8 GEOFFREY SAMUEL
Tibetan meditation techniques can at first seem complex, even bewildering, to those familiar with Buddhist meditation primarily through the simpler forms of Theravāda and Zen Buddhist practice commonly taught in the West. Much Tibetan imagery is complex, and meditation is intertwined with elaborate, even theatrical, ritual techniques. In addition, Tibetan meditation is intrinsically Tantric, and for Westerners the term “Tantra” tends to be associated primarily with ritualized sex, an association that is certainly evoked by much Tibetan imagery, though it has little to do with most Tibetan practice.
In fact, much of this elaborate ritual can be performed through visualization and creative imagination, without the use of elaborate props, and the most advanced levels of Tibetan practice can be very direct and simple. Simplicity in the Tibetan tradition, however, tends to come at the later stages, not at the beginning. One might say that this is because the Tibetan traditions see a need to deconstruct the conditioning of everyday life, and to dissolve or weaken the ways in which our experience of the world is entrained by deeply engrained emotions and habitual tendencies, before moving to the levels of direct experience.
As for Tantric sex, sexual practices in the literal sense do not form part of most Tibetan meditation. Today, they are confined to a small minority of committed yogic practitioners within certain specific traditions. At the same time, sexuality as a dimension of human existence is certainly not excluded from Tantric practice, and appears both in the imagery of Tantric ritual and meditational procedures, and as part of the general understanding of human psychophysiological processes that underlies the practices.
Thus the striking and dramatic imagery and symbolism of Tibetan Buddhist practice today is deployed in the service of essentially the same goals as Buddhist practice elsewhere. Whether this was so in the earlier days of Indian Tantra is open to question. Earlier versions of Tantra in India, at any rate in non-Buddhist circles, seem to have centered around techniques of magic and sorcery, often employed for destructive purposes on behalf of local kings and chieftains.1 For the Tibetans, while some of the imagery may seem to hark back to such contexts, Buddhist Tantra, or Vajrayāna Buddhism, as it is often termed, derives by definition from a revelation of the wisdom and compassion of an enlightened Buddha. It should only be practiced with the highest of motivations, which is bodhicitta, the altruistic desire to attain Buddhahood in order to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings, a category that includes gods, 146animals, hell beings, and other spirits as well as humans. The relationship between Mahāyāna Buddhism and Vajrayāna Buddhism in Tibet is essentially one between theory and practice. The Mahāyāna teachings define the structure of the path and the goal toward which it is oriented, and the Vajrayāna provides the techniques by which it is to be attained.2
Here it is worth outlining some basic assumptions of Mahāyāna and Tantric Buddhism in Tibet. Western understandings of Buddhism see the historical Buddha, Śākyamuni, as a human teacher living at a particular point in time whose activities formed the starting point of a tradition developed by a succession of later historical personages. By contrast, the Tibetan perspective has a different and much expanded sense of the nature of the Buddha and of Buddhahood. Within this perspective, the historical Buddha was an example, an emanation, or a projection (I am deliberately keeping this a little vague since a detailed explanation would go well beyond the scope of this chapter) of a universal principle or capability that is variously called Buddhahood, Buddha nature, Enlightenment, or the Dharmakāya. Buddha nature is present in all life, and particularly in all beings that have consciousness (the “sentient beings” referred to above). Thus Buddhahood can be seen as a potential mode of being that any living consciousness can potentially adopt. Put somewhat differently, Buddha nature is within all phenomena, and constitutes the underlying nature of the universe seen “as it really is.” There is a basic opposition here between things as ordinary beings see and experience them, with dualistic vision, and things as they are seen in their enlightened form, through “pure vision” (Tib. dag snang).3
The various Tantric deities, in the Tibetan perspective, are aspects of this pure vision. They are devices through which ritual practitioners can access both the knowledge and, very importantly, the power of the Buddha. Lamas perform their work through the power of creative imagination, visualizing the deities and then summoning the real presence of the deities to enter the visualized forms. The deities may be evoked externally or internally, a distinction that is in any case illusory from the point of view of ultimate reality.
While the explicit central goal of these practices is for the ritual performer to attain Buddhahood in order to relieve the sufferings of living beings, the deities can also be invoked for more immediate and this-worldly purposes, such as the attainment of health and long life, of good fortune and prosperity, or for defense against malevolent spirits and other obstacles and forces of evil. The ability to do this is grounded in the activity of lamas of the past, who established the ongoing lineages of Tantric practice by which today’s Tantric practitioners continue to control the forces of the apparent world. These ongoing traditions of Tantric practice became the property of major monasteries, passed on through the centuries by hereditary or reincarnate lamas much of whose status, charisma, and political power was associated with their connection to one or another of the lineages of Tantric practice.
Thus Tantric lamas are above all ritual performers and teachers of the skills of ritual performance, skills that historically have been seen as of central value to Tibetan society. These skills involve the creative manipulation of the forces 147represented by the Tantric deities, and this is routinely done through the practitioner’s imaginative identification with Tantric deities, supported by visualization, gesture, liturgy, and a variety of ritual implements and offerings.
Tshe-sgrub, or longevity practices, are among the most significant of the meditative processes carried out through this Tantric methodology. Their purpose is to attain a long and healthy life. At the same time, as we will see, the orientation toward the achievement of Buddhahood remains very much part of the wider context within which the practice is performed. Tshe-sgrub practices form part of a much wider repertoire of Tibetan longevity-related practices, which include medical preparations, dietary practices involving the ritual empowerment of pills made from herbal and mineral substances and their ingestion under controlled circumstances, and physical exercises, as well as practices such as the liberation of animals to generate positive karma or the performance of Tantric ritual to avert and eliminate obstacles to health and well-being or to avert the time of death. While tshe-sgrub practices are characteristically Vajrayāna Buddhist in their form and procedures, and refer explicitly to the Indian Tantric ideas of the siddhi, or attainment of power over the duration of life, these practices also incorporate both elements from the Indian alchemical tradition, and also other elements that suggest procedures of Himalayan shamanism, such as the recalling of soul-substance or spirit that has been stolen by demonic forces or otherwise lost to the surrounding environment.
Elsewhere I have discussed the history of Indo-Tibetan alchemy4 and the evolution of longevity practice in Tibet,5 and I have also considered how one might understand these practices in anthropological terms.6 Here I will present a description of one specific cycle of longevity practices, the ’Chi-med Srog Thig, a set of practices that originated with the late nineteenth-century lama Zil-gnon Nam-mkha’i rdo-rje and is particularly associated with the late Dudjom Rinpoche (bDud-’joms Rin-po-che ’Jigs-bral Ye-shes rdo-rje).7
What is the ’Chi-med Srog Thig (the name means something like Creative Seed of Immortal Life)? To start with, like all Tibetan Tantric practices, the ’Chi-med Srog Thig is an ongoing continuity of practice, passed down from teacher to student. Thus, while there is a body of texts that relate to it, the ’Chi-med Srog Thig is essentially the ongoing practice tradition rather than the text. As such, it is one of the many practice traditions within Tibetan Buddhism mentioned earlier. Some of these have been handed down over many centuries, in some cases going back to Indian Buddhism; others, such as the ’Chi-med Srog Thig, go back to a specific vision or revelation at a more recent point in time. The ’Chi-med Srog Thig was revealed at the beginning of the twentieth century, in this case to a gter-ston, a term often translated somewhat literally as “treasure finder” but which we can tentatively render as “visionary lama.”8 It should be noted that none of these practices is regarded as being of simply human origin; there is always some kind of contact with the levels of ultimate reality represented by the 148Buddha and his various Tantric manifestations. The gter-ston is one way in which this contact can take place.
A gter-ston is a person who is thought of as having a link back to Padmasambhava (generally known in Tibetan as Padma ’Byung-gnas or Guru Rin-po-che), the principal originating lama of the Rnying-ma-pa (Old Ones) tradition, regarded as the earliest of the major Tibetan Buddhist traditions. The Rnying-ma-pa is also the tradition that is closest to what one could call, with reservations, the “shamanic” side of Tibetan religion.9 Padmasambhava is probably a historical figure who came to Tibet from India in the late eighth century. During his visit to Tibet he is held to have bound the local gods of Tibet in obedience to the Buddhist teachings, and to have helped establish the first Tibetan monastery. He is also said to have gathered together a group of twenty-five close disciples, including the then King, Khri-srong Lde’u-btsan, and a princess, Ye-shes Mtsho-rgyal, who acted as one of his Tantric consorts and wrote down his teachings, which were concealed in cryptic forms. Buddhist gter-ston10 are regarded as rebirths of one or more of these twenty-five disciples, who carry within their mind-streams the imprint of the original teachings given by Padmasambhava. The idiom of visionary revelation is complex, but the general idea is that some precipitating event awakens these memories, and the gter-ston has access to them and can transcribe or dictate them in a form that can be practiced by his followers. The gter-ston may find physical texts and other objects that catalyze the rediscovery, or may simply uncover the teachings within the depths of his own consciousness.11
A gter-ston may or may not be able to produce a formal textual presentation of the teachings he or she reveals. His talents may be more for visionary work than for scholarship, and it is not unusual for a gter-ston to work with one or more lamas with more gifts for the compilation of the teachings in liturgical form. These lamas may also be responsible for the further propagation of the teachings. If they are heads of major monasteries, the teachings may become part of the ongoing “property” of that monastery and its lamas, and be passed on through successive generations of lamas and students in that tradition alongside the other teachings associated with the monastery. In other cases, a lama may establish a major new teaching tradition on the basis of a particular set of revelations (gter-ma, a term that can refer both to physical objects and to texts discovered, and also, as here, to a body of discovered teachings and practices). This was the case, for example, with the lama Karma ’Chags-med, who worked with the gter-ston Mi-’gyur Rdo-rje in the early seventeenth century, in the codification of his Gnam Chos (Sky Dharma) revelations. These became the basis of liturgical practice at the newly founded monastery of Dpal-yul, and in time the Dpal-yul tradition became one of the six major teaching monasteries of the Rnying-ma-pa tradition, with numerous dependent monasteries all practicing the Gnam Chos teachings.
A complete gter-ma cycle generally includes a whole range of liturgical and practice texts relating to a specific deity and his or her maṇḍala, along with associated historical texts, empowerment texts, explanatory and commentarial 149material, and so on. Thus one can carry out a wide range of activities, from solo meditational practices to large-scale public rituals, on the basis of a single gter-ma. We will see some of how this works later when I run through the material in the ’Chi-med Srog Thig cycle.
This whole process of gter-ma revelation has close relationships to a variety of other visionary practices in Tibetan religion, and there is much more that could be said about it, and indeed much that has been said by others and by myself in other contexts,12 but here it is perhaps enough to note that it introduces an important dynamic element into Tibetan Buddhism. A gter-ma-revelation is not necessarily automatically accepted. Much depends on the status of the original lama and of the people who take up the teachings. Many gter-ma teachings doubtless disappeared with little or no trace. Others became major traditions of practice within contemporary religion, as with the main gter-ma cycles associated with Dudjom Rinpoche, of which the ’Chi-med Srog Thig is one.
Dudjom Rinpoche was himself a gter-ston, but he was not in fact the discoverer of the ’Chi-med Srog Thig cycle. The original revelation of the ’Chi-med Srog Thig took place at the start of the twentieth century, through a lama called Zil-gnon Nam-mkha’i Rdo-rje.13 The initial revelation took place in Southern Tibet in 1902, and was followed by a more public revelation at a sacred site in Bhutan in 1904.14 The ’Chi-med Srog Thig formed part of a series of revelations that were received by Zil-gnon Nam-mkha’i Rdo-rje, and was associated as a set of accessory practices to a group of Vajrakīlaya teachings.
We do not as yet know a great deal about Zil-gnon, but he lived in Eastern Tibet, and was apparently associated with the Zur-mangs group of monasteries, part of the Karma Bka’-brgyud-pa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. While gter-ma discovery is more associated with the Rnying-ma-pa than with the various branches of the Bka’-brgyud-pa, there were close links between Rnying-ma-pa and Bka’-brgyud-pa in Eastern Tibet in the nineteenth century. The Karma Bka’-brgyud-pa were closely involved in the great Buddhist revival centered at the court of Sde-dge (Derge) in the mid-to late nineteenth century and generally referred to as the Ris-med (eclectic or nonsectarian) movement, in which gter-ma revelations were of particular importance. Zil-gnon appears to have made a deep impression on the principal lama of the Karma Bka’-brgyud-pa, the fifteenth Karmapa (Rgyal-ba Karma-pa Mkha-khyab Rdo-rje, 1871–1922), who wrote the basic empowerment ritual and several other texts for the ’Chi-med Srog Thig cycle between 1911 and 1916, and was recognized as the chos-bdag, or owner and propagator, of Zil-gnon’s revelation.
The fifteenth Karmapa died, however, in 1922, and although the texts for the ’Chi-med Srog Thig are included in his Gsung-’bum (Collected Works), there is as far as we know no continuing practice tradition of the ’Chi-med Srog Thig among the Karma Bka’-brgyud-pa today. The large-scale propagation of Zil-gnon’s teachings was the work of another, much younger East Tibetan lama, Dudjom Rinpoche (Bdud-’joms Rin-po-che, 1904–1987), whose personal name was ’Jigs-bral Ye-shes Rdo-rje. Dudjom Rinpoche, as mentioned earlier, was himself a gter-ston, as well as being the recognized rebirth of another well-known 150visionary lama, Bdud-’joms Gling-pa, and he is said to have found his own first gter-ma at the age of five.15 Dudjom Rinpoche took over as chos-bdag or chief propagator of the ’Chi-med Srog Thig practices. He wrote most of the other ritual and liturgical texts for the cycle, and seems to have taken it up with some enthusiasm, perhaps because his own health was poor for much of his life (he suffered badly from emphysema). The ’Chi-med Srog Thig became one of his principal practices and was taught widely to his many students and followers.
Crucially for the later history of this cycle of teachings, Dudjom Rinpoche left Tibet in 1958, initially settling at Kalimpong in West Bengal, India. He was a major figure among the Tibetan refugees, and along with the sixteenth Karmapa (1924–1981), who went to Sikkim, and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910–1991), who had settled in Bhutan, formed the principal counterweight to the refugee administration at Dharamsala, which was dominated by the Dalai Lama’s Dge-lugs-pa tradition. Dudjom later also lived in Nepal and in France, where he died in 1987. Today there are many lamas, particularly in Nepal and the Kalimpong area, who are followers of his teachings. He was also one of the first senior lamas to have Western students and patrons.
What is long-life practice supposed to do? The English term “long-life practice,” or “longevity practice,” is a translation of the Tibetan tshe-sgrub, literally “realization or accomplishment of tshe” where tshe means life in the sense of life duration. Tshe ring-po, a long life span, is certainly an explicit goal of the practices. More technically, the practices are described as being aimed at the attainment or accomplishment of the siddhi (Tib. dngos-grub) of long life, the Tantric power of control over life span. This was held to be one of a number of “powers” or “abilities” of the Enlightened Buddha and so of the Tantric adept. Indian Tantric adepts (siddha) such as the great Nāgārjuna were thought of as having attained the siddhi of long life, and so as being able to live as long as they desired.16 As we will see, Padmasambhava was also believed to have attained this siddhi. However, the situation becomes complicated in two ways.
Firstly, it may be asked whether the practice is really concerned with long life in the sense of an increased duration of time in this ordinary and by definition very unsatisfactory and largely illusory existence in saṃsāra, the world of cyclic existence, of life, death and rebirth, which the Buddhist teachings are explicitly aimed at transcending. It is not uncommon to encounter direct denials that this is the case. The real long-life siddhi, one may be told, is Enlightenment itself, and the state of Enlightenment or Buddhahood is beyond ordinary notions of space and time.17 The mere mundane question of adding a few months or years onto one’s current rebirth is not a matter to be taken seriously.18 Within this perspective, extension of the duration of life is at best a question of upāyakauśalya, or skill in means, by which the student is lured toward a goal that actually far transcends such meaningless concerns. 151
A position of this kind is in radical contrast to the general Tibetan lay perception that long-life practice is precisely about living longer in this life, admittedly a problematic goal for a tradition such as Buddhism that regards ordinary saṃsāric life as radically unsatisfactory and ultimately largely illusory, and sees attachment to saṃsāra as a basic problem to be countered through practice. What is more common in the learned discourse about long-life practice is a kind of compromise position, by which the extension in life duration is real (at least as far as anything in this life has reality), but its purpose is explicitly Dharmic.
Thus one strives to achieve a longer and healthier life so as to have more time and more ability to practice the Dharma, with the ultimate aim of altogether transcending such relative concepts and then of aiding others to follow one along the same path. This is very much in line with the familiar Tibetan emphasis, deriving from Indian Mahāyāna sources, on human life as a unique opportunity for the achievement of Buddhahood. Since we have this opportunity, we should seek to make as good a use of it as possible.
It goes along with this that the deities of long life, such as the form of Amitāyus who is at the center of the ’Chi-med Srog Thig cycle, are thought of, like almost all of the deities at the center of specific Tantric practices, as themselves aspects of the Enlightened Buddha. The ultimate attainment of Amitāyus is therefore equivalent to Buddhahood itself, or at least takes you a fair way along the path to it. This helps remove the conflict between the apparently saṃsāric goal to which the practice is oriented, and the explicitly trans-saṃsāric intention of any proper Mahāyāna practice. Most tshe-sgrub practice texts ensure that you are regularly reminded of this trans-saṃsāric motivation, as in fact do most other kinds of Buddhist practice aimed at superficially worldly ends. Thus the ’Chi-med Srog Thig practice begins with verses in which the practitioner takes refuge in the deity of long life, who is in effect treated as a form of the Buddha, and in which the altruistic motivation for the practice is generated. It ends with a dedication of merit and auspicious wishes, which again return us very explicitly to the central aims of Buddhist practice.
Secondly, long-life practice is thought of as operating on a number of factors or components, among which tshe (life duration) itself is listed as one. This raises the question of the relationship between tshe in the sense of the overall goal of the practice, and tshe as one of the factors that is being manipulated through the practice. One can think of this in at least two ways. Firstly, part of the process of achievement of long life consists in mastery over these other aspects of health and longevity; secondly, the aim of the practice is in fact rather more than long life itself, since (for example) long life as a permanent invalid in continual pain is not necessarily helpful for the achievement of Enlightenment. This is particularly true on the Tantric path, where Buddhahood is closely linked with mastery over the inner flows of the subtle body, for which good physical health is a major asset.
What then are the various factors or components on which long-life practice might be seen as operating? Here there are generally three or four principal 152factors mentioned in the practice texts, though the precise lists vary. The ’Chi-med Srog Thig uses four factors: tshe, life span or life duration; srog, which can be translated approximately as “life force” or “vital strength”; bla, a term for separable life essence or protective energy; and dbugs, literally meaning “breath.” Other factors that may be involved include rlung-rta (good fortune) and dbang-thang (personal power, ability to enforce one’s will).
As Barbara Gerke has demonstrated in her own research on the contemporary ethnography of long-life concepts and practices,19 these form part of a body of Tibetan terms that occur both in popular discourse and in a variety of learned contexts, including medicine, astrology, and other forms of divination. Thus in astrology the variations over time of srog, bla, lus (body), rlung-rta, and dbang-thang are tracked and correlated with the cycles of the five elements (metal, wood, water, air, and fire) fundamental to the Chinese-derived system of Tibetan astrology (nag-rtsis). The rlung-rta, or “prayer flag” rituals, that are an ubiquitous feature of Tibetan communities are not just concerned with increasing the rlung-rta (good fortune) after which they are named. They also explicitly ask in most cases for the increase of srog, lus, tshe, and dbang-thang. The movement of bla around the body is traced in the medical context and is significant in terms of the use of various medical procedures, such as moxibustion.
Whether these factors have the same meaning in each of these different contexts is another question. Bla is a particularly significant factor in this regard since it appears to have a direct derivation from pre-Buddhist Tibetan ideas of a separable soul or life essence similar to that found in many Asian and American contexts.20 Such souls can generally be lost, and the work of shamanic practitioners is, as is well known, often conceived of in terms of its recovery. This is true in the Tibetan case as well, and as we will see that this becomes extended to the other factors; tshe or srog may also be seen as potentially able to be lost to the surrounding environment and also able to be recovered from that environment through the practice. Thus the body in longevity practice is seen as open to the surrounding environment and intimately connected with it, and the practice itself, like a range of other Tibetan Tantric practices, can be seen as a reworking within a sophisticated literate culture of ideas of lost or stolen souls.
In relation to the environment, it is worth saying a few more things about the concept of bla. Firstly, bla may pertain to social groups or regions as well as to individuals. Secondly, specific places, plants, or animals in the environment may be thought of as external homes of the bla and their vitality linked to the vitality of the corresponding person or group. Such ideas are common in the Tibetan epic of Gling Ge-sar, where defeating a particularly powerful human or demonic opponent can involve tracking his or her bla-object, and in various folk and popular ritual contexts. They have also remained quite alive in popular understandings, and easily shade over into ideas of relationships to local deities: thus the bla ri (bla mountain) or bla mtsho (bla lake) of a region is also the home of its guardian deity, so that the health of the bla may also be figured in terms of maintaining good relations with the local deity. 153
These relationships to the environment are not referenced directly in longevity practice but can probably be thought of as part of a network of associations that support longevity practice’s environmental dimension and give it plausibility and naturalness in the Tibetan setting. To put this differently, the idea of an ecological or environmental dimension to health may be found in a variety of premodern Tibetan contexts, and these can be thought of as reinforcing one another. The extent to which these concepts may be reworked or rethought in terms of modern ideas of environmental health is a complex and interesting question, but one into which I shall not go here.
The key transaction in longevity practice does however retain a strong environmental dimension. Put simply, in longevity practice, deterioration in bla srog tshe and other related factors is remedied by recovering the “lost” bla srog tshe and so on from the surrounding environment and returning it to the individual, and also by strengthening the individual with the aid of positive forces or essences in the environment. This can be done by the individual practitioner on his or her own behalf, or by a lama, with or without a supporting ritual team, on behalf of others.
I have referred to the ’Chi-med Srog Thig as a cycle of teachings but so far have avoided being explicit about what this means. The central feature of a gter-ma cycle is a specific revelation or series of revelations that normally focus around a specific form of a deity and the associated maṇḍala. In the case of the ’Chi-med Srog Thig, the central deities are as already mentioned forms of Amitāyus, more specifically a male-female couple (Padma Thod-’phreng-rtsal and consort) who are held to represent the specific forms of Amitāyus and of his consort Caṇḍalī that were realized by Padmasambhava and his consort, the Indian princess Mandāravā, when they themselves achieved the long-life siddhi, an episode that was held to have happened at a location known as Māratika and today mostly identified with the Hindu-Buddhist cave shrine of Halase in Nepal.21
These two figures are surrounded by a maṇḍala of subsidiary figures: four further Buddha figures, each with female consort, in the four directions, six goddesses of sensory enjoyment, eight offering goddesses, and four door-keeper goddesses. These are portrayed as images in figure 8.1, and are represented by dots in figure 8.2. The door-keeper goddesses again have male consorts, so this comes to a total of thirty-two deities, including the central figures. There are also four symbolic supports for the four life forces. Figure 8.1 also portrays the two saṃbhogakāya deities (Padma Gar-dbang and consort), of which Padma Thod-’phreng-rtsal and consort are nirmāṇakāya projections or emanations, and the dharmakāya deities (Samantabhadra and consort) from which they in turn derive, as well as the deified lamas of the lineage through which the teachings have been passed down, at the top of the painting, and the worldly protector gods associated with the teachings at the foot.
It is the imaginative recreation by the practitioner of this maṇḍala of deities that effectively defines the practice of the ’Chi-med Srog Thig. None of the 154individual deities is unique to the ’Chi-med Srog Thig, but the specific configuration, and specific details of the iconography (such as the implements held by the various figures) are not repeated exactly in any other cycle, and a primary function of the initiation or empowerment ritual (dbang gi cho-ga, or dbang chog for short) in the cycle is to introduce future practitioners to this specific constellation of deities, which they will invoke and bring into being through visualization and active imagination in the practice.
Major gter-ma cycles such as the ’Chi-med Srog Thig contain a large number of individual texts carried out in relation to the maṇḍala of deities of that particular gter-ma. These form the basis for a variety of meditational practices and ritual activities. To get a sense of what the ’Chi-med Srog Thig contains in textual terms, I now turn to a brief survey of the texts in volume 14 (volume Pha22) of Dudjom Rinpoche’s Gsung-’bum (Collected Works). These texts center around the longevity deity Guru Amitāyus (Bla-ma Tshe-dpag-med), a Tibetan development 156of the important Indian Buddhist deity Amitāyus, whose name (meaning “limitless life”) already indicates his close association with long-life practices.
The overall title of these practices is worth a brief glance: it is Rdo rje’i phur pa yang gsang phrin las bcud dril gyi las tshe sgrub ’chi med srog thig (The Creative Seed of Immortal Life Longevity Practice, an Activity of the Extra-secret Essential Vajrakīlaya Practice). As this implies, these practices are technically an appendix to a set of practices associated with the fierce Tantric deity Phurba or Vajrakīlaya, also originally revealed by the same lama, Zil-gnon Nam-mkha’i Rdo-rje. The first few texts in volume 14 are in fact about these Vajrakīlaya practices, but the bulk of the volume is about the long-life practices of Guru Amitāyus, and in fact includes little or no reference to their supposed context as part of a Vajrakīlaya cycle. The balance is quite telling; the Vajrakīlaya texts take up 70 pages, the ’Chi med srog thig practices some 480 pages, so the latter hardly appear as an appendix to the former.
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 texts157 | ||
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 158the 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 159 |
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 Tantric 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. 160
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 161to 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.
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). 162
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).
27. Cathy Cantwell notes that this text is “drawn from the long longevity practice of the Padma gling-pa tradition. [It] fills the necessary niche for such a section within a self-sufficient cycle, although in practice, it may be considered too short to be of more than symbolic value, and when needed, more substantial yogic practices for controlling the channels and air currents (rtsa rlung) from other Dudjom cycles may be done instead, such as from the mKha’ ’gro thugs thig (in Volume ma) or the gNam lcags spu gri (Volume da).” (Personal communication, 2007.)
28. Wallace, Kālacakratantra.
29. Cf. Moerman, Meaning; Wilce and Price, “Metaphors”; Samuel “Healing, Efficacy and the Spirits”; Samuel, “Inner Work”; and Samuel, “Healing in Tibetan Buddhism.”
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