That's Not Buddhist

This is the story of Garab Dorje. It tells how when Manjushrimitra heard there was a master in the north-west of India teaching a doctrine that went beyond cause and effect, he and six other scholars from the University of Nalanda, started out to confront and defeat the master who taught this heresy. However, when they arrived and received Garab Dorje’s teaching, Manjushrimitra realised he was in fact correct and, in an act of contrition for having initially argued against this superior view, prepared to cut his own tongue out. Thankfully Garab Dorje intervened and said better to become his student and realise the teaching for himself - which is what he did.

            What are we to make of this legend and particularly, how does it affect our understanding of how karma works? Garab Dorje is the first teacher of one of the two non-dual traditions found in Tibet. The other is called the ‘Great Seal’, Mahamudra. However it does more than simply tell the story of how a particular stream of teachings came into being, it also signals that things from a non-dual perspective begin to appear quite different. Not unlike trying to imagine four dimensions with brains that only do three. (Try it.) Garab Dorje is doing four, Manjushrimitra - his name means ‘friend of wisdom’ - is initially still doing three. This is important because we have to keep this in mind whenever we are trying to understand non-dual awareness, which in this tradition is called rigpa. It’s kind of saying, you can say it exists and a bit about it but really the only way to properly know it is by leaving our normal way of thinking behind and entering a direct experience in which rigpa, non-dual awareness, knows itself.

So rigpa is the name for a state of spacious awareness that apparently has no limits - there is no edge to it. Within this spacious awareness thoughts and emotions may still arise but when they do, because there is no grasping or identification with them, they instantly dissolve. The tradition calls this ‘self-liberation’, thoughts if left alone dissolve of their own accord. One of the signatures of an authentic state of rigpa is that the experience of me, the meditator resting in rigpa, is also happening within rigpa. It’s not that I am sitting on my seat and I am experiencing rigpa as an altered state of consciousness. Rather all the things that I experience as ‘me’, bodily sensations, the feeling of emotions and thoughts etc., are all contained within non-dual awareness. (As they must for it to be non-dual.) To use a traditional metaphor, rigpa is like a mirror. Everything arises within it and dissolves. And also like a mirror the reflections that come and go are not separate things, they are the mirror itself. Intrinsic awareness and the contents of awareness are not two separate things. Beginning to feel the strain of thinking in four dimensions?

The point of trying to talk about this intrinsic and completely natural form of awareness, something that is always present if we can recognise it, is that when resting in it the laws of karma change. So back to the point of the story. Karma is intentioned action, for it to be created it requires a sense of me and everything else other than me. In other words a dualistically partitioned consciousness. Because non-dual awareness is not structured in this way intentionality can no longer exist and when there is no intention there is no more karma. Pause here to take this in … We can actually check this out if we are able to rest even for a few moments in rigpa - during this time intentions simply do not exist. That’s why it’s called ‘resting’ and not ‘doing’. And that’s also why it’s called a ‘doing nothing’ meditation. However, the instant an intention arises and is acted upon non-dual awareness ends, the dualistic mind reasserts itself and more karma - either good or bad - is created.

Now, even if within non-dual awareness, karma is not being created this does not mean that what arises within/as this awareness - which is everything - is not karmically conditioned. Intrinsic awareness is not a radical shift in that our senses suddenly start working in a different way or that we kind of blank out or disappear. Everything remains exactly the same. The reflections in the mirror do not change but the sense that they are reflections in a mirror is present. (And here you can hear three dimension language struggling with four dimensions). Now these reflections are conditioned by our past karma. Put very simply, if we have the karma of a human being, we will continue to experience the ‘display of awareness’ - all experience - from our human perspective. And on a more personal level, as I rest in intrinsic awareness the content of this awareness is still conditioned by what I have previously intentionally done. But the point is, as I experience this but do not react in any way, (thus creating karma), from a dualistic perspective my karmic ‘bank’ is being emptied and is not being replenished. If I go on doing this long enough finally all karma will be exhausted, which is to become a buddha - one who has gone beyond suffering! Of course, from the perspective of rigpa this all changes - there is no karmic bank full of karmic seeds that need to be purified and exhausted, there is only the display of awareness, primordially pure and spontaneously present.

For poor old Manjushrimitra and the other scholars who accompanied him this was a difficult teaching to swallow. The Buddhism they had been reared on was all about the interdependence of everything and particularly the interdependence between actions and their consequences. It was all dualistic. Here they were confronted with something that made sense but it required - if they were to truly understand it - that they receive from Garab Dorje the instructions that pointed out intrinsic awareness and how to maintain without effort resting within it. They  had to know it first hand - no easy task. As for us, we need not enter into a debate in which our tongues may become forfeit. Much better to take up the Buddha’s invitation of exploring it for ourselves. The whole thing of karma - intentions bearing different kinds of fruit - and now the possibility of creating no karma at all by ending our reactivity takes this another step further that we can personally test. Can I observe how my reactivity both comes from areas of sensitivity and leads to further intentional actions? Can I observe how, if I can not get caught up in this, either through simple mindfulness or the more profound resting in doing nothing practices, that this reactivity gradually begins to relax and wear away? I hope so.

NW. 9 July 2026

The image is of Garab Dorje in his form of a yogi.