Dzogchen is a yana; Nyingma is a sect. Post below explains the difference. The Nyingma lineages teach all the yanas, not just Dzogchen. In fact, Dzogchen was a rare teaching in the Nyingma in pre-modern times.https://vividness.live/2013/11/25/yanas-are-not-buddhist-sects/ …
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Replying to @Meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean and
More accurately I should say that “Nyingma” designates a heterogeneous group of sects. The word just means “old.” The Nyingma sects are all those that trace their lineages back before the advent of the Sarma (“New”) sects around 1050. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyingma#Second_dissemination_and_New_translations …
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Replying to @Meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean and
Dzogchen was considered the distinctive teaching of the Nyingma largely because the Sarma Schools mainly rejected it. (With exceptions as noted.) They rejected it because it calls the bluff on the contradiction between emptiness and religious norms:https://vividness.live/2015/11/27/emptiness-form-and-dzogchen-ethics/ …
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Replying to @Meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean and
That made it politically explosive, so in practice Dzogchen was taught to a tiny elite only. The Nyingma lineages, like the Sarma, taught conventional morality, and the lower yanas, to nearly everyone. The Dzogchen texts and doctrines were kept mainly secret.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean and
The political suppression of Vajrayana in the West in the 1980s-1990s was initially a suppression of Dzogchen. Tarthang Tulku taught it openly to non-Tibetan lay people, which was sort of like if a new Pope publicly proclaimed that at its core Catholicism was a pedophile sex cult
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Replying to @Meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean and
I know Trungpa was teaching Dzogchen early, late 60s in UK, but not so much openly, and not to groups (AFAIK) Then he moved to USA and took on a more gradual approach, particularly after ‘72ish IIRC. So Tarthang Tulku was teaching openly to groups? Cool
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Replying to @misen__ @Malcolm_Ocean and
I don’t know as much about Tarthang Tulku’s history as I would like (because it has been suppressed, afaict). I gather he was teaching Dzogchen openly in Berkeley in the mid-70s. Then he made it an esoteric-only teaching (early 80s?), and by about 1990 he effectively disappeared.
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Replying to @Meaningness @misen__ and
I assume that this was due to a series of increasingly credible death threats, but I have zero direct evidence of this. At one time I was trying to make discreet inquiries to see if I could get the story, but those didn’t go anywhere.
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Replying to @Meaningness @misen__ and
I no longer care about being discreet because this is now all ancient history and the players are all dead or retired and no one cares anymore. (I hope.)
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Replying to @Meaningness @misen__ and
The frankest of the Trungpa bios—I can’t remember which that was—includes evidence that his apparent psychotic breakdown at the end was driven in part at least by threats against him specifically for teaching Dzogchen.
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I don’t think I’ve heard the death thread stories before. Interesting stuff! Can’t say I’m surprised, the Tibetans love a good poisoning.
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Replying to @misen__ @Meaningness and
In the early 80’s there was somewhat of an astral war being played out. The death of Jamgön Kongtrul and to some degree Trungpa were watermarks for some of these sectairian challenges.
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Replying to @misen__ @Malcolm_Ocean and
Tbc, in Tarthang Tulku’s case, this is pure conjecture on my part. In the case of other lamas, I have stories only one degree of separation from the target.
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