Chakzampa Thangtong Gyalpo

Abstract

Chakzampa Thangtong Gyalpo is one of the most significant Mahāsiddhas of Tibet who worked in the first half of the 15th century in Tibet and Bhutan. Thangtong Gyalpo was a yogi, philosopher, poet, exorcist, teacher, architect, engineer, painter, sculptor, doctor, treasure revealer and last but not least, an iron chain suspension bridge builder, a universal genius with supernatural abilities. The spectrum of his titles and epithets is accordingly wide, beginning with his name, ‘Thangtong Gyalpo’ (the King of the Empty Plains), ‘iron bridge yogi’ (lcags zam rnal ‘byor pa), ‘father of the Tibetan opera’ and up to the ‘Leonardo da Vinci of Asia’ as Wolf Kahlen called him. Tashi Tsering summarises his activities in superlatives as presented below: The mad saint (sgrub smyon), the destroyer of illusion (’khrul zhig), the performer of miracles, the medicine man who dispelled epidemics, the protector from Hor invasions, and the mender of harmful geomantic configurations (me btsa’ gso ba). He was also an accomplished master of technology, who built numerous iron bridges and ferries, erected many devotional objects symbolising body, speech and mind and allegedly pioneered the fashioning of statues out of precious stones. He was a great propagator of the Avalokiteshvara cycle and sadhana and, to come closer to our subject, and is considered to have been the initiator of a lce lha mo and bla ma ma ni, ii