentically reflexive open awareness, however, is an authentic pacification of elaborations. The most important conclusion to be derived from this, according to one important strand of interpretation, is that reflexive authentic awareness is not a consciousness. We will return to this point below.

In light of this glorious indefiniteness, the inevitable contradictions of the world become proof for the existence of unbounded wholeness. Thus plurality proves wholeness. Put another way, it is precisely because unbounded wholeness is rife with multiplicities that it is an authentic whole. This understanding of unbounded wholeness is, to our best knowledge, unique to Bon.

*****

The emphasis on the fact of diversity helps to explain the limits of reasoning; the emphasis on wholeness supports the coherent subjective state of authentic open awareness. Reasoning, by its very functioning, disrupts both subjective and objective unities. The unborn and unceasing is "whole" or "one" in the sense of being a single essence and in the sense of being one with the self-arisen primordial wisdom that is open awareness wisdom.

*****

Moreover, because unbounded wholeness is free of all extremes, it is the abiding condition of all knowable phenomena.

Being the "abiding condition of all knowable phenomena" means that nothing whatsoever is contradictory with unbounded wholeness; hence, again, its character of diversity.

... without limits of any kind, the unbounded is fundamentally a principle of inclusion and as such cannot be ruptured by contradictions or multiplicities. To the contrary, emphasizing its multitudinous character helps demonstrate its spaciously open nature, an ambience innocent of limits—hence, one well-rounded "whole" (thigle), It is noteworthy that in addition to its various meanings associated with the seminal and spherical, Bon Dzogchen etymologies of thig le make explicit its affinity with what is wholly unencumbered—spatially, temporally, ontologically, and epistemologically. Emic understanding equates thig with the unborn and le with the unceasing. In Authenticity, as elsewhere in Dzogchen, this phrasing expresses a middle way: avoiding the extreme of annihilation through being unceasing and avoiding the extreme of permanence through being unborn. As neither quality is definite, wholeness goes unchallenged.

*****

Most especially, this unsurpassed Great Completeness
Is shown free from both the eternal and the nil.
Eternal? Its heart essence is changeless and ceaseless.
Nil? It is the unborn sky realm:
Bon Body, neither changelessly eternal nor nil,
Beyond the realm of free and unfree.

The view of unbounded wholeness is not eternalism, because it is not actually established. This describes its nature. Nor is it annihilation, because open awareness is unceasing clarity, a reference to its dynamism.

Here, the text locates itself in relation to a binary, the better to deny that it participates in such. Its middle way, unlike that of Madhyamaka, entails both positive and negative propositions, and thus it, too, is multifaceted and indefinite.

*****

Without indefiniteness, there could be no Dzogchen, no Great Completeness.
After all, unbounded wholeness's completeness lies with its infinite encompassment—definiteness is finite.

[Taylor Ellwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is unlike the other books that Tenzin has put out. It's more academic, but it provides some very useful cultural context that you may find helpful in understanding Bon and Dzogchen.