The Composition of a Manual of Dzogchen Meditation
par Stéphane Arguillère, Maître de conférences, Inalco
Tülku Tsullo (1884-1957), an important scholar of the Nyingma branch of Tibetan Buddhism, is the author of a large meditation manual on a cycle of « revelations » of the «treasury discoverer » Rigdzin Gödem (1337-1408), the Direct Revelation of the Intention of Samantabhadra (Kunzang Gongpa Zangthal). This corpus had, to some extent, fallen into disuse since the early 18th Century; Tülku Tsullo’s comprehensive manual was surely an attempt to revive this tradition. An exhaustive historical and philological inquiry on this text revealed the complete making of the text, drawing largely on 14th century sources of which it is more or less a patchwork — not only of those that are clearly acknowledged, but also a few writings of Longchen Rabjam (1308-1364), one (unquoted) treatise of which gives the whole book most of its structural canvas and a large part of its contents. Tülku Tsullo, who knew most of what had been written about the Gongpa Zangthal from the 14th century, seems to have prefered to reconstruct something from older materials. After a few words about Dzogchen (rDzogs chen) as a specific meditative and doctrinal tradition, and about the Gongpa Zangthal as such and its transmission from the 14th to the 20th century, we will describe Tülku Tsullo’s manual and show, on the basis of a few examples, in which way it was composed.
