Swooping from Above While Climbing from Below

Or being there while getting there

Image of a banner available on Etsy

If I were to create a graphic of my expertise in the Tibetan language, I’d need only three or four pixels. Nevertheless, I’ll proclaim that the white “letter” at the center of the image above stands for the sound “Ah.” You often see it called Tibetan A, but I understand that letters in English are more like complete sounds in Tibetan, and that one is “Ah.” Displayed in colored circles, it symbolizes the Dzogchen approach to enlightenment.

I call it an approach and not a school because Dzogchen is a method practiced in all the major Vajrayana (Tibetan¹) schools of Buddhism. It relies mainly on experiential learning through meditating and living, complemented by written and oral teachings. I chose to start with Dzogchen because of the nifty symbol (which, to me, represents “Ahhhhhh…”). Still, the two previous sentences apply equally to Mahamudra, and those two approaches constitute the core of my practice.

Dzogchen and Mahamudra use the roadmap common in Buddhism — ground, path, and fruition — and mean pretty much the same thing by the three stages. That’s why many of us benefit from teachers of both perspectives.

In The Citadel of Awareness, one of my Dzogchen teachers, Anam Thubten, writes:

In simple terms, ground is where we start from, the fruition is where we want to go, and the path is how to get there.

A few pages later, he adds:

That conceptual map is needed in the beginning, though in the end that map has to be transcended.

The map needs to be transcended because it is conceptual. It implies a starting point, a path we transverse over time, and an endpoint. Again, from Anam Thubten:

The ultimate truth can never be fully captured in words and concepts.

One of his favorite adjectives for Dzogchen is “ineffable.”

Acknowledging that words are inadequate, I’ll use a few to (I hope) offer a glimpse into the three-part framework:

• Ground. The starting point is our primordial nature of mind, pure of conceptual thought. This is our inherent Buddha Nature. The ground can also be called the view because we’ll be guided along the path by an understanding that we are already Buddhas and need to clear away conceptual confusion and egotistical clinging to relax into our pure, non-dual state.

• Path. The path involves preparation (often in the form of ngondro² practices to soften the ego and strengthen devotion), pith instructions, and meditation. Pith instructions are short pointers to guide the meditator toward knowing the nature of the mind experientially and, hence, one’s Buddha Nature. Along the path, one devotes oneself to developing traits such as generosity, patience, ethical living, loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, wisdom, and meditation.

• Fruition. Since I haven’t reached this stage, I’ll have less to say about it. It’s becoming fully awake. You could call it nirvana or enlightenment, but here’s what Aban Thubten, in The Citadel of Awareness, writes about awakening:

The term awakening…does not have only one definition. It has to be interpreted in context. Obviously it is not biological awakening, like awakening from sleep…. It could refer to all sorts of inner epiphanies. It could refer to someone having an extramundane or transcendent spiritual experience that has a profound impact on that person’s life. It could refer to awakening from delusion to wisdom, from suffering to freedom. Or it can be awakening to something very profound, like great emptiness, no-self, or dharmakaya mind. Or it can sometimes be a synonym for enlightenment or nirvana.

---

This section of a mural in India, photographed by Leo Viktorov, depicts Padmasambhava, who brought Vajrayana Buddhism to Tibet in the Eighth Century. On our left, below him, is Tilopa, who taught the Mahamudra discipline in India to Naropa, on the right. Not shown is Naropa’s student Marpa the Translator, who traveled from Tibet to India in the 11th Century, learned Mahamudra and brought it back to Tibet.

That brings us to the headline of this post. The phrases “Swooping from above while climbing from below” and “Being there while getting there” are pith instructions often used by the teacher who introduced me to Dzogchen, Lama Surya Das, who also has been trained in Mahamudra. The phrases refer to the path.

While they’re pith instructions about concepts that can’t be fully understood with words, I’ll do my best to explain them. Dzogchen and Mahamudra differ slightly in the timing of the teaching. Dzogchen teachers present the view early and encourage students to understand it intellectually as they meditate to experience it. Mahamudra teachers prefer to coach students via meditation to experience the view as the teachers reveal parts of it.

Either way, meditation is a vehicle by which students grow to experience firsthand what they are learning intellectually. They are swooping from above while climbing from below. They are being there while getting there.

---

We can’t end the discussion of experiencing what words can’t fully describe without mentioning perhaps the most ineffable Buddhist concept: emptiness.

Whatever we regard as having substance — including ourselves, the tree across the street, even the air between us and the tree — really has no enduring, independent nature. We all depend on everything else for our existence. Everything is made of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles that get breathed in and out and exchanged in other ways with everything else. So everything is continuously changing. That’s part of understanding emptiness.

Everything we perceive comes through and is influenced by our minds. We depend on our imperfect minds to experience reality, so the mind creates reality. That’s another aspect of emptiness that philosophers have grappled with as long as there have been philosophers.

The Buddhist concept of emptiness is often misunderstood as nothingness. It’s not, but it’s also not everythingness. So we meditate to grok it. If you’d like to try, below is a meditation using the words of Dzogchen master Nyosul Khenpo Rinpoche, one of Lama Surya’s teachers, to help us swoop from above on the subject of emptiness.

I hope you have found this blog post helpful. If you have friends who might enjoy it, please click the “share” button.

1. Vajrayana is the school of Buddhism most closely associated with Tibet. Elements of Vajrayana can be traced back to India before Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rinpoche, brought them to Tibet in the Eighth Century, where they flourished. I prefer to use the “Vajrayana” term because its leading figures no longer live and teach in Tibet because of the Chinese occupation.

2. I won’t try to explain ngondro here except to say that the traditional forms can be difficult for many of us in the West, so some teachers are offering alternatives to them.