Padmasambhava

Padmasambhava is revered across the Himalaya as Guru Rinpoche, the precious teacher, and in the Nyingma school as a second buddha. The gap between what can be documented about him and what is told about him is one of the widest in the history of religion, and both sides of it are worth stating plainly.

What the early record supports. The Testament of Ba, in versions dating from perhaps the ninth to the twelfth centuries, associates him with the founding of Samye, Tibet's first monastery, under King Trisong Detsen, who reigned from 755 to the end of the century. The Dunhuang manuscripts, which are early and independent, mention a tantric master named Padmasambhava associated with kilaya rituals who tames demons. Crucially, they do not connect him to Trisong Detsen. So the early witness knows the name and the ritual specialism but not the national-founder role. His historical existence was questioned by earlier Tibetologists and is now cautiously accepted.

What came later. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries several parallel narratives circulated about who had brought Buddhism to Tibet, featuring Padmasambhava, Vimalamitra and Vairotsana, and Padmasambhava's did not initially dominate. Nyangral Nyima Ozer, 1124 to 1192, wrote the Zangling-ma, the earliest full biography. Orgyen Lingpa, 1323 to about 1360, elaborated further, introducing the eleven deeds in the Padma bka' thang of 1352. By the end of the twelfth century his account had displaced the others.

The developed life has him born from a lotus in Oddiyana as an eight-year-old, subduing the gods and spirits of Tibet one by one and binding them under oath as protectors, taking twenty-five chief disciples, and concealing terma to be recovered by prophesied revealers in later centuries.

Scholars working this material include Sam van Schaik, Jacob Dalton and Lewis Doney.

The terma system is the mechanism by which the Nyingma school receives new scripture, and it is unusual in that the tradition is entirely open about the fact that the texts appear later than the figure they are attributed to.

The claim is that Padmasambhava, foreseeing periods when the teaching would be suppressed or misunderstood, concealed texts, objects and instructions in rocks, lakes, statues, pillars and in the minds of his disciples, to be found when they would be useful. The finders are tertons, treasure revealers, understood to be rebirths of those disciples. Earth treasures are physical objects recovered from physical places; mind treasures arise in the terton's awareness without any object being dug up. The best-known terma in the West is the collection published in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Two things follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is that this is a working system for producing authoritative new texts inside a tradition that formally closed its canon, and it produces a great deal of the Nyingma literature, including the biographies of Padmasambhava himself. Nyangral Nyima Ozer and Orgyen Lingpa, who wrote the standard lives, were both tertons, so the biography of the figure who authorises terma is itself terma. The circularity is visible from outside and does not trouble the tradition, which does not share the assumption that a text's value depends on the date of its composition.

The second is that this makes historical work on Padmasambhava difficult in a specific way. The sources are not forgeries in intent: nobody conceals that the Padma bka' thang was written in 1352. They are texts making a claim about transmission that a historian cannot evaluate on historical grounds.

Other Tibetan schools have contested terma, and the Nyingma have defended it, since at least the eleventh century.