The Expanse That Knows Itself
Dharmadhātu, Dharmakāya, and the Vast Expanse, from the Abhidharma to the Great Perfection
Introduction: One Ground, Four Disclosures
A practitioner who practises a Dzogchen teaching will hear four expressions used as though they named one reality and, a moment later, as though they named four. In the morning, a ngöndro text invites the practitioner to rest in the dharmadhātu (ཆོས་དབྱིངས་, chos dbyings). At midday, another sādhana text calls it the dharmakāya (ཆོས་སྐུ་, chos sku). In the completion stage practices of the early evening, it might become the vast expanse (ཀློང་ཆེན་, klong chen), and at night, when the practice turns to the visions, the expanse of space (ནམ་མཁའི་དབྱིངས་, nam mkha’i dbyings). Translators have offered “basic space”, “reality body”, “great expanse”, and “space”, sometimes using the last for all four. The student is left to suspect either that the tradition is lavishly redundant or that some distinction is being withheld, or that the translators are simply confused.
None of these suspicions is correct. The four terms are not four things, and they are not four synonyms. They are four disclosures of one ground, each answering a different question that may be put to it. The dharmadhātu answers where and whence: the realm in which, and the source from which, everything that appears arises. The dharmakāya answers who and how present: the way the same ground is present as awakened being. The vast expanse answers how far and how free: the limitlessness in which neither centre nor edge can be found. The expanse of space answers like what: the ground under the example of space, and, in the visionary practice, the very sky upon which its radiance appears.
To understand why the Great Perfection can use these names so freely, one must follow each of them through the strata that deposited it. Each arrives carrying the sediment of a different century of Indian and Tibetan thought. What the Great Perfection does with that sediment is without parallel in the Buddhist world. It does not select among the inherited meanings. It shows that they were never in competition, and that each of them described the ground from one side.
I. The Words Before the Doctrine
Dharmadhātu is a Sanskrit compound of two words, each so overburdened that the Indian commentators spent centuries disciplining them. Dharma may mean a phenomenon, a quality, a law, a teaching, a truth, or the nature of a thing. Dhātu may mean an element, a realm, a constituent, or, as Vasubandhu explains in the Abhidharmakośa, a lode: the seam in a mountain from which a particular metal is drawn. The sense of dhātu as a source, a place from which something is taken, is as old as the Abhidharma itself.
In that Abhidharma, there are eighteen dhātus: six sense faculties, six objects, six consciousnesses. The dharmadhātu is one of the six objects, the sphere of whatever mental consciousness knows, which is to say thoughts, feelings, perceptions, intentions, and the unconditioned. In its first appearance the word names nothing exalted. It names the ordinary content of the mind. This detail is easily passed over, and yet the whole later history of the term, and the whole Dzogchen use of it, turns upon it, for the Great Perfection will eventually reclaim this oldest and humblest sense and show that it was never different from the highest.
The Tibetan translators then made a decision with lasting consequences. Sanskrit dhātu divided into two Tibetan words. Khams retained the sense of element, lineage, and potential, as in sangs rgyas kyi khams, “the buddha-element”. Dbyings retained the sense of expanse and open room, and it is dbyings that was used for dharmadhātu and also for ākāśadhātu, the realm of space, nam mkha’i dbyings. The Mahāyāna treatises had long employed space as the principal example of the dharmadhātu. The Ratnagotravibhāga teaches that the buddha-element, though present in every being, is untouched by defilement just as space is untouched by whatever moves within it. The phrase “expanse of space” is therefore no late Dzogchen coinage. It is an ancient pairing of the ground with its favourite example, and the question of what that example cannot say proves to be one of the central questions of the Great Perfection.
II. A Body That Is the Way Things Are
The history of dharmakāya begins in bereavement. When the Buddha passed away, his community was left with two things to honour: the relics of his body, themselves called dhātu, and the Dharma he had taught. The early discourses already say that the Tathāgata has the Dharma for his body. In the Dīgha Nikāya he is called dhammakāya, a title expressing his identity with the truth he taught. The word kāya carries more than “body”. It means also an assemblage or collection, so that the dharmakāya is a body composed of dharmas, of qualities and truths, a Buddha as the gathering of what a Buddha is.
The Prajñāpāramitā lifted this identification from the teaching to the nature of things. The Vajracchedikā declares that the Buddhas are to be seen from the Dharma, for the guides are dharma-bodies, and in the same verse it adds that this dharmatā cannot be known and cannot be cognised. The entire later problem is folded into that single verse. The Buddha’s true being is the way things are, and the way things are cannot be made into an object of knowledge. In the same literature the word dharmadhātu has left the Abhidharma sphere of mental objects and joined the synonyms of emptiness: suchness, dharmatā, the limit of reality.
Two words now point toward one unknowable, the first from the side of the Buddha and the second from the side of things. The Mahāyāna would spend several centuries asking whether they are the same.
III. The Scholastic Settlement
The first systematic answer was given by the Yogācāra and by the treatises attributed to Maitreya. The Madhyāntavibhāga explains that the dharmadhātu is so named because it is the cause of the noble dharmas, which is dhātu in its sense of source, now applied to the ultimate. The Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha arrange the Buddha’s being in three bodies and describe Buddhahood as a transformation of the basis. The Abhisamayālaṃkāra distinguishes four: the essence body, the wisdom dharmakāya, the enjoyment body, and the emanation body. The Tibetan scholastic tradition then speaks of two aspects of the dharmakāya: its nature, which is the purity of the dharmadhātu both natural and freed from adventitious stains, and its wisdom, which is the knowing that realises it. The Buddhabhūmisūtra lays Buddhahood out as five factors, the pure dharmadhātu together with four wisdoms, and in the later schemes of the five Buddha families the wisdom of the dharmadhātu (chos dbyings ye shes) takes the central place.
The form of this settlement deserves to be held clearly in mind. The dharmadhātu stands on the side of the object, as what is realised. The wisdom stands on the side of the subject, as what realises. The dharmakāya is the Buddha in whom the two are one. The scholars are well aware that for a Buddha there is no duality, and they say so. Nevertheless the structure is one of object and subject, however perfectly joined, and a large part of what the Sarma schools say about these terms flows through it. The Great Perfection will hold the same terms in a different way.
IV. The Garbha and the Nearness of the Ground
A second current, that of the scriptures on buddha-nature, narrows the distance between the two terms almost to nothing. The Śrīmālādevīsūtra declares that the tathāgatagarbha is the embryo of the dharmadhātu and the embryo of the dharmakāya, and then makes an identification on which a great deal depends: the dharmakāya of the Tathāgata, when not free from the sheath of defilements, is called the tathāgatagarbha. Covered, it is garbha. Uncovered, it is dharmakāya. The Anūnatvāpūrṇatvanirdeśa goes further, teaching that what is called the realm of beings is not other than the dharmadhātu, which neither increases nor diminishes whether beings are bound or free. The Ratnagotravibhāga gives three reasons why all beings possess the buddha-essence: the Buddha’s dharmakāya pervades them, suchness is without distinction, and they possess the lineage. The Dharmadhātustava, attributed to the Noble Nāgārjuna, offers the great similes: butter present in unchurned milk, a lamp within a vessel, a stained cloth cleansed by fire, which burns the stain and leaves the cloth.
By the end of this stratum the dharmadhātu is no longer a distant ultimate and the dharmakāya is no longer a distant reward. Both are present now, in every being, as the ground, and the path is described as an uncovering. This is the inheritance the Great Perfection receives. It does not invent the nearness of the ground. It takes the nearness with a seriousness that no earlier system dared to sustain.
V. The Strata of Secret Mantra
Secret Mantra did not abandon this vocabulary. It gave it architecture, ritual, and physiology. But in each stratum the words take a different aspect, and the Great Perfection can be seen in its true shape only against them.
In the Yoga Tantras, above all the Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha, the dharmadhātu becomes a plan. The Vajradhātu maṇḍala, the realm of the vajra, arranges the five Tathāgatas around Vairocana, whose wisdom at the centre is the wisdom of the dharmadhātu. The expanse has become a palace.
In the Anuttarayoga Tantras it becomes a womb. The dharmodayā, the source of dharmas, is the triangular form from which the maṇḍala palace arises. The commentary on the Hevajra states that the dharmodayā is the dharmadhātu because worldly and noble phenomena alike arise from it, and the Vimalaprabhā on the Kālacakra identifies this dharma-source with Prajñāpāramitā and Mahāmudrā, the one from whom all Buddhas are born. The Mañjuśrī of the Nāmasaṃgīti, Lord of Speech of the Dharmadhātu, bears this very emblem. In the completion stage the dharmakāya ceases to be a doctrine and becomes an event. In the Guhyasamāja and the Six Yogas, the clear light is the cause of the dharmakāya, and the meeting of the ground clear light with the path clear light is the meeting of mother and child.
In Mahāmudrā, the vocabulary turns toward immediacy. Saraha sings of mind itself, and Gampopa teaches that thought is the dharmakāya. The word dharmadhātu recedes, and dharmakāya becomes the name of the nature of whatever is being experienced now.
In the Kālacakra and Jonang tradition, Dolpopa reads the dharmadhātu and the dharmakāya as the ultimate that is empty of everything other than itself yet not empty of its own enlightened qualities. Whatever one concludes about the controversy he provoked, his instinct was that the ultimate cannot be a bare negation.
In the Ancient School’s Mahāyoga and Anuyoga, Rongzom reads the whole of Secret Mantra through the great purity and great equality of all that appears. Everything is primordially a maṇḍala, not made into one by envisioning. The dharmadhātu is here neither a source to be approached nor a palace to be built, but the way things already are.
When the Great Perfection speaks, therefore, the word dharmadhātu has already lived five lives: the sphere of mental objects, the ultimate emptiness, the purified object of a Buddha’s realisation, the womb of Buddhas, and the plan of the maṇḍala. The word dharmakāya has been the teaching, the unknowable nature of the Buddha, the wisdom body, the garbha uncovered, and the clear light of death.
VI. The Great Perfection Gathers the Terms Home
According to the legends of the Great Perfection, Mañjuśrīmitra arranged the transmission of Garab Dorje into three series: the Mind Series (sems sde), the Space Series (klong sde), and the Instruction Series (man ngag sde). The Mind Series takes the ground as bodhicitta, the all-creating king of the Kunjed Gyalpo. The Instruction Series, which is the heart of the Seventeen Tantras and of the Heart-Essence of Vimalamitra and the Omniscient Longchenpa, takes the ground together with awareness and supplies the methods of recognition and of the visions. The Space Series takes the klong, the vast expanse itself, for its name and its way. Among its tantras stands the Royal Tantra of the Vast Expanse (klong chen rab ‘byams rgyal po), and the great master of the fourteenth century took that phrase for his own name, Longchen Rabjam, Infinite Vast Expanse.
Here the ground (gzhi) is the ground of all saṃsāra and nirvāṇa (‘khor ‘das kun gyi gzhi), and it is carefully distinguished from the kun gzhi that stores habitual tendencies. Its essence (ngo bo) is primordial purity (ka dag). Its nature (rang bzhin) is spontaneous presence (lhun grub). Its compassionate dynamic (thugs rje rtsal) is its unobstructed responsiveness. These are the dharmakāya, the sambhogakāya, and the nirmāṇakāya of the ground, and they are not distant attainments. They are the constitution of every being.
The decisive turn follows. The scholastic settlement held the dharmadhātu and the wisdom that realises it as object and subject, joined at Buddhahood. The Great Perfection declares: expanse and awareness are inseparable, dbyings rig dbyer med (དབྱིངས་རིག་དབྱེར་མེད་). The tantras give them faces, the expanse as the Great Mother Samantabhadrī and the awareness as Samantabhadra, in a union that has never been interrupted. Vimalamitra’s Lamp Summarising Awareness defines this awareness as knowing, lucid, and unchanging. The expanse of the Great Perfection is therefore not the object of a knower standing outside it. It is the knowing of itself.
One consequence returns to the beginning of the history. Every thought, every emotion, every perception that arises in a being is, in this system, the dynamic expression (rtsal) of the ground, arising from the expanse, abiding as it, and dissolving into it. The dharmadhātu as the sphere of mental objects, and the dharmadhātu as the ultimate ground, are the same sphere seen with confusion and without it. The word that began as the humblest of the Abhidharma comes home as the highest, and its referent has not changed at all. Garab Dorje’s third statement, confidence in liberation (gdeng grol), expresses exactly this: whatever arises is liberated in the expanse from which it arises.
VII. What Actually Distinguishes the Four
These distinctions are tendencies of usage and not legislated definitions. A master may, in a given verse, employ any of the four for the whole ground.
Dharmadhātu and dharmakāya. The dharmadhātu is the ground seen as where and whence: the realm in which the whole of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa arises, abides, and dissolves, and the Great Mother (yum chen mo) from whom Buddhas and beings are born, the old dharmodayā of Anuttarayoga. The dharmakāya is the same ground seen as who and how present: awakened being, Samantabhadra, the expanse knowing itself. The scholastic distinction of object and subject survives, but as two faces of one reality and never as two things. There is also a difference of scope. In the threefold scheme of the ground, the dharmakāya is the first of three, the essence. In its fuller sense, as the entire primordial Buddha, it contains the other two as its own display, and then it extends as far as the expanse itself.
Dharmadhātu and the vast expanse. Dbyings retains the memory of dhātu: realm, source, element, lode. Klong carries the feeling of an unbounded spread, without bottom, edge, or partiality. The Space Series chose this word because its way is the dissolving of every boundary. In the texts one tends to find arising from the dbyings and dissolving into it, while resting and liberation are located in the klong. The Omniscient Longchenpa often sets the two words in a single line so that their accents may join.
Dharmadhātu and the expanse of space. Nam mkha’i dbyings may simply be the dharmadhātu under its oldest example. But the example fails, and the tradition says so. Space, in the Abhidharma, is the unconditioned absence of obstruction, inert and knowing nothing. The expanse of the Great Perfection is lucid and cognisant. It is space that knows. In the practice of the visions the phrase takes a further and quite literal sense: the sky, outer and inner, as the field upon which the radiance of awareness appears, and the space element that supports the other four.
VIII. Six Subtleties That Alter Practice
The expanse is not a void. To read the dharmadhātu as a bare emptiness, a mere negation, is the characteristic way of the Sūtras and is not the meaning of the Great Perfection. The ground is gsal stong, lucid and empty, and the lucidity is not added to the emptiness afterwards. A practitioner who meditates upon space as an absence has meditated upon the example and missed what it exemplifies.
It is neither a place nor a state. One cannot enter it, because one cannot be outside it. Because the ground is the ground of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa alike, the expanse is not the nirvāṇic half of a polarity. The deluded mind too arises in it and nowhere else.
It includes movement. An expanse without limit that excluded turbulence would have a limit and would no longer be limitless. Movement is the rtsal of the ground, its dynamism. A practitioner who can recognise only in stillness has found the stillness of the expanse and not yet its vastness. Garab Dorje’s instruction is to sustain recognition whether there is stillness or movement, joy or sorrow, because what moves is the creativity of the expanse itself.
Ground, path, and fruit share one dharmakāya. The Great Perfection takes the buddha-nature scriptures at their word. The dharmakāya is not a remote result produced by effort. The ground dharmakāya is present, the path dharmakāya is its recognition, and the fruit dharmakāya is its full manifestation. Practice is not a journey. It is the falling away of whatever prevented the recognition of where one stands.
The expanse has a body, and the body a visible face. In no other system does the dharmadhātu become a visual field. The Tantra of Self-Arisen Sound and Vimalamitra’s commentary teach that the four lamps arise from the elements of reality, earth, water, fire, and air, supported by space, and that the visions appear within the Lamp of Utterly Pure Space. The Crystal Tube channel, running from the heart to the eyes, is the pathway of this radiance. The expanse is not only realised. It is seen, in the body, in the channels, and in the sky.
It is not empty of its qualities. Primordial purity and spontaneous presence are inseparable, and the dharmakāya is complete with its qualities from the beginning. This is the youthful vase body (gzhon nu bum pa’i sku), in which the vase of the expanse holds the ageless awareness, and in which the two are one.
IX. The Path, Stage by Stage
Before recognition. For most practitioners the dharmadhātu begins as a word and an inference. One studies the Prajñāpāramitā, follows the Noble Nāgārjuna’s reasoning, learns that phenomena lack own-being, and holds “space” as a poetically inspiring notion. The preliminaries purify and ripen, and they are the threshold of the Great Perfection. A taste may come even here, but it is a taste of the example and not of what it exemplifies.
Direct introduction. Garab Dorje’s first statement, the direct introduction to one’s own nature (ngo rang ngo sprod), is the moment in which the teacher points and the word becomes an experience. What is recognised is neither a quiet state nor a vision nor a thought. It is the knowing in which quiet, vision, and thought occur, with its empty, lucid, unobstructed quality. The tradition calls this seeing the face of the dharmakāya. It has two sides that cannot be pulled apart, an openness without edge and a lucid awareness without object. It is the expanse knowing itself, tasted for the first time.
Stabilisation in Trekchö. The second statement, deciding upon the one thing (thag gcig gcod), inaugurates the long work of making recognition continuous. Many experiences arise: vastness, clarity, bliss, the cessation of thought. They are not to be dismissed as nothing, for they are the radiance of the ground, and they are not to be clung to, for clinging turns radiance into possession. Two errors have to be met by contact and not by theory. The first is to mistake blank vacancy for the expanse, and its remedy is the lucidity that the expanse never lacks. The second is to mistake a quiet moment for the whole expanse and to treat every disturbance as a fall, and its remedy is the seeing that disturbance too is the movement of the expanse. In this way the practitioner comes to be in the vast expanse and not merely beside it. Recognition no longer depends on conditions, and thoughts arise and liberate in the expanse, as the third statement says.
The body of the expanse. This stage has a bodily face, and it is no side path. Bliss, warmth, and clarity accompany recognition because the winds are settling in the central channel. In the oral instruction of Tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal, the bodily counterpart of maturing recognition is the enlargement of the central channel. In the early stages, the channels of karmic movement lie outside it, so that recognition holds in stillness and slips in movement. As the central channel grows, the karmic channels come to lie within it, and the winds of thought and emotion flow within, and as, the wisdom wind itself. The body learns, in its own language, what the mind has recognised: there is no longer an elsewhere to which movement can be exiled, because the expanse includes it.
The visions. In Direct Crossing, the expanse becomes visible. The key points of posture, gaze, and breath, with the mouth-breathing of this system, open the channel of light to the eyes. The Lamp of Utterly Pure Space shows the blue expanse, the sky becomes a mirror, and the visions of light arise within it. The four visions mark the ripening. In manifest dharmatā (chos nyid mngon sum) the expanse is directly seen and recognised. In the increase of experience (nyams gong ‘phel) its display multiplies and its blissful clarity deepens. In awareness reaching its full measure (rig pa tshad phebs) the maṇḍalas of the sambhogakāya fill the expanse and are known as self-display. In the exhaustion of dharmatā beyond mind (chos nyid zad pa), reification is exhausted, the display folds back into the expanse, and what remains is the youthful vase body.
The fruit. At death, or in the rainbow body and the great transference, the ground luminosity dawns as the mother, the practitioner’s own recognition meets it as the child, and the elements dissolve into the expanse. The dharmakāya is complete. Yet the expanse that receives the practitioner is not a closed chamber. From it, spontaneously and without effort, the form bodies arise for the sake of beings. The dharmadhātu is where the practitioner is freed, and it is also where compassion continues to arise.
X. Closing: Resting in What Has Never Been Elsewhere
When the great Tertön says “rest in the vast expanse”, the instruction can be heard in four registers at once. It says that one is already in the realm and source of everything, the dharmadhātu. It says that the one who is here, aware, is the awakened presence of the ground, the dharmakāya. It says that there is no edge, no centre, and no corner from which to defend oneself, the klong chen. And it says that this is like space and unlike space, since it knows, the nam mkha’i dbyings. The ground has taken all four names because no single name could hold it.
One may marvel at how much of Indian Buddhism had to occur for these words to be spoken with such simplicity. The Abhidharma gave a sphere of mental objects. The Prajñāpāramitā dissolved it into the unknowable nature of things. The Yogācāra made it the object of a Buddha’s realisation, the scriptures on buddha-nature placed it in every being, and Secret Mantra gave it a womb, a palace, and a clear light. In the Great Perfection all of this is gathered into one claim: the expanse is not other than awareness, thought is its movement, the body is its channel, the sky is its screen, and nothing has ever stood outside it. And the Omniscient Longchenpa took as his name the word the ground uses for itself.
