samarasapadalīno niḥsvabhāvaikavīraḥ
śamitasakalabhāvairjñānadṛṣṭiprakāśaḥ |
viditaparamatattvo labdhavijñānasaukhyo
nayitaparamabodho jñānanetrādyanāthaḥ ||“Merged in the state of the same taste,
the Solitary Hero free from intrinsic nature;
the radiance of the vision of awareness,
all phenomena stilled;
he who has known ultimate reality
and found the bliss of realisation,
and who has led others to the supreme awakening:
Jñānanetra, the first Lord.”- Hymn to the Five Wheels of Space, Verse 3
Although this verse sounds like a praise from the Atiyoga tradition of Tibet, it is not. It is a praise from the Atinaya tradition of Kashmir. It is about Jñānanetra, its mysterious founder who received empowerment from the Yoginī Śrī-Maṅgalā in Oḍḍiyāna and founded Kashmir’s first nondual system: the Krama (the Sequential), which also goes by the names Mahānaya (the Great Path), Mahāmnāya (the Great Transmission), and Atinaya: the Path of Ati.
There is a land to the north-west of Kashmir, beyond the Indus, in the green valley of the Swāt, that both of the traditions we are about to consider remember as their source. The Tibetans call it Orgyen. The Sanskrit texts call it Oḍḍiyāna. Its old capital, Maṅgalapura, survives in the name of the modern town of Mingora. For the Great Perfection it is the homeland of the wisdom lineage: the land where Garab Dorje was born by the lake of Dhanakośa, where the tantras of the Great Perfection first descended into a human body, and from which Padmasambhava, the Second Buddha, came to Tibet. For the Kashmirian Krama tradition, which also calls itself the Great Way (Mahānaya) and the Ati Way (Atinaya), it is the place of revelation: the great seat of the north, where in the cremation ground called Karavīra the Goddess revealed the whole teaching to its first master, Jñānanetra, the Lord whose Eye is Awareness.
That two of the most radical teachings of direct awakening in the whole of India should look back to the same small valley is not a small thing. It invites a question that many practitioners of the Great Perfection have felt in their hearts on first meeting the Krama: are these perhaps one teaching, a single sky of realisation that later history divided into a Buddhist and a Śaiva river? This essay takes that question seriously. It listens to the primary sources of both traditions, and to what the finest modern study of the Kashmirian Krama has brought to light. It will not pretend to a certainty that the evidence does not give. But it will try to show why the question arises so naturally, how deep the kinship goes, and what a practitioner may rightly draw from it.
The names of the Way
The Krama is known by many names, and each is a little teaching. Krama means “sequence” or “cycle”: the Goddess Kālī (Thröma Nagmo) is worshipped as the cycle of all-devouring consciousness itself, as it goes out into its objects, abides with them, withdraws them into itself, and rests in what is beyond all phases. It is called Mahānaya, the Great Way, and Mahārtha, the Great Meaning. It is called Mahāmnāya, the Great Transmission, and Rahasyāmnāya, the Secret Transmission. And one name stands out for a practitioner of the Great Perfection: the commentator on the Old Kashmiri Mahānayaprakāśa calls the Krama the essence of the Ati-Naya, “the Ati Way”, the teaching that transcends every other.
The Great Perfection, too, names itself in many ways. It is rdzogs pa chen po, the Great Perfection or Great Completion, rendered into Sanskrit as Mahāsandhi, the Great Union. It is Atiyoga, the Yoga Beyond, the ninth and summit vehicle. And its masters speak of the dgongs pa chen po, the great intent, the Great Meaning, the enlightened mind of the buddhas as it is in itself, which the teaching transmits. The resonance is immediate: a Great Way and a Great Perfection; the Great Meaning and the Great Intent; the Way Beyond and the Yoga Beyond.
We should not ask more of these names than they can give. Artha, “meaning” or “aim”, is not the same word as dgongs pa, “intent”; Mahāsandhi is not attested as a name of the Atinaya; and great titles are found everywhere in the religious language of medieval India. Names alone do not prove a common origin. But they show something real: that both traditions understood themselves in the same way, as the final teaching, beyond every graded path, opening directly onto reality as it is.
What the scholarship has seen
The modern study that has done most to recover the Atinaya from its scattered manuscripts is Prof. Alexis Sanderson’s long essay on the Śaiva exegesis of Kashmir. In it he pauses to make exactly the comparison that concerns us. Speaking of the Atinaya’s (the Krama’s) masters, he observes that the Great Perfection of the Nyingma has much in common with it. Both, he notes, centre on enlightenment through direct experience of the ground: in the Great Perfection, the Great Primordial Purity, gzhi ka dag chen po; in the Atinaya, the pure dynamism of awareness. And both conceive that ground in strikingly similar terms: as an innate, self-established state of unbounded freedom, which the Great Perfection calls ye grol, primordial liberation, which displays all the differentiation of experience, yet in its essence remains untouched by the pairs of knower and known, thought and non-thought, saṃsāra and nirvāṇa.
He sees a second likeness in the way each places itself among the teachings. Both present themselves as the ultimate approach to reality, standing above every other level of revelation. In the Great Perfection, Atiyoga crowns a ladder that descends through Anuyoga, Mahāyoga, Yoga, Ubhaya and Kriyā tantra to the sūtras of the Great Vehicle. In the Atinaya, the highest practice that reaches the goal through pure direct spontaneity stands above the graded worship of the Krama itself, which stands above the Kālī worship of the Northern Transmission, which in turn stands above the rest of the Śaiva world. Both culminate in a practice for sudden awakening. And yet, Prof. Sanderson adds, neither cuts itself off from the levels below. Each draws its meaning from them as a gnosis that transcends the tantric systems from within, and each relies on them for the practical means of serving the world.
He even notices a parallel in the lives of the masters. Gurus of the Atinaya, liberated yogins who taught direct realisation, were remembered as also performing fierce rites for the protection of the realm, just as Nubchen Sangye Yeshe, one of the earliest masters of the Great Perfection in Tibet, is remembered for having turned back an army by the power of wrathful mantras. In both traditions, the summit of the view did not abolish the full range of the Secret Mantra; it held it.
This is the strongest testimony we have that the kinship is not a fancy of the devout. A scholar of the most exacting kind, reading the Atinaya’s manuscripts line by line, found the Great Perfection rising in his mind as the nearest parallel.
The land of the Yoginīs
The Atinaya’s own accounts of its origin are remarkably precise about Oḍḍiyāna, and modern study has shown them to be accurate. The Atinaya’s scripture, the Kālīkulakramasadbhāva, opens by placing the teaching in the north, in Oḍḍiyāna, the great seat, the best of all seats; and a later Atinaya manual adds that it is the resort of Siddhas and Yoginīs. Its masters tell how Jñānanetra received the teaching there from the goddess Maṅgalā and her Yoginīs, the Pīṭheśvarīs, the Ladies of the Seat, in the cremation ground of Karavīra.
Remarkably, these details are confirmed from the Tibetan side. In the thirteenth century the Kagyü master Orgyenpa Rinchen Pal made the long journey from western Tibet to Oḍḍiyāna and left an account of it, the Guide to Orgyen. At the heart of the land, he writes, before the entrance to the town, there stood a self-arisen image of the goddess Maṅgaladevī in sandalwood. To the east of the town he visited a cremation ground he calls Bhir sma sha, one of the eight great charnel grounds: Karavīra, the very place of the Atinaya’s revelation. He tells how the women there knew the arts of magical transformation, and when asked who they were, answered that they were Yoginīs. And he says that when he first saw the land from afar, his old memory traces were stirred, and that in that region, as soon as the least insight arose, ḍākinīs would appear before one.
There is more. The Tibetan collection of the lives of the eighty-four Mahāsiddhas tells that the great Siddha Kambala, master of the Cakrasaṃvara tradition, went to Maṅgalapura, the capital of Oḍḍiyāna, and practised in a cave named Panawa in a place called Karavīra. Panawa is almost certainly praṇava, the syllable Oṃ; and one of the Atinaya system’s own names for Oḍḍiyāna is precisely the Praṇava-pīṭha, the Seat of Oṃ. In one valley, then, in one cremation ground, at the cave of the primordial syllable, Buddhist Siddhas of the Secret Mantra and the first master of the Krama were meditating in the presence of the same Yoginīs.
This is the very same place from which the Great Perfection also remembers itself coming: a world of charnel grounds and lakes, of Siddhas and ḍākinīs, where realisation was passed not only in books but from heart to heart, by sign and by song.
Transmission from the heart
Nothing is closer between the two traditions than their understanding of how the teaching truly passes. The Atinaya distinguishes its graded worship, which leads step by step through the phases of the cycle, from a higher way, which it calls kathana, oral instruction: the direct communication of the state from master to disciple. Its texts speak of the vaktrāmnāya, the transmission by mouth, the teaching that comes mukhān mukham, from mouth to mouth, and of the siddhamukhāmnāya, the oral transmission of the siddhas. One text, the Chummāsaṃketaprakāśa, describes this supreme transmission as passed from mouth to mouth, free of every conception. An Atinaya author tells that those who reach the highest rest through oral instruction alone need not worship the circles of emission, abiding and withdrawal at all; after the circle of the Multitude they pass directly to the Nameless.
One of the Atinaya poets, Nāga, celebrates his own awakening through such instruction in words a Dzogchen yogin could have written. In his Cittasaṃtoṣatriṃśikā, the Thirty Verses on the Contentment of the Heart, he gives thanks for his great fortune: today, he says, he is drenched in the sweetness of an awareness that dwells nowhere, welling up from a ground that is free and without stain, and he stands amazed at what has ripened from the teaching of the practice that cannot be spoken, which he received from the very heart of his master’s words.
The Great Perfection knows this movement intimately. Its lineage is described as threefold: the mind transmission of the buddhas, in which realisation passes without any sign; the symbolic transmission of the vidyādharas, in which a gesture, a word, a glance is enough; and the oral transmission to fortunate human beings. Its highest teachings are man ngag, upadeśa, pith instructions, and the innermost of them, the Heart Essence, is held to have been placed by Garab Dorje in the hands of Mañjuśrīmitra, by him in the hands of Śrī Siṃha, and so onward, until it came to Vimalamitra and Padmasambhava and was carried to Tibet. Garab Dorje’s three statements are themselves an oral instruction of the most direct kind: introduce directly one’s own nature; decide on this one thing; gain confidence in liberation.
Even the names of the masters seem to answer one another. The first master of the Atinaya was called Jñānanetra, the Eye of Gnosis; in the Heart Essence lineage, the master from whom Vimalamitra received the teaching was called Jñānasūtra, the Thread of Gnosis. One is the eye that sees the nature of mind; the other is the thread along which that seeing passes from heart to heart. Names alone prove nothing, and names of gnosis were dear to many yogins of that age. But it is fitting that at the source of both traditions stand masters named for the same wisdom: one for its seeing, the other for its transmission.
This threefold lineage is not found in the Buddhist tantras of India. It is found, almost to the letter, in the Kaula traditions of the Śaiva world, which speak of three streams (ogha) of the teaching: the divine stream (divyaugha), passing among the deities beyond all words; the stream of the Siddhas (siddhaugha), passing among the perfected ones; and the human stream (mānavaugha), passing from master to disciple. The correspondence with the mind transmission of the Victorious Ones, the symbolic transmission of the Vidyādharas and the aural transmission to human beings is complete. And the Atinaya knows it intimately: in Jñānanetra’s own hymn to Kālī (Tib. Thröma Nagmo), the Mother divides her form into the sixty-four powers of the Krama and so “pours forth the divine stream”, the divyaugha, to carry the world across.
The Great Perfection’s ngo sprod, the introduction to the nature of mind, and its ngo shes, the recognition of it, likewise have their exact Śaiva counterparts in the pratyabhijñāpana and the pratyabhijñā, the introduction and the recognition, which gave the Kashmirian philosophy of Recognition its very name.
And in both traditions the Yoginīs are the keepers of the secret. The Krama’s Chummās, its short, sealed sayings in Old Kashmiri, were received, according to the tradition, from the Yoginīs of Oḍḍiyāna in their great assembly. The Great Perfection’s treasures are sealed in ḍākinī script and guarded by ḍākinīs; Padmasambhava himself received teaching in the charnel grounds from the wisdom ḍākinīs. The commentary on the Vātūlanāthasūtras tells that their secret teaching was revealed by the Ladies of the Seat at their great gathering. Whatever one makes of these accounts as history, they describe one and the same sacred geography of transmission.
The sudden leap
The Atinaya is, at its summit, a teaching of sudden awakening, and its key word for this is sāhasa. The word means a bold, sudden leap, an act done in a single stroke without hesitation. The first of the Vātūlanāthasūtras says simply: mahāsāhasavṛttyā svarūpalābhaḥ, “the attainment of one’s own nature comes by the movement of the great sudden leap.” The Chummāsaṃketaprakāśa says, in the voice of the realised: “Having mounted, in a single forceful stroke, the boundless, sudden, unshakable state, I abide in the condition of full awakening.” The Mahānayaprakāśa calls the Atinaya’s practice of devouring all experience without remainder “the birthplace of the great sudden leap.” And Nāga asks, in his Paramārcanatriṃśikā, the Thirty Verses on the Supreme Worship, whether something can truly be called worship if in it one does not, in every movement of awareness, take hold of the absorption of the sudden leap, flooded with radiant, stainless knowing, and find there the rising of expansive consciousness.
For a practitioner of the Great Perfection, this vocabulary rings with a strange familiarity. The Great Perfection is the teaching of the cig car ba, the simultaneous approach, as against the gradual. Nubchen Sangye Yeshe, in his Lamp for the Eye of Contemplation, set the Great Perfection above the sudden and gradual approaches of the sūtra traditions. And the innermost practice of the Heart Essence is called thod rgal, the direct crossing, the leap over the crest, in which the spontaneously present radiance of the ground is recognised without passing through stages. The parallel of sāhasa and thod rgal should not be pressed as though the two were just the same practice; they are not. But the gesture is the same: a direct, unhesitating entry into the nature of mind, not built up step by step but recognised all at once.
Effortlessness
Even more telling, perhaps, is the shared understanding of effort. In the Svabodhodayamañjarī, “The Cluster of Flowers of the Rising of One’s Own Awakening”, a work of the Krama milieu, the author draws a sharp line between himself and the ancients. The ancients, he says, taught that the mind’s activity ceases through practice and detachment, the method of the Yoga-Sūtras. “I teach,” he says, “that this cessation comes without effort, ayatnena.” Abhinavagupta, alluding to this teaching, gives the reason: the activities of the senses fall away of themselves when they are simply not attended to; the harder one tries to hold them down, the more they stir. They dissolve only by being left as they are. The same text teaches its practitioner to rest with whatever is beautiful to the senses, a sound, a form, until it dissolves of itself, and not to cling afterwards to what has dissolved; so that in every moment awareness sinks back into itself, and one becomes liberated while living.
Here we are very close to the heart of the Great Perfection. The Cuckoo of Awareness, one of the earliest Great Perfection texts, preserved among the manuscripts of Dunhuang, sings: the nature of all that is manifold is not two; in its every part it is free of elaboration; though nothing is conceived as “it is like this”, it shines forth in every form as all-good; since all is already complete, the sickness of effort is cast off; resting spontaneously present, one leaves it as it is. The masters of the Great Perfection teach that thoughts are neither to be suppressed nor followed, for suppression feeds them as surely as indulgence; recognised in their nature, they liberate themselves, like writing on water. Abhinavagupta’s remark that holding the mind down only makes it stir the more is a sentence that the Omniscient Longchenpa might have written.
The sky of awareness
Both traditions speak of the nature of mind through the image of the sky, and in both the image is more than an image. The Krama’s highest goddesses are the Khecarīs (Tib. Khachöd, the name of our Root-Guru’s sister), “those who move in the sky”: the powers of consciousness moving in the sky of awareness, cidvyoma, cidgagana. Its poets speak of the nirāvaraṇa-cidvyoma, the unobscured sky of awareness, and of the anavacchinna-cidvyoma, the sky of awareness without limits; Nāga signs his poems as one who swells with the supreme nectar of that sky.
Keyūravatī, the Yoginī who succeeded Jñānanetra, is praised as one who moves in the wheel of the sky, khacakracāriṇī. The Krama’s culminating phase is the Nameless, anākhya, in which every phase dissolves; and Jñānanetra’s hymn to the Goddess praises her as resting in the ground where dissolution itself dissolves, free of the display of being and non-being, yet manifest everywhere at every moment.
The Great Perfection speaks of dbyings, basic space, and of the inseparability of space and awareness, dbyings rig dbyer med. Its ground is ka dag, primordial purity, empty like the sky, and lhun grub, spontaneous presence, luminous like the sun in it. The view, the masters say, is to recognise that awareness is like the sky, which no cloud has ever stained.
In the Great Perfection this is more than a simile. As the French scholar of the Great Perfection Jean-Luc Achard has emphasised, emptiness in the Great Perfection is space: without losing any of its earlier meanings, the absence of inherent existence, the openness of all things, it becomes the living expanse, dbyings, klong, nam mkha’, in which awareness rests and from which its radiance arises. The Sanskrit of the Atinaya knows the same identity in a single syllable. Kha means the sky, and it also means the void, the zero, the empty centre of the wheel. The Atinaya’s highest teaching is a teaching of the khas, the voids or skies of awareness: its most secret hymn, the Khacakrapañcakastotra, is the Hymn to the Five Wheels of Space; and its five flows of awareness, from Vyomavāmeśvarī, she who pours forth the sky, through Khecarī, Dikcarī, Gocarī and Bhūcarī, are five spaces in which consciousness moves, from the sky of the knower down to the ground of things. Nāga speaks of the fivefold pervasion of the sky that unfolds from Khecarī, beautiful in the blossoming of the heart. And the Great Perfection speaks of the five spaces of Samantabhadra, the expanses of the primordial Buddha in which the five lights and the five wisdoms abide. Five spaces in the Atinaya, five spaces in the Great Perfection; the void that is sky, and the sky that is awareness. These are not coincidences.
Kālī who devours Time
There is one more resonance that a Dzogchen practitioner will feel deeply, and that has received little attention. In the Krama, Kālī (Thröma Nagmo) is above all the one who devours Time. Jñānanetra’s hymn praises her as having divided the body of Time into the twelve Kālīs, the phases of each moment of knowing, and then gathered them back into herself as one; as intent on devouring dreadful Great Time, who has devoured all the three worlds, yet remaining slender-waisted, since all that is consumed vanishes into her emptiness. Her final form is the Kālī who consumes Time itself, kālagrāsa, beyond all sequence.
The Great Perfection, too, speaks of the fourth time, dus bzhi pa, the timeless time of the nature of mind, beyond past, present and future, in which the three times are equal. To recognise the nature of mind is to step out of the river of time without leaving the moment. In both traditions, liberation is not a future event at the end of a path; it is the recognition of what has never entered time at all.
The greatest masters of the Great Perfection know this goddess intimately. Thröma Nagmo, the Black Wrathful Mother, Krodhakālī, is the Great Perfection’s own Kālī, and many of its finest practitioners, among them the disciples of Dudjom Lingpa, are said to have reached the supreme goal of Atiyoga through her practice. In the Luminous Heart Essence revealed by the Tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal, the whole cycle culminates in the Secret Practices of Thröma Nagmo. There the Direct Crossing itself is taught through her, and the AH, the syllable of the unborn, is the all-devouring reality into which every appearance, and time itself, dissolves. The Black Mother who devours Time in the cremation ground of Karavīra and the Black Wrathful Mother who opens the gate of Thögal are not two strangers who happen to resemble each other.
The visions of light
The kinship comes closest of all, and becomes most concrete, in the practice that the Heart Essence holds as its innermost secret: thod rgal, the Direct Crossing. Here the yogin allows the spontaneous presence of the ground to appear by itself: unfolding through the four visions, the direct perception of reality, the increase of experience, awareness reaching its full measure, and the exhaustion of phenomena, until every appearance dissolves back into its source. Nothing is constructed and nothing is envisioned; the visions are the radiance of awareness itself, recognised as its own display.
Among the Śaiva scriptures, the one in which the principles of this practice appear most clearly is the Mālinīvijayottaratantra, the root scripture of the Trika, which Abhinavagupta made the foundation of his Tantrāloka. In its chapters on yoga it teaches a contemplation of the reality of visual form, in which the yogin, resting awareness in form itself, passes through a progression of luminous appearances. In that progression the bindu appears, a sphere of light from which the deities of the maṇḍala and streams of rays pour forth; and the progression culminates not in the vision of any deity, but in an experience of light that pervades everything. Here, in a Śaiva scripture, are the principles of the Direct Crossing: the thig le as the matrix of all appearance, the unfolding of vision in stages, and its consummation in a light without boundary.
The same world of practice lives elsewhere in the Śaiva sources. The Svacchandatantra teaches a related contemplation of the reality of Sadāśiva. And the Vijñānabhairava, the great manual of contemplation on which the masters of the Krama drew for their own instructions, teaches the yogin to remain unmoving and to gaze without blinking into the cloudless sky, so that in that very moment he takes on the body of Bhairava; to close the gates of the senses with the hands until the bindu is seen and, dissolving by degrees, leaves one in the supreme state; and to rest the gaze on the light of the sun, of the moon or of a lamp. A practitioner of the Heart Essence will recognise each of these instructions.
The most recent research into the origins of the Heart Essence has found in these Śaiva contemplations, together with the six-limbed yoga of the Kālacakra, the clearest precedents for its visionary practice. It points to a wider current of non-dual yoga in the north-west of India, practising sky-gazing and seeing the bindu, and it suggests that the yogins who gave the Heart Essence its form in Tibet in the eleventh and twelfth centuries drew on that current, most probably by way of Kashmir. The same research notes the other correspondences already met with here: the three streams and the three transmissions; the Śaiva śakti and the Great Perfection’s rtsal, the dynamic power by which the ground displays itself without ever leaving its purity; the introduction and the recognition; and the sealed sayings of the Krama, its Chummās, beside the cryptic symbols, brda, of the Heart Essence.
The Self that is no self
At this point the objection that every student of the two traditions has been taught rises of its own accord. The Krama, it is said, is Śaiva, and speaks of the Self, ātman, and of the great “I”, aham; the Great Perfection is Buddhist, and stands on the Buddha’s teaching of no-self, anātman. Here, surely, the two ways part. But when we look closely, this opposition proves far less simple than the textbooks make it, and far less decisive.
Begin with the word itself. In the Atinaya, and in the whole non-dual Śaivism of Kashmir, the supreme “I” is aham: a, the first of all phonemes, the Unsurpassed, and ha, the last, joined in the bindu. Between them lies the whole garland of the mātṛkā, the matrix of all sound, and so the whole of the universe, gathered into one word. This is not the cry of a person asserting himself. It is the alphabet of reality folded back into its source. And the very same two syllables stand at the centre of the yogas of channels and winds, tsa lung, that the Great Perfection holds as one of its most precious means. The short A burns below the navel; the HAM hangs inverted at the crown. The fire of the A rises, the nectar of the HAM melts and descends, and in their meeting the whole web of the subtle body, with all the letters of its channels, is unified in bliss and emptiness. In the subtle body of the Secret Mantra, A below and HAM above are the two poles of the same word, aham, “I”: the union of all the mātṛkās in one breath. The Krama and the Great Perfection do not merely use similar images here. They join the same two letters, in the same body, for the same union.
Then consider what the Buddha denied. When he taught anattā, the self he refused was the self as it was commonly conceived in his world: a lasting, separate individual, the owner of experience and the doer of deeds, standing apart from all that changes. That is the ego, the ahaṃkāra, the maker of “I”. And every non-dual tradition of India denies it as resolutely as the Buddha did. In the Krama, ahaṃkāra is a product of Māyā, a contraction of awareness, never the goal. A Krama hymn, preserved in a commentary on the Vijñānabhairava, calls this “I” a demon, thirsting for the blood of human steadiness, tearing it open with the fangs of “mine”, and says that it becomes the Goddess’s servant by the mere remembrance of her. What the Krama calls the Self is precisely what remains when that demon has been tamed: not a someone, but awareness itself, without owner and without centre. Between the Buddha’s anattā and the Krama’s Self there is, in large part, a shift in language rather than a contradiction in realisation.
The Buddhist tradition itself knows this shift. The teachings on the buddha-nature, tathāgatagarbha, speak openly of the Self. The Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra teaches that the buddha-nature is permanent, blissful, Self and pure, and it is careful to say that this Self is not the self of worldly beings, not the ego. The Ratnagotravibhāga calls it the perfection of Self, because in it the very duality of self and no-self has been pacified. The tantras of the Great Perfection speak of the bdag nyid chen po, the great Self, the great identity of all things in the nature of mind; and the Kun byed rgyal po speaks throughout in the first person, as the All-Creating King: “I” am the creator of all, and everything that appears is my own display. In the living oral transmission of the Tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal, this is called the selfless Self. Jñānanetra, closing his hymn, says that he, Śiva, has spoken this praise of his own nature through the power of perfect immersion, for the good of a universe that is wholly his own. The Krama’s “I” and the Great Perfection’s All-Creating King speak in the same voice, because both are speaking from within the state itself.
The real danger, and its guard
There is, nevertheless, a real danger in the language of the Self, and it should be named plainly. The word “Self” tends to be grasped. It invites the mind to make of the ultimate a thing, a ground that is posited and held, a conceptually imputed absolute. This, and not the word itself, is the true risk of the Atinaya: that its reality be reified, made into a ground that the mind then clings to.
But the Atinaya knows this danger, and its language guards against it again and again. Its culminating phase is the Nameless, anākhya, which no concept can reach. Its Goddess is praised as resting where dissolution itself dissolves, free of being and non-being. Its Kālī devours even Time, and in the end devours the devourer. The commentator on the Vātūlanāthasūtras praises the master as one who reveals the emptiness beyond the emptiness, śūnyātiśūnya, where awareness, unchanging, shines everywhere with the gaze that moves in the sky. A tradition that speaks so is not building a substance. It is pointing past every substance, including the substance of the Self.
It does not do so with the same clarity as the Great Perfection, and there is no need to pretend otherwise. The Great Perfection’s view was refined over a thousand years of Tibetan contemplation and dialectic, by Nubchen and Rongzom, by the Omniscient Longchenpa above all, and it reached its peak of precision in Mipham the Great, who set out with incomparable care the inseparability of emptiness and luminosity, the ground that is never a thing and yet never nothing. Between Jñānanetra in the cremation ground of Karavīra and Mipham in Kham lie more than a thousand years. The Atinaya can be forgiven for not having had the benefit of a millennium of Tibetan dialectic to refine its view. What is remarkable is not that its language is less exact, but how close it already came.
The practices, too, have their own shapes. The Krama’s graded path is a contemplative worship of the circles of Kālī, the twelve, the thirteen, the sixty-four Yoginīs with Maṅgalā at their centre, with the offerings of the Kaula rites. The Great Perfection’s breakthrough, khregs chod, rests in the naked recognition of awareness, and its direct crossing works with the spontaneous visions of light. Yet both crown their graded ways with the same instruction beyond method: the oral transmission that makes the cycles unnecessary, the introduction that leaves nothing to do. Their outer forms differ; their summits face each other.
Siblings from Oḍḍiyāna
What, then, of history? Here we must speak with care, and also with courage. The study that has done most to recover the Krama observes that the surviving evidence does not by itself prove that a tradition already established in Oḍḍiyāna was carried into Kashmir; Jñānanetra was most probably a Kashmirian brahmin, active in the ninth century, and later sources do not show a continuing link with the valley of the Swāt. That caution is the proper caution of the historian, and it should be heard. But it is a statement about what the fragments that survive can prove, not about what was. The sources of this world are few and broken: a single manuscript here, a quotation there, a pilgrim’s guide written four centuries later. Absence of evidence, in such a landscape, is not evidence of absence.
And what has survived points again and again in one direction. The Krama’s memory of Oḍḍiyāna is exact: the goddess Maṅgalā, the cremation ground of Karavīra, the Seat of Oṃ, all confirmed by a Tibetan pilgrim who stood there. The Great Perfection remembers the same land as the birthplace of Garab Dorje and of its wisdom lineage. Buddhist Siddhas and the first master of the Krama practised in the same charnel ground, before the same goddess, among the same Yoginīs. And the two traditions share not one or two scattered motifs but a whole constellation: the name of the Way Beyond, Atinaya and Atiyoga; the three streams of transmission, divine, symbolic and human, found in the Kaula world and nowhere else in India; the introduction and the recognition; the power, śakti and rtsal, by which the ground displays itself without leaving its purity; the sudden leap and the effortless rest; the sealed sayings of the Yoginīs and the symbolic language of the ḍākinīs; the sky of awareness and the visions of light; the union of A and HAM; and the Self that is no self. Coincidence can explain a parallel. It cannot explain a family.
This essay is therefore convinced that the Atinaya and the Atiyoga are siblings, children of the same mother, and that their kinship reaches back to Oḍḍiyāna itself: to a world of practice in the valley of the Swāt where, before the names Buddhist and Śaiva hardened into walls, Siddhas and Yoginīs transmitted from heart to heart the recognition of an awareness already free. One sibling went east into Kashmir and spoke the language of the Goddess and the great “I”. The other went further on into Tibet and spoke the language of emptiness and the buddha-nature, and there, over a thousand years, refined its view to the clarity of the Omniscient Longchenpa and Mipham. Later, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the Heart Essence took its final form, the siblings met again, and the elder’s contemplations of light, power and recognition flowed once more into the younger’s practice. This cannot be proven from the broken record that remains. But it is the reading that best honours all that has survived.
A practitioner of the Great Perfection may therefore read the masters of the Atinaya not as a rival school, but as family. When Nāga speaks of the nectar of an awareness that dwells nowhere, welling up from a ground free and without stain; when Vātūlanātha says that one’s own nature is gained by a single great leap; when the commentator praises the emptiness beyond the emptiness; when Jñānanetra, in the cremation ground of Karavīra, asks the Mother that the three worlds may become as he saw them, resting beyond every division: a yogin of the Great Perfection recognises the taste, and recognises the voice of a brother. That recognition is the truest meeting of the two traditions, and the sky of Oḍḍiyāna, in which both were born, is one.
