Buddhahood and its Basis of Designation

On the basis of the ordinary body, speech, and mind of a samsaric being, it is ridiculous
to say, I am a buddha. You cant even validly state, I have buddha nature. You may
have read such an assertion in a book, but you cannot validly make that statement. Unless
you actually are a buddha, making statements about your buddha nature is just the
blathering hubris of a conceptual mind. On that basis of designation, all you can validly
assert is, I am a sentient being, and for some of us even that may be a stretch!
On the other hand, from the basis of designation of the dharmakaya as experienced
through rigpa, you can say, I am a buddha. That is a valid statement (even though a
buddha would have no motivation to say such a thing). If you have stabilized the
spontaneous presence of the luminous expanse, then indeed you are a buddha, and you
dwell in unconditioned and unmanifest buddha nature. Good for you.
The discriminating factor between these two statements is the basis of designation.
Within the base of samsaric mind (sems) you can only impute the personhood of a
sentient being. Within the base of intrinsic awareness (rigpa) you can only impute a
selfless buddhahood. Both of these are accurate. But what you must not do is confuse the
two. It is not ok to casually mix them up. In fact, it is karmically damaging for a sentient
being to make grandiose assumptions about buddhahood. Today, we often see statements
such as: Since buddha nature is already present within me, there is nothing I need to do.
All effort is useless; I can just relax into my true nature. Emptiness is emptiness and form
is form; I will just let them be and my work is done.
Well, such statements are simply bullshit! They are the wishful thinking of lazy egos, or
worse, a con game played by unscrupulous gurus. To imagine yourself as a buddha
because you have some notion of an omnipresent buddha nature is self-delusional. Its as
bogus as imagining yourself to be a Mozart because you have a notion of Mozart being a
child prodigy. You are neither a concert pianist nor a buddha unless you train yourself
accordingly. In the case of a buddha, that training begins with shamatha and vipashyana
meditation. Without that foundation, your samsaric mind remains dysfunctional.
The Mahayana sutras present buddha nature as a view of reality that can be realized
through a path and its resulting fruition. The Vajrayana tantras do the same, although
they usually claim to offer a quicker path. These quicker methods are understandably
very popular with westerners. Westerners barely have a minute between text messages, so
quicker is better! Lately, westerners have become infatuated with the very highest of the
Vajrayana teachings, such as Essence Mahamudra and Nyingthig Dzogchen.
Unfortunately, there is a major disconnect between the western mindset and the original
social context of those teachings. Such texts were only meant to address the final stages
of the path. As such, these texts sometimes make disparaging statements about lower
practices. They marginalize them as dualistic or condition-based. Likewise, they advocate
non-meditation over meditation. Speedy western minds seize on such statements in a
predictable and harmful way. What they overlook is that these highest teachings were

written for a specific audience in which the mastery of shamatha and vipashyana
meditation was assumed. These teachings were for advanced practitioners of the highest
acumen who had stabilized mindfulness to the level of samadhi, merged that samadhi
with insight, and mastered the nyam experiences as well. Only then did the practice of
non-meditation have any genuine meaning.
When you first set out on the Buddhist Path, you have no immediate access to emptiness
or rigpa none. You wouldnt know it if you saw it! To claim that you have mastered
rigpa because you read about it in a book is at best a waste of time, and at worst a
corruption of the path into a form of spiritual materialism. It is not even sufficient to be
introduced to it through the pointing out instruction of a guru. This may provide you
with a flash of recognition, but a flash or glimpse of rigpa is a far cry from settling your
mind in its natural state. The means of developing immediate and stabilized access to
rigpa is through the repeated examination of the non-dual nature of mind, and that
examination takes place within structured meditation practice. The highest teachings of
Dzogchen and Mahamudra are predicated on this sort of stabilized mindfulness. This is
called taking the mind as the path. You cannot skip it. If you do, your mind continues to
oscillate between laxity and excitation. It continues to jump from attachment to
attachment. It is like a wild horse that has never learned to respond to a bridle. There is
no way for such a mind to sever mental afflictions at their root; no way to cut through
namarupa, and no way to experience the ethically neutral ground of alayavijnana. Sorry,
its not going to happen.
So, the key to making use of Mahamudra and Dzogchen is to first master shamatha and
vipashyana. Mindfulness and insight meditation are the tools that will produce calm
abiding in one-pointed samadhi, and crystal clear insight into emptiness. These are not
concepts I repeat these are not concepts. They are not ideas or topics to be studied
from books. They are not any form of thought content. Rather, they are non-conceptual
and non-dual states of awareness produced through the disciplined training of body,
speech, and mind. When mastered, they do not maintain any subject-object dichotomy;
they transcend it. In fact, they are perfectly able to bring the practitioner to buddhahood
without resorting to Mahamudra or Dzogchen. They are the 7th and 8th parts of the Noble
Eightfold Path, and as such they are the essence of Buddhas method.
Unfortunately, it has become common practice in some contemporary Buddhist
organizations and internet discussion groups to marginalize shamatha and vipashyana.
There is a steady stream of web posts ignoring shamatha and vipashyana meditation or
even demeaning it. These and other practices are all lumped together under the label of
gradual path, and written off as inferior. Only the sudden path of Dzogchen is worthy
of their attention. In fact, not even conventional Dzogchen will do these days; it has to be
radical nyingthig or yangthig Dzogchen. You dont even need to do the korde rushen
outer and inner preliminaries. The latest craze among these Candy Crush digital gurus is
Atiyoga. The pitch for Ati is that it isnt even a sudden path, but rather a pathless path.
You just snap your fingers and click the heels of your ruby slippers. Presto youre
enlightened. The presentation goes like this:

Since the primordial great expanse is omnipresent, everything you are and
do is part of it - right?
So searching for it elsewhere is stupid right?
So, stop searching and just be right?
Youre supposed to answer Right! at this point.
As for Buddhas original meditation exercises in mindfulness and insight - well that is
just Buddhism For Dummies. We are well past those preliminaries. At most we just
need a little Dzogchen trekch and tgal.
Indeed, Dzogchen has become the spiritual soup de jure in the enlightenment
marketplace. There is a veritable tsunami of books, publications, and chat rooms where
would-be Dzogchenpas regurgitate the pithy statements of ancient masters, but they do it
without any unmediated or impersonal realization of it. They have no such realization
because they have never tamed their minds on the meditation cushion. In fact, what
attracted them to Dzogchen in the first place was the idea that they could skip all that
boring work.
Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but if you want to achieve stability in rigpa and dwell in
Ati beyond cyclic existence, there is no alternative to shamatha and vipashyana
meditation. That is where all paths begin. And to make steady progress in meditation, you
must retire from the busy-ness of your daily occupations and retreat to a meditation
cushion. You dont have to sit for days on end, but you must sit regularly and frequently,
just as would do to train a horse or a concert pianist. Until you make this beginning
commitment, you havent even slipped a training bridle over your nose. You havent even
found middle C.
Shamatha and vipashyana are the catalysts that precipitate the attachments out of our
samsaric minds, and thus leave the crystalline clarity of intrinsically pure awareness in
the present continuum. Once that clarity is stabilized, then formal meditation is no longer
necessary, but until that stabilization is achieved, shamatha and vipashyana are essential.
They are not optional. In fact, they are the only paths to awakening that Buddha taught
during his earthly incarnation. Tantra, Mahamudra, Bon, Zen, and Dzogchen may offer
further embellishments to the later stages of development, but they all depend on the
mastery of shamatha and vipashyana in order to have any significance. Without that
mastery, all these so-called higher teachings are just esoteric distractions. Even worse,
they risk becoming karmic attachments so overwhelming that they completely derail your
chances for any genuine progress in this lifetime. The great masters of every lineage have
repeated this warning, and most have endeavored to qualify students before endangering
them with teachings they cannot safely comprehend. Those warnings are going unheeded
today, and this recklessness is putting the future of genuine Buddhism at risk. So, the next
time you read or teach something about buddha nature, please make sure it is based on
the realization of shamatha and vipashyana. Make that your basis of designation.
Written at Nagi Naljor

By Jon Norris
May 2012