Padmasambhava in early Tibetan myth and ritual, Part 2: IOLTibJ321

Let me begin this reassessment of the early sources on Padmasambhava with IOL TibJ321. One of the most remarkable finds from Dunhuang, this manuscript in 85 folios[1] contains a complete Nyingma Mahāyoga tantra embedded within its commentary, with many marginal notes. The tantra is famous, still a mainstay of the Nyingma canon and found also in several Kanjurs, called The Noble Lassoo of Methods, a Garland of Lotuses (‘phags pa thabs kyi zhags pa padma ‘phreng gi don bsdus pa). Cathy and I have been editing and studying the tantra and its commentary for some time, and our work is nearing completion.

Current palaeographical knowledge locates the Dunhuang manuscript to the latter half of the tenth century. However the text itself must be older than its Dunhuang witness:  our critical edition can demonstrate that an ancestor of the versions from the local Kanjurs of Bathang, Hemis, and Tawang, and from the South Central Tibetan rNying ma’i rgyud ‘bum editions, was older than the Dunhuang manuscript by more than one copying at the least.

The Dunhuang manuscript mentions Padmasambhava four times: once in the marginal notes at the beginning, twice in the marginal notes near the end, and once within the main text of the commentary itself, also near the end. The references are somewhat enigmatic, and we will be publishing on them at greater length elsewhere, so here I will only review our findings in brief.

Ken Eastman in the 1980’s was the first to look at these references, and had tentatively suggested they might be presenting Padmasambhava as the human author of the commentary. Jake Dalton and Sam van Schaik follow him in taking much the same line, albeit quite assertively and no longer tentatively.[2] However, despite the difficulty of the materials and the rather complicated way in which the root text, commentary and marginal notes cross-reference, neither Ken Eastman, Jake Dalton or Sam van Schaik had time to study the text in much depth or for very long, and none have written more than a few pages on it.

After a much more detailed study by Cathy, it now appears quite uncertain that Padmasambhava is being represented as the author of the commentary, and it is important that the scholarly community takes note of this fact. Rather, there is a distinct emphasis on portraying him as a sublime realised being with exceptional access to the Tathāgata’s secret teachings, and quite possibly even as the source of the root tantra itself.

The references it makes to Padmasambhava are not entirely clear and unambiguous, since they assume the reader already has such information, but what is clear and unambiguous is that these are references to an exceptional, mythologised being, and not to an ordinary human teacher. At its end, the main text of the commentary lavishly praises Padmasambhava as padma rgyal po, the ‘Lotus King’, in verses which the accompanying notes explain are being addressed by Śāntigarbha to Padmasambhava. It is fascinating that these verses comprise a precise form of laudatory words picked up two centuries later by Nyang ral Nyi ma’i ‘od zer and the wider hagiographical tradition in their own praises of Padmasambhava, and Nyang ral again specifically links these words to the Lotus King, a form which remains canonical as one of the famous Eight Aspects of Guru Rinpoche.

Figure 1: Padma rGyal po, as depicted in the Ritual Dance of the Guru’s Eight Aspects (gu ru mtshan brgyad ’chams), Jangsa Monastery, Kalimpong, 2009. Photo by Cathy Cantwell.

The praises from IOLTibJ321 and from Nyang ral’s Zangs gling ma

As you can see in the diagram, the verses say that Sam bha ba is “he who has attained the supreme siddhi, of great wonder, Padma rGyal po [The Lotus King] (who) is not worldly; (he who) unravels from the expanse the tathāgata’s great secret pith instructions“. Note the use of the Tibetan word ma ‘gyur here in the Dunhuang manuscript. It is not a very natural Tibetan usage, and like many phrases in these old manuscripts, it’s not entirely clear what it means. Where ‘gyur ba occurs in Tibetan literature, it is often as a translation of the Sanskrit bhūta. Literally, both ‘gyur ba and bhūta mean ‘become’, but most often, the idiomatic meaning of the Sanskrit is simply ‘who is’. Tibetans tended to translate bhūta literally rather than idiomatically, thus giving ‘gyur ba (to become) simply to render ‘who is’.[3] So there is some albeit rather tenuous suggestion here that the verse of praise might have somewhere in its background or prehistory, something translated into Tibetan from Sanskrit.

The marginal notes attached to this praise are slightly ambiguous, explaining that after examination, Śāntigarbha finds either Padmasambhava himself, or his teachings, flawless, and is praising him.^[4] Right at the start of the text, the notes already told us that while the Buddha has condensed (the meanings) of the root text (‘bu tas bsdus), it was Sambhava who produced or made (them) (sam ba bhas byas)—a similar meaning to Śāntigarbha’s praise of him here for unravelling the secret great pith instructions of the tathāgata from the expanse.

Finally, a page above this praise which ends the commentarial text, right at the end of the root tantra itself, a marginal note refers to Padmasambhava.  This annotation seems possibly to suggest that what has gone before, namely the speech of the tantra, which has emerged naturally out of sameness, was demonstrated by Padmasambhava without any personal fabrication or rang gzo.  There follows an explanation of how, given this natural emergence, when a noble being speaks with pure awareness, the resulting utterance is Tantra.[5]

Thus, Padmasambhava seems to be closely involved with the Buddha’s original teaching of the tantra, in terms that go some distance to making him sound like a treasure revealer of some kind, and so one might speculate if the name ‘Padma’ in the texts’s title might conceivably be referring to Padmasambhava.  This, however, is unlikely: the first chapter of the commentary, which discusses the title, gives no hint of the word, “padma”, having any such implication.

I should add, these findings in IOL Tib J321 have not been remarked upon by previous scholars, but we feel they might add significantly to our knowledge of 10^th century representations of Padmasambhava. We will deal with them at very much greater length in our forthcoming book.

Finally, a note on the citation from Nyang ral Nyi ma’i ‘od zer: Lewis Doney of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, has worked on critically editing Nyang ral’s Guru Padma hagiography.  He argues convincingly that the earliest and historically most influential recension is that represented by two manuscripts in the National Archives in Kathmandu and two manuscripts from Bhutan, which he classifies as ZL3.  The version of ZL3 used here is Lewis Doney’s identification in the Kathmandu National Archives.  We have emended rtog in line 2 to rtogs, found in all the other witnesses of ZL3.  The Rin chen gter mdzod chen mo version (Paro: Ngodrup and Sherab Drimay, Kyichu Monastery, 1976, Volume Ka: 25), which has in modern times become the most widely used version, incorporates later material.  It gives a variant second line for this verse (rtogs ba bla med mchog tu gyur pa yis/).