Buddhism and the Karma Kamtsang
Tibetan Buddhist Tradition
What is a Buddha?
A Buddha is someone who realises (i.e. makes real) the ultimate potential of
the mind. Therefore, one day or another, we may all become Buddhas. The
ultimate potential is a state of total, unlimited clarity, that knows
everyone and everything. It is inseparable from an infinite, universal love
and compassion and endowed with tremendous power to help others whose minds
are open.
The journey to this ultimate state involves freeing the mind from its
grosser limitations, such as anger, selfish desire, pride etc., and also
its subtle limitations, mainly consisting of conditioned thought-
patterns of dualistic perception (subject-object, me-you, mind-body etc.).
Someone who completes this journey of liberation, perfectly, is a Buddha.
Such was Sakyamuni, who achieved his
total enlightenment over 2,500 years ago, in India.
Through the great clarity of his mind, he taught the universal truths of
existence, in their entirety. There are thought to be 1,002 such teaching
Buddhas during the lifetime of our solar system. Sakyamuni was the fourth.
General - the Buddha and His Teaching
A Buddha is not a saviour but a teacher. His teachings ("dharma")
show us what to do in order to achieve the same state that he achieved. The
dharma is perpetuated through the ages, as a living tradition of enlightened
experience and as a philosophy, by those members of the Buddhist community
who have themselves already achieved unmistaken insight. These are known as
the realised sangha.
The Buddha's teachings spread from India throughout Asia, even reaching as
far as Greece at one point (Buddhist Greek monarch - Melinder). They reached
what are today Japan, Indonesia, Mongolia and Russia, and countries (such as
China, Burma etc.) on the way from India to these continental extremities.
Today they are to be found throughout the world.
The teachings themselves are addressed to 3 different audiences:
... those wishing to improve
their worldly experience, in this life and future lives, through a better
understanding of the causal mechanisms of existence.
... those who recognise the
limited, anguished nature of worldly existence, wish to free from
it forever and who therefore seek a lasting peace and happiness.
... those who want not just the
peace and happiness of liberation from worldly suffering, but all the myriad
qualities present in total enlightenment. These qualities enable great benefit
for all other forms of conscious life, as we can see from the life of
Sakyamuni Buddha.
Each of us is unique. We have different needs and different aspirations.
Among those who benefit from practising the Buddhist meditation techniques
and way of life, one can distinguish three major capacities (yãna):
... the hinayana - the first two
audiences mentioned above. The keypoints of their spiritual path are non-
violence, pure ethics and meditation (mainly concentration meditation).
... the mahayana - the third
audience. Their path, which has a broader ethical dimension and a wider and
deeper scope of meditation, is underpinned at all times by a compassionate
longing to achieve the ultimate potential of one's own existence in order
to be truly capable of helping others.
... the vajrayana -
a special development of the mahayana buddhism mentioned above. It is special
on account of the very powerful, customised, meditation techniques which
it employs. This third yana can only be applied when an excellent and
properly-qualified teacher (Skt. = guru) teaches someone who has the
required stability and qualities of mind.
Tibetan Buddhism
All three aspects of the Buddha's teaching were perpetuated in Tibet. There
is not really such a thing as "Tibetan Buddhism", inasmuch as its content is
chiefly composed of the Buddhism flourishing in India between the 8th - 12th
centuries C.E., transplanted into Tibet over those centuries during a great
wave of activity animated by both Indian and Tibetan Buddhist masters
(fortunately so, for it was eradicated in its
native India in the centuries which followed). Although the Tibetans did
an excellent job of codifying and commenting on the Buddhism of India, they
added little to its actual content. Tibetan Buddhism should not be seen as
some exotic backwater of Buddhism, as some might expect, but as the cream of
Buddhism, in its most complete form found anywhere in the world. Within its
manifold teachings, one finds all that is found separately elsewhere as
Thervada, Zen etc. as well as many teachings that only remained extant in
Tibet.
Of the three sorts of Indian Buddhism, the vajrayana (also often referred
to as tantra) survived in a living
and integral form only in Tibet, although some traces of it are found, in a more rarefied
and hermetic way, in Burma and Japan. It is the nec plus ultra
of Buddhism and the Tibetans preserved it in an extraordinary way. Almost
one in four Tibetan men was a monk or hermit, it is said. A slightly less,
but still significant, percentage of the female population were nuns. It is through
their widespread and diligent practice of meditation that the "inner transmission"
of the real meaning of the Buddha's teachings was kept alive and flourishing
in Tibet.
Over the centuries, various major streams of Buddhism emerged in Tibet.
Although Tibetan scholars analyse 8 key currents, many people today
consider there to be 4 major schools of Tibetan Buddhism: the Nyingma,
Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug. Of these, the oldest is the Nyingma,
founded when Buddhism was first implanted in Tibet in the 8th century, and
the youngest is the Gelug, dating from around the 14th century,
the most well-known present-day figure of which is HH the Dalai Lama.
The Kagyu tradition
The Kagyu tradition, like all authentic Buddhist lineages, has its roots
firmly planted in the teachings of the Buddha. The central point is always
one and the same: how to emerge from the transient ups-and-downs, pains and
linited pleasures of worldly existence, based in illusion, and find the permanent,
ultimate happiness which is the true nature of existence? Illusion and truth,
relative and ultimate.
What distinguishes the Kagyu from the other traditions is the way in which
the Buddha's teaching is formulated and the extremely powerful meditation
techniques it employs to enable one to experience and make real the
meaning of the Buddha's teaching. The clarity of formulation and vividness
of technique arise through a direct and unbroken line of teaching coming
directly from the Buddha. This is explained more fully in the page on
Kagyu and the spiritual inheritance from Tilopa
and its section on the meaning of the name
Kagyu.
[by clinking on the hyperlinked
names, in the section that follows, you will find fuller
biographical data, taken from Ken Holmes' book
"Karmapa"]
The Kagyu lineage itself stems directly from the Buddha through two
streams of teaching. The content of both, and the real heart of the Kagyu
doctrine is called mahamudra:
... the first stream of teachings
comes from the Buddha, in the form of Vajradhara, through a succession of
Indian masters including Saraha and Nagarjuna and
ending with Maitripa in 11th century India. The main thrust
of this aspect of mahamudra is direct meditation work with mind itself.
These teachings were Taken to Tibet by Maitripa's disciple - the Tibetan,
Marpa.
... the second stream of teachings
came from Vajradhara to
Tilopa, an
extraordinary Buddhist mahasiddha who has assimilated and mastered the
teachings of over 100 important gurus of his day. He passed on the
quintessence of his heritage to Mahapandita
Naropa, one of Buddhism's
greatest scholars and one of the 84 great siddha of India. This line
of mahamudra uses many visualisation and yoga techniques to assist the
overall understanding of the nature of reality. The
Tibetan, Marpa, was the main spiritual heir to this transmission too.
Thus both streams of mahamudra went to Tibet due to the incredible strong-
minded diligenece of Marpa who, in his search for understanding,
made the perilous journey from Tibet to India
three times and who spent over 20 years there
under the guidance of Naropa absorbing the finest of Indian vajrayana
Buddhist teachings.
Marpa's own main disciple was Milarepa
, a person driven to Buddhism by the
dramatic events of his own life. Milarepa was to become Tibet's most famous
yogi, on account of his completing the journey to enlightenment within just
one lifetime and also through his unequalled diligence meditating in a thin
cotton robe in caves high in the snow-clad mountains.
The next two generations of Kagyu patriarch were to really shape its future
for the millenium to follow. Milarepa's disciple
Gampopa integrated
the profound teachings he received into the great scholarship and pure
monastic discipline that he had already mastered, to become a Buddhist master
competent in every aspect of the teachings and embodying the perfection of
all three yanas. Gampopa's coming had even been predicted by Buddha Sakyamuni,
in the Samdhiraja Sutra. Whereas Milarepa achieved enlightenment in one life,
Gampopa is seen as someone who remains for countless cosmic ages as a 10th
level bodhisattva, in order to assist Buddha after Buddha in bringing their
teachings to the world.
The chapter on Gampopa in the 2-volume edition of the "100,000 Songs of
Milarepa" will give you more details and an interesting ionsight into the
relationship between Milarepa and Gampopa.
There are 4 major and 8 minor Kagyu lineages stemming from the
disciples of Gampopa. They are collectively known as the Dagpo Kagyu,
Dagpo Rinpoche being another name for Gampopa. Both names (as do many
Tibetan names) originate in places. Dagpo was, in fact, the name of Gampopa's
birth place and Gampo is the name of the holy mountain on which he established
the first Tibetan Kagyu monastery.
Then follows an extraordinary phenomenon in the Kagyu lineage. Gampopa's
main disciple was the 1st Gyalwa Karmapa, Dusum Chenpa.
He was to reincarnate, again and again from then onwards, to guide and protect
the Kagyu lineage. Thus he was to become Tibet's first tulku, or reincarnate
guru. In between each successive Karmapa reincarnation, the continuity of
the lineage of spiritual insight was ensured by his chief disciple at the
time, who re-transmitted the details of the teachings to the reincarnation
of his previous guru. This unbroken succession, from Tilopa down through
Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa, Gampopa, the Karmapas, Situpas, Sharmapas,
Gyaltsabpas and the other gurus, is known as the Golden Rosary of
Kagyu teachers:
Golden Rosary of Kagyu teachers
His Holiness the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa passed away in 1981 and his
reincarnation was discovered in Tibet in 1992. The 17th Gyalwa
Karmapa is Urgyen Trinley Dorje, presently at the traditional
Tibetan seat of the Karmapas:
Tsurphu monastery in Tibet.
The main lineage-holders at present are the Khentin Tai Situpa and the
Goshir Gyaltsabpa. When the time is appropriate, they will re-transmit
the formal outer shell of the Kagyu teachings to the 17th Karmapa, whose
mind is the continuing purity and clarity of the former Karmapas. It is
traditionally not considered appropriate to include either these two
lineage-holders or the present Karmapa in the Golden Rosary list until this
formal transmission has been accomplished.
.. Page created and maintained
by Ken Holmes
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Last updated 25 January 1997
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