Renunciation and Longing

The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint

Annabella Pitkin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780226816920, 9780226796376
• eBook ISBN: 9780226816913
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.
 
In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama's death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.
 
In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.

[ CHAPTER 1 ]

“Like Water into Water”: Transmission Lineages in Tibetan Buddhism

You continually wandered to unmarked regions and directions,

You studied at the lotus feet of scholars and masters without sectarianism (ris med)

You excelled in all Dharmas, both common and uncommon.

At your feet, O Buddhist ascetic, I pay homage.

Angrup 2005:97

Teacher-Student Connections: “You have come from such a distance”

Sometime in summer during the early 1920s, the Dzogchen master and scholar Zhenpen Chokyi Nangwa (1871–1927), widely known as Khenpo Zhenga, received a visitor at his hermitage, high on the mountainside above the forested upper slopes of Gyawo, in the eastern Tibetan region of Kham, near the cultural border with China.1 The visitor was Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen. Near thirty at the time of this meeting, Khunu Lama arrived at the Gyawo retreat thin and travel-worn. He had journeyed some fourteen hundred kilometers east from Lhasa to Kham on foot and horseback, to meet religious teachers. In the words of namtar author K. Angrup, “Having taken on his back what was necessary for his livelihood, he traveled the long difficult roads from central Tibet to Kham, all the while not making any mental comparisons [i.e., between comfort and discomfort] but rather, by the great power of his enthusiasm [traveling easily], like a swan plunging into a lotus lake.”2 Khunu Lama was even further from his own birthplace in Kinnaur, far to the southwest on the other side of the Himalayas. Not for nothing does Angrup describe him as “an older Indian student.”3 His Kinnauri appearance and accent seemed so foreign to the people he met in eastern Tibet that many people there simply referred to him as the Gyagar Lama (“The Indian Lama”), or sometimes as an atsara, or “Indian beggar.”4

Khenpo Zhenga was already near the end of his life when Khunu Lama arrived and had stopped teaching or taking on new students. He had entered retreat to prepare for death. One of the towering religious and intellectual figures of the period, he would pass away soon after their meeting, in March 1927, at age 56.5 When Khunu Lama arrived requesting teachings, the Khenpo reportedly said, “‘It has been many years since I gave explanatory teachings. It is time to practice, for death is waiting; there will be no explanation of the Dharma.’”6

But Khunu Lama refused to leave or to content himself with relationships to other teachers at the hermitage, although these other teachers were themselves trained disciples of Khenpo Zhenga. According to biographers of both men, Khunu Lama had developed faith in the Khenpo, and so he persisted, remaining at the hermitage and repeatedly requesting teachings from Zhenga himself. Finally, Zhenga agreed to teach him, saying, “‘You have come from such a distance; moreover, it would be helpful if you benefited the teachings and beings in the future.’” The same source continues, “He then conferred on Tenzin Gyaltsen all of the pith instructions in their entirety, emphasizing the thirteen great source texts. He entrusted Tenzin Gyaltsen with the ultimate transmission, even giving him his own copies of these thirteen texts.”7 In this way, Khunu Lama became one of the last students accepted by Khenpo Zhenga before he passed away.

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Lineage connection forms a recurring motif in stories about Khunu Lama, who seems to have been a kind of virtuoso of connection. Biographers and students describe how he made traveling in order to meet teachers the central project of the first half of his life. Over and over again, in my conversations with people who knew him or had heard of him, a recurring source of interest and admiration was the sheer number of teachers Khunu Lama met, the range of teachings he received, and the degree to which he entered into multiple lineage networks across the entire Himalayan region.

For Khunu Lama, travel and lineage connections went closely together. The trajectory of his early years as a student took him from his birthplace in the remote Kinnaur Valley on the Indo-Tibetan border to central Tibet, via northern India and Sikkim. Subsequently, he traveled across the Tibetan Plateau, first from west to east and then back to central Tibet and on to India again, meeting lamas and receiving teachings along the way. It can be hard to fathom the distances involved, the discomforts of travel, mostly on foot or horseback, across mountain passes and rivers, through mud and blizzards, to regions where he was a stranger. Khunu Lama’s own students remember him as being a kind of human repository of Buddhist teachings and connections as a result of these journeys.

Written works on his life and oral stories people tell about him often note that, when his students asked him who his masters were, he listed twenty-two root gurus, eighteen of whom he met during his sojourn in Kham. Even more remarkably, these twenty-two gurus were from across the spectrum of Tibetan Buddhist lineages and teaching systems, including from each of the four main Tibetan Buddhist schools, the Sakya, Nyingma, Kagyu, and Geluk. Many people emphasize that Khunu Lama had teachers and transmissions from every school of Tibetan Buddhism, leading narrators to highlight his role as an ecumenical or rimè teacher and practitioner, a designation to which I will return. Importantly, Khunu Lama was in no way unique in this regard. Many influential figures in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist intellectual and religious history have recorded even longer lists of root gurus, with a similar diversity of lineages and styles.8

In this chapter, I consider the main kinds of lineage relationship that Khunu Lama participated in, including lineages of family, of teacher-student transmission, and of incarnation. Focusing especially here on his youth and his pursuit of teachings during the first half of his life, including from Khenpo Zhenga, I link the ecumenicism for which Khunu Lama is remembered with the range and diversity of his lineage connections, and with his lifelong practice of traveling for the sake of learning (and teaching). To convey something of the historical and intellectual context of Khunu Lama’s choices, and of present-day accounts of his life, I also note parallels to the life stories of influential individuals associated with the lineages that he joined, many of whom are held up by present-day authors as authorizing referents exemplifying the values of renunciation, non-sectarian scholarship, and devotion also attributed to Khunu Lama. While this chapter focuses broadly on accounts of lineage connection, readers may also notice the importance of narratives of separation—for instance, in moments where students struggle to gain their teachers’ acceptance.

The Lineage Family

Historically, Tibetan and Himalayan authors and audiences, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, have attended with care not only to lineages of spiritual or intellectual transmission, but also to lineages of family descent, especially of important figures. The importance of family lineage descent is clear in the earliest written Tibetan sources, as well as in oral literature from genres ranging from the epic to wedding songs. Family lineages in Tibetan and Himalayan settings harness influential notions of biological relatedness and inheritance, in which a dominant “bone” (rus) lineage is passed down through the father, and a more recessive “blood” (khrag) lineage is passed through the mother.9 Individual Himalayan and Tibetan communities in different regions incorporate these and related notions of family lineage, hierarchy, and kinship in differing ways. These mappings of biological descent can be important not only to individual families for decisions about inherited property and marriage, but also for clan histories, genealogies, and power. In the context of clan genealogy, political authority and social status as well as economic claims may be at stake in assertions of lineage descent.

Tibetan Buddhist transmission lineages resemble family lineages in part because Tibetan Buddhists, like Buddhists in general, intentionally highlight the similarities between them. For instance, participants in Tibetan Buddhist transmission lineages often refer to each other using the vocabulary of family kinship, in phrases like “father lama” (ba bla ma), “heart child” (thugs sres), and “honored mother/wife” (yum). These patterns resemble and extend practices of medieval Indian Buddhist tantric communities.10 Similar forms occur in South and East Asian Buddhist lineage practices more generally.11 Even lineages of scholarship for forms of knowledge that Tibetan authors generally classify as not explicitly Buddhist, such as medicine, poetics, and grammar, tend to follow the pattern of lineage succession on a genealogical model, though these relationships are often described with less intimacy.12

During their assimilation of Indian Buddhism from the seventh to roughly the twelfth centuries, Tibetans had adopted Indian Buddhist vocabularies of lineage that were already rich with familial resonances. Indian Buddhists from a very early period had reimagined an array of words for family, caste, and clan as inward qualities, associated with Buddhist devotion and practice. Thus, for example, the Sanskrit term gotra (rigs in Tibetan), which can mean lineage or genetic material in the familial and biological sense, was repurposed in Buddhist texts to mean membership in the “family” of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas.13 This Buddhist family membership can be achieved through rituals of initiation, vows of commitment, and/or the generation of inner Buddhist qualities. Most importantly for Mahāyāna Buddhists, membership in the family of the Buddhas derives from generation of the quality of bodhicitta, the bodhisattva’s “mind of enlightenment”—that is, the mind of someone wishing to become enlightened for the sake of others.14

In framing networks of gurus and disciples using these imaginal repertoires of family relations, Tibetan Buddhists, like Indian Buddhists and Buddhists elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia, attest to the power and importance of guru-disciple connections. At the same time, such familial vocabularies also actively work to shore up the intimacy and reciprocal obligations built into Buddhist lineage relationships. The vocabulary of parent-guru/child-student, or of dharma siblings, not only reveals what may be the emotional closeness of such interpersonal ties, but also serves a hortatory and disciplinary function (in the literal sense of training disciples): the discourse of family respect, obligation, and care shows how these Buddhist relationships should function. In a way reminiscent of J. L. Austin’s theory of the speech act, Buddhist vocabularies of familial intimacy and relationality are framed so as to cause participants to enact these relationships when they use these words.15

Describing guru-disciple lineages as families also offers a way to negotiate one of the most complex dynamics in Buddhist societies—namely, the relationship between biological family life and the Buddhist community. The nature of this relationship is a recurring source of interest and reflection for Buddhist practitioners. It is also a repeated site of misunderstanding and critique for non-Buddhist writers and observers. Both Buddhists and critics of Buddhism often cite the famous home-departure scene from accounts of the life of the Buddha Śākyamuni, in which the Buddha-to-be leaves behind his aging father and stepmother, his wife Yaśodharā, and their infant son in order to seek enlightenment. This scene serves as a lightning rod for fantasies and anxieties about the nature of Buddhist renunciation.

For critics of Buddhism ranging from Song Dynasty Confucians to nineteenth-century European Orientalists, the scene of the Buddha’s departure from home suggests a profound tension between committed Buddhist practice and the intimacies and obligations of family relationships. Buddhist commentators by contrast have often interpreted the Buddha’s “Great Departure” as showing the necessity of renouncing ordinary family life if one is to truly benefit family and loved ones of this or any lifetime. This Buddhist claim depends on two interrelated propositions: first, that non-enlightened people cannot save their family members from suffering and death, which are the “real” dangers to human happiness; and second, that only by renouncing can one achieve Buddhist enlightenment, which, in Buddhist terms, is the only state in which one can truly help others.

In fact, however, emotionally and spiritually compelling Buddhist rhetorics of renunciation have consistently coexisted in Buddhist societies with the ongoing importance of family and kin group.16 On the one hand, Buddhists in many places and historical periods have taken monastic vows, including vows of celibacy. Likewise, Buddhists have often valorized monastic practice as essential for the continuity of Buddhist knowledge and the availability of Buddhist teaching, as well as for providing a “field of merit” for sponsors and lay donors within the larger community. Buddhists across Asia have frequently linked the flourishing of the monastic sangha (specifically the male sangha of fully ordained bhikṣu/bhikku) with the flourishing of the kingdom or nation and its protection from epidemics and war.17

Buddhists in many times and places have wrestled on a personal level with the transitoriness and conflicting obligations of family life, clan membership, and political involvement. In the face of personal tragedy, political persecution, or professional disappointment, Buddhist practices of renunciation have offered refuge, both in the technical Buddhist sense of placing oneself under the care of the Buddha, Dharma, and Buddhist community, and in the more general meaning of a respite and alternative. Renunciation (the exact contours of which have varied from place to place) has offered a religious ideal, a form of social critique, a way of being in the world, a response to a personal confrontation with impermanence, a form of institutional membership, a moral shield against political or monetary corruption, and often all of the above.

Yet at the same time, as examples from India to Thailand, China, Japan, and the Tibetan world suggest, many Buddhists’ activities as Buddhists have also been family- and clan-related, even in the case of monastics. Not only did and do individuals renounce (both in the specific sense of taking monastic vows, and in other ways) together with close relatives, spouses, children, kin group, and friends, but those who become monks and nuns have frequently remained closely connected to kin and friends within the monastic establishment, albeit often through “Buddhist” forms of connection, such as teacher-student relationships and ritual communities.18 In general, in societies that have adopted Buddhism, the pre-Buddhist family-based structures of clan and community that historically undergirded social life have continued to operate within Buddhist institutions and networks. People often become Buddhists together. An awareness of this helps to put to rest the assertions of colonial-era European writers that Asian Buddhists, and especially the Vajrayāna practitioners of the Himalayan region, were degenerates, louche idolators who had “lost” the “original” monastic purity of early Buddhism.19

In Tibet and the Himalayan re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Technical Note on Phonetic Transcription, Transliteration, and Naming Practices
• Maps of Khunu Lama’s Travels
• Chronology
• introduction  Themes in the Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Renunciant
• chapter 1  “Like Water into Water”: Transmission Lineages in Tibetan Buddhism
• chapter 2  “He abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma”: Tibetan Buddhist Imaginaries of Home-Leaving and Renunciation
• chapter 3  “Aim Your Dharma Practice at a Beggar’s Life”
• chapter 4  Dislocation and Continuity
• chapter 5  “With such devotion that tears cascade from your eyes”: Renunciation, Separation, and Guru Devotion
• chapter 6  Death and Other Disruptions: Dying Like a Dog in the Wilderness
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index