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Alexander Berzin:
Although tulkus are the reincarnations of highly advanced tantric practitioners, such practitioners need not necessarily have been great spiritual teachers, nor monks or nuns. They may have been lay meditators, for instance, who lived alone as hermits in caves. To start a line of tulkus requires usually only four conditions: (1) foreknowledge that recognition of one's future incarnations will be beneficial to others, (2) well-developed bodhichitta as the motivation, (3) sincere prayers to take rebirth in a form, beneficial to others, which will be recognized as a tulku, and (4) a certain degree of mastery of the first stage of the highest class of tantra.
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The word tulku means a network of emanations (Skt. nirmanakaya, emanation body). Not only do fully enlightened Buddhas generate and appear as an array of emanations, so do advanced practitioners of the highest class of tantra. The array they generate is called a network of pathway-level emanations. The founders of lines of tulkus, then, may have achieved any level of spiritual attainment ranging from part of the generation stage to Buddhahood. Thus, they do not even need to have attained straightforward nonconceptual perception of reality (voidness, emptiness, the absence of impossible ways of existing). In short, only a tiny fraction of the founders of tulku lines comprises enlightened beings.
For this reason, the majority of tulkus still have negative karmic potentials in addition to a vast network of positive instincts (collection of merit). Depending on the circumstances of their upbringing and the societies in which they live, different potentials come to the fore and ripen in each lifetime. Thus, some tulkus may act in completely unenlightened ways. Nevertheless, by the force of the death-juncture meditation and prayers of the founders of their lines, their next incarnations may still be as Rinpoches, located and recognized by the masters who have determined that to do so would have special benefit. This may occur even if the tulkus in question failed to perform death-juncture meditation when they died. |
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