Longchen Rabjam’s doctrine (4) [adapted from Profusion de la Vaste Sphère (Peeters, 2007)]
Having made this clarification, one has guarded against two ruinous pitfalls: either the idea that Klong chen rab ’byams would seek to flatten the Great Completeness into the confines of the lower doctrines (one would find hundreds of texts to the contrary), or the opposite extreme view, asserting that the rDzogs chen has absolutely nothing to do with the other doctrines of the Buddhist Mahāyāna. The view which I think is that of the author is that there is a single “idea” or “intention” (dgongs pa) of the Buddha in the whole of his preaching; that this idea is revealed, so far as it is capable of expression, only in the rDzogs chen.
At the same time, that once one has adopted the right point of view, one finds in the Subordinate Vehicles, in addition to a number of theses which are merely pedagogical expedients, a certain quantity of affirmations which are to be preserved, albeit in a sublimated form, within rDzogs chen. The same is true of the idealistic doctrines relating to the eight consciousnesses (vijñāna) or Nāgārjuna’s views on emptiness, which, reinterpreted and put in their proper place in the correct perspective, fit harmoniously into the Great Perfection.
Because of his conception of the fundamental unity of Buddhism, there was no doubt in his mind that its seemingly disparate developments should converge, not merely in an ultimate experience, but also in a synthetic doctrine, which would be as faithful an image of it as discursive thought could provide.
Moreover, on reading his work, it is clear that many of the doctrines of the classical Mahāyāna do not only have the modest status of preparations or approximations to a true thought – that of the rDzogs chen: they are incorporated into what is given as the ultimate system. Of course, this does not happen without displacing their meaning. But, on the other hand, their association with the view proper to the Great Perfection is not without enlightening it, nor without putting it into a perspective which, at the very least, would not spontaneously impose itself on the naive reader of, say, the Seventeen Tantras.
Klong chen rab ’byams’ general tendency in philosophy is not to set the rDzogs chen apart from the general (and itself layered) edifice of Buddhist philosophy, as if the latter, to take up a classical comparison, were at most a temporary ladder[1] or staircase to climb up to this higher truth, which would, then, be somehow heterogeneous with respect to its mediations. Rather, he inclines to include everything, in a sort of sublimated state, in the sphere of rDzogs chen.
Or, more precisely, after a negative moment, when the absolute superiority of the rDzogs chen is posited, so that its own view is grasped in its singularity, a further deepening of this view makes it possible to see that it embraces everything in its vast scope. Thus the intellectual movement of Klong chen rab ’byams is analogous to the spiritual movement of rDzogs chen pa: it too begins with the strict dissociation (ru shan ’byed pa, etc.) of consciousness (rnam shes, vijñāna) and principial knowledge (ye shes, jñāna), or of mind (sems) and Intelligence (rig pa); then it proceeds to reintegrate the one into the other, to the point where the very notion of an otherness disappears.
It is this dialectical movement that I think we observed in the chronology of Klong chen rab ‘byams’ work as a whole, if I was not misled by the meager clues: (1) a period devoted to pure rDzogs chen, and even more specifically to sNying thig,[2] (2) then the period of syntheses integrating the lower Vehicles,[3] (3) to end with a return to pure immediate simplicity.[4]
In this way, Klong chen pa’s synthesis (especially in the intermediate period) does not consist mainly in calling upon the classical texts and doctrines of traditional Buddhism to make them say what they do not say. Nor does our author fall into the other extreme, which would tend to distort the Great Perfection in order to hypocritically flatter the prejudices of vain censors. The second hypothesis is of course easily born when one considers the question from the political situation that formed.
Tibet in the following centuries ;[5] but, even a century later, Go rams pa bSod nams seng ge or Śākya mchog ldan could still express, and even with the greatest freedom of tone, ideas that would later suffer from censorship. All the more so in the time of Klong chen rab ’byams, a fertile period of intellectual ferment.