Imagining the Real: Buddhist Paths to Wholeness in Tibet

In many Buddhist traditions, confusion is intrinsic to ordinary experience. This confusion, or ignorance, consists either of imagining as existent something is which isn’t, like an inviolable self, or denying into no-existence something that does exist, like cause and effect. Buddhist practitioners seek freedom from all such mesmerizing imaginals. And yet the path to freedom itself involves of intentional imagining. How can this be? In making the multi-faceted role of the imagination in Buddhist thought and contemplative practice our focus here, we note how such imagining differs from thinking, especially through its integration of the cognitive emotional, and somatic or embodied experience. And we consider especially how this works in Dzogchen, the Great Completeness, regarded as the acme of the ancient (Nyingma) Tibetan Buddhist paths. Dzogchen’s way of handling the apparent conundrum of imagination bringing freedom from itself is actually a key to its inclusive vision. e We here introduce the stages of such training by referring to an especially succinct distillation of them in 18th