Longchen Rabjam, known to the tradition simply as Longchenpa, was born in 1308 in the Yoru region of central Tibet. His life ran on two tracks at once. By the standard hagiographic account he was a monastic prodigy, ordained at twelve, mastering the entire scholastic curriculum at Sangphu Neuthok, the leading philosophical college of his day, before he turned twenty. By another account he was, at almost the same time, the receiver of a long series of visionary transmissions from the dakini Yeshe Tsogyal and from the ground itself, the visions that gave him direct access to the Heart Essence (Nyingthig) Dzogchen lineage that descends from Padmasambhava. He spent the rest of his short life weaving these two strands, the rigorous scholastic and the visionary, into a single body of work.
Dzogchen — the Great Perfection — is the highest of the nine vehicles in the Nyingma classification of the Buddhist path. Its central recognition is unusually plain: the nature of mind is already, primordially, awake. There is nothing to develop, nothing to construct, nothing to gradually attain. The work of practice is to recognise what one is, and to rest in that recognition without manipulating it. The vocabulary is carefully chosen: rigpa, the bare awareness; kadag, the primordial purity; lhundrub, the spontaneous presence. The recognition is conferred through pointing-out instruction, given by a teacher who is themselves established in the recognition, transmitted in a single moment that the practitioner must then learn to live in.
Longchenpa’s contribution was to gather the scattered Dzogchen transmissions of the previous five centuries into a body of writing of extraordinary literary and philosophical refinement. His major works are arranged in the Seven Treasuries, particularly The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding and The Treasure of the Dharmadhatu; the Trilogy of Natural Ease; and the Four-Themed Precious Garland. Through these works the Heart Essence lineage was preserved through later centuries when the Nyingma school faced repeated political pressure.
He died at fifty-six, having spent his last years teaching a small circle of students in the wilderness retreats of southern Tibet. The tradition records that his transmission line ran without interruption through Jigme Lingpa in the eighteenth century to the great teachers of the rimé renaissance in the nineteenth, and from there to the contemporary Dzogchen masters who carry the lineage today.
On Dzogchen, briefly
Among the contemplative recognitions gathered in this library, Dzogchen is unusually close to the Advaita pointing of Ramana and Nisargadatta. Both speak of a primordial awareness that is one’s own ground. Both refuse the idea that this awareness is to be constructed or attained. Both treat the apparent person as a momentary movement within an awareness that does not move. The technical vocabularies are different (the Tibetan rigpa and the Sanskrit atman have different histories and different commitments), but practitioners who move between the two traditions tend to recognise the recognition as one.
Where to read more
The Dzogchen literature is mostly in copyright. The most reliable English versions are:
- Longchenpa: The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding (Padma Translation Committee, 1998) — the central work in clean English.
- You Are the Eyes of the World (translation of The Jewel Ship, Kennard Lipman and Merrill Peterson with Namkhai Norbu, 1987) — short and accessible.
- Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen: An Introduction (Reginald Ray, 2000) — the best contextual entry-point for non-specialists.
