“From the Depth of My Heart to My Mother Yeshe Chödrön”

An excerpt from an explanation by Adriano Clemente at Tashigar Norte, Margarita Island, Venezuela, 31 January 2025.

“From the Depth of My Heart to My Mother Yeshe Chödrön” is a text that Chögyal Namkhai Norbu wrote at the age of nineteen and compresses in a few pages the view and meditation practice of the Dzogchen teaching. Addressed to his mother by the author at the moment of their final leave-taking, when he was very young.

Good day to everybody. I’m very happy to do this second course here at Tashigar North. 

This is a very important place because it is the place where our teacher opened the gate of the Longsal teachings and where for the first time he gave this very important empowerment of the Jnanadakini, which is the root of the Longsal.

For many years Rinpoche spent much of his time here on this island, in this place.

At the time there were many problems related to the social condition of this country as well as other negative circumstances, so the Gar has barely managed to survive these last ten years. However, thanks to the effort of just a few practitioners who continue to reside here, we still have this wonderful place.

I really hope that in the future if the situation changes here that other practitioners can come and enjoy and stay a few months here to do practice and deepen their knowledge. This is a very positive place for deepening the Dzogchen teaching.

Then of course we also need to maintain the place and collaborate according to our situation. Since I’m here, I’m trying to help, and I already gave a retreat course last month and now I’m doing this second one before I leave in a few weeks.

When we do a retreat, we concentrate on the Dzogchen teaching because we are called the Dzogchen Community. If we are introduced to the Dzogchen teaching by an authentic teacher just one time and we follow the teaching, receive that method, that knowledge, then we can simply continue by ourselves. This is what we call basic knowledge of the Dzogchen teaching. But we have so many difficulties and obscurations due to our karma, emotions and lack of clarity that we often need to refresh that knowledge or that kind of experience we had in the beginning. Therefore it is very useful to have different ways to approach the knowledge of the teaching.

For instance, if we speak about Tregchöd, which is the basic essence of Dzogchen practice, many Tregchöd instruction texts exist. Although they are all very similar, each one focuses on a different aspect or angle. So if one method or instruction doesn’t work for us then we can work with another text and another teaching.

For this course I chose a text that Rinpoche wrote when he was quite young. It is an Upadesa teaching. In general we have three subdivisions in the Dzogchen scriptures: tantras, lungs, and upadeshas. The tantras are the main original texts transmitted from the dharmakaya or from Samantabhadra to the sambhogakaya. There are many tantras in the Dzogchen teaching, such as the Kunjed Gyalpo (The Supreme Source Tantra) and the Drathalgyur (Sounds and Dimensions Tantra). The lungs are the main points and are generally excerpted from tantras and have a more essential, condensed meaning. An example is The Total Space of Vajrasattva.

Then we have the mennag, or upadeshas. An upadesha is a teaching that a realized teacher transmits through their own experience of the tantras and lungs and communicates to their students. Then it becomes an upadesha. 

For instance, if we look at the Longsal cycle of teachings there is more or less one original tantra, although it is not complete. There are also initiations and sadhanas belonging to the Anuyoga, such as the Mandarava, Gomadevi and Jnanadakini practices, which are mostly Anuyoga transmissions. Then we have a series of Dzogchen teachings that all belong to the Upadesa category of teachings. They are in the Upadesa category because Rinpoche received all these teachings in dreams through different teachers such as Vairocana, Padmasambhava and other manifestations. In the end they are all mostly unified in his root teachers Rigdzin Changchub Dorje and Togden Urgyen Tendzin.

So we can understand clearly that the teacher is the main bridge for a practitioner to any kind of realization. And even though a practitioner may have contact with Padmasambhava, that teaching goes through the teacher and is a manifestation through the knowledge of the teacher.

In the same way, we have all these Dzogchen Longsal teachings related to a specific terma. A terma is a kind of teaching that was transmitted, at the time of Padmasambhava for example, without necessarily being explained to a student, and that transmission entered directly into the mindstream or the consciousness of the student. This consciousness may transmigrate through different lives, but the seed still remains. Then, when secondary causes manifest, this mind treasure, or gongter, appears. However, for that to occur one must be a highly realized practitioner. If you read these Longsal histories it is very clearly explained.

This particular text, however, was not received as a terma but rather is a text that Rinpoche wrote for his mother in Lhasa, just before he parted from her for the last time, in March 1958.

Rinpoche’s family was from Kham in the region of Derge. In 1956, Rinpoche went on a pilgrimage to India and Nepal with his father. When they returned, at the end of 1956, the beginning of 1957, the situation in Kham in eastern Tibet had very much deteriorated because many Khampa fighters were rebelling against the Chinese armies there. Tibetans from Kham were trying to escape to Central Tibet because they thought it might be safer there, but the Chinese were stopping them. Rinpoche decided  to escape to Central Tibet with his family and although it was not easy, after three months they succeeded to reach Lhasa. 

While they were there the situation with the Chinese also started to become difficult and Rinpoche had many doubts. He did Ekajati practice in the Jokhang, asking if it would be better to remain in Tibet or to go to India. He also consulted some means of divination and it became quite clear that they should go to India as soon as possible.

His father and mother, however, were not sure how they could go to India because they had a lot of yaks and other animals that they had brought with them from East Tibet. They said that first of all they would have to sell all these animals in order to have some money and then go to India. They decided that Rinpoche, with his younger brother, Pema Gungtsen; an assistant monk and Rinpoche’s younger sister, should go to India and their parents would join them later. So in March 1958 Rinpoche said goodbye to his parents in Lhasa.

After a few months when they had reached Sikkim some of the animals accompanying them were not well because the weather was different from that of Tibet. Rinpoche’s brother thought it was not good to keep the animals with them because they were dying and thought it better to return to Lhasa and sell them. In that way he could come together with his parents to join them in Sikkim. 

The day after his brother arrived in Lhasa he was arrested together with his father by the Chinese. At the time Rinpoche was an important tulku and the Chinese were trying to catch all the important tulkus. But they thought he was in India with one of these rebel groups trying to fight against the Chinese so they arrested his father and brother. They were put in prison where they died after a few months as happened to hundreds of thousands of Tibetans.

Rinpoche attempted to go back to Tibet because he was concerned that his family were having these problems because of him. But he was unable to return and remained in Sikkim and then at some point he left for Italy. 

So this is just a brief introduction, because that was the last time that Rinpoche saw his mother.

“From the Depth of My Heart to My Mother Yeshe Chödrön” is an important text because it’s a very essential Tregchöd teaching. Previous to this, Rinpoche had written another shorter text for his father, which was also an essential Tregchöd teaching.

I chose this text because it addresses in a simple and essential way the knowledge of the nature of mind and how we continue in that knowledge. 

Every time I teach, I now read from the original Tibetan text and I want to explain why because people might think that if a text has already been translated, I could read directly from the English.

When translating from Tibetan we have to interpret some expressions. Sometimes we have a Tibetan word with two slightly different meanings and we have to choose one expression for that. When we have a translation, it means the translator made an arbitrary choice to go in one direction in the interpretation, but often it does not convey the whole meaning that is expressed in Tibetan. In other words, when we are reading a translation, depending on the translator, some percentage of the translator’s understanding of the text may sometimes not be correct. For this reason I always prefer to read from the Tibetan.

First of all, the text gives an introduction to the nature of our mind. Then it introduces a method for discovering it concretely, and in the last part it clarifies what it means to continue in the state of Tregchöd, which is the essence of Dzogchen meditation. So now we start with the text.

Usually when we speak about the mind it seems to be something really very concrete and very active because everything we do is always related to our mind. If there is no mind, there is absolutely nothing. Everything we do, everything we think, is based on our mind, on our thoughts. At the same time the origin of this mind that is creating confusion, ignorance and duality is the same as that of the primordial Buddha Samantabhadra.

We always say that the Dzogchen teaching is the teaching of the mind of Samantabhadra. This text says that Samantabhadra recognized that original condition and since he recognized it, he liberated himself. We, however, have not recognized that original condition and therefore we began to transmigrate in infinite samsara.

Samantabhadra is very important in the Dzogchen teaching and is referred to as the Adibuddha, or primordial Buddha. Ultimately, Adibuddha means our primordial state, that original state called primordial Bodhicitta that has never been stained by delusion, ignorance, karma, emotions. As it has always been, it always will be. That is also called Samantabhadra, but Samantabhadra of the base. It means we have that potentiality but until we have realized or actualized that potentiality, we are dreaming, we are sentient beings, we are transmigrating. That is the difference between Samantabhadra and sentient beings.

We can understand what a sentient being is because we have that experience. But who is Samantabhadra? If we take as our starting point our limited perception, our dualistic vision, we are told that in the beginning there was one kind of being that never fell into dualism, that never started to dream, but awakened at the same moment as this manifestation of the base. That is called Samantabhadra. From our dualistic perception Samantabhadra can be explained as a being who never fell into dualism. That is the reason why it is said that our mind originated at the same time as Samantabhadra.

In the invocation of Samantabhadra it says, “I, Samantabhadra, have recognized the condition of the base. The state of Rigpa arose in this base condition from the beginning, but all other sentient beings did not recognize it and so the only difference between myself and all sentient beings is that they are dreaming. So through my aspiration, my invocation, may all sentient beings awaken from this dream to the real state, which is the same as my own.”

This invocation is a very important teaching and is the essence of Dzogchen. According to some interpretations it is a metaphor, and in the real sense Samantabhadra is just a symbol for our real state. That is, of course, the ultimate meaning.

The text goes on to explain that now we have this great fortune to have met the Dzogchen teaching we should really go to the essence. We should not follow it simply because other people are following it or because we want to feel important or different. We should follow the teaching in an honest and sincere way, not with the motivation of the eight worldly dharmas. In general the eight worldly dharmas are the actions that we carry out in samsara, like a dance of the six lokas: we try to get what we like and avoid what we don’t like; we like people to speak well about us but we don’t like them to criticize us; we like to be happy but we don’t like to suffer. It means everything we do is based on our selfish interest. Sometimes we apply or mix that with the teaching and then it really becomes a very wrong approach. You may remember that some years after he started to teach, Rinpoche wrote twenty-seven commitments based on that principle.

Now that we have this possibility to follow the teaching, we have to really understand what the real nature of our primordial condition is: what we call the view in the Dzogchen teaching. When we say it is a primordial condition or primordial nature, we use a name like the nature of mind or the absolute state because that means not being conditioned by all the relative phenomena of our perception. This condition is itself self-originated, which means that no cause has created it. We have that kind of primordial condition and we must discover it in ourselves so that it does not remain just a concept.

How can we do that? We should not make any kind of effort with our mind or point toward it like a target, because if we have a target it means that we already have a concept that we are trying to reach. That concept, however, is a creation of our mind.

For instance, we think that the primordial state is white and we try to be in that condition—we do some meditation and our effort is to remove all other colors just to be in that white. This means that we are correcting, adjusting something and that becomes an obstacle.

 When we do meditation, the first thing is that we should not enter into working with our mind. If we start working with our mind, it means we are following our thoughts and if we follow our thoughts it means we are distracted. We know what we should do to remain present and undistracted. In any case we should not apply any kind of effort with our mind. 

We relax this mind, or our presence, our consciousness; we leave it as it is in its condition, without changing anything, without following our thoughts, just keeping that presence and observing. If we do that, what manifests or what we can experience in that moment is called the wisdom of the self-originated state, of instant presence manifesting nakedly.

This is one way of observing our mind. It is like muddy water. If we don’t do anything with this water but just leave it as it is, gradually the pure part separates from the impure part and in that moment the water becomes limpid. In the same way we can have that natural clarity of our mind, and if we have that recognition, this self-originated wisdom can manifest nakedly.

We can have that experience of this self-originated wisdom, but we cannot express or explain it. We cannot say it is like this or like that. As we said at the beginning, we should not try to make a concept of our real condition because it is not something we can define. It is not something that has a cause for it to arise, or a place where it dwells or where it ends. It is beyond all our dualistic concepts. If we relax in that condition we are no longer involved with our attachments and aversions, our desires or repulsions and everything based on our thoughts. When we are relaxed in that state, even if thoughts or emotions arise, we do not follow them and so they disappear in the same way that they arose. All these concepts of liberation, of illusion and delusion, are concepts arising from our dualistic mind, from our thoughts, and in that moment we don’t need to follow them. We simply relax in that condition that is beyond all dualistic concepts.

When we consider the state of dharmakaya it means that all our concepts are pacified or dissolved in that state. It is not that we are doing something with our effort but naturally that condition arises. It is also called the essence, which is pure from the beginning, the dimension of all-pervading immense emptiness. When we make a subdivision from our dualistic point of view to consider the condition of our mind or our consciousness, we say that the essence is empty because we cannot find anything concrete, while its nature is clarity, because thoughts and sense perceptions continually arise. And this manifestation of clarity is related with our potentiality of energy that continues without interruption.

The text explains that first of all we are in the essence—the state beyond all concepts—then at the same time we have that self-perfected nature or the aspect of clarity. These two aspects, emptiness and clarity, are inseparable. They are without duality, and that is called the primordial condition of our state. The nature of the three kayas of the three dimensions is already contained in our state of Rigpa, or instant presence, and if we have that recognition it is called having the view of the self-perfected Dzogpa Chenpo teaching.

Edited by L. Granger
Final editing by S. Schwartz