PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

344Pacific WorldOr one hundredth part of a hair from a horse’s tail split into a hundred,Such is the quivering which joins intellect to mind.This is called the Innate Nescience. 124In other words, ignorance is the “joining” of Being’s pristine intelligenceand the dichotomizing, obscuring processes of ordinary mentation (Tib.sems; Skt. citta), a joining in which sems is privileged and Being is occluded.In the more technical accounts of the gzhi’s errancy mode, ignoranceestablishes the “ontic foundation” or “site” (Tib. kun-gzhi 125 ) for thelimiting/obscuring thought processes (Tib. sems; Skt. citta) more directlyassociated with human experience. Mind itself is constituted by eight“perceptual patterns” (Tib. rnam-par shes-pa; Skt. vijñåna) and the fiftyone“co-operators” (Tib. sems-byung; Skt. caitta), the latter including avariety of cognitive and affective “pollutants” (such as passion, conceit,jealousy, etc.) that “specify processes of wandering farther and fartheraway from that which existentially matters, of a continual being off course,and of straying deeper and deeper into obscurantism and self-deception.”126 In this context, sems is described as a “lost child” who has strayedfrom his mother’s (i.e., the gzhi’s) side. 127As indicated above, ignorance is generally identified as the cause of theerrancy mode. Based on his own personal visionary experience, DudjomLingpa attributes these words to Vajradhara: “The obscuring of the groundof being by non-recognition of intrinsic awareness is indisputably theground of all ordinary experience (kun-gzhi).” 128 But ignorance is also ageneral and pervasive characteristic of the entire “straying” process, includingits end product, the person. 129 Mind (Tib. sems) and ignorance arefunctionally equivalent in Dzogchen. 130 And because ignorance constitutesthe experiential alienation from Being, it is in turn identified withduality: a localized subjectivity (the “I”) over against the object. The closeassociation of all these aspects means that any or all may be described as the“basis” of samsara. In some sources, samsara is “rooted” in subject-objectduality. 131 Others may emphasize that duality is founded on the “I,” 132which may in turn be considered to include the concept of “self-nature” ingeneral. According to Dudjom Lingpa (reporting, he claims, the words ofÛrisimha experienced in vision), “Just as water, which exists in a naturallyfree-flowing state, becomes frozen into ice under the influence of a coldwind, so the ground of being exists in a naturally free state, yet the entirespectrum of cyclic existence is established solely due to the underlyingconception of an individual self and a self-nature of phenomena.” 133It is important to emphasize that, from a Dzogchen perspective, theunfolding of the errancy mode never compromises Being’s essentially purenature. With respect to the individual, this invariant purity is referred to byvarious terms: the nature of mind (Tib. sems-nyid), the awakened mind(Tib. byang-chub-kyi sems, Skt. bodhicitta), Buddha-nature (Tib. bde-