The Observer and the Taste of Presence · Chapter 19 · Part IV
Two Traditions, One Risk
The two traditions are not in agreement on everything, and their synchronisation has to be argued rather than assumed.
Dzogchen speaks of rang rig, self-cognizing awareness. The difficulty is in how this is heard. A nature that is not produced and stands as the ground of appearances would be the svabhāva that Madhyamaka refuses. Read with Mipham, Dzogchen does not mean that: "not made by causes and conditions" is Nāgārjuna's "unborn by nature", and spontaneous presence is dependent arising met without fixing. Candrakīrti's sixth chapter of the Madhyamakāvatāra criticises the self-awareness (svasaṃvedana) of cognition, the Yogācāra view of self-knowing mind. The standard counterexample in these debates is the blade that cannot cut itself: a cognition cannot know itself without splitting into a knower and a known. The Buddhist logicians' reply uses the lamp. Dharmakīrti takes a lamp as the model of self-awareness, and Prajñākaragupta argues that a cognition arises with the essence of shining, so that the blade comparison does not apply to it. On this reading self-knowing is not a second act performed on the flow of awareness. It is that flow's luminosity. Even so, I do not posit self-knowing awareness, not even as convention. What the word points to, I keep only as a denial: knowing is not lit by another, and nothing lights it, not even itself. There is no second act and no knower behind; this clarity is as empty as what appears.
Mipham's Beacon of Certainty, in John Whitney Pettit's translation and study, defends Dzogchen in the terms of Madhyamaka logic, and it argues with Gelug positions, including Tsongkhapa's eight points of difficulty. Its treatment of the relation between Dzogchen view and Madhyamaka is one of the main sources for the synthesis this book offers, and it should be read in full before the reader accepts or rejects that synthesis.
Other readings of Longchenpa differ. David Higgins's study of the sems and ye shes distinction reads Longchenpa as rejecting self-reflective awareness. The chapter presents this reading, the Dharmakīrtian lamp and the Madhyamaka objection as interpretations to be weighed, not as settled positions.
Longchenpa's own account of the ground is careful. He does not treat the ground as a foundation: it is called a ground only from a relative perspective, and in the true nature of reality it is empty of being one.
Whether the two traditions refer to the same thing is still contested. Some lineages hold that Dzogchen is its own resultant vehicle, not reducible to or guaranteed by Madhyamaka analysis. The claim that the two traditions share a view of appearing and its emptiness is a synthesis, and this book presents it as one. The narrower and more defensible claim is that they agree the substantialist grasp is the problem, and that their methods converge on undoing it.
The two traditions also meet at a shared danger in practice. Dzogchen teachers distinguish suppressing thoughts from their self-release (rang grol). Suppression pushes thoughts down, which can create a stillness that becomes one more fixed state. Self-release lets thoughts dissolve when they are not followed or fixed. Madhyamaka makes the same point from its own side. Candrakīrti accepted śamatha as a conventional means that calms the mind, but he held that the decisive step is analysis, which shows that the parts searched for cannot be found. Stillness forced by effort can become a new object of holding.