The Net of Magical Display
The Māyājāla cycle, the Guhyagarbha, and the place of Mahāyoga within the Great Perfection
Prologue: a net that holds nothing and lets nothing fall
The name is the teaching. Māyā is magical display: the conjurer's apparition, vivid, functional, and without any substance of its own. Jāla is a net. A net of magical display is therefore the whole of appearance understood as a single, seamless weave in which every knot reflects every other, nothing stands alone, and nothing is anything other than the radiance of the awakened mind. The Tibetans rendered the name sgyu 'phrul drwa ba, “net of magical emanation". Whoever sees the world as this net has, in the language of the cycle, already entered the maṇḍala.
The texts gathered under this name form the scriptural spine of the Nyingma, the Ancient Translation school of Tibet. At their centre stands the Guhyagarbha, the Tantra of the Secret Essence (lit. Womb), which the tradition regards as the single tantra that summarises all the others. Around it are grouped some eighteen further works, each said to unfold one facet of the same revelation: its maṇḍala, its activity, its qualities, its commitments, its empowerment, its display. They are preserved together in the Collected Tantras of the Ancients (rNying ma rgyud 'bum), where they fill two whole volumes and part of a third.
This essay explains what these texts are. It sets out what the Magical Net is, why the Guhyagarbha stands at its heart, where the whole cycle belongs in the Nyingma map of the nine vehicles, how it is read from the summit of the Great Perfection, and why its revelation has never ceased.
I. What the Magical Net is
One scripture, many volumes
The first thing to understand is that “the Māyājāla" is both a single tantra and a family of tantras. Tradition speaks of an original Magical Net in a Hundred Thousand Verses (sgyu 'phrul stong phrag brgya pa), a vast scripture from which the eighteen great tantras of Mahāyoga were subdivided by the Indian master Kukkurāja. Whether one reads this as history or as a way of expressing unity, its meaning is clear: the many texts are one revelation seen from many sides, as a single jewel shows a different face to each direction.
The family therefore has an inner and an outer circle. The inner circle is the Magical Net proper, known as the Eight Sections of the Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul sde brgyad). The outer circle is the whole class of Eighteen Great Tantras of Mahāyoga (rgyud sde chen po bco brgyad), of which the Magical Net is the root and the Guhyagarbha the summary.
The Eight Sections
The traditional enumeration of the Eight Sections assigns each text a function within the whole.
The Secret Essence (lit. Womb) (gsang ba'i snying po), the Guhyagarbha itself, states the magical display of mind: it is the root. The Magical Net of the Goddess (lha mo sgyu 'phrul) describes the display. The Eightfold Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul brgyad pa) perfects the maṇḍala. The Fortyfold Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul bzhi bcu pa) reveals the enlightened activities in their completeness. The Supreme Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul bla ma) is self-manifest wisdom and governs empowerment. The Eightyfold Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul brgyad bcu pa) perfects the enlightened qualities. The Supplementary Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul le lag) sets out the sacred commitments. And the Magical Net of Mañjuśrī ('jam dpal sgyu 'phrul drwa ba) encompasses all the collections of the teaching.
The arrangement is itself a maṇḍala. At the centre is the mind of awakening as it is (the Guhyagarbha); around it are its body (the maṇḍala), its speech (the display and the Mañjuśrī litany), its qualities, its activities, its commitments and its empowerment. To study the Eight Sections in order is to walk around a single palace and look at it through each of its doors.
The eighteen great tantras
The wider class of eighteen, which the Guhyagarbha is said to abridge, is arranged in four groups.
The five root tantras, of enlightened body, speech, mind, qualities and activity: the Union with the Buddhas (Sangs rgyas mnyam sbyor, Skt. Buddhasamāyoga), the Secret Moon Drop (Zla gsang thig le, Skt. Śrīcandraguhyatilaka), the Assembly of Secrets (gSang ba 'dus pa, Skt. Guhyasamāja), the Glorious Supreme Primal (dPal mchog dang po, Skt. Śrīparamādya) and the Garland of Activity (Las kyi phreng ba, Skt. Karmamālā).
The five practice tantras, the "displays" of the great herukas: the Display of Heruka, the Display of the Supreme Steed (Hayagrīva), the Display of Compassion, the Display of Nectar, and the Twelvefold Kīla.
The five tantras of conduct: the Mountain Pile, the Magnificent Lightning of Wisdom, the Array of Commitments, the One-Pointed Samādhi and the Rampant Elephant.
The two supplementary tantras: the Magical Net of Vairocana (rNam snang sgyu 'phrul drwa ba) and the Noose of Methods (Thabs kyi zhags pa).
And over all of them, as the eighteenth that contains the rest, the Guhyagarbha.
One detail becomes significant here. The Magical Net of Vairocana, preserved in the Collected Tantras and also extant in a later translation by the great translator Rinchen Zangpo, is one of these two supplementary tantras. The Magical Net thus runs through the whole class of eighteen, from the root to the supplement.
II. The Guhyagarbha: the secret essence
Its name and its claim
The Guhyagarbha's full title in Sanskrit is Śrī-guhyagarbha-tattvaviniścaya-mahātantra, “the glorious great tantra of the secret essence (lit. womb), definitive with respect to reality". In Tibetan it is dPal gsang ba'i snying po de kho na nyid nges pa, often shortened to rGyud gsang ba'i snying po, and it is also called rDo rje sems dpa' sgyu 'phrul drwa ba, the Magical Net of Vajrasattva. The tradition says that it reveals all things to be self-manifesting, or that it reveals mind and wisdom to be self-manifesting.
That word, rang snang, “self-manifesting", is the key to the whole cycle. The Guhyagarbha does not say that the world should be transformed into the maṇḍala of deities. It says that the world is the maṇḍala, manifesting of itself, and that impure appearance is simply this self-manifestation unrecognised. The five aggregates are the five buddhas; the five elements are their consorts; the consciousnesses are the male bodhisattvas and their objects the female; everything is, and has always been, the assembly of the peaceful and wrathful deities. This is why its maṇḍala is that of the forty-two peaceful and fifty-eight wrathful deities, the maṇḍala that the later treasure-revealers made famous as the zhi khro and that the Bardo Thödol presents to the dead.
Three versions
The Guhyagarbha exists in three lengths: the root version in twenty-two chapters; the intermediate Forty, in fact forty-six chapters, emphasising activity; and the long Eighty, in fact eighty-two chapters, emphasising enlightened qualities and treating the wrathful deities in greater detail. A short Later Tantra (phyi ma) in five chapters supplements the root, as later tantras do throughout the literature of Secret Mantra.
Its history and its defenders
Few texts have been argued over as long as the Guhyagarbha. It was translated in the imperial period by Vimalamitra with Ma Rinchen Chok and Nyak Jñānakumāra, and it has been taught without interruption in the Nyingma since. When the scholars of the later translation schools compiled the canon, many of them doubted the Indian origin of the Nyingma tantras. Yet Chomden Rigpai Raltri, one of the principal architects of the canon in the thirteenth century, included the Guhyagarbha in his inventory, because he had himself seen a Sanskrit manuscript of it, had heard of another, and had judged its content genuine. It stands today in the Old Tantras section of the Kangyur, together with the Magical Net of Vajrasattva, the Eighty, the Magical Net of the Goddess and the Supreme Magical Net.
The tradition that has studied it most closely is also the one that has read it most deeply. Its great Indian commentators include Līlāvajra (Vilāsavajra), Buddhaguhya and Vimalamitra. In Tibet its lineage of explanation, the Kama or “oral transmission" lineage, passed through the Zur clan and was later gathered by Minling Terchen and his brother Lochen Dharmaśrī. And its most celebrated commentary, Longchenpa's Dispelling the Darkness of the Ten Directions (Phyogs bcu mun sel), reads it from the summit of the Great Perfection.
III. Where Mahāyoga stands: the nine vehicles
To understand what the Magical Net is, one has to understand the map in which the Nyingma places it.
The nine stages of the path
The Nyingma divides the whole of the Buddha's teaching into nine vehicles (theg pa rim dgu), arranged not as rival schools but as a single ascent, each vehicle including what precedes it and opening onto what follows.
The first three are the causal vehicles, which treat awakening as a result to be produced from its causes: the vehicles of the hearers, of the solitary buddhas and of the bodhisattvas.
The next three are the outer tantras, in which the practitioner relates to the deity as servant to master, as friend to friend, and finally as equal: Kriyāyoga, Ubhayayoga (or Caryā) and Yogatantra.
The last three are the inner tantras, the tantras of skilful means, in which the deity is not an external presence to be approached but the practitioner's own nature to be recognised: Mahāyoga, Anuyoga and Atiyoga. They correspond to what the later schools call the unsurpassed tantras.
The three inner yogas
The three inner yogas are best understood as three emphases within one realisation.
Mahāyoga, “great yoga", emphasises the stage of generation (bskyed rim). Its view is the indivisibility of the two truths: the relative, which is the pure appearance of the maṇḍala, and the ultimate, which is emptiness, are not two. Its method is to see all appearance as deity, all sound as mantra, and all thought as wisdom, entering through the three meditative absorptions of suchness, of all-illumination and of the seed. Its scripture is divided into a tantra section (rgyud sde), whose root is the Magical Net, and a practice section (sgrub sde), the Eight Great Sādhana Teachings (bka' brgyad) that Padmasambhava received from the eight vidyādharas.
Anuyoga, “subsequent yoga", emphasises the stage of completion (rdzogs rim). Its view is the indivisibility of expanse and wisdom, the mother Samantabhadrī and the father Samantabhadra, and their child, the maṇḍala of great bliss. Its method works with the subtle body, the channels, winds and essences, so that the maṇḍala is not so much visualised as instantly present.
Atiyoga, “supreme yoga", is the Great Perfection itself. Here there is neither generation nor completion to be accomplished, because awareness is primordially pure and its display spontaneously present. The deity is not built and not dissolved. It is recognised as the natural radiance of awareness.
The relationship between the three is not a hierarchy of better and worse practices. It is a gradual loosening of effort. Mahāyoga builds the maṇḍala so that one may discover that it was never built. Anuyoga completes it so that one may discover that it was never incomplete. Atiyoga simply recognises it.
The subdivisions within each yoga
The Nyingma sharpens this picture further by saying that each of the three contains all three. There is a Mahāyoga of Mahāyoga, an Anuyoga of Mahāyoga and an Atiyoga of Mahāyoga, and so on. A Mahāyoga tantra, in other words, may teach the Great Perfection in its own idiom.
This is the key to the place of the Guhyagarbha. Longchenpa, in Dispelling the Darkness of the Ten Directions, takes the tantra's own declaration, that it reveals mind and wisdom as self-manifesting, as the sign that it belongs to the Mahā division of Atiyoga. Classified as Mahāyoga, the Guhyagarbha is read by him in the light of the Great Perfection, from the perspective the tradition sometimes calls “Mahā-Ati".
IV. The Magical Net read from the Great Perfection
Longchenpa’s reading
This is why the Magical Net matters so much to anyone who practises the Great Perfection. Longchenpa did not treat the Guhyagarbha as a manual of visualisation that the Dzogchen practitioner leaves behind. He treated it as the Great Perfection speaking in the language of the maṇḍala. When the tantra says that all things are the maṇḍala manifesting of itself, Longchenpa hears the Great Perfection's teaching that appearances are the self-display of awareness. When it describes the forty-two peaceful deities, he sees the natural expression of the ground. When it speaks of the wrathful assembly, he sees the dynamic energy of that same ground, unimpeded.
The other great readers of the tantra agree in substance, though they differ in emphasis. Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo, in the eleventh century, read the view of Mahāyoga as the view of great purity and equality, not far from the Great Perfection. Mipham, in the nineteenth, wrote his Essence of Clear Light ('Od gsal snying po) on the Guhyagarbha in the same spirit. The result is that, for the Nyingma, the Magical Net is not merely a lower rung. It is the place where the Great Perfection first puts on its ornaments.
Why the net is magical
The title of the cycle itself contains its deepest teaching. A magician's display appears vividly and functions perfectly, yet has no substance. The Magical Net is the world seen exactly so: vivid, functional, and empty. Such a world does not need to be rejected, because it does not bind; nor does it need to be clung to, because it cannot be held. It is to be enjoyed as display.
And it is a net because nothing in it is separate. Each deity of the maṇḍala contains the others; each aggregate is a buddha, and each buddha is the whole. The image recalls the jewelled net of Indra in the Avataṃsaka, in which every jewel reflects every other. What the sūtra shows as a vision, the Magical Net makes into a path: one learns to live inside the net, as the net, until the distinction between the one who sees and the maṇḍala that is seen has dissolved.
From the maṇḍala to the ground
The connection to the Great Perfection can be put in a single sentence. In Mahāyoga, the practitioner generates the maṇḍala and discovers that it is empty; in the Great Perfection, the practitioner recognises emptiness and discovers that it is the maṇḍala. The Magical Net and the Great Perfection meet in the middle of that sentence. This is why the two have always been transmitted together in the Nyingma, why the peaceful and wrathful deities of the Guhyagarbha appear in the bardo teachings of the Great Perfection, and why so many of the Dzogchen masters were also the great holders of the Magical Net.
V. The tantras of the cycle, with their Sanskrit names
Nineteen texts of the Magical Net are preserved in the Collected Tantras of the Ancients. Sanskrit titles are given below where they are attested; where only a reconstruction is possible, this is said. Many Nyingma tantras preserve a Sanskrit title only in their opening line (rgya gar skad du), and some of these titles are themselves back-formations; they should be treated as traditional rather than philological evidence.
1. The Guhyagarbha, root version (rgyud gsang ba'i snying po, 22 chapters). Skt. Śrī-guhyagarbha-tattvaviniścaya-mahātantra. The root of the cycle; mind and wisdom as self-manifesting. Translated by gNyags Jñānakumāra and rMa Rin chen mchog under the instruction of Vimalamitra.
2. The Later Tantra of the Guhyagarbha (gsang ba'i snying po'i phyi ma, 5 chapters). No independent Sanskrit title is attested; Guhyagarbha-uttaratantra is a conventional reconstruction, on the pattern of the Guhyasamāja-uttaratantra. The dependence of all attainments on the unique buddha-body; seminal points and winds.
3. The Eighty (sgyu 'phrul brgyad bcu pa, 82 chapters). The long Guhyagarbha. Enlightened qualities; fuller treatment of the wrathful deities.
4. The Forty (sgyu 'phrul bzhi bcu pa, 46 chapters). The intermediate Guhyagarbha. Enlightened activity.
5. The Supplement (sgyu 'phrul le lag, 33 chapters). Commitments. Its thirty-two chapters after the first correspond closely to those of text 15.
6. The Eightfold (sgyu 'phrul brgyad pa, 8 chapters). The maṇḍala; union with the natural Great Perfection.
7. The Supreme Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul drwa ba bla ma chen po, 13 chapters). In the Kangyur it is titled The Tantra of the Great Guru, from the Secret Essence Definitive with Respect to the Real. Empowerment.
8. The Magical Net of the Goddess (bshad brgyud lha mo sgyu 'phrul, 13 chapters). An explanatory tantra; the display of reality. A Sanskrit form Devīmāyājāla is a reconstruction. Translated by Līlāvajra and rMa Rin chen mchog.
9. The Magical Net of Mañjuśrī ('jam dpal sgyu 'phrul drwa ba, 14 chapters). Skt. Mañjuśrī-jñānasattvasya paramārtha-nāmasaṅgīti, the Litany of the Names of Mañjuśrī, extant in Sanskrit. The cohesion of all the vehicles. The Nāmasaṅgīti is traditionally said to be drawn from the chapter on the net of samādhi of the Māyājāla, though the corresponding verses are not found in the extant Māyājāla.
10. The Magical Net of Vajrasattva, Mirror of All Secrets (rdo rje sems dpa' sgyu 'phrul drwa ba gsang ba thams cad kyi me long, 13 chapters with root text). Skt. Vajrasattva-māyājāla. The hundred deities and their colours and emblems; the immediate path of liberation. Some have taken it for an early translation of the Māyājāla proper, though it differs considerably in content.
11. The Magical Net, Tantra of the Essence of Wisdom (sgyu 'phrul drwa ba ye shes snying po'i rgyud, 13 chapters). No Sanskrit title attested. The gradual path of liberation; translated by Nubchen Sangye Yeshe.
12. The Ocean of Magical Display (sgyu 'phrul rgya mtsho, 22 chapters). No Sanskrit title attested; Māyājāla-sāgara would be the natural reconstruction. The immediate path of skilful means; the stage of generation.
13. The Consummation of the Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul thal ba'i rgyud, 26 chapters). No Sanskrit title attested; the sense of thal ba here is uncertain. The gradual path of skilful means.
14. The Great Display of Consummation (rdo rje sems dpa' sgyu 'phrul drwa ba las gsang ba'i snying po de kho na nyid bstan pa rol pa chen po'i thal ba'i rgyud, 13 chapters). No Sanskrit title attested. Mind, maṇḍala, empowerment and the wrathful deities.
15. The Root Tantra of the Vajra Secret Essence (rdo rje gsang ba'i snying po rtsa ba'i rgyud de kho na nyid nges pa, 33 chapters). Also titled The Great King of Tantras, the Magical Net. Closely parallel to text 5.
16. The Wrathful King of Tantras of Power (khro bo stobs kyi rgyud rgyal). A fragment.
17. The Magical Net for Accomplishing the Lord of Yogins by the Power of the Precious Wrathful One (khro bo rin po che'i stobs kyis rnal 'byor dbang phyug sgrub pa'i sgyu 'phrul drwa ba'i rgyud). Translated by Vimalamitra and Vairocana.
18. The Array of the Essence of the Magical Net (sgyu 'phrul snying po bkod pa, 8 chapters). Ground and expression; the absorption of ground, path and fruit.
19. The Magical Net of Vairocana (rnam snang sgyu 'phrul drwa ba, 10 chapters). Skt. Māyājāla-mahātantrarāja, extant also in Rinchen Zangpo's later translation. One of the two supplementary tantras among the eighteen great tantras. The later schools class the Māyājāla among the father tantras, or sometimes among the yoga tantras.
What else belongs to the picture
To understand the cycle completely, four further things should be added to the list of nineteen.
First, the Eight Sections as a traditional grouping. The nineteen texts are preserved by volume, not in the traditional eightfold arrangement. The eight are found among them (texts 1, 8, 6, 4, 7, 3, 5 and 9), and knowing the grouping shows how the cycle was meant to be studied as a whole.
Second, the other seventeen of the eighteen great tantras, which the Guhyagarbha is said to summarise. Only one of them, the Magical Net of Vairocana, is among the nineteen. The Noose of Methods, the other supplementary tantra, also stands in the Old Tantras section of the Kangyur.
Third, the commentarial tradition, without which the tantras cannot be understood: the Indian commentaries of Līlāvajra, Buddhaguhya (whose Mārgavyūha, Lam rnam bkod, is a classic) and Vimalamitra; Rongzom's commentary; Longchenpa's trilogy on the Guhyagarbha, of which Dispelling the Darkness of the Ten Directions is the chief; Lochen Dharmaśrī's Ornament of the Intention of the Lord of Secrets (gSang bdag dgongs rgyan); and Mipham's Essence of Clear Light.
Fourth, the treasure tradition, to which we now turn.
VI. The net is still being woven: the Magical Net in the treasure tradition
The Nyingma transmits its teachings in two great streams. The long transmission of the Kama (ring brgyud bka' ma) is the unbroken line of explanation from teacher to disciple, reaching back to the imperial period. The short transmission of the Treasures (nye brgyud gter ma) is the revelation, in later times, of teachings concealed by Padmasambhava and his consort Yeshe Tsogyal in the elements or in the depths of a disciple's mind, to be discovered when beings are ready for them.
The Magical Net has lived in both streams from the beginning. The Gathering of the Sugatas of the Eight Transmitted Precepts, which Padmasambhava introduced into Tibet, was revealed again in many treasure cycles, such as that of Nyangral Nyima Özer. The maṇḍala of the forty-two peaceful and fifty-eight wrathful deities, which is the maṇḍala of the Guhyagarbha, reappears in Karma Lingpa's Self-Liberation through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones (Zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol), the source of the Bardo Thödol, and in countless later treasure cycles of the peaceful and wrathful deities. The Magical Net did not close with the translations of the eighth century. It has kept revealing itself.
This revelation continues in our own time. Our Root-Guru, the tertön Gyurmed Ngakrabtsal (Akṣara-Muni-Śāsa-Samudra, or AR), has revealed treasure teachings of the Magical Net cycle. To witness such a revelation is to understand something about the cycle that no catalogue can convey. The Magical Net is not a closed canon to be preserved like a relic. It is the living display of the awakened mind, and the awakened mind has not stopped displaying itself. Wherever a master arises in whom the net is fully seen, the net shows new faces; wherever there are disciples ready to receive it, it speaks again.
This is exactly what the tantras themselves teach. If the maṇḍala is self-manifesting, it cannot be exhausted by any set of texts. The eighteen tantras were said to be subdivided from a hundred thousand verses, and the hundred thousand from a revelation that has no measure. The treasure tradition is simply the recognition that this measureless revelation is still going on.
Epilogue: entering the net
The Magical Net is sometimes presented as a subject for specialists: a thicket of titles, recensions and chapter counts. It is that, and the long labour of the commentators is indispensable. But the list of texts is only the outside of the palace.
From the inside, the Magical Net is the simplest thing in the world. It is this very appearance, seen as it is: vivid, empty, interconnected without seam, the natural radiance of awareness. The Guhyagarbha calls it the maṇḍala manifesting of itself. The Great Perfection calls it the self-display of awareness. The treasure-revealers show that it is inexhaustible. And the practitioner who has once glimpsed it knows that every thread of experience, however ordinary, is already a luminous thread in the net of the buddhas.
