Dear list members,

Our next seminar will be held on Friday  21st at 6.00 pm.  This month the seminar will be hosted at University of Western Sydney, Superintendents Cottage.  Please refer to Map (Ref ET) for details.  Our speaker will be John Wu

We do hope you can attend
AABS Executive

Truth, Experience and Enlightenment in Longchenpa
The most prominent feature of the Dzogchen tradition in Tibet, which has no readily identifiable source in Indian Buddhism, is its belief in the existence of a primordial mind that is already enlightened from a timeless beginning. It is not the ordinary mind of discursive thoughts that waver between the two psychological poles of attraction and revulsion that characterise the unenlightened life of ordinary people. The first Tibetan thinker to develop Dzogchen into a philosophical system was Longchenpa, also known as Longchen Rabjam (1308-1363). In Longchenpa's thought, primordial mind is postulated as the "basic space of being" itself. From the Western perspective, this beckons at the possibility of formulating a phenomenology of enlightenment which sees the essence of being as not problematic, but already perfected in the beginning. Intrinsic evil, for example, is not a possibility in Dzogchen. The criteria for arriving at this insight can only have a hermeneutic basis in the Tibetan Buddhist distinction between myong-ba and nyams, which both mean experience but with the latter emphasising "subjectivity", and in the Tibetan practice of transforming nyams into rtogs, which is the non-dual realisation of enlightenment (see Janet Gyatso, 1999). In Dzogchen, nyams is possible in the first place because of the ceaseless manifestations of the primordial mind itself. Yet the assertion of this "truth" is only possible if the error of a misunderstood nyams is a real ane ever present possibility. To echo Heidegger, it can be said that primordial enlightenment actually takes part in the contested interplay between truth as disclosure and falsehood as concealment, such that the question of truth in experience comes to the fore. This philosophical problem will be examined in light of Longchenpa's insights into the indeterminacy of experience in the Tibetan understanding of religious truth.