The Non-Abandonment of Wandering Beings
Self-Grasping, Compassion, and the Non-Dual Logic of Madhyamaka, Secret Mantra, and Dzogchen
Four Sanskrit stanzas examined here articulate a paradox at the heart of Mahāyāna and Secret Mantra soteriology: saṃsāra is to be abandoned, yet saṃsārin (wandering) beings are not to be abandoned; indeed, the abandonment of saṃsāra is said to depend upon precisely this non-abandonment. The paradox is resolved when the object of renunciation is distinguished from the beings who are conventionally said to inhabit it. More fundamentally, the verses locate the perpetuation of saṃsāra not in the mere presence of conditioned phenomena but in ahaṃgrāha, the grasping at “I”, and in the svātma-dṛṣṭi that supports it. The attempt to reject saṃsārin beings therefore becomes self-defeating insofar as it consolidates the subject-object polarity upon which saṃsāric cognition depends.
This essay argues that the verses can be read as articulating a progressively deepening continuity between Madhyamaka, the bodhisattva ideal, Secret Mantra, and Dzogchen. Madhyamaka supplies the epistemological critique of intrinsic selfhood; Mahāyāna establishes compassion as inseparable from the wisdom that recognises emptiness; Secret Mantra transforms rather than merely rejects phenomenal appearance; and Dzogchen radicalises this trajectory by understanding appearance, emptiness and compassionate responsiveness as inseparable dimensions of primordial awareness. The final triad of deva-bhakti, guru-bhakti and sattva-bhakti can consequently be interpreted as three complementary modalities for the attenuation of ahaṃgrāha or ego-clinging: through transformation of identity, dissolution of the imagined distance from awakening, and displacement of self-centredness through compassionate concern for beings.
The argument ultimately concerns the meaning of renunciation itself. From a Madhyamaka perspective, liberation cannot consist in the flight of an intrinsically existent subject from an intrinsically existent saṃsāra. From a Secret Mantra perspective, appearance is not overcome by rejection but transformed through recognition of its purity. From the perspective of Dzogchen, the decisive event is neither metaphysical departure nor ontological transformation, but recognition: the exhaustion of grasping within the primordial display of awareness.
1. The Problem of Renunciation
The opening stanza establishes its argument through an apparent contradiction:
na saṃsāra-prahāṇāya saṃsāriṇo 'pi saṃtyajet |
saṃsāriṇām asaṃtyāgāt saṃsāra-tyāgaḥ sidhyate ||
For the sake of abandoning saṃsāra,
one should never abandon those who wander in saṃsāra;
for it is precisely through not abandoning those who wander in saṃsāra
that the abandonment of saṃsāra actually succeeds.
The distinction between saṃsāra and saṃsārin is here soteriologically decisive. The former denotes cyclic existence; the latter, literally “one who wanders,” denotes the sentient beings who participate in that cycle. The verse consequently refuses to identify liberation with the abandonment of others who are bound up in saṃsāra.
This is more than an ethical injunction. The syntax encodes the great work of liberation: saṃsāra-tyāga, the abandonment of saṃsāra, is said to be accomplished through saṃsāriṇām asaṃtyāga, the non-abandonment of wandering beings. Non-abandonment is therefore not merely compatible with liberation; it is presented as constitutive of liberation.
The proposition becomes intelligible only when the goal of liberation is located at the level of cognitive appropriation rather than phenomenal existence. If saṃsāra is construed as a substantial domain that exists independently of cognition, then liberation naturally appears as an act of departure. If, however, saṃsāra is understood in accordance with the Mahāyāna analysis of dependent origination, then its perpetuation must be traced to ignorance and grasping. The question consequently changes from “How does one leave saṃsāra?” to “What makes experience saṃsāric?”
The second formulation is decisive. Saṃsāra is not perpetuated simply by the occurrence of conditioned appearances. It is perpetuated through their appropriation under the categories of subject and object, self and other, grasping and rejection. The verse therefore implicitly distinguishes appearance from bondage and renunciation from rejection.
This distinction is foundational for the subsequent argument.
2. Svātma-dṛṣṭi and the Madhyamaka Analysis of Self-Grasping
The second stanza identifies the mechanism through which an ostensibly liberative rejection of saṃsāra becomes counterproductive:
saṃsāri-tyāga-dṛṣṭyā hi svātma-dṛṣṭir vivardhate |
tenāhaṃgrāha-vṛddhyaiva saṃsārasya pravartanam ||
For when one views those who wander in saṃsāra as to be abandoned,
one's view of the self only grows stronger;
and as this grasping at “I” increases,
so saṃsāra itself is perpetuated.
The key conceptual sequence is:
saṃsāri-tyāga-dṛṣṭi → svātma-dṛṣṭi → ahaṃgrāha-vṛddhi → saṃsāra-pravartana.
The argument is recognisably Madhyamaka in structure. The decisive error is not simply the affirmation of a person in conventional discourse. Madhyamaka does not require the denial of conventional persons. Its target is the apprehension of persons and phenomena as possessing intrinsic, independent existence.
Svātma-dṛṣṭi or the view of the self therefore should be understood as a reifying mode of apprehension rather than merely the empirical awareness that one is a person. Likewise, ahaṃgrāha or ego-clinging is not equivalent to ordinary first-person reference. It denotes the appropriation of an “I” as an independently established centre of experience.
The practitioner who thinks, “I must abandon saṃsāra,” has established a structure consisting of:
an autonomous subject who renounces;
an independently identifiable domain called saṃsāra;
beings who belong to that domain;
a substantial distinction between the liberated subject and the beings who remain bound.
From the Madhyamaka standpoint, each element is vulnerable to investigation. The very act of abandoning saṃsāra can therefore become an implicit affirmation of the independent reality of one abandoning it.
This is the precise significance of the concluding eva:
ahaṃgrāha-vṛddhyaiva
“Precisely through the increase of grasping at ‘I’.”
The verse does not merely claim that ego-clinging is morally undesirable. It proposes that the intensification of self-grasping is itself the mechanism through which saṃsāra continues to operate.
3. Renunciation and Reification
The distinction between renunciation and rejection becomes especially important here.
In ordinary renunciant discourse, tyāga can easily be interpreted as physical withdrawal: abandoning possessions, relationships, worldly activity, or social existence. Such forms of renunciation may have legitimate disciplinary functions, but they do not by themselves establish liberation. The decisive issue is whether the mind continues to appropriate experience through grasping.
A practitioner may abandon the world while retaining an intensely reified sense of self as “the one who has renounced the world”. In such a case, the content of identification has changed while the structure of identification remains intact.
This is precisely the phenomenon described by svātma-dṛṣṭi-vivṛddhi.
The verse therefore offers a sophisticated critique of spiritualised self-reference. The egoic identity need not identify itself with wealth, sexuality, social status or sensory pleasure. It can identify itself with renunciation, purity, knowledge, meditation or liberation. Indeed, the more subtle the spiritual identity, the more difficult its operation may be to detect.
Madhyamaka's contribution at this point is methodological. Rather than asking what the practitioner should replace the self with, it interrogates the mode by which the self is apprehended in the first place. The problem is not solved by constructing a better I, but by examining the presumed independent status of the I itself.
The verse's mention of compassion therefore emerges directly from its analysis of emptiness. If self and other are not intrinsically established, then the rigid opposition between “my liberation” and “their bondage” cannot be maintained at the level of ultimate analysis.
4. Compassion as a Condition of Liberation
The third stanza supplies the positive alternative:
saṃsāry-atyāga-dṛṣṭyā tu dayayā kleśa-hānataḥ |
saṃsāra-hāni-siddhis tu yujyate nānya-mārgataḥ ||
Yet when one sees that those who wander in saṃsāra are not to be abandoned,
and through compassion the afflictions are brought to an end,
the cessation of saṃsāra is thereby accomplished;
there is no other path to its cessation.
The crucial expression is saṃsāry-atyāga-dṛṣṭyā, the “view of non-abandonment of the saṃsārin (the wandering being)”. The negation is doctrinally decisive. The practitioner does not overcome the duality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa by refusing to distinguish conditioned existence from liberation at the conventional level. Rather, the practitioner refuses to make the liberation of the self dependent upon the rejection of other beings.
The operative principle is dayā, compassion.
Within Mahāyāna, compassion cannot be adequately understood as an emotional supplement to wisdom. The bodhisattva ideal places the welfare of sentient beings within the very definition of the path. Candrakīrti's treatment of compassion in the Madhyamakāvatāra is paradigmatic in this regard: compassion occupies a structurally privileged position within the path, rather than functioning as a merely preliminary ethical disposition.
The present verses articulate an even stronger claim. Compassion is not only the motivation for liberative activity; it is implicated in the dissolution of the very grasping that perpetuates saṃsāra.
The logic is therefore:
non-abandonment of beings → compassion → diminution of afflictions → cessation of saṃsāra.
The point is not that compassionate activity mechanically produces liberation. Rather, compassion undermines the self-centred appropriation that renders experience saṃsāric.
This is why the verse concludes:
nānya-mārgataḥ
“By no other path.”
The formulation is intentionally uncompromising. It denies the possibility of a liberation grounded in radical self-separation from beings.
5. Emptiness and Compassion: The Mahāyāna Synthesis
The apparent opposition between emptiness and compassion disappears once their functions are properly distinguished.
Emptiness prevents compassion from becoming an ontological affirmation of inherently existing beings who possess an inherently existing suffering self. Compassion prevents emptiness from degenerating into an abstract negation of conventional suffering and conventional persons.
The two therefore correct opposite distortions.
Without the insight of emptiness, compassion can become structurally entangled with the very duality it seeks to overcome: I, the compassionate subject, acts upon you, the suffering object.
Without compassion, emptiness can be misconstrued as a metaphysical licence for indifference: if beings are empty, why concern oneself with their suffering?
The Mahāyāna answer is that neither inference follows.
Because beings are empty, their suffering does not become meaningless; because the self is empty, compassion does not require an ultimately existing benefactor. Conventional suffering remains experientially and ethically significant while lacking intrinsic existence.
This is precisely the domain in which the bodhisattva ideal acquires its philosophical necessity. The bodhisattva does not abandon saṃsārin beings because the distinction between self and other is not ultimately substantial, while continuing to engage that distinction conventionally as the basis of compassionate action.
The resulting path is neither attachment to saṃsāra nor rejection of saṃsāra.
It is freedom from reification within saṃsāra.
6. From Madhyamaka to Secret Mantra: The Status of Appearance
The transition from Madhyamaka to Secret Mantra is, at its deepest level, a development in the implications of emptiness.
If phenomena lack intrinsic existence, their appearance cannot be rejected simply on the grounds that it is phenomenal. What must be abandoned is the reification of appearance.
Secret Mantra consequently introduces a different soteriological strategy: rather than treating ordinary appearance merely as an obstacle to be overcome, it employs appearance itself as the path.
This is the conceptual basis of deity yoga.
The practitioner does not simply think, “I am an ordinary person who wishes eventually to become a deity.” The ordinary identification is deliberately reconfigured. Body, speech, environment and cognition are subjected to a transformation in which their apparent ordinariness is no longer taken as ultimate.
The relevant movement is therefore not:
impure appearance → elimination → pure reality
but:
reified appearance → recognition of emptiness and purity → transformed appearance.
This distinction is essential.
The Secret Mantra path does not contradict Madhyamaka by affirming an intrinsically existent pure world in opposition to an intrinsically existent impure world. Its transformative efficacy depends precisely upon the emptiness of the categories it transforms.
7. Deva-bhakti: Deity as a Critique of Ordinary Identity
The final stanza begins:
deva-bhaktyā tv ahaṃgrāhas tanūkṛta ihāpi saḥ
Through devotion to the deity, moreover,
the grasping at “I” is here diminished.
The expression tanūkṛta is particularly suggestive. The goal is not necessarily an abrupt destruction of the egoic structure, but its attenuation or thinning.
Within Secret Mantra, deity practice can be interpreted precisely in this way.
Ordinary identity is not treated as an immutable essence. It is exposed as constructed and therefore transformable. The practitioner adopts the form of the deity, employs the deity's mantra, and inhabits the mandala of pure appearance. Through this process, the ordinary ahaṃgrāha or ego-clinging is deprived of its privileged status.
The deity is therefore soteriologically significant not because it supplies a superior object for devotion, but because deity yoga destabilises the ordinary architecture of subjectivity.
The danger, naturally, is that the practitioner may merely substitute one form of ego-identification for another: “I am now spiritually special; I am the deity; I possess a higher identity.” Authentic Guhyamantrayāna avoids this reification through the inseparability of deity and emptiness.
The deity is precisely effective because the deity is empty.
8. Guru-bhakti: The Collapse of the Distance Between Practitioner and Awakening
The verse then introduces a second modality:
guru-bhaktyātha vā
or through devotion to the Guru.
Guru devotion occupies a distinctive position in Secret Mantra because it operates upon the relational structure within which spiritual knowledge is ordinarily conceptualised.
The practitioner commonly presupposes a distance:
“I am here; awakening is elsewhere.”
The Guru functions within Secret Mantra as the embodied possibility that this distance is not ultimately founded.
This does not entail the metaphysical deification of a human teacher in a simplistic sense. The deeper function of Guru devotion is to destabilise the practitioner's habitual assumption that awakened awareness is an external object to be acquired.
In Dzogchen this point becomes especially explicit. Introduction to the nature of mind is not the transmission of a substance previously absent from the practitioner. It is the recognition of what is already present but unrecognised.
Guru devotion can therefore be interpreted as a method for undermining the appropriation of awakening as an external object:
“I, the practitioner, must acquire enlightenment.”
The Guru's function is to expose the conceptual structure of that sentence.
9. Sattva-bhakti: Sentient Beings as the Field of Merit
The final term is perhaps the most conceptually striking:
sattva-bhaktyā 'haṃgrāhaḥ kṣīyate
through devotion to sentient beings, the grasping at “I” is worn away.
The formulation is more radical than a conventional exhortation to altruism.
The sentient being is not merely the object toward which compassion is directed. The relation to sentient beings becomes itself a means of transforming the subject who relates to them.
This is a decisive inversion.
Ordinary self-grasping organises experience around the question:
“What does this mean for me?”
Compassion reverses the vector of attention:
“What is needed here?”
But the deepest form of compassion eventually destabilises even this formulation, because it no longer rests upon a substantial compassionate agent acting upon substantial recipients. The distinction remains operational conventionally while losing its claim to intrinsic reality.
Thus sattva-bhakti functions as a practical corollary of Madhyamaka and a bridge to the non-duality of Secret Mantra.
The beings whom one initially imagined as phenomenal ‘others’ wandering in delusion become precisely the field in which self-grasping is exposed and relinquished.
10. The Dzogchen Radicalisation: Recognition Rather Than Transformation
The movement from Madhyamaka through Secret Mantra reaches a distinctive expression in Dzogchen.
Dzogchen does not merely ask how to transform an impure mode of experience into a pure one. It asks what is present prior to the conceptual division between impure and pure.
The classical Dzogchen presentation of primordial awareness through the inseparability of essence, nature and compassionate energy (ngo bo, rang bzhin, thugs rje tsal) is decisive here. The essence is empty; the nature is luminous; its dynamic energy manifests unimpededly. The three are not successive properties but inseparable aspects of a single primordial condition.
This provides the deepest framework for understanding the verses.
If appearance is the dynamic expression of awareness, then saṃsāric appearance cannot be treated as an ontological contaminant external to the path. What makes appearance saṃsāric is non-recognition; what liberates appearance is recognition.
The problem is consequently not that appearances exist. The problem is that they are grasped.
This is the Dzogchen reformulation of the Madhyamaka diagnosis. Madhyamaka demonstrates the absence of intrinsic existence. Dzogchen asks what remains when that absence is not merely understood conceptually but recognised directly as the nature of awareness itself.
11. Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa: The Question of Recognition
From this perspective, the verse's refusal to abandon saṃsārin beings acquires a precise Dzogchen significance.
If beings and appearances are expressions of the dynamic energy of primordial awareness, then rejecting them as intrinsically “saṃsāric” risks reifying precisely the distinction whose conceptual basis has been undermined.
This does not collapse saṃsāra and nirvāṇa into a crude identity. Their conventional significance remains radically different: one is characterised by non-recognition and affliction, the other by recognition and wisdom.
The non-duality concerns their basis, not the conventional equality of their consequences.
The same appearance can therefore function differently according to whether its nature is recognised. This is why Dzogchen can speak of liberation without positing a journey from one ontological domain into another. The essential event is recognition. The display does not need to be annihilated. Only the grasping at views ceases.
12. The Three Devotions as a Unified Soteriological Structure
The final stanza can now be read as a highly compressed account of the progressive dissolution of ahaṃgrāha or ego-clinging:
deva-bhaktyā ... guru-bhaktyā ... sattva-bhaktyā
The three forms of devotion correspond to three dimensions of egoic fixation.
Deity
Deity practice destabilises ordinary identity.
It demonstrates that the identity ordinarily grasped as “I” is neither fixed nor inherently existent.
Guru
Guru devotion destabilises the distance between practitioner and awakening.
It exposes the presupposition that awakening exists externally as an object to be acquired.
Sentient beings
Compassionate devotion to beings destabilises self-centredness. It displaces the self from its presumed position as the exclusive centre of soteriological concern.
These three are therefore not arbitrary devotional alternatives. They can be understood as complementary interventions into the structure of self-grasping:
identity → separation → self-centredness.
The progressive result is expressed by the final verb:
kṣīyate
“is diminished”, “wears away”, “is exhausted”.
The choice is significant. The path is not described as the violent destruction of a substantial self. Such destruction would itself risk presupposing precisely the substantial entity Madhyamaka denies. What is exhausted is grasping. The self need not be destroyed because no intrinsically existing self was ever established. What ceases is the appropriation of experience as “I” and “mine”.
13. The Non-Abandonment of Beings as the Highest Form of Renunciation
The four verses can therefore be understood as a sustained redefinition of renunciation.
At the most superficial level, renunciation means abandoning objects.
At the Madhyamaka level, it means abandoning reification.
At the Mahāyāna level, it means abandoning self-centred appropriation while refusing to abandon beings.
At the Secret Mantra level, it means abandoning impure apprehension rather than rejecting appearance.
At the Dzogchen level, it means allowing grasping to exhaust itself within recognition of primordial awareness.
The progression is not merely historical or sectarian. It can be understood phenomenologically as a deepening analysis of what liberation could possibly mean.
If the self is empty, there is no independently existing renouncer.
If phenomena are empty, there is no independently existing saṃsāra to which the renouncer could ultimately escape.
If compassion is inseparable from wisdom, there is no contradiction between liberation and the welfare of beings.
If appearance is inseparable from awareness, there is no need to annihilate appearance.
And if awareness is recognised in its primordial condition, the fundamental task is exhausted in the relinquishment of grasping.
Thus the opening paradox is not merely resolved; it is transformed.
One does not abandon saṃsāra by abandoning saṃsārin. But one abandons the saṃsāric mode of apprehending both.
Liberation Without Abandonment
The philosophical force of these verses lies in their refusal to permit liberation to be conceived as an escape performed by an independently existing subject from an independently existing world.
Their central thesis may be formulated with precision:
The attempt to abandon saṃsāra by rejecting saṃsārin beings reinforces the self-grasping through which saṃsāra is perpetuated; the non-abandonment of beings, grounded in compassion, undermines that grasping and therefore constitutes the very possibility of liberation.
This thesis is intelligible within Madhyamaka because the self and its objects are empty of intrinsic existence. It becomes ethically imperative within Mahāyāna because the bodhisattva cannot separate personal liberation from the liberation of beings. It becomes methodologically radical within Secret Mantra because appearance itself becomes the field of transformation. And it reaches its most uncompromising expression in Dzogchen, where appearance and emptiness, awareness and compassionate energy, are understood as inseparable dimensions of primordial reality.
The deepest renunciation is consequently not the rejection of the world. It is the relinquishment of the grasping by which the world is divided into “I” and “other”, “mine” and “not mine”, “saṃsāra” and “that from which I must escape.”
The practitioner discovers that the obstacle was never appearance as such. It was appropriation.
The beings one sought to leave behind therefore become the field of merit in which self-grasping can diminish. Compassion becomes the means by which that grasping is loosened. Devotion becomes a means of displacing the egoic centre. Deity practice destabilises ordinary identity; Guru devotion destabilises the externalisation of awakening; devotion to beings destabilises the self as the privileged centre of concern.
At the culmination of this process, the distinction between path and goal undergoes its final transformation:
There is no substantial self that escapes saṃsāra. There is no substantial saṃsāra from which such a self escapes.
There is only the exhaustion of grasping at views and the recognition of what has never required liberation in the first place.
From the standpoint of Dzogchen, this is why the final movement is not toward a newly constructed state but toward recognition: the recognition of primordial awareness in which emptiness is not the negation of appearance, appearance is not the obstruction of awareness, and compassion is not an ethical addition to wisdom.
The abandonment of saṃsāra is therefore fulfilled precisely where abandonment ceases to mean rejection. Nothing needs to be abandoned as an object of hatred or flight. What must be abandoned is the grasping that makes abandonment necessary. And when that grasping is exhausted, the beings whom one refused to abandon are no longer obstacles to liberation. They are inseparable from the very field in which liberation is recognised. Indeed, endless beings are realised to have secretly been one’s own teachers: the buddhas themselves.
