The Natural Freedom of Non-Living Things in a Tibetan Buddhist Rdzogs chen Tantra

This paper examines an idiosyncratic account of “effortless natural freedom” (bad med rang grol) in a Tibetan Buddhist Great Perfection tantra, The Pearl Garland (Mu tig ’phreng ba). The text advances a provocative cosmovision in which bodies, sensory faculties, and inert material elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—are said to be primordially and effortlessly “free” (grol ba). Inverting conventional Buddhist soteriology, where freedom names release from saṃsārainto nirvāṇa, this chapter presents freedom not as the culmination of the path but as its precondition, extending even to those forms of existence Buddhism traditionally characterizes as bound, or “marked” by suffering. The tantra accordingly presses a philosophically probing and practical question: If everything is already free, why practice at all? Through close reading of the chapter and its twelfth-century commentary, the paper analyzes its proposition of the freedom of non-living things, and considers its philosophical and environmental-ethical implications.