Padmasambhava

At Samye the walls went up in daylight and came down in the dark. Masons dressed and set the courses through the morning heat, and by first light the stone lay scattered again, as if the ground had shrugged. The emperor Trisong Detsen had a scholar on hand for exactly this kind of project, the Indian monk Shantarakshita, a man of impeccable discipline, and the monk said plainly that the problem was outside his competence. A Vinaya monk does not do occult combat. What Tibet needed was a specialist, and the specialist was living down in Nepal.

The stories say he had been born from a lotus. When the emperor’s emissaries reached the frontier he was already standing there waiting for them, and when they offered him gold he refused it on the grounds that in his vision everything had already turned to gold. That is the tone of the whole legend. He arrives ahead of the invitation, he declines what he is offered because he has already got it, and he treats the fierce local divinities of the plateau not as enemies to be destroyed but as competitors to be beaten and then employed.

The earliest surviving Tibetan account of what he actually did is stranger and more procedural than the later epics. In the Testament of Wa, foreign monks had been blamed for a run of disasters and expelled to appease the spirits, and Shantarakshita brought Padmasambhava in to settle the matter properly. He used prasena divination to reach the Four Great Kings and put a question to them that reads like a claims investigation: two years ago a great flood overcame Pangtang, a fire raged in the Rasa castle, and disease spread among both people and livestock, so who are the gods and serpent spirits that did this? The Kings, who can see, gave him the clan names. Calling the spirits by those names forced them into human bodies, probably through a medium, and once they were standing in front of him he threatened them, explained the karmic consequences of what they had been doing, and put them under oath. The demons became protectors of the doctrine. Nobody was destroyed. They were conscripted.

The history underneath this is thin to the point of vanishing. Only a couple of mentions of Padmasambhava have been identified in the late-first-millennium Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, one of them a bare annotation in a colophon, the other a short hagiography in which he is a tantric adept living in Nepal who defeats demonic obstruction through his mastery of the rites of Vajrakila, the adamant spike. Read alongside the early redactions of the Testament of Wa, that evidence supports a fairly modest man: an eighth-century specialist in one tantric cycle, with a following in Nepal and southern Tibet, who may have met the king, may have worked as an exorcist during the building of Samye, and may, since water and irrigation run through every version of the story, have known something about hydraulic engineering. One scholar went so far as to propose he never existed at all, which most of the field regards as a step too far on the slim evidence available. He was, on the earliest record, a jobbing ritualist with a good reputation.

He grew because he was useful. The lay tantric lineages that flourished in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries traced themselves back to him and to his Vajrakila rites, and when new lines of tantra began arriving from India and calling the old Tibetan traditions degenerate, those lineages leaned harder and harder on the one thing the newcomers could not claim, which was a personal connection to the imperial court. A marginal dharma-master of the eighth century reemerged two centuries later as an emblem of Tibet’s imperial greatness.

The figure most Tibetans picture was assembled in the twelfth century by one man. Nyangrel Nyima Ozer, who lived from 1124 to 1192 and was the first of the great treasure-revealers, compiled the Copper Island biography, the first text to run a complete narrative from the discovery of an infant on the pistil of a lotus in northwest India through to the final departure from Tibet. In the earliest surviving versions of that text he goes by roughly a dozen names. Years later Nyangrel had a vision in which he travelled to a pure realm and met eight distinct Padmasambhavas standing at the cardinal and intermediate points of a mandala, and that vision fixed the set. The eight names of the guru became the standard by which he is painted: the lake-born vajra at the centre, the monk Shakya Sengge who looks exactly like the Buddha, the tantrika Nyima Ozer, the king Pema Gyalpo, the charnel-ground adept Loden Chokse, the scholar in his robes, the figure shown outward-facing with his consort Mandarava, and the two fierce ones, Sengge Dradrok and Dorje Drolo, with ferocious faces and heavy bodies wreathed in flame. Nothing in the Copper Island asks for those last two to be painted as monsters. The artists went further than the text, and Dorje Drolo, the last of the eight to settle into a fixed form, ended up standing on the back of a pregnant tigress with a vajra in his right hand and a three-sided ritual dagger in his left.

The portraits are unusually specific for a figure so historically obscure. One of the oldest, a copper-alloy statue two feet high made in western Tibet or Ladakh in the fourteenth century, sits him enthroned in a yogic posture with a vajra in one hand for clarity and a skull cup in the other for detachment, the distinctive cloth cap of his order on his head and the long stretched earlobes of an enlightened being. Its dedication names the patron who paid for it, a ruler called Kunga Gyalpo about whom nothing else survives. In painting he wears the lotus hat, cradles a khatvanga staff in the bend of his left elbow, and in his wrathful forms goes barefoot in a tiger-skin skirt over a sun disc.

The powers follow from the method. He divines, he compels by name, he turns dry ground into irrigated field, he dances along the outer wall of a monastery and the spirits that were pulling it down stop. Above all he hides things. Before leaving Tibet he is said to have crossed every inch of the plateau with Yeshe Tsogyal, the woman of the court who became his consort and is now the spiritual mother of the Tibetan people, burying images, ritual objects and above all texts, each one intended for a specific need at a specific later date. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is one of them. His disciples keep being reborn to dig them up.

The limits are just as clear. He could not stay. His standing at court made him an object of jealousy among the aristocracy, the oath-bound divinities grew restive, and he left for the southern island of Camara, where he will live as an immortal until this aeon ends. Not one line of writing can be securely attributed to him, and the enormous body of scripture that carries his name is by definition scripture he did not publish, which is why some Tibetan factions dismissed the entire revelatory corpus as forgery and worked to suppress it. That argument was effectively settled by patronage rather than proof when the fifth Dalai Lama, a fervent devotee, gave the cult the sanction of the highest office in the country. The nearest thing to his own voice is a short survey of the nine vehicles called A Garland of Views, a text that at least reflects what the first generations of Tibetans who owed him allegiance believed he had taught them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Padmasambhava?

Padmasambhava was an Indian tantric master of the eighth century who is credited with clearing the way for Buddhism in imperial Tibet. Tibetans call him Guru Rinpoche, the Precious Guru, and the Nyingma school traces its lineages directly to him. He is remembered above all for subduing the local gods and demons of Tibet and binding them to protect the Buddhist teaching.

Did Padmasambhava really exist?

Almost certainly, though the historical record of him is very thin. Only a couple of references to Padmasambhava have been identified in the late-first-millennium Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, and the early Testament of Wa gives him a limited role as a ritual specialist in the Vajrakila rites with a following in Nepal and southern Tibet. One scholar proposed he was an entirely mythical construction, a conclusion the field generally rejects as going beyond what the slim evidence supports.

What are the eight manifestations of Guru Rinpoche?

They are eight forms of Padmasambhava fixed by the twelfth-century treasure-revealer Nyangrel Nyima Ozer, who reported meeting eight distinct Padmasambhavas in a vision of a mandala. The set includes the lake-born vajra at the centre, the monk Shakya Sengge, the tantrika Nyima Ozer, the king Pema Gyalpo, the charnel-ground adept Loden Chokse, a scholarly form, a form shown with the consort Mandarava, and the two wrathful figures Sengge Dradrok and Dorje Drolo. The eight names became the standard framework for painting and sculpting him.

What is terma, and why is Padmasambhava connected to it?

Terma are treasures, meaning texts, images and ritual objects said to have been concealed by Padmasambhava across Tibet for discovery at the moment they would be needed. He is the eponymous source of an enormous corpus of these revealed scriptures, including the work known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The people who find them, called treasure-revealers, claim to be reincarnations of his own eighth-century disciples.

Why did Padmasambhava leave Tibet?

His influence over the emperor made him an object of jealousy among factions of the Tibetan aristocracy, and the local divinities he had bound by oath grew restive. With conditions no longer favourable he departed for the southern island of Camara, where the tradition holds he lives as an immortal until the end of the present age. The earliest account, the Testament of Wa, has his activities run him afoul of the king and his ministers and has him leave the country soon after.

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