The Two That Is Not Two
Madhyamaka, Secret Mantra Polarity, and the Logic of Inseparability
There is a remarkable recurrence in the history of Indian and Tibetan thought: realities that appear, at first glance, to be constituted by pairs are repeatedly articulated in ways that deny their ultimate separability.
Emptiness and form
Conventional and ultimate
Method and wisdom
Bliss and emptiness
Primordial purity and spontaneous presence
Awareness and its expressive energy
Puruṣa and Prakṛti
Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā
Śiva and Śakti
Samantabhadra and Samantabhadrī
The vocabulary changes. The philosophical systems differ. Their soteriological projects are not identical. And yet a recognisable formal structure persists:
Two poles are distinguished, but neither pole is ultimately established independently of the other.
This structure is especially striking when viewed against the background of Madhyamaka. The Madhyamaka analysis of the two truths does not, strictly speaking, teach that reality consists of two levels, two substances, or two independently existing orders. Its force lies precisely in destabilising the very possibility of such ultimate bifurcation. The conventional and the ultimate are distinguishable in discourse and practice, but the ultimate is not a second world concealed behind the conventional. Emptiness is not an entity standing on the other side of appearances.
Indeed, the more radically Madhyamaka emptiness is understood, the less possible it becomes to construe its “two” as an ontological duality.
This opens an intriguing interpretive possibility.
The many tantric pairs that emerge historically and doctrinally after Madhyamaka need not be understood as simply equivalent to the two truths. Nor should they be reduced to metaphors for a pre-existing metaphysical One. Rather, they can be read as different articulations of a more general logic first made philosophically devastating by Madhyamaka: the logic of distinction without intrinsic separation.
Secret Mantra’s “inseparable couple” may thus be understood as what happens when the Madhyamaka insight is not merely stated as a philosophical negation, but re-expressed as a phenomenology of manifestation.
The result is not: two things become one.
It is subtler:
The two are discovered never to have been two in the sense that conceptual reification had supposed.
That difference is everything.
I. The two truths are not two worlds
The first step is to resist the most tempting interpretation of the Madhyamaka two truths.
The Noble Nāgārjuna’s famous formulation in Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24.8 states that the Buddhas teach the Dharma through reliance upon two truths: conventional truth and ultimate truth. Yet the subsequent Madhyamaka tradition has repeatedly wrestled with what precisely this distinction means.
One danger is to imagine a two-storey universe:
upper storey: ultimate reality, emptiness
lower storey: conventional reality, appearances
On this model, ordinary phenomena somehow occupy an inferior ontological domain while emptiness constitutes the genuinely real domain behind them.
But this is precisely the kind of metaphysical reification Madhyamaka is designed to undo.
The ultimate cannot be an independently existing object. If emptiness were itself an ultimately established entity, it would possess precisely the sort of intrinsic nature that emptiness denies to everything else. The Noble Nāgārjuna’s critique is therefore radically self-consuming: emptiness cannot become a metaphysical foundation upon which the world is subsequently constructed.
This is why the relationship between conventional truth and ultimate truth is so difficult to characterise.
They are two, because the distinction is indispensable.
They are not two, because neither can be established as an independent reality standing over against the other.
The conventional is not ultimately established apart from emptiness.
And emptiness is not discoverable as an independently existing thing apart from the phenomena whose lack of intrinsic nature it reveals.
II. The extraordinary consequence: emptiness does not abolish appearance
This becomes especially important in the Noble Nāgārjuna’s identification of dependent origination and emptiness.
The point of emptiness is not that phenomena fail to appear. It is that they do not possess the kind of self-grounded existence that we ordinarily attribute to them.
Phenomena arise dependently. Therefore they lack svabhāva. Because they lack svabhāva, their existence cannot be isolated from conditions, relations, conceptual designation, causal efficacy, and the network of dependencies through which they arise.
Hence emptiness is not the negation of appearance. It is the negation of intrinsic existence.
That distinction allows something extraordinary to happen.
The disappearance of intrinsic being does not result in the disappearance of the phenomenal world. Indeed, from the Madhyamaka perspective, it is precisely because things lack intrinsic existence that dependent arising and conventional efficacy are possible. The two dimensions therefore mutually illuminate one another: emptiness is not an ontological void lying behind conventional reality. It is the absence of intrinsic establishment that characterises conventional reality itself.
Thus:
emptiness does not stand opposite appearance.
Rather:
emptiness is the non-intrinsic mode of appearance.
This is the seed of a much broader logic.
If something is empty, then its apparent identity does not imprison it within an intrinsic nature.
If it lacks intrinsic nature, it can arise relationally.
If it can arise relationally, then its manifestation is not something added to an underlying essence.
Appearance becomes possible precisely because there is no fixed essence behind it.
This is one reason why the movement from Madhyamaka into tantric and especially Dzogchen idioms can be philosophically fascinating.
Tantric discourse increasingly asks not merely:
What is the status of appearance?
but:
What is the nature of appearance when appearance is understood from within emptiness?
III. From two truths to two aspects
Here we reach the heart of the matter.
The tantric pairs do not necessarily reproduce the Madhyamaka two truths as such. Something has changed.
The pair is no longer primarily:
conventional — ultimate
but increasingly becomes:
emptiness — manifestation
or:
purity — spontaneous presence
or:
awareness — dynamic
or:
consciousness — energy
The two truths have become something closer to two aspects of a single non-dual event.
This is not necessarily a historical linear development in every case, and it would be misleading to imagine a simple evolutionary sequence from the Noble Nāgārjuna to Dzogchen. The intellectual histories are considerably more complicated. Madhyamaka itself developed through multiple interpretive trajectories, while tantric traditions emerged from diverse Śaiva-Śākta, Kāpālika, Pāñcarātra, Secret Mantra, and other religious environments.
Nevertheless, as a comparative structure, the resemblance is profound.
The basic pattern is:
distinction without intrinsic division.
And once this pattern is recognised, the remarkable proliferation of tantric dyads begins to look less arbitrary.
IV. Emptiness and form: the primordial polarity
The most fundamental Buddhist example is already present in the Mahāyāna equation of emptiness and form.
The Prajñāpāramitā tradition famously gives this relation its canonical formulation:
form is emptiness — emptiness is form
Whatever the precise historical and exegetical complexities surrounding this formula, its philosophical importance is immense.
It refuses two symmetrical errors.
The first is substantialism:
form exists intrinsically.
The second is nihilism:
because form is empty, form does not exist at all.
Instead:
form is empty, and precisely therefore form is not other than emptiness.
But neither does this mean that “form” and “emptiness” are simply interchangeable words.
Form still appears.
Emptiness still means something.
The distinction remains indispensable.
What disappears is the supposition that their distinction corresponds to two independently established realities.
This gives us the primordial template for the tantric “two”:
appearance is not rejected
emptiness is not reified
the two are neither collapsed nor separated
The relationship itself becomes the point.
V. From form—emptiness to purity—spontaneous presence
This structure becomes extraordinarily suggestive when placed beside the Dzogchen pair ka dag — lhun grub.
Ka dag, “primordial purity,” names the fact that reality has never acquired intrinsic existence in the first place. Nothing has to be purified into emptiness. The primordial condition is already free from intrinsic establishment.
Lhun grub, “spontaneous presence,” names the unobstructed manifestation or display of phenomena.
At first these seem almost opposite.
If reality is primordially pure, why is there manifestation?
If there is spontaneous manifestation, how can reality be fundamentally empty?
But the Dzogchen answer is precisely that the question presupposes the wrong kind of duality.
Primordial purity is not a blank substratum from which manifestation subsequently emerges.
Spontaneous presence is not an independently existing phenomenal layer that somehow obscures primordial purity.
Rather:
primordial purity and spontaneous presence are two inseparable aspects of the same condition.
The philosophical symmetry with emptiness/form is therefore striking.
Madhyamaka-inflected formulation in Dzogchen formulation:
emptiness — ka dag
appearance/form — lhun grub
lack of intrinsic existence — primordial purity
unobstructed manifestation — spontaneous presence
non-separation — inseparability
This should not be taken as an equation of doctrines. Dzogchen has its own technical vocabulary, its own contemplative phenomenology, and its own historical development. But structurally, something recognisable has happened.
The negative insight of emptiness has been joined to a positive account of manifestation, while nothing is intrinsically established.
Therefore: manifestation is unobstructed. The absence of essence becomes inseparable from the richness of appearance.
This is an extraordinary transformation of the philosophical problem.
The question is no longer merely:
How can appearances be empty?
It becomes:
How could appearances be anything other than empty and therefore dynamically manifest?
VI. Rigpa and rtsal: awareness and its own display
The same structure becomes even more intimate with rigpa and rtsal.
Here the polarity is not merely between an ontological category called “emptiness” and another called “appearance.”
It concerns awareness itself and its expressive/display dimension.
Rigpa designates primordial, nondual knowing or awareness in Dzogchen discourse. Rtsal refers to its dynamic energy, potency, or expressive manifestation.
Again, one might initially imagine a duality: awareness here; manifestation there.
But this is precisely what the language of inseparability resists. The display is not an external product manufactured by awareness. Nor is awareness a hidden substance existing behind its display.
The point is closer to:
awareness is intrinsically expressive, and its expression is inseparable from awareness.
Here the “two” becomes almost grammatical.
One needs two terms because language must distinguish:
that which knows,
and what manifests;
awareness,
and its dynamic display.
But the distinction is not an ontological partition. The display cannot be peeled away from awareness and retained as an independently established entity. Nor can awareness be isolated as a pure object standing apart from its expressive capacity.
Thus:
rigpa / rtsal is not consciousness + activity.
It is awareness-as-display and display-as-awareness.
This makes it particularly illuminating to compare with emptiness/form. Form is not something that emptiness manufactures. Rtsal is not something rigpa manufactures. In both cases, the second pole is not an external addition to the first. It is the first understood in its manifestive dimension.
VII. The Secret Mantra genius: turning the logic of negation into the dynamic energy
This may be the most important shift.
Madhyamaka’s method is overwhelmingly analytic and deconstructive. It investigates claims to intrinsic existence and demonstrates their incoherence. Its great philosophical achievement is not to install a new metaphysical object in the place of the old ones, but to deprive conceptual reification of its final resting place.
Secret Mantra discourse, by contrast, is exceptionally interested in how the empty manifests. This produces a new vocabulary:
Emptiness becomes inseparable from appearance.
Awareness becomes inseparable from energy.
Primordial purity becomes inseparable from spontaneous presence.
Wisdom becomes inseparable from method.
Bliss becomes inseparable from emptiness.
The Deity’s mandala becomes inseparable from the empty nature of the display.
One could describe this as the tantric positive articulation of Madhyamaka’s non-foundationalism—provided that this is understood as a comparative thesis rather than a simple historical claim.
The fundamental insight is no longer expressed only through negation: this cannot be intrinsically established.
It begins to be expressed through a paradoxical affirmation:
precisely because it cannot be intrinsically established, its appearance is free.
This is where the language of spontaneous presence becomes luminous.
VIII. Why “inseparable” is more precise than “one”
There is an important danger in describing all of this as “ultimately one.” The phrase sounds attractive but can easily import a metaphysics that Madhyamaka would reject.
If there is an ultimately existent One behind the many, then the One itself becomes a candidate for svabhāva. We have simply replaced dualistic metaphysics with monistic metaphysics. That is not what emptiness requires.
The more exact term is therefore: inseparable (abheda, abhinna, yuganaddha).
“Inseparable” does not necessarily mean numerically identical.
It means that the two cannot be established as independently existing.
This distinction is subtle but decisive.
Suppose we say:
emptiness = form.
That can be interpreted as collapsing the distinction.
Suppose we say:
emptiness and form are ultimately two.
That establishes a duality.
But:
emptiness and form are inseparable
preserves the conventional distinction while denying ultimate division.
Likewise:
ka dag and lhun grub are inseparable.
rigpa and rtsal are inseparable.
kṛṣṇa and rādhā are inseparable.
śiva and śakti are inseparable.
samantabhadra and samantabhadrī are inseparable.
“Inseparable” thus names a mode of non-duality that transcends the opposition between identity and difference: two aspects are distinguishable in thought, yet remain utterly undivided in their nature. The Sanskrit yuganaddha and Tibetan དབྱེར་མེད་ (dbyer med, yermed) are therefore among the essential keys to understanding Dzogchen.
IX. The deeper structure: two without two
We can now formulate the recurring pattern more precisely.
A Secret Mantra pair has four characteristics.
1. The poles are distinguishable
They are not meaningless synonyms.
Emptiness is not simply another word for form.
Awareness is not simply another word for its display.
Purity is not simply another word for presence.
The distinction performs conceptual, phenomenological, ritual, or soteriological work.
2. Neither pole is self-sufficient
Neither can be established independently.
Form cannot be isolated from emptiness.
Display cannot be isolated from awareness.
Presence cannot be isolated from primordial purity.
3. Each pole reveals the other
The two are not merely mutually dependent.
They are mutually illuminating.
Emptiness explains the freedom of appearance.
Appearance gives concrete expression to emptiness.
Primordial purity explains the absence of obstruction.
Spontaneous presence displays that freedom.
Awareness is known through its knowing/display.
Display reveals the dynamic character of awareness.
4. Their non-separation does not abolish their distinction
This final point is the most important.
The goal is not to arrive at an undifferentiated state in which there are no distinctions whatsoever.
Rather, distinctions become transparent.
The distinction remains, but it no longer hardens into duality.
Thus:
two, but not two things.
Or even:
two as modes of articulation of what cannot ultimately be divided.
This is perhaps the most elegant way of understanding the tantric multiplication of twos.
X. Śiva and Śakti, Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā: the comparative mirror
The Śaiva and Pāñcarātra material makes the pattern particularly vivid.
In various Śaiva-Śākta and Pāñcarātra traditions, Śiva and Śakti — or Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā in the Pāñcarātra — function as complementary poles: consciousness and its power, the quiescent and the dynamic, the transcendent and the manifestive.
The exact metaphysics varies dramatically among traditions, so any blanket statement would be hazardous. But the structural similarity is unmistakable.
Śakti is not simply something that happens to Śiva. She is the reflective power (vimarśa) through which Śiva’s light of consciousness (prakāśa) manifests and comes to re-cognise itself. Yet Śakti is not thereby a second independent substance. The two form a polarity whose terms become unintelligible when detached from one another. Likewise, Rādhā is not merely something that happens to Kṛṣṇa but is his dynamic energy.
This is closely analogous to the structure we have been examining:
emptiness — appearance
ka dag — lhun grub
rigpa — rtsal
But the comparison should sharpen, rather than erase, the differences.
The Madhyamaka critique does not permit us simply to install an ultimately existent consciousness as the metaphysical ground. A genuinely Madhyamaka reading must also subject any purported ground—including consciousness, awareness, emptiness, and even the ultimate—to the critique of intrinsic establishment. The Noble Nāgārjuna’s radicalism lies partly in the fact that emptiness itself cannot become a new svabhāva.
Thus Śiva–Śakti and Kṛṣṇa-Rādhā may be structurally analogous to rigpa–rtsal without being doctrinally equivalent to it.
The comparison is most fruitful when it concerns the logic of inseparable polarity, not when it becomes an equation of metaphysical systems.
XI. The “two” is generated by analysis—and then overcome without being erased
There is a further philosophical subtlety: Why do we have two at all?
Because conceptual thought distinguishes. This is not necessarily a defect.
Indeed, distinctions are indispensable.
We distinguish:
cause and effect,
subject and object,
emptiness and appearance,
awareness and manifestation.
Without distinctions there could be no discourse, no practice, no analysis, no teaching.
Madhyamaka does not therefore abolish conceptual distinctions. It demonstrates that they cannot be made into intrinsically existent divisions.
This means that the two truths are themselves an extraordinary pedagogical device.
One first distinguishes:
conventional — ultimate.
Then one discovers that the ultimate cannot be found apart from the conventional.
The very distinction that enables the analysis becomes transparent.
Something analogous occurs with tantric pairs.
One distinguishes:
ka dag — lhun grub.
Then one discovers that neither can be established apart from the other.
One distinguishes:
rigpa — rtsal.
Then one discovers that the display is inseparable from awareness.
The pattern can therefore be expressed as:
distinction → analysis → non-separation → transparent distinction.
The final state is not the elimination of distinction.
It is distinction without reification.
This may be the deepest continuity between the Madhyamaka sensibility and the tantric logic of inseparability.
XII. A “Madhyamaka of pairs”
We might therefore speak, cautiously, of a Madhyamaka of tantric polarities: not in the sense that Secret Mantra can be reduced to Madhyamaka, but in the sense that the Madhyamaka analysis of non-inherent existence provides an illuminating conceptual framework for understanding a recurrent tantric mode of articulation.
At the same time, it is essential not to collapse tantric systems into Madhyamaka. Secret Mantra possesses its own contemplative technologies, soteriological structures and, in different traditions, distinct philosophical commitments. Nevertheless, it is striking that many extended tantric sādhana texts open with a formula whose philosophical grammar is unmistakably Madhyamaka-like:
Oṃ svabhāva-śuddhāḥ sarvadharmāḥ svabhāva-śuddho 'ham
OṂ. All phenomena are pure by nature; I am pure by nature.
Whatever the precise historical genealogy of this formula in particular traditions, its logic is significant. The practitioner does not begin by affirming an intrinsically existent deity and then proceeding towards identification with it. The ordinary subject, the phenomena constituting experience, and ultimately the very basis upon which the ritual mandala is established are first released from the presumption of intrinsic existence. Tantric transformation thus takes place within, rather than independently of, an understanding of emptiness.
Nor, however, should every tantric dyad or polarity be retrospectively attributed to the historical Noble Nāgārjuna. The conceptual affinities are real, but historical derivation must be demonstrated rather than presumed. A particularly suggestive example occurs in a hymn attributed to Nāgārjuna, although probably belonging to a later period, in which Prajñāpāramitā is addressed as a Goddess. There she is described as inseparable from the Buddha, the Teacher of the World, just as the moon is inseparable from its light. Addressed as Āryā, “the Noble One”, she is thereby situated within a longstanding vocabulary of personified feminine wisdom. The hymn declares:
“O Noble One, endowed with every virtue, between you and the Buddha, the Teacher of the World, the sages perceive no separation, just as there is no separation between the moon and its light.”
The historical importance of such a passage should not be overstated. Its value lies less in proving that later tantric systems originated directly with the Noble Nāgārjuna than in revealing an early and powerful Buddhist grammar for expressing non-duality through relational inseparability. Wisdom and Buddhahood, feminine and masculine, principle and manifestation can be distinguished conceptually without being established as ultimately separate.
Nor do all Secret Mantra traditions share a single philosophical architecture. The relation between Madhyamaka, the various strands of Yogācāra (Vijñānavāda), Buddha-nature teachings, Mahāmudrā and, eventually, Dzogchen is historically and doctrinally complex, and different Secret Mantra systems formulate the relation between emptiness, appearance, deity, awareness and wisdom in markedly different ways.
Yet beneath this diversity, a recurrent structure can nevertheless be discerned:
Whenever two poles are posited, the question becomes whether either can ultimately be established independently.
If not, the pair undergoes a transformation. It is no longer a pair of things. It becomes a pair of aspects. Then perhaps a pair of functions. Then perhaps a pair of names for one indivisible display.
Eventually the “two” itself begins to function as a teaching device for seeing the impossibility of ultimate division.
This yields a fascinating inversion.
Ordinary dualism says: There are two things, and therefore they are separate.
The Madhyamaka-infused Secret Mantra structure says:
There are two distinguishable poles precisely because neither is intrinsically isolated. The two do not generate separation. Their emptiness makes their relationality possible.
XIII. Complementarity without metaphysical completion
This also clarifies the usefulness of the word complementary.
Complementarity does not mean that each pole supplies a missing substance required to complete the other.
That would still suggest two incomplete entities.
Rather, each pole is the relationally articulated face of the other.
Form is not an incomplete emptiness.
Emptiness is not an incomplete form.
Spontaneous presence is not an incomplete primordial purity.
Primordial purity is not an incomplete spontaneous presence.
The polarity is not between two deficient halves waiting to be joined.
It is between two perspectives on an indivisible process.
This is why “inseparability” is more philosophically precise than “union.”
Union implies that there were two things which subsequently came together.
Inseparability says: The supposed separation was never ultimately established.
This is much closer to the Madhyamaka sensibility.
XIV. The extraordinary possibility: polarity as the expression of emptiness
We can now turn the entire argument around.
Instead of asking: How can two things ultimately be one?
We can ask: What would two-ness look like if nothing possessed intrinsic existence?
The answer might be: polarity without substance.
A distinction can arise without becoming a metaphysical division. Appearance can arise without becoming a self-existing entity. Awareness can manifest without becoming an eternal substance. Energy can express without becoming a second principle. The “two” becomes dynamic rather than substantial. It is a relation rather than a pair of objects.
This is why the Secret Mantra vocabulary can proliferate endlessly without necessarily producing an ontology of endless dualities.
Each pair is another articulation of the same discovery: difference does not require separation.
XV. From the two truths to the two aspects of experience
There is consequently a profound shift from Madhyamaka to tantric phenomenology.
Madhyamaka asks: What happens when we search for intrinsic existence?
Answer: It cannot be found.
Tantra asks: What does experience look like when its phenomena are not grasped as intrinsically existing?
Answer: It can appear vividly, dynamically, symbolically, energetically, even blissfully —without becoming substantial.
Dzogchen radicalizes this further. The question becomes:
What is the nature of awareness in which appearance and emptiness are never divided?
And the answer is articulated through the inseparability of:
ka dag and lhun grub
rigpa and rtsal.
Thus what was a philosophical negation becomes a phenomenological description.
What was: no intrinsic existence
becomes: spontaneous presence.
What was: emptiness
becomes: unobstructed display.
What was: absence of svabhāva
becomes: freedom of manifestation.
This should not be mistaken for a conversion of emptiness into a metaphysical positive substance. Rather, it is an attempt to describe what emptiness looks like from within lived, awakened experience.
XVI. The final paradox
The deepest point may therefore be stated paradoxically. The more thoroughly the two are examined, the less they can be found as two. But the less they can be found as two, the more meaningful their distinction becomes.
Why?
Because their distinction is no longer being asked to carry an ontological burden. It does not have to divide reality into two substances. It can simply articulate two dimensions of an inseparable event.
Thus:
emptiness names the absence of intrinsic establishment.
form names manifestation.
ka dag names primordial freedom from intrinsic establishment.
lhun grub names spontaneous manifestation.
rigpa names knowing.
rtsal names its expressive display dimension.
Śiva names consciousness.
Śakti names its dynamic power.
Kṛṣṇa names supreme lordship.
Rādhā names his energy.
Samantabhadra names awareness.
Samantabhadrī names the space of emptiness.
The vocabularies differ profoundly, but the formal movement is recognisable:
from opposition to polarity,
from polarity to complementarity,
from complementarity to inseparability,
and from inseparability to the recognition that the “two” were never independently established in the first place.
The point is not to arrive at One.
The point is to discover that
Two never had the kind of existence that would require a metaphysical One to reunify them.
XVII. The two that remains
There is consequently a final formulation that may capture the whole phenomenon better than “two becomes one.”
It is: the two remains, but the division disappears.
This is perhaps what is most beautiful about the tantric use of paired categories.
The traditions do not necessarily abandon distinctions once nonduality is recognised.
They become able to inhabit distinction without falling into dualism.
Emptiness remains distinguishable from form.
Purity remains distinguishable from presence.
Awareness remains distinguishable from display.
Śiva remains distinguishable from Śakti.
Kṛṣṇa remains distinguishable from Rādhā in their boundless dance.
Samantabhadra remains still, while Samantabhadrī sways to and forth in his embrace.
But none can finally stand alone.
And therefore the pair itself becomes a revelation.
The two no longer tells us: Reality is divided.
It tells us:
Reality can manifest as difference without becoming intrinsically divided.
This is why the tantric vocabulary of inseparability is philosophically more radical than a simple doctrine of mystical unity.
Mystical unity can still imagine an underlying One.
Inseparability requires no such One.
It requires only that neither pole possess independent being.
The result is a peculiar and fertile form of nonduality:
not one instead of two,
not two instead of one,
but two without ultimate two-ness.
Or, more radically still:
difference without separation;
manifestation without substance;
appearance without intrinsic being;
emptiness without an empty thing;
awareness without a separate observer;
and a world whose very capacity to appear is inseparable from its lack of an essence.
Seen in this light, the extraordinary proliferation of tantric “twos” is not a departure from the philosophical problem posed by Madhyamaka. It can be read as one of the great religious-philosophical experiments in what happens when that problem is carried into the domains of embodiment, visualization, ritual, energy, awareness, and lived experience.
Madhyamaka discovers that no pole can stand by itself.
Tantra asks what becomes possible when that non-self-standingness is not merely understood, but inhabited.
And Dzogchen gives perhaps the most compressed expression of the result:
Primordial purity is not apart from spontaneous presence
Awareness is not apart from its display
The two remain visible.
But nowhere, ultimately, can one find the line that divides them.
