Brilliant Illumination of the Lamp of the Five Stages
Sutra and Tantra: The Profound and Miraculous
Lesson 6: The Accelerated Path of Tantra
Reading:
Brilliant Illumination of the Lamp of the Five Stages
(Rim lnga rab tu gsal ba’i sgron me) Practical Instruction in the King of Tantras, The Glorious Esoteric Community by TsongKhapa Losang Drakpa
INTRODUCTION AND TRANSLATION
by Robert A.F. Thurman Edited by Thomas F. Yarnall Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences series Tengyur Translation Initiative Jey Yabsey Sungbum Collection Published by The American Institute of Buddhist Studies Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies Tibet House US New York 2010 3
Introduction
1. What is a “Buddha Vajradhara,” the Goal of this Tradition?
Ablaze in glory of wondrous signs and marks, Forever playing in the taste of the bliss-void kiss, Recklessly compassionate, free of extremist calm— I bow to the Victor with the seven super-factors!1 To study this work fruitfully, we need first of all to understand what the author thinks is the goal of the practices described within it. That is to say, we need to imagine what TsongKhapa imagines is the kind of being called a “buddha vajradhara”—what a buddha really is—whether viewed from the Tantric perspective or not. What he thinks a buddha-being is, is so utterly fantastic, even preposterous, from the perspective of our
philosophically materialist modern culture, it takes a real effort of imagination, a nearly sci-fi exercise in openness of mind. We don’t have to agree that in reality there is such a thing, but to understand the work at hand, it is fruitful to place ourselves in the position of Tsong Khapa’s audience. To catch a glimpse of where he is coming from, we have to review the parameters he sets up for our imagining. This is an effort required to understand any form of Buddhism, but it is particularly important in the Tantric or mantric context, since a lot of the work of mantric practice involves contemplative deployment of the structured imagination.
It is also quite probable that Tsong Khapa feels he should salute Vajradhara Buddha in this technical way because even his own Tibetan Buddhist contemporaries and successors might not so easily imagine what a buddha is, in its inconceivable reality. TsongKhapa himself said —after what he referred to as his coming to complete clarity about the uttermost subtleties of the realistic view, and what others refer to as his perfect enlightenment—that it was the opposite of what he had expected it to be, indicating that even a great scholar such as he had not fully been
Tib. rGyal ba yan lag bdun ldan. These are the components of a Buddha Vajradhara’s material body: 1) it has the auspicious signs and marks; 2) it is in embrace of a wisdom-intuition consort (being both the male and the female); 3) its mind is always super-bliss; 4) such bliss is ever aware of voidness; 5) its compassion avoids extremist calm; 6) its bodily continuum is uninterrupted; and 7) its enlightened deeds are unceasing.4 · Introduction able to imagine what
the buddha-awareness was really like. When even a Buddhist thinks of enlightenment, she thinks of a kind of awareness far greater than her habitual own, but still it is difficult to imagine a being whose consciousness is at once infinitely expanded and minutely detailed, who feels him- / her- / it-self a timeless eternity of utter freedom ecstatically blissful, and whose multi-sourced presence can manifest in relation to countless individual beings as countless different relational beings at once.
To try to express the inexpressible, from the three buddha-body theory perspective, a buddha is a being who is not restricted to having to be enclosed in a single separate embodiment that faces an “other” universe and yet who does not neglect the countless beings who persist in feeling that they are separate, and are facing him, her, or it as an “other.” When a buddha completes its, her, or his wisdom store in the buddha-truth-body (Skt. dharmakāya), it viscerally
experiences itself as indivisibly one with all realities, and other beings and things and the spaces and energies within and around them are felt to be part of its body. This feeling feels those beings, things, and energies as configurations of a limitless bliss, as the truth body is simultaneously a bliss body, the buddha-beatific-body (Skt. saṁbhogakāya). This bliss feeling does not anaesthetize the buddha being from also feeling what the beings feel of suffering; in a
way the bliss energizes the ability to remain aware of the others’ feelings of dis-satisfaction and pain. Indeed, the awareness of others’ dissatisfaction and pain in turn stimulates the spacious cloudlike truth-beatitude-indivisible buddha-body to manifest or emanate limitless forms of embodiment (Skt. nirmāṇakāya) as beings or things that can be perceived by the suffering beings and that perfectly mirror to them, according to their perceptual capacities, their potential freedom from suffering and their potential awareness of their own natural bliss.
Although this description of the inconceivable, amazing cognitive-dissonance-tolerant, dichotomy-reconciling nature of buddhahood is ultimately ungraspable in linear binary terms, we can imagine it with the help of limiting concepts such as voidness, freedom, nonduality, and the elaborated theory of the three bodies of buddhahood. Imagining it, we can aspire consciously to evolve toward achieving it for ourselves and those with whom we want to share it, in case it is really possible and not just a Buddhist fantasy. At any rate, the mantric or Tantric path is presented as the science and art of accelerating such conscious evolution by Introduction · 5 employing a supremely subtle technology of spiritual genetic engineering of a buddha mind and buddha bodies.
A point that should be clarified here is that the buddha mind is referred to in the theory as a “body of truth,” and the buddha bodies of beatitude and emanation are referred to as a “material body” (Skt. rūpa-kāya, often wrongly translated as “form body”). This may be a hint in the exoteric Universal Vehicle of the esoteric doctrine of the nonduality of body and mind at the ultimate or supremely subtle level.
To such an end of stimulating imagination and inspiration, Tsong Khapa embeds in his opening salutatory verse a standard formulation of the seven super-components of the material body of a buddha vajradhara (inconceivably indivisible from his and all buddhas’ infinite truth body, itself completely interpenetrating all other embodied beings and discrete things).
There are seven super-components of a buddha vajradhara’s material body.
1. IT HAS THE AUSPICIOUS SIGNS AND MARKS
There are traditionally thirty-two auspicious signs and eighty auspicious marks which a buddha vajradhara’s material body has in common with other buddhas such as Śhākyamuni and so forth. Nāgārjuna in his Jewel Rosary details these 112 signs and marks, explaining in brief how each one is the evolutionary (karmic) result of specific deeds in the many lives leading up to buddhahood (see below).
The final body of a buddha is the truth or reality body, which is infinite and timeless and indivisible. The individual expands always em-bodied awareness to encompass the ultimate reality of infinite worlds and beings, both enlightened and unenlightened, mental and physical. At the same time, the individual momentum of positive engagement with others —the love and compassion that drives a being to evolve into the ability of providing happiness to countless others—persists in the physical omni-presence of a buddha in an equally infinite beatific body that infinitely enjoys having all reality as its body, and
simultaneously encompasses the awarenesses of the infinite others who suffer due to their failure to realize their oneness with such a universe. This awareness automatically and effortlessly then manifests as infinite seemingly discrete embodiments, called “emanations.” For their own evolutionary benefit, self-alienated migrating beings can interact with these emanations. Therefore, a buddha vajradhara is not just one individual, beautiful, divine embodiment, separate superbeing in a desire realm heaven—that manifestation is just one of countless manifestations, but it is the one that best expresses to the evolutionary psychonaut, or adept, the ideal and goal he or she is aiming for.
Regarding the emanation bodies, there are said to be three kinds: artistic, incarnational, and supreme. The artistic emanation body consists of all representations of buddhas and their deeds by artists whose aim is to help beings imagine the supreme evolutionary state all beings can achieve. The incarnational emanation body is all the manifestations a buddha can create to interact with alienated beings in order to help their development, including
inanimate objects such as buildings, continents, even planets, in addition to plants and animate beings. The supreme ema-nation body is a buddha like Śhākyamuni Buddha, who manifests descent from heaven, conception, birth, and so on (the twelve deeds with which we are familiar). It is such a supreme emanation that manifests a body that carries on it the graphic demonstrations (the signs and marks) of all his or her evolutionary achievements. In this way all emanation bodies are themselves teachings for specific beings in specific evolutionary times and places.
In his Jewel Rosary,2 Nāgārjuna gives a summary of the marks and their causes in a buddha’s evolutionary past: Through proper honoring of stupas, venerables, noble ones, and the elderly, you will become a universal mon-arch, your glorious hands and feet marked with wheels.
King, always maintain firmly your vows about your practices; you will then become a bodhisattva, with very level feet.
By giving gifts, speaking pleasantly, fulfilling beings’ wishes, and practicing what you teach, you will have hands with glorious fingers joined by luminous webs.
2 Here I quote a number of verses to give a taste of the specifics of the biological theory of karmic evolution (Jewel Rosary, vs. 177–197).Introduction · 7 By always generously giving the finest food and drink, your glorious hands and feet will be soft, and along with your shoulder blades and the nape of your neck, seven areas will be broad, and your body will be large.
By never doing harm and freeing condemned persons, your body will be beautiful, straight, and tall, your fingers will be long, and the backs of your heels will be broad.
By spreading spiritual disciplines, you will have a good complexion, a good repute, your ankles will not protrude, and your body hairs will stand upwards.
Due to your enthusiasm in propagating the arts and sciences, and so on, you will have the calves of an antelope, a sharp intelligence, and great wisdom.
When others desire your wealth and possessions, by disciplining yourself to give them immediately, you will have broad arms, an attractive appearance, and will be-come a world leader.
By reconciling friends who are in conflict, you will become supreme, and your glorious private organ will retract within [like a stallion]. By bestowing upon others excellent dwellings, your complexion will be soft, like stainless refined gold. By granting to others superior powers and dutifully fol-lowing your teachers, your each and every hair will be your ornament, including a special tuft of hair between the eyebrows.
By speaking pleasantly and meaningfully, and by acting upon the good speech [of others], you will have curving shoulders and a lion-like upper body.
By nursing and healing the sick, the area between your shoulders will be broad, you will live in a state of ease, and all your tastes will be excellent. By conducting your affairs in accord with the Dharma, your skull dome will be beautifully elevated, and [your body] will be symmetrical like a banana tree.
By speaking true and gentle words over a long time, O lord
of men, your tongue will be long, and your voice like that of Brahma the creator.
By always speaking truth continuously, your cheeks will be lion-like, glorious, and you will be hard to overcome.
By being carefully respectful, serving others, and doing what is proper, your teeth will be shining, white, and even. By always speaking true and non-divisive words, you will have forty glorious teeth, set evenly and wondrous to behold.
By gazing at beings with altruistic love without desire, hatred, or delusion, your eyes will be bright and blue, with lashes like a bull’s. Thus in brief know well these thirty-two signs of a great lion of beings, together with their [evolutionary] causes.
Nāgārjuna then goes on to mention the eighty auspicious signs, not listing them, saying it would take too long; but the lists are common in the Sūtras. This list gives us the feel of the Buddhist worldview. Life is evolutionary. The acts we perform of body, speech, and mind in any given life produce their result in the future of this life or in a future life.
The patterns cited in this specific case of attaining the thirty-two auspicious marks of a superbeing (mahāpuruṣha) connect moral actions with biological results.
A point to be emphasized is that this counts in the Buddhist culture as a “scientific” explanation of the physical characteristics of a “supreme emanation buddha body,” such as that of Śhākyamuni. Therefore, less evolved beings who have some physical marks resembling these thirty-two have been committing acts of the same type. Thus if you are tall, with long fingers, and the backs of your heels are broad, you have been relatively less harmful to other beings in many previous lives; in numerous Introduction · 9 life-forms, and in previous human lives you have saved lives and pardoned condemned beings.
Anything in these directions—height and breadth and beauty of body, nature of hands and feet and limbs, shape of eyes, length of tongue, beauty of cheeks, and so on—all these physical traits come from past evolutionary actions of body and speech and mind. The Darwinian theory of “survival of the fittest”—meaning increase of the survival-enhancing qualities of a species (not individuals) due to the physical propagation of the offspring of better equipped individuals
generation after generation, producing mutations that cope better with the environment, that are transmitted by physical genes, and so forth—is somewhat parallel to the Buddhist theory. But added here to that picture (of the mutations of species over countless generations in coordination with environmental changes) is the individual’s own personal evolution. That individual carries the results of his or
her own evolutionary actions encoded in a mental gene (Skt. gotra) that goes from one coarse flesh and blood embodiment to another, meeting the physical genes of fathers and mothers in human or other animal forms born in mammalian womb, reptilian or avian egg, insect moisture, or magical environment.
Once persons encounter such a “karmic” biological worldview and come to think of it as realistic, either through cultural conditioning in a Buddhist culture or through historical and internal scientific investigation, they adapt their lifestyles to consciously cultivate that mental gene through skillful evolutionary actions, considering that cultivation to be the prime priority of their lives, since its results will determine the qualities of their inevitable lives far
into the future. The ultimate change of lifestyle is precisely the Tantric one, where individuals decide that they cannot wait for countless rebirths of gradual progress to reach the summit of positive life experience for self and other that is defined as buddhahood.
And so they enter the Tantric path of self creation and self perfection, compressing all those deaths and rebirths into a single intense lifetime or a few lifetimes in order to get to the highest goal as soon as possible.
Tantric art and contemplative technology is thus a form of genetic engineering. The main tool is the highly concentrated and stabilized creative imagination, which uses the patterns of the mandala environments and the divine embodiments (themselves derived from meritorious actions and scientific insights) to shape the spiritual gene of the practitioner. This 10 · Introduction
shaped gene then simulates, in the virtual reality of the lucid-dream-like contemplative performance (Skt. sādhana), the death, between, and rebirth processes; first as a rehearsal of out-of-coarse- or subtle- body performances; and then as actual mind- and shape- shifting transformations in the evolutionary direction of buddhahood.
2. IT IS IN EMBRACE OF A WISDOM-INTUITION CONSORT (AS BOTH THE MALE AND THE FEMALE)
The highest pleasure in ordinary life is generally conceded to be the release experienced in sexual orgasm, wherein an individual melts his or her normal bodily rigidities and feels intense rapture through a blissful inner flooding of pleasurable energy. In Buddhist neurobiology, this is explained as the bodily energies (or vital winds) dissolving away from their normal functions in the limbs and muscles and nerves (including the brain) and concentrating in the
central channel of the nervous system, said to run through the body from mid-brow up to crown of head and down in front of the spine to the tip of the genital organ. These energies take with them endocrine drops that anchor blissful feelings and concentrate them into a powerful force that carries the mind with it into release from all mental and physical preoccupations. The most powerful bliss experience of this kind occurs in a “normal,” egocentrically-wired being only
at death, as the mental energy is released from preoccupation within the coarse body. That experience dissipates as that mental-subtle-energy continuum arises as a subtle dreamlike body in a “between state.” This fairy-like “between being” (Skt. gandharva) migrates in
its state of separateness throughout all the optional forms of existence in the vast universe other than it. When eventually the gandharva being itself is attracted to the coupling of a male and a female of some species, it melts into their state of self-expanding passion and is drawn into its next coarse embodiment in a womb, etc.
Therefore, that a vajradhara buddha is always in embrace with a wisdom-intuition consort indicates that this embodiment is not a coarse, non-blissful, ordinary one. It is perpetually indivisible from the bliss of orgasmic freedom, experiencing the male and female
complementarity of orgasmic wholeness and contentment at all times. This gives a hint that such a being is nothing but a manifestation of the infinite bliss-void-indivisible of the infinite truth and beatific bodies, where every atom and Introduction · 11 subatomic energy is experienced as orgasmic release in creative magical emanation.
A very key point to note here—to clear up a general scholarly mis-apprehension about Tantra, namely that it is essentially a male chauvinist tradition—is that a vajradhara buddha is both the female and the male in the embrace, not just the male
exploitively wrapping himself in some sort of subservient female as a mindless accessory. On simpler levels, the male is universal compassion and the female transcendent wisdom; the male is superbliss art and the female is profound voidness wisdom; or the male is the magic illusion body and the female the clear light transparence of the total voidness.
3. ITS MIND IS ALWAYS SUPER-BLISS
This emphasizes the transcendent nature of buddhahood: a vajradhara buddha body mind represents the ultimate nondual awareness of enlightenment that experiences its own/everything’s reality as unobstructed bliss of orgasmic freedom, nirvana. This is the reality that Śhākyamuni and all buddhas proclaim as the very substance of even samsaric reality, not
enjoyed by beings who know it as otherwise, even while their bodies and minds are essentially constituted of bliss and their whole beings are primally interpenetrated by uncreated nirvana. In exoteric Universal Vehicle this is taught by the Buddha in the Lotus Sūtra and other cataphatic Sūtras, wherein the Buddha shocks his dualistic Elder disciples, monastic vehicle arhat saints, by proclaiming the world’s purity, blissfulness, eternal selfhood, and transcendent freedom.
4. SUCH BLISS IS EVER AWARE OF VOIDNESS
This blissful wisdom that enjoys the inconceivable exquisiteness of the relative world never loses sight of its essential freedom, its ultimate peacefulness, its brilliant infinite energy that therefore has no need to do anything, and so has done all that needs to be done. So the nirvanic bliss-awareness is not contradictory to the ultimate calmness
and oneness of the immanent beyond; it neither troubles the ocean of bliss with elaborations nor constrains it by clinging to non-elaboration. Being “aware of voidness” simply means that the blissed-out subjectivity remains in a limitlessly melting, nongrasping flow, in unity with an infinite horizon of openness pervading all objectivities.
5. ITS COMPASSION AVOIDS EXTREMIST CALM
The previous two super-components of a vajradhara indicate the buddha mind’s nature as the ultimate tolerance of cognitive dissonance, the reconciliation of all dichotomies, the unity of simplicity and complexity, and not simply as a collapsed state of total extinct oblivion or resigned relational bondage. Particularly, this fifth super-component indicates that a
vajradhara buddha is not tempted to escape into sheer infinity without any differentiated objects; his/her/its transcendent wisdom is absolutely self-transforming into the infinite compassion that cannot abandon beings trapped by ignorance in the suffering of egocentric separateness and alienation from the multi-dimensional, inconceivable universe of freedom.
6. ITS BODILY CONTINUUM IS UNINTERRUPTED
Being an infinite awareness beyond unity and plurality, one indivisible—with every detail—with all buddhas of the past, present, and future, along with all unenlightened beings of all those three times also, and being also indivisible with the infinite clear light transparency energy of absolute void freedom, a vajradhara buddha effortlessly responds to the needs of infinite numbers of suffering
beings. A vajradhara buddha manifests from this inexhaustibly energetic nirvanic reality whatever medicine will relieve that suffering, whether it be the magical emanation of a vajradhara, a buddha, a bodhisattva, a person, a companion, an enemy, a substance, a continent, a planet, a star, a deity, a demon, a death, a rebirth, and so forth.
The fact that some sensitive humans who seek freedom and enlightenment carry subconsciously the notion that they are somehow going to escape from embodiment, going to have a rest, going to get out of entanglements, and so forth, is nowhere more powerfully responded to in the Buddhist Sūtras
than by the iconic event of the supreme emanation body Buddha’s parinirvana, ultimate freedom understood by dualistic Buddhists as “no more rebirth.” However, the proposition that a buddha simply dis-appears from existence upon final enlightenment is definitively refuted by the many Universal Vehicle presentations of nonduality.
7. ITS ENLIGHTENED DEEDS ARE UNCEASING
Seeing nirvana as here and now, as nondually and blissfully immanent within all details of differentiation and manifestation, means that Introduction · 13 there is no need at all for any interruption of embodiment. Iconically, this presents buddhahood not as the permanent extinction attractive to escapist dualists, but rather as a glorious explosion into infinite life, driven by in-finite compassion into hyperdrive to manifest whatever is needed to tame whomsoever.
This last super-component of vajradharahood adds to the Tantric dimension an encouraging transhistorical dimension where the aspirant need no longer feel lost in a decadent historical era when buddhas are gone, enlightened institutions have been crushed, beings are deluded and self-destructive, and so on—just how the world looks to us when we read the news or get bogged down in confronting
political confusion, venality, and incompetence. The investigator and adventurer who seeks the real meaning and purpose of life wants to live it by taking up the priceless and rare human opportunity to become truly consciously awake. This
involves mastering the evolutionary process to accelerate her or his development toward the ideal evolutionary condition of bliss-freedom indivisible and wisdom-compassion irresistible, infinitely alive because firmly rooted in the transcendent rootlessness of death. This
scientist-explorer can always and without fail discover the past present and future vajradhara buddhas to help her or him find knowledge, consecration, instruction, wisdom, and artfulness. As far away as they may seem at times, their enlightened deeds are unceasing, they are never retired or unavailable.
I am fully aware that this unpacking of Tsong Khapa’s opening salutation reveals a worldview profoundly at odds with that of “modern” scientific materialism. I do not expect academic colleagues—committed to the institutions founded on spiritual absolutism and now devoted to scientific materialism—to be convinced that such things can be realistic: such things as real former and
future life continua, mental genetic evolution, a teleology not based on an omnipotent creator god but on individual choice of purpose made by rational persons who scientifically investigate reality in systematic ways and discover the void nature of things
as being in nondual harmonious equivalence with a causal coherence of lifestyle leading to buddhahood as the logical summit of evolutionary potential. However, there is no way to understand the works of the Indian and Tibetan great adepts (mahāsiddhas)—great yogī/nīs, scientist-explorers, astronaut-like psychonauts—unless one at least makes the effort to imagine the world they discovered, considered, and then persuasively argued is the more real world. After all, if modern or postmodern scientific materialists wish to be truly scientific, and not dogmatic and fundamentalist, they must admit that the cutting
edge of science has reached the uncertainty principle, the mutual transformability of matter and energy, the inconceivability of the macro- and micro- universes, and the openness to the principle that all “laws of the universe” are hypotheses awaiting
falsification by new data and new theories. Thus, the examination, evaluation, and imaginative experimental appreciation of realistic worldviews and paradigms that at first seem completely strange and outlandish is part of the advancing of the frontiers of knowledge and the deepening of scientific and humanistic wisdom. 2. Who Are the Beings Who Maintain this Tradition?
To the Lord of Secrets, collector of all secrets combined, And to the ancestral mentors who achieved supremacy Through the path of the Community, King of Tantras— Indrabhūti, Nāgaḍākinī, Visukalpa, glorious Saraha, Vajrin Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, Nāgabodhi, Śhākyamitra, Mataṅgi, Chandra kīrti pāda and the others— I bow with the mind of ferocious faith!
LORD OF SECRETS
The “Lord of Secrets” (Guhyapati, gsang ba’i bdag po) is considered an emanation of Vajradhara Buddha, incarnating the powerful energy of all buddhas as a bodhisattva who asks Vajradhara to explain the esoteric teachings and then records what he is taught. He is usually represented as dark blue in color, often one-headed and two-armed, holding a vajra five-pronged double scepter that symbolizes the buddhas’ wielding of the supreme power of the relative universe—this power being fierce love and compassion—basically the indomitable bliss of deathless freedom that seeks to go beyond being contained within any individual’s experience and to share itself with all sensitive beings.
Tsong Khapa had a personal mentor and colleague named Hlodrak Khenchen Namkha Gyaltsen, who, when teaching TsongKhapa, would be perceived as transformed into the iconic form of Vajrapaṇi. When he learned from Tsong Khapa, he would perceive Tsong Khapa as transformed into Mañjuśhrī. The Khenchen was gratefully credited by the late Introduction · lama, Kyabjey Lingtsang Rinpochey —the Dalai Lama’s senior tutor and the 90th Ganden Throne-holder of the Gelukpa order—with having dissuaded Tsong Khapa and his eight close followers from going on pious pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy places in India in 1399. For had they gone, they might not have returned very easily, if at all in that era, and Tibet would not have benefited from the twenty years of writing, teach-ing, and building Tsong Khapa gave to it from that time until his passing in
And what are these “secrets” of which Vajradhara / Vajrapaṇi is the “Lord?” These are the esoteric teachings of the Tantras, which are the “continua” of person, reality, and teaching, that are the highest technologies of transforming the meaningless, purposeless, and miserable world of cyclic living—wherein misknowing egocentric beings struggle futilely and endlessly against an overwhelming infinite universe—into a buddha-verse of mutual love, compassion, and blissful pleasure energizing the inconceivable positive evolution of interconnected self and other.
Why are they “secret?” They are not secret from anyone who needs them, just as the formulas and procedures of sub-atomic quantum physics are not intrinsically secret from anyone, but are as good as secret for any-one who is unprepared by a complex and sustained education. For such persons, they are incomprehensible and useless. Moreover, there is an additional element in the need for secrecy in the context of Tantra; the need to protect such unprepared persons, as they can hurt themselves in profound evolutionary ways if they misuse the powerful technologies of Tantra.
A cardinal Tantric technique is the art of purifying perception: to visualize and gradually learn to perceive the universe as a buddhaverse or mandalic paradise, with all beings as divine “buddhine” beings and all environments as perfected divine abodes. If this were to be employed with sustained concentration by persons who have not first had some level of experiential realization of voidness and its inevitably
entailed awareness of the relativity and constructedness of all things, it would lead such practitioners into the trap of psychosis, getting them stuck in an alternate reality far more pleasant and seemingly secure than the jarring and dangerous ordinary reality. A second cardinal art of Tantra is purifying self-conception: cultivating a divine buddha-
identity to replace the ordinary, habitual self-identity of the ignorant person. If that were to be practiced by someone without at least some level of the realization of 16 · Introduction selflessness and its entailed insight into the constructedness of relational self, it would lead to megalomania. Thirdly, if a practitioner does not have at least some degree of detachment from primal
subconscious drives of eros and thanatos, and some degree of universal compassion toward others, the powerful energies of the deeper mind and body, when aroused within the Tantric atmosphere, are likely to carry the person still perceiving those energies as lust and hostility into dangerous areas of manipulative exploitation of others, which would prove enormously destructive to both self and others.
Therefore the guardian of the secrets of the Tantras is the fierce Vajrapaṇi, who appears occasionally in the exoteric Sūtras as a yakṣha-like fierce protector of the Buddha, who dwells under his teaching throne.
I recall the Sūtra of the Wise and the Fool account where several Vajra-paṇis come out from under Śhākyamuni’s throne to ward off the six false teachers.
ANCESTRAL MENTORS
This term “ancestral mentor” (Tib. brgyud pa’i bla ma), usually translated “lineage lama,” is translated this way to reveal the feeling of a practicing great adept, who is not identified in her or his mind with his blood lineage and does not look back to great
grandparents and so on as the most important ancestors. We can see in the case of Tibetan culture that the common institution of ancestor worship or preoccupation with bone (father) and blood (mother) lineage is almost completely neglected, having been thoroughly eroded by the commonsensically accepted, culturally embedded, biological theory of karmic evolution. That
is, persons so acculturated consider their own past existences to have been in other families, nations, genders, races, even species, and so there is not a very strong connection with the blood or bone of the parents of this life and their forebears. Further, a dead parent or great grandparent is considered more likely to be reincarnated as one’s neighbor than to be in some ancestral happy hunting ground awaiting veneration and the offerings of tea and cookies from successive generations.
However, in past generations, those who provided and preserved precious Dharma teachings and practices are the spiritual ancestors who engendered the good qualities and liberating realizations in oneself that really enhance one’s “spiritual gene” (gotra, rigs); so they are considered the real ancestors. Spiritual adepts—and, by their conscious and subliminal Introduction · 17 example, all Tibetans—are acculturated to view their Dharma ancestors as more important than
their clan forebears. The rituals of offering drops of elixir to them in one’s daily prayers and performances are in effect substitutes for the more usual ancestor rituals we find in other Asian societies. Every ritual performance (sādhana) written by lamas such as Tsong Khapa and his successors, and performed by hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns over the centuries, includes an invocation of these ancestral mentors at the beginning and makes offerings to them during a later section of the performance.
THE PATH OF THE ESOTERIC COMMUNITY TANTRA
From among the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, the Esoteric Community Tantra (Guhyasamāja) is considered by Tsong Khapa the paradigmatic “Father Tantra.” I say “paradigmatic” rather than “supreme,” as is often said, since every Tantra proclaims itself to be “supreme.” Indeed, each of them can assist the practitioner to the supreme achievement of buddhahood if properly implemented. The special virtue of the Esoteric Community is said to be that it has five Explanatory Tantras taught by Vajradhara Buddha which complement the originally revealed Root Tantra. It therefore provides all the materials needed for a student and practitioner to understand all Tantras, many of which are less complete in their teachings.
The “Father” category of Tantras is critically defined by Tsong Khapa as characterizing those Tantras that emphasize the methodology for attaining the magic body (māyadeha, sgyu lus), a subtle body like a dream body. The practitioner learns to release this subtle body from within his or her meditatively entranced coarse body, which subtle body can then act in the universe to accelerate the accumulation of the stores of merit and wisdom that are required for buddhahood, gathering lifetimes of merit and wisdom in a single lifetime dedicated to such meditation.
The “Mother” category of Unexcelled Yoga Tantras emphasizes the arts of deepening the wisdom of either a coarsely or a subtly embodied practitioner by plunging her or him again and again into the clear light transparence realms within the infinite event horizon of deep voidness.
With all due respect, Tsong Khapa critiqued those venerated mentor scholars, such as Butön Rinpochey, who argued for a third category of “nondual” Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, on the principle that all of them are nondual; the “Mother” and “Father” categories simply describe their · Introduction dominant emphasis, not an exclusive focus. These most advanced Tantras are all called “unexcelled” (anuttara), rather than “highest” (parama), because they reveal and make accessible
the innermost core of nondual reality, and nothing can go beyond them since they contain everything within their matrix; “highest” implies a hierarchy in which the goal is somehow above and away from the “lower” things, which would carry a trace of dualism. Unexcelled Yoga Tantra teaching is not “higher” than the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the ten transcendences, and so forth. It is the matrix in which all of those teachings are nested, and where they are fulfilled to the subtlest and most complete degree.
Although Tsong Khapa was an adept practitioner of a number of Tantras other than the Esoteric Community—he quotes from many of them—he usually based his analytic commentaries such as this one on the Esoteric Community literature and its commentaries developed in the noble (Skt. ārya) tradition of Indian Buddhist Tantrism.
Tsong Khapa goes on to mention outstanding examples of the spiritual ancestors he reveres as having brought the Esoteric Community Tantra teaching forward in history from the initial revelation of the Buddha to Tsong Khapa’s day.
INDRABHŪTI
Indrabhūti was a great adept said to have been a high king of Uḍḍiyāna. Contemporary scholars identify this land with the Swat valley presently in Pakistan, but in ancient times it possibly represented the entire country now known as Afghanistan and northern
Pakistan. It is said that he was fortunate enough to have received the original revelation of the Esoteric Community Tantra directly from Śhākyamuni as Vajradhara. It is said that the reason the Esoteric Community mandala universe has no charnel grounds (śhmaśhāna) around it (representing samsaric existence), as do other Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, is that since Indrabhūti
was a king, he liked things clean and orderly. He would have been repelled by any graphic display of the decay and putrefaction elemental in ordinary life. Upon receiving the teachings, Indrabhūti put them into practice and within twelve years attained perfect buddhahood as a great adept. He spread the teaching so widely within his kingdom, it is said, that even the fish in the lakes attained communion (yuganaddha), the orgasmic embrace of personal oneness with all nature and all beings that describes Tantric buddhahood.
NĀGAḌĀKINĪ
It is interesting that the second ancestor is a female, the Dragon Angel (klu’i mkha ’gro ma), who figures in the tradition’s history as having received the Esoteric Community Tantra teachings and precepts from King Indrabhūti and passed them on in turn to the southern Indian king, Visukalpa.
VISUKALPA
Apparently a king from southern India who received the teachings from the Nāgaḍākinī and passed them on to Saraha.
GLORIOUS SARAHA
There is a bit more information about Saraha, who was a Brahmin, but who was attracted by a female arrow-maker when strolling through a bazaar, humbled, and then taught how to make a straight arrow. To take up such a profession was to abandon his status as a high caste Brahmin and to live among the lowliest castes, typical behavior of the great adepts.
He became enlightened as a great adept and eventually taught the great Nāgārjuna.
VAJRIN NĀGĀRJUNA
The life of Nāgārjuna is fraught with historical uncertainty. He is said by his own highly philosophical, scientific, and critical tradition to have lived over six hundred years. He was given by his Brahmin parents to a monastery in his youth, as he was afflicted early on with an apparently incurable disease which a sage told them would prove fatal if he remained a householder. He was a good monk, also a doctor and alchemist, and works on medicine and alchemy are
attributed to him. Once he had become a teacher of the Individual Vehicle clear science (Abhi-dharma) tradition, he was approached by nāgas, under-ocean benevolent serpent- or dragon-like beings, and given a library of Universal Vehicle (Mahāyāna) Sūtras which they had been keeping safe since Śhākyamuni Buddha’s time. He revealed these texts in several batches, the first being the Transcendent Wisdom and Flower Garland Sūtras and the second being the Elucidation of the Intention, the White Lotus, and the Śhrīmālā-devī Sūtras.
He left India for around 250 years between these revelations and spent time in the northern continent, Uttarakuru, the continent on the 20 · Introduction other side of the axial mountain Sumeru, which would correspond on the round earth geography to the Americas. This “legendary” account would place his dates around 50 BCE to 550 CE. During this extraordinary lifespan (not quite up to Methuselah’s standards to be sure), he was a
Buddhist monk and teacher of the Individual Vehicle, a doctor and alchemist, author of several medical tomes, a discoverer of lost Universal Vehicle texts and a revealer of their philosophical and spiritual meanings in two phases, and an explorer who traveled across oceans and visited other continents. Finally, he was a mystic adept, upholder of the esoteric teachings and attainer of vajradharahood, replete with its omnipresent buddha bliss-void transparence body of truth, with its magic body time-less ability to manifest wherever and whenever it would be helpful to disciples.
I will return below to the problems this legendary richness poses for the contemporary materialist and historicist scholarship. For these short vignettes, I am presenting these ancestral masters according to the way Tsong Khapa and his colleagues perceived them.
ĀRYADEVA
Āryadeva was born as the son of the king of Shri Lanka in ca. 3rd century CE, miraculously appearing in a lotus in the garden. According to his legend, like Nāgārjuna, he lived for several centuries. Although placed on the throne at an early age, he felt dissatisfied with royal life and soon renounced his role in society and wandered off into South India to study the Dharma, taking ordination from Nāgārjuna
himself. He soon became the Master’s foremost disciple, even surpassing his Master in some respects, as conveyed in the legends of his Tantric persona, Karṇaripa. This is only startling if we fail to recognize the basic anti-authoritarian and progressive stance of Buddhism, even in those ancient times.
The most famous story about Āryadeva is his debate with the great Paṇḍit Mātṛcheṭa, a great Shaivite logician, as well as a great adept. No one could withstand him in disputation, and so he conquered the great monastic university of Nālandā. In those days, you had to defend your philosophical positions against all comers, if you were to retain your endowment and control over your own college.
Āryadeva was sent from South India by Nāgārjuna to recover the Buddhist curriculum of the university, and after many shenanigans, Āryadeva succeeded in doing so, converting Mātṛcheṭa to becoming an important writer in the Buddhist tradition. Āryadeva, like Nāgārjuna, is claimed as a patriarch by the Ch’an/ Zen school of the Far East.
Āryadeva’s principal philosophical works show that he did indeed take on the various Brahmin schools of thought, whereas Nāgārjuna had mainly confined himself to refuting the Individual Vehicle Abhidharma masters who had fallen into too rigid a spiritualistic dualism to open up to the profound teaching of wisdom and compassion indivisible.
Āryadeva’s greatest work of critical philosophy was the Four Hundred on Yoga Practice, which begins with a systematic arrangement of the Universal Vehicle path, and continues with a devastating critique of all the extremist ideologies existent in India during his time. His major work in the Tantric field, the Lamp of Integrated Practices, is remarkable for its lucidity and comprehensiveness. It is very extensively quoted by
Tsong Khapa in the present work, which some consider as much a commentary on Āryadeva’s Lamp as an independent treatise. What is specially interesting about it is its attempt to integrate exoteric and esoteric Universal Vehicle practices, even though its main focus is the perfection stages practices of the noble tradition.
NĀGABODHI, ŚHĀKYAMITRA, MATAṄGIPA
These three important disciples of Nāgārjuna were key figures in the noble tradition of the Community. Nāgabodhi wrote a number of important works, Śhākyamitra a chapter of the Five Stages as Nāgārjuna’s transmitter, and Mataṅgipa various works in the Tengyur collection.
CHANDRAKĪRTI PĀDA
Chandrakīrti was also from South India, born probably in the latter part of the 6th century CE in a place called Samanta, according to Tibetan sources. He was ordained and studied under Buddhapālita’s disciple Kamalabuddhi. After becoming an expert himself, he went to Nālandā in the north, and eventually became an abbot there. At the time, the ruling post-Gupta monarch was somewhat unfavorable to the
Buddhist scholars, so they were restricting their teaching activities to the monastic university proper. Chandrakīrti changed that, and began to teach the Universal Vehicle and the Centrist philosophy widely again. He had a famous debate that lasted for seven years with the master grammarian and idealist philosopher, Chandragomin. It was later revealed that Chandragomin managed to stand up to Chandrakīrti only through daily consultations ·
Introduction with the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśhvara, through a famous statue standing in a courtyard at the monastery. When Chandrakīrti complained that the bodhisattva was showing favoritism he was told, “You don’t need me, you have Mañjuśhrī helping you! So I just thought to
help this fellow along a little.” According to the Tibetan tradition, Chandrakīrti was the “ultimate” disciple of Nāgārjuna himself. At the end of his long life, Nāgārjuna taught him his “ultimate” teaching, that of the uncreated. Whatever else this may mean, it indicates a sense of Chandrakīrti’s destiny as elucidator of the essence of
Nāgārjuna’s message, as does the legendary connection with Mañjuśhrī. Other legendary events of his life are his milking of the picture of a cow to feed the monks of Nālandā during a famine, and his riding of a stone lion to frighten away a Tajik army that was threatening the monastery. He is also said to have survived a forest fire while meditating in retreat. His rescuers found him in the middle of an unburnt circle on his grass mat, saying, “My master Nāgārjuna burnt entirely the fuel of phenomena with the fire of the uncreated. My master has done so, and I have done so; so how can the phenomenal fire burn me?” Many other such miraculous signs are recounted.
A final interesting story about him was his last interaction with Avalokiteśhvara, after he discovered that the bodhisattva had been helping his adversary Chandragomin in their debate. Avalokiteśhvara said that he was always there to help everyone, but that people couldn’t see him. Chandra carried him around town on his head, but most people saw nothing, some saw a dead dog, and one prostitute saw a foot of the
Lord Avalokiteśhvara, whereby she instantly attained numerous siddhi powers. It is highly interesting that a story so similar to the legend of Asaṅga should be attached to this paragon of the deep wisdom lineage.
Chandrakīrti’s greatest works were his Stages of the Enlightenment Path work, Introduction to the Middle Way, his commentary on Nāgār-juna’s Wisdom, the Lucid Exposition, and his commentary on the Esoteric Community Tantra, the Illumination of the Lamp. These latter two are known as the sun and moon, lighting up the earth of Sūtra and Tantra, respectively. Finally, the Tibetans consider him also to be one of the “Eighty-four Great Adepts.”
ABOUT THESE LEGENDARY ACCOUNTS
The attitude and hardened opinion among modern Buddhist studies scholars is that the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist scholars (and perhaps some members of the Shingon Buddhist tradition of Japan) could not manage to notice the difference between Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva, and Chandrakīrti—the philosopher sages of early and middle first millennium Buddhism—and the adepts by the same names listed here in the ancestral lineage of the Esoteric Community Tantra teachings. This disrespectful opinion about the naïveté, or fundamentalism, or whatever else, on the
part of the many great intellects to whom it is applied will simply no longer do. It goes along with the long-established, and now perhaps subliminal, “Westerners’” chauvinist idea and racial prejudice that “Eastern” people are to be lumped together with “primitive” people (not to mention that the so-called “primitives” don’t fit the caricature either).
The idea is that since “Eastern” people have no sense of linear time, no interest in history, and so live in the eternal now of endless cycles, this explains their lack of progress in the sciences and their general social backwardness and economic underdevelopment. Therefore, quite naturally, modern scholars would think that such “backward” people would be so unrealistic, unscientific, and unhistorical as to think that
the two Nāgārjunas, Āryadevas, and Chandrakīrtis could be the same persons. And they think the same about the many other Indian master authors who also wrote both philosophical and exoteric works of solid repute as well as works on the esoteric Tantras (actually most of the great ones did).
The evidence for this truism of contemporary scholars is exclusively the presumed existence and nonexistence of texts. There is absolutely no “hard” evidence at all. The only dating used by modern scholars for these individuals comes from the recorded timing of Chinese or Tibetan translations of texts attributed to them, built upon by a certain amount of inter-textual referencing. Texts in India were hand-written on palm leaf pages and never printed until recent times. They would not last too long and would be re-copied over and over,
usually every few generations. Root texts and commentaries were often intermingled, so intertextual reference is sometimes an unreliable guide. Spiritual texts in particular were considered more importantly memorized than written, a tradition that came from Vedic practices. Additionally, esoteric texts were kept strictly secret, if committed at all to some handwritten pages. The tradition says that the 24 · Introduction Tantric traditions were kept hidden without being written down in the human realm for over 700 years.
This is the place to put this contentious issue into a new light (as I will do more in detail below), in the context of this work on the perfection stage of Unexcelled Yoga Tantra, considered by the Indo-Tibetan Universal Vehicle Buddhists to be the most advanced possible scientific
and spiritual teaching. Since there is no hard evidence either way as to the dating, life-spans, and historical activities of these eminent personalities, it is more respectful and logical to accept the critical scholarship of the traditional analysts than it is to presume to know better and dogmatically follow our various modern, “Western,” and “scientific” prejudices.
The basic presumption is that, since there are no such (we are certainly not) extraordinary, miracle-producing, highly enlightened beings with far-beyond-though-not-dissimilar-to-Einstein genius, no one ever could have been such a person, especially not a “pre-modern,” Asian, spiritual person. Indeed the very concept of the enlightenment of buddha-hood as the complete and accurate knowledge of the exact [[nature of
reality]] is preposterous to us on its face. However, we must here confront the fact that the only evidence we have for the rigid opinion that there are no other extraordinary persons up to the inconceivably
extraordinary person of a buddha is our own failure to be enlightened in that way. We cannot even say we have the evidence of never having met any such person, since they have the tradition of most often hiding their enlightenment, perhaps to avoid arrest, intrusive dissection, and lethal examination such as the E.T. in the film was about to undergo when he escaped. So we might have met one or two, but were
unfortunately unable to recognize them. I do not say I am so enlightened, or that I know I have met any who are, but I am open to the fact that I wouldn’t have recognized one if I saw her or him. So at least I maintain an open mind.
To summarize this argument so far: 1) The presence or absence of texts in the climate of India cannot provide ironclad dating evidence. All the claims of contemporary scholars that there must be two of everybody are just speculation grounded in preconceived ideas. 2) The Tibetan scholars who accept that the two Nāgārjunas, two Āryadevas, etc., are the same persons in different eras and contexts is a perfectly good hypothesis until something non-speculative arises to
dis prove it. A “modernist” presumption of superior perspective is no better than a racist, nationalist, religious, or culturalist one. 3) The whole program of disproving everything “traditional” people think and believe, based on the assumed superiority of our modernist knowledge and culture, is itself obsolete in the postmodern era. A key part of our critical scholarship’s quest of objective truth has to be to question the rigidity of our conditioned subjectivities and their biases and blindnesses.
Through global warming (over-heating), pollution, population explosion, etc., we are driving the world into extinction with our diseased, ignorance-driven, objectivist science and technology-magnified egocentrist culture. This cannot rationally be considered superiority in knowledge and culture. It will not do to proclaim like the late Richard Rorty that we are ethnocentric, and then just honor that fact by refusing to learn anything about any other culture or look at
the world through other eyes and languages and worldviews. 4) The essence of the noble tradition of the Esoteric Community and other Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, as opposed to the Jñānapāda tradition and perhaps others, is that the dialecticist centrist worldview goes along with the Unexcelled Yoga lifestyle. It is inner scientific and techno-logical and not merely nonrational and mystical.
Tsong Khapa bows with powerful faith not because he is a fundamentalist—not at all—but because he has met these ancestral adepts personally, he has talked with them. They are immortal on the magic body (māyadeha) plane, like George Lucas’s jedi masters, who can walk back
and forth through time. So therefore, we need not be over-obsessed with ancillary issues of historicism. My only purpose in even bringing it up myself—in the face of the sharp teeth of all my colleagues’ and even students’ modernist presuppositions—is only as part of helping the reader break through for a moment their habitual intellectual and even unconscious
entrapment in a horizon of preconceptions wherein everything explored in this work of Tsong Khapa and other Tibetan master scholar-adepts is some sort of quaint pseudo-magical thinking, primitive superstitious twaddle, perhaps of some interest historically that people were ever so crazy. This means that Tsong Khapa himself, if he were engaged with us, would be delighted if someone were to find a brass plate engraved with a note from Vajrin Nāgārjuna that he is not the Āchārya Nāgārjuna, but his 26 · Introduction successor in philosophy and institution, his reincarnation, his namesake, his inspired descendant, or whatever.
Once in a taped interview, the present Dalai Lama of Tibet, himself a scholar and adept of this type (though he would certainly disclaim the latter honorific), once was asked the following hypothetical question by the late Carl Sagan: “Your Holiness, what would you do if we set up a careful experiment and conclusively disproved the possibility of personal reincarnation?” After a moment of thought, the Dalai Lama
said, “Why I would cease to believe in it! We no longer consider the earth to be a flat continent projecting outward from an axial mountain.” Sagan caught his breath from the surprise and cognitive dissonance he was experiencing from this response. After another moment, the Dalai Lama asked enthusiastically, “Now how would we go about setting up such an experiment?” Needless to say, Sagan was speechless, and looked quite relieved as both broke into hearty laughter.
So we should certainly continue to look for evidence to support, refine, or disprove the current set of scholarly historicist theories about the dating and meaning of the Buddhist Tantras. But until we do find some-thing as concrete as the brass plaque disclaimer by Vajrin Nāgārjuna, we should not avoid looking into the Tantras on the terms of those who looked into them before, over centuries, scholastically as well as yogically. These masters were highly intelligent, rational, scientific-minded people.
After much study and practice they came to accept the human possibility of the full enlightenment of body as well as mind via the esoteric evolutionary acceleration that uses a virtual reality subtle body mind to develop the three bodies of buddhahood in one lifetime or two. Therefore, whether or not they had attained such a fulfillment personally, they came to accept as scientific fact that their great adept
ancestors had broken the biological imperatives of our era’s maximum hundred year lifespan and could have continued their studies and teachings over centuries. Even after physical death, such spiritual ancestors could appear concretely and enduringly to disciples of later times who required their direct instruction.
I personally, as myself a product of our modernist culture, would be immensely astonished were Nāgārjuna or Tsong Khapa etc. to appear to me to resolve my doubts or give me encouragement, as my cultural conditioning and perceptual habit is still bound in materialism due to my own lack of attainment. But intellectually, I have to admit that I have seen no convincing disproof of the possibility, just prejudiced and dogmatic dismissals asserted without evidence. So I have to remain open-minded, even though skeptically so.
If anyone has concrete evidence of the impossibility of the super-normal attainments proposed in the great adept tradition, they should bring it forth. If they cannot, yet still assert the “massive facticity” of the materialist canons of possibility, they are not a scholar,
a true seeker of knowledge, but a dogmatic defender of some unexamined preconception about the innate superiority of the scientific materialist worldview, the modern academic institution, and the postmodern industrial lifestyle of the crumbling, late great Euro-American empire. 3. Who is the Inspiration of this Author?
My mentor Mañjughoṣha elucidates precisely The path of the Community, which grants to one who understands, The supreme fearless eloquence concerning all Sūtras— I bow with constant devotion to his lotus foot!
I need not elaborate the history of Tsong Khapa’s special devotion to and mentor relationship with Mañjuśhrī, which I have already done in detail in my Central Philosophy of Tibet. Suffice it to say that, as hard-headed a logician and critical philosopher as he was, he did experience himself as in direct dialogue with the divine bodhisattva, day in and day out, discussing where to go, what to do, how to
develop insight into the nature of reality, and how to practice accordingly. That is to say, his primary mentor in exoteric Centrist philosophical studies, and simultaneously his root guru in the esoteric practice sense, was thought by him to be the divine bodhisattva himself—in short, his main teacher was what might be called an angelic being.
What is interesting here is that the salutation to the bodhisattva of wisdom in this context indicates the Tibetan tradition that the study of Dialecticist Centrism and Unexcelled Yoga Tantra are two sides of the same coin. That is, the philosophical view of Tantrism is Dialecticist relativism—the view that all things are purely conventional, illusory, and dream-like in their reality. Therefore, their nature and structure are power-fully controlled by language, relatively ultimately in the form of mantra.
This view entails that the relational, conventional self is a work in progress, and that it can be shaped and accelerated in its evolution through 28 · Introduction subtle and extremely subtle mental and physical creativity as well as by coarse-reality mental, verbal, and physical activities.
This full entanglement of Sūtra and Tantra is further indicated by Tsong Khapa’s statement above that it is through mastery of the Esoteric Community Unexcelled Yoga Tantra that one attains the enlightenment that bestows full explanatory eloquence about the exoteric Sūtra teachings. Why does he refer to the
goal of enlightenment as “supreme eloquence” about Buddha’s Sūtras? It must be because the first thing an enlightened being feels like doing is to share her or his happiness by expressing it in ways that will be effective in enlightening others. Tsong Khapa himself wrote in his enlightenment poem, “Of all a buddha’s deeds, his speech is supreme. Therefore the wise praise buddhas for their speech.”
4. Who Are His Honored Tibetan Predecessors and Mentors?
Those who, driven by great waves of their store of virtues, Such as their vows to uphold the Victor’s Holy Dharma, Endured so many hardships to visit the Noble Country And spread this path all over this snowy mountain land— Rinchen Zangpo, who was the eye of our world, Marpa of Hlodrak, keeper of the treasury of secrets, And ’Gös of rTa Nag, the best translator, expert in amazing texts— To their feet I bow!
Although the lineage of Tibetan generation masters of the Esoteric Community literature and practice instruction is long, Tsong Khapa singles out for special recognition three famous translators. Rinchen Zangpo (958– 1055) was a Nyingmapa when it was all of Tibetan Buddhism, before it was organized into a more formal “order” to distinguish itself from the Kadam, Kagyu, Sakya orders, etc. Marpa Lotsawa (1012–1097) was the teacher of Milarepa, and Tibetan founder of the Kagyu order. Gö Lotsawa (11th century) was a very important translator among the early Kadampa lamas.
The Indo-Tibetan lineage as seen by the Esoteric Community practitioners after Tsong Khapa runs as follows: Lord Vajradhara himself, of course; Lodrö Rinchen (*Ratnamati), a tenth stage bodhisattva on the exoteric level who attained communion on the esoteric; the Savior Nāgārjuna (ca. 100 BCE to 500 CE), who is praised for his exoteric achievement, as having “gained the supreme exaltation of the eight masteries and having made openly visible extreme-free relativity, the sole eye for seeing the ocean of Sūtras”; “… Mataṅgipa, who gained supreme powers with ritual deeds in the great burning ground of Begara,
heart-son sustained by the supreme noble one; …Tilopa, Śhrī Jñāna (ca. 988–1069), who, attaining powers, went to the Pure Land of bliss, and blessed by the Holy Ḍākinī, performed more deeds than a thousand buddhas; … Nārotapa (ca. 956– 1041), in whose heart was born the magical samadhi, as the Ḍākinī prophesied; …Marpa, the skilled yogī who attained powers, …and touched
the feet of hundreds of Indian masters; …Wangi Dorjey (aka. ’Tshur, 11th–12th century); …Sönam Rinchen (Jakhangpa, 12th century), a full vessel of wondrous virtues, with distinctive marks such as crown uṣhṇīṣha, and secret vajra ensheathed, stallion-
like; …Tsultrim Kyab (disciple of Sönam Rinchen, 12th–13th century); …Zhönu Ö of Serding (Serdingpa, 12th–13th century), the treasury of the two tantras, identifying the bardos, the three illusion tantra, and the messenger’s swift transference to the pure land; Özer of Deding (Chöku Özer, 13th century) holder of the treasure of limitless virtues, who at once beheld the wisdom mandala, just entering the mandala of Śhrī Kālachakra; …Pakpa Ö of Lake Jo, omniscient one who
conquered the darkness of ignorance with the light rays of wisdom knowing reality, surpassing all ordinary perceptions and conceptions; Butön Chöje Rinchen Drub (1290–1364), who understood the words and meanings of all Sūtras and Tantras, the second Victor of the
dark age, who upheld the victory banner of the non-decline of the Buddha’s teachings”; and finally “…Khyungpo Lhaspa (14th century), supreme master, principal of mantra holders, with immeasurable strength of merit and wisdom, whose youthful body was unstained by flaws of lust.”
This lineage comes from the Community performance (sādhana) script originally written by Tsong Khapa and embellished by his successors. 5. Who Most Needs the Esoteric Community?
Since those whose eye is prejudiced about Sūtra and Tantra texts, For whom the teachings have not dawned supreme as practices, Who do not know exactly the subtle paths of the philosophies Of the world ornaments, which are the only doorway To seek the meaning of the profound buddha-statements, And who thus take refuge in mere literal expressions, And sit content with random personal instructions in the subtle, Cannot, even with great effort, find the good path of the Community— I am going to explain it for their sake.
To be “prejudiced” about exoteric or esoteric texts is to take one aspect or session of Buddha’s teaching (Tsong Khapa considers Śhākya-muni, as Vajradhara, to be the author of the Tantras) and become attached to it. Then, since there are inconsistencies between Sūtras, and since each was taught for a specific set of disciples, if one is literalistic about the meanings and holds that the others do not measure up, are not correct, are
for inferior students, and so forth, one is considered prejudiced. When all the teachings “dawn as practices” (this line drawn from the famous four-square path elaborated by Atīśha), then this kind of partiality will not prevail, and the practitioner can fulfill the aim of any teaching. Still,
there are those whose studies and practice of the subtleties of logic, ethics, and critical philosophy have not prepared them to enter the Tantric path. There needs to be a basis of at least a solid inferential understanding of voidness, a firm vow of the spirit of enlightenment, and a degree of transcendence of being dominated by instinctual drives for power and fame.
Students not properly prepared tend to take some simplistic version of initiation or teaching and think “Ah, I am perfect! I have the perfect teaching! My teacher gave me the inner secret precept! I’m all set, and don’t need all that other stuff!” So such types of aspirants for the pro-found and subtle path of the Community will fail to find their way. Their plight motivates Tsong Khapa to write this treatise.
6. Who Are the Lucky Students of this Text?
But those who are ambitious for the personal instruction, That comes from the path of reason and reference That well combines all Root and Explanatory Tantras By means of the secret precept of the second great Vajradhara, Should think to themselves “How lucky am I to enter here!” Into this path of great secrets, Traveled by millions of heroes and heroines, Such as Indrabhūti, Sukhanātha [[[Padmavajra]]], Saraha, Nāgārjuna, and Nāgayoginī!
On the positive side, there are those who don’t get stuck in prejudice and sectarianism, have the right preparation and do not think that access to the esoteric obviates the need to understand the profound transcendent wisdom and cultivate the magnificent spirit of enlightenment. These easily recognize that the esoteric teachings also need extensive and penetrating study as well as powerful motivation to practice, and so confidently and wholeheartedly enter the miraculous path of Unexcelled Yoga.
Though in a previous verse Tsong Khapa has already mentioned the ancestral mentors, in this verse he selects the mentors who are more revered for their heroic deeds than for their profound writings. He addition-ally mentions Mahāsukhanātha, who is usually recognized as Padmavajra, a great adept identified with Avalokiteśhvara (in the 84 adepts’ histories he is the mentor of the adept Śhavari, the hunter).
How to Study this Text Think it over well, your faces aglow with joy, Allowing yourself the feelings of the brightest smile, And, abandoning all distractions And the three faults of vessels— Listen [to me well]!
Finally, Tsong Khapa encourages us to be happy and proud, now that we have been fortunate enough to encounter this teaching. We should approach it with proper preparation and suitable respect. His own delight
in being able to share this quintessential clarification of the deepest points of the most advanced practices is infectious, and he urges the reader, student, or disciple to allow herself or himself the luxury of a great big smile. He then gets down to business, admonishing us to avoid
covering the vessel of our minds with arrogance, the false idea that we already know everything there is to know about this and so seal off our receptiv-ity and the possibility of us coming up with new insight and experience (the fault of the covered vessel); to avoid poisoning the elixir of the teaching poured into the vessel by nursing
within our attitudes the distorting motivations of greed for power or fame or wealth, hateful competitiveness with rivals thinking how our new knowledge will enable us to dominate them, or delusions about how we can possess and manipulate these treasure teachings of the heart and use them to bolster our egotism and status (the fault of the poisoned vessel); and to avoid losing the teachings by being forgetful and
distracted, rushing on to other things, looking for shortcuts and easy ways out, being taken in by seductive but superficial “easy” approaches and so missing the essence, the value of these supreme instructions (the fault of the vessel with holes in it which loses its contents immediately, however bountifully they are poured into it).
Rim lnga rab tu gsal ba'i sgron me
