Translation or Invention: The Case Against Its Own Texts

Not every scholar accepts the traditional account of Dzogchen's Indian origin at face value, and the disagreement is a genuine textual and historical one rather than a dismissal of the tradition. Some of the earliest Dzogchen material survives among the Dunhuang manuscripts, Tibetan documents sealed in a cave library around the eleventh century and rediscovered only in the twentieth, and close study of that material has let scholars compare early Dzogchen writing against the tantric corpus the tradition says it descends from. What that comparison shows is contested: some scholars read the early texts as authentic, if creatively adapted, transmissions of Indian tantric material, while others read at least some of the corpus as later Tibetan composition presented, in keeping with the region's terma, or treasure text, convention, as a rediscovered teaching from an earlier master rather than a new one. The dispute is not new. Dzogchen's claim that awakening requires no graduated method drew accusations within Tibet itself, echoing the eighth century Samye debate over sudden versus gradual enlightenment, that its approach resembled Chinese Chan more than it resembled properly Indian Buddhist tantra, a charge Nyingma scholars have answered on textual grounds for centuries. Sam van Schaik's study of the Longchen Nyingtig's own textual history is one recent contribution to a question philology has not closed.