Buddha

A buddha is someone who has fully awakened: free of all confusion, with every quality of the mind fully unfolded. The Sanskrit word comes from the root budh, to wake up. The Tibetan sangye is made of two syllables. Sang means purified, in the sense that whatever clouded the mind has cleared away. Gye means blossomed, like a flower that has opened completely. Say "the Buddha" and you usually mean one particular person. Say "a buddha" and you mean a state that is, in principle, open to anyone.

The prince from Lumbini

The historical Buddha was born around five centuries before the common era as Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of the Shakya clan, in Lumbini in what is now Nepal. He grew up in comfort, came face to face with old age, sickness and death, and left the palace to look for an answer. Years of harsh austerity got him nowhere, so he took a middle way instead. Sitting in meditation under a tree at Bodhgaya, he awakened fully. He then taught for more than forty years and became known as Shakyamuni, the sage of the Shakyas.

It helps to be clear about what he was not. He was not a god or a creator, nor a prophet speaking for someone else. He was a human being who started out as confused as the rest of us and saw through that confusion completely. That is why his example still carries so much weight.

Not only one buddha

In Tibetan Buddhism, and in the Nyingma tradition especially, Shakyamuni is not the only buddha. The tradition speaks of countless buddhas in other ages and other worlds. Guru Rinpoche, who brought the Vajrayana to Tibet, is often called the second Buddha.

The teachings on the three kayas take this further. A buddha has more than one dimension. The historical Shakyamuni is the nirmanakaya, the form in which a buddha appears to ordinary beings like us. Beneath it lies the dharmakaya: the true nature of the awakened mind itself, without form and without limit.

This is where the subject meets the heart of Dzogchen. Buddhahood, in these teachings, is not something brought in from outside, nor something built up slowly over many lifetimes. It is the nature of your own mind, already present and simply not recognised. This is called buddha-nature. Seen that way, the Buddha stops being a distant figure from history. He becomes more like a mirror, showing what your own mind looks like once nothing covers it.

So it makes sense that practice at Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling starts with him. The Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro opens with taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, and we do that together every Saturday in Hoofddorp.