Dzogchen
'Dzogchen is not simply a teaching, not another philosophy, not another elaborate system, not a seductive clutch of techniques. Dzogchen is a state, the primordial state, that state of total awakening that is the heart-essence of all the buddhas and all spiritual paths, and the summit of an individual’s spiritual evolution. Dzogchen is often translated as ‘Great Perfection.’ I prefer to leave it untranslated, for Great Perfection carries a sense of a perfectness we have to strive to attain, a goal that lies at the end of a long and grueling journey. Nothing could be further from the true meaning of Dzogchen: the already self-perfected state of our primordial nature, which needs no ‘perfecting,’ for it has always been perfect from the very beginning, just like the sky…
'What this means is that the entire range of all possible appearances, and all possible phenomena in all the different realities, whether samsara or nirvana, all of these without exception have always been and will always be perfect and complete, within the vast and boundless expanse of the nature of mind. Yet even though the essence of everything is empty and ‘pure from the very beginning,’ its nature is rich in noble qualities, pregnant with every possibility, a limitless, incessantly and dynamically creative field that is always spontaneously perfect.'
- Sogyal Rinpoche, in 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.'
'What this means is that the entire range of all possible appearances, and all possible phenomena in all the different realities, whether samsara or nirvana, all of these without exception have always been and will always be perfect and complete, within the vast and boundless expanse of the nature of mind. Yet even though the essence of everything is empty and ‘pure from the very beginning,’ its nature is rich in noble qualities, pregnant with every possibility, a limitless, incessantly and dynamically creative field that is always spontaneously perfect.'
- Sogyal Rinpoche, in 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.'