The Question and Its Answer
Rigpa is neither one nor many. It is not a private possession that each being owns, and it is not a single universal substance in which all beings share. Yet the Great Perfection does not leave the matter in perfect symmetry. Because number belongs only to what can be divided and counted, and rigpa is empty in essence, every attempt to count it fails; but because its nature is luminous and self-knowing, ‘it’ is recognised in each being as that being’s own face. The tradition therefore speaks of one ground and two paths, of countless continua and a single sphere, and it leans, without ever coming to rest, towards not two rather than towards one.
The question is asked again and again by those who meet the teachings: Do I have my own rigpa? Is there one rigpa in which all of us partake? When the tantras speak of Samantabhadra as the ground, is there one Samantabhadra or are there as many as there are beings? The questions are conceptual, and the masters often answer them with silence or a smile. But they are not idle. They touch the deepest structure of the view, and a wrong answer in either direction distorts practice. To say that each being has a separate rigpa turns awareness into a soul. To say that all share one rigpa turns it into a cosmic Self. The Great Perfection is neither a doctrine of souls nor a doctrine of the Absolute Self, and the precision with which it avoids both is one of its quiet glories.
To see that precision clearly, one must walk the long road of Indian and Tibetan reflection on the one and the many: through the Noble Nāgārjuna’s refusal of both, through the Sāṅkhya of many puruṣas and the Advaita-Vedānta of one Brahman, through the Buddhist schools from the Abhidharma to the treatises on buddha-nature, through the great Tibetan debates, and finally into the language of the Heart Essence itself, where essence, nature and compassion give the question its exact answer.
Why Number Fails
Number is a property of things that have their own boundaries. One requires something that is itself and not another; many requires several such things. Where nothing has its own boundary, neither one nor many can take hold. This is the root insight from which every subtle answer to the question grows.
The Noble Nāgārjuna places it at the very threshold of the Root Verses on the Middle Way. In the dedicatory verse he praises the Buddha who taught dependent arising as free of eight extremes: without cessation and without arising, without annihilation and without permanence, anekārtham anānārtham, not of one reality and not of many realities, without coming and without going. Unity and plurality stand beside arising and ceasing as conceptual extremes imposed on what is dependently arisen. They are not false descriptions of a real thing; they are categories that find no real thing to describe.
The reasoning was later sharpened into one of the great arguments of the Middle Way, the argument from the absence of one and many. The Glorious Śāntarakṣita opens his Ornament of the Middle Way with it: whatever is truly real must be either truly one or truly many; nothing is truly one, for everything has parts, directions and moments; and since the many are only collections of ones, nothing is truly many either. Therefore nothing is truly real. The argument dissolves the self and the atom alike, and it applies with equal force to any attempt to make awareness into a countable entity.
Two consequences follow, and both will matter for the Great Perfection. First, the question “one rigpa or many?” presupposes that rigpa is the kind of thing that can be counted. If it were, it would be conditioned, divisible and impermanent, and it would not be rigpa. Second, the Middle Way does not replace one and many with a third, mysterious quantity. Its answer is not a number at all. It is the recognition that the question has been asked about something that number does not reach.
And yet the Mahāyāna does not leave the two extremes in equal weight everywhere. The tradition that follows the Noble Nāgārjuna calls reality advaya or advaita, nondual, and the whole later Mahāyāna speaks of the dharmadhātu, the expanse of reality, in the singular, of the one taste of all phenomena, and of the undifferentiated suchness of all beings. The grammar of the singular is used, while the metaphysics of the singular is refused. This delicate asymmetry, not two without one, is the thread to follow.
The Two Indian Poles: Many Puruṣas and One Brahman
Long before the Buddhist schools refined their answer, the philosophies of India had already set out the two great positions between which every later answer moves. Sāṅkhya affirmed many conscious principles of identical nature. The Aupaniṣadas (the early Advaita-Vedāntins) affirmed one consciousness appearing as many. Each saw something true, and each, from the Buddhist point of view, reified it.
Sāṅkhya: innumerable puruṣas of one nature
Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṅkhyakārikā argues explicitly for the plurality of conscious principles. In its eighteenth verse it gives the reasons: because birth, death and the sense faculties are allotted to each individually; because beings do not act all at once; and because the three guṇas or qualities of primordial nature are distributed differently in each, the plurality of puruṣas is established. If there were only one puruṣa, when one being was born all would be born, when one died all would die, when one was liberated all would be liberated. The next verse describes what every puruṣa is: a witness, isolated, indifferent, a seer, not an agent. The puruṣas are innumerable, but each is pure consciousness of exactly the same nature, untouched by matter, merely beholding.
This is a strikingly modern intuition. It answers the very objection that troubles students of the Great Perfection: if awareness were one, why did Samantabhadra’s primordial liberation not liberate everyone? Sāṅkhya’s answer is that liberation is individual because consciousnesses are many, though their nature is identical. But Sāṅkhya pays for this answer with a heavy price. Its puruṣas are eternal, partless, self-existent entities, and the plurality is ultimate. Consciousness is many in its very being. Nothing in Sāṅkhya can account for how those many identical lights could ever recognise that they are not separate.
Advaita-Vedānta: one consciousness, many reflections
The Upaniṣads declare the opposite. Ekam evādvitīyam, says the Chāndogya: one only, without a second. Śaṅkara’s Advaita-Vedānta answers the Sāṅkhya objection by distinguishing the one Brahman from the many limiting adjuncts, the upādhis, through which it appears as many selves, like one sun reflected in many pots of water. Bondage and liberation belong to the reflections, not to the sun; when one pot breaks, its reflection returns to the sun, while the others remain. Here plurality is real only at the level of appearance, and consciousness itself is singular.
The Advaitin answer gains what Sāṅkhya lost: the many can awaken to their identity because they were never truly many. But it pays its own price. Consciousness becomes a single, permanent, self-existent Self, and the Buddhist analysis finds in this the subtlest form of the very clinging to self that the path is meant to dissolve.
A third voice
The nondual Śaiva traditions of Kashmir offer a refined variant. In the Heart of Recognition, Kṣemarāja says that consciousness, free in itself, becomes manifold through the division of corresponding subjects and objects. Śiva alone is, and the many knowers are his self-contractions. This is closer to the language of the Great Perfection than either Sāṅkhya or Advaita-Vedānta, because it treats multiplicity as the free play of one awareness rather than as an illusion or an ultimate plurality. Yet it still names that awareness as one supreme Self, and so it remains, from the Buddhist side, a doctrine of the one.
The Buddhist traditions refuse both poles, but not by standing in the middle between them. They refuse the ground on which both stand: the assumption that consciousness is something that has a number.
The Buddhist Schools: From Many Streams to One Expanse
The Buddhist schools approach the question from the other end. They begin not with a self that might be one or many but with the denial of any self at all, and then ask how, without a self, beings can be distinct, and how, without a self, they can awaken to what is not distinct. Their answers move, school by school, from an emphasis on the many towards an emphasis on what is not many, without ever arriving at the one.
The Abhidharma: separate continua without a self
For the Abhidharma, a being is a saṃtāna, a continuum of momentary physical and mental events linked by cause and effect. There is no owner of the stream, but the streams are distinct: my karma ripens in my continuum, not in yours; my liberation is the cessation of the afflictions in my continuum. Plurality here is real at the level of conventional truth, and it is the plurality of causal lines, not of souls. This already answers half of the Sāṅkhya objection without positing a puruṣa: liberation is individual because karmic continua are individual, not because there are many eternal consciousnesses.
Dharmakīrti and Ratnakīrti: proving and refuting other minds
The epistemologists turned the question into a formal problem. Dharmakīrti wrote a short treatise, the Proof of Other Continua, arguing that we can infer the existence of other minds from the speech and actions we observe, just as we know our own intentions to cause our own speech and actions. At the level of conventional, inferential knowledge, other mindstreams are established.
Some four centuries later, Ratnakīrti of Vikramaśīla wrote the Refutation of Other Continua. From the standpoint of the Yogācāra’s ultimate truth, he argues, the very distinction between one’s own continuum and another’s cannot be established, because no cognition ever reaches anything outside itself; what is called “another mind” is only an appearance within cognition. Ratnakīrti does not conclude that there is one great mind; he concludes that the division into self and other is a construction that does not survive analysis. Here, for the first time with full rigour, the Buddhist tradition denies the ultimate reality of plurality without affirming unity.
Yogācāra and the transformation of the basis
The Yogācāra teaches that each being has its own ālayavijñāna, its own store consciousness, carrying its own seeds. Plurality of beings is the plurality of these storehouses. But at awakening the store consciousness is transformed, āśraya-parāvṛtti, the revolution of the basis, and what it becomes is no longer a private consciousness but nondual wisdom, the dharmadhātu purified.
The Ornament of the Mahāyāna Sūtras then asks the decisive question directly: are the Buddhas one or many? Its answer is one of the most exact sentences in all of Buddhist literature. The Buddhas are not one, it says, because of the difference of their lineages, because their accumulations were not in vain, because each is complete, and because there is no first Buddha; and they are not many, because in the stainless basis there is no difference. Each awakening is truly someone’s awakening, the fruit of a distinct path; and yet what is awakened to admits no division. Plurality belongs to the paths; non-plurality belongs to the basis. This single verse already contains the structure of the Great Perfection’s answer.
Buddha-nature: the undifferentiated suchness
The Ratnagotravibhāga gives three reasons why all beings possess the buddha-nature: because the dharmakāya of the Buddha radiates through all of them; because suchness is without differentiation; and because the lineage, the potential, is present in each. The second reason is the one that matters here. The suchness of a Buddha and the suchness of an ant are not two suchnesses that happen to be similar, as the Sāṅkhya puruṣas are similar. They are not two at all. Yet the third reason, the lineage, is spoken of as present in each being, as each being’s own potential to awaken. The buddha-nature is thus at once undifferentiated in its suchness and individual in its ripening, and the text never resolves the tension by naming a number.
The Tibetan Debate: Particular Emptinesses, One Ultimate, Undivided Equality
In Tibet the question was argued with great sharpness, because it touches the relation between emptiness and buddha-nature, and between the two truths. Three positions mark out the field.
The Gelug: each emptiness belongs to its basis
Tsongkhapa and his successors insist that emptiness is always the emptiness of something. The emptiness of a pot is the pot’s lack of inherent existence; the emptiness of a mind is that mind’s lack of inherent existence. These emptinesses are all of one kind, and they are realised in exactly the same way, but each is a property of its own basis. In the same way, each Buddha’s dharmakāya is in that Buddha’s own continuum; the omniscient minds of the Buddhas know all things identically, yet they are not one mind. This position keeps faith with conventional plurality and with the Middle Way’s refusal of any single ultimate substance. Its risk, from the side of the Great Perfection, is to make the many seem more final than the not-two.
The Jonang: one ultimate, empty of what is other
Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen took the opposite path. For him the ultimate, the dharmatā, is not empty of itself but empty of everything other than itself, gzhan stong: it is permanent, unconditioned, endowed with all the qualities of the Buddha, and identical in all beings. The buddha-nature of every being is the same single ultimate, covered by different adventitious stains. Critics accused him of reintroducing the Self of the non-Buddhists. Whatever one makes of the accusation, the Jonang view is the nearest Tibetan Buddhism comes to the pole of the one.
Mipham: the equality of the two truths
Ju Mipham, standing within the Nyingma tradition and drawing on the Great Perfection, sought to hold both sides without falling to either. He affirms with the Middle Way that the ultimate is empty of any self-nature and cannot be counted; and he affirms with the teachings on buddha-nature that luminosity is the indivisible nature of every mind. Appearances arise distinctly in each continuum, according to each being’s karma, and so beings are many in what appears to them; but the nature of mind is not divided by those appearances, for emptiness and luminosity are a single, indivisible equality. Mipham’s balance is the one the Great Perfection itself requires: plurality on the side of appearance and the path, indivisibility on the side of the nature, and no reification on either side.
The Great Perfection: One Ground, Two Paths
The Great Perfection gives the question its most exact answer by distinguishing three things that the other traditions often merge: the ground as it is in itself, the habitual all-ground that carries each being’s karma, and the recognition in which the ground knows itself. Plurality belongs to the second; recognition is always individual in its occurrence but not in its content; and the ground itself is beyond number.
One ground
The Aspiration of Samantabhadra, revealed by Rigdzin Gödem, opens with words that seem to settle the matter at once: gzhi gcig lam gnyis ’bras bu gnyis, one ground, two paths, two fruits, the magical display of awareness and unawareness. The ground is called one. But the same verses immediately describe it as unconditioned, self-arising, inexpressible, and neither saṃsāra nor nirvāṇa. The one of “one ground” is therefore not one among others, as one person is one among many. It means that there is no second ground: saṃsāra does not have a separate origin from nirvāṇa, and delusion does not spring from a different source than awakening. Gcig here has the force of advaya, not of eka. It denies a second; it does not count a first.
Essence, nature and compassion
The threefold description of the ground in the Heart Essence tantras answers the question from three sides at once.
In its essence, ngo bo, the ground is empty, primordially pure. Emptiness has no boundaries, no parts, no location, and therefore no number. To ask whether the empty essence in one being is the same as or different from the empty essence in another is like asking whether the space inside one vase is the same as the space inside another. Before the vases, there was no division; when they break, no division is found; and even while they stand, the space is not truly divided by them. The essence is not one, because there is nothing to count; but it is certainly not two.
In its nature, rang bzhin, the ground is luminous, spontaneously present, and self-knowing. Here the question becomes subtle. Luminosity is not an object that could be shared or owned; it is the knowing itself. And knowing is always reflexive: rigpa is rang rig, self-knowing awareness, and it is recognised as rang ngo, one’s own face. The word rang, self, which runs through the whole vocabulary of the Great Perfection, does not mean “mine” as opposed to “yours”. It means not dependent on another: self-arising, self-luminous, self-liberating. Rigpa is never known from outside, as an object in another’s mind, but only in the immediacy of its own self-recognition. This is why the teaching always speaks of your rigpa and your own face. Not because awareness is a private possession, but because it can only be recognised from within, where it is.
In its compassion, thugs rje, the ground is all-pervading, unobstructed responsiveness, the energy that manifests as everything. Here plurality is genuinely at home. The dynamic expression of the ground appears as countless beings, countless worlds, countless pure lands. Multiplicity is not an illusion to be dissolved; it is the display, rol pa, of the ground’s own responsiveness. One might say: the essence admits no number, the nature admits no ownership, and compassion manifests every number.
The all-ground and the dharmakāya
The Omniscient Longchenpa draws a line through the middle of the question when he distinguishes the kun gzhi, the all-ground, from the chos sku, the dharmakāya. The all-ground is the neutral basis in which each being’s habitual tendencies are stored; it is individual in the plain sense that my karma is stored in it and yours is not. When one asks what makes beings many, the answer is this: their all-grounds, their karmic continua, their habitual patterns, their sufferings, are many. But the all-ground is not rigpa. It is the ground as it is veiled. The dharmakāya, the ground as it knows itself, is not individuated by karma, for it has never been touched by karma.
The single sphere
The tantras of the Great Perfection call the ultimate thig le nyag gcig, the single sphere. Here the word one returns in its most daring form. Yet the image itself refuses to be counted. A sphere has no edge, no front and no back, no beginning and no end. Nyag gcig, sole or unique, is used in the sense of uncompounded and without a second, not in the sense of one unit among many. The single sphere is the dharmadhātu seen as without parts, and it is precisely because it is without parts that it cannot be one thing set over against other things. The language of the singular is used again to say: not two.
How Many Samantabhadras?
Samantabhadra is not a person who existed before all others and whose awareness all beings borrow. He is the name the tantras give to the ground recognising itself at the very first moment of its display. Asking how many Samantabhadras there are is therefore like asking how many times the sun has recognised that it is shining. Every being who awakens awakens as Samantabhadra, and there are not therefore many Samantabhadras.
The objection of the first Buddha
The classical objection is the same one Sāṅkhya raised against a single puruṣa. If the ground is one, and Samantabhadra recognised it and was liberated, why were not all beings liberated with him? The Great Perfection answers not by multiplying grounds but by locating plurality precisely where it arises. When the seal of the youthful vase body opened and the ground shone outward through the eight gateways, recognition was immediate liberation. Non-recognition, however, is not a single event in a single ground. The tantras describe it through three ignorances: the ignorance of single identity, in which awareness does not know its own face; coemergent ignorance, in which a subtle split opens between knower and known; and imputing ignorance, in which the display is taken as other and the knower as a self. It is the third ignorance that constructs “I” and “other”. Plurality of beings is therefore not prior to delusion; it is the very shape that delusion takes. The many arise with the imputation of selves, and they are liberated one by one, as each imputation is seen through.
This is why the Ornament of the Mahāyāna Sūtras could say that Buddhas are not one because of the difference of their paths. Liberation happens in each continuum, because delusion happened in each continuum. Samantabhadra’s recognition did not liberate others for the same reason that one dreamer’s waking does not wake the others: not because there are two dreamers’ worlds of awareness, but because waking is the end of a particular dream, and the dreams are many.
Primordial ancestor
The tradition calls Samantabhadra the primordial ancestor, the grandfather of all the Buddhas. The image is exact. An ancestor is not the same person as his descendants, and yet they carry his nature; he is not one of them, and yet they would not be without him. Every Buddha who awakens awakens into what Samantabhadra recognised, not into a separate copy of it. In the dharmakāya there is no difference between the awakening of Samantabhadra and the awakening of a yogin in Kham today; in the form bodies, which appear for beings, there are countless Buddhas, each with a name, a pure land and a retinue.
Many in appearance, not many in nature
The Omniscient Longchenpa’s teaching on the fruit completes the answer. The dharmakāya of all the Buddhas is of one taste. Their inner clarity, like the youthful vase body, has no division, and from their own side they do not appear at all. The form bodies, the sambhogakāya and nirmāṇakāya, appear to beings according to beings’ own perception, and in that appearing they are many. So the Buddhas are many from the side of those who meet them, and not many from the side of their own realisation. That is the deepest sense of Samantabhadra’s name: all-good, kun tu bzang po, the goodness that is everywhere, and therefore nowhere a second time.
Not Two, Never One
If rigpa is neither one nor many, why does the whole tradition lean towards the language of the one: one ground, one taste, single sphere, undifferentiated suchness, nonduality? The asymmetry is deliberate, and it rests on a precise distinction between two kinds of negation.
Two kinds of negation
Indian grammarians and Buddhist logicians distinguished the prasajya negation, which simply denies and implies nothing in its place, from the paryudāsa negation, which denies one thing and thereby implies another. “Not many” as a paryudāsa would imply “one”; as a prasajya it implies nothing. The word advaya or advaita, nondual, is a prasajya negation of duality. It denies a second without positing a first. This is why the tradition can say not two with full confidence while refusing to say one. To say one would be to give the negation a positive content, to turn the absence of division into a unity that could be grasped. To say not two leaves the absence of division unfilled, as open as space.
Why not two rather than not one?
The two denials are symmetrical in logic, but not in their effect on the mind. The habit that binds beings is not the habit of seeing everything as one; it is the habit of seeing self and other, subject and object, here and there, two. The imputing ignorance that constructs saṃsāra is a dualising ignorance. The path, therefore, does not need to be warned against too much oneness nearly as often as it needs to be released from twoness. Every practice of the Great Perfection, from the separation of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa to the four ways of leaving everything as it is, dissolves a duality: between stillness and movement, between meditation and post-meditation, between the knower and the known, between the practitioner and the Buddha. The language of not-two is medicine for the disease of two.
The danger of the opposite error is real but subtler. When the language of not-two hardens into a doctrine of the one, awareness becomes a cosmic Self, an object of contemplation, a thing that can be possessed by merging with it. The masters guard against this with the teaching of the empty essence. Whatever is recognised as rigpa and then held as the One is no longer rigpa, but a concept of it. So the tradition leans towards not-two, and at the same moment it pulls back from one. That leaning without landing is the exact posture of the view.
The three answers in practice
The practitioner can hold the whole matter in three sentences, each corresponding to an aspect of the ground. As to the essence: rigpa cannot be counted, because it is empty. As to the nature: rigpa is always recognised as one’s own face, because it is self-knowing, and no one else can recognise it for you. As to compassion: rigpa manifests as all beings and all worlds, because its responsiveness is unobstructed. Is it mine? It is known only here, as my own face, yet it is not mine. Is it shared? Nothing is divided that could be shared. Is it one? It is not two.
The Question Answered by Recognition
In the end the question “one rigpa or many?” is not answered by an argument but by the recognition of rigpa itself, in which the question loses its footing. When awareness knows its own face, it does not find a boundary that would make it this awareness as opposed to that one, and it does not find a substance that would make it the same as all others. It finds only its own open, luminous knowing, without edges, without owner, without a second.
Sāṅkhya saw that liberation is individual and concluded that consciousnesses are many. Advaita saw that consciousness is undivided and concluded that it is one. The Abhidharma saw that beings are distinct streams without a self. Dharmakīrti proved other minds; Ratnakīrti showed that the division between minds does not survive analysis. The Ornament of the Mahāyāna Sūtras said that the Buddhas are not one because their paths differ, and not many because their basis does not. The Ratnagotravibhāga said that suchness is undifferentiated, and the lineage is present in each. The Gelug kept faith with the many emptinesses of many bases; the Jonang with the one ultimate; Mipham with their indivisible equality. And the Great Perfection gathered all of them into a single sentence that never contradicts itself: one ground, two paths, two fruits.
The ground is one in the sense that there is no second ground. The paths are two, and in truth countless, because each being deludes itself and each being awakens. The fruits are two, saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, but in the end they are the magical display of one ground recognising or not recognising itself. When the recognition is complete, the many Buddhas are of one taste, and that one taste has no number.
To the student who asks whether she has her own rigpa, the most precise answer is also the simplest. Look: what knows these words? It is not yours, for you cannot find yourself in it. It is not someone else’s, for there is no other to be found. It is not one, for there is nothing to count. It is not two. Rest there. That is Samantabhadra, and there has never been another.
