Garab Dorje and the Nine Vehicles Above Which Nothing Sits

The Nyingma school organizes the whole of Buddhist teaching into nine vehicles arranged as an ascending sequence, from the foundational monastic path through increasingly advanced tantric methods, with Dzogchen, also called Atiyoga, placed as the ninth and highest, a summit above which the classification places nothing further. Nyingma's own account traces Dzogchen's origin to Garab Dorje, held to be its first human teacher, born in the land of Uddiyana and understood within the tradition as having received the teaching directly through visionary transmission rather than as one more student learning it from an existing master; from Garab Dorje the line is said to run through Manjushrimitra and Shri Singha before reaching Padmasambhava and the translator Vairotsana, who are credited with carrying it into Tibet in the eighth century. Dzogchen's own literature divides itself into three classes addressing the teaching from different angles, the mind class, the space class and the instruction class, the last of these being the source of the later Nyingtig, or heart essence, texts that became the tradition's most widely studied Dzogchen material. What sets the ninth vehicle apart from the eight beneath it, on the tradition's own account, is not that it adds a more powerful technique to the ones already given but that it treats the ground of mind as already pure and complete, so nothing remains to be manufactured, only recognized.