The Dawn of Awareness: An Upadesha Tantra of the Great Perfection Paperback – May 10, 2025

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 Upadeśa 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 Upadeśa 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 Upadeśa 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. Read more