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The Great Perfection is a Buddhist tradition that emphasizes enlightenment in the present. The original scriptures of the Great Perfection were popular in India during the Seventh to Eighth Centuries of our era, but were lost in the original. It is due to the efforts of the Tibetan Lotsawa translators that they survive in the world, and are preserved in the collection called The Hundred Thousand Tantras of the Ancients or Nyingma Gyubum. The Great Perfection scriptures are generally divided into three groups: The Mind Section, the Space Section, and the Upadesha Instruction Section. The Tantras of the Mind Section speak primarily on the primacy of our own minds as we create our own realities. The Space Section emphasizes our unity within the sentience of all space. The third, the Upadesha Instruction Section, gives us pointers on how to make the Great Perfection real in our own lives right now. There are seventeen scriptures associated with the Upadesha Instruction Section. The Dawn of Awareness Tantra is the crown jewel of them all. It is the largest, most comprehensive, and most thorough presentation of the Great Perfection in any of the works that remain. The Tantra was translated into Tibetan by Vimalamitra based on original witnesses in three different languages: Sanskrit, Orgyanese, and Chinese. This indicates that by the Eighth Century it was already popular internationally. It is preserved in volume eleven of the mTshams brag manuscript of the Nyingma Gyubum on pages 323-699.
Whether you are newly interested in the Great Perfection and its writings or you are a veteran practitioner, the Dawn of Awareness will bring you an inexhaustible storehouse of brilliant thought and inspiration. The teachings in this Tantra purport to have come to Earth from out of Space. Whether this is a device of literature or an attempt to recount real events we cannot know. Readers who are willing to stretch their minds beyond conventional limitations will get the most out of this Tantra. Those who read it merely as a historical curiosity will nonetheless enjoy its brilliant exposition. A careful reading of the Tantra indicates that there are layers of accretion in the Tantra's composition. A text-critical study is in order. I trust that the present translation will serve to inspire further research. The profound import of this Tantra encompasses time and space, and offers us a vision of our own reality that is startling and astounding.
Dawn of Awareness: An Upadesha Tantra of the Great Perfection, Christopher Wilkinson, Paperback; 675 pages; $57.00
Christopher Wilkinson began his career in Buddhist literature in 1972 at the age of fifteen, taking refuge vows from his guru Dezhung Rinpoche. In that same year he began formal study of Tibetan language at the University of Washington under Geshe Ngawang Nornang and Turrell Wylie. He then received many instructions from Kalu Rinpoche, completing the traditional practice of five hundred thousand Mahamudra preliminaries. He became a Buddhist monk at the age of eighteen, living in the home of Dezhung Rinpoche while he continued his studies at the University of Washington. He graduated in 1980 with a B.A. degree in Asian Languages and Literature and another B.A. degree in Comparative Religion (College Honors, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). After a two year tour of Buddhist pilgrimage sites throughout Asia he worked for five years in refugee resettlement in Seattle, Washington, then proceeded to the University of Calgary for an M.A. in Buddhist Studies where he wrote a groundbreaking thesis on the Yangti transmission of the Great Perfection tradition titled "Clear Meaning: Studies on a Thirteenth Century rDzog chen Tantra." He proceeded to work on a critical edition of the Sanskrit text of the 20,000 line Perfection of Wisdom in Berkeley, California, followed by an intensive study of Burmese language in Hawaii. In 1990 he began three years' service as a visiting professor in English Literature in Sulawesi, Indonesia, exploring the remnants of the ancient Sri Vijaya Empire there. He worked as a research fellow for the Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation for several years, playing a part in the early development of the famous Rubin Museum of Art. In the years that followed he became a Research Fellow at the Centre de Recherches sur les Civilisations de l'Asie Orientale, Collge de France, and taught at the University of Calgary as an Adjunct Professor for five years. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, a study of the Yoginitantra first translated into Tibetan during the Eighth century of our era, at the University of Leiden's Institute for Area Studies.
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