kīli kīlaya

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/).

When did the figure of Padmasambhava first become mythologised, when did he first become incorporated into ritual, when did his apotheosis begin?

For Tibetan tradition, the answers are simple. Padmasambhava was a peerless guru with the vidyādhara’s control over lifespan, who became revered in Tibet when Emperor Trisongdetsen invited him, by which time he had already been a living legend in India for many centuries.

Modern academics are denied such beautiful and easy answers.  In general we are permitted to accept as valid evidence far less data than traditional Tibetan historians, and in few places is this felt more acutely than the history of Padmasambhava: for modern scholarship, the admissible historical evidence for the person or even for his representation is very slight indeed.

Following the digitisation of the Dunhuang texts over the last decade, we have happily seen a small augmentation of the available evidence for the early representations of the great Guru, even if not for the great Guru himself. Part of that augmentation has come from the discovery of a new Dunhuang source, and part from a more intensive analysis of already known sources.  However, Cathy and I are not convinced that the implications of the new source have so far been fully appreciated, nor that the bigger picture as it should now stand has been properly assessed. In this multi-part blog I want to present a more thorough interrogation of the new source of evidence, together with a fuller investigation of the already known sources, to arrive at a more complete depiction of what we can now know about the prehistory of  Padmasambhava’s early representation if we put all the available evidence together.

The most convenient summary of how the historical Padmasambhava looked to modern scholarship before the digitisation of the Dunhuang texts comes from Matthew Kapstein. Writing in 2000, the only admissible evidence then available to him was fourfold:

(i) The early historical text, the Testament of Ba, which presents Padmasambhava visiting Tibet.

(ii) The 10th century Dunhuang text PT44, which narrates Padmasambhava bringing the Vajrakīla tradition to Tibet.

(iii) An early text attributed to Padmasambhava called the Garland of Views, or man ngag lta ‘phreng, and a commentary on it by the 11^th century rNying ma sage, Rong zom

(iv) The termas of Nyang ral (1124-1192) and Guru Chowang (1212-1270), which present fully-fledged apotheoses of Padmasambhava as a fully-enlightened Buddha.

Based on this evidence, Matthew Kapstein concluded that:

(i) The Testament of Ba shows Padmasambhava quite likely did visit Tibet during Trisongdetsen’s reign.

(ii)  PT44 indicates followers of his tantric teachings were active in post-Imperial Tibet.

(iii) Rong zom’s commentary and the few Dunhuang references show that the Padmasambhava cult began its ascent during the ‘time of fragments’, between the end of Empire and the start of the gsar ma period in the late 10^th century.

(iv) Nyang ral and Chowang’s termas suggest the most massive elaboration of Padmasambhava’s cult developed from the 12th century.[1]

Since Matthew Kapstein published that in 2000, there have been two further developments. Firstly, a new Dunhuang source, PT307, was felicitously discovered by Jacob Dalton, who published an article on it (this article also deals with another Dunhung text, TibJ644, that Jake Dalton had initially hoped related to Padmasambhava, but after some last-minute discussions between us, we decided was not yet so conclusively established as initially hoped).[2]

Secondly, Cathy and I are completing a much more detailed analysis than has hitherto been attempted of the evidence from the Dunhuang text IOL Tib J 321, looking at it more carefully than Ken Eastman’s short note from the 1980’s,  Jake Dalton brief survey in 2004/6?, or Sam van Schaik’s small blog entry in 2007. It is largely these two sources of evidence that will inform my paper today, together with a reassessment of the already well-known sources PT 44 and the Testament of Ba.

So what can the new and fully admissible evidence tell us different from what Matthew Kapstein wrote in 2000? It is a tribute to his historical discipline, and the caution with which his reasoning neither exceeded nor underrated the scanty evidence, that the advances we can now report consist more of detail than of substance. Kapstein wisely put no definite dates on any particular aspect of the Padmasambhava cult, which he understood as a gradual process developing throughout the post-imperial period, coming to some sort of culmination with Nyang ral three centuries later. What is new is that we now have much stronger evidence that the mythologisation of Padmasambhava, his incorporation into ritual, and it seems even his apotheosis, began within the earlier part of the very long time frame Matthew Kapstein suggested. In other words, when portraying Padmasambhava in his famous hagiographical and historical writings, Nyang ral was developing existent themes, rather than inventing new ones. Our new evidence suggests that Padmasambhava was already the object of religious myth and ritual worship, and was probably already seen as the enlightened source of tantric scriptures, as many as two hundred years before Nyang ral, even if not yet with so much poetic elaboration. An important proviso is that we have not yet ascertained if the evidence bears witness to a widespread veneration of Padma in the tenth century, or something narrower followed only by a few. This is because the evidence currently available suggests two different views of Padma in the early sources:

• Firstly, in the context of the possibly early or mid 10th century rDzogs chen oriented bSam gtan mig sgron of gNubs sangs rgyas ye shes, he is cited as a great teacher and even mythologised, but no more so than his peers like Vimalamitra, and there is no sign of his integration into ritual (but of course, we cannot yet tell for sure if the sole available version of this text includes later interpolations or not).
• Secondly, in the possibly late 10th century Mahāyoga texts from Dunhuang, he is mythologised, incorporated into ritual, and elevated above his peers, even apotheosized. The available versions of the testament of Ba seem to broadly concur with this.

Jake Dalton has in the last five years or so emerged as one of the most frequently cited interpreters of the early rNying ma pa, and is widely renowned as a highly innovative and interesting scholar. He has recognised, as many others such as Anne-Marie Blondeau and Matthew Kapstein did before him, that there is real evidence for some kind of a Padmasambhava cult from the 10th century or earlier. However, we think his work in this particular instance has not yet exhausted the possibilities for these sources, despite his early access to them. This is because Jake has not focused enough on the ritual function of the Dunhaung texts related to Padmasambhava, nor their connections with Mahāyoga; approaching them mainly in terms of their narratives divorced from ritual context, he has several times arrived at incomplete or even slightly inaccurate conclusions. By not recognising the ritual clues, he has significantly underestimated the full import of these extraordinary sources whose evidence for the early Padmasambhava cult is in fact quite a lot richer than he realises.

I was impressed to see on a YouTube interview made on his campus that Paul Harrison of Stanford University, although not a practising Buddhist, has learned the Diamond Sūtra by heart and recites it daily, to introduce a performative understanding into his academic research on this text.  In the same way, academic scholars of tantrism might benefit sometimes by actually performing tantric rituals themselves, to get a more nuanced view of things.

In the subsequent parts of this blog, I will set out in detail the further insights we can add to Jake Dalton’s, and indeed Matthew Kapstein’s and various other scholars’ earlier findings, by approaching the Dunhuang evidence for Padmasambhava through the lens of ritual. After all, it has never been doubted that PT44 and PT307 must be connected in some way with ritual. No one has ever suggested otherwise, because both comprise stilted narratives culminating in explicitly ritual passages. The reason they have not so far been studied through the lens of ritual is probably one of methodological tradition: in the short history of their subject, unlike the anthropologists, academic tantric textual scholars have quite simply never been expected to approach their materials from a performative perspective. I wonder if it might be time for that to change.