by Longchenpa
It follows from this that one may without absurdity claim to be a follower and aspiring practitioner of the Great Perfection in the sense of receiving teachings from a qualified master of that tradition and in trying, the best one can, to implement them. Nevertheless, to say that one possesses the view of the Great Perfection, and is therefore a genuine and qualified practitioner of that tradition, is to make a very considerable claim—one that, in a traditional setting, few, even among the most erudite and experienced, would ever dream of making. The great twentieth-century master Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, the founder of Larung Gar in Golog and in his day one of the greatest living authorities on the writings of Longchenpa, is on record as saying that even the word “Dzogchen” was something that he hardly dared even to pronounce!
The reason for this brief discussion in the present context is that the power of blessing possessed by qualified masters of the Great Perfection to introduce disciples to the nature of the mind is often said to be a particular feature of the writings of Longchenpa—such was the inspirational power that poured from the state of wisdom in which their author is said to have composed them. For example, The Precious Treasure of the Ultimate Expanse (Chos dbyings rin po che’i mdzod), a text in which this blessing power is said to be very strongly present, is prized in the Nyingma school as a thödrol (thos grol), a text that liberates merely through the power of its sound. Like the Bardo Thödrol (better known to Western readers as the Tibetan Book of the Dead), it is, among Nyingma practitioners, frequently read aloud in the presence of those who have just died. Similarly, students aspiring to the practice of the Great Perfection are often encouraged simply to read a few verses of this text before settling in meditation.
Given the quality thus ascribed to the writings of Longchenpa, as well as their reputation for profound meaning and subtle expression, it is not surprising that commentaries on them are all too few. And if we add to this the fact that Longchenpa’s insights are often expressed not merely in sophisticated verse but, appropriately enough, with the allusive, suggestive power of a natural poet—with what trepidation does one embark upon the almost impossible task of translating them?
HAGIOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
Information about the life and achievements of the great Tibetan masters of the past may be culled from two sources. On the one hand, we may have recourse to the traditional biographies which, as their Tibetan name namthar indicates,3 are invariably of a hagiographical nature. Alternatively, through the examination of historical evidence, the comparative study of documents and so on, analyzed and coordinated according to the principles of scientific research, one may endeavor to construct as clear a picture as possible of the social, religious, intellectual, and political environment in which the lives of given individuals unfolded and thereby come to an assessment of their achievements in relation to the constraints and opportunities implicit in their contemporary setting.
There are advantages and drawbacks in both these approaches. In the first place, the Tibetan namthar, like hagiographies in other religious traditions, are intended to inspire and impress, and in this they often succeed. They are generally filled with stories of heroic accomplishments attended by wonderful, often miraculous, events. Purely historical details, if not actually ignored, are frequently relegated to a secondary, usually supportive, position and are often imprecise and difficult to corroborate. The traditional biographies of Longchenpa are no exception. They are filled with marvels that demonstrate his intelligence, his intrepid perseverance, and his high attainment. His life was marked by visions of deities and by the teachings and prophecies that he received from them. His day-to-day experience seems to have been punctuated on a regular basis by visits to other dimensions and supernatural meetings with ḍākinīs, Dharma protectors, and local gods and spirits, who came either to help him in his work or to receive teachings—to venerate, advise, and admonish. The accounts of Longchenpa’s life that are at present available in English translation are all strongly colored by this hagiographic character.4
Much less evident in these accounts are the historical details of a more mundane nature that are nevertheless liable to strike a Western reader as interesting, if not crucial, elements in the understanding of Longchenpa’s life and work. For example, his position in the development of a specifically Nyingma interpretation of Madhyamaka—given his traditional allegiances, his education at Sangphu, and his historical situation (midway between the death of Sakya Paṇḍita and the appearance of Tsongkhapa)—is completely ignored in the traditional biographies. Similarly his political entanglement with Drikung Kunrin and the Tai Situ Changchub Gyaltsen—a misfortune resulting in an exile that, while marking a period of blessedness for the people of Bhutan (which is, of course, the reason for mentioning it), must have seriously disrupted Longchenpa’s life and work—is alluded to in only the briefest and often garbled terms.
Given the essentially inspirational purpose of hagiography—to awaken feelings of devotion and the desire to emulate—it is clear that the effectiveness of such literature depends to an important degree on cultural setting. For this reason, Western readers often find the stories contained in traditional hagiographies to be so far removed from their own understanding and experience of the world that, however much they may be moved and inspired by their poetic beauty, they are less able to accept them as historical fact, and in practice dismiss them. Tibetans, on the other hand, with their very different vision of the world, experience no such difficulty.
By contrast, when, thanks to historical research, important individuals are viewed in their contemporary setting amid the social, political, and religious pressures that affected them, they stand out with much greater clarity and for that reason tend to appear more credible to modern readers. It is nevertheless important to beware of the fact that the materialistic assumptions implicit in modern historical method are inevitably and fundamentally at odds with the worldview of Tibetan Buddhism, which, though ancient, is still very much alive. The out-of-hand and often contemptuous dismissal by Western scholars of important elements of Tibetan religious culture both ancient and modern—the existence of spirit guardians, for example, and their intervention in human affairs, or the concealment and discovery of terma (gter ma), or Dharma treasures—and the reductionism with which such scholars explain them according to their own often unexamined philosophical assumptions, throw up a barrier that excludes a sympathetic understanding of that culture and greatly impedes the reception of the spiritual values and disciplines that it has to teach. While creating the appearance of objectivity, such scholarship frequently renders its subject alien and places the investigator securely outside the tradition that he or she is attempting to explain. It is worth bearing in mind that a modern reader brought up on Hollywood and Disneyland may well smile at the image of Rāhula and Ekajaṭī busily preparing Longchenpa’s ink and stationery, but for traditional Tibetans, both ancient and modern, such stories are not a laughing matter. They are taken seriously as part of a general worldview that remains for them entirely credible. The existence of spirits and the possibility of interaction with them remains even now a feature of ordinary life, as the Nechung oracle, still an important institution in the Tibetan exile community, demonstrates.
With these reflections in mind, we will attempt a brief description of Longchenpa’s life and times in which we will try to supplement the traditional biographies already available in translation with such additional details as we have been able to glean from the available historical sources.
LONGCHENPA’S LIFE AND TIMES
Longchen Rabjam was born in 1308 in a village in the upper part of the Dra valley in Yuru, a southern district in the central province of Tibet. Nothing is recorded of the social importance of his family save that his father, Lopön Tsensung, a lama of the Nyingma school, was descended from the ancient clan of Rog, which, five hundred years earlier, had supplied one of the group of seven men first selected to take monastic ordination at Samyé from the great abbot Ś�
�ntarakṣita. Longchenpa’s mother belonged to the clan of Drom and was thus distantly related to Dromtön Gyalwai Jungne, one of the patriarchs of the Kadampa tradition, the foremost disciple of Atiśa (982–1054) and founder, in 1057, of the monastery of Reting.
Longchenpa received his first religious education from his father, who granted him his first tantric empowerments and instructed him also in the rudiments of medicine and astrology. When Longchenpa was nine years old, his mother died; and this tragedy was followed two years later by the death of his father. Thus orphaned, the young boy entered the monastery of Samyé and at the age of twelve received his first ordination from the abbot Sonam Rinchen and the master Lopön Kunga Özer.5
Owing to the paucity of documentary evidence, it is difficult to form a clear picture of the state of Samyé in 1320. After the collapse of the empire following the death of Lang Darma in 841, Samyé, like the other royal temples, fell into a ruinous state so that by the time the first monks returned to the central provinces toward the end of the tenth century, it was empty and desolate.6 Gradually, however, it was restored. Its ancient library, which had not been pillaged during the period of persecution and abandonment, was repaired; and when Atiśa visited it in 1047, he was impressed by its richness, amazed to find there Sanskrit manuscripts of works that had been lost in India. During the following centuries, the monastery and temple passed through various vicissitudes but, having been rebuilt by the members of the Kagyu school in the course of the thirteenth century, it would probably have been in reasonable condition by the time Longchenpa went to live there. He proved to be an avid student with an advanced capacity for memorization and, having at his disposal an incomparable collection of books, he soon laid the ground for his future reputation as “the well-read scholar from Samyé (bsam yas lung mang ba).”
In 1327, at the age of nineteen, he left for the monastic university of Sangphu Neutog, not far from Lhasa, where he stayed for six years. Sangphu was a place of learning of high renown. Founded in 1073 by Ngok Lekpai Sherab, who had been one of Atiśa’s closest disciples, it was the cradle of Tibetan scholasticism and became, in its heyday, the most illustrious center of learning in the country. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, it had divided into two separate institutions, Lingtö and Lingmé, the first of which Longchenpa entered, during the tenure of Tengönpa and Chöpel Gyaltsen, its fifteenth and sixteenth abbots.7
While at Sangphu, Longchenpa imbibed the entire scholastic curriculum. His studies covered the full range of Buddhist tenet systems. This included the Abhidharma, the logico-epistemological tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the Yogācāra school and the five texts of Maitreya and Asaṅga together with their commentaries, and the texts of Madhyamaka according, we may suppose, to its svātantrika and prāsaṅgika subschools. It should be noticed that, by the Longchenpa’s time, two hundred years had passed since the great svātantrika-prāsaṅgika controversies of the twelfth century. And almost a century had elapsed since Sakya Paṇḍita officially adopted the prāsaṅgika view, combined with the logico-epistemological tradition, as the official position of his school. And since, by the early fourteenth century, Sangphu had fallen largely under the influence of Sakya, it is very likely that Longchenpa studied Madhyamaka principally according to the Sakya view—well before Tsongkhapa’s new interpretation was to cause such a stir at the turn of the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, the fact that Longchenpa’s intellectual maturity was strongly influenced by his understanding of the Great Perfection renders his interpretation of Madhyamaka and its relation to Yogācāra a subject of great interest, foreshadowing the position of Mipham Rinpoche five hundred years later.
One can well imagine that the young Longchenpa was a diligent and exemplary student. Thanks moreover to a powerful contemplative gift nurtured from his earliest youth, he was able to combine his intellectual studies with intensive meditative practice, which, it is said, bore fruit even at that early age, in pure visions of various deities: Mañjuśrī, Sarasvatī, Vajravārāhī, Tārā, and so on.
During his period of studies at Sangphu, Longchenpa took time to seek out and request teachings from masters of different traditions and lineages. This illustrated the liberal and eclectic spirit that characterized the religious and scholarly life of fourteenth-century Tibet. The sectarian animosity and partisan spirit that was to beset the different schools was still a thing of the future. And Longchenpa, like Tsongkhapa his younger contemporary, was able to pursue wide-ranging interests and to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, thus enriching the academic curriculum that he had followed at Sangphu with a wealth of instructions and transmissions, in Sūtra and Tantra, from, it is said, at least twenty different teachers.8 It was at this time too that he received from the master Zhönnu Töndrup advanced instruction in the Nyingma tradition on the generation and perfection stage practices of Tantra, together with the mind-class teachings of the Great Perfection.
However rich and distinguished Longchenpa’s education may have been, his student days were not without their trials; and they were soured toward the end by the animosity of a group of students from Kham who, through their uncouth and jealous behavior, succeeded in driving him away. As it happened, this setback proved the harbinger of good fortune. Shaking the dust of Sangphu from his feet, he set off with the intention of devoting some time to solitary meditation. A chance meeting with a friendly scholar led to the discovery of an amenable cave. There Longchenpa spent eight months in dark retreat, in the course of which he had a vision of Tārā who, in response to his prayers, promised her protection and crowned him with her own diadem. As the vision passed, Longchenpa entered a profound absorption that lasted for several days. The vision of Tārā, Tulku Thondup remarks, established the interdependent link for his meeting with a master of Heart Essence, or Nyingthig (snying thig), the highest teachings of the Great Perfection.9
On leaving his retreat, Longchenpa made his way home to Samyé. He did not stay there very long, however, for in 1335 at the age of twenty-seven, and thanks again to the visionary promptings of Tārā, he set off to meet his root guru Zhönnu Gyalpo, the master more commonly known as Rigdzin Kumaradza (1266–1343). At that time, Kumaradza was living in a camp in the highlands of Yartö Khyam in the company of about seventy disciples. Prepared for this encounter by a premonitory dream, he welcomed Longchenpa, whom he recognized as the future holder of his lineage. He entertained him warmly and facilitated his attendance at his teachings despite the fact that Longchenpa was destitute of even the most basic material resources. Kumaradza’s monastic settlement was essentially nomadic and the community was frequently on the move. This posed considerable difficulties for Longchenpa, who in the course of his studies at Samyé and Sangphu had doubtless acquired the regular and peaceful habits of sedentary scholarship. Nevertheless, he persevered, and braving the physical hardships that were a daily feature of life with Kumaradza, he remained with his teacher for about two years. Kumaradza was himself long inured to such austerities. For as a disciple of the great yogi Melong Dorje (1243–1303), he had come to manhood amid the same kind of material hardships that it was now Longchenpa’s lot to endure. Kumaradza took Longchenpa as his heart son and transmitted to him the Nyingthig teachings—that is, the Vima Nyingthig—of which he was a lineage holder.
At this point, it may be helpful to review briefly the nature and position of Nyingthig within the nine-vehicle system of the Nyingma school. According to this scheme, there are three sūtra vehicles corresponding to the two Hīnayāna paths of the śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas, together with the Mahāyāna sūtra path of the bodhisattvas. These Sūtra vehicles are further amplified by six vehicles of Tantra, three outer (Kriyā, Caryā, and Yoga) and three inner (Mahāyoga, Anuyoga, and Atiyoga). Of the three inner tantras, Mahāyoga and Anuyoga correspond respectively to the generation and perfection stage practices while Atiyoga is the vehicle of the Great Perfection or Dzogchen.
The Great Perfection is divided into three classes, named according to
the salient feature of the teachings concerned. The first of these is the “mind class” (sems sde), which emphasizes the luminous nature of awareness as the ground from which phenomena manifest. It will be remembered that it was this division of the Great Perfection that Longchenpa had already received from the master Zhönnu Töndrup. The second division of the Great Perfection is the “space class” (klong sde), so called because it emphasizes the empty expanse of awareness in which phenomena subside. Finally, the “pith-instruction class” (man ngag gi sde) is free from fixation on either the luminosity aspect or the emptiness aspect of awareness. For that reason, it transcends the previous two classes and is thus considered supreme.10 The pith-instruction class is further divided into four sections: outer, inner, secret, and “most and unsurpassably secret” (phyi, nang, gsang, yang gsang bla med). Of these, the fourth and highest section is known as the Heart Essence, or Nyingthig, and it was this that Longchenpa received from Kumaradza.
The history of the arrival and transmission of the Nyingthig teachings in Tibet is a colorful, fascinating, but rather complicated story. In general, they are said to have been brought to the Land of Snow through three sources: the Indian paṇḍita Vimalamitra, Guru Padmasambhava, and the great Tibetan translator Vairotsana. In the context of Longchenpa’s spiritual heritage, only the first two need be considered here.
Vimalamitra is said to have been invited to Tibet around the turn of the ninth century by King Trisong Detsen. At Samyé and to a small group of five people, including the king himself and the master Nyang Tingdzin Zangpo, Vimalamitra secretly transmitted the seventeen tantras of Nyingthig, their explanatory commentaries and the associated pith instructions, all of which he had himself received from the master Śrī Siṃha. Following this important event, he hid the four volumes of the Nyingthig pith instructions, written in inks of different colors, in the cliff of Tragmar Gekong near Samyé Chimpu. Before departing for China, Vimalamitra entrusted his teachings to Nyang Tingdzin Zangpo, thereby beginning a lineage of transmission from individual master to individual disciple that was to be maintained for many generations in conditions of the strictest secrecy. Nyang attained the rainbow body11 in 838. By that time, having already passed on these teachings to a trusted disciple, he had also taken the precaution of concealing the texts of the seventeen tantras as well as other texts of Nyingthig, in the temple of Zhai Lhakhang in the valley of Drikung in the province of Uru.