Subject: Of Padmasambhava, hidden scriptures and their discoverers ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This post meanders around the following two questions; hopefully somebody on the net can shed more light on them. Who was Padmasambhava, and were any of the "hidden scriptures" attributed to him really written by him? Padmasambhava was one of the two founding fathers of Buddhism in Tibet, the other was Shantirakshita. His name means "the lotus-born" and derives from the legend that he appeared on earth full-fledged as an eight-year old boy, radiantly sitting on an enormous lotus in the lake of Dhanakosha in the land of Oddiyana (possibly the present-day Swat Vall y in northern Pakistan). His immaculate birth in a lotus (symbol of purity) was brought about by the buddha Amitabha who responded to the plea by Avalokiteshvara to do something to prevent the destruction of all religion in the kingdom of Oddiyana that was threatened by the king if he could not have a son. The king then adopted the lotus-born as his n, and the disaster was averted. The historical facts seem to be that the powerful Tibetan king Trisong Detsen (reigned 755-797 C.E.) invited the Indian pandit Shantirakshita from Nalanda University to come to Tibet and oversee the translation of much of the Indian corpus of Buddhist scriptures from Sanskrit into the Tibetan language. The king had recognized the preciousness of the dharma that was thriving in India but barely known in Tibet which was dominated by the Bonpo religion. Shantirakshita commenced this project by assembling a team of 108 Indian pandits and many more Tibetans as translators. He also insisted that the tantric practitioner and mahasiddhi Padmasambhava be invited to help root Buddhism in Tibet. The king complied with this wish, and Padmasambhava soon arrived on the scene. It appears that Padmasambhava spent only a few years in Tibet, using his tantric powers to remove obstacles to the establishment of the buddhadharma. During his tenure in Tibet which culminated in the year 779 with the founding of Samye, the first Tibetan Bu dhist monastery, he surrounded himself with a circle of twenty-five close disciples. Forem st among these was the Tibetan princess Yeshe Tsogyel, who was first married to King Trisong Detsen but then became Padmasambhava's principal consort and recorded many of his teachings. This group of disciples and their descendants formed the beginning of what later came to be called the Nyingmapa school (the "ancient ones", or "old school"). This order in fact was the sole school of Buddhism in Tibet until the arrival of the Indian pandit Atisha in the year 1042, and the subsequent formation of the new translation schools (Sakyapa, Kagyupa and, much later, Gelugpa). Just as miraculously as Padmasambhava appeared on the scene, he disappeared. Nothing is known of his whereabouts after his Tibetan sojourn. Legend has it that he never died, but simply disappear d into the air and now lives in his pure kingdom-paradise of the glorious copper-colored mountain somewhere in the Southwest (of India?). From there he can be called by r citing the vajra guru mantra OM AH HUNG BENZAR GURU PEMA SIDDHI HUNG. Because of the great depth of his realization, his phenomenal tantric powers and his meritorious deeds on behalf of the Tibetans, Padmasambhava came to be venerated by many Tibetans as the second Buddha, and he has retained this lofty status up to the present day. For example, in the liturgy of the Nyi gmapa li age, he serves as the meditational deity called upon in guru yoga, the centerpiece of the set of vajrayana preliminary practices called ngondro. These practices are anything but preliminary, in fact they are among the most important vajrayana practices. In Tibet, Padmasambhava universally is known also by the epithet "Guru Rinpoche" ("most precious teacher"). In guru yoga (union with the buddha mind of the teacher), Padmasambhava is visualized in his usual human form with his characteristic adornments. These include his lotus hat with five flaps, sun and moon and a white vulture feather, his trident (khatvanga) with three severed heads, hemivajra and floating scarf, several layers of garments, a dorje in his right hand, and a skull cap containing a vase filled with the nectar of immortality in his left hand, and the man himself sitting in the posture of royal ease. He represents both the root teacher (tsawe lama) of the meditator as well as all the buddhas of the three times and ten directions. In guru yoga, the practitioner invokes Padmasambhava through visualization, prayer and mantra, asking for his blessings and guidance and for removing obstacles, and eventually visualizes union with the guru and receiving the four empowerments, followed by dissolution and resting in rigpa (pure awareness). Clearly, Padmasambhava assumes an enormously important role in this key vajrayana practice, and this is mirrored by the somber tone of the famous seven-line prayer with which he is first invoked in the practice. The text of this prayer is: In the northwest of the country of Oddiyana, in the heart of a lotus flower, endowed with the most marvelous attainments, you are renowned as the "lotus born". Surrounded by a retinue of dakinis, following in your footsteps, I pray to you to come and give me your blessings. GURU PEMA SIDDHI HUNG. There are many things that puzzle me about Padmasambhava. As may be clear from the brief narrative above, the historical record seems to be very scanty on this figure. Who was he? Where did he come from? What was his training? What exactly did he do in Tibet? What were his teachings? And what did he do after he left Tibet? The official position of the Nyingmapa school is that Padmasambhava founded this school and left many teachings behind, almost all of them in the form of termas (treasures). Termas are Buddhist texts which were hidden soon after their conception, as the time was not yet ripe for them to be revealed. Centuries later, they were rediscovered by tertons, individuals with a special aptitude for unearthing these treasures. There are several kinds of termas. For example, "earth treasures" (sa ter) are actual texts hidden away in caves or on mountains or statues and physically rediscovered in these locations. "Mind treasures" (gong ter) are texts revealed to tertons in visions or dreams; often they are transmitted in a special script, the dakini script, which then needs to be translated into Tibetan. I suppose that to the Tibetan mind, to which everything is mind to begin with, there is no fundamental distinction between earth and mind treasures, and issues such as human authorship, authenticity, and historical standing are unimportant. Not so to the Western mind, and at's the crux of my inquiry here. We would consider an earth treasure o be a text written down by a specific human author with real ink on real paper at a defined date, then hidden at a distinct location and retrieved from that location by another person at a much later date. Whatever the claims of the discoverer, in principle the authorship and date of writing of such a text should be verifiable by modern methods of textual an analysis supplemented perhaps by physical dating method . On the other hand, we would consider mind treasures to be the product of the terton rather than the product of e.g. Padmasambhava, even if the terton claims that Padmasambhava was the author of the text. Since the terton probably doesn't view Padmasambhava as a historical person anyway but rather as the embodiment of the buddha mind, he is not committing fraud; it may well be that the inspiration for writing the "discovered" text indeed came from the terton's buddha mind. Hence, I have no rouble with the mind treasures, and we can exclude them from the discussion. For example, the famous Nyingmapa dzogchen master Jigme Lingpa "discovered" many mind treasures (his influential Longchen Nyingtik cycle of teachings are of this sort). Regardless of whom he attributes these texts to, to me they are the product of Jingme Lingpa's mind, and I would call him their author. My question to the Buddhist scholars on this list is this: What is the scoop on the earth treasures? Is there any validity to the claim that an important form of dharma transmission in Tibetan Buddhism, particularly in the Nyingmapa school, has been through earth termas? Is here definitive proof for any earth terma that it indeed was transmitted in the way described above? There might be evidence available on this question. For example, Dudjom Rinpoche, the last Supreme Head of the Nyingmapa order, who died only a few years ago, supposedly was a terton. Which texts did he uncover? Can anybody verify that he indeed dug them up? Is there any evidence that any of his texts, purported to be earth termas, are indeed of much earlier provenance? Can we exclude the possibility that texts passed off as earth termas, were in fact written by the terton? More importantly, can any of the texts ascribed to Padmasambhava, be they hidden-and-rediscovered, or circulated openly from day one, be said with any degree of certainty to be authentically from his pen? In his rather interesting scholarly study of the early dzogchen literature entitled "The Great Perfection" (E.J. Brill, 1988), the Tibetan Buddhologist Samten Gyaltsen Karmay states that only one dzogchen text (the Man ngag lta ba'i phreng ba, i.e. Rosary of Theories, King of Precepts) is known to have survived that has been attributed to Padmasambhava and may indeed have been written by him (but Karmay isn't at all certain about his authorship). Then what about all the terma texts attributed to Padmasambhava? For example, the whole cycle of bardo thodol texts on the intermediate states between death and rebirth are terma texts attributed to Padmasambhava. This cycle became famous in the West under the title of "The Tibetan Book of the Dead". Is there any evidence for the veracity of this claim, i.e. that Padmasambhava authored them and then passed them on as termas? I am particularly interested in any evidence regarding the authorship of Padmasambhava for the basic dzogchen ext "Self-liberation through seeing with naked awareness, being a direct introduction to the state of intrinsic awareness" (rig-pa ngo-sprod gcer-mthong rang grol). This text was formerly translated by Evans-Wentz as the "Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation", and then recently retranslated more faithfully by John Myrdhin Reynolds. This text in fact provides the basic dzogchen "view" underlying the entire cycle of bardo thodol texts. "Self-liberation through seeing ..." purportedly was discovered as an earth treasure by the terton Karma Lingpa (1356-1405, i.e. nearly seven centuries after Padmasambhava!) who also discovered the most widely known cycle of bardo thodol teachings (the one translated and made famous first by Evans-Wentz and subsequently by others). "Self-liberation ..." seems to have been written from a very high level of realization, presenting very clearly the basic dzogchen "view" and serving as a powerful "po nting out instruction", as far as I can tell with my own limited vision. Whoever the person was who wrote this text, I hold in very high regard and venerate. I would like to believe the claim that the author was Padmasambhava himself. My main motivation for writing this article was as follows: If, in guru yoga, one should consider Padmasambhava a human person, with whom one can establish a personal rapport, then it would be nice to know more about him, and in particular, to have some texts available that one can be reasonably certain to have been written by him. If, on the other hand, the objective of the guru yoga practice is to connect with the universal buddha nature present in all buddhas, then why is a human figure with such distinctive characteristics used for the purpose of visualization, rather than some generic buddha such as Samanthabhadra or Vajrasattva? I'm not sure I'm making myself clear. Here is another try. If the purpose of this practice is to g devotion in a human teacher (which also helps cutting down the ego of the practitioner), then why not put a genuinely human figure into the visualization. If, on the other hand, the purp se of the practice is to generate devotion and trust in the inner teacher, i.e. one's own buddha nature and primordial mind, then why not a put a non-human buddha figure into the visualization. As it is, the standard practice seems to be to visualize Guru Rinpoche = Padmasambhava, too idiosyncratic a figure to be easily perceived as a superhuman buddha, and yet too much of a legendary and ill-defined figure to relate to easily. Two other points pertinent to this maddening uncertainty in the historical facts about Padmasambhava. First, there is a famous sculpture of him that supposedly had him exclaim "looks like me" when he saw it (haven't I heard that story before, with respect to Tsongkhapa saying exactly that about a sculpture depicting him?). This story implies two things: one, that the sculpture was made in his lifetime, and two, that it indeed portrays him somewhat realistically. Has this sculpture indeed been dated and found to originate in the eighth century, i.e. is there any chance that we indeed may glimpse a view of the real Padmasambhava? Second, in "Self-liberation ....", the author refers to Mahamudra being the same as Dzogchen, Madhyamaka, Prajnaparamita etc. Was the term Mahamudra already in use during Padmasambhava's lifetime? I thought it arose with the early Kagyu masters or their forerunners who came a little after Padmasambhava's lifetime. If it was not in use then, that would kill the idea that this text was authored by Padmasambhava, wouldn't it? Disclaimer: I am not at all an expert in the subjects addressed above; I only have superficial and shaky knowledge of these things. But overall, I believe that my rendition is fairly accurate, even though I may have erred in many little details. Please correct me; we would like to get things right on this forum. I apologize for this lengthy d verbose post; with me, it always seems to come out like this. Jochen Kleinschmidt * * * End of File * * *