Tibetan Yoga and Mysticism_ A Textual Study of the Yogas of Naropa and Mahamudra Meditation in the Medieval Tradition of Dag po

Abstract

In the Central Tibetan region of Dakpo stands a mountain known as Mt. Dakla Gampo. Since the twelfth century, the mountain has been home to a hermitage for meditators. The founder of the site and its long lineage of Tibetan mystics was the medieval Buddhist monk Gampopa Sönam Rinchen (1079-1153). Sönam Rinchen took ordination in his early twenties and spent several years learning from some of the leading Buddhist scholar monks and lay yogīs of his day. Thereupon, he went into a decade-long solitary meditation retreat, dwelling in rocky caves and self-made meditation huts in uninhabited places. At the age of forty two, he took up residence on Mt. Dakla Gampo to live in a life-long retreat in the wasteland solitude. Soon a small community of fellow yogī meditators began to assemble around him in order to train in Tantric yogas and Mahāmudrā meditation under his skilled guidance and mentoring. Having taught many trainees for over thirty years, Sönam Rinchen finally passed away on the mountain. The best of his students went on to found the different chapters of the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism that today is known as the Kagyü school, name of which means "the transmission of the instruction lineages". A number of his followers wrote down teachings that they had received orally from Sönam Rinchen and gradually these notes, writings, and texts were compiled into a large written corpus called The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo (Dakpö Kabum). It is from the roots of these medieval texts – originating in the twelfth century – that a massive trunk of meditative instructions, radiating branches of inner yoga techniques, and vitalizing leaves of unique mystical terminology grew into a giant tree in the Himalayan wilderness of Tibetan mysticism. Nevertheless, nowadays, the non-Tibetan audience invariably conceives of Gampopa Sönam Rinchen, commonly called 'Gampopa', as being a rather dry monastic figure associated exclusively with a single literary work, namely a large scholastic treatise on Mahāyāna Buddhism in English called The Jewel Ornament of Liberation and in Tibetan referred to in shorthand as the Dakpo Targyen. The misperception has over the last halfcentury been reinforced by the repeated Western translations exclusively of this particular text. The replicated image is not only skewed but is fraught with factual and representational problems. In terms of authorship, it is very unlikely that The Jewel Ornament was ever composed by Sönam Rinchen, given that it markedly differs in style and contents from the rest of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo and bears all the hallmarks of being a much later work. More importantly, the notion misrepresents Gampopa and the larger written tradition associated with him as being scholastic rather than experiential in nature. When the focus is repositioned to the other 82% of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo, an earlier textual layer comes into view, revealing traces of a large contemplative community of medieval yogī renunciates earnestly devoted to practicing yoga and meditating in the mountain wilderness. 20 Theoretical Preamble In view thereof, the intellectual aims of this book are threefold. The first aim is to effect a contradistinctive fusion of horizons by reenvisioning and reclaiming Gampopa as a mystic and innovator. The second aim is to shift the ontology of the text by severing The Manifold Sayings from authorial intentionalism. The third aim is to propose a neostructuralist reading by disassembling the textual corpus into its smallest interpretive units and begin to determine their meaning-producing interrelations. These three aims will be addressed respectively by the three parts of the book. The historical distance between the reader and the discourse of a text requires a fusion of horizons in the act of reading, constituting what Hans-Georg GADAMER (1992:301-302) has termed "the hermeneutical situation." The reader's standpoint is the horizon of a consciousness that is affected and delimited by history. The text's standpoint is the horizon of its discourse. Meaning is acquired by the fusion of these horizons: the reader as the discursive agent interacts with the signifiers of the text as the discursive object to construe what comes to be signified by the discourse. Signification is thus created anew in each hermeneutical situation. Given that the reader's interpretive horizon is a historically affected consciousness, the present book's project of examining The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo is a hermeneutical situation that always remains prefigured by the historically embedded scholarly, religious, and popular notions of 'Gampopa' as the author and ultimate source of these written works. For a textual reading, it is fundamentally impossible to exit this interpretive circumstance and to acquire a form of consciousness that is wholly objective and uncolored by preexisting notions. Accordingly, the first task at hand when embarking on a new reading of Gampopa Sönam Rinchen and The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo is not to refute or deny the existing state of the art by dispelling the prevailing opinions. Rather, it is to transform the situation by introducing contradistinctive notions, which can enlarge the interpretive scope sufficiently to allow for an advanced reading of the text, in turn leading to new signification. The needed displacement of notions is to be achieved in the book's Part I, wherein the author Gampopa shall be reenvisioned and reclaimed as a mystic and innovator. In the current study, the term 'mysticism' is to be understood in a very specific sense. It denotes a contemplative system that in its core is non-ritualistic and not concerned with form. As such, this sets it apart from meditation techniques involving elaborate outer rituals and extensive inner visualization techniques. Furthermore, it separates it from types of mysticism built on visions, prophecy, ecstasy, spirit possession, and speaking in tongues. With this specific signification in mind, the present narrow use of the term fulfills most but not all of the twelve general characteristics of mystical experience posited by Reinhard MARGREITER (1997). In essence, mysticism is here used narrowly as referring to meditative absorption in non-conceptuality. The Tibetan word employed in The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo for such absorption is Chakgya Chenpo. The phrase, which literally means "the great seal," is the Tibetan replication of the well-known Indian Sanskrit term Mahāmudrā. Mahāmudrā, viewed as a unique form of Tibetan mysticism, has been chosen as the focal point for the book's first part in order to confront the reader with a representation of Gampopa that differs from the scholastic image of a Mahāyāna author. The portrayal Theoretical Preamble 21 adduced in Chapter One is that of Gampopa as a mystic, namely as a meditation master whose prime occupation was the development of a Tibetan contemplative system. The chapter provides an anthology of Mahāmudrā passages in Tibetan and English translation concerned with Gampopa's approach to mysticism in theory and practice as reflected in writings by his closest students. These passages from primary sources are intended to augment the hermeneutical situation by introducing parts of The Manifold Sayings other than The Jewel Ornament. Though various forms of Indian and Tibetan Mahāmudrā have already received several academic and popular treatments in the past decades, the Mahāmudrā segments of The Manifold Sayings stand out as being of particular historical importance, because they are the earliest substantive Tibetan Mahāmudrā writings. On the one hand, these texts postdate the phase of late Indian Buddhism, given that Gampopa detached Mahāmudrā from its traditional Indian Tantric context of ritual, visualization, and sexuality. On the other hand, they predate the later Tibetan phenomenon of the Mahāyānization of Mahāmudrā in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries, when Tibetan Buddhist writers apologetically retrofitted Tibetan Mahāmudrā mysticism with the classical Indian contemplative categories of tranquility and insight meditation, named shinä – lhaktong or śamatha – vipaśyanā. Hence, a study of the Mahāmudrā passages in The Manifold Sayings is essential for discerning originality and innovation in Tibetan mysticism and for setting a hermeneutical beginning from which the Tibetan mystical terminology can be researched through etymology and philology. Moving now to a slightly deeper theoretical level, it is to be observed that 'originality' and 'innovation', in point of fact, are highly precarious notions in classical and medieval Asian Studies. The truth of the matter is that the historicist approach, which is the implicit constant in virtually all textual, literary, and philological study in the modern humanities, intrinsically necessitates a search for origins. The chief governing principle of the historicist project is the placing of its object of study in historical time, whereby the object's ascribed value becomes secularized. Resultantly, the historicist configuration of time is a verbalization of the object's past until the point of its origin, located either in a concrete historical event or in the initial inception in the history of an idea. It is this construction of the past that renders the humanities' objects of study relevant to the hermeneutical situation of the present, thereby creating what François HARTOG (2003) has called "the regimes of historicity." Through the circular mechanism of placing the past in the present, which has been acutely described by Jörn RÜSEN (2013), the humanities fulfill their academic and social purpose of knowledge production (Sinnbildung) of the past within the hermeneutical situation of the formation and education of the modern individual's cultural identity (Bildung) within the nation state. The book at hand is no exception to this rule, for it too is a reflection of the commonplace academic search for meaning in the conception of the past as 'origin' and 'history'. Without reservation, the very reason for the selection of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo as the book's object of study lies precisely in the philological value of this corpus for understanding the beginnings of Tibetan mysticism. 22 Theoretical Preamble Edward W. SAID (1983:127) once remarked that "the theoretical level of investigation is connected historically in the West to a notion of originality." Ergo, the intellectual significance which in the humanities is attributed to originality and innovation (Greek: kainotēs) is generally linked to the social value that overall is ascribed to these notions in the predominantly Eurocentric condition of modernity. In this cultural modality, originality and innovation are commonly regarded as the telltale signs of creativity and progress in the arts, industry, and technology. Conversely, cultural and epistemic preservation, transmission, and reproduction are less appraised, being either merely of antiquarian concern for cultural heritage or demoted to outright negative connotations of appropriation, plagiarism, and kitsch. The inbuilt Eurocentricity of the academic search for originality, which dictates the historicist investigation undertaken also in the present monograph, has to be kept firmly in mind, because the book's object of study hails from a very different epistēmē governed by entirely other values. The cultural encounter of this hermeneutical situation demands a very challenging fusion of interpretive horizons between the humanist academic horizon of the reader and the discursive horizon of its object of study that in both place and time lies well outside the Eurocentric vantage point. Regarding place, as has been discussed at length by Elías J. PALTI (2006), ideas become misplaced when the scholarly focus moves away from the traditional dominant places of the humanities and social sciences, namely the cultural-economic core of Europe and North America, and instead becomes engaged with 'non-places' along the culturally-economically dependent periphery. Hence, speaking of 'originality' and 'innovation' in connection with Asian Studies in general and Tibetan Studies in particular proves problematic, because the altered context of the Oriental 'Other' constitutes an entirely different hermeneutical situation, which brings unforeseen meanings and values of the terms into play. Regarding time, the present object of study belongs to the Middle Ages, an epoch with a mindset so entirely different from the interpretive horizon of the modern reader. Accordingly, as argued by Gabrielle M. SPIEGEL (1990), a proper historically informed reading needs to be firmly grounded directly in the social logic of the text. Verily, when the notions of 'originality' and 'innovation' are considered from within the epistēmē of twelfth-century Tibet, it comes to fore that these terms were looked upon with great suspicion as heterodoxy of grave soteriological consequence. In the classicism of the day, precisely the inverse epistemic values were considered the virtues of highest genius. Exact and unaltered memorization, reproduction, and transmission were not thought of as stagnant and plagiarist, but were deemed essential for preserving the Buddha's teachings in their pure Indian form. Oppositely, any attempt to innovate had to be carefully disguised by couching new creative expressions in traditional frameworks of classical terminology, scriptural quotation, and the authority of an Indian guru lineage. The issues at stake turn up in Chapter Two of the book, when the reception history of Gampopa's Mahāmudrā system is investigated. It is revealed how some later Tibetan authors criticized Gampopa's brand of mysticism for not being in line with the orthodox Theoretical Preamble 23 Indian Mahāmudrā tradition. While the critique underscores the originality found in The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo and their consequent worth for the humanist study of the beginnings of Tibetan mysticism, it is also a reminder to the reader that the texts at hand need to be read with assiduous attention to their own social logic and epistemic values. In conjunction, the two chapters of the book's Part I bring together a series of inescapable considerations needed when entering into a new reading of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo. In Part II, the book embarks on accomplishing its second aim: to shift the ontology of the text by severing The Manifold Sayings from authorial intentionalism. The ontology of the text denotes the text's mode of being, namely its presence as an object of knowledge. Given that the text only acquires meaning as a text within the hermeneutical situation, its ontology is constituted as an inseverable part of this epistemic event. To highlight how the object of knowledge's ontology is contingent on its appearance and representation to the intentionality of the knowing subject, GADAMER (1992:115) argued that the mode of being of a work is linked with its presentation (Darstellung). That is to say, the text's ontology is substantiated and embodied in the presentation of its lay-out and typography, which are matters of textual production. In an earlier study (KRAGH, 2013c), it has been demonstrated how certain changes in text design, which were introduced when The Manifold Sayings were printed for the first time in 1520, created the impression that the entire oeuvre was composed by Gampopa, whereas no such general authorship claim is attested in the older handwritten manuscript recension. The altered presentation ontologizes the text within a new superstructure of authorial unity, easily leading to the fallacy of authorial intentionalism. From a methodological perspective, the supposition of singular authorship calls for unwarranted comparison, erroneously suggesting that it is possible to assess the author's intention in lesser known parts of the collection by adopting a well-known work, like The Jewel Ornament, as a yardstick. This type of thinking inserts the notion of the 'design' or 'intention' of the author into the hermeneutical situation, which – as argued by William K. WIMSATT JR. and Monroe C. BEARDSLEY (1946:468) – "is neither available nor desirable as a standard." Comparison between individual parts of the corpus is only sensible when it is recognized that The Manifold Sayings consist of numerous heterogeneous segments composed by a number of anonymous or little known authors from the broader Dakpo community, of whom some were students of Gampopa and others belonged to later generations. Direct evidence of writing by many hands is found throughout the collection and any impression of complete authorial unity is simply a false consciousness spawned by late editorial modifications in the presentation of the corpus. Yet, even when vigilant scholarly attention is paid to the composite constitution of the corpus as a poly-authored work, the authorial icon of Gampopa remains lightly hovering above the hermeneutical situation. A relatively unwrought figure of Gampopa features in much – albeit not all – of the corpus, because many written passages are ascribed to Gampopa as representing his spoken word. A large number of segments commence with phrases declaring "the teacher says..." or "again the Dharma master Gampopa says…," and 24 Theoretical Preamble long passages are bracketed within Tibetan quotation markers. Moreover, some portions give shape to Gampopa as a concrete character by providing hagiographical accounts of his religious life, which ties The Manifold Sayings in with the larger Tibetan tradition of Gampopa narratives found elsewhere in later religious annals, eulogies, and lineage histories of the Kagyü school. From within the Tibetan tradition, it is these literary collages of Gampopa that define and delimit the reception-historically affected consciousness of the reader. Highlighting this issue, Chapter Three presents a study of the hagiographical tradition portraying Gampopa. Special attention is given to the earliest hagiographical records, being the works that exhibit the most divergent and contradictory accounts. The intended outcome is awareness of the fact that the representation of Gampopa on the whole is a narrative construct that has been forged over the course of many centuries. This discernment aims to shift the ontology of the text, perhaps not entirely blotting out the authorial figure of Gampopa as an interpretive element in the reading but at least allowing for an improved hermeneutical situation, wherein the image can be cautiously appraised through understanding its effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte). With the critical hermeneutical perspectives uncovered in the book's Parts I-II in place, the aim of Part III is to establish a new reading strategy for textual corpora (Tibetan: bka' 'bum), applicable to The Manifold Sayings, building the foundation for what forthwith may be referred to as a neostructuralist methodology for discourse analysis. Part III begins with Chapter Four, wherein the reading of the corpus is prepared by first introducing the religious historical context of the early Dakpo community, thus opening to view a social logic of the medieval text. The chapter then surveys all the manuscripts, prints, and editions of the corpus, drawing attention to the presentation (Darstellung) of each recension, which is significant for hermeneutically apprehending the ontology of the text through the course of its reception history. Finally, the very substantial Chapter Five embarks on the actual neostructuralist reading of the corpus in its entirety on the basis of the standard edition of the forty works found in the first printed version of The Manifold Sayings of 1520. The proposed neostructualist method is theoretically underpinned by the semiology of Ferdinand de SAUSSURE. In his linguistic examination of meaning-formation, SAUSSURE (1916:166) arrived at a sophisticated view of language as a system of arbitrary signs entailing no intrinsically positive terms, wherein signification exclusively emanates from the structural differences between them. Accordingly, the meaning of a given word or utterance is regarded as not arising from the word or utterance itself but only through its thetical relations to allied words and antithetical differences to opposing expressions in the particular linguistic context. To adopt these structuralist principles in a reading strategy for an entire discourse, it becomes necessary to operate with larger analytical units than the individual linguistic signs treated by SAUSSURE. One of the most influential attempts at doing so has been the structuralist study of myth advanced by Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS. In the method of LÉVISTRAUSS (1955:431), a myth would be broken down to a sequence of shortest possible sentences, which could be employed as the constituent units of a structuralist analysis. Theoretical Preamble 25 Examining the meaning-producing bundles of relations between the derived sentences, LÉVI-STRAUSS especially focused on pairs of binary opposites, such as the raw and the cooked, in order to arrive at generic conceptual dichotomies in kinship, social relationships, and culture that would be applicable for a general theory of structuralist anthropology. While the present neostructualist approach shares LÉVI-STRAUSS' objective of applying fundamental semiological principles to a higher level of discourse analysis, the reductionist aspect of his method needs to be avoided, because it involves a degree of generalization that is unsuitable for a close reading of rigorous textual scholarship. Consequently, instead of using individual linguistic signs or simplified sentences as the constituent units of the analysis, the reading presented here will center on unabridged segments of discourse, which aggregate to form a textual corpus in its entirety, resulting in a true bricolage of meaningbearing relations. As with all structuralist analysis, the study of these segments operates along two juxtaposed dimensions of the relations to be examined: the synchronic and the diachronic. The synchronic dimension denotes relations that can be posited between the constituent textual segments across the corpus within a given recension of the text. These relations can either be in the modality of metaphoric part-part relationships between individual segments or in the modality of synecdochic part-whole relationships between a given segment and the corpus as a text in its totality. In the case of The Manifold Sayings, the segments that serve as the constituent units for the analysis are embedded directly in the text. In the standard printed edition, the corpus is arranged into forty works, which in turn are divided into 444 separate passages that in nearly every case is explicitly demarcated by means of special opening and closing markers. Chapter Five clearly defines the exact starting and ending point of each segment, summarizes their contents, and notes a large number of synchronic relations between the segments. These synchronic cross-references of terminology, yoga and meditation instructions, mystical doctrines, literary writing styles, citation patterns, and many other issues of textual production combine to create an extensive conceptual lattice that may serve as an intertextual ground for all further investigation of meanings in the corpus. The diachronic dimension signifies relations that are historically predicated in terms of the text's redaction history. The traditional starting point for diachronic analysis in the humanist traditions of textual scholarship is the earliest possible version of the text, whence a progressive historical explanation can be formulated. That approach, however, entails a deep seated anachronistic fallacy of prefigured historical beginnings, where the existence of a later phenomenon chosen as the object of study – whether it be a nation state, an institution, a religious tradition, or simply a text – is conceived of as having its birth in an earlier era during which the phenomenon as such was not yet found. For example, the early Dakpo religious community may be viewed as the historical beginning of the Kagyü school of Tibetan Buddhism, but as a matter of fact the school label Kagyü is virtually absent throughout The Manifold Sayings, suggesting a time when this sectarian brand was not yet part of the community's self-image. 26 Theoretical Preamble In consequence, for the neostructuralist method proposed here, the diachronic analysis shall adhere to the principle that history should be written forwards but read backwards. Such a retrogressive approach may be illustrated by the ingenious three-volume history of Indonesia by Denys LOMBARD entitled Le carrefour javanais: essai d'histoire globale (1990). LOMBARD has written each volume forwards in time, but as a whole the volumes cover a retrogressive series of topics, with the first tome presenting modern Indonesia's colonial and post-colonial history, the second tome uncovering the preceding Islamic and Chinese civilizational layers of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, and the third tome excavating the underlying stratum of Indian-imported Javanese heritage from the fifth till the fourteenth centuries. Using a retrogressive outlook prevents predetermining the writing of a history by setting its point of departure in the inception of a later phenomenon. Instead, the outlook engages in an open-ended investigative search for prior events that need not necessarily be viewed as inaugural. In line with this principle, the reading presented in the present book's Chapter Five is predicated not on the earliest version of The Manifold Sayings but on the later standard printed edition of the corpus. By providing exhaustive references to parallel texts of each segment in earlier and later editions, the reading lays a firm ground for further retrogressive study of the corpus in its antecedent writing and compilation history. What though quickly becomes evident in the book's implementation of its neostructuralist method is that the adoption of entire textual segments as the constituent units for the analysis radically destabilizes meaning. The meaning-forming relations that can be found between long segments of discourse are of such immense complexity that any reductionist abstraction into simple binary opposites, as done by LÉVI-STRAUSS, is altogether inapplicable. All in all, the horizon of the semantic field, which emanates from a system of virtually endless possible relations between its substantial constituent parts, is boundless. Nonetheless, the reading of concrete, stable meanings in the text remains attainable, because a delimited interpretive reflection materializes in the specific hermeneutical situation that is brought about by the fusion of the infinite semantic horizon of the text and the finite interpretive horizon of the reader. Drawing on Martin HEIDEGGER's Sein und Zeit, GADAMER (1992:266-267) reasoned that interpretive reflection operates in a repeated circular mode. When the interpreter looks at "the things themselves" in the text and becomes aware of the subtle interpretive foreprojections originating in him- or herself, new meaning can be penetrated in the text. These meanings hold an ontologically positive significance for refiguring the interpreter's foreprojections, thereby enabling another reading capable of finding new meanings in the text. The present study of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo intertwines three such hermeneutical circles, each of which exerts an ontologically positive effect of its own. The first circle of reenvisioning and reclaiming Gampopa as a mystic and innovator in Part I clears the semantic field of shallow fore-structures (Vor-strukturen) erected in the courte durée by restrictive closures in the history of research. This circle repositions The Manifold Sayings as an object of knowledge for the study of yoga and mysticism. The second circle of severing The Manifold Sayings from authorial intentionalism in Part II decenters the Theoretical Preamble 27 semantic field of deep fore-structures built up in the longue durée of the Tibetan hagiographical tradition of a religious founder. This circle reorients the sayings as an object of knowledge for the study of an entire community of religious writers. The third circle of presenting a neostructuralist reading of the corpus in Part III spreads out the semantic field by forming a new fore-structure of both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. This circle reconstitutes The Manifold Sayings as an object of knowledge for the study of text. In unison, the turnings of these three hermeneutical circles will lift up the reader's gaze from the scholastic textual production of the medieval Buddhist seminaries seated at the floor of Himalayan valleys up to the discourses spoken in the simple hermitages of Tibetan mystics and yoga practitioners nestled high in the mountains.