The Only Terma in the Matho Termas

Shrî Seng-ha, after the Gting-skyes edition, vol. 4

One thing that has puzzled me about the 1261 history of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism associated with Scholar Deyu is its nearly complete disinterest in Terma revealers. What makes this even more remarkable is that the anonymous author of this and works related to it had Nyingma lineage connections in addition to Zhijé. Other authors with a great fondness for Nyingma teachings share this trait, most prominently Gö Lotsawa and his Blue Annals of 1478. The most celebrated Tertons of the 12th and 13th centuries, Nyangral and Chöwang, are basically overlooked, even if Gö does mention them as a pair twice, succinctly and in passing. Of course the Nyingma school has more to offer than Termas, including Kama (Bka’-ma) texts believed to have a continual transmission above ground. These Kama texts are the ones championed by both Gö and the anonymous writer of the Long Deyu.

Reading the Deyu history in particular might make us wonder if the influence of Nyangral and Chöwang as Tertons might have been limited, restricted to a relatively small locality. Surely if their Termas had overtaken the whole range of the high Himalayas they would have been impossible to overlook. Another possibility is that the two historians we just mentioned could have distrusted the whole idea of revelation through textual excavations. Not ready to pronounce on this, I do think it worthwhile to consider just how successful the Tertons may or may not have been in popularizing their revelations among the broader public. Was it a problem of credibility, or just that news of them and their revelations hadn’t reached so many ears?

A veritable time capsule with a closure date around 1200, the Matho discoveries could help us with our historical thinking along such lines as these. Now that we have datable fragments from around a thousand texts representing a large variety of texts of various schools that flourished in Western Tibet in 11th-12th centuries (for a handlist look here) available for study, we should be able to gauge quite a number of things, among them the influence of Termas (specific ones as well as their related cultural traditions). But after leafing through all the scans of Matho fragments, only one Terma was in evidence.  So we will have to content ourselves by looking at that one Terma alone. Then we might see if this very small sampling can tell us anything about the developing Terma tradition and its reach.

The set of scans labelled vol. 369, like so many of the Matho texts, is in booklet form, with simple signatures joining very wide and narrow leaves folded over at the middle and stitched at the folds. Despite their booklet formats there can be some disorder as folios may have broken at the fold and separated from the booklet, or pages may have simply gotten mixed in with the booklet pages for no good reason. It isn’t always easy to be sure of such things from scans, and I will try not to burden you with codicological refinements. Have a look at this sample (click to enlarge).

Scan 13 of v369 of BDRC W1BL9

The specific folios that most interest us are scan nos. 11-14 of vol. 369, in other words, two leaves only, that appear to have never belonged together with the rest. The condition of the leaves, their size, and style of writing etc. are markedly different. The subject matter, too, contrasts dramatically. While the booklet as a whole is about fierce protector magic, the leaves in question are about Buddhist philosophy with much mention of Madhyamaka (here called U-ma rather than the expected spelling Dbu-ma) using specialized terms of philosophical logic and debate like chos-can. I notice, too, it uses some odd terminology like 'dod-tog (used quite a bit in Matho v425, another logico-philosophical fragment, but I can’t tell you what it means; I’m guessing it may be a short form of ’dod-pa’i rtog-pa or the like).*

(*Added note, April 17, 2024: I now see that Matho v478 uses the term, too, only there it is spelled ’dod-thog, which would lead our etymologizing in a different direction. Actually the spelling ’dod-thog is the one well testified in BDRC search results, although it is only common in pre-Mongol works, and Bon commentaries on pre-Mongol works.)

Instead of getting invested in logico-epistemological metaphysics, as intellectually engrossing as that could be, let’s leave it aside and dive directly into that colophon. I’ll just type it out in Wylie (marking persons in blue and places green), then write my own comments about each section of it without necessarily translating every detail, and finally say why I think it might cause us to rethink or imagine how we might change our views about the early history of Tibetan Terma traditions.

'di ni chos kyi [insert?] gnya' non yin te / gnyis la myi spel / cig las rgyun myi gcad do // gdam ngag 'di ni shi ri sing ngas / be ro tsa na la bshad / des g.yu' sgra bsnyel mo la bshad / des bum thang rtsi lung gi lha khang gi gter du sbas so //

Let me translate this very important part because it tells us who concealed it. For a change the concealer was neither Padmasambhava nor his consort Yeshe Tsogyal: 

“This is a heavy dharmic yoke. It will not be propounded to two, through one its continuity will be ensured. These precepts were taught by Śrīsiṃha to Vairocana, and the latter taught them to Yudra Nyelmo, while the latter hid them as Treasure (Gter) of the Bumtang Tsilung Temple.” 

Śrīsiṃha is a name well known to every student of Dzogchen in the Nyingma school. It may well be that despite his Sanskritic name he was a Central Asian, or more specifically a Sogdian, and more closely associated with China than with India. In those days there was a Sogdian expat community in the capital city Chang-an (Xi’an). This all requires sorting out. 

The traditional story about how the Tibetan monk Vairocana went to India to find Atiyoga teaching accompanied by a single traveling companion has been subject of an earlier blog dubbed “Kashgar Tiger.” 

The normal way to spell the name of Vairocana’s disciple is G.yu-sgra Snying-po. It may well be that the spelling we have here, given that it looks quite odd, would be a genuine old spelling. The name of a Minister G.yu-sgra does occur in a Dunhuang text, and I do think they are likely to be one and the same person. Vairocana himself grew up among members of the imperial court as his father fulfilled ambassadorial functions (see that same “Kashgar Tiger” blog). The name element Bsnyel-mo I suppose might be a nickname he received for being forgetful, sickly or lazy, but more likely it associates him with a clan or place name (Snyel-’or is known as an early clan name associated with western Tibet), although nothing in this is sure enough to push in the flag pins.  

It says the temple where it was concealed was Bum-thang Rtsi-lung, and the only other reference I could immediately find was to a place called Bum-thang Rtsis-lung, a place Kongtrul’s Terton history associates with the text discoveries of Bonpo Dragtsal.* The last part of this Terton’s name, Dragtsal, means Rocky Grove, while the first part leaves no doubt he was a Bonpo, at least by birth.

(*Other even more important references to Bum-thang Rtsi-lung may be found in Sørensen’s book, p. 275, end of note 856.)

Now let’s see what our colophon says about the revealer of our text.

de nas mye nag kha so bas ’phra’ dang bton no //

des gnyan bston shes rab rdo rje la bshad do //

des sras bla ma nyi khri ’bar la bshad do //

The first line says the one who encountered ('phrad?) and extracted (bton) it was the Tangut Khasowa. He instructed Gnyan-ston Shes-rab-rdo-rje in it, while the latter instructed his son, the Lama Nyi-khri-’bar (‘Blazing like Ten Thousand Suns’?).  

As this tells us the earliest history of the text at the time it was being excavated and immediately afterwards, it is especially significant. So it will be disappointing if we can’t identify the revealer precisely. Mye-nyag and Me-nyag are common spellings for Mi-nyag, in earlier times definitely a name for Tanguts, even if as an ethnonym it could have been appropriated by non-Tanguts later on (I suppose), although there was an awareness that the Tangut royal family took refuge in Tibet where they left a lot of descendants. In 1200, the Tangut Kingdom was still thriving far up beyond the northeastern quadrant of the Plateau, not knowing its population would face annihilation by a Mongol army.  True, a man from there would have had a long way to go to reach Bumtang in Bhutan in its southeastern quadrant.  I wish I could tell you more about him as well as the 3rd person, Nyi-khri-’bar, beyond just saying how his name more likely means ‘Blazing Light of the 2[5],000 [Verse Perfection of Wisdom].’

Since the first and 3rd are so mysterious, it is the 2nd one that warrants our attention all the more. Gnyan-ston Shes-rab-rdo-rje is a wellknown figure to people who have spent their lives together with Bon scriptures, but I dare to say no one else. There are various formations of his name that include Gnyan-’theng, Gnyan-mthing, and Gnyan-ston Shes-rab-seng-ge. Bonpos attribute to him the set of Twenty-One Minor Sûtras along with one or two of the Khams-brgyad scriptures of Bon. For a good source on his life, in English, see S.G. Karmay’s Treasury of Good Sayings, pp. 153-4. This tells us his Shel-brag-ma treasure* cache was opened in 1067 CE. A shepherd with a broken foot in search of a lost lamb, he happened to see a light shining through a crack that led him into the cave where the treasures were found. This does make him sound like a naive person who simply stumbled over texts, not a student of a Tangut teacher, but it’s likely we have this all wrong and he wasn’t just a simple shepherd after all. I would love to learn about a longer (and older) source on his life. It is said his teaching didn’t immediately spread, this happened only two generations later.

(*The name of the cache comes from Shel-brag, a place in the higher parts of Nyang Valley in Gtsang Province. Perhaps the best biographical source I know of is a 2-page sketch in the modern Bon history by Dpal-tshul, since Karmay's English is available and enough for present purposes. Both sources are recent, but nobody has thought of searching out earlier ones so we will have to wait on it.)

Meanwhile, with a sense of duty and the feeling it may lead us somewhere, let’s go through the remainder of the colophon with its lengthy discussions of the variant lineages full of interesting names that may be found of significance for us.

yang khungs cig la / shi ri sing ngas / be ro tsa na la / des khri srong lde brtsan la / btsad pos yar lung bang s[o]'i khrod du gter du sbas pa / sngegs shes rab dpal [?] (scan p.  no. 14) gyis rnyed / des gnyan shes rab rdo rje la bshad / des khong rang gi sras bla ma nyi khri 'bar la bshad / des bla ma rje la bshad / des shes rab go cha la bshad/ des 'byung gnas glog ros la bshad / des bla ma skyid rtsil [??] gyi li ston la bshad / des stag shar bsgom chen la bshad / des shwa ra'i mkhan po la bshad / dam pa'i mkhan pos dngos la gnang ba'o //

This paragraph supplies an alternative source for the lineage that surprisingly has the Tibetan Emperor Trisongdetsen concealing the text at the site of the royal tombs in Yarlung Valley, and identifies the one who received them as Sngegs Shes-rab-dpal. So we have an alternative Terton, an alternative Treasure site, as well as an alternative concealer here. Sngegs taught it to Gnyan Shes-rab-rdo-rje who then passed it on to his son Nyi-khri-’bar (here matching what we already heard).  Then there are six more lineage holders named ending with the seventh, dngos meaning ‘myself,’ a disciple of the Abbot of Shwa-ra.  None of these last listed names ring any bells with me, so I won't belabour the questions.  I do imagine that one of the names 'Byung-gnas-glog-ros, is odd enough it may have to do with another oddly named figure, likely an Uighur Turk, named Glog-gi-’byung-gnas (see the Deyu translation, note 3073 on p. 784), but the dates don’t come to our aid.

Here again, our Bonpo Terton received the same teachings from a different treasure revealer. We ought to see if we can find out who this Sngegs Shes-rab-dpal might be. To my regret, I can come up with nothing definite about him. Sngegs is a family name often mentioned in Old Tibetan sources with the spelling Rngegs. Matho fragment v105 mentions another member of the Sngegs clan.

Now we move on to the final paragraph of the colophon, in which the colophon writer identifies himself, even tells us the name of his own disciple. However, it has nothing to add about the Terton so perhaps it isn’t all that significant for us.  It does tell us a later segment of the lineage, and one that can’t simply be slotted into the ones already supplied:

yang bla ma 'gos ston gyis slob dpon khyung ston la bshad / slob dpon khyung ston gyis / bla ma skar ma la yang gsan / slob dpon khyung ston kyis / slob dpon zhang btsun la gnang / slob dpon zhang btsun gyis dngos dge' slong pad ma bzang po la gnang / bdag gis chos nyid rdo rje la rgyud... (final words perhaps missing).

Now we can know the penultimate recipient of the lineages, and the author of the lineage accounts, is a person named Padma-bzang-po. Not at all a common name form, yet he cannot be identical to the Great Abbot Padma-bzang-po mentioned in Blue Annals, p. 412, he and all the persons with this moniker findable in BDRC are much too late to consider. Nobody else is immediately identifiable, although I suppose the Khyung-ston listed here would be the one BDRC (Person RID P3836) lists as Lho-pa Khyung-ston Grags, 11th century. He is actually credited with finding Atiyoga Terma texts himself, the most famous one being found in the Vairocana collection (at vol. 4, pp. 159-190), where he is called Khyung-grags from Lho-brag.*

(*Not to get too involved at the moment, I am still eager to say that this most famous Terma of Khyung-grags is none other than the Golden Tortoise (Gser-gyi Rus-sbal) closely studied in both Bon and Chos versions by Samten G. Karmay in his most-cited book. If you are interested, I highly recommend that you read what Karmay has to say about the Termas of the one he calls Ye-shes-khyung-grags.)

So, let’s try and make plain the situation we have here. The very same source written by Padma-bzang-po supplies us with two different scenarios for the concealment and excavation of the Treasure text. Neither has Gnyan-ston, known to us as a Bon Terton, doing the actual excavation work. No, he received the Terma from someone else, either Mye-nag Kha-so-ba or Sngegs Shes-rab-dpal. The concealers are different, too, either G.yu-sgra or the Emperor Trisongdetsen.  

In the sketch of Gnyan-ston’s life told by Dpal-tshul in his recently written monumental Bon history, the concealer is Lde-bon Gyim-tsha. It is Gnyan-ston himself who acts as the Terton excavator; the cave was packed full of texts, but the copyist was unwilling, so all trace of the treasure door was erased and most of the books were never released to the world. Some were transformed into Chos texts by the scribe already, and for this bad deed he died of leprosy and the propagation of the Treasure teachings was temporarily incapacitated. Although Dpal-tshul says there had been minor transmissions in Tibet from east to west, it was only in the time of Bru-rje (i.e., in the mid-13th century) that the lineage he knows about got its start. He does name the immediate disciple of Gnyan-ston as Ra-ston G.yung-drung-’od-zer, and not the Nyi-khri-’bar we met with before.

So it may be that the text before us was in fact passed on by an entirely Nyingma Terton and then transmitted in a Nyingma lineage, and all it has to do with Bon is that a person otherwise remembered as a Bon Terton was second in line, receiving it directly from its Terton. Then, in an unrelated (?) event, that same Bon Terton’s texts, texts that were thoroughly Bon when he found them, were in some part repackaged as Chos.

But there is one further question that can be no longer avoided, What about the text our fragment apparently belongs to? A quick look at it told us it was very strongly philosophical in nature, so I emailed G.H. and asked him if any such text was associated with the name of Śrīsiṃha. He immediately pointed me toward a text entitled Resolving What it Means to Open the Doorbolt of the Heart, or more shortly, Heart’s Doorbolt, the metaphorical “doorbolt” in this case is one locking an equally metaphorical (?) treasury (gter).  Its ten chapters can be quite philosophical in tone it is true, but it acts primarily as a guide to the Nine Vehicles idea using characteristically Nyingma terminology. Not perceiving this in the Matho fragment, I redoubled my efforts to locate one of its parallels elsewhere by spelling things a little differently and so on in BDRC search mode until at last I landed on a phrase match that surprised me a lot, so much it led me on a veritable wild goose chase that in the end left nothing on the dinner table.

Therein lies yet another puzzle, if this text, meant to be a well rounded survey of philosophico-doctrinal systems, was initially taught by Śrīsiṃha to Vairocana then we would inevitably expect it to be about Mind Class Dzogchen, or at least include a survey of the Nine Vehicles that would culminate in Atiyoga, very much like the Doorbolt does. But nothing like that is evident in it. Once again we are on the receiving end of a curve ball and we’re left standing in the batter’s box wondering what just happened. But hey, the game isn’t over yet.

A significant piece of certainty collapsed when I realized that these “two folios” (four scan pages) of ours are actually an example of “one folio folded at the middle” I mentioned before.  It fell out of the booklet it once belonged to, then got mistakenly inserted into another booklet. That means we have to rethink the relation between scan nos. 11-12 and 13-14. I had previously imagined I could read the text continuously without break in a way that seemed intelligible, but now I see that it just doesn’t work. The booklet the double folio fell out of could have contained a variety of texts with different titles and colophons. To follow my new certainty, 11-12 and 13-14 don’t need to belong to the same text, could well belong to two different ones. So the philosophical text’s only connection to the colophon is that they both once formed part of the same booklet (sharing the same scribe); [1] the logico-philosophical discussion and [2] the “precepts” (gdams-ngag, here likely meaning meditative guidance for Dzogchen practice) are separate matters pertaining to separate texts. The colophon we spent so much time investigating belongs to a text that isn’t visible to us. That could make it impossible to identify.

• If there is a significant historical point we can take away from this, it’s that Nyingma and Bon Tertons were often crossing paths, cooperating with each other, exchanging teachings and texts, and even — in cases that require more study — apparently working for both teams. This most of us who have spent time in the field already know, but the content of this colophon, our earliest datable manuscript evidence of Nyingma Terton activity, helps us make the following statement more confidently. We cannot study the history of Nyingma Terma practices without also studying the Bon side of things.

I won’t suggest that this Matho text is just a small contribution to early Terma manuscript study. In some very real sense it might be taken as a beginning point. Beginnings often take place within realms of confusion, and our human mind is never satisfied to remain in such indeterminate states for long. Errors, even errors within errors, are the true concealers and it is through them, and our seeing through them, that we must of necessity find our way to approach truth’s treasury. Meanwhile, if we take a wrong turn, we have to go back and start on a different foot and turn in a different direction. I confess that I haven’t been able to divine a clear path towards resolving all of our problems, but I do have hope, and all my hope is in you.

°   °   °

Web resources

“Kashgar Tiger” posted at Tibetologic blog on October 30, 2012)=.

“Locating a Tertön Prayer in Terma History” posted at Tibeto-logic blog on September 29, 2019.

Matho Fragments Handlist.  Go here if you are curious about other fragments found in the Matho manuscript cache:

https://sites.google.com/site/tiblical/matho-fragments-handlist

Tertön Prayer of 16th Century: 

https://sites.google.com/site/tiblical/tertön-prayer-of-16th-century

Tibetan Proper Name Index, or TPNI:  

https://sites.google.com/view/tibetosophy/home

Print literature

Jean-Luc Achard, “Le Tantra des Vingt-Deux Perles de l'Esprit de Parfaite Pureté : un exemple d'intertextualité entre les traditions Bon po et rNying ma pa,” contained in: Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol. 15 (2005), pp. 59-106. This concerns a particular Nyingma tantra with clear Bon parallels, Byang-chub-sems Thig-pa Nyi-shu-rtsa-gnyis-pa'i Rgyud, the first text in a section in the 4th volume of the Vairocana collection (running from pp. 244 through 279), that includes most of the Dzogchen texts mentioned in this blog. It proves the Bon version of that just-mentioned work was the basis for the Nyingma. Perhaps I don’t need to say it, but I believe all of the small texts in that small section of the Vairocana collection will prove relevant for Dzogchen Terma studies.

Anne-Marie Blondeau, “Le ‘découvreur’ du Maṇi bka'-'bum était-il Bon-po?” contained in: Louis Ligeti, ed., Tibetan and Buddhist Studies Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, Munshiram Manoharlal (Delhi 2000, reprint of the 1984), vol. 1, pp. 77-123. Particularly relevant are the pages on the Golden Tortoise and Ye-shes-khyung-grags on pp. 111-114, but there is much to learn here about how Tertons and Termas were in various manners shared between Bon and Chos.

Dpal-tshul (=Dpal-ldan-tshul-khrims), G.yung-drung Bon-gyi Bstan-'byung, Tibetan Bonpo Monastic Centre (Dolanji 1972), vol. 2, pp. 199-201. This has the biographical sketch of Gnyan-ston, the Bonpo Terton we find in the Matho fragment as the recipient the Nyingma Terma lineage.

Samten G. Karmay, The Great Perfection: A Philosophical and Meditative Teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, E.J. Brill (Leiden 1988); and also the 2nd edition, E.J. Brill (Leiden 2007), pp. 220-223. Just read these pages concerning the Terma of Ye-shes-khyung-grags and tell me if you don’t think things are getting a lot more interesting in terms of Bon and Chos Terma interrelations of the pre-Mongol era.

Dan Martin, tr., A History of Buddhism in India and Tibet: An Expanded Version of the Dharma’s Origins Made by the Learned Scholar Deyu, The Library of Tibetan Classics series no. 32, Wisdom Publications (Somerville 2022), in 952 pages.  The actual author of this 1261 history is unidentified, although the text is conventionally attributed to the Scholar Deyu (Mkhas-pa Lde’u), in actuality one of several names of the author of the verse "root text" only, not the work as a whole. To make our lives easier, I call this the Long Deyu, as there are two shorter and earlier ones.

Robert Mayer, “Did Vairocana Have Lice?” Blog posted at Kila Kilaya dated July 11, 2012.

——, “Indian nidhi, Tibetan gter ma, Guru Chos dbang, and a Kriyātantra on Treasure Doors: Rethinking Treasure (Part Two),” Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines [free on the web], vol. 64 (July 2022), pp. 368-446. Much recommended as the latest word on Terma. Whole books are expected to reveal themselves before long.

——, “Rethinking Treasure (Part One),” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines, vol. 52 (October 2019), pp. 119-184.

Per Sørensen, Tibetan Buddhist Historiography: The Mirror Illuminating the Royal Genealogies: An Annotated Translation of the XIVth Century Tibetan Chronicle: rGyal-rabs gsal-ba’i me-long, Harrassowitz Verlag (Wiesbaden 1994).

Vairocana, Man-ngag Rig-pa Klong-rdzogs-kyis Rgyud, contained in: The Rgyud-’bum of Vairocana: A Collection of Ancient Tantras and Esoteric Instructions Compiled and Translated by the Eighth Century Tibetan Master, "reproduced from the rare manuscript belonging to the Venerable Tokden Rimpoche of Gangon,” Tashi Y. Tashigangpa (Leh 1971), vol. 4, pp. 274-279. I list this here just because it is a visionary text associated with Vairocana where we find, near the end, cig la mi snub gnyis la mi spel te, words that closely echo our Matho fragment, gnyis la myi spel / cig las rgyun myi gcad do.  I located it by searching THlib, and you can even see the scanned pages if you go here: https://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/ngb/catalog.php#cat=bg/0100. Searching the much larger database of BDRC turns up nothing of significance, odd but true.

Jim Valby, “rDzogs chen Ati Yoga Teachings of Master Śrī Siṃha,” contained in: Donatella Rossi and Charles Jamyang Oliphant of Rossie, eds., Sharro: Festschrift for Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Garuda Books (Switzerland 2016), pp. 311-318. Includes an annotated translation of a Dzogchen composition entitled 'Khor-ba Rtsad-nas Gcod-pa Bdud-rtsi Dri-med-kyi Man-ngag.  See the Coda, but no, this brief four-part work is not the same text mentioned there, although its title is similar.  I recently received from Ratna a link to an archived page where you can get an idea of the enormous amount of work Jim Valby has done on the Dzogchen tantras.

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Coda

There is yet another Dzogchen tantra represented in the Matho, apart from the All Making King, subject of our previous blog. The Matho scan set called "v146" is one single folio, but it does contain a Chapter Five chapter colophon that includes within it the title of the main text:  Rdzogs-pa-chen-po [']Khor-ba Rtsa-nas Gcod-pa[?] 'i Rgyud.  Read it as 'Khor-ba Rtsad-nas Gcod-pa, and you have the name, or part of the name, of a number of Dzogchen tantras available to us today in various sets of Nyingma tantras.* 

(*As I discovered from looking at this rKTs page, Matho fragment v41 seems to be from one of those similar titles: Rdzogs-pa-chen-po 'Khor-ba Rtsad-nas Gcod-pa Chos-sku Skye-med Rig-pa'i Rgyud, but to judge from a published version, this tantra ought to have 23 or 24 chapters.)

Oh my, searching within thlib.org, the site from Virginia, you can find the very same Chapter Five colophon, and the surrounding text looks quite, if not quite exactly, the same. It isn’t a very long text, and if you want to be more sure it’s the same one we're talking about — I mean without being confused by all the similar titles — it has seven chapters altogether.

There are even more Nyingma Dzogchen fragments, not a great quantity, but they can be found:  no. v189 has on its scan page no. 3 a title in a chapter colophon that reveals the title of the entire tantra: Rdzogs-pa-chen-po Lta-ba’i Yang-snying Nam-ka Klong-yangs-kyi Rgyud. That ought to be the first text in vol. 8 of the Vairocana collection.  No. v303 is a praise to a Dzogchen master with a lot of names in it, maybe we should blog about that sometime.

In general, if we expand our search, not just for Dzogchen, but for Nyingma texts in general, they are quite well represented here, particularly if we were to take all the Phurpa texts to be Nyingma, a move that may not be entirely justifiable. I’d like to say that the Nyingma may be the most well represented sectarian grouping in Matho, while coming in 2nd would be the Zhijé, the Kagyu in 3rd place. A couple of Kadampa-associated texts (v254 in particular, but v89 and v349, too) make me wonder whether it might be in 3rd or rather 4th place? I suppose 4th. Now I’m thinking I’ll go look at the Zhijé texts. If you knew me you would know that to me they are the most fascinating of all.

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Criticism

I asked our good friend Jean-Luc what he thought, and he kindly sent me an amazingly helpful criticism in return.  I think I am ready to accept every point he makes, so I will just let him speak for himself by quoting from his email of December 13, 2023:

Regarding the passage you quote on the blog, I don’t know why but I keep reading “ ’di ni chos kyi (sku) gnya’ gnon yin te/” with gnya’ gnon meaning valaya = circular collar (The Outer Wheel of Time, p. 547). In this case, I would see it as implying something like a very valuable ornament, the teachings transmitted by Sri Singha being like an ornament of the dharmakaya. Or maybe, it’s just the fever…😊

gnyis la myi spel sounds like an imperative tense, sounding like: “Do not spread it to two (disciples at a time)!”

cig las rgyun mi gcad do: “its flow should not be broken to more than one” ==> “Do not spread its flow (of transmission) to more than one (disciple)!”

I guess this is the same meaning as yours. This is the idea of a single transmission (gcig brgyud).

As to the Bum-thang rTsi-lung, it is in the Chos ’byung me tog snying po (p. 353) and styled as a place where the Sems-phyogs texts were hidden: “bum thang rtsi lungs su sems phyogs thams cad sbas/”. And as you know, it’s in the lDe’u chos ’byung, described as a temple built to subjugate the Monpas…

The All Making King’s Earliest Fragment

 

Scanned leaf from Matho, BDRC no. W1BL9, vol. 405 (click to enlarge)

ཀུན་བྱེད་རྒྱལ་པོ་, the All Making King, is difficult to talk about. Let’s start with the end of his name. As you may notice, if not right away later on, his gender identity and preferred pronoun can be an issue, although we’ll follow the grammatical clue of the final syllable and use him. The word king might seem to lend him a governing or ruling function, just that his kingdoms and governments tend to dissolve away. He may look like a creator god, a highly intriguing point for followers of monotheistic creationism,* although some may need reminding we’re not in the Middle East exactly, and All Making is an epithet of the Hindu (and yes, sometimes showing up among Buddhists) god Brahma. In Hindu religious contexts less a creator than a re-creator, he has a quite different image in Buddhist accounts of what does indeed look like creation. But creation of what by what from what? is the question we ought to be asking.

(*I can tell you, but only in a footnote, that this thoroughly Buddhist text puts forward the carrot of creationism only to pull the rug out from under the feet of foundationalism. For more on the issue of creationism in Bon, Buddhism and Tibetan myth, see Martin and even better, Reynolds.)

Have you ever found yourself in the deep of the night veering in and out of sleep when suddenly it occurs to you that you’ve been ignoring or denying some deeper need, and that life as you have been living it is not as it should be, maybe even naught but a superficial unfulfilling sham?  Did the message ever come to you in a direct way, as if a pipe were conveying the sound directly from your heart into your ear canal loud and clear as day? 

I’m trying to convey a taste of what it’s like to engage in a slow contemplative reading of the All Making King. You could say it’s a work of soaring poetic beauty. That it is, without the least doubt, but the syntax often doesn’t make its case immediately, it forces you to concentrate more deeply until its elements either do or do not fall in place and make clear sense. It can be at times as if your own mind were informing itself about itself, and really, that’s the whole point. Does that strike you as totally perplexing or impossible?

Needless to say this makes translation that can reproduce the experience difficult. Today I won’t even try, I’ll just refer you to English translations that have been done already (readers of Tibetan can get a taste of it in the text transcription, appended below). 

Anyway, let me tell you about an amazing find in the old Chortens of Matho in Ladakh. Some years back a Rinpoche of the Sakya school ordered a group of Chortens taken down. In the process a large number of old manuscript fragments were revealed. I’ll have more to say about it in upcoming blogs, just to point out that this represents a manuscript cache from early times quite comparable in significance to the Dunhuang manuscript cache of still earlier times. The Matho texts all seem to date prior to the time the Chortens would have been closed, around the year 1200 CE (a few decades later is a possibility that might be considered, but no later than that; Helmut Tauscher has written about the dating, and what he says is surely correct). 

Only two damaged leaves of the All Making King are there. There is no title or colophon present, and nothing better for identifying what it is than the name of the All Making King right there in the first surviving line, as you might see in our frontispiece. Using 21st-century digital search capacities, it was a simple matter to assign the first leaf to Chapter 17, and the second leaf we can see contains significant parts of Chapters 15-16 (and what looks like it ought to be the very beginning of Chapter 17).

So let me underline the significance of this manuscript treasure finding. I believe that with only one very small exception, this is the oldest textual testimony for the words of the All Making King.  The only thing that tends to spoil this conceit is the presence of the Cuckoo of Awareness among the Dunhuang documents (see Dalton's entry listed below).  Why?  Because the Cuckoo of Awareness, extremely brief as it is, is one of the five Earliest Translated Atiyoga Mind Class texts that were somehow absorbed into the increasingly voluminous All Making King (see Derbac).

How is it useful for Dzogchen studies to have this early example of the text? Well, for one thing it can help us understand how the Mind Class scriptures may have been welded and melded together over time. This has been made an issue in a number of recent academic studies. Here we present a further example from our Matho fragment: In the 2nd leaf (verso, line 3) you can see a dividing mark in the form of a double staff with two dots in the middle. It is at this point that the Gting-skyes edition of the Old Tantra Collection ends its Chapter Fifteen. The Matho text has no indication of chapter division, no mention of a fifteenth chapter. It does continue on with the content of the 16th chapter, but minus the three introductory lines reminding us that it is a dialogue with Sems-dpa’-rdo-rje (Sattvavajra?). Future students of Dzogchen manuscriptology will need to continue this work of comparison, as there are other surprising textual differences (an important hint they may find useful:  Just reverse the order of the two scans, placing the 2nd folio before the 1st, then go to work. Don’t do it backwards as I did).

To sum up this one text-critical point in order to finally put this up on the web. Like the other Matho manuscripts it surely dates before 1200 CE. The earlier limit may not be all that clear, but I’d guesstimate as old or even older than 1000 CE (it is, after all a fragment of a booklet that may have required time to fall into pieces and eventually get placed in the Chorten at its consecration). It appears that the All Making King scripture found in Matho didn’t yet have chapter divisions, and that chapter endings with their chapter ending titles and introductions may have been composed later on. Really and truly, I see no problem in making text-critical observations so long as they don’t pretend to erase the poetry along with the experiential realizations the poetry was created to convey, regardless of any chapter divisions.

Afterthought after afterthought

Did anyone notice there in our Matho fragment the triad of dpe, don and rtags? Instance (similitudes / similes / examples), meaning (intended purposes, aims) and sign (marks that provoke recognition)?  There is a note on this in Drenpa's Proclamation, a book that came out quite recently. This triad is found in some early Bon texts (mostly also pre-1200). What may seem like a scholastic schema is quite the contrary, a way of speaking about esoteric precepts, or what is in Dzogchen spoken of as a direct introduction, something that may not involve any words at all. It does seem to me that the phrase dpe don rtags gsum is more often encountered in Bon writings,* while in non-Bon writings it is nearly always invoked in relation to the All Making King, where the first one, the instance, is bound to be space itself.

(*I believe I could, if pressed to do so, come up with at least twelve Bon texts that make use of this expression, but bear in mind that the Bon texts are not so well represented among the 15 million searchable pages scanned in BDRC.)

But then again in context of strictly rule-governed logic, rtags can mean the third term of the syllogism, the reason, so some whiff of scholasticism may be intended there after all. Asia never quite shared the Euro-split between Platonism (dialogue and mystical speculation) and Aristotelianism (logic and natural science), although a somehow comparable split might be, in Tibet, the one between Candrakîrtianism and Dharmakîrtianism. Now I’m sorry I brought that up, because the differences are also glaring at me. (Read the book by Dreyfuss to see how Dharmakîrtianism had no real adherents in Tibet, but its ideas were much debated.)

Hmmm. Doesn’t Peircean semiosis work with an interacting triad of the Sign, the Object and the Interpretant? Indeed it does, but don’t press me to tell you how that is the least bit relevant, that is unless Peirce was inspired by the All Making King! It’s true that the pre-modern Tibetan scripture and the [post-]modern semiotician both share a preference for triplets and triads over those dueling dyads and binaries that rule in our computers and our politics today, and I do wonder what the deeper background for this similitude could possibly be. I leave it for sharper and more penetrating minds than my own, but I do think even if their individual parts are only partially and not perfectly matching, the Dzogchen and Peircean triads, as wholes, extend over the same territory.

§  §  §

Some English-language literature on logic, and on the All Making King & its translations

Note: There is no complete translation so far as I know, but see Namkhai Norbu’s and Dargyay’s partial translations marked with the ★.

Thomas Cattoi, “Ground and Manifestation: A Christian Reading of the Kun-byed Rgyal-po in Conversation with Origen's De Principiis,’ contained in: Acts of the October 2014 Minzu University Conference on Interreligious Dialogue, Minzu University (Beijing 2015), pp. 15-27. Not yet seen, I saw the reference at the author’s faculty page.

Jake Dalton, “IOL Tib J 647,” contained in: Jacob Dalton and Sam van Schaik, Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library, Brill (Leiden 2006), pp. 292-293.  This on the Dunhuang text of the Cuckoo of Awareness, in only 6 lines of verse, that was incorporated into the All Making King. Some rare references to Atiyoga may be found in Dunhuang, and this catalogue is the place to look for them.

Eva K. Dargyay, “A Rnying ma Text: The Kun byed rgyal po'i mdo,” contained in: Barbara Aziz and Matthew Kapstein, eds., Soundings in Tibetan Civilization, Manohar Publications (Delhi 1985), pp. 283-293.

Eva K. Dargyay, “The Concept of a ‘Creator God’ in Tantric Buddhism,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 8 (1985), pp. 31-47.

★E.K. Neumaier Dargyay, The Sovereign All Creating Mind: The Motherly Buddha, SUNY (Albany 1992). If you do not find a way to hold the book, an odd digitized version can be found here. This is in a certain sense a complete translation, because it ends at Chapter 57 of the 84-chapter text, but at what it seems might be the final chapter. For the translation of Chapter 17 (the only English translation of it there is as far as I know), look on pp. 98-99 of the print edition, and notice the illusion of gender bending going on in it. On the triad of "simile, quintessence and characteristics" (translation choices I would not have used), see especially p. 127 (part of her translation of Chapter 34).  But then look at her p. 97 (part of Chapter 15) where we see “simile, meaning and investigation.” Reviewed by J.W. de Jong in Indo-Iranian Journal, vol. 38 (1995), pp. 200-203; by Kerry Martin Skora in Philosophy East and West, vol. 46, no. 1 (January 1996), pp. 107-116.

Mihai Derbac, The “Five Early” (sNga lnga) Texts of the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition rDzogs chen Sems sde: A Historical, Literary and Textual Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Tibetan Texts, PhD dissertation, University of Calgary (2019), downloadable from the PRISM Repository of the University of Calgary. I list this here not just because it is something I've been reading recently, but because it contains a very useful bibliography of relevant books and essays (and discussions about the same) saving me the duty of listing all those things here.

Georges B.J. Dreyfus, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk, University of California Press (Berkeley 2003), pp. 206-208. This is the perfect proof text for my belief that, in the language of logical argumentation, dpe and rtags can name two specific parts of the five-fold Indic syllogism (five in contrast to the three-fold Aristotelian). Both would seem to be direct translations for Sanskrit terms, as Dreyfus indicates.

Shoryu Katsura & Ernst Steinkellner, eds., The Role of the Example (Dṛṣṭānta) in Classical Indian Logic, Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde series vol. 58, Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, Universität Wien (Vienna 2004). This other article published in Pacific World may be better for providing background on Buddhist logic.

Per Kværne and Dan Martin, trs. and eds., Drenpa’s Proclamation: The Rise and Decline of the Bön Religion in Tibet, Vajra Books (Kathmandu 2023). The relevant footnote is no. 947, located at pp. 275-276.

Kennard Lipman and Merrill Peterson, You Are the Eyes of the World, Lotsawa (Novato 1987).  Translation of Klong-chen-pa’s commentary on the Kun-byed Rgyal-po. Reviewed by Georgios Halkias in Tibet Journal, vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 117-119. Kennard Lipman is the best when it comes to making Dzogchen shine brilliantly through English.

Dan Martin, “Creator God or Creator Figure?” Lungta [an annual publication of the Amnye Machen Institute, McLeod Ganj, India], vol. 16 (Spring 2003), pp. 15-20. See Reynolds for his fantastic job of countering the naively creationist reading of the All Making King.

Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Rigbai Kujyug, the Six Vajra Verses: An Oral Commentary by Namkhai Norbu, December 1985, Merigar, Italy, ed. by Cheh-Ngee Goh, Rinchen Editions (Singapore 1990. Translation and teachings based on the Cuckoo of Awareness. Newer editions may be available.

★Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and Adriano Clemente, The Supreme Source: The Fundamental Tantra of the Dzogchen Semde Kunjed Gyalpo, Snow Lion (Ithaca 1999), translated from Italian by Andrew Lukianowicz. A set of chapter summaries and excerpts, this is again not a complete translation of the All Making King, but I do believe it is the best.

John Myrdhin Reynolds, “Kun byed Rgyal po: The Principal Dzogchen Tantra,” contained in: John Reynolds, The Golden Letters: The Three Statements of Garab Dorje, the First Teacher of Dzogchen, together with a Commentary by Dza Patrul Rinpoche Entitled, “The Special Teaching of the Wise and Glorious King,” Snow Lion (Ithaca 1996), pp. 236-248.

Jim Valby, “Five Principles of rDzogs chen Transmission in the Kun byed rgyal po,” Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, vol. 24 (October 2012), pp. 157-164.

Jim Valby, tr., Ornament of the State of Samantabhadra: Commentary on the All-Creating King of the Pure Perfect Presence of the Great Perfection, in 6 volumes. A translation of Gzhan-phan-’od-zer, Chos Thams-cad Rdzogs-pa-chen-po Byang-chub-kyi Sems Kun-byed Rgyal-po'i 'Grel-pa Kun-bzang Dgongs-rgyan (Lhasa 2006), in 2 vols.  I have not seen either publication, although I would like to.

•  •  •

The fragments in Matho W1BL9 vol. 405 transcribed

What we have are two leaf fragments, inscribed on both sides. There are no page numbers given. The two leaves are given here in the order of the scan. Both leaves once formed part of a booklet, bound into a signature on the left-hand side (just like so many other Matho fragments were). The text of the first leaf doesn’t seem to continue on the second, and on closer study we find that it does not.  Only the first leaf recto is illustrated above, for the rest you should go to BDRC Work RID W1BL9, then locate vol. 405.

• One rare feature of the manuscript is that it allows single Tibetan syllables to be split between two lines. Hardly ever seen outside the Matho fragments, it feels like a violation. Also, rules governing the use of the syllable dividing dot (tsheg) before the staff (shad) punctuation were not known to the scribe, if they even existed then. The use of tsheg and shad has been somewhat regularized in our transcription, although this hardly makes any difference.

This text edition was made by Michael Walter, and double checked for accuracy.

X = illegible graph  _ space within word  × apparent strike through

[1 recto]

... ston pa’i kun byed rgyal po lags |

sku gdung ring srel rtag tu zung shig pa | sku ni rgyal ba gang dang gang gi sku | sku ni rgyal ba gang dang gang gi sku | gsung ni dus gsum sangs rgyas gang dang  gang gi gdung |

ring srel zhes ni ci lta bu la bgyi | sku ni nga sdang rgyal ba sagsum gi sku | gdung ni dus gsum rgyal ba’i gdung | dus med rtag tu sems la ’di ’chang na | dus gsum sangs rgyas kun kyi mchod pa’i rten | sku gdung ring srel zhes ni de la bya |

sku gdung ring srel de ltar lags na yang  | de la dus gsum sangs rgyas ci ltar mchod | |

chod pa la ni yon tan ci zhig mchis | nga’i sku gdung ring srel de ni | dus gsum sangs rgyas rtag tu sems ltas mchod | de’i yon tan myi ’bral de thob nas | chos rnams kun gyi rgyal por nus par gyur |:|

snang srid snod bcud thams cad kun | snang ni nga’i ngo bor snang | dag ni chos kyi dbyings su dag | ’dul ba rnam pa sna tshogs la | …[6-7 syllables?] 'i | theg pa gsum gyi ngo yang …

[1 verso]

’das pa yul la myi ltos pas | rgyu la mi bsgrub ’bras myi ’dod | ’dod pa med pa’i dgos pa des | rang bzhin ˘˘lhun˘˘ gyis grub par gyur || ye nas yin la bya mi dgos | 

nga las byung ba’i ston pa sku gsum gyis | bstan pa’i theg pa rnam × gsum bstan pa ni || ston pa gsum gyis ma brtsal grub pa’i lung ma bstan ||

kun byed nga yis theg cig bstan pa ni | brtsal bas grub pa’i lung du ngas ma bstan | kun byed byang chub nga’i rang bzhin las | ma brtsal rang bzhin lhun gyis grub pa ni | rgyal ba kun gyi snying po sku gsum ste | nga’i rang bzhin ma bcos chos skur grub | nga’i ngo bo ma bcos long spyod rdzogs ||

nga’i thugs rje mngon ’phyung sprul sku sum brtsal nas grub ba ’bras bu bstan pa myed || sku gsum kun byed nga ru bstan pa ste | ji ltar snang ba’i chos rnams thams cad kun || rang bzhin ngo bo thugs rje ma bcos gsum | X sku gsum nga’i de bzhin nyid du bstan | nga dang nga’i de bzhin nyid las ni || sangs rgyas zhes bya’i yon tan sgos [~sgros?] kyang med | sems can … [few legible letters on following line, mostly torn off]

[2 recto]

brtsal bsgrub myed pas ye nas che[?] bar bshad | 

bdag nyid chen po sangs rgyas che bar [bshad] | ma skyes spros bral mngon du ’phyung ba ’di | ye nas gzung ’dzin ____ chos kyi dbyings | bya myi dgos pas ye nas sangs rgyas yin | rtsal bsgrub myi dgos ye nas che bar bshad | chos nyi[d] sangs rgyas che bar bshad pa yin ||

nga’i nges par mngon du phyung ba ’di | dpe’ don rtags ni rnam pa gsum bstan te | chos nyid don la nam mkha’ dpe’ bstan te | byang chub sems kyis rtags kyi nges par du | the rtsom za ba rnams la nges pa du | dpe’ don rtags kya[ng] de yin sangs rgyas bstan ||

nga’i rang bzhin de bzhin nyid ’di ni | su la mngon du phyung ba ni mi snang bas | de ni ma nor ba’i rang bzhin la | bzhin ni ma bcos pa’i rang bzhin te | nyid ni ngo bo nyid la brtags pa yin | de bzhin nyid kyi rang bzhin de nyid la | du[s?] gsum sangs rgyas

[2 verso]

yod pa’i bsgos myi ’dogs | khams gsum sems can med pa’i skur myi ’debs | rtog dpyod bsam ba ci yang dgongs myed pas | sangs rgyas myed pa’i che bar nga’is bshad |:|

nga ni ye nas kun byed rgyal po yin | bston pa bstan pa ’khor dus ngas byas nas | ston pa’i bstan pa yang ni nga yis byed || bstan pa’i rang bzhin de bston la || ’khor yang nga’i ngo bo de phyung nas | dus gnas pa’i rang bzhin ni | kun byed nga’i rang bzhin bstan pa las || nga myin chos ni cig kyang bstan pa myed || 

sems dpa’ chen po rdo rje khyod nyid kyang || kun byed nga’i rang bzhin bstan pa’i phyir || khyod kyang nga la nga yis phyung ba yin | kun byed nga ni chos kyi snying por zhog || 

dus gnas phun sum tshogs pa thams cad kun | kun byed rgyal po nga yin byang chub sems |:|

sku gdung ring srel rtag chang na | rgyal ba’i yang mes kun mes nga dang mnyam | ston XX  ... ... ...

•

For the complete Tibetan text in 84 chapters, I suppose I ought to recommend this one:  Chos Thams-cad Rdzogs-chen Byang-chub-kyi Sems Kun-byed Rgyal-po containing 84 chapters, found in  the Gting-skyes edition, vol. 1, pp. 1-220.  Following is chapter 17 only of the Gting-skyes manuscript set of the Old Collection of Tantras (blank verse format added, double-checked for [my] errors):

Chapter Seventeen: Handing Down Relics

དེ་ནས་བྱང་ཆུབ་ཀྱི་སེམས་ཀུན་བྱེད་རྒྱལ་པོ་དེས།

ཉིད་ཀྱི་སྐུ་གདུང་འདི་ཟུང་ཅིག་པར་གསུངས་སོ།།

de nas byang chub kyi sems kun byed rgyal po des | 

nyid kyi sku gdung 'di zung cig par gsungs so ||

 

ཀྱེ་སེམས་དཔའ་ཆེན་པོ་འདི་ཟུང་ཤིག།

སྐུ་གདུང་རིང་བསྲེལ་རྟག་འཆང་ན།།

རྒྱལ་བའི་ཡང་མེས་ཀུན་བྱེད་ང་དང་མཉམ་ཞེས་གསུངས་སོ།། [fol. 33v - p. 66]

kye sems dpa' chen po 'di zung shig ||

sku gdung ring bsrel rtag 'chang na ||

rgyal ba'i yang mes kun byed nga dang mnyam zhes gsungs so || [p. 66]

དེ་ནས་སེམས་དཔའ་རྡོ་རྗེས་ཞུས་པ།

ཀྱེ་དུས་གསུམ་སངས་རྒྱས་ཀུན་གྱི་ཡང་མེས་པོ།།

སྟོན་པའི་སྟོན་པ་ཀུན་བྱེད་རྒྱལ་པོ་ལགས།

སྐུ་གདུང་རིང་བསྲེལ་རྟག་ཏུ་ཟུང་ཅིག་པ།།

སྐུ་ནི་རྒྱལ་བ་གང་དང་གང་གི་སྐུ།།

གདུང་ནི་སངས་རྒྱས་གང་དང་གང་གི་གདུང་།།

རིང་བསྲེལ་ཞེས་ནི་ཇི་ལྟ་བུ་ལ་བགྱི།། ཞེས་ཞུས་སོ།།

de nas sems dpa' rdo rjes zhus pa | 

kye dus gsum sangs rgyas kun gyi yang mes po || 

ston pa'i ston pa kun byed rgyal po lags | 

sku gdung ring bsrel rtag tu zung cig pa || 

sku ni rgyal ba gang dang gang gi sku ||

gdung ni sangs rgyas gang dang gang gi gdung || 

ring bsrel zhes ni ji lta bu la bgyi || zhes zhus so ||

 

ཀྱེ་སེམས་དཔའ་ཆེན་པོ་ཉོན་ཅིག།

སྐུ་ནི་ང་སྲས་རྒྱལ་བ་གསུམ་གྱི་སྐུ།།

གདུང་ནི་དུས་གསུམ་རྒྱལ་བ་ང་ཡི་སེམས།།

དུས་མེད་རྟག་ཏུ་སེམས་དཔའ་འདི་འཆང་ན།།

དུས་གསུམ་སངས་རྒྱས་ཀུན་གྱི་མཆོད་པའི་བརྟེན།།

སྐུ་གདུང་རིང་བསྲེལ་ཞེས་ནི་དེ་ལ་བྱ།།

kye sems dpa' chen po nyon cig || 

sku ni nga sras rgyal ba gsum gyi sku ||

gdung ni dus gsum rgyal ba nga yi sems || 

dus med rtag tu sems dpa' 'di 'chang na | 

dus gsum sangs rgyas kun gyi mchod pa'i brten || 

sku gdung ring bsrel zhes ni de la bya || 

ཀྱེ་སྟོན་པའི་སྟོན་པ་ཀུན་བྱེད་རྒྱལ་པོ་ལགས།།

སྐུ་གདུང་རིང་བསྲེལ་དེ་ལྟར་ལགས་ན་ཡང་།།

དེ་ལ་དུས་གསུམ་སངས་རྒྱས་ཇི་ལྟར་མཆོད།།

མཆོད་པ་ལ་ནི་ཡོན་ཏན་ཅི་ཞིག་མཆིས།། ཅེས་ཞུས་སོ།།

kye ston pa'i ston pa kun byed rgyal po lags | 

sku gdung ring bsrel de ltar lags na yang | 

de la dus gsum sangs rgyas ji ltar mchod | 

mchod pa la ni yon tan ci zhig mchis | ces zhus so ||

ཀྱེ་སེམས་དཔའ་ཆེན་པོ་ཁྱོད་ཉོན་ཅིག།

ང་ཡི་སྐུ་གདུང་རིང་བསྲེལ་དེ་ལ་ནི།།

དུས་གསུམ་སངས་རྒྱས་རྟག་ཏུ་སེམས་ལྟས་མཆོད།།

དེ་ཡི་ཡོན་ཏན་མི་འབྲལ་དེ་ཐོབ་ནས།།

ཆོས་རྣམས་ཀུན་བྱེད་རྒྱལ་པོར་ནུས་པར་འགྱུར། ཞེས་གསུངས་སོ།།

kye sems dpa' chen po khyod nyon cig | 

nga yi sku gdung ring bsrel de la ni | 

dus gsum sangs rgyas rtag tu sems ltas mchod | 

de yi yon tan mi 'bral de thob nas | 

chos rnams kun byed rgyal por nus par 'gyur | zhes gsungs so ||

བྱང་ཆུབ་ཀྱི་སེམས་ཀུན་བྱེད་རྒྱལ་པོ་ལས།

སྐུ་གདུང་གཏད་པའི་ལེའུ་སྟེ་བཅུ་བདུན་པའོ།།

byang chub kyi sems kun byed rgyal po las | 

sku gdung gtad pa'i le'u ste bcu bdun pa'o ||

__________

PS: I sent a pre-post draft of this blog to F, and in response to his response, I wrote an email I never sent to him criticizing myself in a rather defensive manner.  Here it is:

Dear F,

Yes, I guess it’s true what you say, the blog is after all full of lazily abductive reasoning based on a weak coverage of material not sufficiently represented in its full glory.

But I guess my aim is served, that others will notice the similarities and put things together in a way that can be better pinned down.

One kind of Peircean (but even more Emersonian) idea is that words/concepts have pressure release valves. It’s as if they are always vulnerable to invasion or loss in at least one compass direction. Poets celebrate this malleable quality of words and bend them around into magnificent sculptures, which is great.  But without stone-stable concepts/definitions to work with syllogisms aren’t going to march on to find victory in well established truth the way they’re supposed to do.

I’m not going to go into piddling details, no time or energy for it.

That’s my "pragmatic" approach at work.  You do know the Americans.  If they think at all, they tend to be pragmatic, thinking it makes them more scientific, so will most likely turn to the pragmatist school for help and inspiration.  Myself I’ve always been more inspired by Emerson, who although called a transcendentalist is also often tied into the group of Peirce and James, and I suppose they even had direct contact with each other, didn’t they?

The real abduction will happen when some semioticians grab ahold of our dear Kunjé and paint him into their corner, making him their kind of pragmatist thinker, perhaps a precursor. It would be horrible to see him taken captive that way.  But better them than those monotheistic creationists.

I actually kind of like it when pre-modern and post-modern ideas are brought close enough to touch each other despite their mutual abhorrence. The fireworks can be amazing.  Or not.

I piddled around and tried to fix the blog a bit, and will try to work it through some more.  So much of it was created in the course of writing, it’s more a journey than a destination, that’s for sure.

Yours, D

This only makes me feel more fondly for the early days of our millennium. I miss the inspiration and instigation that emerges out of dialogue. In years gone by Tibeto-logic used to have all that before it, along with all the other blogs, was abandoned for FB and Twitch, and now X. Please, please comment and have your say if you can hack your way through the Captchas.

•

ངས་ཁྱོད་ལ་འགྲེལ་བཤད་རྒྱག་མི་ཐུབ་པའི་བྱ་བ་ཞིག་བཤད་པར་ཡིད་ཆེས་བྱོས་དང་། ངས་ཁྱོད་ལ་ནམ་ཡང་ནོར་བ་ཞིག་མི་བྱེད།

Can you guess which Beatles song these words come from? 

• Translated by Monlam AI, something I’m trying to test myself with.  (Thank you K.K. for sharing the link.)

Terton Onomastics

Title page of a text included in BDRC no. W4PD975 (click to enlarge)

If you’ve been with us in recent years you would know this: Surprising new pieces of older Tibetan literature are popping up all the time. You would also know that the main place where this is happening is BDRC (formerly TBRC) and its BUDA website. The title page you see just above with the unusual archway of entry is a great example. Maybe the best part of its story is that, for Tibetan readers of the world, it presents a number of puzzles, puzzles that I haven’t, or haven’t yet, solved to my own satisfaction. One of the mysteries is who wrote it, but before going into that, let’s try and say what it’s about. Come, let’s walk through that door.

First, the title: 

Gsang-sngags-kyi Rig-pa-'dzin-pa-rnams-kyi Rnam-thar Sa-bon tsam dang Mtshan dang Mtshan-gyi Rnam-grangs.  

“Knowledge Holders of Secret Mantra: Seed Biographies along with Their Names and Variant Names.”

The title already tells you it’s an onomasticon, a study of personal names of a limited group of persons. It tells you who those persons are, ‘Knowledge Holders of Secret Mantra.’  When you look into the book’s content, it is clear this means above all those known to us as Tertons. A Terton (གཏེར་སྟོན་) is someone who reveals or extracts (སྟོན་ or བཏོན་) treasures (གཏེར་མ་). By treasures we think first of their scriptural discoveries, although relics, images, medical works and even luxury objects and precious metals could also be found by them, often in one and the same excavation site.

I tried transcribing the first couple of pages, not being all that certain I could manage the odd style of cursive* with its special abbreviation practices.** I soon ran into puzzling problems. Particularly when I got to the misplaced passages marked off with special symbols such as the ‘three jewels’ mark, it wasn’t clear to me where these were meant to be inserted. These first pages do not yet concern the Tertons, the Treasure Revealers, but rather the Treasure Concealers, in particular “Guru Rinpoche” Padmasambhava followed by his 25 disciples. Mostly it is filled by brief sections about the Tertons and their individual names. I thought I ought to make a list of their names at least (see the Appendix).

(*I do appreciate the calligraphy, but at times its style could be described as sloppy, just notice how the letter “zha” [ཞ་] appears. **For the word mtshan, as you can see already in the title, its root consonant "tsh" can be reduced to the tiny flag that normally serves to differentiate it from the "ch." The resulting abbreviation looks something like "m'n.")

You get the impression this includes more mention of Bon than is usual in works on this subject. Already in the Guru Rinpoche section we are told what names he received in Bon sources.

I will go ahead and quote from our earlier blog (linked below) knowing that adherents of the Nyingma school may be discomfited:

“And of course, it needs saying that the Bon school must be brought into our future conclusion-making processes, as they have a rich literature of Tertön histories, prayers and prophecies of their own. It’s even possible that followers of Bon got their terma traditions underway before the Nyingma did.”

To flesh that out a bit, it seems likely as we suggested in that same blog that the first Nyingma Tertön was active in around 1080 CE. If so that makes the Nyingma phenomenon significantly later than the Bön Terma tradition that begins in a big way with the discoveries of Shenchen Luga in 1017 CE, although with the revealers of the Nāga Hundred Thousand (ཀླུ་འབུམ་) and a few other Bon scriptures, we would need to push Bon Terma revelations back a century or so before Shenchen’s.  So their Termas may be not just a half, but as much as two centuries older than Nyingma Termas.

There is a lot more to know about the Tertons as a group of prophetic revelatory figures in Tibetan history simply because Tibetan Studies experts as a whole haven’t studied them in sufficient depth and detail, not yet. Not just the onomastic and biographical works, but other genres, in particular Terton prayers and prophecies need to be taken into account. The sheer weight of the volumes of rediscovered teachings would disable more than one elephant. There is so much to take in. 

At the head of my own list is a better understanding of the surely different, but often similar and occasionally overlapping, traditions of Bon and Nyingma schools. The good investigative work that has been done here and there hasn’t really been put together to form a fuller circumspectual portrayal of the phenomenon of Treasure revelation — what it was and is, what it has meant to Tibetans, and what it ought to mean to everyone. Let’s get to work. 

I’ve heard there may be a new book coming out that will answer our questions about how Treasure traditions may be inspired by or simply continue earlier robust traditions both Indian and Tibetan.  No, I didn’t write it, and I won’t say more until it is more than a rumor echoing in empty space.

Some refs.

We’ve already blogged at some length about Tertons a few years back, just look here: Locating a Terton Prayer in Terma History. Once there, you’ll find references to further resources that I won’t list all over again. Your dyed-in-the-wool Tibetosophers can have a look at this webpage we made, supplying a particular set of sources of Tertön names that may be compared and contrasted to this newly noticed onomasticon.

An onomasticon, really? That means a collection of nouns limited to a particular specialized field. Most often it means a collection of proper nouns. Perhaps the best known work by that name, the Onomasticon by Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339 CE), was limited to place names within the area of what we call the Middle East. It’s particularly important for understanding the place names on the Madaba Mosaic Map that can still be seen in situ on the floor of a church in a town in Jordan located high in the hills just east of Jericho. Although it hardly compares, I’ve also composed a kind of onomasticon limited to Tibetan proper names, both person and place names. It took over 40 years to make it, with a length of about 1,700 pages if it were ever printed on paper. Just a few days ago I posted it at a free website, free in its making and free to use, called “Tibetosophy.”  If you feel you are ready to make use of it, feel free to go here:

https://sites.google.com/view/tibetosophy

You can even make use of it to find out more about the Tertons named in this Onomasticon.  The bibliographical details are as follows:

“Rig pa ʼdzin pa rnams kyi rnam thar sa bon tsam dang mtshan gyi rnam grangs ci rigs.” Bla ma don rgyal gyis nyar tshags mdzad paʼi dpe rnying dpe dkon, vol. 32, pp. 93–136. Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC), purl.bdrc.io/resource/MW4PD975_317ABE. Accessed 18 Nov. 2023. [BDRC bdr:MW4PD975_317ABE]

If you want to get to it easily, just type the entire Resource ID number W4PD975 into the search box at BUDA. Click on the scanned title page. Then go to volume 32 and scroll down about a hundred pages. 

 

Appendix

I will list the names of the Tertons here, not promising a thorough, in-depth job of it. My reason for doing this is just so they will be findable by people out there searching the worldwide web. As things stand, it isn’t likely OCR will be effective enough with cursive manuscript for a long time into the future, so the effort can be justified. I assign page numbers to the text, as the folios are unnumbered and in a booklet format (44 scanned pages in all): 

1)  Names and forms of Guru Rinpoche according to various sources.  Scan pp. 1-5.

• The name is Padma-mthong-grol in Bon sources, specifically citing the testimony of a Terma revealed by the Terton Guru Rnon-rtse aka A-ya Bon-po Lha-'bum.  Scan p. 6.

2) Emperor Khri-srong-lde'u-btsan.  Scan p. 7.

3) The sons of the same and the subsequent royal line.  7-8.

Others among the 25 disciples of Guru Rinpoche apart from the Emperor, starting with Gnubs chen Sangs rgyas ye shes as no. 2, each subsequent one should have received his or her own numbers 3-25.  No. 8 is Vairocana (on p. 10) who deserves special attention.  Dran-pa-nam-mkha' is noticed on p. 16, with the information that he was given the name Phung-bon Mgo-dmar because he was presented with a red hat at his ordination. Ends (p. 18) with an interesting comment that there can be different ways of listing and identifying the 25 disciples and that some say there were 27.  Scan pp. 9-18.

At scan p. 19 begins the listing of the “Hundred Tertons” (གཏེར་སྟོན་བརྒྱ་རྩ་).  We'll just list their names with page and line numbers (interlinear mchan-notes do not count as lines) so you can locate information about them with ease. At least to begin with each Terton is awarded a number (superinscribed above the name), so we will attempt to follow the same system. Even if the numeration gives out after no. 14, I just keep numbering them anyway. In my experience the number “100” was never meant to be exact:

1. Sangs-rgyas-bla-ma, the 1st of the Tertons.  19.1.

2. Rgya Lo-tsā.  19.2.

3. Sna-nam-pa ('Brog-pa Sna-nam Thub-pa-rgyal-po).  19.4.

4. Rgya Zhang-khrom.  19.6.

5. Nyi-ma-seng-ge.  19.7.

6. Dbu-ru Ston-pa Shākya-'od.  19.8.

7. Bon-po Brag-tshal.  20.1.

8. Snye-mo Zhu-yas.  20.3.  He is quite rightly identified as a Bonpo by birth, but not noticed is that he was a chief disciple of Gshen-chen Klu-dga'.

9. Grub-thob Dngos-grub.  20.4.

10. Gtsug-lag-dpal-dge.  20.7.

11. Ku-sa Sman-pa.  20.8.

12. Bon-po Lha-'bum.  21.4.

13. Khyung-po Dpal-dge.  21.5.

14. Gra-pa Mngon-shes.  23.1.

15. Ra-shag Chen-po.  23.6.

16. Nyang-ral.  23.8.

17. Dbon-sras Khyung-thog (=Khyung-thog-rtsal).  24.6.

18. Ra-mo Shel-sman.  25.1.

19. Gu-ru Chos-dbang.  25.3.

20. Gu-ru Jo-tshe.  25.7.

21. Padma-dbang-phyug.  26.2.

22. Do-ban Rgya-mtsho (~Dor-ban?).  26.4.

23. Rakshi Ston-pa.  26.6.

24. Byar-rong E-yi Sman-pa (=Nyi-'od-gsal).  26.8.

25. Gra-sgom Chos-rdor.  27.1.

26. G.yag-phyar Sngon-mo.  27.4.

27-28. Grum, and his patron of Paro, Bhutan named Nag-po-mkhar.  27.6.

29. Lha-btsun Sngon-mo.  27.9.  Notice the mention here of Mchog-'gyur-gling-pa (1829-1870), which helps us date the work.

30. Nyi-ma-grags-pa.  28.4.

31. Rin-chen-tshul-rdor.  28.7.

32. Tshe-brtan-rgyal-mtshan.  29.4.

33. Me-ban Rin-chen-gling-pa.  29.6.

34.  O-rgyan-gling-pa.  29.10.

35. Dri-med-'od-zer.  30.4.

36. Rog-rje-gling-pa.  31.3.

37. Gter-bdag-gling-pa.  31.8.

38. Padma-kun-skyong-gling-pa.  32.2.

39. Mdo-sngags-gling-pa Mchog-ldan-mgon-po.  32.4.

40. Bstan-gnyis-gling-pa Padma-tshe-dbang-rgyal-po.  33.1.

41. Rdo-rje-gling-pa. 33.4.

42. Rin-chen-gling-pa, "The Second" (=Sangs-rgyas-gling-pa).  34.2.

43. O-rgyan-padma-gling-pa.  34.7.

44. O-rgyan-las-'phro-gling-pa.  35.1.

45. Bsam-gtan-bde-chen-gling-pa.  35.6.

46. Zhig-po-gling-pa.  35.8.

47. Bde-chen-gling-pa (the one born in Gro-shul Tshwa-lung).  36.1. Here on scan no. 36 is a statement about how the Thang-yig that was found at Shel-brag actually has 47 Tertons ranging from Sangs-rgyas-bla-ma up until Bde-chen-gling-pa. I'll transcribe it:

de ltar gter chen sangs rgyas bla ma nas bde chen gling pa'i bar thang yig shel brag ma'i dngos bstan bzhi bcu zhe bdun gyi rnam thar sa bon tsam du btus pa de'ang snga phyi rim par byon pa'i go rim du mi gnas thang yig gi dngos bstan ma bcos pa yin no ||

• This does create some perplexing problems as the Biography of Guru Rinpoche from Shel-brag was revealed in 1352. Just identifying let alone dating the particular Bde-chen-gling-pa who was born in Gro-shul is a problem, but nobody seems to date him or any other figure by this name to any time before the 17th century. Well, let’s go on to list the rest.

48. Rgya-ban Rdo-rje-'od.  37.1

49. Gu-ru Hūṃ-'bar.  37.2.

50. Lha-btsun Byang-chub-'od.  37.3.

51. Jo-bo Rje Dī-paṃ-ka-ra.  37.5.  This is Atiśa, from Bengal.

52. Zhang-btsun Dar-ma-rin-chen.  37.7.

53. Rong-zom Chos-kyi-bzang-po.  37.8.

54. Rdor-'bum-chos-kyi-grags-pa.  37.9.

55. Sangs-rgyas-'bar.  37.10.

56. Se-ston Ring-mo.  37.11.

57. Rgya Phur-bu (=Phur-bu-mgon).  37.11.

58. Dge-bshes Dra-nga Rdo-rje-kun-grags. 37.12.

59. Lha-rje Gnubs-chung.  38.1.  He is likely to be the magic teacher of Milarepa before Milarepa met Marpa.

60. Rgya-ston Brtson-'grus-seng-ge-dar. 38.4.

61. Lce-btsun Seng-ge-dbang-phyug. 38.5.

62. Sar-ban Phyogs-med.  38.8.

63. Gnyan Lo-tsā-ba Dar-ma-grags.  38.9.

64. Shākya-'od, or Shākya-bzang-po.  38.11.

65. Zangs-ri-ras-pa.  38.11.

66. Gnyal-pa Jo-sras Seng-ge Gnyag-ston Nag-po.  39.1.

67. Snye-mo Rgya Gong-ri-pa Sangs-rgyas-dbang-chen.  39.1.

68-69. Chu-pho Rtogs-ldan, aka Dge-bsnyen-rgyal-mtshan and Dge-'dun-rgyal-mtshan.  39.4.

70. Sprul-sku Ba-mkhal Smug-po.  39.6.

71. Mol-mi-'khyil.  39.7.

72. Gru-gu Yang-dbang.  39.8.

73. Sum-pa Byang-chub-blo-gros. 39.9.

74. Stag-lung-pa Sangs-rgyas-dbon-po.  39.10.

75. Gnyal-pa Nyi-ma-shes-rab.  39.12.

76. Khro-phu Lo-tsâ-ba Gnubs Byams-pa'i-dpal.  40.1.

77. G.yas-ban Ya-bon.  40.2.

78. Bal-po A-hūṃ-'bar.  40.2.

79. A-ro Dpal-po (?).  40.3.

80-82. Sum-tshogs.  Name of a group of three Tertons: Rkyang-po Grags-pa-dbang-phyug, Sum-pa Byang-chub-tshul-khrims, and 'Bre Shes-rab-bla-ma.  40.4.

83. Du-gu Rin-chen-seng-ge.  40.5.

84. Gtsang-pa La-ba-ring-mo, or Gtsang-ring Shes-rab.  40.6.

85. Jo-mo Sman-mo.  40.8.  A woman Terton.

86. Me-long-rdo-rje.  41.1.

87. Skal-ldan Byis-pa.  41.2.

88. Brang-ti Rgyal-nyi Mkhar-bu.  41.3. Revealer of medical Termas.  (Brang-ti Rgyal-mnyes Mkhar-bu is a more common spelling of his name.  Mkhar-'bum also occurs.)

89-92. Four Terma assistants of Gu-ru Chos-dbang by the names of Sgom-chen 'Brug-pa, Gnyan-ston Dzambha-la, Don-grub-seng-ge, and Padma-grags-pa. 41.4.

93. Dung-mtsho-ras-pa, The Earlier.  41.5.

94. Mkha'-'gro-ma Kun-dga'-'bum.  41.6.  Another woman Terton.

95. Dung-mtsho-ras-pa, The Later.  41.7.

96.  Badzra-ma-ti, the Indian.  41.9.

97. Rgyal-sras Legs-pa.  41.10.

—. Scan no. 43 has only two lines saying there were five King Tertons and Three Supreme Emanation Tertons, with the King Tertons being Nyang-ral, Gu-ru Chos-dbang, Rdor-gling, and Padma-gling-pa (the fifth one is not listed).

—. Scan no. 44, the final scanned page, lists alternative names of three prominent women, in fact queens, of 8th-century Tibet.  

So no, I now feel sure there is no telltale statement, let alone an informative colophon, identifying the author. About all I can say for sure is that the author or note-taker (or combination of the two) must have lived sometime in the 20th century because he mentions, in an authored statement of his, the name of the 19th-century Terton Mchog-'gyur-gling-pa.

But let’s consider some possibilities. Now that I've taken the book* down from the shelf and can compare, I see that our author follows more or less the same listing as Kongtrul does in his famous set of Terton biographies (written in 1886), not just for the first 47,** but for the following ones as well. One difference is that while our Onomasticon stops with Rgyal-sras Legs-pa, Kongtrul’s continues with about 60 more names.

(*Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö Taye, The Hundred Tertöns: A Garland of Beryl, Brief accounts of Profound Terma and the Siddhas Who Have Revealed It, tr. by Yeshe Gyamtso, KTD Publications [Woodstock 2011].  **These first 47 adhere to the order of prophecies in the Thang-yig, just as Kongtrul did, so from this we draw no diagnostic clues. We have to go on to look at the order and content that comes after no. 47 in the list.)

That leads me to wonder if our Terton Onomasticon isn’t in fact one of two things:  1. A set of notes made by a reader of Kongtrul’s work, severely abbreviating it and stopping abruptly.  2. An earlier sketch that would only later be expanded into Kongtrul’s work, which could mean it may be a writing of Kongtrul himself. I rather doubt that last possibility, but I suppose it could be considered.  We just have to look into it some more.  I’ve noticed that there are places where our text supplies information not found in Kongtrul’s work,* so it isn’t simply a student notebook.

(*For example it supplies more details about the three subsequent reincarnations of Bde-chen-gling-pa, no. 47 in the list, than you find in Kongtrul.)

 

— — —

 

Postscript (Nov. 27, 2023):

About that question of who the first Nyingma Terton may have been. Some might take exception to the ideas put forward, so let me go into it once more. In the Onomasticon and likewise in Kongtrul, it is Sangs-rgyas-bla-ma who was first. Whether or not his history had been told prior to the time of the Fifth Dalai Lama I haven’t been able to discover yet. His dating is quite shadowy, cast somewhere around the last half of the 10th century, active in Ngari. The main problem with him being declared first is just that no texts he excavated, no lineage he initiated, is available in later history, well, not until a visionary rediscovery in the 19th century. 

Sprul-pa'i Gter-ston Rdor-'bum-grags
miniature from a medical text.
TBRC W4CZ355782

The Zab-bu-lung history and a whole group of related Terma histories give the first Terton as Rdo-rje-'bum or Rdor-'bum Chos-kyi-grags-pa. His is somewhat less shadowy, yet shadowy he is, and his discoveries were all related to medicine rather than Dharma.  Obscure as he may be to most of us, BDRC has a Person ID for him dating him to the 11th century.  Let me quote here what was said in the earlier blog, as I’m not sure you will locate it in that rambling discussion:

Looking at the Tertön Prayer itself, what strikes us right away is that the first verse is devoted to a relatively unknown Tertön named Dorjebum (Rdo-rje-'bum) known for his medical terma. He is, in the Zab-bu-lung history explicitly stated to be the first of the Tertöns. The same history does slip Sangyé Lama (Sangs-rgyas-bla-ma) into the discussion, but I fail to find him in the prayer itself.  The Fifth Dalai Lama also mentions Sangyé Lama here, but says only that his lineages were not received. It may be due to Kongtrul that it is now common knowledge that Sangyé Lama must be called the first. As a rediscoverer, he may have himself been rediscovered, or at least revalidated, in the 19th century.

The Guru Tashi history has an argument that Dorjebum lived four generations before Yuthokpa, so dating Yuthokpa’s activities to around 1200, that would put him in about 1080 CE, so that’s about the best I can do at dating him.

Immediately after the doctor’s verse, verse 3 is about two women Tertöns, yet another somehow surprising feature. Why, we wonder, would physicians and women Tertöns take priority?  It is only in verses 4 and 5 that we get the names of the Tertöns of greatest renown (to us at least), Nyangral Nyima-özer and Guru Chöwang. 

I haven’t located any of Rdor-'bum’s medical Terma now existing in the form of actual texts. However, there is a record of teachings received by Brag-dkar Rta-so Chos-kyi-dbang-phyug (1775-1839), with a lineage of the same. I haven’t looked into all of this yet, but perhaps it would be worthwhile to go to BDRC and have a look at it as contained in RID no. W1KG14557. It is quite brief. There are 17th-century sources on him we could look into. There are also biographical sketches of him in the recently compiled collective biographies of physicians, where we learn he lived in the time of Marpa, was ordained as a monk, was active in western Tibet or Ngari, and drew his medical Termas from the heart of an image of Tandrin at Traduntse, and still other such Termas from still other images. It’s even said that lineages descending from him are still alive today. All very interesting and worthy of closer study, I do declare. And it is all made possible by searching in the databases of BDRC. Finally, if you require something about him in English, there is no better place to look than Gavin Kilty's translation of the 17th-century medical history by Desi Sangyé Gyatso, Mirror of Beryl, The Library of Tibetan Classics series 28, Wisdom (Somerville 2010), pp. 177-185.