What is Dewachen?

Buddha Amitaba - Dewachen

From The Spiritual Path:  A Compilation of Teachings by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

When you pray to be reborn in Dewachen, what do you really mean? In the ultimate view, Dewachen is the celestial mandala of the Lord Amitabha. Lord Amitabha is a Dharmakaya Buddha. Thus Dewachen is Dharmakaya awareness or the Dharmakaya view—the pure, uncontrived, primordial-wisdom view, free of all conceptualization. To be reborn in Dewachen really means to experience the natural Dharmakaya state—the state that has no limitation. Dharmakaya has no consideration of self and other, no separation between form and formless. To awaken in that state is not to become a transformed or translucent ego. Please understand that if you want to become a better person, you want, somehow, to become transformed. You want to be a Buddha. Then people will say, “Look, there’s a Buddha!” Can you see the difference between that attitude and the experience of pure nature, suchness, free of all idea of ego?

Do you still practice with an idea about what you will be? That very you consists of and maintains incorrect view. When you pray to be reborn in Dewachen—make no mistake about it—you are praying for the death of your ego. Eternal life implies the belief in self-nature as an eternal reality. Someone who believes in eternal life, consciously or unconsciously, is on a path without the understanding that if ego did survive forever, it would only insure the continuation of suffering. Such a path is not workable. If your secret prayer is somehow to become a transformed ego, if you are using Dharma words to disguise your wish to remain intact as a self, then you are asking to continue on the wheel of cyclic death and rebirth, the wheel of suffering, the wheel of samsara.

© Jetsunma Ahkön Lhamo