Asian Traditions of Meditation

by Halvor Eifring

  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 material, 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 visionary 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.

  The Factors of Long Life

  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.

  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 factors 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.

  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.

  The Structure of the Teachings

  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 individual 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.

  Figure 8.1. The ’Chi med srog thig deities, Kalimpong, 2009. Photo by Geoffrey Samuel.

  Figure 8.2. Sand maṇḍala for the ’Chi med Srog Thig major practice session, Jangsa Dechen Choling Monastery, Kalimpong, 2009. Photo by Cathy Cantwell.

  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 of 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.