Impure perception

impure perception (T. ma dag pa'i snang ba མ་དག་པའི་སྣང་བ་). An appearance of something as a non-enlightened mind makes it appear, namely in only a mundane form and with true existence. One of the three types of perception according to Buddhist tantra.

Impure perception is also referred to as "karmic perception", "karmic vision", etc.

Chogyal Namkhai Norbu states:

Karmic vision is the illusory vision of beings in transmigration. It is called "illusory" because, depending on one's karma, it arises from a precise cause. The six principal passions are considered to be the fundamental causes of the six dimensions of existence. Pride, jealousy, attachment, mental obscuration, avarice, and anger, give rise, respectively, to the karmic visions of the gods, the semi-gods, human beings, animals, hungry ghosts (preta), and hell beings. These dimensions are not worlds that can be found to be located in some area of the universe, but are karmic visions, which manifest according to the prevalence of one or other of the passions.

For we human beings, for example, the hell realm does not exist; but if we accumulate during this lifetime sufficient karma of the passion of anger, we can very easily be born in our next life in the karmic vision of hell. And the same is true if we accumulate the passions which cause births as other types of beings. Each one of them has a characteristic karmic vision, which lasts until the karma that produced it has been used up. A story used to give an example of this tells that there once came together, near a river, six different types of beings who each saw the river in a different way. The god among the six saw the river as nectar, the hungry ghost saw it as flaming lava, the human being as clear water, and so on. This example is used to make one understand that there does not exist one vision that is objectively real and concrete in the same way for all beings. If we were to offer a glass of water to drink to a hungry ghost, it would probably burn his throat.

Sources

• Chogyal Namkhai Norbu (1996), Clemente, Adriano, ed., Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State, Snow Lion Publications 
• dag pa'i snang ba, Christian-Steinert Dictionary