This imbalance makes more sense when one appreciates that, as one of our lama-consultants, Lopön Ogyan Tandzin, pointed out, Dudjom Rinpoche also had two major Vajrakīlaya cycles of his own, one of them (Gnam-lcags Spu-gri) said to be based on a discovery by his previous rebirth, bDud-’joms gLing-pa, and the other (Spu-gri Reg-phung) from his own personal gter ma. These two Vajrakīlaya cycles were central components of Dudjom’s overall body of practices and are extensively performed by his students, so it is understandable that the Zil-gnon Vajrakīlaya practice became somewhat superfluous. Dudjom went to some trouble, however, to compose the basic texts for this practice, perhaps out of respect for the lama who had entrusted it to him.23
There is, however, a possible association between the Vajrakīlaya practice and the longevity practice that is worth noting. As Lopön Ogyan Tandzin noted, Vajrakīlaya practice involves the ritual killing or liberation of dangerous and malevolent spirit beings, and killing someone creates extreme negative karma that is specifically regarded as having a potential effect on the killer’s life span. Provided that the performer of these practices maintains an awareness of śūnyatā, the emptiness or voidness of phenomena, which of course includes the demonic beings who are being destroyed, he or she does not suffer any negative karmic consequences. However, it is possible that the practitioners may not always succeed in maintaining such an awareness, and it is therefore important to complement such potentially risky practices as Vajrakīlaya with the life-strengthening practices of tshe-sgrub.24
We now turn to look at the ’Chi-med Srog Thig texts in this volume:
Page numbers Short Tibetan title Description
75–143/144 las-byang
main ritual manual
145–148 rgyun-khyer
short text for regular practice
149–154 sbas-sgom rgyun-khyer
short text for more advanced regular practice
155–156 brgyud ’debs
lineage invocation
157–184 skong ba texts
reconciliation-offering texts
185–186 sman mchod
offering of medicinal herbs
187–192 zur ’debs
additional prayer
193–208 khrigs zin
explanation of texts
209–212 gter srung
invocation of protective deities
213–231/232 bdag ‘jug
self-empowerment to renew link to deity
233–296 sgrub khog
instructions for practice
297–315/316 sbyin-sreg
fire offering
317–343/344 brten-bzhugs
request for long life of lama
345–358 ’chi bslu
ritual to avert death
359–406 dbang chog
empowerment
407–429/430 tshe-dbang
life-empowerment
431–509 bsnyen-yig
text providing explanation and commentary on longevity practice
511–512 ’phrul-’khor
physical yogic practices
513–517/518 bcud-len
dietary practice
519–543/544 yang-zab
concise practice
545–549/550 tshogs glu
song for tshogs offering
551–554 tshogs glu
song for tshogs offering
As can be seen, this is quite a substantial body of material. Two of these texts also occur in the fifteenth Karmapa’s Collected Works, along with a longer version of the dbang chog, or empowerment text, and an additional longer supplementary prayer (zur ’debs).
Almost all of these texts refer to the central practice in which the practitioners construct a relationship with the deity Guru Amitāyus, and provide various ways of operating within this relationship. Here the principal text is the las-byang, which we will look at in a few moments, and the others are mainly adaptations of the basic ritual given in the las-byang for other specific purposes (conferring the empowerment to those being initiated into the practice, conveying long life to others, carrying out a fire offering, and so on), or else supplementary texts, such as the lineage invocation or offering songs that would be used as subsidiary parts of a full ritual sequence (one would, for example, normally include the lineage invocation at or near the start of a practice session). There are also shorter, more concise forms of the practice suitable for daily use, and an extended treatise (the bsnyen-yig) discussing techniques for achieving longevity in general and providing a commentary on the ’Chi-med Srog Thig practice itself.
Two texts that present a rather different kind of material are the bcud len and ’phrul ’khor texts. Bcud len translates as the Sanskrit rasāyana, and bcud is equivalent to that significant and polyvalent Sanskrit term rasa. In the present context, one might translate rasa as “essence” or “juice” (in the literal sense but also in the sense that something that has rasa is “juicy,” has vitality and life). Bcud is also part of a familiar Tibetan compound, snod-bcud, meaning the universe, seen as container, and the essence or life that is contained within it. Another closely related term is bdud-rtsi, the Tibetan equivalent of the Sanskrit amṛta, the immortality-bestowing essence churned from the oceans by the gods and asuras in Brahmanical mythology. Bdud-rtsi/amṛta, the positive life essence of the universe, is closely linked to bcud/rasa, and both terms occur extensively in these and other longevity texts.
The Sanskrit term rasāyana is generally translated into English as “alchemy,” and refers to techniques (spiritual, medical, and protochemical) for longevity or spiritual realization.25 The Tibetan term bcud-len, although used to translate rasāyana and corresponding etymologically to it, is somewhat more specific in meaning. It generally refers to the preparation of ritually empowered herbal and mineral substances that are taken as part of Tantric practice, particularly practices aimed at health and long life.26 In bcud-len practice, one takes one or more bcud-len pills each day and progressively refrains from ordinary food.
The ’phrul-’khor text, as noted, is a text on physical yogic exercises, though it is brief and does not give much detail of the exercises.27 In fact, the las-byang also includes a number of references to one of the basic ’phrul-’khor exercises, though without any detailed explanation; these practices are regarded as somewhat secret and the details are taught orally. It may be helpful to explain for readers unfamiliar with Tibetan Tantric practices that the basic ritual itself includes body movements, both the mudrā, or hand gestures, that form part of many ritual sequences, and a number of sequences in which the practitioner walks or dances around the practice area. The mudrā are always performed, but the dance sequences might simply be visualized or performed symbolically in an everyday practice context. They would generally be included in a large-scale collective ritual, or sgrub chen.
To return to the las-byang and the basic ritual sequence, it is worth quickly summarizing the main components:
Page no.
75 Title
75 Opening statement by Padmasambhava in which he describes his powers and his activities in India and Tibet, including his attainment of long life at Māratika, the occasion that forms the basis for the present practice
77 (A) Preparations: preparing the site, refuge and bodhicitta verses, confession and restoration of samaya, consecration of place and substances
86 (B) Main practice: generation of deity and maṇḍala
91 Invitation of deities into the maṇḍala
94 Establishment, salutation, offerings
99 Praises of the deities
101 Four stages of mantra recitation, followed by supplementary visualizations
106 Requesting the bestowal of siddhi
108 Requesting the various deities in turn to recover the lost or deteriorated life forces (tshe-’gugs)
121 Sealing of the accumulated life forces
121 (C) Tshogs offering including liberative killing and offering of excess; enjoining heart vow, proclaiming Tantr
ic command, offering to the brtan-ma goddesses (protectors of Tibet); Heruka Horse Dance, confession, dissolution of maṇḍala, dedication and aspiration, auspicious verses
140 Final verses of Padmasambhava and account of the concealment of the gter-ma
143 Colophon describing the discovery of the gter-ma and its public revelation in the Wood Dragon year (1904–1905)
A key element here is the tshe-’gugs (marked in bold above), and it is really to this that the whole ritual sequence leads. This is the section in which the deities of the maṇḍala are asked in turn to recover and restore the lost life forces and to bring in positive life forces to strengthen the practitioner. Here the practitioner chants the main mantra of the practice while imagining its letters rotating around a mantra seed syllable at his or her heart center, which is of course also the visualized heart center of the deity. From it, light radiates out, gathers, and reabsorbs the pure essence of both samsara and nirvana (srid zhi’i tshe bcud dwangs ma), another term for the rasa/bcud referred to above. This pure essence repairs any deterioration of one’s life elements (bla tshe srog dbugs), so leading to the attainment of power over life and health.
A noticeable feature of the las-byang is the outer frame of Padmasambhava’s speech. In the opening and closing sequences, and at a number of key points, he explains that this is his text and his practice. The deity with which the practitioner is identified is, as explained earlier, a form of Padmasambhava himself as identifying with Amitāyus. At the end of the text, Padmasambhava gives directions to his Tibetan consort Ye-shes mTsho-rgyal, who generally acts in gter-ma texts as his scribe, to write the text down and conceal it. This is then followed by the colophon, in which the gter-ston states that he found it in a cave in Bhutan that is associated with Ye-shes mTsho-rgyal and deciphered it (since these texts are thought of as a series of indications in a script only readable by gter-ston, and act more as a stimulus to recovery than as an actual text).
The two extended statements by Padmasambhava form a frame that encloses the three phases of preparation, actual practice, and concluding rituals, and that is in itself included in the text by an outer frame formed by the title and colophon.
We might also note the strong female and sexualized aspects of this practice; the deities are either male-female couples in sexual embrace, or goddesses who are described as sexually attractive and alluring, and the rasa, or juice, itself has clear sexual associations at several points in the text. This links up with a frequent theme of long-life practice that goes back to Indian Tantric lineages such as those associated with the Kālacakra Tantra. In the root text of the Kālacakra Tantra and its commentary, the Vimalaprabhā, long-life practice is recommended for performance by older men with young women in order to restore their health and vitality.28 In the ’Chi-med Srog Thig practices we have been discussing here, the women are visualized goddesses, and the practice can be and is performed by women as well as men, but there are undoubted traces of Indian and Tibetan gender attitudes in which young women are seen as key signifiers of purity, good fortune, and life energy.
What is more critical from the contemporary Tibetan perspective is the deep grounding of the practice both in the key Tibetan Buddhist narrative of Padmasambhava’s presence in Tibet, a narrative that is also present materially through the countless sites, images, and shrines associated with Padmasambhava, and in the central Buddhist orientation toward the attainment of Buddhahood. This may be, in a sense, a reworking of a common shamanic theme found in many cultural contexts outside Tibet, but it has been very thoroughly transformed into a Tibetan Buddhist conceptual and symbolic vocabulary.
Finally, though, we can ask what this practice does, and how it might work, assuming that processes of this kind may indeed have some real effect on the health of the human organism.29 At the core of tshe-sgrub, particularly as performed by an individual meditator in retreat context or as part of a regular personal practice, is, as we have seen, the constructed relationship between the meditator’s own bodymind complex and the wider environment, mediated by the image of the Tantric deity. The bodymind in tshe-sgrub is understood as a site open to outward and inward flows of various kinds of life essence that may be both lost to external forces and recovered and brought back into the body.
The revitalizing flows of life essence are associated both with the imaginative recreation of the universe typical of Tibetan Tantric practice, with associated mantra recitation, mudrā (ritual gestures), and so on, and also with specific breathing and visualization techniques that link the individual with the wider environment. Thus tshe-sgrub implies that the vitality of the bodymind is critically affected by ongoing transactions with the wider environment. However, the transformation of the environment through “pure vision” into the maṇḍala of the Tantric deities, who then act to retrieve lost life energy and to replenish the meditator with the pure, health-giving essence of the transfigured universe, moves the person undertaking the practice from a situation in which the environment is a source of threat and danger to one in which it is a source of health and positive support.
Thus the “message” of tshe-sgrub to the bodymind of the person undertaking the practice, if we can speak in such terms, is that health is intimately related to the wider environment, but that the wider environment, as transformed by the practice, is fundamentally positive and benevolent.
The Buddhist relativizing of the self-concept provides both a theoretical basis for this view and an underlying vision that is constantly referred to in the practices. So is the soteriological orientation of the entire tradition; long life and vitality in the Tibetan vision are achieved not for their own sake but to provide the material basis for further progress toward the attainment of Buddhahood. A more detailed study of the textual material and the way in which it is practiced would demonstrate this point in a great deal more detail. However, I hope that the description presented here is sufficient both to explain something of the structure and content of Tibetan longevity meditation, and of the way in which it is understood to operate.
Notes
1. Samuel, Origins of Yoga and Tantra.
2. This is a simplified account, both because there are forms of practice that derive from the Mahāyāna teachings, and also because the Vajrayāna does have its own theoretical assumptions, such as those underlying the internal structure of cakras and nāḍīs that make up the “subtle body” (cf. Madhu Khanna’s contribution to this volume).
3. Tibetan names and terms are transcribed according to the Wylie system, except for some places and people well known under other forms (Lhasa, Dudjom Rinpoche).
4. For example, Millard and Samuel, “Precious Pills”; Samuel, “Short History.”
5. Samuel, “Amitāyus.”
6. Samuel, “Healing, Efficacy and the Spirits”; Samuel, “Inner work.”
7. The description and analysis here derives from a three-year research project, “Longevity Practices and Concepts in Tibet: A Study of Long-Life Practices in the Dudjom Tradition” (2006–2009), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. I was the director on this project, and worked with two other researchers, Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer, and two lama consultants, Lama Ogyan P. Tandzin and Lama Kunzang Dorjee. I would like to acknowledge the generous help of my collaborators, and also of Barbara Gerke, Thomas Shor, and Santi Rozario. This was the first full-scale study of Tibetan longevity practices, though tshe-sgrub and tshe-dbang rituals are discussed at some length in Beyer, Cult of Tārā; and in Kohn, Lord of the Dance.
8. On gter ston and gter ma, see Thondup, Hidden Teachings; Gyatso, Literary Transmission of the Traditions of Thang-stong rGyal-po; Gyatso, Apparitions of the Self; and Samuel, Civilized Shamans, 229–230, 294–302.
9. Samuel, Civilized Shamans; Samuel, Tantric Revisionings, 8–17 and 72–93.
10. There are also Bon gter ston, on which, see, for example, Samuel, Civilized Shamans, 462–463; Martin, Unearthing Bon Treasures.
11. It is unusual for a
gter ston to be female, although there are one or two examples (e.g., Hanna, “Vast as the Sky”; Jacoby, Consorts and Revelation).
12. See, for example, Samuel, Civilized Shamans, 229–230, 294–302, 462–463.
13. Zil-gnon is a title; zil gnon = Skt. abhibhāva, a state of meditative control (over external forces).
14. Cantwell and Mayer, “Textual Corpus.”
15. See http://www.dudjomba.org/issue1/ENGLISH/e12.html (accessed February 20, 2013).
16. Cf. Ray, “Nāgārjuna’s Longevity”; Mabbett, “Historical Nāgārjuna Revisited.”
17. See, for example, the argument in the Suvarṇaprabhāsa Sūtra, chapter 2 (= Emmerick, Sūtra of Golden Light, 3–8).
18. For example, the contemporary lama Changling Rinpoche presented this argument to Robert Mayer and myself (personal communication, London, September 2006).
19. Gerke, Time and Longevity.
20. Samuel, Civilized Shamans, 186–187, 263–264.
21. Cf. Buffetrille, Halase-Maratika Caves; Buffetrille, Pèlerins, Lamas et Visionnaires, 293–341.
22. The volumes of a large multivolume work such as this are numbered using the letters of the Tibetan alphabet (ka = volume 1, kha = volume 2, etc.).
23. See Cantwell and Mayer, “Textual Corpus.”
24. Lama Kunsang Dorjee of Jangsa Gompa, however, explicitly denied that this was why the tshe-sgrub practice was included in the context of a Vajrakīlaya cycle (interview, London, 2007). As he noted, Vajrakīlaya includes its own longevity practice.
25. Cf. Samuel, “Short History.”
26. There is a probable historical relationship here to similar Chinese practices (Schipper, Taoist Body; Shawn, “Life without Grains”), though whether this is entirely mediated via India or whether there might be some more direct influences is hard to say (cf. Samuel, Origins of Yoga and Tantra, 278–282).
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