Dzogchen — The Great Perfection
Dzogchen (the great perfection) is the highest teaching of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism — the direct recognition that one's own awareness (rigpa) is already the enlightened state, requiring no transformation.
Dzogchen (Tibetan: rdzogs chen — great perfection/completion) is the pinnacle teaching of the Nyingmapa tradition, said to have been transmitted by Samantabhadra (the primordial Buddha) and brought to Tibet by Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra. Unlike gradual path approaches, Dzogchen teaches that the practitioner's own awareness (rigpa — naked, uncontrived awareness) is already the enlightened state: not a state to be achieved through transformation but to be recognized as what always already is. The three aspects of the enlightened nature — Trekcho (cutting through — recognizing rigpa), Thogal (direct crossing — spontaneous visions), and Yangti (the innermost secret) — constitute a complete path from recognition to stabilization to the rainbow body (jalü) at death. Dzogchen masters have a tradition of demonstrating the rainbow body at death — their physical form dissolving into light — of which hundreds of documented cases exist in the Tibetan tradition.
Rigpa is not something to be achieved. It is the nature of your own awareness, here and now, complete and perfect.
Physicist David Bohm's concept of 'undivided wholeness in flowing movement' (holomovement) resonates with the Dzogchen understanding of rigpa as the ground state of all possible experience — not a particular state but the nature of awareness itself.
Tibetan Book of the Dead