PeterC wrote: ↑Mon Jun 05, 2023 5:24 am
Lingpupa wrote: ↑Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:48 pm
So Vimalamitra WAS practicing Guhyagarbha and Vajrakilaya, but he wasn't REALLY practicing them, so it doesn't count?
Philosophy 101, anyone?
Come on, you know very well that there’s a difference between someone practicing Kilaya as a complete path (ie the two stages) and someone practicing it to remove obstacles to their main practice.
Of course I know that. I’m afraid I forgot that in this kind of forum things have to be spelt out very clearly – the context gets overlooked only too easily (and I confess to doing that as much as anyone). So I suppose I should make the effort to clarify.
Way back on page 8 of this thread I estimated that
it's only in certain corners of Internet Buddhism that "dzogchen without sadhana" is given much credence,
and invited those with a different view to
offer references to acknowledged, non-mythical, living dzogchen practitioners who do not and have not practiced extensive sadhana.
Malcolm’s response was an evidence-free assertion that my estimate was wrong, while Zoey85 stated, again without reference, that it was “in the literature”, and later *guessed* that “you can still find them in retreat places and towns in parts of Nepal and India”.
Eventually, maybe a week later, I pointed out that *nobody* had produced any references of the type that I was interested in, and it was therefore clear that if any significan number of “acknowledged, non-mythical, living dzogchen practitioners who do not and have not practiced extensive sadhana” exists at all, they are nevertheless extremely rare. Malcolm’s response to this was a couple of yawn emojis. The modern equivalent, I suppose, to putting your hands over your ears and singing “Naaa-naa na naaa-na”.
Now we get to the crux of the matter. Yagmort pointed out that
Vimalamitra himself was Guhyagarbha and Vajrakila lineage holder,
and that the corollary is that the notion of Vimalamitra as a master practicing dzogchen only, i.e. without sadhana, looks questionable. And it was (
here at last is the context) as a counter to THAT point that Malcolm brought in the
distinction between practicing deity yoga as a complete path as opposed to using deity yoga for temporary benefits.
Against a blank background, this distinction, as you say Peter, is entirely straightforward. But Malcolm made it as a direct counter to Yagmort’s doubts. It was made, as the context shows, in an attempt to dismiss Vimalamitra’s expertise in Guhyagarbha and Vajrakila, and to retain him as a standard-bearer for sadhana-free dzogchen. As I put it, an implication that:
Vimalamitra WAS practicing Guhyagarbha and Vajrakilaya, but he wasn't REALLY practicing them, so it doesn't count.
A clear case of an informal fallacy.
(In any case, this assumes that we have reliable historical knowledge of Vimalamitra’s life and private practice, but that is a question for another time and place.)
The conclusion is obvious: sadhana-free dzogchen is essentially a didactic ideal. Theoretically perhaps possible, but the reason for talking about it is to emphasize the fact that the realization of dzogchen is not something produced or manufactured, that it is not the “”result” of accumulating hours and hours of samatha or millions and millions of mantras. Great. It’s just not the way dzogchen
as a stream of teaching and practice is generally done in real life.