Self-generation is a visualization practice. Nevertheless it still involves creating an inanimate container universe to support the inner mandala. However, the plants and trees and so on that one visualizes are simply that, a mental image, and mental creation and nothing more.Blue Garuda wrote:If you can find dichotomies in sutra and tantra perhaps it is because you have been conditioned to think that way. Certainly in self-generation in HYT there can be no dichotomy, surely.Namdrol wrote:
Dzogchen abandons the dichotomy between mind and matter found in sutra and tantra. Theoretically, this is a most crucial difference. Because it abandons this dichtomy, it also abandons the dichtomy between the sentient and the non-sentient.
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The dichtomy between mind and matter in scholastic Buddhism is well established. How many times has one seen defenses of rebirth predicated on the difference in kind between mind and matter? We find them in Abhidharma, Sutra and even Tantra (i.e. where the mind is held to be a rider on the energy of the body). And this is perfectly fine within the context of those teachings.
In Dzogchen on the other hand, mind is held to be generated by the vāyus in the body. In the Khandro Nyinthig Padmasambhava declares that mind and vāyu are just different names for the same thing:
"...the energy of that vivid luminosity arising as the diversity, that is called “vāyu”, and it is called “mind”. Though luminosity is called mind, because of movement, it is called “vāyu”"
Mind, such as it is can be considered the subtle aspect of vāyu. But in reality, vāyu, the air element functioning in the human body, is what we call mind.
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