The Sky of Oḍḍiyāna: Ati-Naya (Krama) and Ati-Yoga (Dzogchen)
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) is worshipped as the cycle of 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, Kālīnaya, the Way of Kālī, Devīnaya, the Way of the Goddess, 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 Atinaya, “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 Krama; 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 Krama 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 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 Krama, 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 Krama or 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 Krama, liberated yogins who taught direct realisation. 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 Krama’s manuscripts line by line, found the Great Perfection rising in his mind as the nearest parallel.
The land of the Yoginīs
The Krama’s own accounts of its origin are remarkably precise about Oḍḍiyāna, and modern study has shown them to be accurate. The Krama’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 Krama 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 Krama’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 Krama 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 Krama 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. A Krama 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 Krama 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.
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 Krama knows it intimately: in Jñānanetra’s own hymn to Kālī, the Mother divides her form into the sixty-five 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 Krama is, at its summit, a teaching of sudden awakening, and its key word for this is sāhasa. The word means a bold, violent leap, an assault, 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 Krama’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 expanded 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 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 Patañjali’s Yoga-Sūtra. 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 alone. 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 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), “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.
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 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, the body held in particular postures and the gaze resting in the open sky, in sunlight or in complete darkness, allows the spontaneous presence of the ground to appear by itself: first as threads and drops of light, the vajra chains and the thig le, then 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 the 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 gaze without blinking and without moving into the stainless 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.
Where the ways part
Love of truth requires us now to look just as carefully at what does not fit. And there is much that does not.
The Krama is Śaiva through and through. Its ground is consciousness understood as a dynamic “I”, a-ham, which knows itself in a ceaseless pulsation of reflective awareness, and which the Krama envisions as the Goddess Kālī in the embrace of Bhairava. Its texts speak of the Self, ātman, as the highest reality. The Great Perfection is Buddhist through and through. Its ground is empty in essence, luminous in nature, and all-pervading in its responsiveness; it speaks of rig pa, awareness, and of ye shes, primordial wisdom, but it does not call this a Self, and it inherits the whole Madhyamaka critique of any essence. The two traditions would themselves have insisted on this difference; each, in its own scriptures, places the other’s view among the lower vehicles.
And yet the difference is subtler than it first appears. The great tantra of the Mind Series, the Kun byed rgyal po, the All-Creating King, speaks throughout in the first person: “I” am the creator of all, the mind of perfect purity, and everything that appears is my own display. And Jñānanetra closes his hymn by saying 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. Here the language of the two traditions is almost the same, because both are trying to speak from within the state itself.
The practices differ greatly. The Krama’s graded path is a sequence of contemplative worship of the circles of Kālī, the twelve, the thirteen, the sixty-four Yoginīs with Maṅgalā at their centre, with offerings that include the transgressive substances of the Kaula rites. The Great Perfection’s practice of breakthrough, khregs chod, rests in the naked recognition of awareness, and its practice of direct crossing works with the spontaneous visions of light, for which, as we have seen, the Śaiva contemplations of the Mālinīvijayottara and the Vijñānabhairava offer real precedents. One may find bridges between them, but not identity.
And the history, as far as we can trace it, does not support a single origin. The study that has done most to recover the Krama observes that the evidence does not allow us to suppose that the story of revelation in Oḍḍiyāna idealises the transmission into Kashmir of a tradition already established there. Jñānanetra was most probably himself a Kashmirian brahmin, active in the ninth century. After him, nothing in the sources suggests that a living connection with Oḍḍiyāna was maintained. The earliest Great Perfection texts, the Dunhuang manuscripts and the works of Nubchen, belong to roughly the same period, and they are thoroughly Buddhist in their vocabulary and their lineages. And yet, no text of either tradition, as far as we know, names the other as its source.
One sky, two rivers
What, then, can be said? Something perhaps more interesting than identity.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, the north-western borderlands of India, Oḍḍiyāna, Kashmir and the Himalayan routes towards Tibet, were a single world of practice. Buddhist and Śaiva Siddhas meditated in the same charnel grounds, before the same goddesses, among the same communities of Yoginīs. The great Buddhist yoginī tantras of Cakrasaṃvara share their sacred sites, their goddesses and even whole passages with the Śaiva tantras of the Vidyāpīṭha. In that world, in the same generations, two traditions came to the same summit from two sides of the mountain: the realisation that the nature of mind is already free, that it cannot be built by effort but only recognised, that it is recognised all at once, and that the recognition passes most truly from heart to heart, in the presence of the Yoginīs, outside every graded path.
This is why the suspicion arises so naturally, and why it is not mistaken in its deepest intuition. If the Great Perfection is right that the nature of mind is the same in every being, and if the Krama is right that consciousness recognising itself is the whole of the path, then those who truly entered that recognition, in Oḍḍiyāna or in Kashmir, in the cremation ground of Karavīra or by the lake of Dhanakośa, entered the same sky. What they found there was not two. What they said about it, in the languages of their traditions, was shaped by those traditions, and the differences are real and should be honoured. But the sky in which both rivers have their source is one.
A practitioner of the Great Perfection may therefore read the Krama’s masters not as a rival school, but as fellow travellers who, in the same land and in the same centuries, tasted the same freedom and sang of it in another tongue. When Nāga speaks of the nectar of awareness that has no location, surging up from its unbound and stainless ground; when Vātūlanātha says that one’s own nature is gained by a single great leap; 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 that recognition is the truest meeting of the two traditions.
