Dzogchen Street Preacher #0: Kadag

“Dzogchen Street Preacher” is the overall title for a series of performance pieces I planned in 2009. This extremely brief one, “Kadag,” was meant to introduce the whole thing.

I was on the verge of recording them when there was a mundane emergency that took all my time for a year. When I had the opportunity to work again, the Meaningness book seemed more important.

But less fun! There’s a bit of slack in my life now, and yesterday I decided to take a few hours to record this one. That was fun, and it’s a way to salvage a tiny piece of a project I put a ton of love and attention into, long ago, when I was a different person than I am now.

The video might somehow stand on its own, and communicate something… but explanation might help.

Kadag

Kadag is a key term in Dzogchen, the branch of Buddhism I’m most influenced by. The usual translation is “primordial purity.” That may be misleading.

Kadag is the recognition that nothing is impure—and therefore nothing is pure, either. Purity is a metaphysical distinction, not something found in the actual world. “Primordial” is meant to communicate that.

In the video, I substituted “evenly.” The point is that nothing is more pure than anything else, because this is a nonsense concept from the beginning.

So what?

When you recognize kadag, you recognize that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world. There are no spiritual, existential, or cosmic problems. Only practical ones, which you can address practically, instead of metaphysically.

Then you don’t have to wring your hands about the supposed Problem of Suffering. Suffering is not a Great Evil, it’s just a thing that happens. So it is actually possible to enjoy everything.

There also is nothing fundamentally wrong with you. You are not impure, stained by original sin, inadequate, or rotten at the core. You are just fine—just as you are.

In Dzogchen, the non-method for recognizing kadag is trekchöd.

Kadag is not a Pollyanna-ish attitude. There are many things we don’t like and want to change. And that is good! Let’s do it!

Street Preacher

The frame-story for the “Dzogchen Street Preacher” series is a personal alter-ego in which I’m that.

Dzogchen teaching is usually overburdened with Tibetan religious decorum and status-hierarchy nonsense, so it’s tiresome and intellectual and reaches nearly no one.

The idea that I could stand on a street corner and rant at passers-by about Dzogchen is entertainingly ridiculous. But it might also be effective, and therefore important? I admire people who have the courage and charisma to do this:

Although I have reservations about both his message and some aspects of his delivery!

While I was recording this, some homeless people politely asked what I was doing, and kindly offered to move the garbage bags full of their possessions out of the way. I explained, and politely declined. It adds to the atmosphere of primordial purity, I think, although I didn’t say that.

I didn’t preach at them, because that would have been rude. I think.

Western Buddhism

My former Buddhist teacher, Ngak’chang Rinpoche, loves the culture of the cowboy-era American West. There’s layers of meaning in that, and how it relates to Vajrayana. One aspect, though, is a pun.

“Western Buddhism” is often what Consensus Buddhism called itself. There was a consensus that “Western Buddhism” was becoming a thing, and that it was the right thing; and yet a lot of wrangling in Consensus Buddhist publications about what it was, and what it should be. That was all quite silly and quite distasteful; but now it’s all ancient history, and no one cares anymore.

But—what would “Western Buddhism” mean, if it was a thing? Obviously, Western Buddhists should dress like this:

That’s from a Vajrayana Buddhist retreat on a horse ranch in Montana in 2004. We all dressed as Western Buddhists, and rode horses up into the mountains, and shot single-action 1880s-style revolvers at paper targets, and had wrathful empowerments in the evenings.

It was on this retreat that my now-spouse Charlie Awbery and I got together.

In the picture, that’s me on the left. It’s a Sangha friend on the right, not Charlie. I think Charlie took the picture.

Anyway, that was a daytime Western Buddhist outfit, for riding and shooting. In the evenings, we were more elegant. Specifically, I wore the same outfit that appears in the video.

Ngak’chang Rinpoche was amused by it. It looks like a cowboy-era priest’s get-up. He teased me by calling me “Preacherman”; and I rolled with the joke.

It was ridiculous, of course. Being a priest was as far from my concept of myself as anything possibly could be.

In the last year, I have somehow inadvertently transformed into my most-distant self-possibility: acting as a tantric Buddhist priest, performing the religion’s central ritual role, with gods and miraculous transformations and all that razzmatazz.

Life is very strange. Especially when you are Western Buddhist.

Outtakes

I filmed this on the spur of the moment. I had planned to draft Charlie as camera crew, and also to do a bunch of voice work and practice runs beforehand; but Charlie was at a conference in LA and it was possibly the last day of the year when the weather would cooperate, so I just did it. I did nine takes, but couldn’t check whether any of them were any good, for boring technical reasons, and was afraid they might all be lousy. I’m reasonably happy with how it came out, although I think I could have done better if I’d been able to review the first few takes before continuing.

Anyway, some takes are quite different from others. I thought you might be amused to watch another couple. And maybe you can tell me which of the three you like best!

I wonder if I should substitute one of these for the one I chose to put at the top of this post. What do you think? Which do you prefer?