Within the Great Perfection, transmissions, empowerments, and oral instructions form a single, integrated mandala whose purpose is to bring about direct recognition and stabilization of primordial awareness. Transmission (lung) is the formal reading or recitation of a text or mantra by a qualified master, through which the blessing and unbroken continuity of the lineage are conveyed. This establishes the practitioner’s karmic and energetic connection with specific teachings and authorizes deep engagement with them. In this way, lung does not merely license recitation; it situates the practitioner within a living stream of realization, so that study and practice are not isolated, private efforts but unfold within a sacred continuity.

Empowerment (wang) functions as a ritual initiation that ripens the practitioner’s mindstream and prepares it for the most direct practices. By purifying obscurations and activating the latent buddha-aspect within, empowerment makes the practitioner a suitable vessel for the profound methods of Dzogchen. In many lineages, certain practices such as the most direct approaches to recognizing awareness are only given after such empowerments, precisely because they are understood to open and stabilize the subtle capacities required. Thus wang both grants authorization and creates the inner conditions for realization, sometimes including a direct introduction to awareness within the ritual itself.

Oral instructions (tri) are the living heart of the path, the personal and often highly specific guidance that a master gives to a student. These instructions include the crucial pointing-out of the nature of mind, clarifying how to recognize primordial awareness, how to remain in it, and how to integrate it with every aspect of experience. Tri also address the very human side of practice: doubts, misunderstandings, and obstacles that cannot be resolved by textual study alone. In the Great Perfection, such oral guidance is regarded as indispensable, because without it, even the most exalted texts and empowerments risk remaining at the level of concept or ritual rather than becoming a direct, stable realization of what is already present.