The Yogin and the Madman

Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa

Andrew Quintman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231535533
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa's (1052–1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre's most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangnyön Heruka, or the "Madman of Western Tibet." Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin's corporeal relics.

1

EARLIEST SOURCES

A BIOGRAPHICAL BIRTH

ORIENTATIONS

Apropos of Biographical Anatomy

DAWN BREAKS on the morning after Milarepa’s cremation, and his longtime follower Rechungpa wakes from a wondrous but disheartening dream: ḍākinī maidens were carrying off his master’s mortal remains in the form of a radiant sphere of light. Anxious, he rouses his fellow disciples, and together they peer into the funerary cell, only to find the chamber empty. Neither ashes nor bones remain; gone too are the sacred pearl-like relics, causing even greater dismay. Celestial goddesses had swept clean the yogin’s every physical trace, leaving nothing behind. Heartbroken, the assembly instead inherits his few worldly possessions: a cap, a walking staff, strips of his cotton robe, pieces of hard rock sugar. Such is the record of Milarepa’s passing as told in the fifteenth-century standard version of his life story.

But in addition to these everyday items, Milarepa’s disciples and patrons also kept stories of the yogin’s life, his travels, his ascetic practices, and—perhaps most importantly—his songs. And although Mila’s mortal remains had vanished from sight, his life would take shape once again through the gradual recording and reworking of these accounts. What might have first decomposed was eventually recomposed through the gradual codification of his biographical corpus. This emerged first as rudimentary outlines, a simple skeletal frame. Over time, the structure was modeled by subsequent literary works, adding depth and detail to its inner coil until finally—some four centuries later—a standard life story appeared, breathing life back into the biography. As the yogin’s life came to an end, so his life story took birth.

This study is, in part, an exercise in literary archaeology, sifting through strata of textual fragments and narrative shards laid upon the bedrock of Milarepa’s literary history. But it is equally an experiment in biographical anatomy, examining visceral layers of life writing that came to portray the yogin as a fully fleshed individual. It thus begins in this chapter with the deepest biographical stratum, the innermost layers that constitute Mila’s biographical frame. These are the fragmentary records and notes written by two of the yogin’s direct disciples, Ngendzong Repa and Gampopa, with an additional reference to a work purportedly by Rechungpa.

In some cases these writings are referred to as a Life or biography (rnam thar), and they do fulfill the minimal requirements for such, as described in the introduction. Yet they are not fully formed life stories, at least as those are commonly understood. Ngendzong’s work reviewed in this chapter contains great narrative detail, but lies removed from the yogin’s larger spiritual career; Gampopa’s text maintains a broad sense of biographic chronology (birth, activities, death), but achieves this through a series of largely ambiguous and disconnected vignettes. Both are sketches. They do, however, provide the core components of literary structure and narrative detail—the biographical frame—around which mature versions of the biography could be hung. Thus they mark an incipient form of life writing: a prototype for a combined life story and song collection, analyzed in the next chapter, which I have termed the “proto-Life/Songs” (proto-rnam mgur). These works first appeared in the context of abbreviated lineage records before serving as a model for more complete, more compelling, and perhaps more lifelike representations of the yogin’s life and teachings.

As this chapter explores the early biographical fragments, it will also begin to address two other issues central to the tradition: the legitimation of biographical writing and the relationship between writing lives and promulgating Dharma. These early sources make explicit and repeated claims about their authenticity by stressing the close association of subject and biographer, teacher and disciple, absent from later versions. Ngendzong Repa is portrayed as an ideal archivist, endowed with perfect memory, and said to have verified his sketches directly with Milarepa on multiple occasions. Gampopa’s text similarly stresses the direct transmission of its biographical portrait, recorded in the words of a witness to the subject’s life.

Milarepa’s biographical tradition, like his life itself, was closely tied to the spread of tantric instructions known as the aural transmissions (snyan brgyud), which became the seminal yogic practices of many early Kagyu practitioners. It is not surprising, therefore, that early representations of Milarepa’s life developed in concert with literature documenting the aural transmission lineages. Even the Blue Annals (Deb gter sngon po), a late publication relative to Mila’s biographical tradition, records the master’s life not in the context of his guru’s lineage (the so-called Marpa Kagyu) but specifically in terms of the promulgation of two aural transmission lines.¹ Authors of early biographical works were also important figures in the redaction and transmission of aural transmission texts; among them, Ngendzong Repa stands out most clearly.

Autobiography in Biography

Before turning to the writings of the yogin’s disciples, however, we should first listen to a distinctly autobiographical voice rising through the biographical tradition, recording what are purported to be the words of Milarepa himself. Tibetan interest in self-authored life stories can be traced back at least to the time of Milarepa’s own nascent biographical tradition, and to authors such as the twelfth-century master Lama Zhang, himself one of Mila’s early biographers.² The genre of autobiography later flourished in Tibet, reaching a crescendo in the seventeenth century with the Fifth Dalai Lama’s exhaustive multivolume memoir.³

The stories and songs of Milarepa’s life are filled with first-person accounts; the standard version of his life story is rendered almost entirely as autobiographical narrative—a literary conceit that will be addressed in detail in chapters 4 and 5. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that Milarepa took any interest in recording his own life on paper.⁴ It appears he did not keep notes or diaries, and there is no reason to believe he requested his followers to do so.⁵ Neither did he record his own songs as did, for example, the famed nineteenth-century master Zhapkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol (1781–1851) in his own magisterial autobiography.⁶ As with the figure of the Buddha himself, every word ascribed to Mila has been mediated through one or more generations of disciples, authors, and scribes; there is little, if anything, we can claim to know about him directly.

Nevertheless, many of Milarepa’s songs—in both the early biographies and the later versions—are distinctly self-reflexive. This stems, in part, from the style of verse for which he was famed: “songs of realization” (mgur) said to illuminate the personal experiences gained through sustained yogic meditation. These songs could describe a wide range of motivations and insights, from the meditator’s dissatisfaction with worldly life and eventual renunciation to the hardships of solitary retreat and the blossoming of Buddhist awakening. One example, preserved in many early versions of the life story, describes Milarepa’s overwhelming feeling of impermanence and renunciation upon finding his childhood home destroyed and his family broken:

Alas. Alas. Ay me. Ay me. How sad.

People invested in the things of life’s round—

I think of them over and over; again and again I despair.

They engage and engage, and stir up from its depths so much torment.

They whirl and they whirl and are cast in the depths of life’s round.⁷

Later he adds:

Alas. The things of life’s round have no essence.

Ephemeral. Ephemeral. No essence.

Changing and changing. No essence.

Uncertain. Uncertain. No essence.⁸

Indeed, Milarepa’s songs of realization are deeply personal records of both the context and the content of his spiritual career even as they are—in their written form—clearly the products of an outside author. And while the yogin’s early biographies tell his life story by means of a third-person narrative, the songs of realization retain a deeply autobiographical flavor.

Some of his poetry likewise echoes Tibet’s early epic tales of King Gesar, in which subjects narrate broad sweeps of their life, frequently introducing themselves with a stereotyped formula: “Do you know me? If you don’t, I am so and so.”⁹ Milarepa repeatedly begins his verses with similar phrasing, as in this reply made to a passing merchant, recorded in Gampopa’s early work:

Have you a clue who’s before you now?

If you don’t know who this is here now—

I am the yogin Mila.¹⁰

The corpus of Milarepa’s poetry records numerous songs in which the yogin further recounts details of his life—the sins committed in his youth, the difficulties he underwent during his training—to illustrate the depth of his renunciation or the power of his devotion. One example occurs during his first encounter with future disciple Zhiwa Ö, affording an opportune moment for the autobiographical song that follows. The...