The Lamp for Integrating the Practices (Caryamelapakapradipa)

The Gradual Path of Vajrayana Buddhism

Aryadeva, Christian K. Wedemeyer

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781949163186
• eBook ISBN: 9781949163193
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

An essential tantric text on the practice of advancedyoga in tantric Buddhism. The Lamp for Integrating the Practices (Caryamelapakapradipa) is a systematic and comprehensive exposition of the most advanced yogas of the Esoteric Community Tantra ( Guhyasamaja-tantra ) as espoused by the Noble (Nagarjuna) tradition, an influential school of interpretation within the Mahayoga traditions of Indian Buddhist mysticism. Equal in authority to Nagarjuna's famous Five Stages ( Pañcakrama ), Aryadeva's work is perhaps the earliest prose example of the "stages of the mantra path" genre in Sanskrit. Its systematic path exerted immense influence on later Indian and Tibetan traditions, and it is widely cited by masters from all four major lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. This volume presents the Lamp in a thoroughly annotated English translation. It includesan introductory study discussing the history of the Guhyasamaja and its exegetical traditions, surveying the scriptural and commentarial sources of the Nagarjuna tradition, and analyzing in detail the contents of the Lamp. The book also features a detailed, trilingual glossary. Simultaneously presented online for scholars are a version of its Sanskrit original, critically edited from recently identified manuscripts, and a critical edition of the eleventh-century Tibetan translation by Rinchen Zangpo, including notes on readings found in "lost, " alternative translations.

Part One

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Prologue

ĀRYADEVA’S Lamp for Integrating the Practices (Caryā-melāpaka-pradīpa, hereafter CMP or the Lamp) is among the most important and influential works in the history of esoteric Buddhist thought. One may infer as much from the fact that it is cited in numerous Indian commentaries of the late first and early second millennia, including the Sekoddeśaṭīkā of Naḍapāda (Nāropā) and the Pañcakrama-ṭippaṇī Yogi-manoharā of Muniśrībhadra. In Tibet, it has been considered of the highest authority by authors from all of the various traditional lineages over many centuries. In Gö Kugpa Lhay­tsay’s eleventh-century Survey of the Esoteric Community ( gSang ’dus stong thun) — the earliest extant Tibetan treatise on the Noble Tradition’s practice of the Esoteric Community (Guhyasamāja) Tantra — it is the first and arguably the most prominent textual authority cited; and it was closely studied and cited by a wide range of Tibetan scholar-monks from this time until at least the seventeenth century. Perhaps most notably, the Lamp served as a definitive template for the early fifteenth-century systematization of esoteric practice by the founder of the Ganden (later Geluk) Tradition, Je Rinpoche Lozang Drakpa (1357–1419; a.k.a. Tsongkhapa), through which it continues to exercise a decisive (if second-hand) influence on much of contemporary Tibetan practice of the esoteric traditions to this very day.

It may be considered remarkable, then, that the Lamp has not generated much comment by modern scholars of Buddhism, who have tended (insofar as they have taken notice of the esoteric traditions at all) to focus their attention on the few Vajrayāna works edited and published in the early twentieth century — a number among which the CMP does not figure. A work that was so edited and published, however, and that accordingly has been noticed and commented on since the very inception of the modern study of the Buddhist traditions, is the Pañcakrama, or Five Stages, of Nāgārjuna (hereafter PK). This latter is intimately related to the CMP, for it is the central idea of the PK that the CMP seeks to elaborate and legitimate.

The existence, and to a limited extent the importance, of the PK was noted as early as 1844 in what has come to be considered the foundational document of the modern academic study of Buddhism: Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction à l’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien. Burnouf was not, however, much impressed by Nāgārjuna’s work — indeed, he was rather volubly put off by its antinomian rhetoric — and, aside from a few elementary observations about its use of maṇḍalas and the mantra oṃ śūnyatā-jñāna-svabhāvātmako ’ham, he did not have much to contribute to its study or analysis.⁸ Further research in this area was left to his self-appointed successor, Louis de La Vallée Poussin, who took up work on the PK and one of its commentaries in the 1890s. In 1894, La Vallée Poussin published an initial notice of this work, entitled “Note sur le Pañcakrama,” which was subsequently republished as the introduction to his critical edition in 1896.⁹ Since the publication of that work, the PK has been a touchstone of the published works of esoteric Buddhism, referred to and cited in a variety of contexts.

There has not, however, been equal attention paid to works in the same tradition preserved unpublished in manuscript form or solely in Tibetan translation, as was the CMP until quite recently. The earliest mention of the CMP in modern scholarship seems to have been in Ferdinand Lessing and Alex Wayman’s 1967 translation of the Fundamentals of the Buddhist Tantras (rGyud sde spyi rnam) of Kaydrup Je Gelek Palzang (1385–1438), a major disciple of Tsongkhapa.¹⁰ Further brief reference was subsequently made by Wayman in an article entitled “Early Literary History of the Buddhist Tantras, especially the Guhyasamāja Tantra.”¹¹ Much of this discussion was taken over verbatim into Wayman’s 1977 Yoga of the Guhyasamāja Tantra, which seems to represent what is to date the most extensive discussion of this work and its related traditions in a European language. Wayman emphasized the importance of the Lamp, writing that “in this tradition the greatest work on important phases of tantric praxis is Āryadeva’s Caryāmelāpakapradīpa.”¹²

The “tradition” he speaks of is one that Tibetan intellectuals refer to as the Noble Tradition of the Esoteric Community ( gsang ’dus ’phags lugs). Since the work of Wayman and others, this moniker¹³ has been taken up into scholarly usage. While we have no evidence that Indian tradition likewise had a special name for this school of thought and practice, the literature of the tradition itself is sufficiently coherent and self-referential that it may confidently be said to form a consistent school of thought. Thus, though the name may not be of Indian origin, its application in this case seems apposite. Nonetheless, it should always be borne in mind that the “canon” of commentarial literature this name implies does not appear to have been explicitly so-called in the Indian context.

That said, what is “the Noble Tradition of the Esoteric Community?” In brief, the Noble Tradition comprises a group of authors (and their spiritual descendents) who commented in distinctive ways upon the literature and praxis of the Guhyasamāja Tantra, or Esoteric Community Tantra (hereafter GST or Esoteric Community) — one of the most important scriptures of Indian esoteric Buddhism.¹⁴ Perhaps the idea most central to the Noble Tradition (though by no means exclusive to it) is that the goal of Buddhist enlightenment is to be reached through a gradual yogic process, rather than through a “sudden” or immediate experience. There is, of course, more to it than this, which will be explored in greater detail below. In the meantime, as a working definition, we may postulate that the Noble Tradition asserts that full and complete realization as an enlightened world teacher (samyaksaṃbuddha) is a) only possible through the practice of yogic techniques revealed in the Esoteric Community Tantra, b) that further essential components of these techniques are only taught in a set of auxiliary “explanatory tantras” (vyākhyā-tantra), and c) that these techniques effect a gradual process of transformation whose main features may be reduced to a schema of discrete stages.

In what follows, I will attempt both to unpack the richness condensed into these three propositions and to provide the background necessary to appreciate and to understand the significance and the thought of the Lamp and the school of which it is an authoritative statement. To date, modern scholarship on these traditions has (it seems to me) made little effort to communicate the fundamental concerns of these Buddhist thinkers — either to other specialists or to a more general public. While there have been some few articles discussing the Noble Tradition, nowhere have its constitution and its main contributions to Buddhist thought and practice been clearly and succinctly outlined. Wayman’s remains the only book-length contribution in this area. As valuable as Wayman’s work may have been in its time and place (and I will leave that for the enterprising reader to determine), Yoga does not succeed in communicating clearly and systematically the thought of the Noble Tradition, although it is devoted precisely to elucidating the same. Unfortunately, as in the case of much scholarship on the esoteric Buddhist traditions, Wayman seems not fully to believe that the tradition even has a coherent, explicable system of thought to elucidate, referring as he does to its doctrines as “arcane lore.”

In attempting to rectify this lacuna, I proceed on the understanding that the teachings of this tradition are not at all “arcane,” except in the limited sense that it may at one time have been restricted to initiated practitioners (and even this proposition is open to serious question).¹⁵ The thought of the tradition is herein communicated through the vehicle of a translation and explanation of the CMP, a work ideally suited to this task insofar as it constitutes an unusually lucid and direct presentation of the yogic system and doctrinal underpinnings of the Esoteric Community as mediated through the interpretative lens of Nāgārjuna’s school. This introduction seeks to give an overall sense of the parameters of the tradition — its history, literature, and major figures — as well as to explain its yogic platform in terms accessible to both specialist scholars of Indic religions and the educated public. I begin by addressing the historical context of the tradition and its authors; I then give an overview of the major monuments of the literature of the school; this is followed by an analysis and close reading of the CMP. The introduction concludes with some observations concerning the materials and methods used in editing and translating the work.

History of the Noble Tradition

The Noble Tradition is a school of Buddhist esoteric thought and practice centering on the Esoteric Community Tantra (though making frequent and wide reference to other esoteric scriptures). It is styled “Noble” by Tibetan exegetes in deference to its central thinker, the Noble (i.e., Ārya) Nāgārjuna (Tib. [dpal mgon] ’phags pa klu sgrub), whose PK is the most authoritative statement of the school’s yogic technologies — as contrasted with the other major tradition so identified, which bears the name of its chief thinker, Jñānapāda.¹⁶ In addition to Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, its most significant authors bear the names Nāgabodhi and Candrakīrti. To anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Mahāyāna Buddhist thought, these names will not be unfamiliar, and their conjunction as members of a common “school” will come as no surprise: for these are none other than the names of the more famous thinkers of the exoteric Mahāyāna Centrist Tradition (madhyamaka, dbu ma). Thus, the attributions of these esoteric works to these authors suggests a link between the exoteric school of the Centrists and the esoteric school of the Noble Tradition.

The exact nature of this link, however, has been a matter ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface to the First and Second Editions
• Author’s Prefaces to the First Edition
• Author’s Preface to the Second Edition
• Abbreviations and Sigla
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Translation
• Appendixes, Bibliography, Indexes
• Bibliography
• Indexes
• Copyright