An overview of the root scriptures of the Heart Essence
The Summit of the Nine Vehicles
The Seventeen Tantras are the root scriptures of the Category of Pith Instructions, man ngag sde, the innermost of the three series of the Great Perfection, and therefore the summit of all nine vehicles of the Nyingma. Every teaching of the Heart Essence, from the Vima Nyingthig and the Khandro Nyingthig to the Seven Treasuries of the Omniscient Longchenpa and the Longchen Nyingthig of Rigzin Jigme Lingpa, rests on them. They are the source from which Cutting Through and Direct Crossing, the lamps, the four visions, the bardos and the rainbow body are taught.
They are called tantras, rgyud, because they reveal the unbroken continuity of the ground, the path and the fruit. Yet they differ from all other tantras. The tantras of the lower vehicles teach how to transform the impure into the pure, how to purify, accumulate and accomplish. The Seventeen teach that nothing needs to be transformed. The ground is primordially pure and spontaneously present, the path is the recognition of that ground, and the fruit is the ground recognising itself completely. What the lower tantras attain at the end of the path, these tantras introduce at the beginning.
Tsele Natsok Rangdrol, summarising the teachings of Vimalamitra, the Omniscient Longchenpa and Khenpo Ngakchung, describes them in two sentences that define the whole collection: these tantras teach in full everything a single person needs in order to practise and to reveal complete buddhahood within a single lifetime; and each of them is complete in itself, not dependent on the others. Seventeen tantras and seventeen complete paths; and yet one teaching, like a single moon reflected in seventeen waters.
How the Seventeen Came into the World
The tradition traces the Seventeen through a chain of Vidyādharas, from the dharmakāya to the hermitages of Tibet, in which each link both received and reshaped the teaching. The history is at once a lineage of persons and a description of how the inconceivable becomes transmissible.
From Samantabhadra to Garab Dorje
The tantras of the Great Perfection were spoken by Samantabhadra in the mind-to-mind transmission, passed through Vajrasattva by symbolic transmission, and given to the first human Vidyādhara, Garab Dorje, the Prahevajra of Oḍḍiyāna. Garab Dorje is said to have gathered six million four hundred thousand verses of the Great Perfection, and at his passing into light he left his testament, the Three Words That Strike the Vital Point: introduction to one’s own nature, making a single decision, and confidence in the liberation of arising states.
Mañjuśrīmitra and Śrī-Siṃha
His chief disciple, Mañjuśrīmitra, divided the teachings into the three series: the Mind Series, the Space Series and the Category of Pith Instructions. Mañjuśrīmitra’s disciple, Śrī-Siṃha, divided the Pith Instructions in turn into four cycles: the outer, the inner, the secret and the innermost unexcelled. The Seventeen Tantras form the innermost unexcelled cycle, the most secret of all.
Jñānasūtra, Vimalamitra and Padmasambhava
Śrī-Siṃha transmitted these tantras to Jñānasūtra and Vimalamitra, and, according to the tradition of the Khandro Nyingthig, to Padmasambhava as well. Vimalamitra also came to Tibet at the invitation of King Trisong Detsen. He taught the Pith Instructions to a small circle of disciples, among them the king and Nyang Tingdzin Zangpo, and united the explanatory lineage, with its scriptures, and the hearing lineage, without scriptures. The texts were concealed and later revealed as the Vima Nyingthig, the Heart Essence of Vimalamitra. Padmasambhava concealed his own instructions on the same cycle, which were revealed as the Khandro Nyingthig, the Heart Essence of the Ḍākinīs.
The Tibetan lineage to Longchenpa
The Vima Nyingthig passed through Neten Dangma Lhungyal and Chetsün Senge Wangchuk, whose body dissolved into light, through Zhangtön and his successors, to the great yogin Kumārarāja, and from him to the Omniscient Longchen Rabjam. Longchenpa clarified the Vima Nyingthig in the fifty-one sections of the Lama Yangtig, and the Khandro Nyingthig in the Khandro Yangtig; with his own Zabmo Yangtig, these form the Nyingthig Yabzhi, the Fourfold Heart Essence. In the Treasury of Words and Meanings and the Treasury of the Supreme Vehicle he gave the Seventeen their systematic exposition, quoting them on almost every page.
The tantras themselves were preserved in the Collected Tantras of the Ancient School, the Nyingma Gyübum. Four centuries after Longchenpa, Rigzin Jigme Lingpa received the entire Heart Essence from him in visions and revealed the Longchen Nyingthig, through which the teaching of the Seventeen became a living path for countless practitioners.
How the Seventeen Fit Together
The lists of the Seventeen vary slightly from tradition to tradition. Some include the Tantra of Pointing-Out Instructions, others the Tantra of the All-Illuminating Sphere, Thig le kun gsal, in its place. To the seventeen is added an eighteenth, the Tantra of the Black Wrathful Ekajaṭī, guardian of the teachings; and a tradition connected with Padmasambhava adds a nineteenth, the Tantra of the Blazing Expanse of Luminosity. The order in which they are listed also varies. What does not vary is the sense that together they form a complete path, and that each, in its own way, contains the whole.
Read in the light of the path, the tantras fall naturally into a sequence that follows the practitioner from the first entry into the teaching to the final fruit. This sequence is not a canonical classification but a way of seeing how their individual emphases fit together.
At the centre stands the root, the Tantra of the Reverberation of Sound, which contains in itself the subjects of all the others. The entry to the path is given by the Tantra of Self-Existing Perfection, which confers the four empowerments of the Great Perfection. The ground and the nature of awareness are established by the Tantra of Graceful Auspiciousness. The lamps and the introduction to awareness are taught in the Blazing Lamp, the Mirror of the Heart of Vajrasattva and the Tantra of Pointing-Out Instructions. View, meditation and conduct are resolved in the Tantra of Self-Arising Awareness and the Tantra Without Letters. The errors and sidetracks of the path are cut through by the Mirror of the Heart of Samantabhadra and the Array of Jewels. The maturing of awareness, its signs and its qualities are taught in the Perfected Lion, the Pearl Necklace, the Tantra of Self-Liberated Awareness and the Heap of Jewels. And death, the bardo and the fruit are the subject of the Six Expanses of Samantabhadra, the Union of the Sun and Moon and the Blazing Relics.
The sequence moves exactly as the eleven vajra topics of the Pearl Necklace Tantra move: from the ground, through the way the ground abides in the body and shines through the gateways, through the practice and its measures, to the bardo where mother and child meet and the stage of liberation that comes first. The Seventeen are not a library of separate books. They are a single body of teaching, articulated in seventeen limbs.
The Tantras One by One: The Root, the Entry, the Ground and the Introduction
The Reverberation of Sound
sGra thal ’gyur, the root tantra of the Seventeen. Its title means the sound that breaks through, the sound that passes beyond: the self-sound of dharmatā, which pervades everything and of which all other sounds are reverberations. It is the most extensive of the Seventeen and the one the Omniscient Longchenpa quotes most often, because it gathers in itself the subjects of all the others: the ground, the lamps, the visions, the holdings of the mind, the bardos and the fruit. Its own particular emphasis, as Tsele Natsok Rangdrol summarises it, is how to reveal the level of the nirmāṇakāya and how to accomplish the benefit of others through practices related to sound. The tantra teaches that sound, light and rays are the first appearances of the ground, and that recognising them as one’s own display is liberation. It is the tantra in which the voice of the dharmakāya is heard most directly.
The Tantra of Self-Existing Perfection
rDzogs pa rang byung, the tantra of entry. It teaches how to become a suitable vessel for the teachings by means of the four empowerments of the Great Perfection: the elaborate, the unelaborate, the very unelaborate and the utterly unelaborate. These empowerments move from the outer ritual, with maṇḍala and substances, to the direct introduction of awareness without any support at all, the empowerment of the dynamic expression of awareness. The tantra thus shows that in the Great Perfection empowerment is not merely a ritual of authorisation but itself an introduction to the nature of mind, refined in four stages until nothing remains but awareness meeting itself.
The Tantra of Graceful Auspiciousness
bKra shis mdzes ldan, the tantra of the ground. It teaches how to establish the nature of awareness, and how to identify both the basis of confusion and the basis of unmistaken wisdom. It answers the questions that lie beneath every practice: what is the ground, how did beings stray from it, and how does wisdom remain unconfused even in the midst of confusion. It is the primary source for the Dzogchen teaching that saṃsāra and nirvāṇa have one ground and diverge only through recognition and its absence, the doctrine condensed in the Aspiration of Samantabhadra as one ground, two paths and two fruits.
The Blazing Lamp
sGron ma ’bar ba, the tantra of the lamps. It teaches how to identify the lamps through which awareness shines, their terminology, the analogies for how wisdom arises, the unity of awareness, how to clear away misconceptions about self-knowing, and how to practise. The lamps are the subtle anatomy of the Heart Essence: the abiding ground in the heart, the luminous channel, the far-reaching watery lamp, the lamp of the pure expanse, the lamp of the empty spheres and the lamp of self-arising wisdom. The Blazing Lamp shows that these are not physical structures to be studied but the self-display of awareness, and that self-knowing is not a reflexive act of a subject observing itself, but the very nature of luminosity.
The Mirror of the Heart of Vajrasattva
rDo rje sems dpa’ snying gi me long, the tantra of introduction. It teaches how the lamps are the self-display of awareness, and it gives twenty-one pointing-out instructions by which people of different types and capacities recognise wisdom. It further teaches the four key points and how to practise. Its great gift is its adaptability: recognising that disciples differ, it offers many doors to the same recognition. The heart of Vajrasattva is the mirror in which every face sees its own nature.
The Tantra of Pointing-Out Instructions
Ngo sprod sprad pa, the tantra of indications. It describes how the essence of awareness is applied in practice through various indications, signs and symbols. Where the Mirror of the Heart of Vajrasattva gives the introductions, this tantra shows how to carry them into practice, so that the recognition received from the master becomes the practitioner’s own living experience. In those lists that include instead the All-Illuminating Sphere, Thig le kun gsal, that tantra takes this place, teaching the single sphere of awareness that illuminates everything.
The Tantras One by One: View and Practice, Errors and Maturation
The Tantra of Self-Arising Awareness
Rig pa rang shar, the tantra of view, meditation and conduct. It teaches how to resolve all three, so that the view is not a theory, meditation not a fabrication and conduct not a discipline imposed from outside, but all three are the self-arising of awareness. It is one of the most extensive of the Seventeen, and much of the Heart Essence’s detailed teaching on practice and its fruit is drawn from it. It is a principal scriptural source for the sixteen bhūmis of the Great Perfection, describing the highest stages in terms of the visions themselves, up to the sixteenth, Unexcelled Wisdom, ye shes bla ma, where wisdom dawns naturally on the ground of primordial purity and nothing higher remains. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa’s great manual on Cutting Through and Direct Crossing bears the name of that stage.
The Tantra Without Letters
Yi ge med pa, the tantra of the actual practice. It describes the means of practice itself: how to abandon activities, how to live in places free from defects, the four ways of freely resting, how to sustain naturalness, and the undefiled method of the main practice. Its title is its teaching. The practice it describes cannot be written, because it consists in leaving everything as it is, without adding a single letter of fabrication. It is the scriptural root of the four ways of leaving things as they are, the cokzhak, in which body, eyes, awareness and appearances are left in their natural condition.
The Mirror of the Heart of Samantabhadra
Kun tu bzang po thugs kyi me long, the tantra of discernment. It shows how to identify and cut through pitfalls and errors, and how to establish what is innate. Where other tantras introduce awareness, this one guards it, holding up the mirror of Samantabhadra’s own mind so that the practitioner can see where his meditation has strayed into mere calm, into fabricated experience, or into a subtle grasping at the view itself. What remains when every error has been cut is the innate, which was never produced and therefore can never be lost.
The Array of Jewels
Nor bu phra bkod, the tantra of sidetracks. It shows how to eliminate the defects and deviations connected with the view and with the practice of meditation, conduct and fruition. Its title evokes an array of jewels inlaid in a single setting: every aspect of the path set in its proper place, so that none becomes a distortion. Deviations in the view lead to nihilism or eternalism; deviations in meditation to dullness or agitation; deviations in conduct to licence or rigidity; deviations in the fruit to the expectation of something other than what was always present. The Array of Jewels corrects them one by one, until the whole path shines with its own clarity.
The Tantra of the Perfected Lion
Seng ge rtsal rdzogs, the tantra of signs. It explains the degrees of progress and the signs that occur, how to stabilise awareness and how to increase experience. The lion is the image of fearless awareness; its prowess perfected is awareness that no longer wavers. The tantra gives the practitioner the measures by which progress can be known in body, speech and mind, and the methods by which experience, once it has begun, can be deepened without being grasped.
The Pearl Necklace
Mu tig phreng ba, the tantra of maturation. It is taught to prevent awareness from slipping back, by bringing it to maturity, and it explains how to practise, how to become familiar and how to be liberated. It is also the source of the eleven vajra topics, the great summary of the whole Heart Essence: the ground, the manner of delusion, buddha-nature abiding in beings, its seat in the heart, its pathways, its gateways, its field, the practice, the gauge with its four confidences, the bardo where mother and child meet, and the stage of liberation that comes first. The Omniscient Longchenpa made this sequence the architecture of the Treasury of Words and Meanings.
The Tantras One by One: Liberation, Qualities, Death and Fruit
The Tantra of Self-Liberated Awareness
Rig pa rang grol, the tantra of self-liberation. It teaches that awareness is uncreated and yet liberated by itself, how to gain mastery over appearances, how to grow familiar with the display of awareness, and how all of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are naturally freed. Its central insight is that liberation is not an act performed upon awareness but its own nature. Thoughts, appearances, experiences and even the visions of the path are liberated in the very instant of their arising, because they never left the awareness from which they arose.
The Heap of Jewels
Rin chen spungs pa, the tantra of qualities. It explains how all the qualities that manifest are of the essence of space and awareness. The kāyas, the wisdoms, the pure realms and the enlightened activities are not acquired from outside at the end of the path; they are a heap of jewels already lying within the expanse, revealed as awareness recognises its own space. The tantra thus guards against the subtle belief that the fruit is something new, showing that every quality of buddhahood is the natural richness of the ground.
The Six Expanses of Samantabhadra
Kun tu bzang po klong drug pa, the tantra of the six realms. It teaches how to prevent rebirth in the six realms, how to purify them, and how to manifest the pure realms of self-display. Each of the six realms is the congealed form of an affliction, and each has its corresponding expanse of wisdom. When the expanse is recognised, the realm is not merely escaped but transformed into its pure counterpart. The tantra is closely connected with the instructions for the bardo of becoming, where the doors of rebirth are closed and the natural nirmāṇakāya realms are opened.
The Union of the Sun and Moon
Nyi zla kha sbyor, the tantra of the bardo. It shows what a person experiences in the intermediate states after death, and how to meet each of them. It teaches how to resolve the master’s oral instructions in the bardo of this life, how to stabilise awareness in the bardo of dying, how to attain awakening by recognising awareness in the bardo of dharmatā, and, if necessary, how to be assured of rebirth in a natural nirmāṇakāya realm in the bardo of becoming, there to attain buddhahood without further rebirths. Its title names the union of the white and red elements, the lunar and solar energies, method and wisdom, whose meeting at the heart at death opens the dawning of the ground luminosity. The tantra also contains the Song of the Vajra, which it calls the indestructible vajra dhāraṇī and the conduct of the mind of all the Buddhas, and which it instructs the yogin to sing again and again.
The Blazing Relics
sKu gdung ’bar ba, the tantra of signs at death. It describes the outer and inner signs of awareness reaching maturity, which appear before and after the time of death, in order to inspire and instil confidence in others. When a practitioner of the Great Perfection passes away, the tradition recognises the measure of realisation in what remains: the relics, the lights, the sounds, the shrinking of the body, the rainbow. The tantra explains the meaning of these signs so that they may serve beings, testifying that the path described in the other tantras truly leads to its fruit.
The guardian and the hidden nineteenth
To the seventeen is added the Tantra of the Black Wrathful Śrī Ekajaṭī, dPal e ka dza ti nag mo khros ma, which describes how to protect the practitioner against harm. Ekajaṭī, the single-plaited protectress of the Secret Mantra, is the special guardian of the Heart Essence, and her tantra seals the collection, making eighteen. In a tradition connected with Padmasambhava there is a nineteenth, the Tantra of the Blazing Expanse of Luminosity, Klong gsal ’bar ma, which belongs to the Khandro Nyingthig and completes the cycle as the ḍākinīs transmitted it.
Seventeen Waters, One Moon
Each of the Seventeen is complete in itself, and yet each is also a facet of one teaching. Taken together, they describe the whole arc of awakening in the Great Perfection: the empowerments that open the door, the ground and the nature of awareness, the lamps through which awareness shines and the introductions through which it is recognised, the view, meditation and conduct that sustain recognition, the discernment that protects it from error, the signs and qualities of its maturing, its self-liberation, and finally death, the bardo and the fruit, together with the signs that testify to that fruit for others.
The tantras do not describe this arc as a ladder. Each speaks from the summit. The Reverberation of Sound hears the whole path in the self-sound of dharmatā; the Tantra Without Letters finds it in leaving everything as it is; the Union of the Sun and Moon finds it in the meeting of mother and child at death; the Heap of Jewels finds it in the qualities that were always present.
This is why the Omniscient Longchenpa could weave them into a single fabric, and why a practitioner who receives the transmission of even one of them receives the whole. It is also why the tradition has guarded them so carefully: not because they are complicated, but because they are direct. They do not lead towards the nature of mind; they speak from it. To read them is to be addressed by Samantabhadra himself, in seventeen voices that are one voice, saying in every chapter what the Aspiration of Samantabhadra says in one line: recognise the ground as your own.
