Dzogchen
Dzogchen
Basic Meaning
Dzogchen is an advanced system of meditation techniques to reveal the innate state of perfection primarily, but not exclusively, espoused by the Nyingma Buddhist tradition and the Tibetan Bön tradition.
Has the Sense of
Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, refers more specifically to the nature of awareness, which is the innate state of perfect enlightenment latent in the mind. More broadly, it refers to the associated system of teachings, theories, and practices.
Term Variations | |
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Key Term | Dzogchen |
Topic Variation | Dzogchen |
Tibetan | རྫོགས་ཆེན། ( dzogchen) |
Wylie Tibetan Transliteration | rdzogs chen ( dzogchen) |
Devanagari Sanskrit | महासन्धि |
Romanized Sanskrit | mahāsaṅdhi |
Buddha-nature Site Standard English | Great Perfection |
Richard Barron's English Term | great perfection |
Jeffrey Hopkin's English Term | great completeness |
Ives Waldo's English Term | great perfection |
Alternate Spellings | rdzogs pa chen po |
Term Information | |
Source Language | Tibetan |
Basic Meaning | Dzogchen is an advanced system of meditation techniques to reveal the innate state of perfection primarily, but not exclusively, espoused by the Nyingma Buddhist tradition and the Tibetan Bön tradition. |
Has the Sense of | Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, refers more specifically to the nature of awareness, which is the innate state of perfect enlightenment latent in the mind. More broadly, it refers to the associated system of teachings, theories, and practices. |
Related Terms | atiyoga, Nyingma |
Related Topic Pages | Https://kuenselonline.com/dzogchen-the-great-perfection-2/ |
Term Type | Noun |
Definitions | |
Rangjung Yeshe Dictionary | great perfection, great completeness, Mahasandhi great perfection, maha Ati, total completeness, absolute perfection, total natural perfection. Dzogchen, the Great Perfection
རྫོགས་པ་ཆེན་པོ་ the great perfection approach; great perfection (=nature/ state) [in second case, without definite article] Skt. Mahasandhi – Dzogchen, Great Perfection |
Dung dkar Tshig mdzod Chen mo | གསང་སྔགས་རྙིང་མའི་ཆོས་ཀྱི་སྙིང་པོ་མན་ངག་རྫོགས་པ་ཆེན་པོ། དེ་ལ་ནང་གསེས་ཀྱིས་ཕྱེ་ན། སེམས་སྡེ། ཀློང་སྡེ། མན་ངག་གི་སྡེ་བཅས་གསུམ་ཡོད། ༡ སེམས་སྡེ། འདི་ལ་མ་བུ་བསྡོམས་པའི་བཅོ་བརྒྱད་ཡོད་པ་ལས་ལྔ་ནི་ལོ་ཆེན་བཻ་རོ་ཙཱ་ན་དང་། བཅུ་གསུམ་ནི་པཎ་ཆེན་བི་མ་ལ་ལས་བརྒྱུད་པ་ཡིན་ལ་རྫོགས་པ་ཆེན་པོ་སེམས་ཕྱོགས་སུ་གྲགས་པ་ནི། ལོ་ཆེན་བཻ་རོ་ཙ་དང་གཡུ་སྒྲ་སྙིང་པོ་གཉིས་ལ་གཉགས་ཛྙ་ན་ཀུ་མ་རས་ཞུས། ཁོང་ལ་བཀའ་ཡི་ཆུ་བོ་ཆེན་པོ་བཞི་འདུས་ཤིང་སློབ་མའི་མཆོག་བཅུ་ལ་སོགས་པ་བྱུང་བ་ནས་སོག་པོ་སངས་རྒྱས་ཡེ་ཤེས་སོགས་ལ་བརྒྱུད་ནས་བྱུང་བ་ཡིན། ཡང་ལོ་ཆེན་བཻ་རོ་ཙ་ནའི་སློབ་མ་སྤངས་སངས་རྒྱས་མགོན་པོས་རྦ་རཀྵི་ཏ་ལ་གསུངས། དེས་ཡ་ཟི་དར་མ་ཤེས་རབ་སོགས་ནས་བརྒྱུད་པ་དང་། ཡང་། བཻ་རོ་ཙ་ནས་ཇོ་མོ་སྒྲེ་མོ་ལ་གསུངས་པ་སོགས་བརྒྱུད་པ་མི་འདྲ་བ་ཡོད། འདིའི་ལྟ་གྲུབ་ནི། རང་བྱུང་གི་ཡེ་ཤེས་ཆོས་ཉིད་ཀུན་ཏུ་བཟང་པོའི་ཀློང་དུ་ཆོས་ཅན་གྱི་སྣང་མ་ཐམས་ཅད་རང་སྣང་བཀོད་པའི་གྲྱན་ཙམ་ལས་འཆིང་གྲོལ་དང་། ཤར་བྱ་ཤར་བྱེད་དུ་མ་གྲུབ་པས།་ཡོད་མེད་དང་། ཡིན་མིན་གང་དུའང་མི་དཔོད་པར་ཡེ་གྲོལ་ཕྱོགས་འབྱམས་ཆེན་པོ་གཏན་ལ་འབེབས་པ་དེ་ཡིན། ༢ ཀློང་སྡེ། རྫོགས་པ་ཆེན་པོ་ཀློང་སྡེ་ནི་པཎ་ཆེན་བི་མ་ལ་ལས་བྱུང་། དེས་(དཔལ་ནམ་མཁའ་དང་མཉམ་པའི་རྒྱུད་)ཀྱི་དོན་ཀློང་དགུས་བསྟན་པ་དང་(ཡེ་ཤེས་གསང་བ་)ལ་སོགས་པའི་རྒྱུད་ལ་བརྟེན་ནས་རྡོ་རྗེ་བ་པའི་མན་ངག་རྣམས་བཻ་རོ་ཙ་ནས་དཔང་མི་ཕམ་མགོན་པོ་ལ་གསུངས་པ་(༦༨༡)་རྣམས་རིམ་གྱིས་འཛིང་དྷ་རྨ་བོ་དྷི་སོགས་ནས་རིམ་གྱི་བརྒྱུད་པ་ལས་འཕེལ་རྒྱས་བྱུང་འདིའི་ལྟ་གྲུབ་ནི་སེམས་ཉིད་རང་བྱུང་གི་ཡེ་ཤེས་ཀྱིས་འཁོར་འདུས་ཀུན་ལ་ཁྱབ་ཀྱང་སྣང་བ་དངོས་པོར་རྒྱ་མ་ཆད།་། སྟོང་པ་དངོས་མེད་དུ་རྒྱ་མ་ཆད།གཉིས་པ་མ་ཡིན་པ་ཟུང་འཇུག་གི་ཕྱོགས་སུ་འང་མང་ལྷུང་ལ་ངོ་བོ་སྟོང་པས་རྟག་པའི་མཐའ་ལས་གྲོལ་ཞིང་རང་རྩལ་མག་འགག་པས་ཆད་པའི་མཐའ་ལས་གྲོལ་བས་བྱ་བྲག་བདེ་སྡུག་ལས་འདས་པའི་ལྟ་བ་གཏན་ལ་འབེབས་པར་བྱེད་པ་དེ་ཡིན། ༣ མན་ངན་སྡེ་སྙིང་ཏིག་གི་སྐོར་རྣམས་ཏེ་སློབ་དཔོན་པདྨ་འབྱུང་གནས་ནས་བརྒྱུད་པའི་མན་ངག་མཁའ་འགྲོ་སྙིང་ཏིག་དང་པན་ཆེན་བི་མ་ལ་མི་ཏྲ་ནས་བརྒྱུད་པའི་བི་མ་སྙིང་ཏིག་སོགས་ཡིན་ཞིང་འདིའི་ལྟ་སྒྲུབ་ནི་འཁར་འདས་སྤང་བླང་དང་བྲལ་ཞིང་རེ་དོགས་ཕྱོགས་ལྷུང་ལས་བརྒལ་ནས་བློ་དང་ཡིད་དཔྱོད་ལས་འདས་པའི་ཆོས་ཉིད་དེ་གཞི་དབྱིངས་ཀ་དག་མཁྲེགས་ཆོད་དང་ལམ་སྣང་ལྷུན་གྲུབ་ཐོད་རྒལ་བསྒོམས་པས་བློ་འདས་རང་བྱུང་གི་ཡེ་ཤེས་སྐད་ཅིག་ལ་འཆར་བར་བྱེད་པ་དེ་ཡིན་ཡང་དེ་ལས་ཟབ་པའི་རྫོགས་པ་ཆེན་པོ་ཉིང་ཏིག་ནི་པཎ་ཆེན་བི་མ་ལ་མི་ཏྲ་(སྔ་མ་)བོད་དུ་བྱོན་སྐབས་རྒྱལ་པོ་ཁྲི་སྲོང་ལྡེ་བཙན་དང་མྱང་ཏིང་འཛིན་བཟང་པོ་གཉིས་ལ་གསུངས་ཤིང་མྱང་གིས་དབུ་རུ་འབྲི་གུང་ཝ་ཡི་ལྷ་ཁང་དུ་གཏེར་དུ་སྦས་ནས་ཆིག་བརྒྱུད་ཀྱི་མན་ངག་རྣམས་འབྲོམ་རིན་ཆེན་འབར་ལ་གསུངས་པ་ལས་རིམ་པར་བརྒྱུད་ལྕེ་བཙུན་སེང་གེ་དབང་ཕྱུག་བར་བྱུང་དེས་གདམས་ངག་རྣམས་གཏེར་ཁ་གསུམ་དུ་སྦས་པ་ལས་རོང་སྣར་མདའི་ལྕེ་སྒོམ་ནག་པ་དང་མལ་དྲོ་འཆད་པ་སྟག་གི་ཤངས་པས་པ་ཡར་འབྲོག་གཡུ་མཚོའི་འགྲམ་དུ་འཁྲུངས་པའི་ཞང་བཀྲ་ཤིས་རྡོ་རྗེ་རྣམས་ཀྱིས་གཏེར་ནས་བཏོན་ཏེ་མན་ངག་རྣམས་རིམ་བཞིན་ཀུན་མཁྱེན་ཀློང་ཆེན་པའི་བར་དུ་བྱུང་ཀུན་མཁྱེན་ཀློ་ཆེན་པས་རྫོགས་པ་ཆེན་པོ་སྙིང་ཐིག་གི་ཆོས་སྐོར་རྣམས་གཞུང་དང་མན་ངག་གང་ཅིའི་ཐད་ནས་དར་རྒྱས་སུ་མཛད་པས་བོད་ཡོངས་སུ་ཀློང་ཆེན་སྙིང་ཏིག་ཅེས་གྲགས་པ་འདི་བྱུང་། ཡང་མཁའ་འགྲོ་སྙིང་ཏིག་ནི། སློབ་དཔོན་དགའ་རབ་རྡོ་རྗེ་ནས་རིག་འཛིན་ཤཱི་སིང་ཧ་ལ་གནང་དེ་ལ་སློབ་དཔོན་ཆེན་པོ་པདྨ་འབྱུང་གནས་ཀྱིས་གསན་ནས་བོད་དུ་མཁའ་འགྲོ་ཡེ་ཤེས་མཚོ་རྒྱལ་ལ་གནང་དེས་གཏེར་དུ་སྦས་པ་རྣམས་གཏེར་སྟོན་པདྨ་ལས་འབྲེལ་རྩལ་གྱིས་གཏེར་ནས་བཏོན་ཏེ་རྒྱལ་སྲས་ལེགས་པ་རྒྱལ་མཚན་སོགས་ནས་རིམ་པར་བརྒྱུད་དེ་དར་རྒྱས་སུ་བྱུང་བ་ཡིན་ལོ་རྒྱུས་ཞིབ་པ་ཐུབ་བསྟན་འོད་གསལ་བསྟན་པའི་ཉི་མས་མཛད་པའི་(གནང་ཆེན་སྔ་འགྱུར་ངེས་དོན་ཟབ་མོའི་ཆོས་འབྱུང་)དང་ནམ་པ་མཁའ་སྤྱོད་ཀྱིས་མཛད་པའི་(གཏེར་མའི་ལོ་རྒྱུས་གཏེར་སྟོན་ཆོས་འབྱུང་)ཀོང་སྤྲུལ་ཡོན་ཏན་རྒྱ་མཚོས་མཛད་པའི་(གཏེར་སྟོན་བརྒྱ་རྩའི་རྣམ་ཐར་)བཅས་སུ་གསལ།། |
Wikipedia | wikipedia:Dzogchen |
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The Dudjom lineage, based on the terma, or hidden treasures, revealed by Dudjom Lingpa and his immediate rebirth, His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche (1904–1987), late head of the Nyingma school of Buddhism, is one of the principal modern lineages of Dzogchen transmission.
This new paperback edition includes the Tibetan text as edited by H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche and features an expanded glossary that incorporates equivalent English terms of present-day teachers and translators of Dzogchen. (Source: Back Cover)Path is a state of confusion which is not recognizing this ground, our basic state, to be as it is. Conceptual mind and time are both present during the path. But when your mind is pure, free of these, that is called fruition, and that is what is to be attained. To reiterate, confusion is called path. This confusion can be cleared up. There are three methods to clarify confusion: view, meditation and conduct. By means of the view, meditation and conduct we reveal what is already present. Slowly and gradually, we uncover more and more of the basic state. This process is what I will try to explain. (Tsoknyi Rinpoche, chapter 1, 20–21)
This first part of the Trilogy of Rest sets the foundation for the following two volumes: Finding Rest in Meditation, which focuses on Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, and Finding Rest in Illusion, which focuses on post-meditation yogic conduct. The Padmakara Translation Group has provided us with a clear and fluid new translation to Finding Rest in the Nature of the Mind along with selections from its autocommentary, The Great Chariot, which will serve as a genuine aid to study and meditation.
Here, we find essential instructions on the need to turn away from materialism, how to find a qualified guide, how to develop boundless compassion for all beings, along with the view of tantra and associated meditation techniques. The work culminates with pointing out the result of practice as presented from the Dzogchen perspective, providing us with all the tools necessary to traverse the Tibetan Buddhist path of finding rest.
Shambhala PublicationsLion of Speech: The Life of Mipham Rinpoche offers a translation of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s biography of Mipham Rinpoche, left behind in Tibet when Khyentse Rinpoche went into exile in 1959 and lost for eighty years before its discovery by an extraordinary stroke of good fortune. The biography is written as a traditional namthar, an account of the “life and liberation” of a man who is widely considered to be among the greatest scholars and accomplished masters in the history of Tibetan Buddhism. One of the striking features of Khyentse Rinpoche’s account is that it downplays the “miraculous” aspects of Mipham’s life and activities—perhaps as a means of bringing into sharper focus the effect that Mipham had on his contemporaries as a spiritual master, scholar, and teacher.
Mipam ( 'ju mi pham rgya mtsho, 1846–1912) is one of the most prolific thinkers in the history of Tibet and is a key figure in the Nyingma tradition of Buddhism. His works continue to be widely studied in the Tibetan cultural region and beyond. This book provides an in-depth account of Mipam’s view, drawing on a wide range of his works and offering several new translations. Douglas S. Duckworth shows how a dialectic of presence and absence permeates Mipam’s writings on the Middle Way and Buddha-nature.
This book contains four Tibetan texts in translation. First, The Excellent Path to Liberation explains how to give our attention to the teachings, and how to ground our spiritual practice in harmonious relationships with others and the world at large. Second, Dudjom Lingpa’s account of his visionary journey, Enlightenment without Meditation, teaches by example that as practitioners we should ask ourselves sincere questions concerning our perception of reality, and that we should not be content with superficial answers.
In the third book, Sera Khandro’s commentary, she presents Dudjom Lingpa’s work within two frameworks. She first clarifies the view on which the spiritual path is founded, the path of meditation; the ensuing conduct that reflects and enriches meditative experience; and the path’s result—awakening and enlightenment. Next she illuminates the subtleties of the great perfection view, the four tantric bonds: nonexistence, a single nature, pervasive insubstantial evenness, and spontaneous presence.
Source: Shambhala PublicationsArticles
The constructed nostalgia of the later Great Perfection, or rDzogs chen, tradition gazes backward temporally and geographically toward eighth-century India, reminiscing an era
in which the subcontinent is thought to have served as generous benefactor of Dharma gifts to the fledging Buddhist empire of Tibet. Insistence on the familiar Buddhist requirements for true transmission—authenticity and legitimacy founded in lineage and longevity—certainly inspired many of its textual "revelations" beginning in the eleventh century. Many of those nostalgic constructions of rNying ma history have been well documented by modern scholars.
It would be rash to assert, however, that despite all those imaginings, there were no historical primordia of the Great Perfection in the preceding centuries. The textual roots of the Mind Series (sems sde) texts are testament to these early stirrings, as are the Dunhuang manuscripts identified by Sam van Schaik as expressing a form of “Tibetan Zen.”[1] A third seed was planted via the Tibetan Mahāyoga tantra tradition, and within it, germinations of Great Perfection gnoseology, observable prominently in the ninth-century works of dPal dbyangs, who in some colophons and later histories is designated gNyan dPal dbyangs. His works include six canonical verse texts retrospectively entitled sGron ma drug, or Six Lamps,[2] and the rDo rje sems dpa’ zhus lan (Vajrasattva Questions and Answers) catechism found at Dunhuang in three manuscript copies. I have discussed these texts and their most likely Indian inspirations elsewhere. Here, I highlight a particular text within the Six Lamps, his Thugs kyi sgron ma (Lamp of the Mind), as intending to establish, quite early on, a standard set of topics we see well developed in systemizations of the early Great Perfection tradition a few centuries later, and perhaps even before that, in Mind Series texts such as those attributed to Mañjuśrīmitra like the Byang chub kyi sems rdo la gser zhun and the Byang chub sems bsgom pa.[3]
Of all dPal dbyangs’s texts, the Thugs kyi sgron ma is the ideological, linguistic, and practical hinge to his Mayājāla corpus as a whole, linking the other five of the Six Lamps texts and providing convincing evidence for accepting those Six Lamps as a collection, as well as offering insight to the later interpretations of his catechism. The Thugs kyi sgron ma displays dPal dbyangs’s full range of presentation. It includes, on the one hand, dPal dbyangs’s direct recommendations to Mahāyoga tantra, and on the other hand, his depictions of the realization of reality as utterly unstructured, unmediated, and transcendent of any dichotomization or reification, using the apophatic language sprinkled throughout the rest of the Six Lamps texts. Thus, by emphasizing these two elements—the transgressive and the transcendent—within a single text, the Thugs kyi sgron ma may have served as a valuable field guide to early Tibetan Mahāyoga and at least to some degree as a useful strategic plan for the cultivation of something more sustainable and vibrant on Tibetan soil, the Great Perfection. As I hope to show, dPal dbyangs’s very deliberate indexing of these topics appears to have been intended to standardize them as interpretive categories even while undercutting the value of reliance upon them as such, redefining Mahāyoga tantra as it found its earliest shape in Tibet. (Takahashi, introductory remarks, 159–60)
Notes
1. Sam van Schaik, “The Early Days of the Great Perfection,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 27.1: 167 and 201.
2. The Six Lamps texts are as follows: The Lamp of the Mind (Thugs kyi sgron ma), The Lamp of the Correct View (lTa ba yang dag sgron ma), The Lamp Illuminating the Extremes (mTha'i mun sel sgron ma), The Lamp of Method and Wisdom (Thabs shes sgron ma), The Lamp of the Method of Meditation (bsGom thabs kyi sgron ma), and The Lamp of the Precious View (lTa ba rin chen sgron ma). These are P5918, P5919, P5920, P5921, P5922, and P5923, respectively. There are other Lamp collections in both Nyingma and Bön traditions, usually comprising four or six texts. The most prominent example of these is from the Bönpo Great Perfection lineage, the sGron ma drug gi gdams pa. See Christopher Hatchell's "Advice on the Six Lamps" in Naked Seeing: The Great Perfection, the Wheel of Time, and Visionary Buddhism in Renaissance Tibet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Jean-Luc Achard’s English translation in the Six Lamps: Secret Dzogchen Instructions of the Bön Tradition (Boston: Wisdom, 2017).
particular modes of inquiry and praxis available to most (if not all) humans.
From this second assumption stemmed the idea that humans are predisposed to spiritual awakening, that they, in other words, have within them some germinal capacity (bīja), spiritual affiliation (gotra), element (dhātu), or quintessence (garbha) that is a condition of possibility of this awakening. Alongside these "buddha-nature" concepts developed a family of systematically related gnoseological ideas referring to an abiding, unconditioned (asaṃskṛta) mode of consciousness—variously termed the Mind of awakening (bodhicitta), naturally luminous Mind (prakṛtiprabhāsvaracitta), the nature of mind (citta-dharmatā)—that was identified with the condition of awakening itself, but also viewed as the tacit background whence dualistic mind, that is, the source of all error and obscuration, emerges. Central to this cluster of related ideas was the view that conditions of awakening and delusion are both located within the complex and heterogeneous structure of lived experience itself. In Indian Buddhism, this paradigm found its most detailed and influential expression in the hybridized Yogācāra-Tathāgatagarbha works of Maitreya, the Indian Buddhist Siddha literature and the Buddhist tantras.
In light of the foregoing considerations, the doctrinal history of Buddhism may be regarded as an ongoing attempt to work out precisely what it was that made its founder a buddha or "awakened one" so that such knowledge could be systematically pursued by his followers. That this soteriological imperative has been central to Buddhist philosophical
and psychological investigations from early on is discernible in the long history of attempts to clarify the defining features of consciousness that can be traced back to the systematic analyses of mind and mental factors (citta-caitta) presented in the Abhidhammapiṭaka of the Pali Canon. For, in investigating the nature and structure of consciousness, Buddhist scholars were above all concerned with articulating the conditions necessary for a sentient being (sems can) to become an awakened one, a being in whom (if we follow the Tibetan rendering of "buddha" as sangs rgyas) all cognitive and affective obscurations have dissipated (sangs) so that inherent capacities for knowing and caring (mkhyen brtse nus ldan) can unfold (rgyas).
In Tibet, this soteriologically oriented investigation of consciousness was central to the philosophy of mind that developed within the syncretistic rDzogs chen ("Great Perfection") tradition of the rNying ma ("Ancient Ones") school between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. This philosophy developed around a nexus of core soteriological ideas concerning buddha-nature, the nature of reality, and the nature of mind that served to draw attention to a primordial, nondual mode of being and awareness that usually remains hidden behind the mind's own objectifying and subjectivizing reifications.
A cornerstone of the rDzogs chen philosophy of mind was a basic distinction between dualistic mind (sems) and primordial knowing (ye shes) that was first systematically presented in the seventeen Atiyoga tantras (rgyud bcu bdun) that make up the Heart Essence (snying thig) subclass of the Esoteric Guidance Class (man ngag sde') of rDzogs chen
teachings and are traditionally associated with Vimalamitra. rNying ma historical and biographical works trace this distinction to the teachings of early rDzogs chen masters of the Royal Dynastic Period, in particular the oral transmissions of Vimalamitra (bi ma snyan brgyud), an identification that appears at first glance to be supported by the many passages on the two distinctions found scattered among rNying ma collections such as the Bi ma snying thig, Bai ro rgyud 'bum, rNying ma rgyud 'bum, and dGongs pa zang thal. These teachings often take the form of personal instructions advising the practitioner to discern within the flux of adventitious thoughts and sensations that characterize dualistic mind (sems) an invariant prerepresentational structure of awareness known as primordial knowing (ye shes), open awareness (rig pa), or the nature of mind (sems nyid), from which this turmoil arises. The idea is to directly recognize (ngo sprod) and become increasingly familiar with this abiding condition without confusing it with any of its derivative and distortive aspects. In Klong chen pa's view, this distinction provides an indispensable key to understanding the views and practices that are central to the rDzogs chen tradition.
Although this tradition has attracted increasing interest in recent decades, both popular and academic, there has been little to date in the way of critical study of its philosophical foundations or key doctrinal developments. A noteworthy case in point is the absence of any systematic appraisal of rNying ma ("Ancient Ones") views on the nature of mind that traces their evolution and complex relationships with Indian Cittamātra, Madhyamaka, Pramāṇvāda, and Vajrayāna views. As a step toward at least defining the parameters of this crucial but neglected field of inquiry,
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David Germano is the Executive Director of the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. He has taught and researched Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia since 1992. He is currently focused on the exploration of contemplative ideas, values, and practices involving humanistic and scientific methodologies, as well as new applications in diverse fields; he also holds a faculty appointment in the School of Nursing. He has been a leader in the field of Tibetan Buddhist studies for many years and has long immersed himself in Dzogchen teachings and texts.
Kokyo Henkel has been practicing Zen since 1990 in residence at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center (most recently as Head of Practice), Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, No Abode Hermitage in Mill Valley, and Bukkokuji Monastery in Japan. He was ordained as a priest in 1994 by Tenshin Anderson Roshi and received Dharma Transmission from him in 2010. Kokyo is interested in exploring how the original teachings of Buddha-Dharma from ancient India, China, and Japan can still be very much alive and useful in present-day America to bring peace and openness to the minds of this troubled world.
Kokyo has also been practicing with the Tibetan Dzogchen ("Great Completeness") Teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche since 2003, in California, Colorado, and Kathmandu.