The wall paintings illustrate a Dzogchen ‘treasure text’ (gter ma) revealed two cen- turies earlier by Terton Orgyen Pema Lingpa (1450–1521) and ascribed to Padmasambhava, the ‘Lotus Born’ sage credited with having established Dzogchen in Tibet in the eighth century.
Dzogchen’s body-oriented approach to the realisation of habitually dormant perceptual and existential capacities is vividly portrayed in a series of late seventeenth-century murals in a once secret meditation chamber in Lhasa conceived during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama. While Dzogchen is commonly perceived, and presented, as pertaining principally to the reflexive ‘self-liberating’ potential of the mind, its practice is traditionally infused by physical exercises that push the body-and thereby consciousness-beyond conventional limits and constraints. The Great Perfection or Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) teachings of Tibet are upheld as revealing the ultimate unconditioned nature of human consciousness without recourse to the transforma- tional rites and practices that characterise the tantric, or Vajrayāna, form of Buddhism from which it arose.
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