Trekchö

Trekchö means "cutting through" and is the first of the two main Dzogchen practices. It concerns the recognition of kadag, the primordial purity of mind, and learning to rest in that recognition without adding anything to it. The second practice is called Tögal, direct crossing.

What gets cut

The Tibetan word calls up the image of a tightly bound bundle. Cut the cord and the whole thing falls loose at once. Nothing has to be removed piece by piece.

What falls loose is the taken-for-granted solidity of our experience. A thought feels like an object, a mood like a condition you are stuck inside, a judgement about yourself like a fact. Trekchö does not fight any of this. It looks for where these things are, and finds nothing. The solidity was never there, which is not at all the same as defeating it.

This is why the practice is so hard to describe without betraying it in the same breath. In ordinary meditation you do something: you count, you follow the breath, you bring attention back. Here, any attempt to manufacture the right state is already the mistake. And yet nothing is lazier than drifting off and calling it resting. Between those two runs a narrow passage, and there is no written instruction for it.

What it asks

Trekchö begins with the pointing-out instruction from a teacher. That is not a formality. Without that moment you hold a description of the nature of mind, and a description is exactly what does not help here. Then comes the work of extending a brief recognition into the rest of the day: into busyness, into irritation, into sleep.

The texts this practice rests on come largely from Longchenpa, the great fourteenth-century Dzogchen master. They are carefully built and assume a reader who is already practising the Ngöndro.

In May 2026 we held a weekend in The Hague with Adzom Gyalse Rinpoche on the essential instruction of Trekchö, following Longchenpa's text. Weekends of this kind return in the programme. The preparation for them is the weekly Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro, every Saturday in Hoofddorp.