Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint 9780226816913

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Renunciation and Longing

Figure 1. Khunu Lama and Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, c. 1976. Photo courtesy of Namdol / Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche

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Renunciation and Longing ... The Life of a Twentieth- Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint

Annabella Pitkin

T h e U n i v er si t y of Ch ic ago Pr e ss Ch ic ago a n d Lon don

BU D D H I S M A N D M O D E R N I T Y A series edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr. Recent Books in the Series The Buddha’s Tooth (2021), by John S. Strong Seeking Śākyamuni (2019), by Richard M. Jaffe The Passion Book (2018), by Gendun Chopel A Storied Sage (2016), by Micah L. Auerback Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol (2016), by Donald S. Lopez Jr.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contactthe University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60thSt., Chicago,IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79637-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81692-0 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81691-3 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816913.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pitkin, Annabella, author. Title: Renunciation and longing : the life of a twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist saint / Annabella Pitkin. Other titles: Buddhism and modernity. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Series: Buddhism and modernity | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021042965 | ISBN 9780226796376 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226816920 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226816913 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Khunu Lama, Rinpoche, 1895–1977. | Buddhism—China—Tibet Autonomous Region—Biography. | Buddhist saints—Biography. Classification: LCC BQ968.H87 P58 2022 | DDC 294.3/923092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042965 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

༄༅ །  ་ག ས་ས ་གཏད་ས ་ག ས་ང་ལ་གཏད།  ང་ གས་ ་གཏད་ ་ གས་ ོ ག ་ མ་གཏད། གཏད་ས་བ ་ ་ཉམས་ ན་ ར་ང ས་པ། བཀའ་གདམས་ ག་ ལ་བས ་པ་ ཞབས་ ར ་འད ། You aimed your mind at the Dharma, and your Dharma practice at a beggar’s life. You aimed to practice a beggar’s life till death, and aimed your death at a dry ravine. O you who sincerely practiced the Four Aims of the Kadampas, At your feet I bow down.

།  ན་པ་ གས་དང་འ ག་ ན་་ བད་དང་།  ་་ ་དགའ་ཐ་མལ་་  ས་ གས། འ ག་ ན་ས ་བད་དག་ལས་མ ་འདས་པ།  ལ་འ ར་དབང་ག ་ན་ ་ ཞ བས་ར་ འད། With no desire for sweet fame or worldly honor, Or a ruler’s flattery or ordinary people’s expectations, You transcended the eight worldly concerns. O Great Lord of Yogins, at your feet I bow down. K. Angrup, Rnam thar gsol ‘debs dad pa’i ‘jug ngogs (Angrup 2005, 96–97)

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Technical Note on Phonetic Transcription, Transliteration, and Naming Practices

xix

Maps of Khunu Lama’s Travels Chronology

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Int rod u cti o n

Themes in the Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Renunciant 1 C h a pt e r 1

“Like Water into Water”: Transmission Lineages in Tibetan Buddhism 25 C h a pt e r 2

“He abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma”: Tibetan Buddhist Imaginaries of Home-Leaving and Renunciation 48 C h a pt e r 3

“Aim Your Dharma Practice at a Beggar’s Life”

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C h a pt e r 4

Dislocation and Continuity 112 C h a pt e r 5

“With such devotion that tears cascade from your eyes”: Renunciation, Separation, and Guru Devotion 135 C h a pt e r 6

Death and Other Disruptions: Dying Like a Dog in the Wilderness E pilogu e

194

Glossary 199 Notes

207

Bibliography Index 267

243

162

To my parents and teachers, whose kindness is unrepayable.

Acknowledgments

One of this book’s underlying themes is the importance of Buddhist teacherstudent lineages and how they connect people across time and space, in imagination and in the intimacy of face-to-face encounter. Acknowledging people and institutions that have contributed to this book is a way of recognizing the webs of lineage and relationship in which I myself am embedded. A great gift of this book has been the opportunity to meet many remarkable people connected with Khunu Lama who have shared their recollections with me. I thank them all unreservedly for their generosity, both to me personally during our time together, and toward the research that has become this book, which would not exist without them. Khunu Lama’s name opened many doors. People who knew him made time to talk with me because of their admiration for him. Many of these same people also welcomed me when I was a traveler far from home, gave advice, shared unpublished texts and materials with me, and guided my interpretations of events and ideas described here. This book is the product of years of conversations in big city restaurants, mountain hermitages, hotel rooms, and monastery kitchens, over meals and cups of tea, during car rides, long walks, and pilgrimage circumambulations, and via phone and internet connections. It is shaped by the insights, knowledge, and creativity of many people, though I take full responsibility for the final form of all interpretations, and for all errors. Many people who contributed to this book are acknowledged by name in the chapters and notes that follow. Some remain anonymous at their own request and because of political sensitivities. Nevertheless, I have many people to thank by name here. Tashi Tsering Josayma and the late Gene Smith both played key roles in helping this book take shape. They

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drew on the vast resources of their seemingly limitless personal knowledge of Tibetan and Himalayan history, literature, and contemporary events to repeatedly nudge me in the right direction, helping me figure out what to read, introducing me to people I needed to meet, sending me vital materials, and asking me questions that took my understanding to the next level. My gratitude to both of them is immense. I especially wish that I could have shared the finished book with Gene. This book is also a record of journeys, most obviously the many journeys that marked the long life of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen. Writing it has been another kind of journey, both in the sense of my own travels to visit places and people important in stories about Khunu Lama’s life, and also in the sense that my understanding and perspectives on the themes of his life have developed over time. I’m grateful to the institutions and funders who have generously supported my work over the years of research and writing. Initial research in Tibet, Nepal, and India was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship and a Blakemore-Freeman Fellowship. A follow-up research trip was made possible by a Daniel and Marianne Spiegel Fund Grant through Columbia University. Initial writing was supported by a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship and by a de Bary Postdoctoral Research Scholarship at Columbia. Later phases of research and writing were supported by a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research on Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections, and by multiple forms of generous institutional support at Lehigh University, including support from the Department of Religion Studies and the Asian Studies Program, two Paul Franz, Jr. Pre-Tenure Research Awards, and a Faculty Research Grant from Lehigh’s Office of Research and Graduate Studies. I am tremendously fortunate in my wonderful colleagues at Lehigh University, both in the Religion Studies department and in the Asian Studies program. Their outstanding collegiality, friendship, and encouragement have been inspiring throughout, and their insightful comments on drafts of key sections have made this a much stronger book. I am especially grateful to Hartley Lachter and Michael Raposa, each of whom has been unfailingly supportive as Chair. At an earlier phase of the writing, I benefited from the warm atmosphere and intellectual camaraderie of the Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures department at Barnard College. I thank all my terrific colleagues there and across the street at the Columbia department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Modern Tibetan Studies Program. In writing about Khunu Lama’s life, I build on the previous work of many remarkable scholars who have approached this topic before me. The

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late K. Angrup (Ngodrup Gashawa), Khunu Lama’s main Tibetan language biographer, graciously welcomed me to Lahaul in 2004, and spent hours talking with me and sharing research materials, notes, personal memories, and published and unpublished work, as well as accompanying me to visit the Khunu Lama memorial stupa above Shashur Monastery. The late Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche likewise talked with me during multiple visits at his residence in Boudhanath, Nepal, sharing his biographical essay about Khunu Lama and his personal recollections. I met with the late Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche in New Jersey, where he shared many moving memories and stories from his time with Khunu Lama, and much valuable history. I am deeply grateful to these three consummate experts and grieve that I did not complete this book in time to present it to them. Likewise, I express my deepest thanks to the late Linda LaMacchia, who recorded the extraordinary interviews with Khunu Lama’s nun disciples that I discuss in chapter 6, and who conducted important research on the song traditions of Kinnauri jomos (nuns) that helps to shine a light on a key aspect of Khunu Lama’s legacy. She was unfailingly generous in sharing her work with me, and I wish I could have shared this book with her. I have also been the beneficiary of the outstanding kindness and knowledge of other colleagues whose research addresses Khunu Lama’s life and related topics. Many thanks to Gareth Sparham, whose wonderful book Vast as the Heavens, Deep as the Sea: Verses in Praise of Bodhicitta combines a biographical essay on Khunu Lama with translations of Khunu Lama’s most beloved poetic work. Gareth warmly encouraged me in this research at an early stage and answered many questions. Thierry Dodin, author of a seminal 1997 article on Khunu Lama’s life and renunciatory practice, was likewise extremely supportive of this project, and his article is a tremendous resource. Jürgen Manshardt, Khunu Lama’s German biographer and translator, who is additionally the author of groundbreaking works on Khunu Lama’s female disciple, the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, has been unfailingly encouraging and generous in sharing his important publications and unpublished writings, which have been vital to this book. David Jackson has been a phenomenally helpful source of information over the years, kindly sharing his many research discoveries related to this book. His towering biographies of Dezhung Rinpoche and Chogye Trichen Rinpoche have been invaluable to my understanding of the historical context of Khunu Lama’s life, as have the narratives about Khunu Lama that he recorded with disciples of Chogye Trichen Rinpoche (discussed in chapter 3). Many thanks to Heather Stoddard, whose marvelous biography of Gendun Chopel taught me so much. Our conversations about the timelines of Gendun Chopel’s and Khunu Lama’s activities were a crucial

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help in mapping important points of chronology. I am especially grateful to Heather for pointing out references to Khunu Lama’s connection to S. K. Jinorasa and to Gendun Chophel’s translation of Śāntideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. I also thank John Dunne for early encouragement in this project and for a xerox of precious research materials. Throughout the research and writing of this book, my spirits have been sustained and my ideas sharpened by the good cheer and wise comments of amazing friends and colleagues in many places. Dominique Townsend, Nancy Lin, Sonam Tsering Ngulphu, and Alex Gardner heroically read many chapter drafts and discussed important points, for which I’m hugely grateful. I thank Carla Bellamy, Suzanne Bessenger, Kristina Dy-Liacco, Karl Debreczeny, Holly Gayley, Tina Harris, Sarah Jacoby, Ariana Maki, Arjun Mahey and his whole family, Leigh Miller, Michael Monhart, Liz Monson, Karma Namgyal, Tenzin Gelek and Tenzin Norbu Nangsal for all our many hours of discussion and for crucial help finding materials, Alyson Prude, Jann Ronis, Joshua Schapiro, Michael Sheehy, Antonio Terrone, Roy Tzohar, Ulan (Lan Wu), Carl Yamamoto, Kalsang Wangdu, Eveline Washul, Benno Weiner, Nicole Willock, and Marlies Morsink, my intrepid Kham travel companion. Many thanks to Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa and Kalsang Dorjee Bhutia for enjoyable and important conversations, and to Anna Balikci Denjongpa and Saul Mullard for their help, especially at the start of my research. All my thanks to Harvey Aronson, Robbie Barnett, Ben Bogin, Jake Dalton, Douglas Duckworth, Frances Garrett, David Germano, Janet Gyatso, Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy, Lama Jabb, Roger Jackson, Sonam Kachru, Anne Klein, Donald Lopez Jr., Charlene Makley, Carole McGranahan, Francoise Pommaret, Andrew Quintman, Francoise Robin, Kurtis Schaeffer, Tsering Shakya, David Templeman, Karma Lekshe Tsomo, and Emily Yeh, who have encouraged and inspired me through their work and helped make this a better book through generous comments on portions of the research presented at conferences and in conversation. Many thanks to Alex Gardner, Katie Tsuji, and Tenzin Dickie for making Treasury of Lives the wonderful resource that it is, and huge thanks to Katie Tsuji for the beautiful maps. I am very grateful to Lauran Hartley, who was an unfailing source of support and encouragement and spent hours helping me find precious archival materials, and to Pema Bhum for sage advice. Many thanks to Jann Ronis and everyone at TBRC/BDRC, especially to Karma Gongde for all the texts he has helped me access and for sharing important historical information about educational institutions in Sarnath and Varanasi. The members of my wonderful writing group, Elsa Davidson, Maura Finkelstein, Danilyn Rutherford, and Andrea Voyer, encouraged me through multiple drafts of many

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of these chapters and helped me uncover the possibilities in this project. My heartfelt appreciation to dear friends in Tibet, whom I wish I could name individually. To Nyima Dolma, whose friendship, care, and support are an essential part of this project, and with whom I discussed so many of these ideas, my deepest gratitude. Many of the arguments in this book were refined through presentation and discussion at conferences and workshops, including at meetings of the American Academy of Religion; the Association of Asian Studies; the International Association of Tibetan Studies; the International Association for Buddhist Studies; the Columbia University Seminar on South Asia; the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies / Himalayan Studies Conference series; the French Society for Tibetan Studies; the Tung Lin Kok Yuen Perspectives on Buddhist Thought and Culture Series at the University of Toronto-Scarborough; the Columbia University Modern China Seminar and Weatherhead East Asian Institute; and the workshop on New Directions in Tibetan Literary Studies at Princeton University. I thank all those who invited me to share my work, and the audience members for their questions and comments.

... My discussions of Khunu Lama’s life and of the themes of renunciation, absence, modernity, and secularism in this book build on arguments and translations I first explored in earlier research articles and in my dissertation. I previously published preliminary findings from my research into Khunu Lama’s travels and connections in “Cosmopolitanism in the Himalayas: The Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of Khu nu bla ma bsTan ‘dzin rgyal mtshan and His Sikkimese Teacher, Khang gsar ba bla ma O rgyan bstan ‘dzin rin po che,” Namgyal Institute of Tibetology Bulletin 40, no. 2 (2004), and in “Lineage, Authority and Innovation: The Biography of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen,” in Mapping the Modern in Tibet, ed. Gray Tuttle (Andiast, Switzerland: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 2011). Portions of section 3 of the introduction previously appeared in slightly different form in “Knowledge and Power: Centering Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist Epistemic Authority,” in Waxing Moon: Journal of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies 1 (2021). Parts of the introduction also expand on ideas I develop in “The ‘Age of Faith’ and the ‘Age of Knowledge’: Secularism and Modern Tibetan Accounts of Yogic Power,” in Himalaya 36 no.1, (2016); and in “Dazzling Displays and Mysterious Departures: Bodhisattva Pedagogy as Performance in the Biographies of Two Twentieth-Century Tibetan Buddhist Masters,” Religions 2017 8, no. 9. In

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the latter article, I also recount and discuss the story that appears in this book at the beginning of chapter 2. This book has especially benefited from the wise suggestions and thoughtful questions of Donald Lopez Jr., whose belief in this project has been a tremendous boon, and whose own works on Gendun Chopel, modernity, and the many facets of Buddhism are an ongoing inspiration. The book has been much improved by the thoughtful comments of Ben Bogin, Roger Jackson, and an anonymous reader for the University of Chicago Press. Many thanks to the wonderful team at Chicago for their enthusiasm, patience, and talented work. Kyle Wagner, Dylan Montanari, and Michael Koplow guided this project smoothly through the process with calm and kindness. I am especially grateful to Nick Murray for his meticulous copyediting and exceptional forbearance. At Columbia University, Bob Thurman’s love for Tibetan literature inspired this project. He was the first person to mention Khunu Lama to me by name, in a flash of inspiration when I mentioned I wanted to write something about bodhicitta. I am deeply grateful to him for his mentorship, steadfast encouragement, and the privilege of reading Tibetan with him. I am also grateful to the many other mentors and teachers at Columbia who encouraged me and guided this project in its early stages. Gary Tubb opened up the vast worlds of Sanskrit intellectual and religious culture to my eyes, a precious treasure, while modeling compassion and intellectual excitement in the classroom and beyond. Gray Tuttle’s groundbreaking research has been foundational to my own questions and projects, and his wise interventions and generosity to students offer a model of teaching and scholarship I aspire to emulate. Courtney Bender’s penetrating insights into discourses of modernity, charisma, and religious authority have vastly improved the research that became this book. Her kindness, collegiality, and encouragement have been a beacon. I owe a debt of gratitude to Chunfang Yü, for her gracious contributions to my dissertation committee, mentorship in teaching, and her own wonderful scholarship, which introduced me to exciting new possibilities for analyzing Buddhist narrative literature. Gen Lobsang Jamspal honed my understanding of classical Tibetan language by sharing his own great love for Tibetan literature. He also shared precious memories and materials from his own experiences with Khunu Lama, helping me to connect with key people for my research. Jack Hawley cheered me on from the very beginning and always made time to support and encourage my work, even in the earliest stages—a precious gift. Other crucial mentors during my graduate studies who shaped my research trajectory were Elliot Wolfson and Susan Shapiro, who introduced me to the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas respectively, and who

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first opened my eyes to thinking about the literary imaginaries that animate religious and philosophical texts. Their brilliant insights and inspired pedagogy helped me develop the conceptual roots of this project. I could not have completed the long journey of this book without the love and support of my family. From the depths of my heart I thank my sister Rosie Pitkin for all her love, patience, and humor, not to mention coffee and long walks with the dogs. I couldn’t have made it through without you. You are the good sister. I received my first copy of Gareth Sparham’s book on Khunu Lama, Vast as the Heavens, Deep as the Sea: Verses in Praise of Bodhicitta, from my mother Sally McLendon, who pulled it seemingly at random off the shelves of a Washington, DC, bookstore and handed it to me, saying “This looks interesting.” Her support and love has carried me through many ups and downs of graduate school, research, and writing. She and my father Harvey Pitkin and my stepfather Bill Sturtevant shared their passion for research, books, and writing with me in a way that has shaped my life. Although my father did not live to see this in print, I have thought of him often in the writing of this book. Likewise, I know Bill would celebrate this book’s arrival, though he is not here to receive a copy. To Ashley Bryan, my role model in the writing life and life in general, suffice it to say that I would not know how to approach poetry, philosophy, religious ethics, art, or toasted cheese sandwiches if you had not shared them with me first. Much love and appreciation to my extended family and stepsiblings, especially my stepsister Kinthi Sturtevant. I am grateful to my Maine extended family and friends, who kept me sane throughout the years, especially during pandemic times. Most of all, my gratitude and love to John, who endured years of writing, research trips, and late night typing, who made beautiful meals and kept our lives running and traveled across the world to meet me, who raised my spirits and believed in my work and without whom I could not have completed this book. And to Eleanor, light of my life, research associate extraordinaire, who has patiently waited for so many years to see this book emerge, this book is for you.

Technical Note on Phonetic Transcription, Transliteration, and Naming Practices

Throughout this book, I phoneticize Tibetan words and names to make the book accessible to general readers interested in Buddhism and the Himalayan region, and to scholars in adjacent fields who do not use Tibetan as a research language. I am guided in phoneticizing by the principles outlined in the Treasury of Lives “Phonetic Romanization of the Tibetan Language Principles of Practice” (online at: https://treasuryoflives.org/uploads/ standards_documents/e9ad2-ToL -Phonetic-Principles.pdf ) Where quoted materials use alternative transliteration systems, I have generally regularized the transliterations to match the rest of this book. However, for people, places, or concepts where a particular phonetic rendering has become standard, I use the best-known rendering, and I follow individuals’ preferences for phoneticizing their own names. Included at the end of the book for reference is a glossary that includes persons, places, and terms in both Wylie and phonetic transcription. For texts and concepts where I give Sanskrit or Pāli as well as Tibetan terms in parenthesis, I give the Sanskrit or Pāli first, followed by Tibetan. I use diacritical marks in transliterating Sanskrit and Pāli terms, except for a handful of words and names that have entered regular English usage. For place names in India that appear in my sources under both Tibetan and Indian names, I follow the naming practices of my sources, based on context, and give variant orthography or language in parentheses. Because of political sensitivities in China, certain interviews are cited as anonymous.

Maps of Khunu Lama’s Travels

Figure 2. This map indicates the documented scope of Khunu Lama’s travels 1914–1977. During this period, national borders changed, and some remain contested. Maps in this book use place names based on their appearance in Khunu Lama’s life story, and indicate approximate national borders for reader convenience only. International borders indicated on this map are not authenticated. Arrows indicate directions of Khunu Lama’s departures; he traveled some routes repeatedly. Some portions of his travels are undocumented. Map by Catherine Tsuji/Treasury of Lives 2021.

Figure 3. Map of Khunu Lama’s western Himalayan travels. Map by Catherine Tsuji/ Treasury of Lives 2021. International borders indicated on this map are not authenticated.

Figure 4. Map of Khunu Lama’s eastern Tibetan travels. Map by Catherine Tsuji/Treasury of Lives 2021. International borders indicated on this map are not authenticated.

Chronology

1895

Tenzin Gyaltsen, the future Khunu Rinpoche, is born in Sunnam Village, Kinnaur (khu nu), India, to a locally prominent Buddhist family.

1902

At age seven, the young Tenzin Gyaltsen expresses the wish to study Buddhism. His parents arrange for him to study with his maternal uncle, Lama Rasvir Das, a practitioner in the Drukpa Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism.

1903–4

British troops led by Colonel Francis Younghusband invade Tibet, seeking British trade concessions. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama flees to Mongolia and then travels to Beijing.

1905

The Han Chinese military officer Zhao Erfeng is sent by the Qing government to quell Tibetan resistance to Qing development projects in Kham (eastern Tibet).

1910

Qing troops invade Lhasa. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama flees to British India.

1910

Beginning at age fifteen, Tenzin Gyaltsen studies at Ngari Choling, a monastery in his uncle’s village of Ropa.

1911

At age sixteen, Tenzin Gyaltsen receives the “introduction to the nature of mind” Buddhist instructions from the Drukpa Kagyu master Sonam Gyaltsen (nineteenth cent.), a direct student of the famous Drukpa Kagyu yogin Togden Shakya Shri (1853–1919).

1911

The Qing Dynasty collapses.

1913

The Thirteenth Dalai Lama declares Tibet independent.

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1914

Tenzin Gyaltsen, age nineteen, secretly leaves Kinnaur against his family’s wishes, and travels to Sikkim.

1915–1917

Tenzin Gyaltsen studies in Sikkim with the Sikkimese Nyingma lama and literary scholar Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche (1863–1936), and at the Kagyu monastery of Rumtek.

c. 1917

Tenzin Gyaltsen travels from Sikkim to Tashilhunpo Monastery, the most important Gelukpa monastery in Tsang (west-central Tibet), seat of the Panchen Lamas. At Tashilhunpo, Tenzin Gyaltsen studies logic, epistemology, and other major topics of Buddhist philosophy with Gelukpa scholars, including the philosophy expert Kachen Sangye Pelzang (n.d.). He receives novice monastic vows from a monastic leader and makes a connection with the Ninth Panchen Lama.

1919/1920

Tenzin Gyaltsen travels to Lhasa, the seat of the Ganden Podrang government of the Dalai Lamas. He makes pilgrimages to Buddhist sites and teaches literature to aristocratic families and officials in the central Tibetan government.

c. Early 1920s

Tenzin Gyaltsen is invited back to Tashilhunpo to teach literary topics in the Ninth Panchen Lama’s school for civil servants in his administration.

Early 1920s

Kalep Drungyig Pema Dorje (1858–?), a monastic scholar and grammarian at Kalep Monastery in Tsang, publishes a critique of Tenzin Gyaltsen’s grammatical ideas and those of other literary scholars, in a grammatical treatise titled Kalep’s Commentary on Tibetan Grammar.

1922

Tenzin Gyaltsen leaves central Tibet and travels to Kham (eastern Tibet). Tenzin Gyaltsen meets and becomes the student of the prominent eastern Tibetan scholar and author the Third Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso (1880–1923/25), either during the latter’s visit to central Tibet or in Kham. Tenzin Gyaltsen leaves central Tibet and travels to Kham (eastern Tibet).1

Early/mid-1920s Tenzin Gyaltsen receives teachings from the influential Dzogchen scholar-practitioner Khenpo Zhenga (1871–1927) at Gyawo Hermitage near Dzogchen Monastery in Kham. Mid-1920s to early 1930s Tenzin Gyaltsen, now sometimes known as Khunu Lama, or as Gyagar Lama (“the Indian lama”) travels and teaches in the eastern Tibetan regions of Kham and Amdo. He teaches literary and Buddhist topics to aristocratic families in Chamdo and Dergé, including to the Dergé royal family. He exchanges teachings with meditators and scholars in monaster-

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ies, monastic colleges, hermitages, and cave retreats across the region. c. 1926–27

Khunu Lama teaches Sanskrit and Tibetan grammatical topics to the young Sakya scholar Dezhung Rinpoche (1906–1987) at Dzogchen and Katok Monasteries in Kham.

1927

Khenpo Zhenga passes away. The future Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin (1927–1979) is born in the Drikung Valley in central Tibet. Decades later, she will become one of Khunu Lama’s closest students and his personal attendant at the end of his life.

1933/4

Khunu Lama returns to Lhasa.2

1934–1937/1938 Khunu Lama spends several years in Lhasa. (Khunu Lama himself states in a recorded interview that he spent about five years there.) Mid-1930s

Khunu Lama teaches for several years at the Lhasa Mentsikhang, the Medical and Astrological Institute. He also continues to teach aristocrats and government officials in Lhasa. He gives teachings, primarily on literary topics, to Ling Rinpoche (1903–1983), the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s Senior Tutor.

1935

Khunu Lama meets and makes a religious connection with the Drikung Kagyu master Drubwang Amgon Rinpoche (1853– 1945) at Drikung Til Monastery near Lhasa.

1938 (1939?) Khunu Lama leaves Lhasa and the central Tibetan region, and goes to India to study Sanskrit grammar according to the Paninian system. 1938–39 (1939–40?) Khunu Lama spends a year in Kolkata (Calcutta) studying Sanskrit. 1938 (1939)–c. 1943 Khunu Lama spends five years studying Paninian Sanskrit grammar in Varanasi (Benares) with Pandit Dev Narayan Tripathi (n.d.). During the period 1938–1943, he meets and collaborates with the Tibetan polymath Gendun Chophel (1903– 1951). The two become Sanskrit classmates and apparently work together on a translation of Śantideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra.3 c. 1943–1952 Khunu Lama returns to Kinnaur, and teaches there. August 15, 1947 India becomes an independent dominion within the United Kingdom. January 30, 1948 Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated. Khunu Lama receives the news in Kinnaur. October 1, 1949

The People’s Republic of China is established.

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January 26, 1950 The Republic of India is established, and the Indian Constitution is ratified. October 7, 1950 The People’s Liberation Army enters eastern Tibet, crossing the Drichu River with forty thousand troops. November 17, 1950 The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, age fifteen, formally takes on the responsibilities of head of state. May 23, 1951 The Tibetan delegation to Beijing signs the Seventeen-Point Agreement. 1952

Khunu Lama returns to Varanasi, and takes up residence in the Tekra Math ashram.

1956

Khunu Lama meets Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), framer of the Indian Constitution, Dalit leader, and Buddhist convert, who undergoes a formal ceremony of conversion to Buddhism that same year.

1956

Khunu Lama travels to Srinagar, Kashmir, at the invitation of Bakula Rinpoche (1918–2003), Minister of Jammu and Kashmir from 1953 to 1967. In Srinagar, Khunu Lama teaches literature to K. Angrup, his future biographer, and to the Ladkahi scholar Tashi Rabgias (b. 1927).

Late 1956

Khunu Lama leaves Srinagar. Later that same year, Khunu Lama briefly meets the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the Tenth Panchen Lama during their visit to India.

December 6, 1956 1959–1960

Dr. Ambedkar passes away.

Khunu Lama keeps a diary, recording events in Tibet and the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, as well as writing a daily verse on the topic of bodhicitta. These verses are collected in Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta (Byang chub sems kyi bstod pa rin chen sgron ma), Khunu Lama’s most well-known work.

March 10, 1959 Commemorated by Tibetans as the start of the Lhasa uprising against Chinese Communist rule. March 17, 1959 The Fourteenth Dalai Lama escapes from Lhasa. March–April 1959 The Fourteenth Dalai Lama and other Tibetan leaders flee Tibet and arrive in India. The Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, her attendant Ani Damcho Zangmo, and the nineyear-old Lho Ontul Rinpoche and his tutor are among the approximately hundred thousand Tibetans who also make their way to India. October 1959

Khunu Lama travels to Mussoorie to meet the Dalai Lama and his Senior Tutor, Ling Rinpoche. Ling Rinpoche reintroduces the Dalai Lama to Khunu Lama.

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1960

Khunu Lama translates from Tibetan to Hindi for the Dalai Lama’s lecture to a group of international students at Varanasi Sanskrit University. Kushok Thupstan Tsewang Balingpa (Baling Lama, b. 1935) becomes Khunu Lama’s attendant during this period.

c. 1960

The Drikung Khandroma, Ani Damcho Zangmo, and Ontul Rinpoche take up residence at Tso Pema (Rewalsar) in India.

Early 1960s The Dalai Lama receives teachings from Khunu Lama on a range of Buddhist topics, beginning with Khunu Lama’s own Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta. 1963

The Dalai Lama convenes a gathering of Tibetan Buddhist leaders in Mussoorie to discuss Tibetan Buddhist cultural preservation and educational solutions for the refugees.

1965

Khunu Lama teaches literary topics at the Mussoorie teachertraining program set up by the Dalai Lama after the 1963 meeting.

1966

The first widely published edition of Khunu Lama’s Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta appears, sponsored as a dedication to the Dalai Lama’s late sister and with an introduction by the Dalai Lama.

1970

The Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin succeeds in finding Khunu Lama after searching for him in Bodh Gaya. She remains with him as his disciple and attendant for most of the next seven years.

1973

Khunu Lama travels alone to Sikkim and stays for several months in Gangtok, teaching the Queen Mother of Sikkim and her family.

1974

Khunu Lama is driven from Gangtok to Nepal by car via Kalimpong, by Ngawang Rabgyes, an attendant to the Queen of Sikkim. The Drikung Khandroma meets him, and they travel in Nepal, visiting Kathmandu, Pokhara, and Lumbini.

Early 1975

Khunu Lama meets and gives teachings to Lama Zopa Rinpoche (b. 1946) in Boudhanath, Nepal.

February 2 and 14, 1975 Khunu Lama gives teachings to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s students at the International Mahayana Institute in Boudhanath, Nepal; the group includes many Western students. Spring 1975

Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma travel to Lumbini to visit Chogye Trichen Rinpoche (1919–2007), head of the Tsarpa Sakya lineage. Khunu Lama gives teachings.

Late 1975–early 1976

Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma return to

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Tso Pema in India. At the invitation of the Tso Pema Nyingma Monastery, Khunu Lama gives Dzogchen teachings. Summer 1976

Khunu Lama, the Drikung Khandroma, and the Kinnauri nuns Bogti, Tenzin Dolma, and Tenzin Zangmo stay in the Manali area. Khunu Lama gives teachings to Buddhist communities around Kullu-Manali.

Fall 1976

Khunu Lama, the Drikung Khandroma, and the Kinnauri nuns Bogti, Tenzin Dolma, and Tenzin Zangmo travel to Lahaul (Himachal Pradesh, India), where Khunu Lama gives teachings.

Winter 1977 Khunu Lama teaches the Jewel Ornament of Gampopa at Shashur Gonpa, at Keylong, Lahaul. February 20, 1977 Khunu Lama passes away at Shashur Gonpa in Keylong. According to his Kinnauri nun disciples and the Dalai Lama, Khunu Lama’s body remains in post-death tukdam meditation for several days. His body is carried down the mountainside to meet a helicopter intended to airlift his body to Kinnaur for cremation. However, a storm blocks the helicopter’s arrival. Khunu Lama’s body is carried back up the mountainside to a location above Shashur Gompa, where he is cremated. February–March 1977 Khunu Lama’s funeral is held at Shashur Gonpa. His body relics are divided between Shashur Gonpa and disciples in Kinnaur. One stupa is erected at the cremation site near Shashur Gonpa, and another is erected in Kinnaur at the temple associated with his family. Memorials and relics are also maintained in the individual temples of his disciples. 1979

The Drikung Khandroma passes away. Mewa Khenpo Tubten Ozer (1928–2000) presides over her funeral.

1979

Two incarnations of Khunu Lama have been identified, both born in 1979. Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima was profiled in “Peace on the Planet: A New Generation of Tibetan Lamas,” Mandala Magazine, September/October 2000. Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi is author of the 2020 book Running Toward Mystery (written with Zara Houshmand) and director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.

[ Introduction ]

Themes in the Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Renunciant

According to canonical Buddhist sources, when the Buddha Śākyamuni was about to pass away into the state called parinirvāṇa, he had a conversation with his cousin Ānanda. Ānanda is a central figure in Buddhist literature of many kinds, particularly in Theravādin societies of Southeast Asia. At the time of this conversation, the sources tell us, Ānanda had been the Buddha’s attendant and near-constant companion for some two and a half decades of the Buddha’s teaching career. It is Ānanda’s recollection of the Buddha’s discourses that audiences of Buddhist sutras (Pāli sutta) hear repeated each time a sutra opens, his voice heard or implied in the recurring lines “Thus I have heard: the Buddha was staying at one time in [such and such a place] . . .” In this textual and imaginal sense, Ānanda continually revisits Buddhist audiences, just as he is the Buddha’s constant companion. At the same time, Ānanda offers a kind of foil for Buddhists through the limitations he seems to have: he often asks the questions, requires the explanations, and makes the mistakes that allow the narration of key Buddhist ideas, creating a space for the audience’s ignorance, a kind of Buddhist everyman.1 In the case of the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa, the mistake that Ānanda apparently makes is a big one. Ānanda sees that the Buddha is close to dying and becomes distraught. He begs the Buddha to live a little bit longer. But the Buddha tells Ānanda that his request comes too late. In fact, the Buddha explains, he could indeed have lived much longer. As a Buddha, he can control the processes of his own death, and he could have lived even many hundreds of years. But, harrowingly, the Buddha explains to Ānanda that disciples have to ask a Buddha to remain in the world, and Ānanda has failed to do so. 1

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The Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta recounts these events with great emotional suspense. First, in a preliminary episode, the Buddha becomes ill. He nearly dies. But reflecting that he has not yet given his final teachings, the Buddha uses his powers to suppress his illness. He remains alive, but he takes this occasion to give instructions to the Buddhist community explaining how they should conduct themselves after he is gone. Ānanda, who has witnessed this “false alarm,” is overcome with relief. He tells the Buddha how terrifying it was to see him sick, and how in fact his own body became ill just from seeing the Buddha’s illness. At this point, the Buddha prompts Ānanda to request him to live longer. Over a series of episodes, the Buddha offers both subtle hints and direct encouragement for Ānanda to make this request. But Ānanda remains oblivious. The Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta, perhaps kindly, recounts that Māra, the Buddhist tempter, personification of delusion, ignorance, and addiction (all the forces that in Buddhist terms lead to death), distracts Ānanda each time, preventing him from asking the Buddha to stay. So Ānanda does not ask until it is too late, and the Buddha soon passes into parinirvāṇa despite Ānanda’s grief. In the aftermath, the monastic community commends Ānanda for his recollection of the Buddha’s teachings, but censures him for (among other things) his failure to ask the Buddha to extend his life. This story of Ānanda’s failure to ask the Buddha to live longer offers several lessons that have impressed Buddhist audiences over the centuries. In the first place, in its tight narrative focus on the relationship between the Buddha and his cousin, and on their obligations to each other (the Buddha to teach and guide, and Ānanda to listen, to learn, and to request the Buddha to remain alive), this deathbed episode offers clues to the central importance of the guru-disciple or teacher-student relationship for Buddhist practices and knowledge systems. This deathbed scene takes place within a larger teacher-disciple framework in which the student must begin the teaching relationship by making a request for teachings. The Buddha himself does not begin to teach after his enlightenment until a deity from the Hindu pantheon formally asks him to do so, symbolizing, according to Buddhist commentators, the need for the student to ask. The act of making a request to a teacher is in fact arguably what constitutes a person as a Buddhist disciple in the first place. But this deathbed scene also conveys aspects of the teacher-student dynamic that go beyond teaching, if teaching is understood as simply transmitting knowledge rather than as a form of affective connection. In fact, the story of Ānanda and the Buddha on his deathbed hints at a significant affective dimension in the teacher-student relationship, a kind of mutual

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vulnerability between teachers and students that is both a source of intimacy and a potential source of instability. On the one hand, teachers and students require each other; no one can be a teacher or a student alone. Teachers and students may also have intense emotional and bodily connections with each other: consider how Ānanda says his own body becomes ill when the Buddha appears to be sick. But, painfully, teachers can die and thus abandon students. Perhaps even more disturbingly, students can fail to ask their teachers essential questions, thus jeopardizing the delicate continuity across generations that allows Buddhist communities to continue. In this sense, Buddhist teacher-student relationships are fraught with the highest life-or-death stakes. Buddhist narrative traditions address these high-stakes vulnerabilities in a host of imaginal and ritual ways.

Transmission Lineages and Imaginaries of the Teacher- Student Relationship This book explores the affectively laden, high-stakes relationships between Buddhist teachers and disciples, as framed by the above story of Ānanda. Focusing on intersecting imaginaries of devotion, absence, and longing that inform twentieth-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist interpretations of such relationships, I argue that teacher-student relations are refracted through an ideal of indivisible closeness that works in dynamic tension with the painful reality of recurring separation. Separations between Buddhist teachers and students are fraught and poignant, as Ānanda’s paradigmatic failure to extend the Buddha’s life makes clear. Yet narratives of such moments are crucial sites within which Buddhists reimagine continuity, navigate transfers of authority, and manage the destabilizing and painful ruptures of death and loss. Steven Collins reflects on the idea of a Buddhist imaginary as a civilizational-literary repertoire, one that authors and narrators draw on for a variety of purposes, ranging from the soteriological to the artistic and political.2 In a related study that Collins cites, A. K. Ramanujan describes the imaginary of the South and Southeast Asian Rāmāyaṇa epic as “a pool of signifiers (like a gene pool) that include[s] plots, characters, names, geography, incidents, and relationships.”3 In this sense, “the story has no closure, though it may be enclosed in a text. In India and Southeast Asia, no-one ever reads the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata [and Collins adds the Buddhist text Vessantara] for the first time. The stories are there ‘always already.’ ”4 In a similar way, Buddhist accounts of teacher-student transmission and affective connection unfold within repertoires of meaning and relation-

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ship that are not enclosed in a single narrative or person’s life. Particular teachers and students engage each other within unique individual circumstances. Yet they do so while drawing on and adding to a “pool of signifiers” that includes stories of famous teacher-student relationships of the past and shared understandings of meaningful teacher and student interaction. These shared understandings help make individual choices and creativity legible, both to participants in events and to narrators and audiences who later encounter these events via practices of storytelling, memory, and history. Importantly, this “pool of signifiers” is not necessarily homogenous. Collins reminds us that within the Buddhist imaginaries coalescing in famous narratives of ideal Buddhist life, like that of the Buddha or of the renunciant Prince Vessantara (the immediately prior previous life of the Buddha), we may encounter both “authoritative” and “oppositional” approaches to the tradition—powerful claims about authority and authenticity, and voices of critique, subversion, doubt, and contestation.5 The narratives of this book center on Tibet, India, and the Himalayan region, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Yet the themes I discuss have preoccupied Buddhists in many places and times. For Buddhist writers and commentators across multiple communities and historical periods, individual teacher-student interactions do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they unfold within the temporal and social context of teacher-student networks, which is to say, within the relational, social, intellectual and ritual structures of transmission lineages. Such lineages are human chains of teacherdisciple relationship through which ideas and practices are taught from one generation to the next, ideally bridging both time and geographic distance. These networks of relationship are further reconstituted in narrative as transmissions of memory, and they underlie Buddhist accounts both of continuity with the past, and of change and transformation oriented toward the future.6 Buddhist claims about the authority and authenticity of any given teaching, practice, or experience rest on claims to an unbroken chain of teachers and students connecting back to Śākyamuni or another enlightened figure. Even assertions about direct experiences of enlightenment or ongoing visionary revelations of various kinds—Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, has many traditions of ongoing visionary revelation— make appeals to authenticity that in one way or another depend on an unbroken connection with an authentic lineage.7 At the same time, as Janet Gyatso has described, “Lineage resists totalization; instead it is a process.” As such, it has “no absolute beginning; even the Buddha Śākyamuni has predecessors in previous eras.”8 What gets transmitted, and why does authentic transmission matter so much? Depending on the particular Buddhist tradition, materials that

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must be transmitted from a teacher (rather than simply read from a book on one’s own, for instance) include rituals and instructions for their performance; permissions to read certain texts, as well the empowerment that is understood to make a given text meditationally useful to the reader; specific meditative or yogic techniques; tantric practices; and revealed or visionary materials. For Buddhist communities ranging from India to Japan, Southeast Asia, China, and the Himalayan region, esoteric teachings in particular have required special forms of teacher-student (or more properly, guru-disciple) relationship.9 Without such relationships and the authorization of a continuous lineage, esoteric Buddhist practices are often described as dangerous or simply useless. These relationships make additional claims about both the required intimacy and the essential continuity of transmission lineages. In esoteric guru-disciple pairs, the special nature of the relationship is often marked by the requirement that disciples commit to additional sets of vows enjoining ritual and social obligations toward their guru. Paralleling claims by Chan/Zen practitioners about mind-tomind transmission, participants in esoteric Buddhist traditions frame these kinds of direct personal and ritual relationships as the only mode of access to esoteric Buddhist practice. Likewise, the ordination of Buddhist monks and nuns depends upon the transmission of ordination vows by a group of individuals who already hold (and, ideally, keep) these vows.10 In a more mundane sense, even exoteric texts are understood not to reveal their full meaning without explanatory commentaries, while written commentaries by themselves do not replace the explanations of a skilled living teacher. At the most basic level, from a Buddhist point of view, becoming a Buddhist and engaging in Buddhist activities, whether devotional practice, scholarship, meditation, ritual, or teaching, requires a relationship with a personal teacher, and with a community of Buddhists. Despite the widespread prominence of Buddhist rhetoric about the need for solitary practice, Buddhism is not a solo project. Significantly, simply receiving a ritual transmission of vows or participating in a tantric initiation or consecration ceremony does not by itself make a person into an authorized holder and future transmitter of that lineage to others. A Buddhist teacher’s claim to hold an authentic lineage for a set of vows, or a meditative or ritual practice, or an explanatory teaching actually means several things. First, it means that the individual in question received a transmission from an authentic, authoritative source, which means from someone who had in turn received the transmission from an authorized source, and so on, in a regression that in its ideal sense should culminate in the Buddha (most commonly Śākyamuni, but potentially another enlightened figure.) Secondly, holding an authentic lineage in an

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authentic way should mean that the teacher in question has personally under taken the ritual or meditational obligations associated with the transmission they have received, and has successfully engaged in its practices. The rhetorical ideal is a person who achieves the qualities a given teaching is intended to develop. In this ideal sense, only participants in transmission rituals who are truly able to understand what is transmitted, put it into meditative and ritual practice, experience the soteriological developments in themselves, and keep all the vows and commitments that go with the transmission can then go on to become future transmitters of the lineage. Relatedly, a key axiom of Buddhist historiography is the necessity of establishing the community of ordained monastics in any society that wishes to establish Buddhism, because that monastic community will replicate itself by transmitting Buddhism to others. From this perspective, members of monastic communities are fundamentally lineage custodians and transmitters, as well as being ritual specialists, teachers, and sources of merit for those who make donations. Tibetan historians, for instance, identify the crucial moments in the early transmission of Buddhism to Tibet as the first monastic ordinations of Tibetans and the eighth-century founding of the first Tibetan monastery at Samye. Likewise, the history of Buddhism in Tibet is framed in multiple Tibetan literary genres as the history of specific lineages of monastic and esoteric ordination, practice, and transmission. Chinese and Japanese Buddhists are particularly well-known for their preoccupation with lineage, perhaps most famously the Chan/Zen traditions. Elaborate written lineage charts mapping centuries of transmission are given by teachers to disciples in formal Chan rituals of Buddhist transmission and authorization to teach. Medieval Japanese lay practitioners participated in mass temporary ordination ceremonies that gave them their own lineage certificates, mapping out the chain of transmission linking them directly to the Buddha.11 While scholars have questioned aspects of the historicity of Chan transmission narratives, Chan/Zen accounts of “mind- to-mind” transmission highlight the central Chan/Zen soteriological claim that their tradition communicates a direct experience of Buddhist enlightenment from person to person, beyond the purely intellectual mastery of textual learning. The fact that Chan and Zen are highly elaborated textual and ritual traditions in their own right is sometimes occluded by this rhetoric. In narratives and rituals of Chan/Zen transmission, practitioners are exhorted to accomplish the Buddhist goal of enlightenment for themselves. At the same time, as Chan/Zen narratives also make clear, this experience is enacted and confirmed in intense proximity to a personal teacher, whose own soteriological accomplishment allows them to “seal” the authenticity of the student’s achievement.12

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One way to understand this Chan narrative and ritual emphasis on chains of teacher-disciple transmission connecting back to the Buddha is as in part a response to the problem of authenticity in the new Chinese context, where Buddhism appeared as a foreign religion, its human sources of authenticity far away in geographic terms We see similar claims made about the authenticity of unbroken connection in Buddhist materials wherever Buddhism spread, from South Asia to the Tibetan Plateau and the East Asian seaboard. Yet the concern with unbroken authentic transmission is in fact already discernable in early Indic sources. More broadly then, we might locate in Buddhist narrative and ritual genres centered on lineage a repertoire of techniques and ideas that allow Buddhist communities to engage with temporal and geographic distance, and with many forms of social and cultural change. Buddhist transmission lineages are generative, capable of expanding in a single generation to something much greater than their original size as new initiates join a community of Buddhist practice and receive transmissions from a given teacher. Buddhist transmission lineages are also highly portable, just as human beings are highly mobile. If a teacher who holds a certain lineage travels to a new place, he or she carries the knowledge, authorizations, and (ideally) experiences and realizations of the lineage to where they can reach new students. This is true for Buddhist lineages and societies in general. When we think of the vast transcontinental spread of Buddhism across Asia in the more than two thousand years of its history, it is in some sense the portability of lineages and the expansion of lineage networks that we are primarily thinking of. But Buddhist lineages are also fragile and depend on the human beings who hold them. While many Buddhist lineages concern materials that are also written down in textual form, textual materials do not encompass the lineage and cannot fully preserve it. Tibetan and Himalayan biographies of lineage holders and histories of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist institutions note cases where a given teaching was only ever given by a lineage holder to one or two disciples, and where, as a result, a lineage ended. If the last surviving person who holds a given lineage dies without passing on the transmission, then the lineage itself can die out; the material preservation of texts by itself is not sufficient to preserve a lineage. Texts require authorized, properly trained, and ritually prepared humans (or sometimes other kinds of beings) to make them come alive. A ritual text without living lineage holders is a dead text, the rituals connected to it a silent history rather than a living practice. Living Buddhist communities and active Buddhist claims about human capacities, achievements, and enlightenment can only occur within the vital current of living lineages passed between teachers and students.13

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In this context, Buddhist textual and oral genres of narrating life stories carry particular weight, not only as sources of spiritual inspiration in a broad sense, but also as specific records of lineage connections and models of teacher-student relationship. Indeed, in the Himalayan and Tibetan life narratives that form the core of this book, these elements are interlinked. Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist life stories explicitly document lineage connections and often function to emphasize or enhance the value and efficacy of particular lineages.14 Accounts of past masters in a lineage are often shared as part of lineage transmission rituals, and as Gyatso has highlighted, Tibetan Buddhist genres of religious biography and autobiography are often written and edited by disciples of their main subjects, such that “the disciple’s presence is to be felt throughout the text.”15 At the same time, Tibetan and Himalayan commentators emphasize that genres of religious biography such as namtar (rnam thar, lit. “complete liberation [story]”) ideally have a transformative effect on audiences, one that can expand the lineage to new people. Reading or listening to the namtar of a Buddhist master begins the process of constituting a reader as a disciple of that person.16 To read or hear a namtar is to come into relationship with its protagonist and to participate in devotional practices of memory centered on that person, even if one did not know the person directly. Life-story narratives in this sense maintain and renew lineage ties by strengthening what Danièle Hervieu-Léger calls the “chain of memory,” continually incorporating new audiences into the community of those who remember.17 By modeling ideals of Buddhist virtuoso behavior and teacherstudent interaction, life-story narratives thus provide “authorizing referents,” both for how to be, and how to remember, a certain kind of Buddhist practitioner within a certain kind of Buddhist relationship.18 Life stories in this sense unfold within, and continually replenish, imaginaries of teacherstudent connection. Stories like that of Ānanda at the Buddha’s deathbed offer repertoires of affective experience and narrative structure that individuals and communities deploy in making their own experiences legible to themselves and others.

A Renunciant Wanderer Linking Past and Future In the early decades of the twentieth century, a Himalayan renunciant named Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen (1895–1977)19 wandered across Tibet and India, meeting famous Buddhist masters, while sometimes living so simply, his students say, that he subsisted only on cold barley porridge and water. Venerated today as an embodiment of the Mahāyāna ideal of the bodhisattva, this wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the

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Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan students and American meditators; disciples raced by helicopter to airlift his body from a mountainside, while the four ordained Buddhist women who were with him when he died prayed for his reincarnation and for storms to turn the helicopter away. A book of poems Khunu Lama wrote in 1959–1960 remains in print in several languages, and the Dalai Lama continues to refer to it when he teaches on the subject of compassion. Khunu Lama is remembered today by Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists in part because of his place in multiple important guru-disciple transmission lineages, both as the student or “student’s-student” ( yang slob) of venerated Buddhist luminaries from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and as a teacher himself, in particular of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Narratives of Khunu Lama’s life illuminate the intimate, emotionally intense dynamics of relationship between Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist teachers and students within transmission lineages. Stories about him highlight themes of teacher-student separation and connection, absence and presence, and link these themes to practices of renunciation and devotion. The dynamics of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist lineage relationships take on particular resonance in the historical context of Khunu Lama’s own lifetime. In the political turmoil of the twentieth century, Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist lineages have experienced unprecedented disruptions. The establishment of new states in the Himalayas and in East and South Asia has had a cascade of effects across the region. The “Peaceful Liberation” of Tibet in 1950 by the People’s Republic of China; the 1948 establishment of Indian independence, and the incorporation within the new Indian republic of Himalayan kingdoms such as Sikkim and Ladakh; civil war and governmental change in Nepal; the establishment of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the wars and border conflicts that accompanied these events—all these transformations displaced populations, often with great violence, changed where and how people could travel, whom they could meet and where they could study, and altered forms of national and regional identity. These changes shifted the religious and political geography in which Tibetan and Himalayan people live and work, and in many cases left legacies of trauma that are ongoing. During the decades after 1950, many Buddhist lineage holders in geographic Tibet died, or were jailed, or went into exile, as did more than a hundred thousand other Tibetans. In addition, other kinds of structural changes across the region shifted the cultural and intellectual landscape in both large and small ways. New national language and school policies, for

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instance, in China as well as in India and Nepal, have had effects on literacy, education, and intellectual life. Changing state policies toward herders and farmers have altered lifeways and economic practices for many Tibetan and Himalayan communities, as have moves to urbanize rural populations in states across the region. Technological changes, ranging from rural electrification and the introduction of television to smart phones and instant messaging apps have also shifted the parameters of separation and connection between people and between communities. These new technologies have altered and sometimes expanded modes of both surveillance and communication, artistic production and censorship. Moreover, these new technologies and new life circumstances have had consequences for practices of memory, storytelling, and historiography, as well as for the relative cultural prestige and social capital associated with terms like traditional, modern, religious, and secular. Nevertheless, in the midst of these and other dramatic changes, Buddhist transmission lineages have continued to function, embedded within ritual practices and communal narratives as well as enacted between individuals. Life stories of figures like Khunu Lama play an important role in these ongoing processes of memory and connection, which link contemporary Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists to lineage ancestors in the past, and to future generations, including descendants of current lineage members and converts from outside the Himalayan region. Accounts of Khunu Lama’s life illuminate key questions that emerge in this context. What happens to lineage continuity when teachers are separated from students by death, distance, or the passage of time? What resources of affect and interpretation do twentieth- and twenty-first century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist thinkers mobilize to address such separations? While accounts of Khunu Lama’s life deal only obliquely with the upheavals of his time, stories about him nevertheless have much to say about grief, separation, loss, and lineage continuity. This book argues that Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist authors and audiences draw on the imaginaries and authorizing referents of the teacherstudent relationship instantiated in life stories, such as those about Khunu Lama, to theorize moments of loss and absence, and to mobilize ideals of continuity and indivisible closeness. Tibetan and Himalayan narrators of stories about Khunu Lama reveal, and often mourn, the destabilizing consequences of teacher-student separations. At the same time, their accounts, and those of their interlocutors within broader Tibetan Buddhist literary traditions, emphasize the efficacy of devotional practice in overcoming such separations and re-energizing teacher-student intimacy and lineage connection. I argue that narrators of stories about Khunu Lama foreground themes

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of separation in accounts of his life by centering his practice of renunciation. Indeed, I suggest that renunciation is the dominant motif in stories about him. It is a recurring thread that links all oral and textual accounts of his life that I have encountered. It further provides an interpretive frame for the many unknowns and gaps in stories about him (an interpretive frame used by Tibetan and Himalayan authors and people who knew him, and also by me, in this book). Renunciation seems to have been a central element of Khunu Lama’s personal practice and way of being in the world; it is also central to how he is remembered. Yet, although renunciation is a Buddhist ideal, and Buddhist philosophers present it as a necessary and ultimately liberating antidote to separation and loss, former students also describe Khunu Lama’s renunciation as in a sense causing painful separations between him and his students. Oral and textual accounts of his life connect his practice of renunciation to themes of departure, absence, and self-concealment. Correspondingly, his students describe the challenge of finding and staying with a master who is “always escaping.” His practice of renunciation, as students describe it, caused him to remove himself repeatedly from involvement with status or recognition, even within religious institutions. He disengaged from many mainstream Tibetan Buddhist institutional and ritual activities, such as transmitting tantric initiations, teaching large groups, and owning or displaying ritual objects such as statues of the Buddha. Disciples remember him as someone who chose a reclusive life of intentional poverty, verging on extreme hardship, avoiding fame even among fellow Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists. People describe him as embodying a specific Tibetan and Himalayan ideal type of Buddhist practitioner: the chatralwa (bya bral ba), or renunciant mendicant-hermit, a wandering, often hidden individual, who relinquishes not only possessions but also fame, attention, and all worldly kinds of “success” or ordinary activity (the term can be translated literally as “do-nothing” or “without activity”). The chatralwa ideal is a virtuoso of simplicity who has moved the practice of renunciation even beyond conventional monasticism. Khunu Lama is described as an exemplar of this ideal.20 To put this ideal in context, note that although rhetorics of intense renunciation are very old and influential in Buddhist literatures across many parts of Asia, they have not necessarily served as literal guides for Buddhist practice.21 In fact, the opposite is often true: Buddhists in many times and places have tended to maintain close social and familial bonds even while embracing Buddhist monasticism or other renunciatory lifestyles. The rhetoric of renunciation in particular Buddhist communities often goes hand in hand with a high level of social and familial engagement. In Tibetan

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and Himalayan settings, the ideal of virtuoso renunciation personified by figures like the beloved eleventh-century Tibetan saint Milarepa, or by Khunu Lama in the present day, works in tandem with other kinds of values and abilities.22 These other values often include qualities of leadership, charisma, and power, including the power to teach and lead in potentially competitive environments.23 These other values, which one might label “socially engaged,” are often classified by Tibetan and Himalayan commentators as expressions of compassion, skillfully exercised. (Nevertheless, Tibetan and Himalayan narrators also sometimes articulate ambivalence about Buddhist leaders who engage the world in charismatic and powerful ways. Engaged compassion is a Tibetan Buddhist ideal, but Tibetan and Himalayan authors often criticize or question religious leaders who raise large sums of money, get involved in politics, or take sides in armed conflict in ways that suggest how uncomfortable and contested the intersection of religious and worldly forms of charismatic power can be.)24 Moreover, the ideal of renunciation itself is also often framed as socially engaged in Tibetan and Himalayan sources, since “true” renunciation should be motivated by a Buddhist understanding of altruism, compassion, and service to others. In accounts of individual lives and community histories, episodes of humble, self-abnegating renunciation and powerful, charismatic social engagement overlap. Renunciation and social engagement  can appear as alternating phases of one person’s life or as part of the variety of a community’s leaders and their styles. These overlapping dynamics can be presented as “inner” and “outer” aspects of a single person’s activity, with different audiences perceiving and describing different behaviors and motivations on the part of one figure. Yet exactly how the intersection of renunciation and engagement works in an individual life is a complex matter. Accounts of Khunu Lama’s life, and of his own teaching, writing, and meditation activities, shed light on this tension between renunciation and engagement. Khunu Lama is remembered not only as a renunciant, but also as epitomizing the ideal of the compassionately engaged bodhisattva, the paradigmatic Mahāyāna figure who, in the words of the eighth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva, “dispel[s] the miseries of the world.”25 Khunu Lama’s own writings and his disciples’ recollections of him repeatedly connect him to the bodhisattva ideal. His most famous poetic work, Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta (Byang chub sems kyi bstod pa rin chen sgron ma), is a collection of verses specifically written as an extended reflection on bodhicitta, the definitive bodhisattva quality.26 (In Mahāyāna terms, bodhicitta is the altruistic wish to achieve Buddhahood in order to bring all suffering beings to enlightenment.) Accounts of Khunu Lama’s

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life emphasize his personal practice of compassion and his focus on bodhicitta, both in his famous verses and throughout his teaching career. Former students and his main Tibetan-language biographer comment that Khunu Lama seemed to be “a reincarnation of Śāntideva,” because of his meditational focus on bodhicitta and his literary compositions on that theme, as well as his personal practices of generosity and compassion.27 Yet Khunu Lama is remembered as a kind of renunciant bodhisattva, who deliberately eschewed what might be called “bodhisattva activity in the public sphere”—that is, any activities that might have enmeshed him in dynamics of profit, fame, or reputation. For instance, he apparently avoided accepting donations, fund-raising for Buddhist libraries or monuments, or gathering a large circle of disciples. As one of his students recalled, Khunu Lama said on this topic, “Some lamas can do that, raise a lot of money and gather a lot of people. They can handle that, so it’s OK for them. But I can’t handle it, so I don’t do it.”28 The tension between seclusion and fame, renunciatory absence and generous presence, escaping and teaching is woven throughout accounts of Khunu Lama’s life. Students repeatedly mention how elusive he was, because of his constant travel and unpredictable departures, and because he lived under conditions of such drastic material simplicity, often in unusual places, most famously a Hindu ashram in Varanasi (Benares) in the latter half of his life. This elusiveness is bound up with presentations of him as unconventional and boundary-crossing in various ways. He traveled for much of his adulthood across the Tibetan Plateau and India, traversing cultural and linguistic borders as well as geographic ones. He learned Sanskrit as well as Tibetan, studied non-Buddhist yogic and “Hindu” philosophy as well as Buddhism, and immersed himself in poetry and literature as well as philosophy and meditation, all choices that set him apart from many other leading Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist figures of his generation.29 He taught extensively to women as well as to men, giving formal Buddhist vows to many women, in particular in his home region of Kinnaur. Indeed, by some measures, his closest disciple at the end of his life was a woman, the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin (1927–1979), a figure whose practices of heroic renunciation and voluntary poverty are remembered as paralleling his own. Although Khunu Lama was by no means the only male figure of his generation to have female students, the number of women among his disciples is notable—another aspect of his life that marks his style of renunciation and engagement as distinctive. Likewise, Khunu Lama’s monastic ordination status was hard for observers to pin down, and so too was any single Tibetan Buddhist sectarian identification on his part. Many Tibetan Buddhist lineages claimed him or had some connection with him,

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yet he never restricted himself exclusively to one. People I spoke to often described him as a quintessentially ecumenical or “non-sectarian” (rimè; ris med) figure, someone expert in multiple lineages of Buddhist meditation and explanation who transcended sectarian divisions.30 Yet he himself doesn’t seem to have used the term rimè about himself in his writings or oral teachings.31 Reflecting on his peripatetic life, which spanned a host of social, political, and geographic transformations in the twentieth-century history of Tibetan Buddhism, Khunu Lama emerges as a paradigmatic figure of both separation and connection, and of the relationship between them. His disciples describe searching for him, sometimes for years; missing him, and longing for him when they could not find him. Yet he was an active teacher, sometimes of extremely influential people. His students included members of Himalayan royal families; Indian and Tibetan government ministers; a wide range of prominent Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist scholars, religious teachers, and intellectuals—and even a handful of Western converts to Tibetan Buddhism. His colleagues and acquaintances included such prominent twentieth-century figures as the provocative Tibetan polymath, philosopher, and artist Gendun Chophel (1903–1951) and the Dalit leader, Buddhist convert, and framer of the Indian Constitution Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). The Dalai Lama himself has frequently referred to him at large public teachings, bringing a new generation of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists, and international Buddhist converts into contact with his memory. This book is in part a biographical exploration, based on published and unpublished Tibetan textual sources and on interviews I conducted from 2001 to 2016 with Khunu Lama’s surviving disciples, colleagues, friends, and contemporaries, as well as his current incarnations. In pursuit of these interviews, I followed in Khunu Lama’s footsteps across the Himalayan region, India, Nepal, and Tibetan regions in present-day China, visiting places and meeting people that he knew. I describe here many of the important events of his life, as these are now remembered. Yet this book is not a conventional biography. Khunu Lama’s practices of renunciation had the effect of partially concealing him from historian or biographer, perhaps intentionally so. He avoided institutional affiliations, honors, and awards; he also declined to write his own autobiography in any detail, and apparently discouraged his disciples from writing his biography while he was alive.32 He gave very few interviews and offered very few large public teachings. In general, he seems to have actively and successfully avoided the spotlight. As a result, many ambiguities about his life remain.

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What follows is partial and fragmentary in a way that mirrors the important dynamics of renunciation, separation, connection, and continuity within his own life and work. From another perspective, this book is also more than a biography of a single person. It is an exploration of the processes of memory and recollection that animate the telling of life stories, and the ways in which these processes of recollection shape accounts of separation and continuity within lineages. While the focus of this book is on particular approaches that twentieth-century Tibetan and Himalayan thinkers have taken to these questions, these themes also speak to broader considerations in religious studies, literary studies, and history more generally, such as the structuring of the lives of saints and the potential of narrative as a resource for theory-making.

Beggar Modern In an essay called “Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment Rationalism,” the historian and postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty reimagines the figure of the subaltern in the context of an apparent conflict between religion and modernity. This attempt leads him to reflect that, “the Buddhist imagination once saw the possibility of the joyful, renunciant bhikshu (monk) in the miserable and deprived image of the bhikshuk (beggar).” Via this image, Chakrabarty proposes a mode of history that can be “radically fragmentary,” a history “possessed of an openness so radical that I can express it only in Heideggerian terms: the capacity to hear what one does not already understand.  .  .  . We know about its existence when we come across historical evidence that does not easily fit our categories.”33 This provocative image sparked the lines of inquiry that led to this book. Khunu Lama—whose life and activities elude multiple categories, including sectarianism and affiliation, connection and separation, traditional and modern—leaves only traces for the historian or biographer to follow. These traces impose a regime of fragments, partial glimpses, and contradictory memories narrated by others. The fragments nevertheless take shape within the recollections of these other narrators as permeated by a particular ethical concern, one that narrators of Khunu Lama’s life describe with the Mahāyāna term bodhicitta. Chakrabarty indicates that one of his own intellectual influences is the Lithuanian-French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, by coincidence a rough chronological contemporary of Khunu Lama. Levinas’s ethical mode of philosophy places the fragmentary above the totality,

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homelessness above the return home; the other before the self. He imagines the trope of homelessness through the figure of Moses, an exemplar of an ethics-as-first-philosophy that Levinas calls the “Hebrew,” and that he frames as a corrective to the ego-centered European tradition of “Greek” philosophy, personified for him by Odysseus. While Odysseus returns home, or in Levinas’s reading, to the self-centered self at the center of a closed circle of ontology, Moses by contrast dies homeless, in the wilderness, having seen the promised land but not entered it. Levinas highlights the ethical impact of this Mosaic homelessness in terms that resonate with Buddhist perspectives on renunciation, seen as a process of relinquishing self-grasping. For Levinas, we are always commanded by the other in infinite ethical obligation, and the work of that ethical obligation is never complete. Indeed, even the encounter with the other is incomplete: In some of his writings Levinas suggests that we do not encounter the other directly, but only the other’s “trace.” That trace in turn commands the one who encounters it, asserting an intersubjective obligation to ethical response. As the American Jewish philosopher Edith Wyschogrod has suggested, this intersubjective obligation manifests as the requirement to remember and to tell stories, and also to interrogate the unequal, always precarious processes of memory and narration, with attention to the unsaid, the unremembered, the unheard.34 In this book, my own literary and historical methodology centers on explorations of narrative and recollection. This narrative method is shaped by the theoretical and authorial interventions of Khunu Lama’s main Tibetan and Himalayan biographers and interpreters, including the authors of the primary Tibetan-language textual works on his life: K. Angrup, Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, and Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche. It is also shaped by the perspectives of people who were close to Khunu Lama who shared their oral accounts and interpretations of his activities with me, and by the perspectives of the Kinnauri nuns Bogti and Tenzin Dolma (whose accounts were recorded by Linda LaMacchia).35 Yet the conclusions of this book and all errors in it are my own, reflecting the process through which my writing here further filters stories about Khunu Lama through my particular locations, as a white, US-based scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, writing in English, encountering Khunu Lama’s life through Tibetan as a second language, and engaging throughout this book in multiple acts of translation and retelling. In what follows, I pursue the traces of Khunu Lama’s homeless life through the recollections of those who knew him. In their stories, he emerges as animated by a Buddhist ethical ideal of renunciation, enacting a form of intentional wandering also reminiscent of Levinas’s Mosaic meta-

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phor. The fragmented quality of stories told about Khunu Lama resonates with what we can glimpse of his own commitment to practices of Buddhist moral subjectivity aimed at decentering the self. Yet these fragmentary narrations never coalesce into a single interpretation of who Khunu Lama was. It is in their resistance to any unitary or total picture of Khunu Lama that these fragmentary narrations about his life register most deeply with Chakrabarty’s image of the beggar/monk. Chakrabarty frames the linguistic link between the joyful Buddhist monk and the deprived beggar as a way to wrestle with the role of religion in the midst of a decolonizing politics, a problematic with direct relevance to thinking about a Himalayan Buddhist figure from the twentieth century. As Chakrabarty outlines, certain forms of Marxist critique have framed religious devotion as a tool of domination used by elites and (primarily European) colonizers to control subaltern communities in Asia and elsewhere, while also being a symptom of this exploitation. In this view, religious devotees appear to displace or give away their own historical and political agency to supernatural agents, and open the door to irrationality and their own manipulation. Religious practice and belief serve here as a kind of proxy for the psychological and intellectual consequences of oppression. Chakrabarty notes the danger that this view will lead to religious frameworks labeled “backward” or “primitive” becoming themselves a badge of exclusion, a mark of the uncivilization or “under-development” of subaltern communities that can be used to justify colonization or domination in the first place. Significantly, Tibetan communities within the People’s Republic of China have repeatedly found their social, intellectual, and religious practices being evaluated and marginalized, via categories of Western and Chinese secular modernity that evoke precisely these logics. Chinese state projects in Tibetan areas have emphasized Tibetan “underdevelopment” (rjes lus), implying that Tibet prior to Chinese state intervention “lagged behind in technology, and more importantly, that it was culturally stagnant and backward,”36 terms in which religion figures as a crucial subtext. Indian and Nepalese state policies likewise classify Himalayan and diasporic Tibetan communities in related terms as in need of cultural remediation, often with explicit or implicit reference to religion.37 Underlying such categorizations are progressivist accounts of an emphatically secular (and nationalist) modernity, in which North American and European accounts of religion play an important role. Ironically, the phenomenon that Lama Jabb has called “the scholarly preoccupation and public fascination in the West with Tibetan Buddhism” emerges precisely within this context.38 Discourses of rationality, secular-

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ism, and modernity that emerged within European and North American colonial projects underlie Western imaginaries of Tibetan Buddhism, often to contradictory (and deleterious) effect. Some Western presentations caricature Tibetan and Himalayan intellectual and religious life as antimodern, trapped in magic and superstition. Other presentations claim Tibetan Buddhism as an ideal “rational religion,” whose insights perfectly mirror those of the natural sciences, but only when so-called irrational elements like devotion, ritual, or yogic power have been edited out.39 The calcification of such caricatures leads to a host of material and conceptual erasures—of literary forms and lived experiences, of historical and contemporary events and thinkers, of material as well as epistemic forms of sovereignty.40 It can be tempting nonetheless to turn to vocabularies of “traditional” and “modern” as tools for thinking about Khunu Lama’s life. He was a Buddhist scholar-practitioner deeply committed to sustained engagement with intellectual and spiritual resources rooted in an inherited Indo-Tibetan past. At the same time, his life spanned the period of Tibetan and Himalayan history most implicated in accounts of contemporary modernity. Yet in his own writing and teaching, and in accounts of his life narrated by people who knew him, he appears to have resisted being labeled or categorized in any such way. In thinking about his life in this context, I have found that Chakrabarty’s image of the monk/beggar opens a conceptual alternative, an alternative at which I gesture with the phrase “beggar modern.” Evoking inherited Buddhist ideals of renunciation and home-leaving, together with contemporary experiences of displacement and mobility, the figure of the beggar modern refuses neat assignment either to the box labeled “outmoded religious forms of the past,” or the box labeled “secular modernity.”41 In this sense, the figure of the beggar modern traverses historical categories as Khunu Lama himself walked or rode across the territories of Tibetan and Himalayan cultural geography. Narratives about Khunu Lama bear out this reframing. Rather than emphasizing modernity or tradition as the key terms in stories of his life, narrators return repeatedly to themes of renunciation and devotion, bodhicitta and lineage connection as touchstones, refracting through these terms their own and Khunu Lama’s negotiations with loss and change, as well as survival and continuity. Narrators of stories about Khunu Lama bear out Wyschogrod’s insight that to tell the story of someone’s life is to participate in a work of memory charged with ethical weight, in particular in the aftermath of grave personal and communal trauma. The necessarily fragmentary nature of the stories about Khunu Lama that I explore here offers a constant reminder of the partial nature of all such acts of memory and narration. A book of

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memory and storytelling like this one leaves a gap of what cannot be said or what is not known. What follows here is one among many possible books about Khunu Lama—the beginning, rather than the end, of a relationship of exploration. After all, acts of narration and memory are themselves part of an ongoing process of connection, always anticipating audiences that remain in the future.

Sources for This Work What follows here is based on both oral and textual sources. My main oral sources for this project are interviews I conducted with Khunu Rinpoche’s students, colleagues, and friends between 2003 and 2016 in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities in the present-day People’s Republic of China, Nepal, India, Europe, and the United States. They include interviews with his main Tibetan-language biographers: K. Angrup, Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, and Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche. All translations of my interviews from Tibetan to English are my own except where indicated; for Ladakhi, Hindi, and Kinnauri interviews, I indicate any additional translators in the notes. Some of my interviews took place in English. The people I interviewed knew Khunu Lama in various capacities and at different stages in his life, some quite intimately, some at a distance. They include monks and nuns, lay disciples, and wealthy patrons; people who studied Tibetan and Sanskrit literary and grammatical topics with him; people who received Buddhist teachings from him; devoted longtime disciples and more casual acquaintances. People who spoke with me hailed from many regions of geographic Tibet, and from Ladakh, Kinnaur, Sikkim, and other parts of the Himalayan region, Nepal, and India, and also included five British and American students. In addition to interviews I conducted personally, I have benefited from several other biographical resources. The first is a recorded interview with Khunu Lama himself, conducted by the Tibetan Buddhist scholar Lama Kunga and a group of American students of Buddhism in the early 1970s, near the end of Khunu Lama’s life. (A copy of the cassette tape of this interview was generously provided to me by Gen Lobsang Jamspal.) This interview offers a tantalizing depiction of Khunu Lama in his own words, but unfortunately the recording itself is difficult to hear in places. Moreover, perhaps contrary to expectations, this recorded interview does not function as any kind of ur-text of Khunu Lama’s life, in the sense of trumping all other interpretations. On the contrary, Khunu Lama himself is extremely brief, almost telegraphic, in his replies to questions about his movements,

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teachers, and activities. The oral recollections of surviving students and friends, and in some cases the textual accounts, offer the greatest detail about Khunu Lama’s life, based as they are on earlier and more detailed questioning by close disciples. Also essential for this work are a set of unique oral histories recorded by the anthropologist Linda LaMacchia with religious women from Khunu Lama’s home region of Kinnaur. In particular, LaMacchia interviewed two Kinnauri nuns, Bogti and Tenzin Dolma, who became Khunu Lama’s close disciples near the end of his life and were with him when he died. LaMacchia’s 2008 study, Songs and Lives of the Jomo (Nuns) of Kinnaur, Northwest India: Women’s Religious Expression in Tibetan Buddhism presents their transcribed oral accounts; her articles provide further important analysis of this material. In addition to oral sources, I draw on a range of Tibetan textual materials for Khunu Lama’s life. These include two editions of the religious biography, or namtar, of Khunu Lama in prose and verse by the Lahauli scholar K. Angrup (Tib. Ngodrup Gashawa), who was himself a longtime student of Khunu Lama and a fellow Himalayan, from the valley of Lahaul near Khunu Lama’s home region of Kinnaur. The first edition of his text, Khu nu rin po che’i rnam thar thar pa’i them skas zhes bya ba, was published in 1989 by the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath (CIHTS). The second edition, Khu nu rin po che bla ma bstan ‘dzin rgyal mtshan dpal bzang po’i mdzad rnam thar pa’i them skas, was published in 2005 by CIHTS; both editions also contain Angrup’s verse namtar-supplication prayer to Khunu Lama, excerpts from which serve as the frontispiece for this book. All my references here to Angrup’s Khunu Lama namtar are to the 2005 text, except where specifically noted. Two other important textual sources are a biographical essay by  the noted Tibetan Buddhist teacher, scholar, and encyclopedia author Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche (also a direct student of Khunu Lama), based on his personal interviews with Khunu Lama in 1974 and his reading of K. Angrup’s work; and a condensed biography of Khunu Lama by the influential Drikung Kagyu intellectual and religious master Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche, also a close disciple of Khunu Lama. Khetsun Sangpo’s essay is entitled Khu nu bla ma rin po che’i rnam par thar pa nyid kyi zhal gsungs ma (n.d.). Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche’s biography of Khunu Lama, Mkhyen gzigs khu nu sems dpa’ chen po bstan ‘dzin rgyal mtshan gyi rnam thar dran pa’i gdung sel byin rlabs nyi ‘od, was translated into English in 2011 by Erick Tsiknopoulos, and Mike Dickman, of the Sugatagarbha Translation Group, under the title Sunlight Blessings That Cure the Longing of Remembrance:

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A Biography of the Omniscient Khunu Mahāsattva, Tenzin Gyeltsen. I have gathered additional information about Khunu Lama’s activities from magazine articles and memorial essays written by disciples; from institutional histories of places he visited, such as the Lhasa Astronomical and Medical Institute and Dzogchen Monastery in Khams;42 and from biographies of contemporaries.43 The namtar and associated textual sources, such as magazine articles, were often cited by people I spoke with as authoritative accounts of Khunu Lama’s life story. The writings of Angrup, Khetsun Sangpo, and Lamchen Gyalpo shaped my understanding of the major themes I discuss here, in particular renunciation and the bodhisattva ideal. Yet all these texts are themselves often incomplete or partial. Therefore, although I discuss the textual sources extensively in what follows, and I give Angrup’s 2005 namtar account some priority in organizing the chronology and sequence of this book, I do so because of the role the namtar plays as a conceptually authoritative source for communities that remember Khunu Lama, not because its account is never complicated by other sources. There are a handful of previous Western-language treatments of Khunu Rinpoche’s life, of varying length and detail, which have all been important for this book. These include Jürgen Manshardt’s biographical introduction to his German translation of Khunu Rinpoche’s famous poems on bodhicitta;44 Gareth Sparham’s biographical introduction to his English translation of these poems;45 Thierry Dodin’s biographical essay about Khunu Lama, written on the basis of an oral interview with the Kinnauri scholar Sangngak Tenzin, who was himself a personal student of Khunu Lama;46 and K. Angrup and S. Lall’s brief memorial summary of Khunu Lama’s activities, published in English in the Tibetan Review ten years after Khunu Lama’s death.47 These Western-language presentations themselves rely upon a combination of the first prose and verse namtar editions by Angrup, the biographical summary by Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, and oral accounts, a number of which are from the same individuals whom I also interviewed. Western-language studies of other contemporaneous Tibetan figures and historical events have also been valuable in this book; their authors have also discussed their research with me and provided important insights and information. These studies include David Jackson’s monumental 2003 biography of Dezhung Rinpoche,48 his 2020 biography of Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, both of whom were leading Buddhist scholars and teachers, and also personal students of Khunu Lama; and Jürgen Manshardt’s groundbreaking 2007 biography of the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, the

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female religious master from central Tibet who was Khunu Lama’s main female disciple and close companion. All these textual and oral sources are nevertheless limited. Certain periods of Khunu Lama’s life are obscure, because he traveled alone and did not record his activities. The reader therefore will observe gaps in the chronological record presented here. Khunu Lama did keep a diary during the year 1959/1960, in which he composed his first drafts of the verses on bodhicitta that would become his renowned published work. This diary has never been edited or published to my knowledge, although I have been able to see a Xerox of the handwritten original, thanks to John Dunne. No diaries for other years have surfaced. Khunu Lama seems never to have published a full autobiography, although he did occasionally agree to record oral interviews with students or visitors, and he did compose a brief supplication prayer (gsol ‘debs) at the end of his life, summarizing some of his activities at the request of his students, as I discuss in chapter 5. In general, the lack of an extensive and accessible autobiographical record; the protean nature of the sources that are available; the fact that major sources are oral as well as textual; that the sources are sometimes contradictory; and that each source is, to different degrees, invested in specific ways of remembering Khunu Lama—all of these factors shape the kind of multivocal yet partial narrative that I present here. I consider these complex dynamics of memory, source and narration directly in what follows, reflecting on the ways in which accounts of teachers’ lives are recalled and transmitted to new generations.

Chapter Outline Chapter 1, “‘Like Water into Water’: Transmission Lineages in Tibetan Buddhism,” offers an overview of the kinds of lineage relationships into which Khunu Lama entered, focusing on his early teachers, and his sojourn in eastern Tibet in the 1920s and early 1930s, with reference to his nonsectarian approach to Buddhism. Khunu Lama made a host of connections and entered into a multiplicity of lineages as he traveled from his birthplace to the Tibetan Plateau acquiring teachings. He then shared these teachings with people in Tibet, the Himalayan region, and India later in his life. I highlight several of his important teachers in this chapter, and sketch some of the possible forms and contexts for lineage relationships, ranging from lineages of Buddhist transmission to family and incarnation lineages. The title of chapter 2, “He abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma,” is quoted from Angrup’s 2005 namtar. It encapsulates Angrup’s presentation of Khunu Lama as someone who has turned away from the

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intimacy of family and community of origin to pursue a life devoted to Buddhism. Although Angrup does not use the Tibetan term chatralwa, or renunciant-hermit, the phrase “he abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma,” resonates with the chatralwa ideal, placing a particular style of renunciation at the core of Buddhist practice and at the core of Khunu Lama’s life choices and persona. In chapter 2 I consider narratives about Khunu Lama’s renunciant lifestyle within the larger framework of claims Buddhists have made about renunciation in monastic and household life, and the ways in which Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists in particular have enacted and idealized forms of renunciatory practice. I examine the importance of key authorizing referents for Khunu Lama’s renunciatory activities, and consider the literary references through which Angrup frames the centrality of Khunu Lama’s renunciation. Chapter 3, “Aim Your Dharma Practice at a Beggar’s Life,” continues the exploration of Khunu Lama’s life of renunciation, offering a thematically structured but largely chronological narrative of his activities, beginning with his departure from his birthplace in Kinnaur as a young man and continuing through the end of his life. Focusing on accounts of his renunciatory practices, I examine links narrators make between Khunu Lama’s identity as a Himalayan border person, his perceived and actual connections to India, his non-sectarianism, and his expertise as a literary scholar of Sanskrit and Tibetan grammar and poetics. I also turn in this chapter to potential problems posed by Khunu Lama’s self-concealment, from the point of view of interruptions to lineage continuity that may result. Chapter 4, by contrast, considers Khunu Lama as a figure of connection. It situates Khunu Lama’s life story and his role as a teacher amid a historical context that narrators of stories about him identify as a crisis of cultural survival. In particular, chapter 4 describes events leading up to the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet and the circumstances in which Khunu Lama met him in India. Many of Khunu Lama’s students in his later life also arrived in India as refugees during this time, including the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, Khunu Lama’s close female disciple and attendant. Chapter 4 sketches her early life and escape from Tibet. Her experiences and those of her small circle of disciples and teachers give a sense of the hardships faced by Tibetan refugees and the challenges the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan leaders faced in the precarious exile situation. In this context, chapter 4 offers a chronological account of Khunu Lama’s early meetings with the Dalai Lama and his teaching at a teacher-training program in Mussoorie, and explores selections from Khunu Lama’s own verses in Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta. Chapter 5 addresses the topic of lineage continuity through affective

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imaginaries of guru devotion. In this chapter, I examine literary and ritual tropes associated with the indivisibility of teachers and students and consider representations of the emotional and somatic dimensions of devotional longing. Looking at examples of Khunu Lama’s relationships with students in various settings, and at devotional texts though which students supplicate their teachers, I explore moments where Khunu Lama participated in or resisted such devotional focus on himself. I suggest that imaginaries of longing play a crucial role in bridging Tibetan and Himalayan accounts of indivisible lineage connection, on the one hand, and teacherstudent separation related to practices of renunciation, on the other. Chapter 6 takes up the topic of separation between gurus and disciples in the paradigmatic context of the guru’s death, echoing themes of loss and disappointment hinted at in the story of Ānanda failing to ask the Buddha to extend his life. Accounts of conflicts surrounding Khunu Lama’s funeral suggest how narratives of death present a special case of teacher-student separation, imposing gaps upon the guru-disciple relationship. The separations imposed by death parallel the separations imposed by practices of renunciation, such as those Khunu Lama embraces as part of his chatralwa ideal. Yet these painful separations from the guru prompt disciples to define their own ways of being in the world, while disciples’ recollections of Khunu Lama’s ongoing compassionate agency even after death serve as a source of validation and encouragement. Connecting all the chapters is a focus on the ways that twentieth-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators draw on authorizing referents from the past to harness the creative potential of devotion, memory, and longing. In so doing, narrators mobilize these practices as a resource that energizes lineage connections and continuity across space and time.

[ Ch a pter 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 25

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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.

... 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

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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 teacherstudent 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,

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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

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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 rhet-

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orics 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 familybased 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 region, as elsewhere in Buddhist Asia, fam-

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ily and clan-based social networks and practices of relationship thus coexist with Buddhist rhetorics of renunciation and with large-scale social institutions dedicated to monasticism, as well as with a variety of individual practices of renunciation and yogic cultivation. Knowing this allows us to situate important categories of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist non-celibate yogic practitioners, who may hold significant religious vows and dedicate much of their time to Buddhist activities, but are not monks or nuns.20 Among these multifold forms of relationship, family lineages, transmission lineages, and lineages of reincarnation intersect in a variety of ways. Across the Himalayan region and Tibet, celibate monastic practitioners and institutions coexist with family lineages that may include non-celibate tantric yogic practitioners and religious specialists. Both celibate and noncelibate religious masters often participate in the same shared lineages of transmission and Buddhist scholarship, even if certain aspects of ritual and institutional life may be reserved for either monastics or non-celibate yogic practitioners.21 The most famous example of a Buddhist family lineage may be that of the Sakya Trizins (Sa skya khri ‘dzin), the throne-holders of the Sakya tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, whose leaders have come from the Khon (‘khon) family for nearly a thousand years, and who ruled Tibet with Mongol backing from the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries. This Sakya family lineage includes many prominent celibate monastics, as well as married yogic masters and figures identified as reincarnations. Often the Khon family children in each generation will effectively divide up celibate and non-celibate religious roles, with at least one non-celibate son carrying on the family line, while other brothers and sisters may marry or ordain. Until recently, non-Tibetan scholars have often tended to either sideline or mischaracterize Tibetan Buddhist and Bon family lineages and the tantric specialists within them.22 Sometimes dismissively referring to non-celibate yogic practitioners as “married lamas” or “village lamas,” such scholarship often assumes tension or conflict between family lineages and monastic ones, and between celibate and non-celibate practitioners. While Tibetan monastic critiques of ngakpas, married yogic practitioners (ngags pa) certainly exist, as well as, conversely, critiques of narrow-minded monasticism by yogic practitioners, these polemics occur within a larger environment in which the mainstream of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist life can and does take a variety of forms.23 In Khunu Lama’s case, both within his own natal family and in the Buddhist transmission lineages into which he entered, we see celibate monastics and non-celibate yogic masters interacting to form religious relationships with each other, participating in a shared landscape of Buddhist

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practice, ritual, and transmission. Khunu Lama himself never took full monastic ordination, although he does seem to have taken novice monk vows at least once as a young man while studying at Tashilhunpo Monastery. His ordination status often apparently struck people who met him as ambiguous or hard to pin down. Like Milarepa, the eleventh-century renunciant exemplar to whom he was often compared, he is remembered as neither a monk nor a household lama with a family. Yet the recurring emphasis on renunciation that characterizes narratives about his life is intelligible to audiences familiar with this range of social and ritual identities, in a context in which one does not have to be a fully ordained monk to lead a life devoted to renunciation. The range of transmission lineages that Khunu Lama entered into during his lifetime linked him both to famous celibate monastics and influential married yogins, and to people who were in turn connected to each other by both incarnation lines and family relationships. Indeed, almost two decades before his meeting with Khenpo Zhenga, when the future Khunu Lama was only a teenager still living in his home valley of Kinnaur, he formed an early connection with one of the most prominent lineages in the Himalayan region, one that exemplifies this range of patterns. This was the lineage of the renowned teacher, dreadlocked yogin, and visionary Drubwang Togden Shakya Shri (1853–1919),24 one of the great intellectual and spiritual figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Tibet. Shakya Shri was an influential teacher whose influence was expressed in part through the geographic and social expanse of his lineages.25 Through a combination of family ties, teacher-student transmissions, and lineages of reincarnation, his lineages of spiritual and biological descendants came to span the entire Himalayan region, from Kham in eastern Tibet to Ladakh on the west of the Plateau, and to Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim in the south. Indeed, the historian Tashi Tsering Josayma has suggested that the spread of Togden Shakya Shri’s lineage network is one of the most significant intellectual and religious developments of the late nineteenth century in Tibet and the Himalayas.26 In the present day, individuals linked to Shakya Shri’s family lineage continue to teach Buddhism across the Himalayan region and in communities around the world. Togden Shakya Shri’s example vividly demonstrates the inextricability of family and religious lineages for Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities. As Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa has described, his lineage entwines both biological and spiritual descendants. He was married at least twice and had ten children. After his marriage, he and his large family

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continued to live near the monastery where he had initially been ordained as a novice monk.27 Of his children, some sons became fully ordained monks, while some sons and daughters became famous as non-celibate tantric practitioners. These non-celibate yogic practitioners in turn carried on Togden Shakya Shri’s lineage as a family tradition through having their own children and grandchildren, as well as extending the lineage through transmission to disciples unrelated to them. Moreover, several children and grandchildren of Togden Shakya Shri were identified as the reincarnations of previous Buddhist figures, connecting Shakya Shri’s family lineage to multiple lineages of reincarnation. In addition, several of his daughters married the (non-celibate) heads of other important religious lineages, thus linking the Shakya Shri family lineage with similar influential religious-family networks. Taken together, this broad variety of connections enabled the vast spread of Togden Shakya Shri’s lineage across the Himalayan region and beyond.28 Khunu Lama entered Shakya Shri’s lineage by becoming the disciple of one of Shakya Shri’s own personal students, and went on to maintain connections with Shakya Shri’s lineage throughout his life. Many decades later, after leaving Tibet in 1959, several of Shakya Shri’s students and relatives gathered in northwest India in Ladakh, Kullu-Manali, and Lahaul (near Khunu Lama’s birthplace of Kinnaur). At the end of Khunu Lama’s life, members of this extended lineage family of Shakya Shri invited him to teach, and these were some of the last teachings he gave before his death in 1977.

Khunu Lama’s Family Lineages The future Khunu Lama was himself surrounded as a child by a range of possible models for Buddhist life, ranging from celibate monastics embedded in ritual and teaching institutions to tantric yogic practitioners, some of whom had family lives in addition to their religious obligations. The young Tenzin Gyaltsen was of course born into a family lineage in addition to entering many Buddhist lineages over the course of his long life. Indeed, not only was he a member of a family lineage in the most basic sense of being a child with relatives stretching back into the past (a sense in which we are all members of family lineages, whether or not we have grown up with biological relatives, and whether or not our particular family wants or is able to recall its past), but Khunu Lama’s own natal family had religious connections and status stretching back generations. According to Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche, Khunu Lama’s father was a

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descendant of Pema Lingpa, the fifteenth-sixteenth century Nyingma treasure revealer.29 Close relatives like his maternal uncle and his grandfather were Buddhist practitioners and teachers, and Khunu Lama’s grandfather in particular had studied in Tibet, although unlike his grandson, he ultimately returned to Kinnaur, where he lived as a non-celibate lama with a family.30 Khunu Lama’s mother’s family, including her brother, Rasvir Das, were, like many in their region, primarily Drukpa Kagyu practitioners.31 Written accounts of his life describe Tenzin Gyaltsen’s childhood in this prosperous and well-known large family in the beautiful Himalayan mountain valleys of Kinnaur, in the northern part of what is now the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. His early education there blended family relationships and Buddhist study, following the common pattern for children in Himalayan Buddhist households, who often begin their religious education with a relative.32 Tenzin Gyaltsen’s mother Norkyi arranged for her young son to study with her learned brother.33 Poignantly, however, she and the boy’s father Kalanpur seem not to have anticipated that Buddhist study would soon take their son far out of the valley and away from them, effectively for the rest of their lives. Tenzin Gyaltsen studied with his uncle Rasvir Das until he was fifteen, in Ropa, his uncle’s village.34 The namtar notes, “After that, for a short time he entered religious life at the scholastic college of Ngari Choling, the monastery of [Ropa Village]. Having done so, for about two and a half years he studied and practiced with constant effort.” It was after this entry into religious life that Tenzin Gyaltsen met the disciple of Togden Shakya Shri, who became one of his important early teachers, a master Angrup refers to as “the great Mahāsiddha, Lama Sonam Gyaltsen.”35 Thus, as a young boy and teenager, the future Khunu Lama lived with and was cared for by his parents and close relatives, while beginning his Buddhist training and study. Although he seems to have thrown himself into Buddhist practice and to have visited and lived in a variety of nearby Buddhist religious communities (and met at least one teacher—namely, Sonam Gyaltsen—who had connections to the broader Buddhist world outside Kinnaur), during this early study and practice of Buddhism, he was still close to home, often living with his mother’s brother and his community, perhaps still often seeing his parents and siblings, as well as the many other relatives who lived throughout the area. His Buddhist engagement and family connections in this sense remained deeply woven together, in a way that is familiar across the Himalayan region, as well as in Buddhist societies in East and South Asia. Nevertheless, and following a well-established narrative pattern in Tibetan accounts of Buddhist life, Angrup’s namtar tells us that Tenzin

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Gyaltsen, when he was nineteen years old, made the momentous decision to depart his natal region. In 1914, having decided to embark on a life of Buddhist study and practice, he asked his parents for permission to leave home. When they demurred, he quietly slipped away from home on foot, and set off in pursuit of more teachers and teachings. In Angrup’s words, Khunu  Lama “turned his back on his homeland and departed for the Dharma.”36 He never saw his parents again. Some thirty years later, when Khunu Lama returned to his home valley to teach, his parents had already passed away. As the next chapter explores, powerful Buddhist rhetorics surround the act of leaving home and the embrace of renunciation. Stories about Khunu Lama locate renunciation at the center of his life and identity. Yet we might note that even after leaving home in this decisive way at age nineteen, Khunu Lama remained connected to his relatives and to his place of origin. He supported the first leg of his journey away from home by collecting on loans his brother had made (sending home a note of apology), and he remained in contact with his brothers and their families until the end of his life. In the 1940s, he returned to Kinnaur at the request of relatives and neighbors. At their insistence, he remained in the Kinnaur valley for eight years, teaching Buddhism and composing short works on Buddhist practice to help the local people. These works remain popular today, and Khunu Lama himself is remembered by Kinnauris as a vital figure for the intellectual and religious life of the valley. Thus Khunu Lama’s role as a participant in Buddhist transmission lineages extending across the Tibetan region—which derived from his extensive travels and was a core part of what constituted him as a revered Buddhist teacher—exists in complementarity with his embeddedness in familial and communal forms of lineage connection closer to home. In turn, these entwined forms of lineage connectedness interact in complex ways with his practices of renunciation and self-concealment, as well as with his literary scholarship and his engagement with the bodhisattva ideal. Besides Khunu Lama’s location within family and transmission lineages, he is moreover also now understood as part of an incarnation lineage as well. Two incarnations have been identified: Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima and Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi, both born in 1979. Both continue to teach on many of the themes of bodhicitta that were important to the previous Khunu Lama.37 As Birgit Kellner notes, incarnation lineages link past to future in a distinctive way, bringing the authorizing charisma of departed figures into the present time of a contemporary generation.38 The identification of Khunu Lama’s rebirths in this sense reinscribes the figure of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen within the present and projects his legacy

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toward the future, even as his intellectual biography as a gatherer of lineage transmissions makes him a link to a venerated past.

Intellectual Movements of the Late Nineteenth Century, Non- Sectarian Approaches, and the Thirteen Great Texts An important part of Khunu Lama’s significance for communities and individuals that remember him is thus as a human link to lineage masters of the past, and to their networks of transmission. Through his guru-disciple relationships, Khunu Lama entered into a group of lineages which have had a broad impact across the Himalayan Buddhist world over the last century and a half. Indeed, the names of leading figures within these lineages are so well known by many Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists that an oral narrator or a biographer like Angrup often only needs to mention a name or two to evoke the charisma of the lineage as a whole. Outlining Khunu Lama’s connections to such figures highlights the importance of his time in Tibetan regions, Kham in particular. He arrived in Tibet during the reign of the current Dalai Lama’s predecessor, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Tubten Gyatso (1876–1933, often known as the Great Thirteenth). Dramatic change and upheaval marked this period in many regions of South and East Asia. Tibetan areas, especially Kham, were no exception. The Indian Independence movement confronted British colonial rule in India. Chinese reformers and revolutionaries with a range of political aspirations struggled to transform or topple the Qing Dynasty. Wars, invasions, colonization, and revolutionary movements, as well as individual quests for local power, upended lives and reshaped communities. Japan, Russia, Britain, and China struggled for imperial dominance in Asia, both by proxy and by direct military action. In 1904, only a few years before Khunu Lama crossed the passes as a young student, British troops led by Colonel Francis Younghusband invaded central Tibet in a brief but bloody incursion aimed at securing British trade privileges.39 This in turn heightened Qing anxieties about British designs on Tibet, helping to shift Qing Tibet policy toward a more explicitly colonizing model, in Kham in particular. The Qing general Zhao Erfeng (1845–1911), sent to pacify Kham in 1907, attempted to enforce settlement of Han Chinese farmers and create a Chinese colony there; he acquired the epithet “the Butcher” for his ruthless approach to subduing the region, including attacking monasteries and firing on unarmed civilians.40 In 1910, Qing troops invaded Lhasa, leading the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to flee to British India.41 Yet by 1911 the Qing Dynasty had collapsed and Chinese troops rebelled;

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Zhao Erfeng was executed. In 1912, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama expelled Chinese troops and political representatives from Lhasa, and in 1913 he declared Tibet’s independence. Nevertheless, a range of complex political dynamics continued to fuel regional conflicts. In the Dergé region of Kham, where Khunu Lama met Khenpo Zhenga, a decades-long struggle over succession to the Dergé throne exacerbated long-standing tensions between the Ganden Podrang government of the Dalai Lamas in Lhasa; Chinese Republican (and later Nationalist) officials and regional warlords, who aimed to project Chinese power in the region; and Khampa leaders, who attempted to carve out their own power centers free of interference from either Lhasa or Beijing. Despite these tumultuous events, this was a dynamic time in Tibetan and Himalayan religious and intellectual life. Indeed, Kham in this period was an epicenter of Buddhist efflorescence, an efflorescence with roots in what John Canti, following Gene Smith, has called the Buddhist “renaissance” of the nineteenth century.42 A range of remarkable intellectual and religious figures, heirs to noted lineages of nineteenth-century masters, were active during Khunu Lama’s sojourn, leaving legacies that endure today. Prominent among them were Khenpo Zhenga and other teachers who became Khunu Lama’s gurus in Kham. By traveling to eastern Tibet and receiving transmissions from masters such as Zhenga, Khunu Lama thus entered into a notable confluence of scholars and practitioners. Scholars have proposed a number of rubrics for framing the intellectual and religious ferment that made Kham such a draw for someone like Khunu Lama. One important hallmark of the late nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan cultural renaissance is its strongly non-sectarian or ecumenical character. Some scholars have favored the term non-sectarian or rimè “movement” for this dynamic.43 Others have questioned the notion of a “movement” in the sense of a centrally organized program, emphasizing instead the diffuse and individual quality of the intellectual and religious creativity of the time, and its responsiveness to specific local concerns, including regional Khampa struggles for autonomy.44 There is widespread agreement, however, that leading thinkers of this period shared an enduring commitment to ecumenicism, in part in reaction to the ways sectarian divisions had been mobilized in earlier political conflicts. Their non-sectarian approach continued the ecumenicism of seminal figures from previous periods in Tibetan history, ranging from Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa (1357– 1419), the polymathic progenitor of the Geluk tradition of the Dalai Lamas, to his near contemporary, the Nyingma visionary Longchen Rabjampa (1308–1364, known as Longchenpa), among a host of others from across Tibetan lineage traditions. An ecumenical approach would be central in

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Khunu Lama’s own teaching career, and there is every indication that studies with Zhenga and elsewhere in Kham reinforced this.45 Zhenga himself was a prominent successor to leading participants in the late nineteenth-century Buddhist intellectual and cultural efflorescence in eastern Tibet. In particular, Zhenga’s own root guru (rtsa ba’i bla ma), Orgyen Tenzin Norbu (1841/51–1900?) was himself the direct student of the famous eastern Tibetan Dzogchen master and renunciant Dza Patrul Rinpoche.46 (Dzogchen [rdzogs chen, lit. “Great Perfection”] is a system of meditation particularly associated with the Nyingma lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, for whom it is the pinnacle and culmination of the Buddhist path; it plays a similar role in the Tibetan Bon tradition.)47 Patrul Rinpoche was a contemporary and friend of leading ecumenical masters of the nineteenth century and is linked to Khunu Lama through multiple lineages of transmission and influence. His example serves as an important authorizing referent for Khunu Lama’s own chatralwa renunciant lifestyle, as does Patrul’s emphasis on teaching Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra as widely as possible, including to poor rural people. Indeed, some scholars have seen Patrul’s combined emphasis on the Bodhicaryāvatāra and Dzogchen as key ingredients of both the popular vitality and the ecumenicism of the nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan renaissance in Buddhist learning and practice.48 Khunu Lama seems to have inherited these core aspects of Paltrul’s focus from Khenpo Zhenga, as well as from other teachers he met in Kham.49 When Khunu Lama met Khenpo Zhenga at Zhenga’s hermitage in the mid-1920s, he received from Zhenga the intellectual and spiritual material for which Zhenga is now most remembered: his commentaries (mchan ‘grel) on the Thirteen Great Texts (Gzhung chen bcu gsum), classics of Indian Buddhism that occupy a prominent place in Tibetan philosophy. The commentaries and their thirteen source texts formed the basis of Khenpo Zhenga’s own teaching program at the many institutions of learning that he founded and led, rooted in an intellectual stance that Smith and others have characterized as a kind of “back to the sources” approach.50 This “back to the sources” teaching program, like the larger intellectual and religious lineages of which Khenpo Zhenga was a part, influenced Buddhist education throughout the Kham region, and helped to nourish ecumenicism and the revitalization of Buddhist intellectual life in eastern Tibet. During his tenure as the nineteenth khenpo (mkhan po, abbot) of Śrī Siṃha monastic college at Dzogchen Monastery (in the Nyingma tradition), and at the Kamshe monastic college he founded at Dzongsar Monastery (in the Sakya tradition),51 as well as throughout his teaching career more broadly, Khenpo Zhenga based his curriculum on these thirteen texts and their

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commentaries. In doing so, he followed the instructions of his own teacher, Orgyen Tenzin Norbu, who is said to have given him his own copies of commentaries on the thirteen key Indian source texts and to have directed him to concentrate on these texts, prophesying that if Zhenga taught these “his lineage would be widespread and strong.”52 Khenpo Zhenga’s work with these thirteen texts was highly influential. In foregrounding them in the curriculum as he did, he positioned them as the central texts for Tibetan Buddhist intellectuals and scholar-practitioners, in particular for students at shedra monastic colleges of the commentarial school type (bshad grwa) affiliated with Nyingma, Kagyu, and Sakya traditions.53 Smith has suggested that Khenpo Zhenga did this to “return” Tibetans to a shared core of Indic Buddhism at the heart of all Tibetan Buddhist lineages. Zhenga apparently intended this shared ecumenical Indic inheritance, with its authoritative canonical status as the origin of Tibetan Buddhist ideas and practices, to be an antidote to sectarian conflicts.54 Zhenga’s interventions emphasized Indian sources as foundational and authorizing in multiple ways: He not only highlighted canonical Indic texts as the basis for monastic education in the many Nyingma, Sakya, and Kagyu institutions in which he and his students taught, but he also directed students back to Indian sources via his famous commentaries. That is because Zhenga’s commentaries were themselves formed of excerpts from earlier Indian commentaries on the same root texts, here translated into Tibetan; the commentaries were thus a compendium of selected Indic explications of key Indian Buddhist texts. Zhenga’s commentaries were explicitly not his own “original” (rang bzo) compositions—something that he apparently often emphasized in talking about them.55 Likewise, Zhenga did not include any Tibetan sources on his list of thirteen source texts, possibly preferring to reorient Tibetan students away from Tibetan sectarian controversies and back to Indian classics.56 Taken together, Zhenga’s work in promoting an Indic-derived ecumenical curriculum represents an instance of a Tibetan scholar making an innovative move even while framing his project as a “return to the sources.”57 At the same time, in doing so Khenpo Zhenga seems to have been following the instructions of his own root guru, Orgyen Tenzin Norbu. Both he and Orgyen Tenzin Norbu chose to highlight Indic sources in place of writings by their more recent Tibetan lineage ancestors. Even while avoiding any overt interjection of his own “original” interpretations or sectarian preferences, Zhenga was thus nevertheless making a direct intervention to promote a specific approach to Buddhist scholarship and practice. The shift is subtle. The innovation, if we can call it that, involves emphasizing one kind of transmission lineage inheritance over another, rather than tossing out

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previous interpretations or writing a “new” one. Yet it is not an exaggeration to say that there is a distinct interpretive vision at work in Zhenga’s project, one which had a palpable effect on his students. Here, Khenpo Zhenga represents a striking interlocutor and connection for Khunu Lama. Khunu Lama himself would subsequently engage in his own kinds of projects combining memory and innovation. Like Khenpo Zhenga, he would frame an inherited past of tradition in ways that students now remember as distinctively non-sectarian, in part by mobilizing authoritative lineage sources in particular ways. The resonance between the activities of these two men raises questions about the degree of Khenpo Zhenga’s influence on Khunu Lama. The resonance between their activities also suggests the slippage of the categories “modern” and “traditional” in twentieth-century Tibetan and Himalayan contexts, and how these categories can gloss complex negotiations of authority, legitimacy, and creative intervention. However, rather than redirecting Khunu Lama into entirely new paths, Khenpo Zhenga may have reinforced approaches and interests that the younger Khunu Lama already had. Indeed, these interests may be what drew Khunu Lama to Kham and to Zhenga in the first place. Khunu Lama had actually begun to study Sanskrit and Indian texts several years earlier, in the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, his first stop after leaving Kinnaur in 1914. There he had studied with another important Nyingma lama, the Sikkimese literary scholar Khangsarwa Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche (1863– 1936),58 of whom Khunu Lama reportedly said that he was, “a lama with great qualities, who was a great riknè (rig gnas, lit. “fields of knowledge”) expert, very brilliant.”59 In his younger days, this same Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche had traveled extensively in Tibet, particularly in Kham. As a result, he is often remembered in Sikkim under the nickname Bod Rinpoche (Tibet Rinpoche).60 Like Khunu Lama, Orgyen Tenzin became the student of some of the most influential Tibetan scholars associated with nonsectarian ideas, entering into lineages of Dzogchen meditative practice and Sanskrit and Tibetan poetic scholarship that Khunu Lama would enter years later.61 Orgyen Tenzin is particularly known for his commentaries on the Mirror of Poetics, an influential Sanskrit text on Indian kāvyā poetic forms that Khunu Lama would later study and teach, and he was the young Khunu Lama’s main early teacher of the kāvyā tradition.62 Barely more than three years after his studies with Orgyen Tenzin, when Khunu Lama arrived in central Tibet, he was quickly invited to serve as a literature teacher, and his literary activities seem to have unfolded in tandem with his ecumenical Buddhist studies. After leaving Sikkim in 1917, he made his first lengthy Tibetan stop at the Geluk monastic university of

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Tashilhunpo, seat of the Panchen Lamas.63 There, Khunu Lama studied Buddhist philosophy for several years; yet quite early in his time there, he was also invited to teach literary topics.64 His literary skill soon brought him to the attention of the Ninth Panchen Lama, who invited Khunu Lama to teach “literary science” in a school the Panchen Lama had founded for civil servants in his administration.65 Khunu Lama’s reputation as a literature teacher seems to have spread from that point on, and to have shaped many of his subsequent experiences in Tibet. He resigned from his teaching role in the Panchen Lama’s school in the early 1920s to travel to Lhasa for pilgrimage and study at the three major Geluk monasteries near Lhasa. In Lhasa, aristocratic families and officials invited him to teach literary topics. Some of the officials he met there, including the historian Rakra Rinpoche’s father, Tentong Shapey Gyurme Gyatso (1890–1938), a government minister and general in the Tibetan army who would become governor-general of Chamdo in 1932,66 and the prominent General Dasang Damdul Tsarong (1888–1959), helped him with official travel documents for his journey to Kham, enabling him to ride government horses or mules at some points on the long trip.67 These connections would later draw a number of students to Khunu Lama in India after 1959. Throughout his sojourns across the Tibetan region, Khunu Lama’s expertise in poetics, grammar, and Sanskrit-Tibetan translation served as a calling card, opening doors for him and helping him form relationships with intellectuals, religious masters, and renunciants from Lhasa to Kham. Angrup and other narrators describe how Khunu Lama would seek out holders of key Buddhist lineages to request transmissions from them; frequently these people would request in return that Khunu Lama teach them Sanskrit and Tibetan poetics and grammar, as well as other topics in which he had become expert, including medicine and astrology.68 During his sojourn in Kham, Khunu Lama was even invited to serve as literature tutor to the royal family of Dergé, where he was asked to write a commentary on a famous sixteenth-century lexicographical text called The Scholar’s Lamp of Language (Dag yig ngag sgron; a lexicographical and orthographical dictionary in verse); this commentary remains in print in multiple editions and, after his Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta, is probably his best-known work.69 As all these examples suggest, by the time he met Khenpo Zhenga, Khunu Lama was already versed in many aspects of Indian literary theory, poetics, and grammar, and had pursued Buddhist transmissions with a distinctly ecumenical approach. Manshardt speculates that Khunu Lama’s reputation as a literary scholar was part of what motivated the Khenpo to

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teach him.70 Perhaps, then, rather than look for Khenpo Zhenga’s influence on Khunu Lama, we might think instead of mutual recognition. The two men shared overlapping interests in literature and the Indic sources of Tibetan Buddhism, and they both prioritized Indic sources as support for their ecumenical orientations. The intellectual and religious projects of both men in fact highlight the important role played by Indian learning—and by the category of “Indianness” itself—in Tibetan and Himalayan intellectual life at this period (as at earlier periods of Tibetan history). “Indianness” here appears as a marker of canonicity, authoritative status, and a resulting freedom from specifically Tibetan sectarian constraints. These qualities, which Zhenga seems to have located in the Indian source texts, are also qualities that students would come to associate with the teachings, and indeed the very person, of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen. Within the recollections of his Tibetan and Himalayan biographers and former students, Khunu Lama appears both as an ecumenical scholar-practitioner, connected with virtually every tradition of Tibetan Buddhism; as an Indic (in Tibetan eyes) Himalayan border person in his physical and cultural embodiment; and as someone who was committed to and learned in the study of Sanskrit and Indian Buddhist sources and literatures.71 Khunu Lama apparently came to personify in both his work and in his own physical presence the ecumenical IndoTibetan Buddhist ideal. This forms a central aspect of how he is remembered today. One wonders to what extent Khenpo Zhenga perceived (or imagined) these qualities in him when Khunu Lama first arrived. Khenpo Zhenga, like many of his students, peers, teachers, and friends, seems to have been interested in expanding the geographic reach of the lineage networks of which he was a part. He seems to have attempted not only to redirect Tibetan Buddhists away from Tibet-specific sectarianism and toward a shared re-engagement with Indian Buddhism as a source and foundation, but also to have tried to spread this vision widely. His own intellectual vision had a significant impact on Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist intellectual life. Biographies of Zhenga suggest that he and his students founded or taught at over a hundred institutions of monastic learning, in Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan.72 In part as a result of this wide institutional scope and impact, Zhenga’s commentaries became the standard monastery curriculum across a geographically diffuse network of Tibetan Buddhist learning, influencing multiple generations of subsequent teachers. Zhenga himself, moreover, had more than seventy-two personal disciples, making him, as Samten Chhosphel notes, one of the most influential teachers of his time. These students, including Khunu Lama, offer an example of

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the far-flung human network created through a transmission lineage. (The great expanse of Togden Shakya Shri’s family and spiritual lineages offers another.) Khunu Lama must have seemed like an ideal student. His ethnic “Indianness” (as his Kinnauri identity was understood during his travels in Kham) combined with his ecumenical approach to Buddhism, already in evidence during these years, and the high level of learning in Sanskrit, Indic literature, and poetics he had already achieved before he met Zhenga all must have marked him as an appropriate recipient of what Zhenga had to bestow. Perhaps even Khunu Lama’s mobility, the fact that he had come “so far,” hinted to Khenpo Zhenga that Khunu Lama would continue to travel. With him would go the many lineages he had gathered, including Zhenga’s transmissions.

The Student Must Seek the Teacher: The Theme of Student Effort Returning to our story of Khunu Lama’s meeting with Zhenga at the latter’s high-altitude hermitage in Kham, we might note that Khunu Lama was not the only student from far away. Some of Zhenga’s students came from regions as distant as Mongolia and China, as well as Himalayan areas like Khunu Lama’s own Kinnaur. Nevertheless, Khunu Lama was among the students who traveled the greatest distances to meet the Khenpo. Placing their meeting within the larger context of Tibetan Buddhist modes of imagining and narrating lineage relationships, stories of Khunu Lama’s meeting with Khenpo Zhenga suggest the importance, even urgency, of direct, personal transmission of Buddhist teachings from teacher to student, transmissions which are worth traveling great distances to receive. In stories about their encounter, we see the great Khenpo near his deathbed when Khunu Lama arrives. Khunu Lama nearly fails to receive teachings from him—indeed, at first Khenpo Zhenga and his attendants try to turn him away. The opportunity for their connection is almost lost. There is a poignant narrative anxiety for the audience that they will miss each other, so to speak. According to accounts of the two men’s relationship, Khunu Lama had to be persistent, even stubborn, in his refusal to be put off. It is only his insistence, his commitment, and the hardships he has endured by journeying so far that finally gain him the transmissions and lineage connection he seeks. While Khunu Lama encountered occasional prejudice as an “Indian” or as a rong pa or “valley person” during his years in Tibet, he sometimes also met with respect for his exceptional commit-

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ment to venturing so far from home for the sake of the dharma. We see that happen here, just as we see Zhenga in general make a point of teaching students who had traveled far to reach him. People who recount this episode now, of course, also know Khunu Lama’s future identity as a teacher in his own right. Indeed, for audiences of this story today, Khenpo Zhenga seems almost prescient in finally agreeing to teach Khunu Lama everything he could, for by the beginning of the 1960s, many of the major monasteries in Kham where Khenpo Zhenga had taught or founded monastic colleges would be destroyed. As Chinese Communist forces consolidated control over the region in the 1950s, and during the Cultural Revolution, many monastery buildings would be demolished. Members of their religious communities would be scattered, imprisoned, or killed, some going into exile in India. Beginning in the 1980s, remaining community members would face the task of rebuilding. Khunu Lama himself would go on to play an important role in India after 1959, sharing what he had learned during his travels in Tibet, particularly in Kham, with people who would become influential Tibetan Buddhist teachers in their own right. Among his future students would be many people closely connected to Zhenga’s own lineages and to the monasteries where Zhenga had taught. This historical context adds intensity to present-day narrations of Khunu Lama’s meeting with Zhenga and other teachers. At the same time, this story of Khunu Lama meeting Khenpo Zhenga fits a widespread pattern in Buddhist guru-disciple stories. The dynamic of teacherly refusal and student persistence is a recurring trope of literature about guru-disciple relationships in Tibet and indeed across East and South Asia. Audiences are reminded over and over in such stories that the student must ask the teacher to teach, as the Buddha Śākyamuni has to be asked to teach by the gods of the Indic pantheon after his enlightenment. The students in such narratives must be dedicated and withstand tests of their seriousness of purpose. They may face obstacles, including obstacles imposed by the teacher. Only at the end of the story, so to speak, do they succeed in overcoming all trials to receive the sought-after direct transmission and lineage connection. Tibetan literature is filled with models for this narrative trajectory, ranging from stories of Indian tantric siddhas to the biographies and legends of famous Tibetan masters, past and present. Indeed, this narrative framework is virtually a genre of its own. Tibetan and Himalayan audiences who turn to this topic may think in particular of the story of Milarepa, whose legendary devotion to his teacher Marpa drove him to endure a series of rejections and nearly impossible tasks before Marpa finally accepted him as his primary disciple.73 Marpa, for his part, had earlier struggled to please

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his Indian teacher Naropa, and Naropa had famously suffered in his own attempts to receive teaching from his master, the Indian siddha Tilopa.74 Among Khenpo Zhenga’s contemporaries and within his own circle of students and teachers, such stories are widespread, appearing in the namtar of many of the most distinguished scholar-practitioners, and frequently linked to their identities as renunciants who embraced the chatralwa ideal. Indeed, Zhenga’s own biographies describe how he himself encountered hardships and obstacles as a student before receiving his teacher’s transmission. In the words of one of Zhenga’s biographers, “[Zhenga] endured hardships equal to those recorded in the biography of the lord Milarepa, for his home was far away and he had no provisions for his practice.”75 Moreover, in addition to his poverty, Zhenga was chronically ill, which weakened him physically. One story describes how Zhenga’s guru, the Dzogchen master Orgyen Tenzin Norbu, saw him struggling. “Once as he hobbled to fetch water, his guru Orgyen Tenzin Norbu, saw him, and folded his hands to pray, tears falling from his eyes. He thought to himself, ‘This student truly has the appropriate karma,’ and decided he should provide Zhenga with some means of support. But after reflecting further, he gripped his hands and said to himself, ‘Wait! Wait! Sit still! Don’t interfere with Zhenga, who conducts himself like a bodhisattva in enduring such hardship for the sake of the dharma, just like the exalted masters of the past.’”76 Later on of course, Orgyen Tenzin Norbu transmitted to Zhenga all the teachings he himself had received and is said to have told his other students that Zhenga was clearly a bodhisattva in his last rebirth before enlightenment. While narratives of this kind suggest some of the challenges students may face in forming a relationship with a teacher, Tibetan exegetes emphasize that in fact, from a Buddhist point of view, effort and risk are also involved on the teacher’s part. A teacher who accepts a student becomes bound by his or her commitment to that relationship as much as the student does. From a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, after student and teacher have entered into a formal guru-disciple relationship, the teacher will be obligated to take care of that student, potentially lifetime after lifetime. Guru and disciple moreover become karmically linked through their mutual vows (dam tshig) associated with the guru’s transmissions. This means that the student’s actions can affect the teacher, as well as vice versa. If the disciple receives a tantric transmission from the guru that comes with certain ritual commitments, and then the disciple breaks those commitments, for example, the guru might become sick, or experience other kinds of consequences. In that sense, the burden of care and danger for the guru is significant. Tibetan literary works on guru devotion often advise teachers, as

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well as students, to undertake a serious period of discernment before committing formally to one another. Stories about teachers testing or initially rejecting students should be understood in part in this light.77 The fact that the trope of the stubbornly devoted student who endures hardships and refuses to leave the teacher’s doorstep until he receives teachings is a familiar one does not mean that stories of Khunu Lama meeting Khenpo Zhenga are untrue. On the contrary, the resonance between the story of their meeting and other famous Tibetan Buddhist accounts of students and teachers suggests just how essential such connections are, both intellectually and emotionally, and in Buddhist soteriological terms. Indeed, the familiarity of stories about the teacher-student relationship may serve as a kind of authorization, a proof of authenticity for audiences schooled in the genre of such narratives. In this sense, the echoes of other teacher-student encounters here suggest that what is happening is what is supposed to happen.78 We might make one further observation about the nature of the transmissions that Khunu Lama received from Khenpo Zhenga. During his time with Zhenga, Khunu Lama is said to have received “pith instructions” (man ngag) from Khenpo Zhenga, together with the famous commentaries and Thirteen Great Texts. “Pith instructions” are direct oral teachings from a master to a disciple that explain “the most profound points of practice in a condensed way,”79 as presented by a particular meditation tradition. In this case, given Khenpo Zhenga’s own background as a Dzogchen practitioner from one of the most influential Dzogchen lineages in the Tibetan world, “pith instructions” here likely refers to Dzogchen practice, as well as to other aspects of the Buddhist path connected to the Thirteen Great Texts. Khunu Lama himself would give Dzogchen instruction repeatedly later in his life. According to a number of his closest students, Dzogchen was at the core of his own meditation practice.80 The mention of pith instructions here suggests the scope and completeness—potentially the intimacy—of Khunu Lama’s study with Zhenga. It suggests that Khenpo Zhenga transmitted to Khunu Lama the full range of the Buddhist materials he had to bestow. Most of all, the mention of pith instructions here indicates to audiences that what Khunu Lama received from Khenpo Zhenga, as from his other gurus, was not purely scholastic or philosophical but was at its heart a program of Buddhist practice. When talking about practice-oriented, personal transmissions and, indeed, when talking about the ideal of guru-disciple transmission in general, Tibetan-language works evoke the possibility of an indivisible mutuality between teachers and students. Using recurring metaphors of liquids pouring and dissolving into one another, Tibetan and Himalayan narrators work

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within a literary imaginary of teachers who transmit everything they know to chosen disciples “like pouring water into water” (chu la chu bzhag pa ltar) or “like water dissolving in water” (chu la chu thim pa lta bu).81 These images of inseparability and connection animate Tibetan and Himalayan accounts of guru devotion and are ritually evoked by participants in guru yoga practices. Such metaphors of indivisibility, familiar to many Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist audiences, underscore the importance of teacher-student bonds. These metaphors also suggest a soteriological ideal in which gurus and disciples participate in a shared experience of Buddhist liberation—a soteriological ideal that is also an ideal of seamless transmission across generational time. In this context, narrative motifs of student hardship and testing, like themes of teacher-student separation, express only one dimension of the teacher-student imaginary; they function in complementarity with equally important motifs of intense connection. The following chapters explore both sides of this complementarity, considering accounts of Khunu Lama’s own renunciatory absences and separations in tandem with his many connections with his teachers and students. In chapter 5, I return once again to the liquid metaphors of indivisible connection in the context of the relationship between renunciation and devotion.

[ Ch a pt er 2 ]

“He abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma”: Tibetan Buddhist Imaginaries of Home-Leaving and Renunciation

This is the unadulterated practice of the mighty Kadampa lamas, and thus of those who uphold the ancient tradition of the lineage: “Aim your mind at the Dharma. Aim your Dharma practice at a beggar’s life. Aim your beggar’s life at death. Aim at leaving your death to a dry ravine.” Angrup 2005:16 1 [Khunu Lama] had hardly anything, you know? He had what he was wearing, that’s all he had, nothing else.  .  .  . And whatever people offered him, . . . he used to leave it under his bed, and the next person who comes, he would give it away to them. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 20052

Introduction This chapter introduces aspects of the Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist imaginary of renunciation through which people who knew Khunu Lama describe his life and activities.3 Focusing in particular on accounts of his initial renunciatory departure from home as a teenager, I explore narratives of renunciation from the lives of earlier exemplars, who serve as authorizing referents for Khunu Lama and his choices. I also examine forms of literary The phrase “He abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma” ( pha yul rgyab tu bskyur nas chos la bzhud pa’i skabs ‘byed pa) is the title of Angrup’s chapter 4. See Angrup 2005:15.

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intertextuality that allow narrators, Angrup in particular, to evoke these models of renunciation in their descriptions of Khunu Lama. Buddhists in many times and places have wrestled with what it means to be a renunciant. Should a person live in a cave or become a monk or a nun in a bustling monastic complex? Should a practitioner give up wealth, family life, or sexuality? Or is true renunciation really about an inner attitude of non-attachment in the midst of possessions and activity? These are challenging questions, personal as well as theoretical, for many Buddhists today and in the past. The ways individual Buddhists and their communities have answered these questions inform multiple dimensions of Buddhist life, ranging from how to recount the story of Buddha Śākyamuni to the diverse institutional, economic, and ritual forms of monastic organizations and lay households. Indeed, Buddhist perspectives on renunciation arguably help constitute (and are constituted by) Buddhist orientations to a range of other topics, including gender, wealth, violence, power, and art. In Tibetan and Himalayan societies, Buddhist philosophers and religious teachers from many time periods have debated, imagined, and re-imagined modes of navigating between practices of renunciation and practices of relationship. Tibetan Buddhist thinkers have consistently emphasized that the Buddhist project (whether explored philosophically, sociologically, or soteriologically) is incoherent without a serious understanding of renunciation. Yet Tibetan writers with differing views on how renunciation should be practiced have often challenged each other. Accounts of renunciation have a central presence in classical and contemporary Tibetan and Himalayan literature. Tibetan and Himalayan authors (along with filmmakers and other artists) ask in different ways, What happens to our commitments to other people when we renounce? What kinds of freedom does renunciation bring? How do renouncers feel about those they leave behind (or at least appear to leave), and how do individuals and community members feel if they are among those who are left? Stories about Khunu Lama, like Tibetan Buddhist narratives about renunciation more generally, reveal complex dynamics of relationship and emotion between Tibetan Buddhist teachers and disciples, as well as between Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and their families. For renunciation is not, of course, simply about practices and rules or forms of ordination and vow taking, though it can involve all of these. It is also a multivocal imaginary (or perhaps group of imaginaries), a collection of symbolic and affective landscapes and repertoires from which individual authors and practitioners draw, to which they make changes, and which they invoke to explain their own actions or to frame significance in the lives of others.

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Authors often talk about renunciation in emotionally intense terms, presenting both the wish to renounce and the actions of renouncing as rooted in experiences of sorrow, loss, and longing. Narrative instantiations of renunciation and separation in this sense participate in and constitute powerful repertoires of affect, which form an essential part of the renunciant imaginary.4 While the caricature of Buddhists as emotionless in earlier European-language scholarship and popular perception has been largely dispelled, it is still worth emphasizing that we encounter descriptions of intense emotion specifically in the context of renunciation. Imaginaries of renunciation can appear differently across genres of Tibetan Buddhist writing and historical periods, and in the hands of different authors, their meanings and interpretations contested by thinkers of varying perspectives. Yet taken together, Tibetan Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation offer resources that individuals and communities use as they make their own choices and reckon with life stories of people from the past. Imaginaries of renunciation in this sense offer Tibetan and Himalayan narrators and practitioners resources for articulating ideals of saintly virtuosity and for evaluating claims to virtuosity by other people.5 By the same token, Tibetan Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation also offer terms of critique, both of “fraudulent” renunciation, and of religiously or socially ambitious people who should practice renunciation but don’t. In oral and textual stories about Khunu Lama and people with whom he is connected, narrators draw on shared imaginaries of renunciation to negotiate moments of intimacy and separation, presence and absence, at multiple points in his biography. They do so in part at the level of narrative, through patterns and themes that authors repeat or mark in some way, and in choosing which events to record or how to describe them. At the same time, and thinking back to Ramanujan’s “pool of signifiers,” narrators of stories about Khunu Lama also underscore his renunciation in more subtle ways, ranging from interpolation of quotations and story fragments from famous accounts of other renunciants to specific word choices and use of imagery. In this chapter, I analyze examples of such textual interpolations and imagery, and explore key episodes in narratives of other renunciant figures that function as authorizing referents for Khunu Lama. In describing Khunu Lama’s renunciation, his students recount how he often lived in obscure surroundings in a state of intense voluntary poverty, disengaged from conventional concerns with food, shelter, personal health, or recognition. They also tell stories, over and over again, of Khunu Lama’s departures. Khunu Lama left students, teaching positions, institutions, regions, countries, and patrons. Stories of his departures, as well as stories of his self-concealment, ascetic lifestyle, and unconventional ways

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of teaching and behaving, constitute him in memory specifically as a chatralwa renunciant, one who gives up all attachment to ordinary projects or involvements, often becoming a mendicant wanderer.6 Students also describe Khunu Lama as a “hidden yogin” (Tib. sbas pa’i rnal ‘byor pa), a practitioner who made no show of his practice or accomplishments and whose remarkable qualities were unknown to most people, or perhaps even actively concealed.7 Summing up these aspects of Khunu Lama’s activity, one of his few Western students said of him that he was “so hard to find.” 8

“I have always been escaping” Consider a story told to me by the Ladakhi literary eminence Tashi Rabgias (b. 1927), who was himself Khunu Lama’s student as a young man. This is a story that Tashi Rabgias, a great raconteur, has told a number of times to several people, including to the German scholar of Khunu Lama’s life, Jürgen Manshardt. The story takes place in the Himalayan town of Srinagar, in what is now the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir, near the famously beautiful lake. The time frame is 1956, during the eventful years just after Indian Independence. Only a few years after this story takes place, Khunu Lama would become rather famous as a teacher of Buddhism, Sanskrit, and Tibetan literature to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, among many other Tibetan Buddhist luminaries. But at the time of this story, he was little known, a thin figure in thick glasses wearing threadbare red wool robes that were often too short for his tall frame, someone who pursued a life of anonymity, poverty, and wandering. According to Tashi Rabgias, Khunu Lama was invited to Srinagar in 1956 to teach Sanskrit to the Nineteenth Kushok Bakula Rinpoche (1918– 2003), a leading Buddhist reincarnate lama from Ladakh and a prominent figure in midcentury Himalayan and Indian politics.9 Although Khunu Lama was not yet widely known at this time, a young literature student of his, K. Angrup, had gone to work for Bakula Rinpoche, and had recommended Khunu Lama as a Sanskrit teacher. (Angrup would of course later become Khunu Lama’s main Tibetan-language biographer.) In response to Bakula Rinpoche’s invitation, Khunu Lama came to Srinagar and took up residence in an official bungalow near the lake. But according to Tashi Rabgias, Bakula Rinpoche turned out to be so busy with governmental duties as the newly appointed Minister of Jammu-Kashmir that he almost never had time for his sessions with Khunu Lama. Instead, it was Tashi Rabgias, then a young Ladakhi civil servant and aspiring poet, who was able to study with Khunu Lama, an experience that he still vividly remembers.

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Tashi Rabgias described how Khunu Lama dazzled him with his erudition and knowledge of Buddhist texts, and startled him by sometimes criticizing the word choices of famous Buddhist translators of the past, something Tashi Rabgias recalled he didn’t know you were “allowed” to do. Perhaps most importantly, Tashi Rabgias remembered how thrilled (and embarrassed) he was when Khunu Lama turned out to have read some of his own early poetry, and how kindly Khunu Lama encouraged him as a poet. Nearly fifty years later, when we talked in 2004, Tashi Rabgias said of Khunu Lama, “It becomes a very rare chance in one’s life, to see such a great teacher.” Yet in Tashi Rabgias’s telling, Khunu Lama grew restless in the bungalow by the lake, and abruptly decided to leave, giving no notice. Tashi Rabgias remembers that he himself was very distressed by this. Personally, he did not want to lose his remarkable teacher. And Khunu Lama’s sudden departure was a breach of protocol that he did not want to have to explain to Minister Bakula. Tashi Rabgias pleaded with Khunu Lama to stay, but to no avail. Finally, in despair, Tashi Rabgias blurted out to Khunu Lama, “Sir, if you do like this it will be . . . just like escaping, just like running away.” Tashi Rabgias recalls being horrified at his own rudeness. But in his recollection, Khunu Lama simply nodded, and said, “Yes. Yes, it is like this. I have always been escaping.” Tashi Rabgias paused his story here to turn to me and say, “Such a great man. Who can let him leave? So the only thing is to run away.”10

Narratives of Separation and the Compassionate Bodhisattva How should audiences understand this story of a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who says that he is “always escaping,” whose student says of him that “the only thing is to run away”? The story is striking in part because it shows Khunu Lama apparently contradicting how one might assume compassionate Buddhist teachers should act. We might think that a “compassionate” teacher should always be available to students. There are indeed powerful Tibetan Buddhist rhetorics and narrative tropes to that effect. Yet here we see Khunu Lama leaving his student Tashi Rabgias, despite the latter’s protests and requests, as well as leaving Bakula Rinpoche, his more famous student and patron. Indeed, we hear Khunu Lama saying of himself that he leaves often, all the time. We see Tashi Rabgias disappointed and left behind.11 Because Khunu Lama himself is so closely associated with the bodhisattva ideal of compassion and the cultivation of the paradigmatic virtue of

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bodhicitta, stories like the one above about his “escape” from Srinagar helpfully highlight long-standing tensions within that ideal between renunciation and engagement. Many Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists recite daily the famous dedication verse with which the eighth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva ends his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life: “For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide, to dispel the misery of the world.”12 Yet though many Tibetan presentations of this ideal, often citing Śāntideva’s dedication verse, do suggest a kind of infinite availability and service to beings, this does not necessarily mean that we do not also see teachers gruffly rebuffing students, leaving them or sending them away, and otherwise allowing separations to occur, as we saw in the previous chapter.13 Likewise, although we saw in chapter 1 that the authority of transmission lineages depends upon claims about the indivisibility of teachers and students, precisely because of their generational structure, transmission lineages contain built-in moments of separation and disruption, as do incarnation and family lineages. In all these cases, death creates the most dramatic and challenging kind of disruption. The events of a master’s death foreground with particular intensity emotions of painful separation, and longing for an indivisible intimacy. Narratives of separation thus in fact turn out to operate at multiple junctures within classic Tibetan accounts of guru-disciple relationship. I argue that such separations are actually an essential aspect of Tibetan lifestory genres (especially the namtar genre) and of Tibetan guru devotional literature more broadly. Such separations not only create valuable opportunities for individual and generational creativity and change but also serve to affectively energize practices of guru-devotion in ways that Tibetan commentators assert is religiously indispensable.14 We have already encountered one kind of guru-disciple separation narrative in the previous chapter, in the context of teachers like Khenpo Zhenga, who test or initially refuse student supplicants. In these and related “student hardship” and trial narratives, initial hurdles created by a master (or by the student’s own situation, such as in the case of Khenpo Zhenga’s poverty and illness while studying) spur students on to greater efforts. As we have seen, Tibetan commentators also note that initial trials and obstacles to teacher-student connection can ideally also allow both teacher and student to evaluate each other’s fitness for the more binding guru-disciple vows and commitments that come later, in particular with tantric practice. For Tibetan readers, the life of Milarepa offers an especially influential paradigm of the student-testing narrative. The intense, even harsh trials to which Milarepa’s guru Marpa subjects him famously bring Milarepa to the

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brink of suicide, in scenes that are depicted in heartrending terms, both for Milarepa and the audience. Yet in the best-known account of the Life of Milarepa, by Tsangnyon Heruka, Marpa subsequently reveals that the hardships Milarepa has suffered at his hands were all intended to purify his negative karma and prepare him for liberating Buddhist practice.15 (Milarepa had acquired terrible negative karma, prior to meeting Marpa, by his revenge killing of his relatives and neighbors, done at his mother’s behest, in retaliation for years of cruelty inflicted on his mother, sister, and himself after his father’s death.) Marpa has in fact been “cruel to be kind” to Milarepa; moreover, he reveals that he has secretly agonized over Milarepa’s suffering, having recognized him from the very first moment of their meeting as his karmically destined spiritual heir. Tsangnyon Heruka’s account of Milarepa’s life has Marpa imply that in a sense he has “performed” his harshness and initial rejection of Milarepa; he has engaged in a kind of operatic drama of separation from Milarepa that ultimately serves to highlight the extraordinary intimacy of their bond, a prelude to the practice of guru devotion toward Marpa that Milarepa then performs and inscribes into his own songs and poems for the rest of his life.16 Subsequent scenes in Tsangnyon’s biography of Milarepa show Milarepa’s later interactions with Marpa and with Marpa’s main wife, Dakmema, (Bdag med ma, who in important ways functions in tandem with Marpa as Milarepa’s co-guru, in a kind of good cop-bad cop, mother-father tantric spiritual pair) as having a loving and tender quality. Milarepa refers to Marpa and Dakmema as his parents, and they call him son. When he eventually separates from them in a more literal, physical sense, the narrative includes a long emotional scene of parting. In this farewell scene, all three figures sing poetic songs expressing Buddhist perspectives on the guru and disciple’s indissoluble intimacy, and also on the poignancy of separation. Separation is presented here as deeply painful, and yet ultimately illusory, as long as guru devotion is maintained.17 More generally, scenes of sorrowful separation alternate with scenes affirming indissoluble intimacy across a wide range of Tibetan oral and textual biographical literatures and guru devotional texts, suggesting that this forms part of a larger pattern.18 Returning to Khunu Lama, we observe that many oral and textual narratives about his life, such as Tashi Rabgias’s account of his “escape” from Srinagar, highlight how a guru’s own practice of renunciation can itself create separations between guru and student. When Khunu Lama vanishes from teaching positions, or (as we shall see) when he dresses like an Indian beggar who is hard to identify as a Buddhist master, or when he lives an austere and hidden life in places difficult for students to find, he can seem to slip away from his students’ grasp. His practice of renunciation in this sense

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creates a kind of recurring absence within narratives about him, which can become a space for searching or longing.19 These moments of absence, rooted in Khunu Lama’s practice of renunciation, echo and expand narrative patterns found in other accounts of renunciation and separation within Tibetan biographical literature. Narratives of renunciation and separation in stories about Khunu Lama, and in particular in the namtar texts about him authored by Angrup, also hint at the more final separation of the guru’s death—in this case, Khunu Lama’s own future passing away. Angrup’s main namtar account of Khunu Lama’s life repeatedly highlights these emotional resonances, in particular between Buddhist renunciation, personally poignant experiences of separation (such as leaving home), and acknowledgment of death. Angrup’s choices as a writer subtly but repeatedly remind his audience both of the sadness of samsaric mortality and the poignancy of renunciation: the overlapping sadnesses of multiple forms of parting. We turn now to Angrup’s descriptions of Khunu Lama’s renunciation and his evocation of themes of mortality and separation.

“Aim your Dharma practice at a beggar’s life” In many ways, the most important juncture at which Angrup highlights themes of renunciation, separation, and mortality comes early in the namtar, at the moment when the young Khunu Lama “abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma.”20 As noted in the previous chapter, for many readers, both Tibetan and not, the moment of leaving home in order to practice Buddhism is in fact the most familiar context for thinking about renunciation and separation in a Buddhist context. All other moments of Buddhist renunciation are potentially modeled on this drama of home-leaving.21 From a Buddhist soteriological point of view, home-leaving as a form of renunciation narratively represents an individual’s psychological and physical turn away from involvement in the endless round of ignorant samsaric craving, death, and rebirth, and a turn toward Buddhist enlightenment, here understood as freedom from, and the remedy for, the pain of samsara. In this sense, the moment when a protagonist leaves home as a renunciant forms the real beginning of any account of a Buddhist life. Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist authors such as Angrup often link such renunciatory home-leaving both directly and metaphorically to a protagonist’s dawning awareness of death and, more generally, to awareness of impermanence and suffering. We see this in Tsangnyon’s Life of Milarepa, when Milarepa confronts his own mother’s unburied bones amid the ruins

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of their family house, a sight that causes Milarepa to redouble his commitment to renunciation.22 In experiencing this turn to renunciation in the face of death and impermanence, Tibetan exemplars like Milarepa are often understood to be echoing themes from the life of the Buddha Śākyamuni.23 Influential versions of Śākyamuni’s life story describe how as a young prince he sees the famous Four Sights: an old person, a sick person, a corpse, and a religious mendicant. These Four Sights inspire the future Buddha to leave home and family to seek enlightenment. Protagonists of Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist life stories are likewise shown as confronting the impermanence and pain of samsaric life, particularly through a confrontation with death. They are often then shown physically as well as mentally turning away from their natal families and the homes in which they grew up.24 True to this pattern, in his namtar account, Angrup describes the young Khunu Lama (known as a youth by his personal name, Tenzin Gyaltsen) as deeply moved by seeing suffering and impermanence around him. Angrup says that this turned Tenzin Gyaltsen’s thoughts toward Buddhist renunciation even while he still lived at home, in the comfortable bosom of his family. In Angrup’s telling, even when he was a very young child, “[Tenzin Gyaltsen’s] mind always considered only the endless suffering of samsara, and he lived in a constant state of sadness and disillusionment [skyo shas] with samsara. He had absolutely no interest in deliberately pursuing a worldly career nor likewise did he have any enthusiasm for the preoccupations and business of a household.”25 Here we might note the kind of emotion Angrup invokes here, and in particular the phrase “sadness and disillusionment” (skyo shas) that he uses to characterize Tenzin Gyaltsen’s feelings. The Tibetan term skyo shas is a widespread literary convention, a nearly ubiquitous term used to describe the mental state associated with renunciation. Angrup, following the common pattern in namtar literature, frames this dimension of sadness explicitly as a sensitivity to the suffering of others. According to Angrup, by age seven Tenzin Gyaltsen’s mind was made up: “Every time he saw a poor person, or a destitute person or those with physical disabilities, the completely genuine thought ‘Oh! What a terrible pity’ arose in his mind. Accordingly, Lama on his own at age seven suddenly had the idea to be a Dharma practitioner himself.”26 Yet, as Angrup recounts the sequence of events, this “sadness” at the suffering of others ultimately led young Tenzin Gyaltsen to leave home, a departure that Angrup indicates is itself also marked by emotions of sadness and loss. As we saw in the previous chapter, the future Khunu Lama first began to study Buddhism in his home valley of Kinnaur, within his own family.

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According to the namtar, he studied with his mother’s learned brother, Rasvir Das, the Drukpa Kagyu practitioner who taught him to read and write Tibetan, and to memorize and practice such essential Mahāyāna teachings as the Vajracchedikā and other Prajñāpāramitā sutras. The future Khunu Lama also practiced the Praise of the Twenty-One Noble Taras, and in general, according to Angrup, studied Buddhism in a structured way “exactly as novice monks and nuns of monastic centers.”27 A brief memorial article by Angrup and his colleague S. Lall says that the young Tenzin Gyaltsen was sent to live and study with his uncle when he was only three years old, hinting at an early immersion in Buddhist study.28 The Tibetan Buddhist teacher and scholar Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, who was a disciple of Khunu Lama’s during the 1970s as a young man in Bodh Gaya, India (and who was also close to Khunu Lama’s main female disciple and attendant, the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin), recalled a story that as a child, Khunu Lama had struggled with his parents over his wish to study with his uncle in his uncle’s monastery. In this account, the young boy Khunu Lama ran away from home because his parents would not let him remain in the monastery, after which his parents acquiesced. It is interesting to consider whether Khunu Lama’s desire to leave home to devote his life to Buddhist practice brought him into conflict with his parents even before his final departure from home. According to the namtar, Khunu Lama stayed and studied with his uncle until he was fifteen. He undertook an early monastic training near his home at the monastery of Ngari Choling, with which his uncle was affiliated, where Angrup says he stayed for about two and a half years.29 It was during this period, apparently when he was fifteen or sixteen, that he had his formative encounter with the disciple of Togden Shakya Shri. Angrup recounts how Khunu Lama traveled to the village of Lippa to meet the Drukpa Kagyu yogin Sonam Gyaltsen (nineteenth cent.), renowned in the area as Shakya Shri’s disciple. (Angrup notes that there were few such wellknown teachers in Kinnaur in this period.) According to a recorded interview with Khunu Lama that Angrup quotes, the young Tenzin Gyaltsen received from Sonam Gyaltsen the crucial early introduction to the nature of mind that serves as the basis of meditation in the Kagyu and Nyingma traditions, as well as other Drukpa Kagyu teachings on the Buddhist path.30 However, despite—or maybe because of—these opportunities, when he was nineteen years old, Tenzin Gyaltsen decided to leave home and the Kinnaur Valley completely and to pursue a life dedicated to Buddhist practice. Angrup says in the namtar specifically that he left in order to study Buddhism in “the Dharma realm of Tibet,” and implies that Tenzin Gyaltsen left home in secret, against his parents’ wishes—apparently so secretly

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that he did not even stop to pack provisions or clothes, or to bring any money with him.31 As Angrup and Lall put it in their memorial article, “Though the Negis were a well-to-do family, yet this prodigious boy left his village emptyhanded.”32 The Drikung scholar Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche says in his retelling of Khunu Lama’s life story that, “apprehensive that there would be obstructive situations of discouragement brought on by relatives and others, [Khunu Lama] set off alone.”33 In the namtar Angrup describes Tenzin Gyaltsen’s departure even more dramatically: “Acting on his heartfelt intention, at the age of nineteen, in the male wood ox year—the Western year 1914—with nothing more than eight rupees for his subsistence and travel expenses, without even any suitable boots to put on his feet, he abandoned his homeland for the sake of the Dharma (pha yul rgyab tu bskyur nas chos la bzhud pa’i skabs ‘byed pa).”34 Angrup’s use of phrases like “abandon his homeland” hints at the affective impact of this departure. Among other things, Angrup reminds us later on that Khunu Lama never saw his parents alive again. Khunu Lama’s desire to leave home “for the sake of the Dharma,” and his parents’ apparent resistance echo larger narrative patterns in Tibetan Buddhist life-story literature. As we have seen, one of the enduring tensions in Tibetan Buddhist literature and in the literature of Buddhist communities across Asia has to do with the potential for conflict between commitment to the implicitly renunciatory trajectory of the Buddhist path, and individuals’ emotional, physical, economic, and social ties to parents, siblings, and homeland. The fact that Angrup hints that the young Khunu Lama encountered familial resistance to his departure adds to the legibility of his story, and once again may help audiences ascertain that what is happening is what is supposed to happen. Yet as Angrup’s audience might be expected to know, Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist families are often very proud of religious children, in particular of sons who pursue a religious path. A son who is a monk and (sometimes to a lesser extent) a daughter who is a nun are perceived to make merit for their parents and to be in a special position to help them at crucial junctures like the moment of death.35 Himalayan and Tibetan parents often encourage at least one child in the family to enter a Buddhist vocation. When parents are able, they often support renunciant children financially and in other ways, often for their entire lives. Of course, adults in a household often especially encourage a child to follow a renunciant religious life when there are other children who can support the household financially and ensure the future by marrying and having children.

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In principle, since Khunu Lama had two enterprising and apparently capable brothers (the namtar tells us in passing about their business activities), his choice to leave home as a renunciant should not have been a grave hardship for his family in practical terms, even if it might have been painful emotionally. An interesting further detail is that there is every indication that the future Khunu Lama’s family did support his Buddhist training throughout his boyhood, in both practical and material ways. Angrup emphasizes that Khunu Lama’s family were themselves thoroughly and devotedly Buddhist, a point which he seems to emphasize in part because the Kinnaur region is quite religiously diverse. Angrup assures his readers that Khunu Lama’s family were exemplary Buddhists. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche makes a similar point, contrasting Khunu Lama’s family and region with non-Buddhists in the lower part of the Khunu Valley who, he says, offer blood sacrifices to Hindu gods.36 As noted already, Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen’s own grandfather was himself a Buddhist teacher and had also traveled to Tibet, for which he was much respected. This grandfather had returned to his home village to live with his relatives after his Buddhist training, according to the married-lama model that is common in Kinnaur. Khunu Lama’s earliest education in Buddhism had been with relatives, first with his mother’s brother and then at the nearby monastic community with which his family had links and where, presumably, they paid for his food and other needs. Even much later in his life, at least one of his brothers would regularly send him a small monthly stipend.37 Taken together, the sources about Khunu Lama’s early life suggest that his parents did in fact endorse his religious vocation and encouraged it in many ways, but did not want their son to leave home. A reader might wonder if they even urged him to stay in Kinnaur, as his grandfather and uncle did, to be a Buddhist practitioner nearer to them. Perhaps his parents simply feared they would miss him. Thus, in Khunu Lama’s departure from his family home, the drama of renunciation that Angrup sketches out in the namtar appears as an emotional, affective one, rather than a crisis of family livelihood or inheritance. By contrast, in other influential examples of the namtar genre, the crisis of a family member’s renunciation is often depicted as simultaneously an emotional and a material calamity. To give but one example, emotional and practical concerns are forcefully present in another significant Tibetan biographical work, one with important links to both the Life of Milarepa and to the life story of Khunu Lama. This is the autobiography (rang rnam) of the famed nineteenth-century poet and wandering renunciant yogic mas-

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ter Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol (1781–1851), who was himself sometimes seen as an incarnation of Milarepa and to whom Khunu Lama has been compared.38 In his autobiography, Shabkar recounts how his practice of renunciation led him to leave home in a series of departures, each departure imposing a greater degree of separation from his mother and sister. As his separations from his home and his mother become more final, his mother becomes increasingly distraught, and beseeches him, in ever more emotionally intense terms, to stay. When Shabkar first asks his mother for permission to leave home to go into an isolated retreat, he quotes her as replying, “If I do not have a son living at home, I will be mistreated by everyone.” However, she eventually acquiesces, understanding his Buddhist motivation. Shabkar describes her as saying, “’My son, if I don’t give my permission, it will hinder your practice. If I do give it, I your mother will come upon hard times.’ Weeping, she added, ‘But even though I shall have to bear hardship, I give you my permission, praying that you may reach your ultimate goal.”39 Subsequently, Shabkar again requests her permission to leave, this time to travel “to another land for some years” in order to study with far off masters and again go into extended solitary retreat.40 This time, Shabkar depicts his mother as even more upset by the separation between them. In heartrending terms, he describes her as saying, “I have already given my consent to you practicing the Dharma. But I would be happy if you would stay nearby until I die.” She follows this with a long poetic expression of grief at her son’s departure. In Shabkar’s telling, she renders her grief in the vocabulary of a physical trauma, something devastating her body and senses: “Son, how can you leave me? Son, you are the very eyes in my head. If you go far away, your mother will be like a blind woman. Son, you are my very own limbs. If you go far away, your mother will be like a cripple. Son, you are my very own heart. If you go far away, your mother will be like a corpse.”41 Shabkar’s mother’s lament both suggests the affective experience of missing one’s beloved child and also articulates an urgent practical reality: for an aging widow like Shabkar’s mother in rural eastern Tibet at the turn of the nineteenth century (and often still today), children were effectively the only retirement or insurance policy. Without a son to support her in old age, Shabkar’s mother faced not only sadness but actual poverty and profound hardship, and Shabkar makes it clear in his autobiography that he knows this to be so. He records that his mother urged him to continue his practice of Buddhism, but to do so nearer home, either by following a householder lama model, as others in their neighborhood did, or by joining a nearby religious community. This is an option that, like Milarepa and

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Khunu Lama, Shabkar rejects as still too entangled with samsaric life. (Interestingly, however, Shabkar’s main guru, Chogyal Ngakyi Wangpo (1736– 1807), was himself married, and was in fact also a political figure, a king governing the Kokonor region in Amdo.)42 Shabkar notably acknowledges that at the time of his final departure from his mother’s home, he resorts to lying to his mother and sister in order to get away, telling them he will soon return to live at a nearby monastery. He says that without this lie, he fears they will not let him leave.43 In his autobiography, Shabkar is very direct in describing his mother’s (and sister’s) grief and fear about his leaving, and his own internal conflict. He details his anguish when he returns home after years away to find that his mother has died. Yet Shabkar describes the experience of separating from his mother and sister, and his guilt and conflict about leaving them behind, as ultimately causing an even more profound renunciation to arise within him. In Shabkar’s own description, the inner renunciation that dawns in him after confronting his mother’s death in particular is a spiritual turning point.44 The Life of Milarepa, as we have seen, describes Milarepa as having a closely parallel experience, in which he develops the most sincere renunciation specifically after seeing his deceased mother’s bones, uncared for in the ruins of his abandoned childhood home. Long after his first departure from home, after becoming Marpa’s disciple, and after he has engaged in years of Buddhist practice, it is the confrontation with his mother’s solitary death that the Life of Milarepa presents as energizing Milarepa’s inner experience of renunciation. Noticeably, both Shabkar’s and Milarepa’s biographers do not minimize or conceal the grief of leaving home, nor the feeling of being torn between two sets of obligations. On the contrary, both of these works exemplify a widespread narrative theme in Tibetan Buddhist life-story literature: namely, the emotional conflict involved in home-leaving for both the parents and the renouncer-child. Although outsiders to Buddhist societies hearing about Buddhism for the first time have often seen renunciation primarily as involving a painful separation from sexual intimacy and married life, many Tibetan Buddhist life stories focus instead on the moment of separation from parents and natal home as the most difficult renunciation crisis.45 In the renunciation enacted in home-leaving, the longings of children and parents for each other seem to tragically conflict with the longing of a Buddhist practitioner for enlightenment.46 Yet these forms of longing and sadness also subtly echo and indeed arguably reinforce each other. Tibetan Buddhist life stories and other kinds of Tibetan devotional and sermon literature make it clear that just as the inevitable sufferings of samsara (the unenlightened state of death and rebirth) are heartbreakingly

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sad, renunciation too is in a sense terribly sad.47 Even as Tibetan Buddhist works emphasize the soteriological necessity and efficacy of these moments of renunciation and separation—moments through which, the texts tell us, their protagonists become capable of Buddhist liberation—their authors nevertheless emphasize how sad and wrenching these separations are. Indeed, in his introduction to a recent volume on the life of the influential twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhist master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (who knew Khunu Lama and with whom Khunu Lama had many connections), Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, himself a well-known teacher of Buddhism to Himalayan Buddhists and non-Himalayan Buddhist converts, describes this in English as “the heartrending drama of renunciation.”48 Arguably, biographical works central to Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation, such as the Life of Milarepa and the Life of Shabkar, make narrative and stylistic moves that intentionally heighten the pathos and affective conflict of the crisis of home-leaving. Contradicting simplistic portrayals of Buddhist renunciation as affectively neutral or emotionless, these Tibetan and Himalayan narratives present a renunciation crisis of wrenching emotion as highly productive for the protagonist. These narrative and stylistic strategies of emotional intensification situate the crisis of home-leaving as a central drama in Tibetan Buddhist life-story literature, one that shapes how renunciation is imagined, and also informs other related affective repertoires and imaginaries. In particular, I suggest that narrative intensification of the crisis of home-leaving and the sadness connected with it is mobilized to energize the affective imaginaries associated with the experience of longing, which are then channeled into guru devotion.49 In his namtar presentation of Khunu Lama’s life, Angrup further evokes these affective and conceptual links between sadness (especially the sadness of death), renunciation, and devotional longing through a technique of intertextuality, in which he includes excerpts from other texts within his own writing, as interpolations and epigraphs at the start of his chapters.50 As the astute reader will have observed, Khunu Lama’s departure happens in secret and is apparently unseen. As a result, Angrup’s namtar account does not show a dramatic scene of parting, as in Shabkar’s autobiography. Rather, Angrup evokes the terrors of samsara and the pain of separation in other ways. At the start of the fourth chapter of the namtar, in which Angrup tells the story of Khunu Lama’s slipping away from home, Angrup links Khunu Lama’s departure with larger Tibetan Buddhist imaginaries through his interpolations from other texts. These interpolations illuminate the repertoires of narrative, Buddhist soteriology, and affect within which Angrup (and perhaps Khunu Lama) are working.

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Angrup begins the home-leaving chapter of Khunu Lama’s namtar by introducing a verse on renunciation from Milarepa: “In the words of the lord Milarepa: ‘One’s homeland is a treasury of poisons / the cause of creating terrible craving and hatred / If I turn my back on this, I realize it would be good. / So I will always wander in the uninhabited wilderness.’”51 The language of this pithy statement is striking: one’s homeland is a “treasury” (gter mdzod) but not of wealth, abundance, or love (the “treasures” one might conventionally expect to find at home). Rather, Angrup, channeling Milarepa, here reverses expectations and uses the vocabulary of the “treasury” to tell us that home is filled with the fundamental poisons of ignorance, addiction, and hatred that in Buddhist analysis power the cycle of samsaric suffering. In the bosom of family and friends, people are inevitably caught up in preferences and obligations. It is almost impossible to avoid the push and pull of family bonds and the emotions and actions of family quarrels (as Milarepa himself is understood by the assumed reader to know all too well). The rhetoric of this brief quoted passage from Milarepa is even more striking because Angrup has in fact just told readers during the previous two chapters about all the wonderful qualities of Khunu Lama’s natal home and family, describing them as replete with abundance, excellent family lineage, and loving relations. Yet here, Angrup, by citing Milarepa’s words on renunciation, firmly clarifies that the “treasury” of home life is, if correctly perceived, in truth a treasury of “poison.” Moreover, set against this treasury of poison as the antidote and alternative is the stance of “wandering in the uninhabited wilderness.” This latter phrase offers a kind of summation of the chatralwa renunciant ideal that Khunu Lama, like Milarepa and Shabkar, now embraces through his departure and that will come to define him in his adult life as a Buddhist practitioner. The verse from Milarepa thus sets up Khunu Lama’s decision to leave his home valley, and provides some of the vocabulary and rhetorical structure for how Angrup describes it: as a decision that has ceased to be an individual choice and has become instead something like a necessity. In conveying this necessity in his subsequent description of Khunu Lama’s departure, Angrup intensifies the forceful language of home-as-poison, shifting the metaphor from a “treasury of poison” to the even more frightening image of a “poisonous snake:” “This master [Khunu Lama] also practiced the holy precious Dharma in a totally pure way. Being completely inspired by the thought of renouncing the sight of his homeland—the wellspring of the three poisons of craving, hatred and ignorance—like a poisonous snake, he had no choice except to go to the Dharma realm of Tibet.”52 Angrup frames Khunu Lama’s home-leaving through the quote from

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Milarepa not only as deeply admirable but also as shaped by a kind of inevitability. The “purity” of Khunu Lama’s Buddhist practice here seems to find its fullest and most logical expression in his renunciatory act of “abandoning” his homeland. Moreover, Angrup’s description of Khunu Lama as “inspired by the thought of renouncing the sight of his homeland” together with the quotation from Milarepa also hints at Milarepa as a source for Khunu Lama’s inspiration to leave home. Khunu Lama’s style of practicing renunciation, both at this moment of youthful departure and throughout his later life, echoes the example of Milarepa in many ways, despite the obvious differences in their stories;53 Milarepa’s life story and his renunciation-centered verses may indeed have directly inspired Khunu Lama’s desire to leave his family home. But beyond this, in a more general sense, Milarepa’s verses and the narrative template of his life clearly shape the imaginal and social context for Khunu Lama’s choices and actions, while simultaneously also framing the perspectives and responses of those who remember him or have heard about him. One might thus think of Milarepa in this context as an “authorizing referent,” who by his example as a cultural model creates the social space for certain kinds of behaviors and identities, and who in particular provides an example of what a chatralwa life might look like.54 Angrup’s incorporation of Milarepa’s verse thus situates the young future Khunu Lama’s renunciant identity and his decision to leave home within a repertoire of renunciation in which Milarepa is one of the central exemplars. The repertoire of renunciation within which Angrup situates the young Khunu Lama in this chapter is not limited to the example of Milarepa, however. Following the Milarepa verse, Angrup further sets the stage for Khunu Lama’s departure by invoking a second group of authorizing referents and examples of ideal chatralwa-style renunciatory practice. Angrup does this by quoting another famous verse on renunciation, the very same verse, in fact, that I have placed at the beginning of this chapter: the socalled Kadamapa Four Aims. In framing Khunu Lama’s departure through the Kadamapa Four Aims, Angrup invokes not only the specific sentiments expressed in the verse, but also the persona(ae) of the verse’s author(s) as well: the early masters of the Kadampa (bka’ dam pa) lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. These Kadampa masters—the eleventh-century near-contemporaries of Milarepa—were disciples and inheritors of the teachings of the Bengali master Atīśa (Skt. Atīśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna; Tib. jo bo rje dpal ldan a ti sha, 982–1054), himself viewed by Tibetan historiography as a primary influence on the second diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet from the eleventh century onward. The Kadampa masters remain famous in the Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist

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world both for their own austere practices of renunciation and for their teachings on bodhicitta and on the bodhisattva’s techniques of “mind training” (blo sbyong). These Kadampa techniques of bodhisattva mind training are meditation instructions focused on removing selfishness and developing compassion, in order to foster the altruistic commitment to reach enlightenment for the sake of all beings. These techniques both depend on renunciation and at the same time help to foster it; the Kadampa authors repeatedly describe renunciation as the indispensable core of genuine Buddhist practice. At the imaginal level, the figure of the “Kadampa master” thus often functions in later Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist writing as an example of both the lived experience and the oral transmission of Buddhist renunciation, in parallel to the figure of Milarepa. To be sure, the corpus of Milarepa narratives also includes famous, often humorous, stories of rivalry and conflict between Milarepa and his disciples, and Kadampa geshes, as they are often referred to (dge bshes; kalyāṇamitra in Sanskrit, literally means “virtuous friend,” in the sense of spiritual guide, but also refers to a Tibetan monastic scholarly degree). In the versions of these stories that appear in the Milarepa corpus, the Kadampa geshes often emerge as ideologically rigid adherents of ultimately limited systems of scholastic philosophical logic and monastic discipline. Milarepa and his followers, by contrast, triumph in these stories as the truly liberated practitioners of Buddhism, who discomfit the Kadampas with their profound inner freedom, expressed simultaneously as intellectual fearlessness, social unconventionality, and yogic power. To some extent, one can understand these narratives as transmitting histories of inter-lineage rivalry in the formation of early Tibetan Buddhist schools. They may also partly encode historically later conflicts between Kagyu hierarchs and figures in the Gelukpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, in particular since Gelukpa writers laid explicit claim to the mantle of the Kadampa geshes. One could, moreover, interpret stories in which Milarepa and the Kadampa geshes conflict as negotiating between differing emphases within Buddhist practice, or as offering critiques of subtle self-righteousness or dogmatism on the part of Buddhist practitioners. Nevertheless, despite these stories of one-upmanship and competition, for a broad array of Tibetan and Himalayan writers and teachers past and present, Milarepa and the Kadampa geshes share the narrative and rhetorical role of exemplifying Buddhist renunciant ideals. They are remembered for their mutual rejection of possessions, family life, wealth, and fame, as well as Buddhist institutional entanglements (including monastic leadership positions and the perks and honors of high reincarnate status). Even in

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stylistic terms, stories about both Milarepa and many of the main Kadampa figures share an often humorous disregard for convention in their renunciatory practice, a humor expressed for instance when they tease students and interlocutors who find their renunciation frightening or weird. They also resemble each other in the nature and style of their austerities, and in their repeated assertions of an inextricable link between their renunciation and their compassion for others’ suffering. Indeed, Milarepa’s main disciple, Gampopa Sonam Rinchen, also known as Dakpo Lhaje Sonam Rinchen (1079–1153) drew together the teachings of Milarepa and Marpa with those of the Kadampas, and multiple Tibetan Buddhist traditions point to both Milarepa and the Kadampas as models of what a bodhisattva’s renunciation can or should look like. This context helps to illuminate the ways in which Khunu Lama’s students emphasize his similarities to both Milarepa and the Kadampa geshes, and also hints at why such a resemblance would be important. We see this resemblance in the austere renunciant lifestyle that students describe Khunu Lama as living, in Khunu Lama’s embrace of wandering, and in his personal disregard for appearance, clothing, comfort, and recognition. We also see it in his sometimes humorous flouting of convention. Moreover, in describing Khunu Lama’s personal focus on bodhicitta, both as an object of meditation and as a subject to write about, people who knew him (and more generally people who have heard of him) repeatedly refer to him as a latter-day exemplar of the same bodhisattva ideal embraced by the Kadampas and by Milarepa. During his own lifetime, in fact, Khunu Lama’s students would compare him explicitly both to Milarepa and to famous Kadampas. One Kadampa master to whom Khunu Lama has been compared is Dromtonpa Gyalwé Jungné (1004/5–1064), Atīśa’s main Tibetan disciple and the founder of the Kadampa lineage. Dromtonpa, though a notable and influential promoter of monasticism and a committed renunciant, was himself a layman. He made an unusual figure among Atīśa’s disciples, who were mainly monks, both because of his layman’s status and appearance, and also because of his wide-ranging interests and expertise, spanning topics from monastic rules to tantric practice. Initially some of Atīśa’s monastic disciples did not accept Dromtonpa because he was not a monk, but they were eventually won over by his remarkable qualities. Doboom Tulku Rinpoche, founder of the World Buddhist Culture Trust and former director of Tibet House, New Delhi, recalled that when Khunu Lama was living in India in 1965, the Dalai Lama’s newly formed administration-in-exile asked him to teach at a six-month teacher’s training school in Musoorie, formed as a prelude to the creation of an exile-

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based Tibetan Buddhist educational system, intended to ensure the cultural and religious continuity of Tibetan refugees in the post-1959 diaspora. At this Mussoorie teacher-training intensive, Khunu Lama’s “students” were themselves leading Tibetan lamas and scholars from multiple schools of Tibetan Buddhism, who were being prepared to become teachers of Tibetan students in the future.55 According to Doboom Tulku and other sources, some of the prominent Tibetan religious scholars attending the Mussoorie school were initially less than thrilled to have Khunu Lama as their teacher. They were put off by Khunu Lama’s very simple clothes, his lack of an institutional title or location, and his humble demeanor. They looked down on his (to them) strange Kinnauri Himalayan accent and ambiguous monastic status. It was only after they heard him teach that they recognized his exceptional knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, as well as his profound personal Buddhist understanding. Then, finally, they began to accord him respect. During this time, according to Doboom Tulku, the Dalai Lama visited the Mussoorie school. When he saw the worn, humble figure of Khunu Lama slowly winning over the pompous Buddhist scholars through his erudition and the depth of his Buddhist practice, the Dalai Lama reportedly laughed and said, “It’s just like Dromtonpa among the Kadampa masters.”56 This image of Khunu Lama as a second Dromtonpa comes from rather late in Khunu Lama’s lifetime, after decades of Buddhist study and practice in Tibet and India. At the time when the Dalai Lama compared him to Dromtonpa, Khunu Lama was already seventy years old. Yet Angrup positions the Kadampa Four Aims verse near the beginning of his story of Khunu Lama’s life, at the moment of Khunu Lama’s departure from home. This hints at some similarity between Khunu Lama and the Kadampas, even while Khunu Lama was still a very young man. Perhaps, indeed, the invocation of the Kadampas in this home-leaving chapter previews the kind of figure Khunu Lama will become. In this sense, the early association that Angrup makes between Khunu Lama and the Kadampas in the namtar simultaneously foreshadows the subsequent trajectory of Khunu Lama’s life story, while reflecting back onto Khunu Lama’s youth the memory that remains of him after his death.

The Kadampa Four Aims The imaginary of renunciation that emerges in the Kadampa Four Aims verse resonates across the range of oral and textual modes in which Khunu Lama is remembered. Indeed, in a sense the Kadampa Four Aims articulate the underlying logic of Khunu Lama’s departure from home and larger

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lifestory. This Kadampa verse offers a key to the framework of renunciation within which Khunu Lama is said to have lived, and through which Angrup and other biographers memorialize him. Angrup quotes the Four Aims thus: “This is the unadulterated practice of the mighty Kadampa lamas, and thus of those who uphold the ancient tradition of the lineage: ‘Aim your mind at the Dharma. Aim your Dharma practice at a beggar’s life. Aim your beggar’s life at death. Aim at leaving your death to a dry ravine.’”57 The four lines have a simple parallel structure in Tibetan. Each line of the verse ends with the word gtad, which might be translated in English as “aim,” “entrust,” “surrender,” or perhaps “reference point.” The repetition of gtad at the end of each line intensifies the verse’s hortatory quality. Each line starts with a single noun (“your mind,” “your Dharma,” “your beggar’s life,” “your death”) and then provides the single term at which the first should be “aimed.” In the middle of each line, the word phugs appears, joining each pair of terms together and conveying “fundamentally,” or “always,” or “innermost.” Thus, in each line, there is a direct pairing of terms, conveyed through the grammatical structure. Phrased in the most literal English, the verse might read something like this: “Your mind, fundamentally, at Dharma, aim it. Your Dharma, fundamentally, at beggar-life, aim it. Your beggar-life, fundamentally, at death aim it. Your death, fundamentally, at a dry ravine, aim it.” Tibetan commentators explain that this verse is about an inner attitude of disentanglement from all samsaric projects, including fame or comfort; an acceptance of the unsatisfactory nature of all samsaric experience and the inevitability of death; and an embrace of complete personal simplicity, so that regardless of one’s outer circumstances one is not attached to anything, fostering the bodhisattva attitude of altruistic compassion for others. Considered in this way, the Four Aims remind their audience to turn away from the “eight worldly concerns” (jig rten chos brgyad),” the subtle and insidious concerns over praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, good reputation and bad reputation that can arise not only for ordinary people but even for committed meditators and Buddhist practitioners. Tibetan commentators point to these eight worldly dharmas as the greatest obstacle to authentic and effective Buddhist practice.58 The Four Aims do not necessarily need to be read as suggesting that practitioners should neglect basic care of their bodies or otherwise deliberately go to ascetic extremes. Nevertheless, according to multiple Tibetan commentators on the verse, one of the main points of the Four Aims is an honest confrontation with a series of basic existential fears arising from the practice of renunciation. For instance, a practitioner may fear that Buddhist practice, if done sincerely, will result in poverty. In the face of that

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fear, the Four Aims verse answers that one should embrace the possibility of such poverty completely; only by doing so can the fear of poverty be overcome. The twentieth-century Tibetan scholar Geshe Sonam Rinchen (1937–2013), for instance, explains, “You do not need to live a life of poverty, but if necessary you should be ready to do so by overcoming attachments to pleasurable sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations. This will bring you contentment.”59 Likewise, in Geshe Sonam Rinchen’s explanation, a practitioner might fear that if she truly “aims” for or “entrusts” herself to the possibility of such poverty, she might literally die of starvation. On the one hand, Geshe Sonam Rinchen says, this is in fact highly unlikely: “But if you entrust yourself to poverty and summon up courage to devote all your energy to practicing the teachings come what may, paradoxically you will never lack what you need. The Buddha himself predicted that those of his followers who practiced with dedication would never lack what they need. There is a saying that if the meditator doesn’t roll down the mountain, the food will roll up.”60 In this comment, the audience hears not only the Buddha’s reassurance that sincere Buddhist practice itself paradoxically offers a kind of protection to the practitioner, but also encounters a humorous Tibetan saying, elaborating on the reassuring words of the Buddha. By quoting the Tibetan proverb about food “rolling up” to a meditator, Geshe Sonam Rinchen offers the wry acknowledgment of the irony that even just having a reputation for renunciant practice, deserved or not, may attract lavish patronage (and its attendant complications), together with the reassurance that those practitioners who are truly sincere will always find what they need. Nevertheless, as Geshe Sonam Rinchen goes on to say, the essential point for the practitioner has to be the inner confidence or “entrustment” of being willing to give up even one’s own life for the sake of one’s Buddhist practice. He implies that this is because any other mental attitude retains some traces of self-cherishing. Indeed, despite his assurances that no sincere meditator has ever starved, Geshe Sonam Rinchen elaborates on the third line of the Kadampa verse in blunt terms. Echoing a host of other Tibetan commentaries and instructions, as well as famous passages from Tsangnyon’s Life of Milarepa and Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, he says, “Reflect on the fact that you have died countless times, but never once for the sake of the teachings. Everyone, whether rich or poor, must die eventually, so even if you were to die, this time it would be for a worthwhile reason.”61 Other contemporary Himalayan commentators reinforce this point in equally direct language. The prominent international teacher of Tibetan

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Buddhism Lama Zopa Rinpoche (b. 1946), who had a personal connection to Khunu Lama during the latter years of Khunu Lama’s life, provides a discussion of the Kadampa Four Aims in a series of collected Buddhist discourses published in English under the title How to Practice Dharma: Teachings on the Eight Worldly Dharmas.62 In his analysis of the Four Aims, Lama Zopa also explains that the reference to death is about banishing fear, in a way that goes even beyond the embrace of a beggar’s life. In Lama Zopa’s words, “Perhaps we have reconciled ourselves to living like a beggar, but fears arise,” specifically the fear that because of living like a beggar, one might starve or die of exposure and then fail to accomplish the aims of one’s dharma practice, making the whole endeavor pointless. Lama Zopa notes that, on the contrary, as the Third Aim highlights, if one is a sincere practitioner, one’s dharma practice will not have been pointless: “Even if we do die practicing Dharma, still our life will have been truly worthwhile.” Indeed, he explains, “With the third of the innermost jewels [the Third Aim], entrusting the depths of the beggar to death, we determine that nothing will stop us from having great meaning in this life. Even dying for the Dharma while practicing austerities is far better than experiencing all the riches of the world, collecting much negative karma, and then dying.”63 These interpretations help to provide a context for the final line of the Four Aims, the one which might appear to be the most challenging: “Aim your death at a dry ravine.” In explicating this final line, Geshe Sonam Rinchen again turns directly to Śāntideva, saying, “Now you might be anxious about who will look after you when you grow old and who will dispose of your body in the proper way when you die. Such worries reveal that you are still ensnared by worldly concerns. You may live to be old, but it is not at all certain. Śāntideva says: ‘Go to the cremation ground and think / Those others’ bones and my body / Both have the nature to disintegrate / And so one day they will be alike.’ . . . Courageously entrust yourself to an empty cave, thinking even if for the sake of your practice you have to die alone like a dog far away from everyone in a desolate place, you will not be afraid or distressed.”64 Here, Geshe Sonam Rinchen says, in the freedom to disregard even the concern about what will happen to one’s corpse, the Four Aims address in full the repertoire of concerns generated by a person’s ordinary self-cherishing, up to and including worries about one’s moment of death and the disposition of one’s body. The template for renunciation offered here does not encourage seeking death in a solitary wild place on purpose. Nevertheless, according to Tibetan and Himalayan commentators, the Four Aims do recommend reflecting on the possible outcome of solitary death, extreme and unlikely as it may be, so as to make peace with it in ad-

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vance. Geshe Sonam Rinchen, Lama Zopa, and the commentarial tradition in which they are working suggest that once the meditator has made peace with even the possibility of death alone in a wild and solitary place, then they truly begin to be released from the grip of the eight worldly concerns. The Four Aims thus emerge in mainstream Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist readings as encapsulating the mental steps necessary to free oneself from the fears and self-entanglements that arise for serious practitioners of the bodhisattva path. The Four Aims are in fact the first section of a longer Kadampa sequence of ten meditation points called the Kadampa Ten Innermost Jewels (phugs nor bcu). Both the Four Aims (in brief ) and the complete Ten Innermost Jewels (with more elaboration) provide the essentials of an attitude of renunciation.65 This attitude involves relinquishing all projects and agendas except the practice of Buddhism, and encourages an emotional and psychological directness about the inevitability of death. As a corollary to these first two mental attitudes, renunciation also involves a direct acceptance of the possibility of lifelong personal poverty (arguably poverty of many kinds, encompassing both material relinquishment and an acceptance of profound solitude). While Tibetan Buddhist commentators, including Geshe Sonam Rinchen and Lama Zopa, take pains to point out that not all practitioners are poor in actuality, and sometimes wealthy or politically powerful people have practiced inner renunciation in this way, nevertheless, these authors and their interpretive tradition emphasize that it is essential to embrace the possibility of the “beggar’s life,” together with the possibility of a solitary death in the wilderness. By citing the Four Aims to frame Khunu Lama’s departure from home, Angrup thus evokes what is for many Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist readers a template for inner and outer renunciation that is both familiar and centrally important. The Four Aims convey dimensions of meaning and affect that resonate with the vocabulary of renunciation that Angrup has already introduced, through the earlier verse from Milarepa comparing home to a “treasure house of poison,” a phrase often found in Kadampa literature as well. The spare, even stark, phrasing of the Four Aims fleshes out further implications of the home-leaving that Milarepa recommends, by directly connecting renunciation in the sense of home-leaving with acceptance of poverty, and specifically with the figure of the “beggar” (sprang po), a central image within the chatralwa renunciant ideal. Moreover, the Four Aims tie these themes to an awareness of death, both as an emotional and psychological challenge and as an existential fact. At the imaginal level, the vocabulary of the Four Aims verse also hints at an exterior landscape of renunciation. The “dry ravine” ( grog po skam po), which the fourth line names as the place to which practitioners should

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“entrust” or “aim” their death, has important topographic and metaphoric affinities to the space of the “cave” (brag phug), the landscape feature perhaps most strongly associated with renunciation and meditative practice in the Tibetan imagination. This imagery suggests a Himalayan wilderness landscape of high, rocky mountains, marked by caves and steep-sided, dry watercourses. In Tibetan literature more generally, such landscapes repeatedly appear as places of solitude and meditative effort. The imagery of wild places forms an important part of the geographic and social imaginary of the chatralwa renunciant ideal—geographically liminal zones outside of human towns or monasteries imagined as places of solitude and hardship. In these renunciatory spaces, the rugged features of the landscape and the physical difficulties of surviving go together, and also work as metonymies for each other. The solitude offered by such places is repeatedly described by Himalayan authors as precious for Buddhist practice. At the same time, since solitary life in a remote mountain cave or hillside can be genuinely dangerous, such wilderness retreat practice potentially places the renunciatory challenge offered by the Four Aims—to imagine surrendering even one’s life to a solitary death—squarely in the center of the practitioner’s attention, redoubling the overlap of literal and imagined practices of renunciation.66 These rugged topographies of space and imagination are closely associated with Milarepa, Shabkar, and other virtuoso Himalayan renunciant practitioners with whom Khunu Lama was connected by lineage or by reputation, including his early teacher Sonam Gyaltsen, Khenpo Zhenga, and key figures in Zhenga’s lineage of meditative practice. Milarepa in particular is repeatedly linked to the spaces of the cave and the wilderness, both in influential accounts of his life and in images of him, as well as in the first-person verses and songs attributed to him. Audiences repeatedly see Milarepa seeking out such wilderness environments for meditation, even as he also repeatedly returns to the villages and towns where his relatives and students live in order to teach. Throughout Angrup’s account of Khunu Lama’s life story, and more generally within Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist literary imaginaries, the psychological space of renunciation is frequently imagined through landscapes of caves, ravines, and wild, secluded places. Angrup invokes this landscape of renunciation through his interpolations of Milarepa’s words and the Kadampa Four Aims. The wild and solitary spaces of renunciation are in turn closely connected in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist literature to the figure of the wandering “beggar” (sprang po), a figure that emerges as a central embodiment of the Tibetan chatralwa renunciatory ideal. As an epithet, the term beggar in Tibetan carries some of the same ambiguity as in English,

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appearing in literary contexts both as a self-chosen term of humility and a marker of renunciation (and as such used by some of the most famous Tibetan literary and religious masters to sign their works). It also serves as an insulting or contemptuous term for a poor, homeless, or parasitical person, a ragged wastrel who lives on handouts. The word beggar, of course, as Chakrabarty notes and as explored in the introduction to this volume, directly evokes the ancient Buddhist mendicant ideal of the bhikṣu (Skt.)/ bhikkhu (Pāli), the ordained Buddhist renunciant who lives on alms. When Angrup frames Khunu Lama’s departure from home with the Kadampa Four Aims, he hints that Khunu Lama’s home-leaving is the beginning of his turn to a “beggar’s life.”67 And indeed, after Khunu Lama left his home in Kinnaur in 1914, he seems to have come to embrace the ideal of the “beggar’s life” recommended by the Kadampa Four Aims, in particular with regard to practices of rigorous personal poverty.68 People who knew him in his later years frequently describe him in oral and written sources as looking like a beggar, with threadbare clothes and minimal personal possessions. We saw how, as a young man in Kham in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was in fact disparaged as an “Indian beggar” (atsara) on at least one occasion, and there are stories from his later years in India of his being turned away from lodging or harassed because of his humble appearance.69 More often though, stories about him speak reverently of his beggar-like way of living, as a mark of his genuine chatralwa renunciant practice.70 Many people I spoke with who knew Khunu Lama described him to me as a “real chatralwa,” emphasizing his renunciant identity in admiring terms.71 Yet Khunu Lama did not always practice his renunciation in the Tibetan highland wilderness landscape of dry ravines and remote mountain caves that figure so prominently in Tibetan literary imaginaries of renunciation. On the contrary, after initially leaving home, he began to travel across the Himalayan region to meet with Buddhist teachers. He frequently found them—and later taught his own students—in bustling, often cosmopolitan cities and towns, from Gangtok in Sikkim to Lhasa, Shigatse, and Dergé in central and eastern Tibet, and Varanasi in India. Later on in his own life, in fact, Khunu Lama himself chose to turn the literary convention of remote wilderness renunciation on its head in the most literal way, by electing to live in a kind of concealed retreat, hidden within the bustling Indian city of Varanasi. When asked about this, he playfully insisted that the city was best, because the mountains were too crowded. For instance, Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, a senior Nyingma master who studied with Khunu Lama during the 1960s and 1970s in India as a young man, recalled that when people would ask Khunu Lama why he lived in

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hectic, noisy, hot Varanasi, he would reply, “In the past, people used to go do retreat in the mountains. These days we should not go the mountains, because the mountain is a very touristic place.”72 Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe, one of the most prominent Gelukpa scholars of the Dalai Lama’s generation and a former head of the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, similarly remembered Khunu Lama saying, “In the past, meditators and yogins would retreat to isolated mountain caves. But nowadays, the mountains are full of backpackers and hikers, and there is no peace and quiet, whereas no one wants to come to Varanasi, so it’s a good place to do retreat.”73 By inverting the conventional practice of mountain retreat in this way, Khunu Lama emerges in these accounts as relinquishing attachment even to the compelling imaginaries of renunciation in the wilderness and to the fame that mountain retreat practice might eventually bring. Throughout their accounts of his life, narrators of stories about Khunu Lama hint at a connection between his renunciant practice and the frequent travel that marked his adulthood. His travels literally separated him from any permanent home in an institutional or personal sense. More metaphorically, stories about him present his travels as a marker of his freedom from ordinary attachments, appearing as a key dimension of his engagement with the Kadamapa Four Aims and the example of figures like Milarepa and Shabkar. His wandering, with its attendant reality of continual departure and absence, also goes hand in hand with his practices of self-concealment, reinforced by his unusual choices of residence and lifestyle when he did decide to stay somewhere. His biographers suggest that after he left home as a young man of nineteen, in an important sense he never returned “home,” although later in life he would come back to teach in the Kinnaur Valley for nearly a decade. After his home-departure in 1914, he maintained a wandering, semi-hidden way of living throughout the next sixty years. The next chapter explores how his students describe these practices of renunciation and self-concealment and their effects on his teaching, as well as how these practices contribute to his association with the Mahāyāna philosopher Śāntideva.

[ Ch a pte r 3 ]

“Aim Your Dharma Practice at a Beggar’s Life”

I was amazed the moment we met. . . . I thought the yogins of ancient India must be like him. . . . It was said that he sleeps among the beggars in Bodh Gaya. Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek interview, 2006 He was one of the real, modern-day . . . Buddhist saints. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005 The biggest teaching was just the way he lived, you know, . . . that’s the most inspiring thing. Chris Fynn interview, 2006

Introduction: “With the dust rising up” The previous chapter focused on the Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation through which narrators like Angrup frame accounts of Khunu Lama’s life, paying particular attention to stories about Khunu Lama’s initial departure from home as a young man. In this chapter, I examine how accounts of Khunu Lama’s “beggar’s life” frame his activities as aspects of a bodhisattva’s practice of renunciation, a practice that includes self-concealment as an antidote to the lure of fame. To set the stage, consider the following story from Khunu Lama’s later adult life in India—a story that has become an important episode in Khunu Lama’s life as it is now remembered. Not many years after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s 1959 arrival in India, 75

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probably in the early 1960s, a striking scene unfolded on a dusty road in the historic but sleepy north Indian town of Sarnath, near the hectic city of Varanasi. A large crowd of Tibetan lay people and monastics had gathered near one of Sarnath’s important Buddhist pilgrimage sites to see the Dalai Lama. Indian police had been deployed to manage His Holiness’s visit and handle crowd control. Together with members of his staff and security detail, the Dalai Lama arrived by car. Yet to the shock of the crowd in the Sarnath street, and to the consternation of the Indian police, the Dalai Lama stopped his car before he arrived at the destination. He got out of the car and singled out a shabbily dressed older Kinnauri man among the multitude of people waiting. The Dalai Lama accorded this unknown man a gesture of respect in what the Tibetan community assembled there understood as an act of deep devotion. Several people described these events to me with dramatic flair. In the words of the Tibetan historian Rakra Rinpoche, who heard this story from the Sikkimese translator who was with the Dalai Lama at that time. “His Holiness Dalai Lama visited Varanasi. . . . At that time, the Indian government made a lot of preparations. Tibetans gathered all around Sarnath. Khunu Lama was sitting amidst the Tibetans [to welcome the Dalai Lama]. When the Dalai Lama saw Khunu Lama amidst the surging crowd, . . . His Holiness stepped down immediately from his vehicle and offered prostration. . . . The Dalai Lama offered full prostration . . . in the middle of the road . . . with the dust rising up. When that happened, the Indian police were astonished.”1 When the Fourteenth Dalai Lama prostrated in the dust of the road to Khunu Lama in Sarnath, he brought Khunu Lama to greater public attention than at any previous point. Students from that period recall that after the Dalai Lama prostrated to him, Khunu Lama began to be rather famous among Tibetans in India. Indeed, much of Khunu Lama’s public role as a Buddhist teacher in India in the last two decades of his life was directly connected to his relationship with the Dalai Lama, as well as to his relationships with other influential Tibetan figures. The Sarnath story and similar anecdotes about the Dalai Lama publicly honoring him continue to circulate in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist settings. The Nyingma master Khenpo Sonam Topgyal, for instance, recalled how in the 1960s, at the first large Kālacakra Initiation that the Dalai Lama gave in India after coming into exile, His Holiness introduced Khunu Lama to the crowd by name, saying “Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen is a non-sectarian (rimè) lama without parallel.” As Khenpo Sonam Topgyal put it, “This started a flood of students to Bodh Gaya [where Khunu Lama was then living]. . . . Then, the Tibetans would wait in line for three hours to see Khunu Lama,

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and prostrate.”2 Similarly, Namgyal Taklha, a writer, social worker, and the Dalai Lama’s sister-in-law, recounted how at one point she was living next door to Khunu Lama in Bodh Gaya in the 1970s and noticed that there was “a lot of commotion” outside his room, where he usually lived quietly. When she inquired of other people what had happened, “they said, ‘Oh, His Holiness Dalai Lama came to see him, and they were saying, ‘Oh my goodness, His Holiness Dalai Lama has prostrated to him, so he must be a very special lama.’”3 For many audiences, proximity to the Dalai Lama in stories like these reveals a deeper meaning and value within Khunu Lama’s renunciatory, wandering lifestyle and activities—activities that might otherwise simply make him obscure. The Sarnath prostration story and similar accounts in this sense offer an interpretive lens for the dynamics of renunciation, concealment, and recognition that characterize Khunu Lama’s life as it is remembered. In the Sarnath scene, we see Khunu Lama’s renunciation take the form of near-invisibility within the large crowd. When the Dalai Lama publicly prostrates to him, His Holiness reveals that Khunu Lama’s “true” identity under his shabby exterior is actually that of a hidden bodhisattva and great teacher. Of course, this inner identity is one that Khunu Lama’s personal disciples already understand him to have. But for the Sarnath crowd and the Indian police in the story, this disclosure is a revelation. The scene provides future audiences with a key for correctly interpreting Khunu Lama’s beggar-like and hidden persona as a mark of his exceptional renunciatory practice. The Sarnath story also highlights the Dalai Lama’s own willingness to break convention in order to venerate a revered teacher (a Buddhist motivation that is, according to Tibetan commentators, essential for the Buddhist path). Because the Dalai Lama’s actions here are so surprising for the audience, his actions not only disclose Khunu Lama’s real identity as a great Buddhist master, but also and importantly reinforce the audience’s awareness of the Dalai Lama’s own true identity as an exceptional Buddhist practitioner himself, able to perceive the bodhisattva qualities hidden underneath Khunu Lama’s shabby exterior, and possessed of the social courage and devotion to prostrate to an unimpressive-looking, unknown man in a dusty public street in front of a crowd. Stories of the Dalai Lama’s reverence for Khunu Lama despite his humble appearance highlight the mutual willingness of both Khunu Lama and His Holiness to act in ways that seem startling on the surface but are understood to reflect deeper religious commitments. This kind of unconventionality is itself, of course, an important convention for narratives about chatralwa renunciants and for the associated ideal type of the “mad yogin.”

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In tandem with other renunciatory practices that relate to relinquishing fame and reputation, such unconventionality often functions as a mark of authenticity, as it does here. Yet, as some stories about Khunu Lama also demonstrate, unconventionality as a dimension of renunciation can also have the side effect of concealing practitioners from view, rendering their actions and identity hard to understand, and thus potentially withdrawing them from students. In this sense, practices of renunciatory selfconcealment can require a kind of “translation,” a narrative gloss that elucidates the meaning of otherwise obscure or baffling behavior.4 In stories like the Sarnath encounter above, this form of translation is supplied by the Dalai Lama, when he offers the recognition that confirms Khunu Lama’s renunciation as a treasured form of Buddhist practice. Taken together, such stories of hidden renunciation and recognition contribute to the religious authority and charisma of both Khunu Lama and the Dalai Lama, enhancing audiences’ sense of both of them as worthy of devotion. Yet strikingly, during an interview in 2005, when I asked His Holiness to comment on Khunu Lama’s continuing influence or legacy in the present day, his first reply was, “None at all.” The Dalai Lama went on to clarify this statement, saying, “Well now, in Ladakh, in Khunu [Kinnaur], there is a little [influence]. Among our Tibetan people, he did not teach very much.”5 The Dalai Lama explained that for people in the western Himalaya, in particular for Kinnauris, for whom Khunu Lama is a local hero, and for people in neighboring Himalayan regions such as Ladakh, Khunu Lama is indeed important. This is both because he is from that area and even more because he took pains to teach there extensively, spending years in Kinnaur itself, taking on many Kinnauri disciples, and composing teaching materials in the Kinnauri language especially for them. But, the Dalai Lama suggested, Khunu Lama did not teach as widely to Tibetans, and did not become as famous among them. In what follows, I consider the implications of the Dalai Lama’s words for elucidating dynamics of concealment, separation, and recognition in accounts of Khunu Lama’s distinctive modes of renunciation. The idea that Khunu Lama’s teachings were limited when his qualities as a Buddhist teacher were hidden by his renunciatory practice is a recurring theme in stories about his life. At the same time, as we saw in chapter 1, and as I consider again in chapter 4, Khunu Lama is also remembered as a paramount figure of connection during a period of intense disruption, an important teacher of the Dalai Lama and numerous others, whose lineage relationships bridge the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Tibet and the mid-to-late twentieth century in India. Thus we might note the irony, or perhaps the modesty, in the Dalai Lama’s words—His Holiness did not

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point out that Khunu Lama is in fact often remembered by Tibetans today specifically because of Khunu Lama’s connection to him. Tibetan literary theory analyzes the namtar biographical genre as addressing outer, inner, and secret dimensions of individual life stories.6 Audiences generally encounter Khunu Lama’s renunciatory practice first in depictions of its outer manifestations. Written biographies, including Angrup’s and Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche’s namtar, tend to focus on the external forms of Khunu Lama’s renunciation, including his refusal of salaries and honors, his frequent traveling, and his acceptance of hardship. Oral accounts of Khunu Lama’s life likewise frequently emphasize his personal poverty, and often link this to what is remembered as his preference for the company of poor and humble people.7 People who knew Khunu Lama repeatedly explained to me that even seemingly small details of how he looked, where he lived, what he wore, what he ate, whom he visited, what he studied and wrote, which languages he used, and how he positioned his body all reflected his renunciation. Oral narrators in particular, especially people who knew Khunu Lama personally, moreover interweave their accounts of his outward actions with observations about more internal dimensions of his activity. From this perspective, accounts of Khunu Lama’s material hardship, simplicity, or preference for humble people can be seen as indexing his inward attitude of renunciation and thus as forming part of his inner, as well as outer, biography. Narrators frame both these outer and inner dimensions of stories about his life through the category of the chatralwa. We can trace the theme of Khunu Lama’s chatralwa attitude and practice across multiple textual and oral stories about him, in a kind of collective “renunciatory biography,” with both outer and inner aspects. Notably, according to many narrators, Khunu Lama’s inner chatralwa attitude is repeatedly expressed in his hiddenness, especially via the things he did that obscured (at least for a time) his identity as a Buddhist teacher. And while most accounts of Khunu Lama’s life do not address a “secret” dimension of his activity directly, in the sense of explicitly naming his internal meditative experiences, dreams, or Buddhist realizations, narrators occasionally do hint at layers within his biography that might be considered part of this secret dimension. These include not only glimpses of his personal practices and Buddhist insights, but also intimations of his close association or identification with the paradigmatic Mahāyāna figure of Śāntideva. This chapter turns first to how outer manifestations of Khunu Lama’s renunciation, such as his embrace of poverty, are described in accounts of his travels, studies, and teaching from the time of his home-leaving until his death in 1977. Subsequently, at the “inner” level, this chapter considers

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Khunu Lama’s hiddenness. In the context of renouncing fame, narrators describe many aspects of Khunu Lama’s activity as taking the form of deliberate self-concealment. Indeed, the Dalai Lama’s striking assertion that Khunu Lama had no influence and left no legacy among Tibetans may be read at one level as describing Khunu Lama’s renunciatory resistance to becoming famous. I suggest in this context that Khunu Lama’s personal connections to India often functioned in tandem with his outer and inner practices of renunciation in the perceptions of Tibetan and Western audiences, making him harder to identify as a Tibetan-trained Buddhist master. Building on this idea, I return to the point introduced in chapter 1 that Khunu Lama’s particular style of renunciation, and its associations with his presumed Indianness supported, and was closely connected to, his nonsectarian or ecumenical approach to Buddhism. These considerations lead me to propose that multiple aspects of Khunu Lama’s lifelong interest in Sanskrit and Tibetan literary scholarship are also connected to his renunciation, at least in the perception of some of his students. As we saw in Khunu Lama’s encounter with Khenpo Zhenga, Khunu Lama’s literary scholarship is a central aspect of his biography, closely interwoven with his activities as a Buddhist student and teacher, and central to his Indian-inflected, non-sectarian approach to Buddhism. Yet in addition, according to some narrators, Khunu Lama’s literary erudition was at a subtle level itself a form of renunciatory self-concealment. This may come as a surprise, given how highly figures like Khenpo Zhenga and his peers valued the literary skills involved in accessing Indian Buddhist sources. One might think that literary brilliance would make Khunu Lama more famous, rather than less. And indeed, in certain times and places, it did. Yet literary scholarship, whether in Sanskrit or Tibetan, has often been viewed with both admiration and ambivalence in the Tibetan Buddhist imagination. Sometimes positively viewed as an essential aspect of Buddhist self-cultivation, or as a crucial tool for engaging a precious Indian Buddhist inheritance, literary study has also sometimes been disparaged as a worldly distraction from “real” Buddhist practice and study.8 With this ambiguity in mind, several people who knew Khunu Lama explained that his literary scholarship was actually in some settings an aspect of his self-concealing renunciatory activity, precisely because literary scholarship was sometimes looked down upon. Khunu Lama’s renunciation at all of these levels contributes to the widespread Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist tendency to associate him with the figure of the eighth-century Indian Mahāyāna philosopher-poet Śāntideva, perhaps the most influential exponent of the bodhisattva ideal for Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists. Whether in his association with

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India, in his self-concealment, or in his acceptance of personal hardship as an aspect of developing bodhicitta, Khunu Lama has often been described as a kind of second Śāntideva. The fact that in the tumultuous year of 1959– 1960 Khunu Lama composed a year’s worth of daily verses on the subject of bodhicitta, which have come to constitute his own best-known work, Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta, further heightens this Śāntideva connection. Resonances with Śāntideva in stories of Khunu Lama’s life and work help to illuminate some of the challenges and affordances of Khunu Lama’s chatralwa style of renunciation from the perspective of lineage continuity.

“That’s how possessions accumulate” To expand our sense of how images of renunciation punctuate Khunu Lama’s biographical corpus, let us turn to a sampling of depictions of Khunu Lama, from across the arc of his life story.9 Descriptions of Khunu Lama’s departure from home, his travels in Tibet and India, and his entry into lineages of Buddhist transmission as a student and teacher all are marked by the recurring theme of material hardship and poverty. Readers will recall Angrup’s account of how, at the dramatic moment when Khunu Lama first leaves his home in Kinnaur in 1914, he departs “without even any suitable boots to put on his feet.”10 Manshardt, Khunu Lama’s German-language biographer, interprets this as meaning that Khunu Lama literally left Kinnaur barefoot. This image of the young Tenzin Gyaltsen walking out of his familiar valley and prosperous life shoeless, intent on going to “the Dharma realm of Tibet,”11 sets him in the reader’s imagination as a particular kind of Buddhist figure, a renunciant traveler whose trajectory resembles the lives of Śākyamuni, Milarepa, and Shabkar. However, Angrup’s description of the future Khunu Lama making a quick stop near Manali to collect on his older brother’s loans in order to have travel money nuances this picture: “Having traveled to the right bank of the river in the upper part of Nyungti, the area also known as Kullu, he arrived at a town called Rayesan, where a group of Khunu people had settled a long time before. There, his elder brother, Dondrup Gyaltsen, had made loans. In order to get provisions for practicing the dharma, he [Khunu Lama] collected the repayment on the loans, having discounted the interest.”12 For some audiences, Khunu Lama’s collecting on the loans may show a pragmatic ability to grapple with worldly matters when necessary; he may be a renunciant, but he is sensible enough to realize he needs supplies. Nevertheless, a reader might also note that when Angrup recounts this loan-collection episode in the namtar, he attributes a certain discom-

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fort to Khunu Lama about it. Angrup says, “The Great One [Khunu Lama], expressing a sense of modesty and embarrassment, wrote his brother a letter describing in detail how, upon finding no other means, he engaged in this greedy act, and further expressed his hope that he would not be displeased.”13 The ambivalence that Angrup attributes to Khunu Lama here perhaps offers a passing glimpse both of the closeness of the brothers, such that Khunu Lama might hope for his brother’s support, and of the internal efforts the young would-be renunciant may have made as he balanced pragmatism with his renunciatory aspirations. Khunu Lama used the funds he had thus raised to travel across northern India, at least in part by train,14 and to make his way to the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, where apparently one of his cousins was living and doing business, and where he met his teacher, Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche. After his studies with Orgyen Tenzin, Khunu Lama continued on to Tibet, as described in chapter 1. Yet despite Khunu Lama’s apparent success in Sikkim and Tibet in quickly finding teachers to study with and employment as a teacher himself, textual and oral accounts of his activities as a young man emphasize his extremely simple way of living and his arduous travel. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche describes how meagerly the young Khunu Lama subsisted during the period (probably in 1919 and 1920) when he studied and went on pilgrimages in the city of Lhasa and the three great Geluk monasteries nearby. “At that time, he says, he used to be really, really disciplined and for months he never, never made fire; he would just have a little tsampa [roasted barley flour, the Tibetan staple food] and put in cold water and drink that. He lived for months like this.”15 Likewise, Angrup describes Khunu Lama’s subsequent departure from central Tibet for the eastern region of Kham in 1925 in a similar tone: “As for lord Lama Rinpoche [Tenzin Gyaltsen], he hurried off in search of the holy Dharma. Despite the bitter difficulties of progress along the road, he did not think about them at all.”16 Later on, when Khunu Lama taught members of the royal family of Dergé during his sojourn in eastern Tibet, his biographers describe how he did not accept the various gifts that the royal family offered. Dergé was the home of one of the major Tibetan woodblock printeries for the Tibetan Buddhist canon and also housed a famous library collection of Buddhist canonical and commentarial literature. Multiple stories describe how the Dergé rulers offered Khunu Lama the books of the royal library. In Pema Wangyal Rinpoche’s words, Khunu Lama “became quite famous in Dergé, .  .  .  and they offered him all the collections of the [Buddhist canon]. He said, ‘What should I do with them?’ And he said, ‘Without study, without proper knowledge, they are just dead books.’ And he didn’t accept them, he donated to other monasteries.”17

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Stories of Khunu Lama’s years in India after his travel there from Tibet (c. 1938) similarly highlight aspects of his outward renunciatory practice, including his embrace of material hardship, and his refusal of honors and gifts, even scholarly ones. In fact, because most of Khunu Lama’s currently living Tibetan and Himalayan students met him in India, these former students know more about Khunu Lama’s Indian years than about his earlier decades in Tibet, and they describe his renunciatory practice during his years in India in particular detail. Multiple narrators discuss his refusal of salaries and honors in India in ways that parallel his refusal of gifts in Dergé. For instance, Angrup tells us that some years into his life in India, after his scholarly reputation as a Sanskritist and literary expert was well established, Varanasi Sanskrit University offered Khunu Lama a signal honor: “the rank of professor [dge rgan chen mo].” However, Angrup goes on to say, because he [Khunu Lama] had no interest in the eight [worldly] dharmas, he did not let even the slightest bit of unwholesome flattery occur. As for the monthly salary and additional moneys [due him] according to the rules and regulations of that university, because he lived as a simple renunciate, one who has left behind interest in wealth or material affairs, what use is there even to mention it? Because of not having even a little bit of taint of self-grasping, his intention was only for the sake of the teachings and for living beings. . . . Why would he touch extra money for living expenses? He did not take it.18

A central recurring theme in recollections by Khunu Lama’s students is the material simplicity of his day-to-day living arrangements in India. In this context, the city of Varanasi, and Khunu Lama’s residence there, emerge as important points on his biographical map. The room where Khunu Lama lived in Varanasi functions in student recollections as a particular touchstone of his renunciatory practice, one which also powerfully indexes the “Indian” identity that Tibetan audiences often attribute to him. For some fifteen years, from the 1950s through the early 1960s, Khunu Lama lived on and off in a Hindu ashram in Varanasi called Tekra Math. Tekra Math was a religious community presided over by an Indian Śaivite scholar whom Angrup refers to in the namtar as Reverend (Jo bo) Gangagire,19 who had earlier been Khunu Lama’s Sanskrit classmate in Varanasi in the 1940s. According to the namtar, the two men “had become mutually harmonious and close during the earlier period when they had studied Sanskrit together. Because of that, [Reverend Gangagire] gave [Khunu] Lama Rinpoche a place to live, in a makeshift single room built onto the top floor

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of that above-mentioned math [religious community]. He gave it to him permanently and [Khunu Lama] stayed there.”20 It was this “makeshift single room” that so strikingly seems to have served Khunu Lama as a kind of unconventional space of retreat. This room on the upper floor of the Tekra Math ashram was a place that people who visited strongly associated with renunciation.21 The room’s physical details, as well as its location within a Hindu religious community, come up repeatedly in stories told by those who met Khunu Lama there. Angrup himself, who studied with Khunu Lama on several occasions as a young man, personally recalled in conversation with me that the Varanasi room was unbearably hot for much of the year and full of mosquitoes, because the windows and door had no glass. The lack of glass also meant that during the rains, water would collect on the floor of the room. The space lacked basic furnishings, such as chairs or dishes. Angrup described how Khunu Lama would have to go downstairs and out to a pump in the street to get water in his cupped hands when he needed a drink. According to Angrup, he had asked Khunu Lama why he did not get a pitcher and a cup to keep in his room. Khunu Lama had replied, “First you get one cup and a pitcher. Then you need another cup in case you have a visitor. Then you need a third cup in case someone else comes. And that’s how possessions accumulate.”22 Other accounts also note that Khunu Lama was very poor during the period when he lived in Varanasi—so much so that he ate only once a day.23 The Ladakhi scholar Tashi Rabgias recalled visiting Khunu Lama in his Varanasi room and bringing a gift of fruit for him, “but he would not accept anything.”24 The Tibetan political minister Kasur Sonam Tobgay described Khunu Lama’s Varanasi room on the upper floor of the ashram as “a tiny little room, with no chairs,” remarking that Khunu Lama “only drank cold water”; in other words, Khunu Lama lived so simply that he did not even make tea.25 Khunu Lama’s Ladakhi disciple Baling Lama described him as living on similarly sparse rations, and added that Khunu Lama had told him not to waste much time preparing food.26 The Nyingma teacher and scholar Pema Wangyal Rinpoche recalled that when he and a small group of Nyingma incarnate lamas and khenpos met Khunu Lama, “He had hardly anything, you know? He had what he was wearing, that’s all he had, nothing else.” Pema Wangyal Rinpoche remembered Khunu Lama as living in Varanasi on a meager budget, provided at least partly by family members from Kinnaur. As he recalled, Khunu Lama “asked his uncle to send every month like fifty rupees, by post” which he would then give to the place where he got his single daily meal.27 Notably, Baling Rinpoche recalled Khunu Lama as visiting a small barbershop once a month for a haircut and

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shave, saving his money and rationing his visits to the shop so that he could pay the barber one hundred times his usual small fee at each visit.28 Pema Wangyal Rinpoche contrasted this life of retreat in Varanasi with Khunu Lama’s life a few years later, after he became publicly known as a teacher of the Dalai Lama: “After he became teacher to His Holiness Dalai Lama, then he became quite kind of active and really busy. . . . He used to live near the bank of the river Ganges. And after, of course, when His Holiness Dalai Lama requested him to give teachings on [Śāntideva ’s] Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, then he became very busy, and everybody just disturbed him. Before that he said he was really very quiet.”29 Khunu Lama’s ascetic lifestyle also marks accounts of other places where Tibetan, Himalayan and Western students met him in India. By the late 1960s, Khunu Lama had begun living for long periods of time in Bodh Gaya, the preeminent Buddhist pilgrimage site, associated with the place of the Buddha Śākyamuni’s enlightenment and located in the present-day Indian state of Bihar. Until the final years of his life in the late 1970s, Khunu Lama returned regularly to Bodh Gaya, and many students from the last two decades of his life met him there. Students from those years describe Khunu Lama’s material circumstances in Bodh Gaya as similar to his room in Varanasi in their asceticism, although in Bodh Gaya he usually stayed in more conventionally Tibetan Buddhist surroundings: he had a small room at the main Gelukpa temple (now run by Namgyal Monastery), which was for many years the only Tibetan temple in Bodh Gaya; one person also recalled Khunu Lama subsequently staying in the Drukpa Kagyu temple in Bodh Gaya, as well.30 At some points when giving teachings in Bodh Gaya, Khunu Lama also stayed in a small Tibetan guesthouse. In his biography of the late Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche, the translator and Buddhist scholar Alexander Berzin describes Khunu Lama’s Bodh Gaya room, where Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche received teachings on the Kālacakra Tantra from Khunu Lama one summer, probably in the late 1960s. Berzin describes how in Bodh Gaya “in summer, the temperature regularly soars to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, which is nearly 50 degrees Centigrade. With frequent power cuts, water shortages, and no air conditioning, being there can be quite a trial. Khunu Lama regularly lived there in a tiny windowless room without even a fan.”31 Similarly, Pema Wangyal Rinpoche recalled that “even when he was in Bodh Gaya, he had only a few books, Sanskrit books. . . . He was studying a little bit, but of course most of the time, he just goes in the morning to sit under the Bodhi tree [the site associated with Śākyamuni’s enlightenment]. When he comes back in the

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afternoon, he used to read. . . . [The] Drikung Khandroma used to bring lunch, and after that he locks the door and nobody comes to visit him. And whatever people offered him, . . . he used to leave it under his bed and the next person who comes, he would give it away to them. This kind of recycling. . . . He had no possessions whatsoever.”32

Some accounts of Khunu Lama’s ascetic practice in Bodh Gaya actually place him outside of conventional housing altogether. Bihar, where Bodh Gaya is located, has for decades been among the poorest states in India. Many visitors to Bodh Gaya are struck by the numbers of destitute people there. In that context, it is notable that Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek repeatedly recalled hearing that Khunu Lama sometimes slept outside with the beggars in the Bodh Gaya streets, which Khen Rinpoche framed as a paramount expression of Khunu Lama’s bodhisattva-style renunciatory practice.33 But Khunu Lama did not spend all his time in spartan rooms and streets in Varanasi and Bodh Gaya. During the 1960s and early 1970s, and probably in the late 1930s and 1940s, he made regular visits to the cooler, higheraltitude Himalayan foothill towns of Kalimpong and Darjeeling, and also visited Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, where he taught Buddhist topics to the Queen Mother of Sikkim, Gyalyum Kunzang Dechen Tsomo Namgyal (1906–87), and her mother, sisters, and at least one of her daughters. He also seems to have visited Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom bordering Sikkim.34 Even people who met him in these less visibly ascetic settings, however, describe Khunu Lama in terms of his practices of simplicity and material renunciation. For example, Ngawang Rabgyas, who served as an attendant to the Queen Mother of Sikkim as a young man, and who chauffeured Khunu Lama from Sikkim to Kalimpong and later to Kathmandu in the late 1970s, highlighted Khunu Lama’s lack of possessions, recalling, for instance, that Khunu Lama traveled with “only one small bag.” Ngawang Rabgyas remembered hearing Khunu Lama describe his discomfort with fancy surroundings, such as those at his wealthy patron’s house in Kalimpong or the Taktse Palace in Gangtok. Khunu Lama told Ngawang Rabgyas that he “didn’t like his sponsor’s fancy house—Khunu Lama said he was a village person, and so he wouldn’t stay a long time there.” Likewise, Ngawang Rabyas also recalled that “When villagers came to see [Khunu Lama], he would say, ‘You are poor villagers who need money. You better accumulate Tara mantras.’” Ngawang Rabyas implies here that Khunu Lama understood the material hardships of poor rural people and framed the Buddhist practices he recommended for them specifically around their concerns,

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here recommending a mantra practice associated with the female Buddha Tara for the accumulation of prosperity and success.35 A preference for poor and ordinary people over aristocratic patrons is of course a common trope in Tibetan and Himalayan namtar literature, particularly in the life stories of figures remembered as chatralwa. Khunu Lama’s reported preference for poor villagers in this context further locates him in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Tibetan renunciates Patrul Rinpoche and Shabkar, themselves key ancestors in the Buddhist lineages that Khunu Lama entered in Kham. Patrul, Shabkar, and many of their disciples famously espoused a preference for poor people in their writings and behavior, and in turn evoke renunciant exemplars from even earlier periods, particularly Milarepa and the Kadampas. At another level, this preference for poor people, even considered as a dimension of memory and narrative, can be understood as a form of social critique as well as an aspect of renunciation. Khunu Lama apparently also enacted his chatralwa asceticism even in formal settings with important people, such as when giving blessings to the Queen Mother of Sikkim and her family and friends. Where some religious teachers might have done things for such aristocratic patrons in a very elaborate way, this was apparently not Khunu Lama’s approach. Tibetan and Himalayan religious figures often bestow ritually empowered items on disciples to wear or carry for blessing and protection. Especially common are knotted red threads or cords, often made specifically for this purpose, that recipients wear around their wrists or necks. But Khunu Lama did not give out the conventional red protection cords. Rather, visitors who wished to receive a protection cord from him would have to rip a length of fabric for themselves (potentially from some article of their own clothing) and then give it to him to bless and bestow. One of the Queen Mother of Sikkim’s daughters recalled that once her mother and the renowned female Buddhist master Khandro Tsering Chodron (1929–2011) were talking before visiting Khunu Lama in his room.36 “They discussed the poor quality of the protection cords Khunu Rinpoche gave out. When they went in to see Khunu Rinpoche, he said out of the blue, ‘You can afford nice protection cords! I am a chatralwa—I can’t afford better ones. You will have to rip [lengths of cloth] yourselves!’”37 Other former students of Khunu Lama also pointed to his refusal to acquire and distribute conventional protection cords as a mark of his renunciation. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok, a minister in the central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala who studied with Khunu Lama as a young man, recalled with humor, “If you went to seek a blessing from [Khunu Lama] he

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wouldn’t even have any thread to give you! Most of the time, if you offered him a katak [the traditional white silk greeting scarf ], he would just tear a piece off of that katak. Only for those who insist! . . . Then he would tear the katak, pull out some thread, bless it, and give that to you as a protection cord.”38 Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok further linked this refusal to participate in the conventional material exchanges of the lama-disciple or lamavisitor relationship with other things that he recalled Khunu Lama saying and doing at a rare public Dzogchen teaching that he gave in 1976, a year before he died. This teaching was one of the few times in Khunu Lama’s life when he is recorded as having given Buddhist teachings to a large group of people. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok particularly recalled that at this teaching, Khunu Lama refused to accept the money offerings that were made to him by the assembled disciples, offerings that are part of the standard ritual procedure at such gatherings. Instead of keeping the donated money, each day Khunu Lama would redistribute it back to the assembly of people attending the teachings. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok connected this attitude toward material donations with Khunu Lama’s broader renunciatory attitude toward the rituals that normally form part of tantric or Dzogchen transmissions: “So wherever there’s need of many ceremonies, there’s not much ceremony in him.” Chris Fynn, a British student of Khunu Lama, who also attended this 1976 Dzogchen teaching, recalled him in similar terms: “He just didn’t have anything to do with ritual at all . . . like that sort of traditional Tibetan big pujas and things. . . . I saw him go to a temple that people had nicely decorated and everything, and he said, “Take all that down because it has nothing to do with Buddhism. . . . You’re only putting up all this to show off.” Echoing the Sikkimese attendant Nagwang Rabgyas, Chris Fynn connected this attitude to what he described as Khunu Lama’s preference for simple people over wealthy patrons. “He was very, very simple, like . . . if big important people came to see him, he would just sort of say hello and goodbye, and if people like villagers came, he would sit them down and talk to them for hours. He was more interested in poor people, in talking to them.”39 Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok recalled that at one point during these same 1976 teachings, Khunu Lama spoke directly about his own renunciatory attitude to wealth. Notably, in Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s recollection, Khunu Lama commented that no one should negatively judge other lamas based on his own example of renunciation: He was saying that he was just one single individual Buddhist practitioner, so he was saying that because of his way of doing things, nobody

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should criticize other lamas, because they are able to do much more. Because when you are able to do much more, then for those things you need many more things. You know, you need assistants, you need secretaries, you need personal assistants, and also some money and an office and a living place. . . .”40

These comments—telling his students not to judge other lamas who might seem more involved in worldly activities than he, as a chatralwa, was— suggest a subtle critique of the potential entanglements involved in helming a large religious organization. At the same time, these comments also depict Khunu Lama as renouncing pride even in his own “accomplishments” as a chatralwa. Indeed, Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok also recalled Khunu Lama saying during these same teachings, “I have nobody, I am nobody, I want nothing.  .  .  . So don’t compare me with any other lamas.” Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok glossed this by saying of Khunu Lama, “Because all of the great lamas . . . they have so many great qualities at the same time, or the great karma to be able to do many things. Like the Dalai Lama of course. But for himself [Khunu Lama], he is saying that he is just one, by himself. So, because of being so, he doesn’t have all those things that other lamas have. Because he’s unable to do what others are able to do.”41 Here, Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok presents Khunu Lama’s chatralwa practice as a kind of consummate humility. He attributes to Khunu Lama an attitude toward renunciation that seems to echo the affective stance of the Kadampa Four Aims verse that Angrup uses in framing Khunu Lama’s departure from home in the namtar.42 In Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s description, Khunu Lama renounces not only the “eight worldly concerns,” but even attachment to the excellence of his own renunciation or to the idea that everyone should renounce like him. Related themes emerge in accounts of Khunu Lama’s other travels during the last years of his life. In 1974, a year and a half before the public teaching at which he made the above remarks, Khunu Lama and his female disciple and attendant, the Drikung Khandroma, traveled to the Kathmandu area in Nepal. They stayed in Nepal through the summer of 1975, with Khunu Lama sometimes giving teachings when requested by the various Tibetan Buddhist teachers and communities in the area, and sometimes visiting Buddhist pilgrimage sites and practicing meditation. Among the prominent lamas who invited Khunu Lama to teach while he was in Nepal was the late Sakya master Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, as well as Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, cofounder of the international Buddhist organization Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition

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(FPMT). In response to their requests, Khunu Lama taught Tibetan and Himalayan monastics, and also several groups of Westerners, who were part of a wave of European and North American Buddhist students exploring Tibetan Buddhism in the 1970s. The American nun and academic Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo recalled trying to meet Khunu Lama in Nepal when she was studying with Lama Zopa’s community as a young woman. Her comments echo many of the themes often connected to Khunu Lama’s renunciation: We heard rumors that a realized yogin named Khunu Lama Rinpoche was staying in Kathmandu. A number of people sneaked off and went into town to try to meet him, but were never able to find him. A few stalwart people tried to find him several times, but came up empty-handed. Stories circulated about how this lama had wandered throughout Tibet learning the Dharma from all the great masters before the Communist takeover. We heard that he wandered as a renunciant along the banks of the Ganges. When people discovered that he was a great yogin, they made offerings to him, including valuable things like silver and gold. He completely ignored these well-intended offerings, however, and just threw them under the bed.43

Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo and a companion did ultimately succeed in meeting Khunu Lama, however, and Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo credits him with inspiring her to study the Tibetan language. Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma spent the summer of 1975 with Chogye Trichen Rinpoche in Lumbini, the site in Nepal associated with the Buddha’s birth, which Chogye Trichen helped to restore as a pilgrimage site. David Jackson has compiled and summarized oral histories from several of Chogye Trichen’s attendants and students, describing Khunu Lama’s activities during this summer in Lumbini. Echoing themes seen in accounts from earlier periods of his life, Jackson’s sources describe Khunu Lama’s habits as intensely frugal, in ways that offer outward markers of his lack of concern with his own comfort. “He was very thin, hardly more than skin and bones. Every day he rose early and was served at about 5:00 a.m. by his attendant some thin gruel or soup, which lasted him all day until late in the evening.” In addition to such outer indicators of renunciation, Chogye Trichen’s attendants and students also recounted details to Jackson that offer glimpses of more inward aspects of Khunu Lama’s activities and suggest an entwining of his practices of renunciation, devotion, and meditation. According to these accounts, during the latter part of his stay in Lumbini,

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Khunu Lama spent most of his time each day in meditation, entering into states of meditative absorption that would sometimes abstract him from his surroundings for hours at a time: After breakfast he went out and paid his respects to the Buddha’s birthplace in the Mayadevi temple, making a small offering. Then he retired to the eastern or western porch of that temple. Sometimes he went to a spot to the side of the Ashoka pillar that was very quiet and where nobody could see him. There he remained in meditative concentration from early morning, sometimes without break, until about 7:30 or 8:00 p.m, when he walked back to his room. Other times he came back much sooner. The length of his meditative absorptions was unpredictable, as was its place of onset. Once when he went out into the adjoining rice fields to relieve himself, he entered a deep absorption for several hours.44

This rare image of Khunu Lama as a meditator who moves constantly in and out of states of meditative absorption resonates with a story recounted by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche about a conversation between Khunu Lama and the Sixteenth Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924–1981) from some ten years earlier. As Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche recalled it, Khunu Lama visited the Karmapa when the Karmapa was staying in Bodh Gaya at the Ashoka Hotel, probably sometime in the 1960s. The young Chokyi Nyima, barely out of his teens at that time, was serving as the Karmapa’s attendant and listened in as the two senior figures discussed their experiences with the stages and practices of Mahāmudrā meditation. (Mahāmudrā, or “Great Seal,” is a culminating system of meditation, important in the Geluk, Sakya, and Kagyu traditions, and particularly associated with the Kagyu, for whom it is understood as the pinnacle of Buddhist practice.)45 The Karmapa described his own experiences of meditative concentration and asked Khunu Lama’s advice. According to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, the Karmapa said that he could maintain his meditative awareness throughout his waking day, and could again recognize his awareness during sleep. But during the time just between the waking state and falling asleep, “between sleep and not-sleep,” there was a short period where he was not aware. The Karmapa asked Khunu Lama for advice on how to overcome the interruption of this “blank” period. According to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Khunu Lama did not have specific advice for the Karmapa about this, but was “overcome with joy” at hearing about the level of meditative practice the Karmapa had already achieved, expressing his reverence with folded hands. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche recalled that at the end of the conversation, when Khunu Lama was leaving, the Karmapa was likewise extremely

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reverent toward Khunu Lama, and subsequently said to Chokyi Nyima that Khunu Lama was “really extraordinary, the kind of practitioner one very rarely encounters.”46 Returning to Chogye Trichen’s students’ recollections of Khunu Lama meditating among the temples and rice fields of Lumbini, it is notable that their descriptions of him as a meditator also evoke some of the themes of departure and absence that we have already seen linked to his practice of renunciation. People recall Khunu Lama during his stay in Lumbini as hard to spot, meditating behind the Ashokan pillar or in a corner of the temple porch, or out in the rice fields. People also recall him threatening to leave if there were too many requests to teach: “Chogye Rinpoche . . . next asked Khunu Lama to teach Sachen’s Path with the Fruit Commentary Given for His Son (Lam’bras sras don ma). Khunu Lama replied ‘If you ask me to do a lot of things, I’m going to leave.’ Chogye Rinpoche promised this would be his last request. Khunu Lama then agreed and expounded that work for about one month.” Readers may hear in this exchange an echo of the episode described in chapter 2, when Khunu Lama abruptly leaves Bakula Rinpoche’s residence in Srinagar. As the Ladakhi scholar Tashi Rabgias recalled of that time, Khunu Lama remarked when leaving, “Yes, I am always escaping.” Khunu Lama’s British disciple Chris Fynn commented in a similar vein that while he was living with Khunu Lama at the end of the latter’s life, “He used to go all over the place. . . . He would get sort of, get up and go. . . . He would say to Drikung Khandro, ‘Oh today we’re going somewhere,’ you know, just like that. Nobody . . . would have planned or anything.”47 A further example of how hiddenness and meditation often appear linked in accounts of Khunu Lama’s chatralwa style of practice comes up in stories about his practice of having someone lock him inside his room from the outside while he was meditating, perhaps so that he would appear not to be home. Namgyal Taklha recalled going to meet Khunu Lama for the first time in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling, in the early 1960s. Together with her grandmother and a great aunt who was a nun, they visited the family home of another nun. There, Mrs. Taklha recalled, “We went up a narrow stairway, I think on the third floor. . . . There was a room which was locked, so [the nun they were visiting] took the key, opened the lock, and I was quite surprised. There was a tiny little room, and there was this lama in a maroon robe . . . sitting there [this lama of course being Khunu Lama].”48 A Western nun who met Khunu Lama in Nepal in 1974 similarly described him as staying on the upper floor of a “leaky mud brick hut,” with the door to his room “locked from outside with an enormous padlock.”49 Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche explained this practice

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of being locked in as a practical one, “so that [Khunu Lama] could do his practice undisturbed.”50 Nevertheless, many people recalled this practice as striking. As Mrs. Taklha put it, “I was so surprised to have somebody open the door and see him there, locked in.”51 Chogye Trichen Rinpoche’s students further recall that during Khunu Lama’s visit to Lumbini, people observed him sharing his meditation space with potentially lethal snakes: “Khunu Lama went the Mayadevi temple to meditate every morning the whole summer, rain or shine. That year the monsoon became torrential at times, flooding many parts of Lumbini. . . . The spots he had chosen for his meditation near the eastern or western sides of the Mayadevi temple also flooded occasionally, but Khunu Lama remained where he was, sitting in water. The snakes also became plentiful, emerging above ground as their subterranean lairs flooded. He took no notice of them, nor they of  him.”52

Khunu Lama’s tolerance of snakes in this account suggests a marked lack of concern with personal comfort and safety. In addition, this story of meditation with snakes also evokes associations with other stories of enlightened figures and their peaceable interactions with dangerous animals. Meditation with snakes moreover echoes a frequently depicted episode in the life of the Buddha Śākyamuni: after his enlightenment, he is protected from rain while he sits in meditation by the giant king of the nāgas in the form of a cobra, who spreads out his hood over the Buddha to shield him. Like the story of Khunu Lama’s apparent clairvoyance regarding complaints about his lack of protection cords, the Lumbini snake story implies that some narrators link Khunu Lama’s ascetic and meditative practices to his possession of advanced yogic abilities, although many narrators also emphasized that an aspect of Khunu Lama’s renunciant practice of selfconcealment included concealing any such abilities. Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma ended their stay in Nepal in late 1975 or early 1976. After returning to India, they traveled to Tso Pema (Rewalsar), an important north Indian pilgrimage site for Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists, where Khunu Lama gave the above-mentioned 1976 Dzogchen teaching attended by Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok, Chris Fynn, and many others. After this, Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma, accompanied by Chris Fynn and a small group of Khunu Lama’s Kinnauri nun disciples, journeyed a short distance north to Manali, in present-day Himachal Pradesh. There, in the Himalayan foothills, near the roads leading to his birthplace in Kinnaur, Khunu Lama gave teachings for a month

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on Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament of Liberation (Dam chos yid bzhin gyi nor bu thar pa rin po che′i rgyan) and the meditational system of Mahāmudrā, from the perspective of the Kagyu tradition. He gave these teachings at the retreat community of Apho Rinpoche, grandson of the famous nineteenthcentury yogin Togden Shakya Shri, whose family lineage we encountered in chapter 1, and whose student Sonam Gyaltsen had taught Khunu Lama during his youth in Kinnaur. Chris Fynn recalled this teaching to Apho Rinpoche’s community as yet another instance when Khunu Lama dispensed with the ritual of receiving offerings: “After he taught at Apho Rinpoche’s, for I don’t know, two or three months, they made a mandala offering to him and . . . tried to give him something, and he just threw the money on the floor and said, ‘I don’t want any money, just practice.’”53 Sey Rinpoche (Sey Rinpoche Gelek Namgyal, Togden Shakya Shri’s great grandson and Apho Rinpoche’s son) commented that Khunu Lama gave these teachings in Manali during his “last moments,” in the final year of his life.54 Indeed, in Chris Fynn’s recollection, Khunu Lama was already ill when he, with the Drikung Khandroma and four of his Kinnauri nun disciples, left Manali at the conclusion of the teachings to Apho Rinpoche’s community. Despite his illness, however, Khunu Lama and his disciples traveled up into the mountains, to the Himalayan valley of Lahaul. There, Khunu Lama spent the final months of his life teaching at several monasteries. He died in 1977 at Shashur Monastery, above the village of Keylong, the home of K. Angrup, his main namtar author.

“An Indian lama who could speak Tibetan ” Having sampled these accounts of Khunu Lama’s renunciation from across the arc of what I have called his “renunciatory biography,” I turn now to the second dynamic I want to discuss: namely, the numerous narrators, particularly Tibetan and Western students, who associate Khunu Lama with India, in part because of his cultural origins in the Indo-Tibetan border region of Kinnaur, and in part because of choices he made later in life having to do with self-presentation, residence, dress, and intellectual interests. I argue that this (imagined or actual) link to India plays an important role in how people who remember him construe his practice of renunciation and his renunciatory self-concealment. Khunu Lama’s Tibetan students in particular often commented specifically on his choice to live for long periods of his later life in non-Buddhist Indian religious spaces, Varanasi foremost among them. Varanasi is a central place of Hindu pilgrimage to the river Ganges. As one Tibetan former student of Khunu Lama put it, “Varanasi is a Hindu sadhu [religious

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renunciant] place.”55 Moreover, not only did Khunu Lama choose to live in Varanasi, he lived in Tekra Math, the “Hindu ashram” mentioned earlier, a highly unusual residence for a mid-twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhist master. Many Tibetan narrators connected Khunu Lama’s living there with other things that they identified as markers of his “Indian” identity. These included his ability to speak Hindi, his knowledge of Sanskrit, and his “Indian”-seeming Kinnauri appearance, as well as his interactions with sadhus and other Indian religious figures, and his extensive travels through India.56 As we saw in chapter 1, several of these attributes—particularly Khunu Lama’s non-Tibetan appearance and origins in Kinnaur in the Indian Himalaya—had already influenced how people viewed him when he lived in Tibet decades earlier. In the early 1920s, for instance, the Nyingma exegete Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso Rinpoche apparently referred to Khunu Lama as the “gyagar lama” (rgya gar bla ma, “the Indian lama,”) when they first met. This nickname seems to have followed Khunu Lama throughout his subsequent travels in Kham, marking him as at once Tibetanized and foreign, admirably expert in Indic knowledge systems but also a partial cultural outsider in Tibet.57 Many times this “Indic outsider” status worked to Khunu Lama’s advantage, most importantly, as chapter 1 describes, when the retired Khenpo Zhenga transmitted to him the Thirteen Great Texts because he had traveled so far from home seeking Buddhist knowledge. At the same time, Khunu Lama’s perceived “Indianness” and foreignness occasionally drew less positive attention. For example, Jackson notes that, during the same period when Khunu Lama was living in Kham, an eastern Tibetan master who was a teacher of the influential Sakya scholar Dezhung Rinpoche (1906–1987), apparently referred to Khunu Lama as an “atsara,” when trying to discourage the young Dezhung Rinpoche from studying Sanskrit with him. As noted in chapter 2, in this context atsara seems to have connoted something derogatory, like “Indian beggar.” According to Jackson, the term atsara here conveyed criticism of Khunu Lama’s apparent foreignness and of his wandering-mendicant lifestyle and appearance. In this episode, we see a potential downside of Khunu Lama’s renunciant Indic persona, which could make him seem disreputable and alien.58 Nevertheless, many stories about the ways Khunu Lama transcended Indo-Tibetan cultural boundaries have an admiring tone. One kind of detail that emerges in such stories relates to Khunu Lama’s travels in India, as well as to his physical appearance. According to tales he told his students, Khunu Lama journeyed with non-Buddhist Indian companions to visit pilgrimage sites throughout the subcontinent, from Benares to South India. Tulku Thondup Rinpoche recalled that there were stories that told how

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Khunu Lama “wandered with Hindu yogins.”59 Other narrators, echoing the theme of Khunu Lama’s preference for the company of poor people, described him as often traveling with poor Indian laborers.60 In this context, it is notable that even some of Khunu Lama’s physical postures struck at least one person who knew him in the 1960s as distinctively Indic: “Khunu Lama would fold up, fold his legs up to his chin, like a yoga pose, and stay like that for a long time.”61 Other accounts also connect Khunu Lama’s physical postures to yoga, which itself connotes a connection to India. For instance, Manshardt’s sources say that Khunu Lama spent a year in Mumbai (Bombay), and that there, in addition to studying Sanskrit, he spent time studying hatha yoga, an unusual project for a Tibetan Buddhist scholar. Students from later in Khunu Lama’s life likewise mention glimpsing him in physical postures that they assumed were part of his hatha yoga practice—a fact they found astonishing.62 Tibetan students and patrons who knew him in India specifically commented on Khunu Lama’s clothing choices as well, observing that while living in Varanasi and traveling in India, he often dressed in the yellow clothes of an Indian sadhu, although he adopted a Tibetan-style red chuba (robe) in his final years.63 This periodic adoption of the outward appearance of an Indian renunciant rather than a Tibetan one apparently made him seem to be, in the words of the Dalai Lama as quoted by Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, “an Indian yogin who could speak Tibetan.”64 Some who knew Khunu Lama in India, such as Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, specifically described him as resembling “an emaciated Mahātmā Gandhi.”65 Namgyal Taklha recalled that when she met Khunu Lama in Bodh Gaya, he was a “very simple, sort of Gandhi-looking lama.”66 Comparisons to Gandhi hint at a saintliness and asceticism shared by the two men, evident in their physical thinness and plain, unadorned clothing, and perhaps also in their public associations with compassion and personal renunciation. At the same time, since Gandhi’s fame made him one of the most recognizable Indian figures of the time, comparisons to Gandhi may be another way of saying that Khunu Lama looked like a distinctively “Indian” kind of renunciant. Moreover, Gandhi’s role in the Indian Independence movement made him a figure of interest to Tibetans in India after 1959, adding another dimension to this comparison. Khunu Lama himself seems to have admired Gandhi. Manshardt reports that when Khunu Lama received the news of Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, he was grief-stricken and fasted for a whole day in remembrance.67 As we have seen, self-concealment of various kinds emerges in these narratives as part of Khunu Lama’s withdrawal from social entanglements. Elaborating on this theme of self-concealment, key interpreters of Khunu

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Lama’s remembered life story, such as Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, suggest that his sadhu-style clothing, like his residence in Tekra Math ashram, functioned as a distinctive extension of his renunciatory attitude, a relinquishment of the physical trappings of Tibetan Buddhist socio-religious culture that so extensively shaped him during his earlier life in Tibet. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche glossed Khunu Lama’s embrace of an Indian appearance and place of residence as part of Khunu Lama’s practice as a “hidden yogin” (sbas pa’i rnal ‘byor pa). According to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Khunu Lama “often disappeared [in India]—he would hide in Hindu ashrams and wear Hindu dress, so that he could be left alone to do his practice.”68 Similarly, Doboom Tulku said that Khunu Lama “went to Benares [Varanasi] to the ghats [by the river Ganges] because elsewhere there were so many visitors.”69 This self-concealment seems to have worked. Students often commented on how difficult Khunu Lama was to find. Chogye Trichen Rinpoche recalled that when the Dalai Lama asked him to deliver an invitation to Khunu Lama in Varanasi in 1965 (when the Dalai Lama told him to find “an Indian yogin who could speak Tibetan”), he could not locate Khunu Lama at first, and had to make two trips to Varanasi in order to contact him.70 Stories like this suggest that by dispensing with many outward markers of his identity as a Tibet-trained Buddhist scholar, Khunu Lama succeeded in gaining the freedom of near anonymity. Yet these stories also suggest that students sometimes struggled when they tried to find him. From this point of view, Khunu Lama’s self-concealment via dress, travel, or choice of residence seems strategically intended to subvert the built-in paradox of renunciation as articulated in the Tibetan namtar tradition: namely, that renunciation itself can make you famous.71 By dislocating himself somewhat from the Tibetan community where his choices and activities might be most legible, by making himself sometimes almost illegible to both Tibetan and Indian audiences in terms of his neither-Tibetannor-Indian cultural presence, Khunu Lama troubled the smooth surface of lineage memory, resisting the development of a “conventional” Tibetan Buddhist renunciant persona.72

“I am a Buddhist”: Sanskrit, Literary Science, and Non- Sectarianism The Indic inflections of Khunu Lama’s renunciatory practice also emerge in the context of his lifelong engagement with Indian scholarly traditions and his knowledge of Indian languages. In their written accounts, K. Angrup, Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche and Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche all emphasize

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Khunu Lama’s mastery not only of Indian and Tibetan philosophical texts but also of the Indian and Tibetan “fields of knowledge,” or riknè (rig gnas) more broadly, especially the fields of knowledge connected to literature, grammar, and poetics—and Sanskrit in particular.73 Oral narrators likewise consistently mention Khunu Lama’s literary erudition, often, though not always, in tandem with describing his Buddhist mastery. Khunu Lama’s knowledge of Sanskrit and of Indian literature and philosophical systems seems to have enabled him to engage with non-Buddhist Indian people, places, and intellectual worlds in a way that significantly contributed to his non-sectarian approach to Buddhism. Khunu Lama’s non-sectarianism was unusual, however, in that he not only took an ecumenical approach to sectarian differences between Tibetan Buddhist lineages, but also sought out extensive interactions with members of non-Buddhist religious communities in India. In this sense, Khunu Lama’s knowledge of Indian ideas and languages enabled him to practice a distinctive kind of non-sectarian, inter-religious engagement, which seems to have functioned in part as a rejection of a hermetically sealed location within one religious community. I suggest that this rejection of a sectarian position itself can be seen as a kind of renunciation (as well as also relating to his identity as a person from a Himalayan region bordering both India and Tibet). Languages and Khunu Lama’s skill with them play a recurring role in stories about him. His knowledge of Hindi and Sanskrit as well as Tibetan seems to have highlighted his perceived Indo-Tibetan cross-cultural competence, at least as far as Tibetans, and sometimes Westerners, were concerned. His language skills, together with his appearance, clothing, and other cultural markers, helped him to appear both as “an Indian yogin who could speak Tibetan” and, conversely, as an unusual kind of Tibetan Buddhist who was a Hindi speaker and Sanskrit expert.74 In particular, for Tibetans who arrived in India as refugees after 1959, Khunu Lama’s language skills apparently made him useful in a practical sense, and perhaps also made him a reassuring presence, someone who bridged differences between Tibetan and Indian contexts. On at least one occasion, in 1960, Khunu Lama in fact literally served as a translator. The Dalai Lama and a small group of Tibetan Buddhist leaders visited Varanasi Sanskrit University, and Khunu Lama was tasked with translating between Hindi and Tibetan for the Tibetan group and the university staff with whom they met.75 Khunu Lama’s study of Sanskrit in particular emerges in stories about him as a kind of connective tissue, in both pragmatic and narrative terms. Sanskrit (and literary studies more generally) linked Khunu Lama with Indian intellectual and religious knowledge systems, and with other people who engaged with those systems. Practically speaking, his Sanskrit liter-

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ary expertise allowed Khunu Lama to establish relationships with Tibetan, Indian, and Himalayan scholars and intellectuals across a wide swath of the Indo-Tibetan region. As we have seen, in many cases, this expertise materially facilitated his travel and entrée into a variety of social settings. Together with his study of Tibetan grammar and poetics, Khunu Lama’s Sanskrit knowledge opened doors for him, led him to significant teaching positions, and brought him to the attention of major patrons at multiple phases of his life. It was Khunu Lama’s Sanskrit and Tibetan literary knowledge that first gave him a degree of renown in Tibet as a young man, especially among central and eastern Tibetan religious and intellectual elites. For instance, when he met Khenpo Zhenga and other luminaries in Kham, or when he was invited to teach the royal family in Dergé, his Sanskrit mastery was a key credential. Many sources document how Khunu Lama would often be asked to teach Sanskrit in the places where he had himself traveled to receive Buddhist teachings. Later in India, Sanskrit studies introduced Khunu Lama to his classmate Reverend Gangagire and thus led him to live at Tekra Math, the Varanasi ashram. Even Khunu Lama’s meetings with the Dalai Lama many years later in India ultimately turn out to derive from his early, elite literary connections in Tibet, via a chain of literature-related teacher-student relationships that intersect with his Buddhist lineage connections.76 Moreover, Khunu Lama’s knowledge of and interest in Sanskrit literature and Indic philosophical systems made it possible for him to engage non-Buddhist Indian religious practitioners, including apparently both Hindus and Jains, in a kind of inter-religious encounter far outside the sectarian debates more familiar to most Tibetan scholars of his period. Many people who knew Khunu Lama (including Himalayan, Tibetan, and Western students) specifically described him as actively engaged in philosophical dialogue with Hindu ascetics and scholars in India throughout the second half of his life. Doboom Tulku Rinpoche, for instance, explained that “Khunu Rinpoche knew Hindu topics” and moreover that “he went to their lectures.”77 Manshardt adds that, according to his sources, Khunu Lama studied Jainism in conjunction with his studies of yoga in the 1940s.78 Narrators do sometimes describe Khunu Lama as arguing for the superiority of Buddhism in his encounters with non-Buddhist Indian scholars.79 Angrup reports in the namtar, “While [Khunu Lama] was living in Varanasi, he stayed by the River Ganges, [where] he completely tamed the mental faculties of all those who criticized each [Buddhist] scripture.”80 Even where students describe these episodes as dialogic, they often recall how Khunu Lama shone. According to Chris Fynn, for instance, “Once in Manali, when he was staying at the Tibetan monastery in the bazaar

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there, three Indian Brahmins from Benares [Varanasi] came to him, and they were discussing things written in Sanskrit for about two and a half days, [including the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (Skt. anātman) and the after-death bardo state (bar do; Skt. antarābhava), speaking mainly in Sanskrit], and he was quoting Hindu scriptures to them. He was saying, this is in this Upaniṣad, and this is in that Upaniṣad. And at the end they just put Rinpoche’s feet on their heads.”81 What is striking about these accounts is not so much whether or not Khunu Lama is said to have shown the superiority of Buddhism, but the fact that he had such interactions with Indian non-Buddhists in the first place. While classical Buddhist literature in both Sanskrit and Tibetan is filled with (often triumphal) stories of Buddhists debating philosophers from other Indian schools, for many early twentieth-century Tibetan religious intellectuals, such exchanges had for centuries existed only as a literary trope. The twentieth-century Tibetan diaspora brought many Tibetan religious scholars into renewed contact with living Indian cultures. Khunu Lama, like his contemporary and sometime Sanskrit classmate Gendun Chopel, was one of a small, early group of Tibet-trained scholars who engaged directly with Indic intellectual traditions that were not explicitly Buddhist. Perhaps most importantly, according to the recollections of his former students Khunu Lama’s Sanskrit mastery and Indic literary knowledge enriched his non-sectarian approach to Buddhism. As we have seen, Tibetan thinkers like Khenpo Zhenga had mobilized classical Indian texts as resources for projects they framed as non-sectarian. Khenpo Zhenga, for instance, presented his own work as drawing on Indian Buddhist sources to access a shared inheritance transcending Tibetan sectarian disputes. Many people remember Khunu Lama’s teaching activities as reflecting a parallel intersection of non-sectarian views with Sanskrit and Tibetan literary study. The Ladakhi literary scholar Tashi Rabgias, for instance, recalled that in Srinagar in 1956, when he studied with Khunu Lama, they had focused on the most influential Indian text on poetics in Tibetan, the Mirror of Poetics (Snyan ngag me long). This text is the Tibetan translation of the Kāvyādarśa, a Sanskrit work on poetics by the Indian literary luminary Daṇḍin (7th– 8th centuries), which remains the primary treatise on poetics in the Tibetan literary world.82 Tashi Rabgias remembered that Khunu Lama did not use a commentary in their work together; instead, he had Tashi Rabgias work through the Sanskrit examples directly. Khunu Lama would periodically pause a lesson to comment on the word choices used by Tibetan translators many centuries before, sometimes saying, “Had the Lotsawa [trans-

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lator] used this word, it would have been better.” As Tashi Rabgias put it, describing his own surprise, “I had never heard such things before!” 83 His implication here, echoed by other former students and Tibetan scholars, is that Khunu Lama’s mastery of the Sanskrit and Tibetan literary sources enabled him to confidently, and sometimes critically, discern the translation history of key texts and therefore to engage independently with multiple interpretations, outside of any specific received wisdom or sectarian interpretation.84 This grounding in both Indic and Tibetan sources is remembered as playing a role in the ecumenical way Khunu Lama later taught in the 1960s and 1970s. Many people with whom I spoke repeatedly emphasized Khunu Lama’s ability to teach Buddhism in a “non-sectarian” way (sometimes using the English term non-sectarian and sometimes using the Tibetan term rimè). People describing the “non-sectarian” aspects of Khunu Lama’s teaching explained that he would teach a particular philosophical or meditational topic from multiple Tibetan lineage philosophical perspectives, one after the other, so that audiences from each of the Tibetan lineage traditions would hear a presentation framed according to the terms of their own tradition.85 They attributed this ability to his knowledge of both Indian and Tibetan source texts and philosophical systems. For example, Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, reflecting on Khunu Lama’s teachings to him, as well as to Khenpo Palden Sherab and a group of other young lamas in Darjeeling over the course of about nine months in the late 1960s, commented that Khunu Lama would give a kind of “textual explanation” of the texts he had been asked to teach, but in a particular way. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche said that Khunu Lama’s teaching was pecha tri (dpe cha ‘khrid; “textual explanation”) “but not really pecha tri. He wouldn’t look at the text. You know, he knew it by heart. But he would comment very simply . . . just giving points according to which drubta (grub mtha’; “philosophical system”) would explain it like this, according to the Nyingmapa, Kagyu, Sakya, Geluk. But he will never say that this [sect’s philosophical system] is better or not.”86 In fact, according to the Drikung abbot Lho Ontul Rinpoche, “No one knew which tradition he belonged to, because he was a master of all traditions.”87 The Nyingma scholar-yogin Khenpo Sonam Topgyal recalled Khunu Lama’s teaching style in related terms, commenting that, “whatever the student needed, he taught each person according to their own system.”88 Similarly, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche reflected, “There is one master that I have met personally, Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen, and nobody ever knew, even when he passed away, exactly what lineage to which he belonged. Kagyu masters received Kagyu teachings from him and

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they thought he was a Kagyu teacher; Geluk followers thought he was a Gelukpa; Sakyas thought he was a Sakyapa; and Nyingmas thought he was a Nyingmapa. I personally received many instructions from him, but he never let out which was his preference. He touched my heart deeply; he opened my heart to being non-sectarian.”89 Certain narrators even remember some of Khunu Lama’s non-teaching practices as non-sectarian. For example, Pema Wangyal Rinpoche recalled how Khunu Lama would give away the donations made to him by students in Bodh Gaya. In Pema Wangyal Rinpoche’s description, “Whenever people would offer him money, he would put the money offerings in a plastic bag, . . . and once in a while, whatever he had collected, a few thousand, he would send to Drepung, Sera, Ganden, Tashilhunpo [the four major Gelukpa monasteries].  .  .  . He used to send it by money order.” Notably, Pema Wangyal Rinpoche here remembers Khunu Lama not only as a renunciant who “never used to keep anything as a private or personal thing, as belongings,” but also as a person who made regular offerings to the four major Gelukpa monasteries reconstituted in India, even while he himself was closely connected to Kagyu, Nyingma, and Sakya lineages via his personal family background and through many of his own transmissions and practices.90 This does not mean that narrators do not also frame stories about Khunu Lama’s activities in accordance with their own sectarian affiliations. Angrup makes an intriguing comment in the namtar regarding Khunu Lama’s temporary stay as a young man in the Gelukpa monastery of Tashilhunpo in west-central Tibet, around 1918. Angrup, himself a Drukpa Kagyu practitioner, states, “Privately, Je Lama Rinpoche [Khunu Lama] had taken up the mantle of the Kagyu Buddhist tradition, but he temporarily entered into the Tashilhunpo Gelukpa monks’ assembly and residence and stayed there.”91 Here, Angrup notes Khunu Lama’s ritual entry into the monastic assembly at a famous Geluk institution, but frames it for the reader as a public gesture, required for his studies and residence at Tashilhunpo. Relatedly, a number of former students speculated that Khunu Lama’s underlying sectarian affiliation was to their own tradition, whatever that was, a dynamic that seems to reinforce both the notion of Khunu Lama’s flexibility as a teacher, and the potentially contested process of memorializing individuals as holding specific lineage affiliations. Indeed, in sectarian terms, Khunu Lama seems to have been first and foremost difficult to categorize, and there are hints that he may even have cultivated that quality. Throughout the various, sometimes competing, accounts of his life, people describe him as evading standard Tibetan sectarian designations in his knowledge, lineage connections, and style of teaching (offering a kind of parallel to the ways his visual self-presentation

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bridged Tibetan and Indian modes of dress and behavior). Several people recalled in this context that Khunu Lama himself explicitly refused to claim a specific Tibetan sectarian identity. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, among others, recalled that “Khunu Rinpoche used to say, when people asked him ‘What is your lineage?’ . . . “I am a nang pa [the Tibetan term for “Buddhist,” lit. “insider”].” This is arguably the most ecumenical way possible to answer a question about sectarian affiliation, an answer that points toward the shared Indian origins of Buddhism as an antidote to sectarianism.92 Khunu Lama’s statement that he is a “Buddhist,” and thus, by implication, someone who transcends, or perhaps more accurately, encompasses, the spectrum of Tibetan sectarian lineage distinctions, is echoed in another ecumenical strand in student recollections of him. This is Khunu Lama’s emphasis on the figure of Śākyamuni Buddha himself, the Indian source of Buddhism. Chris Fynn for instance recalled, “If he told people to visualize something, he told them to visualize Śākyamuni Buddha.” Similarly, many people commented that if someone asked Khunu Lama to suggest a Buddhist practice, he would often recommend recitation of the mantra of Śākyamuni. Yet despite the apparently non-sectarian nature of Khunu Lama’s teaching and other activities, and the non-sectarian connotations of describing his own lineage as “Buddhist” or emphasizing the founding figure of Śākyamuni, I have never come across any references to Khunu Lama personally using the Tibetan term rimè to describe himself. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche explained that Khunu Lama’s avoidance of the term rimè made sense, since, “The trouble is, people who say, ‘I am rimè,’ they are the most sectarian.”93 In a related vein, when I asked the scholar, translator, and Dzogchen teacher Tulku Thondup if Khunu Lama was a rimè figure, Tulku Thondup replied, “He’s beyond these boundaries and labeling.”94 Arguably this uncategorizability is itself the most ecumenical stance of all, a subtle further iteration of what is remembered as Khunu Lama’s renunciatory attitude.

“Khunu Lama hid ” Perhaps paradoxically, Khunu Lama’s literary scholarship is, however, also described as having contributed to his renunciation in another way: for some audiences, his literary scholarship itself turns out to have concealed him from view, obscuring his identity as a Buddhist master. According to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, this concealment via literary study was in fact at least partially intentional, and can be understood as a further element of Khunu Lama’s renunciant practice of being a “hidden yogin.”

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From one perspective, of course, Khunu Lama’s literary interests seem to have opened doors for him and garnered him widespread admiration, the very opposite of enabling a practice of hiddenness. Yet for certain Tibetan Buddhist audiences, Khunu Lama’s literary erudition sometimes had the opposite effect. For these audiences, far from being a straightforward indicator of Buddhist excellence or well-roundedness, Khunu Lama’s literary knowledge made him appear to be “merely” a literature scholar, concealing his identity as a “real” Buddhist teacher. In this sense, there turns out to be an additional link between his literary erudition, his Indic connections, and his renunciation. A paradigmatic example of these dynamics emerges in narratives describing Khunu Lama’s time teaching Tibetan scholars in 1965 at the teacher-training program set up by the Dalai Lama in Mussoorie. There, Khunu Lama’s students were themselves leading scholars, monastic abbots, and geshes (holders of the highest monastic degree in the Gelukpa monastic system), who were being prepared to become teachers in the newly established refugee Tibetan educational institutions in India. At the Mussoorie teacher-training program, Khunu Lama was asked to teach literary topics, including Tibetan grammar and poetics. Many people who attended the training program, as well as the Dalai Lama himself, who visited several times, recall that a number of program participants who were initially unenthusiastic about learning from Khunu Lama specifically were put off by the fact that he was a literary scholar.95 For instance, according to the historian Rakra Rinpoche, there were some geshes who “didn’t regard grammar highly”: “The geshes didn’t think that Khunu Lama knew anything besides grammar and poetry; they didn’t think he knew the major Buddhist texts like the tantras and the Middle Way [Skt. Madhyamaka; Tib. dbu ma] philosophy.”96 Here, according to Rakra Rinpoche, Khunu Lama’s knowledge of grammar and poetry made him look less like a Buddhist teacher rather than more. Of course, as Doboom Tulku, Rakra Rinpoche, and others have described, after hearing Khunu Lama teach, these same program participants in Mussoorie realized the extent of Khunu Lama’s Buddhist understanding and began to respect him. “When offering an in-depth explanation, it is said that he [Khunu Lama] really goes very deep. Some geshes were astonished.”97 Ringu Tulku Rinpoche described this shift in attitude toward Khunu Lama with some amusement, saying that at the Mussoorie Lama School, Khunu Lama “just taught sumjupa [sum ju pa, the Tibetan mnemonic for the thirty consonants and vowels of the Tibetan syllabary, the basic building block of Tibetan literacy]. But he taught in such a way, that

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he taught the whole three yanas [the three vehicles of the Buddhist path]! And after he taught his sumjupa, everybody took him as their root guru.”98 It was of course this image of Khunu Lama at the Mussoorie teacher training, winning over the doubtful scholars with his erudition, that inspired the Dalai Lama to compare Khunu Lama to “Dromtonpa in layman’s robes teaching the Kadampa masters” (see chapter 2). The Dalai Lama’s reverence for Khunu Lama also awed people at the school. Rakra Rinpoche noted that several of the geshes whom he knew described how overcome they were when the Dalai Lama visited the school and demonstrated his respect for Khunu Lama: “It is said that the Dalai Lama suddenly came to the classroom and held Khunu Lama Rinpoche’s hand. ‘Good Lord ( jo bo rin po) I was scared!’ said one geshe.”99 Like His Holiness’s prostration to Khunu Lama in the street in Sarnath, the Dalai Lama’s show of respect for him in Mussoorie seems to have offered participants in the school a kind of gloss of Khunu Lama’s “true” Buddhist identity, which was hidden by his outward presentation as a literary scholar. In order to appreciate how Khunu Lama’s literary scholarship could have even temporarily concealed his Buddhist mastery for audiences like the students at the Mussoorie teacher-training program, it helps to have a sense of the range of conceptual locations for literary studies and Sanskrit in mid-twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhist intellectual life, conceptual locations that differed in part depending on institutional setting and lineage context. In the three great Lhasa-area Geluk monastic universities of Sera, Ganden, and Drepung, as well as Tashilhunpo, where Khunu Lama studied as a young man, the kind of learning that was paramount was a form of scholastic philosophical analysis grounded in knowledge of selected canonical Buddhist texts and commentaries, honed through formal debate. This model of the “debating institution,” or tsodra (rtsod grwa), continues to predominate in the major Geluk monastic universities. Its academic rigor has great intellectual cachet, such that aspiring students from a broad range of Tibetan lineages come to study in Gelukpa institutions, in addition to studying at their “home” monasteries. Top students following the Geluk curriculum leading to the degree of geshe traditionally memorize a large collection of texts and use debate to test and refine their understanding. Scholars emerge from this training as skilled logicians and incisive analytic thinkers, with often dazzling mental access to virtual libraries of canonical texts and commentaries that they have memorized. The twentieth-century polymath and iconoclast Gendun Chophel was a notably gifted, if highly unconventional, graduate of this system. However, scholars within this system historically have had limited formal training in literary composition.100

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By contrast, the “commentarial institution,” or shedra (bshad grwa), model, of which Khenpo Zhenga was such a strong proponent, predominates in Nyingma, Kagyu, and Sakya settings.101 This shedra model takes a somewhat different approach, incorporating a larger role for composition and the literary sciences in the context of studying Buddhist philosophy. In part because of the emphasis that shedra institutions place on Indic source texts (albeit in Tibetan summary or translation) rather than the Tibetanauthored textbooks of the Geluk monastic curriculum, Sanskrit literary knowledge and literary study in general can have a more transparent correlation to the Buddhist topics that shedra students study.102 An additional factor helping to explain the apparent dismissal of literary study on the part of some scholars that Khunu Lama encountered is the historic link between certain kinds of literary expertise and pressure to serve in Tibetan governmental and monastic administration. From a certain Buddhist perspective, governmental and administrative roles can ensnare a person in worldly busyness, distractions, and preoccupation with fame, as well as the morally ambiguous world of politics.103 Indeed, the swiftness with which the young Khunu Lama was snapped up by the Ninth Panchen Lama’s civil-service school hints at the desire of such schools for highly literate scholars and perhaps also suggests the difficulty of saying no to such invitations. A focus on Buddhist philosophical topics rather than literary expertise could serve as a technique for avoiding a governmental appointment and thus could offer monks a way to reserve their time for concentrated Buddhist study and practice. Thus, despite the literary fame of founding figures from all the Tibetan Buddhist lineages, many of whom were prolific writers across many genres, for many twentieth-century scholars, study of literary topics, poetry, Sanskrit, grammar, and composition were often seen as trapping a man in politics or administration, or leading to distraction from the “real” knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, ritual, and meditative practice. Nevertheless, as the literary scholar, philosopher, and translator Thubten Jinpa has noted, some of the most prominent twentieth-century public figures, including people with leading official roles, such as both the Junior and Senior Tutors of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, shared a lifelong interest in literature and poetics, and they were by no means alone in this. In fact, as Jinpa points out, a love of poetry and an interest in literature could function as sources of shared interest that connected people even across great differences of age or status. As we have already seen, such connections were important for Khunu Lama throughout his life.104 There is thus no hard and fast sectarian or career distinction between those monastic or lay Buddhists for whom literary study is an essential part

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of being a cultivated person and knowledgeable Mahāyāna practitioner, and those for whom all topics except Buddhist “inner science” are a potential distraction. Even a glance at the list of students who studied literary topics with Khunu Lama makes clear that interest in Sanskrit and Tibetan literary topics consistently transcends sectarian lineage affiliation and public role.105 Senior monastic leaders and officials, and influential aristocratic lay people were often devoted to literary study, and many of them became Khunu Lama’s students during the years when he lived in Lhasa. Yet narratives of Khunu Lama’s role as a teacher, especially in the last decades of his life in India, are marked by an ambivalence about the interplay between his literary knowledge and his Buddhist teaching. There are a number of instances, even after his Mussoorie teaching ended, where his literary erudition is remembered as concealing his Buddhist mastery, for students from many different lineage backgrounds and kinds of roles. His teaching at the Mussoorie program had introduced him to a number of students, but he remained relatively little-known as a Buddhist teacher for several more years. Even after the Dalai Lama publicly honored him in various settings, and students began to seek him out, many of the Tibetan and Himalayan students who found him specifically requested literary teachings, rather than Buddhist ones. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche remembered Khunu Lama himself describing this dynamic as a kind of misrecognition: “What he [Khunu Lama] . . . used to say was, ‘I wonder why people are asking me always . . . [to teach] poetry. And, of course, it’s really great to learn poetry and grammar, but my real subject, my main practice, is really Mahāmudrā and Great Perfection [Dzogchen].’” In Pema Wangyal Rinpoche’s recollection, Khunu Lama lamented the fact that students failed to ask him for the most advanced Buddhist transmissions he was capable of bestowing, and instead focused on literary teachings that, while valuable in themselves, did not have the same soteriological impact. Other former students remember this dynamic as itself the result of deliberate self-concealment on Khunu Lama’s part, a further form of his chatralwa renunciation of fame and reputation that used the comparatively secondary status of literary knowledge (at least compared to explicitly Buddhist topics) as a kind of disguise, paralleling his apparent selfconcealment in the clothes of a mendicant, or of an Indian sadhu, within a Hindu ashram. In Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s view, for instance, Khunu Lama’s public persona as a scholar of Sanskrit and literary topics functioned as part of his practice of relinquishing fame, here specifically the fame that the label “Buddhist master” might have brought.106 According to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, the reason Khunu Lama did not give Buddhist

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transmissions more widely was “because there were not enough requests. Tibetans thought of him only as an expert in Sanskrit and literature. This was because Khunu Lama hid.” Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche expanded upon this idea in a dramatic way, suggesting that Khunu Lama deliberately concealed his Buddhist meditative accomplishments behind his literary expertise in a way that evokes the quintessential Mahāyāna figure with whom he is most associated: “Khunu Lama was a hidden yogin like Śāntideva.”107 According to accounts of Śāntideva’s life that are popular in Tibet, Śāntideva concealed his Buddhist realizations and erudition from his fellow monks, appearing to spend most of his time at meals and asleep. The other monks concluded he was a lazy freeloader on the charity of the monastery, who did nothing but “eat, shit, and sleep.” To mock him, the other monks are said to have actually nicknamed Śāntideva “bhu su ku” (roughly, “eat-sleep-shit”). Later, of course, when Śāntideva publicly taught his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life in a kind of extended virtuoso oration, these other monks realized their mistake. They begged Śāntideva to stay with them and teach them. But when Śāntideva reached the ninth chapter in his oral recitation of the Guide (the “Perfection of Wisdom” chapter), he rose up into the air above the crowd of monks and disappeared. Only his voice continued to teach. Then he traveled off and never returned to the monastery.108 Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche suggested that Khunu Lama’s erudition in literary topics operated as a kind of disguise matching this Śāntideva story. Not only did Khunu Lama “hide” in Indian clothes and non-Buddhist settings, his identity as a literature scholar was itself a form of hiddenness, obscuring his Buddhist qualities. From this perspective, students who failed to recognize him as a Buddhist teacher and failed to ask for the most important teachings he was capable of giving did so in part as a result of Khunu Lama’s own self-concealment. In comparing Khunu Lama to Śāntideva as an example of the “hidden yogin” type of practitioner, Chokyi Nyima explained this self-concealment as a technique for preserving the solitude that meditation practice requires. By framing Khunu Lama’s self-concealment-vialiterary-disguise as a method of avoiding fame, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche reconceptualizes even Khunu Lama’s Sanskrit and literary scholarship as part of a practice of renunciation.

“One of the real modern- day Buddhist saints”: Khunu Lama as Śāntideva Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s comparison of Khunu Lama to Śāntideva is an important assertion, given Śāntideva’s exalted position in Tibetan liter-

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ary and devotional contexts. Notably, in making this comparison, Chokyi Nyima is by no means alone. Angrup himself addresses this theme in his introduction to the 2005 namtar, emphasizing the connection between Khunu Lama and Śāntideva and explicating Khunu Lama’s practices of hiddenness, poverty, and humble appearance as the self-concealment of a true bodhisattva, someone who does the work of Avalokiteśvara (the Buddha of compassion) in the world. In Angrup’s account, indeed, Khunu Lama’s Himalayan origins make him a kind of second Śāntideva, come specifically to benefit “the people of the snow mountains” (kha ba ri pa)—that is, the Tibetan-Himalayan region.109 Oral narratives about Khunu Lama are likewise full of references to Śāntideva. During the 1960s and 1970s in India, when Khunu Lama began to teach a number of young Tibetan Buddhist scholars and reincarnates, he seems to have impressed these students as memorably Śāntideva-like. Many people linked Khunu Lama to Śāntideva in terms of their parallel renunciant, hidden-yogin lifestyles. Tulku Thondup, for example, compared Khunu Lama to Śāntideva by saying, “[Śāntideva] was a simple yogi— people didn’t know he was amazing. Khunu Rinpoche was like that. Now and then someone knew who he was, but mostly people thought he was a simple, ordinary person.”110 Relatedly, Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek noted Khunu Lama’s resemblance to Śāntideva partly in the context of Khunu Lama’s renunciatory practice of intentional poverty, as exemplified in stories of Khunu Lama “sleep[ing] amongst the beggars in Bodh Gaya.”111 Former students often framed their recollections of Khunu Lama’s Śāntideva-like qualities around accounts of his commitment to bodhicitta, both as his core Buddhist practice and as the subject of his famous poetic work, Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta. Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek, for instance, emphasized that “[Khunu Lama’s] main practice was only bodhicitta, . . . [as described in] Śāntideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. People said he might be Śāntideva.” Khen Rinpoche elaborated, “I thought the yogis of ancient India must be like this [like Khunu Lama]. I developed great faith. . . . He practiced bodhicitta all the time. . . . It is said that Śāntideva [also] always practiced only bodhicitta. Therefore, [Khunu Lama] might have been the reincarnation of Śāntideva. . . . Some really special holy people (skyes bu chen po) have said that probably he is [Śāntideva’s reincarnation] for sure.”112 Khunu Lama himself frequently taught Śāntideva’s Guide, most famously to the Dalai Lama. Indeed, according to Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok, “Khunu Lama was His Holiness’s [the Dalai Lama’s] favorite teacher of [Śāntideva’s] Guide.”113 The Dalai Lama has often referred to Khunu Lama in public settings as a great teacher-practitioner of Śāntideva’s Guide, and has also

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praised the Jewel Lamp as a key text on bodhicitta. These frequent public mentions of Khunu Lama by the Dalai Lama in connection both with the Jewel Lamp and Śāntideva’s Guide further reinforce the widespread sense of a Khunu Lama-Śāntideva connection. Across these various accounts and recollections, narrators convey multiple meanings when they highlight a link between Khunu Lama and Śāntideva. Such a connection highlights Khunu Lama’s role as an expert on and embodiment of bodhicitta, while also evoking his renunciation, both of material things and of fame itself. The comparison to Śāntideva, moreover, indexes Khunu Lama’s Indian-inflected non-sectarianism. As an Indian Mahāyāna thinker par excellence, Śāntideva is a wellspring for Tibetan Buddhist systems of philosophy and meditation transcending Tibetan sectarian labels. Not surprisingly, Śāntideva’s works have a central place in the Thirteen Great Texts of Khenpo Zhenga. One major transmission that Khunu Lama received from Khenpo Zhenga was in fact a commentary on Śāntideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (and Khunu Lama seems to have received a key transmission of the root text from one Zhenga’s most renowned disciples).114 Yet the association with Śāntideva also offers something else: a framework for thinking about the kind of invisibility that Khunu Lama’s renunciatory practice seems to have produced in some contexts. In the Tibetan literary imagination, Śāntideva is a hidden yogi, who emerged from concealment to teach the most famous Indian work on the bodhisattva ideal and then vanished again. In the haunting image of Śāntideva’s voice preaching from the air after he himself had (literally) left the building, we find clues about the problem posed by the Dalai Lama’s comment that Khunu Lama left no legacy. Comparisons of Khunu Lama to Śāntideva such as the one made by Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche offer a kind of gloss on the Dalai Lama’s comment. This comparison allows us to see Khunu Lama’s limited teaching as an element of his renunciatory withdrawal from public view, one that, at least on the surface, is highly valorized. After all, a comparison to Śāntideva seems like the highest form of praise. Relinquishing fame is described as deeply admirable by Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists who remember Khunu Lama, including both Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and the Dalai Lama. Nevertheless, in their comments about Khunu Lama’s limited teaching, there is also a note of regret. As Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s reflections about Khunu Lama imply, the hidden aspect of Khunu Lama’s chatralwa practice is a kind of double-edged sword. When I remarked to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche that Khunu Lama had traveled so extensively and collected so many lineage transmissions that he reminded me of the influential nineteenth-century

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polymath Jamgon Kongtrul, (1813–1899) who famously collected, and in many cases preserved or revived, a host of transmission lineages from many different strands of Tibetan Buddhism, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche responded, “In what he received, Khunu Rinpoche was like Kongtrul.” Yet he went on to add, “Khunu Rinpoche received everything, but did he give?” In other words, Khunu Lama received as many lineage transmissions as Kongtrul, and in that sense is a parallel figure. But it is less clear how widely he disseminated these lineages. The reason for that, according to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, has to do with Khunu Lama’s hiddenness. Khunu Lama did indeed transmit what he knew to a significant group of men and women, often in intimate gatherings and person-to-person teachings; there are also explicit references in some accounts of his life to his commitment to transmitting lineages where there was a danger of a break in transmission.115 I return to these important themes of transmission and connection in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Yet in Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s reflections, and the Dalai Lama’s remark about Khunu Lama’s lack of legacy, we nevertheless find Khunu Lama’s comparatively limited number of students framed in poignant terms, as implicated in a kind of gap in recognition, or an experience of loss. This affective dimension of loss further resonates with Pema Wangyal Rinpoche’s memory of Khunu Lama himself speaking regretfully about the students who failed to ask him to teach Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. We can discern here echoes of other Buddhist narratives about students who fail to ask teachers for the right things, Ānanda being the paradigmatic example. In this reading, Khunu Lama’s apparent commitment to embodying the Kadampa Four Aims of beggar-like renunciation produces complex consequences. If the students can’t find the teacher, what becomes of the lineage? The remaining chapters take up this question, and propose some readings in which the challenge posed by renunciatory absence, though poignant, is at the same time also profoundly generative— indeed, essential to lineage continuity.

[ Ch a pter 4 ]

Dislocation and Continuity

At the time when the Land of Snows had reached a dangerous point where the teachings of the Victorious One were in decline, [Khunu Lama] was the one who explained and spread whatever was necessary, whether of the New or Old Traditions, the arts and sciences, the sutras, or the tantras, thus becoming like the re-connector of the lifeforce of the nonsectarian tradition of the Teachings at the moment of its death. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:4–5.

Introduction: “A Critical Time” for Tibet The previous chapter posed the question of whether Khunu Lama’s practices of renunciatory self-concealment might have complicated his relationships with students or produced separations between him and would-be disciples. In this chapter, I turn to a parallel and in a sense opposite theme, that of Khunu Lama’s connections as a teacher in India in the last two decades of his life, from 1959 to1977. This was the period in which he came to teach the Dalai Lama and a number of other well-known Tibetan, Himalayan, and Western students During this time, amid his practices of renunciatory absence and self-concealment, narrators nevertheless also describe him as actively engaged in transmitting teachings and lineages that he had received during his earlier decades of study to students who sought him out. I map several important instances of these teachings and transmissions in this chapter. Yet the theme of separation emerges within sources for this chapter as well, this time in a more external sense. Khunu Lama’s connective activities of teaching and transmission during this period occurred 112

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against the traumatic backdrop of a different kind of separation and interruption of Tibetan transmission lineages, a historical context that narrators of Khunu Lama’s life stories describe via a vocabulary of disruption and crisis. There are subtle hints of these crisis circumstances in Rakra Rinpoche’s account of the Dalai Lama prostrating to Khunu Lama in the dusty Sarnath street, as described in the previous chapter. In this story, the astonishment of the assembled crowd and Indian police forms the dramatic climax of the anecdote. Their surprise, like the reactions of people in similar stories, hint that Khunu Lama’s interactions with the Dalai Lama in India were unusual in some way. As we have seen, narrators and audiences frame such stories of Khunu Lama’s interactions with the Dalai Lama as revealing both Khunu Lama’s special qualities as a Buddhist practitioner, and the Dalai Lama’s own ability to discern those qualities, despite Khunu Lama’s humble exterior. Such dynamics of concealment and recognition play an important role in the ways Khunu Lama’s renunciation is remembered. At the same time, this story and others like it also point to a broader social context of profound dislocation. As the historian Tashi Tsering Josayma has pointed out, during an earlier period of Tibetan history, Khunu Lama and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would have been unlikely to meet at all.1 Certainly it is hard to imagine that they could have met and developed a relationship with the informality that apparently marked their encounters in India. In Tibet prior to the 1950s, they would have been separated by many layers of government protocol and religious hierarchy, and by a multitude of security personnel and officials, structuring all their interactions. While stories of great religious practitioners doing unconventional things are a recurring theme in Tibetan literature, biographies of previous Dalai Lamas do not record many episodes in which a Dalai Lama venerates an obscure renunciant or prostrates to him in a public street in front of a crowd.2 Rakra Rinpoche’s Sarnath story is startling, and hints that both protagonists are interacting in a deeply altered, even disorienting, social, political, and religious situation. These qualities of unfamiliarity and disorientation raise the question of how the Fourteenth Dalai Lama came to meet Khunu Lama in the first place. What in the post-1959 social and political circumstances of Tibetans in India made their connection possible, and made it take the form it did? For Angrup, writing in Khunu Lama’s namtar, the answer is clear: their relationship unfolded within a context of emergency for Tibetans. Angrup frames Khunu Lama’s teaching in India to Tibetans and to the Dalai Lama in particular against the backdrop of the arrival of Chinese Communist forces in Tibet in the 1950s, which Angrup describes as catastrophic, both for individual people and in broader cultural and religious terms:

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At that time, because the Chinese invaded the entire environment and inhabitants of the cool land of Tibet, it was a really critical time of annihilation, robbery and looting. Not only that: a decisive point was reached when it was even unclear whether the tradition of our incomparable Teacher, Śākyamuni Buddha, would survive or be destroyed. As a result, most of those who came to receive [Khunu Lama’s] teachings were Tibetan refugees, both male and female, lay and ordained, who experienced brutal torment under Chinese oppression. Even His Holiness the great Fourteenth Dalai Lama, stated “I received Dharma teachings from this master [Khunu Lama].”3

Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche likewise frames the stakes of Khunu Lama’s post-1959 activities in stark language, describing Khunu Lama’s teaching to Tibetans in India as part of an urgent task of maintaining Tibetan forms of knowledge and Buddhist lineage continuity in a time of threat. Notably, Lamchen Gyalpo presents this task of maintaining continuity as explicitly ecumenical: “At the time when the Land of Snows had reached a dangerous point where the teachings of the Victorious One [the Buddha] were in decline, [Khunu Lama] was the one who explained and spread whatever was necessary, whether of the New or Old Traditions, the arts and sciences, the sutras, or the tantras, thus becoming like the re-connector of the lifeforce of the non-sectarian tradition of the Teachings at the moment of its death.”4 In passages like these, both Lamchen Gyalpo and Angrup frame lineage continuity as a crucial consideration for understanding the events of this time. They identify Khunu Lama’s teaching activities as part of broader communal and personal projects of cultural survival and Buddhist revitalization in circumstances of intense vulnerability.5 It is within this context that narratives of the final two decades of Khunu Lama’s life and teaching activity in India unfold. In addition to teaching his most famous students, the Dalai Lama in particular, during this period, Khunu Lama composed his best-known literary work, the Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta, writing one verse per day throughout the year 1959– 1960. Although the Jewel Lamp verses do not explicitly address the events of the time, Khunu Lama did record some daily news reports from Tibet during that year in the same personal diary in which he composed the verses, noting for instance reports of fighting in Lhasa and the flight of the Dalai Lama.6 While the verses distill Khunu Lama’s reflections on bodhicitta and the bodhisattva’s attitude of compassion without reference to particular places or times, it is possible to read several verses as offering some resonance with the urgent concerns of that year, although such readings suggest only one layer of potential meaning among many.

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This chapter situates Khunu Lama’s teaching and writing during the two decades after 1959 within the themes of lineage continuity amid crisis suggested by Angrup and Lamchen Gyalpo, and with reference to the Indian setting into which Tibetan refugees arrived. Paying particular attention to Khunu Lama’s relationship with the Dalai Lama, as well as his relationship with other Tibetan students, especially the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, I describe key events of the period, and examine some of the overlapping personal connections that drew Khunu Lama toward public roles as teacher, translator, and author. This chapter also explores a selection of his Jewel Lamp verses in more detail, and returns to the topic of Khunu Lama’s association with the seminal eighth century Indian Mahāyāna thinker and writer about bodhicitta, Śāntideva.

From Tibet to India Let us turn first to the departure of the Dalai Lama from Tibet in 1959 and his arrival in India. Many of Khunu Lama’s Tibetan students and colleagues also fled to India at the end of the 1950s, including the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin and students in her circle. Descriptions of these students’ experiences often note directly or implicitly the intersection of their losses as refugees with their Buddhist practices of renunciation, painfully resituating the renunciatory ideal in the crucible of exile and diaspora. A pivotal moment in the Dalai Lama’s own biography came in the fall of 1950, when he was fifteen years old. On October 7, 1950, Chinese Communist troops of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the Drichu River in eastern Tibet; after overcoming Tibetan resistance, they remained at the city of Chamdo awaiting the Ganden Podrang Tibetan government’s response.7 The Dalai Lama and members of the government evacuated from Lhasa to the Indian border. However, they did not continue further at that point. Rather, remaining near the border, the Dalai Lama formally assumed the responsibilities of head of state on November 17, 1950. As political negotiations unfolded around him, he returned to Lhasa, where he completed his education, including his geshe degree and full monastic ordination. He remained in central Tibet (making one visit to Beijing in 1954– 55, and a shorter visit to India in 1956) until the situation in Lhasa reached a new crisis point in 1959.8 For his part, Khunu Lama had already left Tibet more than a decade earlier. During the early 1950s he seems to have been living largely in the Tekra Math ashram in Varanasi, with periodic forays to other parts of India. However, many of the people who would become his close students and colleagues in India remained in Tibet during the next nine years. Cen-

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tral Tibetan students of Khunu Lama describe an uneasy time, in which stretches of outward calm overlay tense negotiation and conflict. People from eastern Tibetan areas of Kham and Amdo, on the other hand, recall the 1950s as marked by violence, upheaval, and dispossession, driving many to flee as refugees to central Tibet.9 During the fraught period after the PLA troops crossed the Drichu, Tibetan leaders in Lhasa were divided on how to respond. Throughout treaty negotiations in 1950–51, a nearly year-long visit to Beijing by the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan religious and political officials in 1954–55, and political and military interventions by Chinese officials and troops in Tibetan areas across the Plateau, Tibetan and Chinese leaders wrestled in part with the social and political role of Tibetan religion. As Gray Tuttle describes, Buddhism in particular, newly imagined as a “world religion,” had emerged in the decades just prior to 1950 as a framework for linking Tibetans and Chinese within an emerging, post-imperial Chinese nation.10 The modern perception of Buddhism as a shared religion had “allowed a handful of Buddhists—both Chinese and Tibetan—to join forces in an effort to remain relevant within the modern nation-state.”11 Together, early and mid-twentieth-century Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist figures formed teaching academies, undertook religious visits and rituals, and in so doing fed substantial Chinese popular interest in Tibetan Buddhism—interest that continues today.12 The Tibetan government’s concerns about the protection of Buddhism and its perceptions of earlier Chinese leaders as potentially supportive of Buddhist institutions were part of the context when in the fall and winter of 1950–51, Chinese Communist leadership pressed the Tibetan government to sign an agreement conceding that Tibet was a part of China. On May 23, 1951, a Tibetan delegation to Beijing signed on to what has become known as the Seventeen-Point Agreement.13 With that agreement, the Tibetan delegation acceded to most of the Chinese demands—in particular, that they acknowledge Tibet as a part of China. However, the Seventeen-Point Agreement appeared to address some Tibetan priorities around Buddhism and its religious, economic, political, and cultural role, since it contained language protecting freedom of religion, the role of the Dalai Lama, and the existing political system in Tibet. Some Tibetan leaders hoped that the Communists would treat Tibetan Buddhism supportively, maintaining the earlier approach of the Chinese Nationalist government.14 As soon became clear, however, the Seventeen-Point Agreement turned out to be insufficient either to fully protect Tibetan religious and social institutions or to maintain harmonious relations. Among other problems, the agreement governed relations specifically between the Chinese

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Communist leadership and the central Tibetan government in Lhasa. The regions of Kham and Amdo in eastern Tibet, where the Lhasa government had had little or no authority, were not included. Eastern Tibetan areas, in fact, encountered Chinese Communist forces much earlier than central Tibet. As the Communists attempted to “reform” Kham and Amdo, gradualist approaches lost ground there entirely, and Chinese Communist leaders began to pursue aggressive policies of collectivization. In 1955, the Communists launched full-scale land-reform programs in eastern Tibet. By late 1955, uprisings and then serious fighting erupted across the eastern regions.15 When Tibetans in Kham resisted, the PLA bombed Tibetan monasteries and villages from the air, seeing them as centers of resistance. The outrage and fear this provoked among Tibetans in Kham helped to catalyze a widespread revolt against the Communists, as well as the formation of the main, Khampa-led Tibetan guerrilla resistance movement, the “Four Rivers, Six Ranges” (chu bzhi sgang drug).16 By 1956, rebellion had spread across Kham; 1958 saw revolt and crackdown in Amdo. Popular protest increased in Lhasa as well.17 Thousands of Khampa refugees streamed into central Tibet and camped, often in dire conditions, in the region surrounding Lhasa. In March of 1959, as fighting extended across eastern Tibet, protests began in Lhasa, on the heels of the Monlam Chenmo (the Great Prayer Festival), where the twenty-five-year-old Dalai Lama had just passed his final geshe exams. The date of March 10 has become a touchstone in Tibetan exilic memory: Tibetans commemorate that day as the start of the Lhasa popular uprising against Chinese Communist rule. The final spark for the uprising was a rumor that the young Dalai Lama would be kidnapped by the Chinese military and taken to China as a hostage or assassinated. Chinese officials had invited the Dalai Lama to watch a show at the Chinese army base, sparking fears of his abduction. Some Tibetan government officials feared that the Chinese intended to use the Dalai Lama as a hostage to force the Lhasa government to assist them in putting down the Khampa revolt. Tibetans in the city mobilized in concern.18 Thousands of Tibetans gathered outside the Norbulingka Palace (the summer palace of the Dalai Lamas) to prevent his being taken anywhere. After a week of popular protest and fighting in the city, as news began to reach the international press, the young Dalai Lama’s advisers and government became increasingly concerned. The Dalai Lama and members of the Tibetan government consulted the Nechung Oracle (the state oracle of Tibet), which responded that it was no longer safe to remain in the Norbulingka. On the night of March 17, the Dalai Lama slipped out of the Norbulingka in disguise and out of Lhasa. Accompanying him were several

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major Buddhist religious figures, in particular his Senior and Junior Tutors, and other key members of his government.19 On March 23 the Chinese Communist flag flew over the Potala Palace for the first time, marking the end of the uprising in Lhasa and final establishment of Chinese control over the city.20 On March 28 the Chinese government released a statement signed by Zhou Enlai, stating that the Tibetan rebellion had “torn up” the Seventeen-Point Agreement and declaring that the “local government” of Tibet had been dissolved.21 Meanwhile, having traveled as far as the remote southern Tibetan region of Lhuntse Dzong, the Dalai Lama and members of the Tibetan government issued a formal statement announcing the “new temporary government of Tibet.”22 But only days later, officials arriving from Lhasa brought news of the PLA’s victory there. Faced with this, the Dalai Lama and his party left Lhuntse Dzong and embarked on two weeks of travel across the mountains, reaching the Indian border on March 30. Unsure of their reception, they hesitated to cross into India until they received confirmation that the government of India would grant them asylum.23 The Dalai Lama and those traveling with him then spent four arduous days crossing the passes from Arunachal Pradesh to the Himalayan foothill region of Assam. Only after finally reaching Assam were they able to complete the remainder of their journey to the Indian hill station of Mussoorie by train. Thousands of Tibetan refugees also made the grueling trek across the Himalayas at this time. All told, some hundred thousand Tibetan men, women, and children would flee to India, as well as to Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal during the next few years. In the subsequent decade, a number of them would become Khunu Lama’s students. Many of the people who made the trip to India became ill on the journey. Both adults and children died during the dangerous high-altitude mountain crossing. Others died from illnesses such as tuberculosis, malaria, and dysentery soon after reaching more tropical lowland areas. Those who survived were often destitute. Among the scattered groups of refugees who made their way through the mountains was a band of travelers who had initially set out from Nangchen in eastern Tibet. (Manshardt describes them as Khampa Tibetan resistance fighters, on the basis of oral sources.)24 Among their number, they protected three Buddhist religious figures, two of whom in particular would go on to form important connections with Khunu Lama: a nine-year old boy, his guardian, and a tall, serious woman. The young boy was the Drikung Kagyu reincarnate lama Lho Ontul Rinpoche (b. 1950), who had fled together with his tutor, Lama Kalsang Namgyal, from their home monastery and village in Nangchen. The tall nun was the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, also known as Neni Rinpoche, the former leader of Terdrom

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Nunnery in the Drikung Valley in central Tibet, and Khunu Lama’s future disciple and attendant. Ontul Rinpoche would become her disciple, and subsequently Khunu Lama’s disciple as well. How the Drikung Khandroma came to travel across the Himalayas to India with the young Ontul Rinpoche and Lama Kalsang Nyamgal is a story in itself. She grew up in central Tibet, in the upper Drikung Valley, where both the main Drikung Til Monastery and Terdrom Nunnery are located. After the early death of her mother, she lived in and around the Terdrom nuns’ community for much of her youth, taking novice ordination and beginning to study and practice at Terdrom as a young girl. In his 2007 account of her life, Manshardt describes how she and her father, with whom she was very close, would often do Buddhist retreats together when she was a child, frequently meditating in the high caves above Terdrom’s renowned hot springs. At times snows apparently sealed them into their retreat cave, echoing the intensive practices of the eighth century female Tibetan Buddhist heroine Yeshe Tsogyal, with whom both the nuns’ community at Terdrom and Sherab Tharchin herself are closely associated.25 Sources describe the young Sherab Tharchin as being a virtuoso meditator at a young age, completing many nyungne (snyung gnas) fasting ritual retreats and studying Buddhist topics in the Drikung nuns’ shedra, suggesting something of her intellectual gifts and interests (and also hinting at the educational opportunities available to women in the Terdrom community before 1959).26 Among the main teachers of her youth in Tibet were figures who had lineage connections to Khunu Lama, and who were themselves known for their chatralwa practice of renunciation. One of these was the Drikung renunciant and yogic master Amgon Rinpoche, with whom Khunu Lama had formed a connection in 1935.27 Another, described in sources based on oral histories as her first root guru, was a Dzogchen master from eastern Tibet named Khenchen Chatral Rahor Chodrak.28 While the identity of this teacher is not completely clear, several masters from Rahor Monastery (a branch of Dzogchen Monastery near Dergé) who had links to Khenpo Zhenga traveled to teach at Drikung around this time. The most famous of these was the Dzogchen expert Rahor Palden Chokyi Drakpa (1800s to ?1901), from Golok, who was one of Khenpo Zhenga’s main disciples, famed for his practice of renunciation.29 Although it is difficult to think that he was Sherab Tharchin’s direct teacher, given his presumed dates, it seems likely that even in her early years she was already connected to lineages of Buddhist practice linking her to Khenpo Zhenga and Khunu Lama (although she apparently did not learn of Khunu Lama specifically until she read his verses in India in 1970). Sources also state that even in her

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youth she had a strong interest in Dzogchen meditation, renunciation, and bodhicitta, much like Khunu Lama himself. In the early 1950s, as Chinese Communist control in central Tibet gradually increased, the nuns’ community at Terdrom seems to have kept a watchful eye on events, while continuing the retreat practices for which they are famous. Probably in 1958, shortly before she passed away, the previous Drikung Khandroma Choden Zangmo Rinpoche (1886–1958), herself one of Sherab Tharchin’s main religious teachers, named Sherab Tharchin as her successor.30 (The title of Drikung Khandroma is not an incarnation lineage; rather, it is bestowed within the Terdrom nuns’ community through a combination of the previous holder’s transmission and the agreement of the community of nuns.)31 Manshardt describes Sherab Tharchin as redoubling her meditation practice after her elevation to the role of Drikung Khandroma. She apparently continued in retreat even as danger from Chinese troops drew nearer, only deciding to leave after experiencing an encounter with visionary overtones. In this encounter, two mysterious “foreign”-seeming women dressed in red and white “sari-like” clothing visited her and guided her away from Terdrom before vanishing, according to one oral account.32 At the place where the two red-and-white clad women led her, she met a group of Tibetans already headed toward India. Sherab Tharchin began to travel with them, but she and her travel companions were surprised by Chinese troops, who opened fire. Sherab Tharchin was the only survivor. Fleeing alone through the mountains, she eventually encountered the group from eastern Tibet who were escorting the nine-year-old Drikung Ontul Rinpoche and his tutor, Kalsang Namgyal. Sherab Tharchin joined their group, and together they made their way to India, apparently on foot.33 Along the route, they met another nun, Ani Damcho Zangmo, also from Kham, who joined their party. She would become the Drikung Khandroma’s disciple, attendant, and travel companion in India in the years to come, and through the Drikung Khandroma’s introduction, would also become Khunu Lama’s student. A major question that immediately confronted the Dalai Lama and members of the Ganden Podrang government after their arrival in India was how to help the refugees, people like the group traveling with the Drikung Khandroma. India had freed itself from British rule only in 1947, and the Republic of India was formally constituted in 1950. Thus the Republic of India in which the Tibetans had just arrived was itself only nine years old, and the Tibetans’ arrival posed significant challenges. Initially Nehru ( Jawaharlal Nehru, 1889–1964, the first prime minister of independent India) was cautious in his response, although he did offer the Tibetans asy-

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lum. He was particularly concerned not to destabilize India’s relationship with China, with which India was already entering difficult negotiations over border disagreements in the Himalayas. India and China would in fact go to war over these and related issues in 1962. However, much Indian public opinion and many Indian political figures were supportive of the Tibetan refugees and urged Nehru both in the press and parliament to offer them additional help. Ultimately, the Indian government allowed the Tibetan refugees to settle in multiple locations in north and south India. The Dalai Lama and members of his government first stayed in Mussoorie, where Khunu Lama would meet with them shortly after their arrival. Subsequently, the government of India suggested that the Tibetans transfer their offices to Dharamsala, then a sleepy rural hamlet in the Himalayan foothills, in what is now the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. The government of India eventually allowed the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan leadership to set up the central Tibetan Administration (Bod mi’i sgrig ‘dzugs; literally, “The Tibetan People’s Organization”) with administrative and legal powers to oversee the Tibetan refugee community. Dharamsala became the de facto capital of exilic Tibetan life. It also became a destination for backpackers and spiritually minded tourists, and for scholars, both Tibetan and not, interested in studying Tibetan history, language, literature, and culture. The early years in India were difficult ones for Tibetan refugees, and the experiences of the Drikung Khandroma and her companions were no exception. After their weeks-long journey through the Himalayas, they were virtually penniless. Nevertheless, soon after their arrival, the Drikung Khandroma and Ani Damcho Zangmo went on pilgrimage to visit important Indian Buddhist sites, often journeying on foot, since they lacked money for train fare. They frequently had to beg for alms in order to eat.34 Eventually, they made their way to the small north Indian town of Rewalsar, or Tso Pema (“Lotus Lake”) in Tibetan, in present-day Himachal Pradesh. Tso Pema is an important pilgrimage site associated with Padmasambhava (literally, “the Lotus Born”), or Guru Rinpoche (“the Precious Guru”), a figure often described as a second Buddha, instrumental in establishing Buddhism in Tibet in the eighth century. In Tibetan Buddhist accounts, Padmasambhava is the main wellspring of the Dzogchen tradition, and Tso Pema is an important sacred landscape for Dzogchen practitioners, filled with traces of Padmasambhava and his female and male disciples. Many female and male retreatants live in the caves above the lake, into the present day, and the Drikung Khandroma and Ani Damcho Zangmo joined them. The two women seem to have remained at Tso Pema from 1960 until 1970. In that year, the Drikung Khandroma read Khunu Lama’s Jewel Lamp: In

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Praise of Bodhicitta and became convinced that he was the lama she had been searching for. She and Ani Damcho therefore left Tso Pema in 1970 and traveled to Bodh Gaya to find him. During the decade when the Drikung Khandroma and Ani Damcho were living at Tso Pema, they were rejoined by their former companion, the young Ontul Rinpoche. During their journey out of Tibet, he had been accompanied by his monastic tutor, Lama Kelsang Namgyal, whom he has described as caring for him like a loving parent. But in order to earn money to support them both in India, Kelsang Namgyal, like many other refugees at this time, went to work on an Indian road-building crew, one of the few jobs readily available to the refugees. He soon became ill in the difficult conditions and died.35 It was after this further blow of losing his tutor that Ontul Rinpoche came to live at Tso Pema with the Drikung Khandroma, who cared for him and guided his religious education over the next ten years. Yet even under these painful circumstances, oral sources describe the Drikung Khandroma and her companions as continuing to focus their attention on Buddhist practices and on opportunities to receive teachings from other Tibetan scholars and meditators who had also arrived in India at this time. The Drikung Khandroma soon took as her teacher the influential Dzogchen master Mewa Khenpo Tubten Ozer (1928–2000), a prominent Nyingma scholar from Nyarong in eastern Tibet, who probably had a connection to her earlier teacher from Rahor.36 After his own escape to India in 1959, Mewa Khenpo Tubten had come to the Manali area. He eventually established a retreat community a short journey from Tso Pema, near Manali at a place called Pangan (also anglicized as Pangaon), a community that several of Khunu Lama’s Kinnauri nun disciples would later join. Khenpo Thubten and the Drikung Khandroma apparently developed a close teacher-student relationship of mutual respect and admiration. People who knew the Drikung Khandroma in this period describe her as intensely modest about her own abilities and extensive training, but also as an advanced teacher in her own right, someone about whom accounts of clairvoyance and other remarkable qualities continue to circulate. Students recall her as a committed renunciant in a style similar to Khunu Lama, who would refuse or give away offerings, and who encouraged other lamas she met to take up mendicant practice. Many students describe her as a stern and forceful presence, famous for speaking bluntly to all, regardless of status, who held her community to high standards for discipline and practice. Ontul Rinpoche recalled that even Khenpo Thubten found her intimidating. At the same time, Ontul Rinpoche described her relationship with Khenpo Thubten as one of mutual care and service.37 Poignantly, although

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they were barely a year apart in age, Khenpo Thubten would later preside over her funeral in 1979. During the 1960s, at the Drikung Khandroma’s urging, the young Ontul Rinpoche likewise became Khenpo Thubten’s disciple. Similarly, in the early 1970s when the Drikung Khandroma became Khunu Lama’s disciple, Ontul Rinpoche did so as well; he lists both Khenpo Thubten and Khunu Lama among his main teachers in his oral and published biographies today. For his part, in the 1970s Khenpo Thubten in turn became Khunu Lama’s student, apparently also through their shared connection to the Drikung Khandroma. Khenpo Thubten and Khunu Lama seem to have esteemed one another and to have often taught one another’s students: in the late 1970s, Khunu Lama would often send students to Khenpo Thubten for Dzogchen instruction, and near the end of his life Khunu Lama gave teachings at Khenpo Thubten’s Pangan retreat center.38 While the Drikung Khandroma and her circle were thus re-establishing the continuity of their religious lives and forming new relationships and communities amid the precarities of the unfamiliar Indian environment, the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan leaders were engaging in a very similar process, albeit on a much broader scale. Maintaining religious as well as cultural continuity in exile emerges as a key focus across a host of personal accounts of this period. Memoirs by Tibetan authors and writings by outside observers emphasize the speed with which the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan religious leaders in India resumed religious rituals. Literally within days of their arrival, the Dalai Lama and other religious leaders were again giving and receiving teachings.39 In their writings, the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan authors describe their focus on religious and cultural continuity during this time as a response to their fears about cultural destruction in Tibet, and as an essential strategy for survival as a diaspora community.40 Likewise, in his Khunu Lama namtar, Angrup frames the early years of Tibetan institution-building in India as imbued with a focus on cultural survival and renewal. At the same time, Tibetan concerns about Buddhist survival and continuity are connected to long-standing Tibetan political, social, and religious priorities that Tibetan historiography identifies as dating back centuries. From this perspective, Tibetan and Himalayan sources make clear that although the circumstances of crisis and displacement in which Tibetan refugees found themselves in India heightened the urgency of maintaining lineage transmissions, the continuity that the Dalai Lama and others sought to maintain in exile (and that Tibetan leaders and community members in geographic Tibet were simultaneously struggling to protect), was itself not a new concern. Indeed, twentieth-century Tibetan leaders prioritized the survival and continuity of Tibetan Buddhism well before the crises of

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the 1950s. The flourishing of Tibetan Buddhism was an animating concern for the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and for many political officials, intellectuals, and religious leaders of his era, as it was for leaders at earlier periods. Concern for the continuity of Buddhism shaped Tibetan official responses to both British and Chinese engagements with Tibet in the early years of the century. Moreover, Buddhist sources across multiple historical periods emphasize that giving and receiving teachings and lineage transmissions is not a purely instrumental or mechanical process, like learning a new technical skill, or being an archivist. On the contrary, meeting Buddhist teachers and receiving transmissions from them is a central part of the ongoing affective and relational activity of a Buddhist master (a porous category in which one might include both individuals referred to by their communities or biographers with the epithet lama (bla ma), as well as any individuals worthy of being remembered via oral or textual narratives about their lives). The literary genre of namtar, for instance, is replete with texts in which a prime concern is the documenting of religious transmissions received by one master from another. Other Tibetan genres that map and document lineage relationships are even more explicit in their focus on receipt or exchange of transmissions from master to disciple or master to master as a key element of narrating a Buddhist life.41 Building on Martin Mills’s insights about the ritual identity of Buddhist incarnate lamas,42 one might go so far as to say that giving and receiving transmissions is part of what makes a man or woman a Buddhist master. Even beyond the teleological goal of receiving teachings in order to practice them and accomplish the Buddhist path—which is both rhetorically important, and also potentially the main goal of individual practitioners— Himalayan and Tibetan religious identities derive in large measure from participation in networks of lineage relations that are constantly being renewed and re-articulated through rituals of transmission and exchange.43 This is true even for hermit-renunciants, who are part of transmission and ritual communities regardless of how isolated they are at any given moment. Thus, in ritual, sociological, and biographical terms, the ongoing gathering and exchange of transmissions with and from other masters is a central, lifelong part of what lamas do. In this dual context of urgent cultural survival and ongoing lineage participation, it is thus not surprising that within weeks of his arrival in India on March 30, 1959, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was actively seeking out and meeting with Buddhist figures, and receiving as well as giving teachings. It is in the midst of these circumstances that he met with Khunu Lama.

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Meeting the Dalai Lama Khunu Lama recorded in his diary that he received a telegram summoning him to Mussoorie to see the Dalai Lama on August 29, 1959, five months after the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India.44 However, Khunu Lama apparently replied that he was too sick to travel and did not actually go to Mussoorie until early October. His diary notes that he finally met with the Dalai Lama on October 4, and that he then remained in Mussoorie for two months, spending time with the Dalai Lama, the Dalai Lama’s mother, and other leading Tibetan lamas and members of the Dalai Lama’s household. Notably, this invitation to spend time with the Dalai Lama and his household in Mussoorie was in fact not simply a response to the crisis circumstances of exile. It also turns out to have been at least in part the result of relationships and connections dating back decades, to Khunu Lama’s earlier years of teaching literary topics in central Tibet. One of his students during the period when he had lived and taught in Lhasa in the 1930s had been none other than the Dalai Lama’s esteemed Senior Tutor, Ling Rinpoche. The Sixth Ling Rinpoche Tubten Lungtok Tenzin Trinlé (1903–1983) was himself a leading incarnate lama, sixth in an incarnation line whose predecessors had included tutors to the Sixth, Eleventh, and Thirteenth Dalai Lamas. The Sixth Ling Rinpoche was venerated for his scholarly erudition and Buddhist practice, and held several prominent religious and political positions. These included becoming Ninety-Seventh Ganden Tripa (dga’ ldan khri pa; throne-holder of Ganden Monastery and ritual head of the Gelukpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism). However, his most important role, and the role for which he is most celebrated in popular memory now was as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s Senior Tutor (yongs ‘dzin ‘dres pa). Senior Tutor is an official position near the pinnacle of Tibetan religious and governmental authority. Prior to 1959, Dalai Lamas during their minority were assigned a number of senior Buddhist hierarchs within the Gelukpa school to oversee their education, including their moral, spiritual, and intellectual maturation, and their ritual initiation into the array of ritual and meditational systems that they would be expected not only to practice, but also to transmit. In addition to a regent (a Gelukpa hierarch chosen to rule Tibet during the often politically precarious interregnum between the passing away of one Dalai Lama and the identification and majority of the next), a young Dalai Lama would be assigned multiple tutors, assistant tutors and philosophical debate partners. These figures became key members of the Dalai Lama’s entourage. Senior lamas in these roles were both religious and political figures, intimately involved in the lives and govern-

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ments of the Dalai Lamas in their care, and often personally close to them. As Senior Tutor, Ling Rinpoche was a central figure in the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s youth and development. The Dalai Lama has described him as being “like a loving father to me, . . . the greatest influence on my life.”45 In this context, it is significant that it was Ling Rinpoche who introduced Khunu Lama to the Dalai Lama in India. Ling Rinpoche’s recommendation helps to explain how and why so soon after his arrival in India, the Dalai Lama happened to seek out Khunu Lama, who was otherwise quite obscure at that time. In the Dalai Lama’s own words, “Ling Rinpoche knew Khunu Rinpoche from Tibet a long time before. In Tibet he had received some teachings from him. Then in India, Ling Rinpoche received teachings from him again. In terms of my own relationship with Khunu Lama, that’s where it came from. . . . In this way, we had a connection.”46 Ling Rinpoche and Khunu Lama themselves became “very close” in the years that followed, according to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, who suggested that this was in part “because they stayed together at the Ganden [Phelgye Ling] Gonpa” (the Tibetan monastery in Bodh Gaya) in later years. (Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche noted that Ling Rinpoche had a large suite of rooms there because of his official leadership position, while Khunu Lama had a characteristically “tiny” room.)47 Indeed, as noted in his diary, already during the first visit he made to the Dalai Lama in Mussoorie in the fall of 1959, Khunu Lama had resumed giving Ling Rinpoche teachings on Tibetan grammar and literary topics.48 Ling Rinpoche’s introduction thus situates the Dalai Lama’s relationship with Khunu Lama within the larger context of the lineage and personal networks of all three men, making at least some aspects of Khunu Lama’s connection to the Dalai Lama more legible and less startling. Their connection moreover reaffirms the point made by Thubten Jinpa in the previous chapter that a shared interest in literature and poetics can function as a special source of relationship between aficionados, creating bonds of friendship that bridge social differences. However, according to the Ladakhi intellectual Tashi Rabgias, Ling Rinpoche had actually only re-introduced the Dalai Lama to Khunu Lama in 1959. The first meeting between the two men in fact occurred in India three years earlier, in 1956, when the Dalai Lama, the Tenth Panchen Lama, and important Tibetan monastic and lay officials had visited India. The Tibetan delegation had traveled to India on the occasion of the Buddha Jayanti celebrations, held to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha Śākyamuni’s life and enlightenment, (while also offering the Indian government an opportunity to connect the new republic with the glories of India’s Buddhist past). For the Tibetan guests, this visit had come during the tense period of negotiation and détente with the Chinese Communist

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leadership of the mid-1950s, and it had offered a chance to seek help for the Tibetan situation with potential allies in India, though ultimately without success. Khunu Lama’s encounter with the Dalai Lama on this earlier occasion was apparently courtesy of Tashi Rabgias himself. This was only a few months after Tashi Rabgias studied with Khunu Lama at Bakula Rinpoche’s residence in Srinagar, from which Khunu Lama had left so precipitately. During the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama’s Buddha Jayanti visit, Tashi Rabgias had been designated as the Panchen Lama’s translator, and was thus traveling with the Tibetan dignitaries on a day when they visited a maharaja’s palace in Varanasi (likely the Ramnagar Fort). Tashi Rabgias described how, as translator, he had to walk in front of the procession of people, “in the very vanguard,” past the large crowd that had assembled: “So many people waited there in the palace, so many people. To my great surprise, . . . Khunu Rinpoche was just in a lane, he was at the back wall, and staying like that. And nobody knew about him. So when I came, I said, ‘Rinpoche please! What are you doing here?’ And I took [him] to the Dalai Lama, and the Panchen Lama.” Tashi Rabgias said that after having found Khunu Lama hiding in the back of the crowd and taken him to meet the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, he stepped away, and so could not comment on what the three men spoke about. But he noted that several years later, when he visited Khunu Lama at Tekra Math, Khunu Lama remembered how Tashi Rabgias had noticed him standing in the back of the crowd, and thanked him for making the introduction.49 Thus Khunu Lama was not in fact completely unknown to the Dalai Lama when Ling Rinpoche brought them together again in Mussoorie in 1959. Whether the Dalai Lama remembered their earlier meeting in Varanasi or not, this re-introduction from Ling Rinpoche set in motion a positive connection between the Dalai Lama and Khunu Lama, which quickly seems to have blossomed into a relationship of mutual veneration. In making this initial re-introduction, moreover, Ling Rinpoche may have mentioned that Khunu Lama could be a valuable resource for helping to address the crisis in education that the refugees were facing, and which the exile government was trying to alleviate.50 Certainly, the Dalai Lama would soon request Khunu Lama’s help with a significant educational project, in the form of the Mussoorie teacher-training program. In addition, the Dalai Lama’s own public statements from this period suggest that he was himself becoming increasingly focused on inter-sectarian Buddhist unity as crucial for the Tibetan exile community’s long-term survival. Khunu Lama’s ecumenical Buddhist training and scholarship, and his lineage connections across many branches of Tibetan Buddhism seem to have particu-

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larly caught the Dalai Lama’s attention in this context. In public settings in the 1960s, and throughout the following decades, the Dalai Lama has often referred to Khunu Lama as an outstanding example of a non-sectarian teacher and thinker. In November 1963, just a few years after his initial re-meeting with Khunu Lama, the Dalai Lama convened a conference in Dharamsala of more than sixty Buddhist leaders from across the range of Tibetan lineages, to discuss the challenges posed by exile and possible strategies for preserving Tibetan Buddhism. Although Gelukpa delegates were the most numerous, attendees included famous figures from the four major Tibetan Buddhist traditions, including Sakya, Geluk, Kagyu, and Nyingma representatives. Khunu Lama was apparently not an official delegate listed on the conference program, but several people recall him as present at the meetings; a surviving group photograph of the assembly shows someone who may be him partially visible in the back row.51 At this meeting, the Dalai Lama emphasized non-sectarian unity as essential to the survival of Tibetan Buddhist culture in exile. As recalled by the Sakya scholar Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, who had just been appointed general secretary of the Council for Religious Affairs in the new exilic administration and who attended the meeting, the Dalai Lama reminded the assembled lamas that they had a responsibility to teach Buddhism to exiled Tibetan youth. In addition, the Dalai Lama pointed out that there was growing international interest in Tibetan Buddhism. To meet it, Tibetan religious leaders would need to learn new languages and teaching methods. Most important of all was ecumenical cooperation and unity between the Tibetan traditions, since the exiles could ill afford divisions.52 One important outcome of this initial 1963 gathering was planning for a new set of Tibetan diaspora educational institutions, in particular for an institute of Buddhist philosophy, one of the projects the 1963 assembly had agreed upon.53 It was to begin this process that the Dalai Lama commissioned the intensive teacher-training program in Mussoorie in 1965 for sixty prominent Tibetan Buddhist scholars, who were to become “teachers of the teachers,” and this was the program for which the Dalai Lama chose Khunu Lama to act as lead teacher.54 When the Dalai Lama tasked Chogye Trichen Rinpoche with finding Khunu Lama in Varanasi, memorably telling him to look for “an Indian lama who can speak Tibetan,” it was to bring Khunu Lama back to teach at this program. Khunu Lama ultimately taught for about six months at the Mussoorie program, instructing the initial group of Tibetan religious scholars who would subsequently become teachers in the soon-to-be-established new exile schools. Many of the Tibetan scholars who attended the Mussoorie program would go on to play major roles in

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setting up and staffing the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, near Varanasi, which has now become a premier diasporic institution of advanced Tibetan scholarship. Mussoorie teacher-training participants also went on to make important contributions to developing the diasporic system of Tibetan primary and secondary education, as well as other specialized institutions of Buddhist learning and cultural preservation. Although, as we have seen, some students at the Mussoorie program are said to have initially been less than enthusiastic about learning from Khunu Lama, by the end of the six-month program, the participants seem to have come to value their studies with him very much. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche notes that, in an indication of their high esteem for Khunu Lama, a group of scholars who had participated in his classes in the Mussoorie program collected and edited the lecture notes they had taken during his teachings and had them printed as a volume in Dharamsala. Funding for printing the five hundred copies was provided by the newly established Tibetan Department of Religious Affairs.55 In the midst of these urgent first months and years of exile, the Dalai Lama also made time to personally receive teachings from Khunu Lama. These transmissions took place over the course of multiple audiences between the two men, during the 1960s. Thierry Dodin records a humorous story told by a Kinnauri disciple of Khunu Lama’s, probably from the beginning of this period, in which Khunu Lama’s practice of renunciation created a minor obstacle when the Dalai Lama tried to visit him in his spartan room at Tekra Math. According to this account, when the Dalai Lama first arrived, Khunu Lama tried to send him away, because in his empty room there were no chairs, and therefore he could not offer his august guest a proper seat.56 Nevertheless, they must have come to some arrangement, since the Dalai Lama recalled that the first direct teaching he received from Khunu Lama did indeed take place in that very Tekra Math room. This initial teaching was of Khunu Lama’s own Jewel Lamp poems. As the Dalai Lama recalled, “When I first received teachings from Khunu Rinpoche, it was his own composition, Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta, that he bestowed, and I received it in Varanasi, at the Hindu temple. There on the top floor Rinpoche had a tiny room. Rinpoche lived there. I received the Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta, the oral transmission. At that time, many tears came to my eyes, when Rinpoche bestowed the oral transmission. . . . I was really deeply moved.”57 The Dalai Lama also described receiving transmissions from Khunu Lama of eleven major works from among Khenpo Zhenga’s Thirteen Great Texts.58 In the Dalai Lama’s recollection, a particularly striking aspect of Khunu Lama’s teaching of these materials from the Thirteen Great Texts was

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his detailed, precise recollection of materials he had studied so long ago, during his time in Kham: All the teachings I received from him were teachings he learned in Khams, most likely about 40 or 50 years before, but he remembered everything so clearly! Incredible. [Khunu] Rinpoche himself said that a long time ago, when he was reading those texts, he memorized them by reciting them, and he really internalized their meaning . . . So that means that when you read [this kind of Buddhist] text, from the beginning, you must focus well on the meaning, and then really remember. Thus in this way, when Khunu Lama taught me these texts that he learned 30 or 40 years before, he was able to give them to me completely easily, rat-atat-tat—it was astonishing.59

In the Dalai Lama’s recollection, linking all the teachings he received from Khunu Lama was the core topic of bodhicitta. After Khunu Lama had given the Dalai Lama the oral transmission of his own Jewel Lamp verses, the next transmission he offered His Holiness was Śāntideva’s Guide. The Dalai Lama recalled that he was also deeply moved during Khunu Lama’s transmission of this as well. In his public remarks, the Dalai Lama has frequently referred to Khunu Lama’s teachings on the topic of bodhicitta, and specifically to his teachings on the Guide. He has also, and more unusually, made repeated references to Khunu Lama’s own Jewel Lamp. This has included giving teachings commenting directly on Khunu Lama’s text. One of many such occasions occurred when Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s organization, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition, invited the Dalai Lama in 1998 to give an explanation of the Jewel Lamp.60 As Sparham notes, it is unusual for figures like the Dalai Lama to teach or refer to the work of contemporary authors and teachers, making these public references to Khunu Lama and his writings a mark of the Dalai Lama’s regard. Notably, when the first printed edition of the verses was published in 1966, the edition was dedicated to the Dalai Lama’s eldest sister, Tsering Dolma Takla (1919–1964), who had recently passed away; the edition was sponsored by her husband, the Tibetan diplomat and official Phuntsok Tashi Takla (1922–1999). The Dalai Lama himself wrote a short forward for the 1966 edition, in which he praises Khunu Lama as a hidden and nonsectarian bodhisattva, someone who has spent a long time studying and reflecting on Śāntideva’s Guide and its core message of bodhicitta “that cherishes others more than self.”61 As the Dalai Lama’s comments about being “deeply moved” suggest, he apparently came to value Khunu Lama very highly from early in their

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relationship. Reflecting on their encounters, the Dalai Lama commented, “He was an exceptional lama.  .  .  . He was a bodhisattva, an exceptional bodhisattva. If we count his special qualities, they are uncountable.”62 A sense of the intimacy and significance of his relationship with Khunu Lama comes through in a description the Dalai Lama gave of Khunu Lama asking him to bestow several transmissions in return, to solidify their religious connection. One of the transmissions Khunu Lama asked for was a lamrim (lam rim, “Stages of the Path”) text by the Third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso (1543–1588). His Holiness described dreaming about the possessions of Dalai Lama Sonam Gyatso the night before giving this transmission to Khunu Lama, a dream that His Holiness interpreted as a particular indication of the value of his connection to Khunu Lama.63 As we have seen, for many of Khunu Lama’s Tibetan students during the 1960s and 1970s, it was his relationship with the Dalai Lama that drew him to their attention. For other students, it was Khunu Lama’s time teaching in the Mussoorie teacher-training program that introduced him to them; for still others, particularly students originally from Kham, it was their own teachers’ prior relationships with Khunu Lama from the 1920s and 1930s that led them to make contact. However, in the Drikung Khandroma’s case, what apparently led her to seek out Khunu Lama and become his student was actually the experience of reading the Jewel Lamp. According to students who knew her, the Drikung Khandroma was strongly interested in bodhicitta as a young woman in Tibet, well before she came to India.64 When she encountered Khunu Lama’s Jewel Lamp verses in 1970, they apparently made such a strong impression that she and Ani Damcho Zangmo left Tso Pema and traveled to Bodh Gaya to search for him. In order to get a sense of what readers of the Jewel Lamp encounter and why the verses might have affected the Drikung Khandroma and others so strongly, consider the following excerpts. These examples illuminate aspects of Khunu Lama’s teaching at this period, in particular his Indianinflected non-sectarianism and his focus on bodhicitta and its connection to renunciation. Some verses may also be read as hinting at resonances between the broader theme of bodhicitta and the circumstances of 1959–1960, when they were written. Many verses evoke familiar Mahāyāna principles, in particular the famous mind-training (blo sbyong) techniques taught by Atīśa and the Kadampa masters, as well as earlier Indic sources, such as the writings of Śāntideva. Verse 38, for example, states, “Bodhicitta comes from knowing that [all] have served as one’s mother / from recollecting and repaying their kindness, from love / from compassion, and from surpassing intention; / it is the source of happiness and benefit for oneself and others.”65 This is an

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admirably compact summary of key Kadampa mind-training instructions, and likewise of central themes from Śāntideva’s Guide. Like Śāntideva’s Guide, which in many ways seems to serve as inspiration for Khunu Lama’s text (although Khunu Lama’s volume does not follow exactly the same structure as the Guide), verses like this one can be read as directed by the writer toward himself, allowing readers into a private inner reflection and exemplifying Khunu Lama’s own personal approach to cultivating bodhicitta. Indeed, Khunu Lama’s description of having set himself the task of writing a verse each day for one year as a practice of self-cultivation fits with such an interpretation. At the same time, these verses can also be read as a teaching given by Khunu Lama to others, sharing the kinds of instructions and encouragements that he might have given to students face to face. Verse 39 offers a statement of what students describe as Khunu Lama’s own perspective on his personal learning and scholarly accomplishments, set in the implied context of Khunu Lama’s renunciation. In Sparham’s translation the verse reads “A learned monk of settled accomplishments / even in possession of an analytic intellect, / yet without bodhicitta / who would aspire to that?”66 Here we find both a statement of principle and perhaps also some subtle expression of critique. Mere learning or intellectual fame would be pointless—nothing to aspire to—and Khunu Lama in this verse seems to clarify the nature of his own scholarship as animated by bodhicitta rather than by the worldly desire for recognition, from which he, as a renunciant, has turned away. He offers what might be an exhortation to himself, or perhaps a reminder to others, to make sure that the accomplishments and rewards of scholarship don’t get in the way of the “real” goal of learning, as understood in Buddhist terms. One might also think here of the times when Khunu Lama’s own literary scholarship apparently concealed his Buddhist mastery. From that perspective, this verse offers a kind of auto-commentary on his distinctive style of participating in both scholarship and Buddhist practice, clarifying for any reader with doubts just where his own Buddhist priorities are. Other verses likewise evoke Khunu Lama’s own practice of renunciation in various ways, linking the hardships of renunciation with the practice of bodhicitta that (ideally) gives it meaning. For example, according to Verse 55, “When one does something for others’ benefit / the pains of heat and cold, hunger and thirst, and so forth / do not get one down, but rather give one’s spirit a boost/.”67 The activity of renouncing one’s own comfort in order to help others requires a certain kind of mental steadfastness according to this verse, but also brings its own rewards. A similar emphasis on being willing to undergo hardship because of a commitment to bodhicitta recurs in many of the later verses as well. For example, Khunu Lama

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goes on to say in a subsequent stanza, “The fact that the more terrible the conditions / become for the bodhisattva, the more/ they serve as an aid to their goodness / is, I think, due to bodhicitta.”68 Such lines can be read as a gloss of Khunu Lama’s own renunciant practice, even while they also provide an exhortation to others. In the latter stanza, a reader might also hear a further resonance, in this case between the hardships embraced by the true bodhisattva renunciant, and the kinds of hardships faced by people in other kinds of difficult situations, perhaps even related to the news of Tibet that Khunu Lama was

Figure 5. Khunu Lama Teaching, c. 1976. Photo courtesy of Namdol/Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, 1976.

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apparently following at the time, via the Indian newspapers. Another verse, 223, also hints at a connection to current events of the time, perhaps even more strongly. This verse urges, “In the face of harm done to the Buddha’s / precious body, Dharma, or children, or to one’s guru / friends, or family, cleave to moderating bodhicitta / and buckle on the armor of patience.”69 One could read Khunu Lama’s stanza here as responding to the specific circumstances of crisis in Tibet that Angrup also evokes in his description of this time period in the namtar. Even while Khunu Lama’s verse explicitly addresses well-known Mahāyāna themes, there is an echo of the intense concerns and emotions of the time, folded into the recurring reminder to the reader (whether that reader is Khunu Lama himself or other readerdisciples) to find relief by turning to the practice of bodhicitta. At the same time, a recurring theme in the Jewel Lamp is the joy (dga’ ba) and bliss (bde ba) of bodhicitta. To be sure, many verses do address the theme of strenuous effort, and the difficulties the bodhisattva must face. Yet over and over again, the verses also assert bodhicitta’s joys, delights, and healing comforts. With metaphors drawn from nature, and from the Sanskrit and Tibetan kāvyā poetic repertoire, Khunu Lama’s verses offer not only an exhortation to practice patience in the face of pain or calamity, but also a counterpoint to the theme of hardship. Khunu Lama says at one point, “The splendour of the bliss of bodhicitta eclipses . . . the worldly happiness of a cakravartin emperor.”70 In this Indic Buddhist image of the “wheel-turning” universal monarch, readers encounter an image of bodhicitta as a kind of power, protection, and abundance. Perhaps in part because these verses simultaneously can be read as interior reflections in the direct personal voice of an individual encouraging himself in his own intensive efforts, and yet can also be read as the exhortations of a teacher who takes each reader as a potential student, the Jewel Lamp has found a wide readership, both in geographic Tibet, and in diasporic Tibetan and Himalayan communities. It remains in print in multiple woodblock print and book format editions as of this writing, and has attracted the commentaries of contemporary writers.71 Moreover, even for people who have not actually read the Jewel Lamp, the fact that Khunu Lama spent a year composing a verse on bodhicitta each day forms part of his popular reputation, contributing to the perception of him as a figure who embodies the non-sectarian and compassionate qualities of Śāntideva. Thus both the individual verses of the Jewel Lamp and the broader reputation of the Jewel Lamp as a work on bodhicitta praised by the Dalai Lama himself play an important role in how people continue to remember Khunu Lama’s role as an ecumenical teacher and lineage connector in the challenging decades after 1959.

[ Ch a pter 5 ]

“With such devotion that tears cascade from your eyes”: Renunciation, Separation, and Guru Devotion

The key to invoking the blessings is to give rise to devotion that isn’t merely lip service, but is inspired by disenchantment and renunciation. It should be felt from the depths of one’s heart, from the marrow of one’s bones. Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Tayé 2020

Introduction The two previous chapters have examined stories about Khunu Lama’s life from a pair of contrasting yet complementary perspectives. Chapter 3 suggested that an important strand in stories about Khunu Lama is the recurring image of him as a hidden yogin, a renunciant who has relinquished the pursuit of fame to such an extent that he has become “hard to find.” Conversely, chapter 4 considered Khunu Lama as a connective figure, whose lineage relationships and personal connections bridge the pre- and post1959 periods, and whose seminal work on bodhicitta speaks to Buddhist practitioners across geographic and sectarian boundaries. As we have seen, renunciation as Khunu Lama is remembered as practicing it has complex consequences for his relationships with students. Commentators celebrate Khunu Lama’s hiddenness as an expression of his chatralwa style of renunciation. His frequent travels and departures, the unconventional places where he lived, even his practice of being locked into his room from the outside—former students interpret all these as disengagements from fame as well as comfort, and as strategies for finding quiet and time to pursue meditative practice. Hiddenness is moreover one 135

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of the qualities that connects Khunu Lama to Śāntideva, that exemplar and exponent of the bodhisattva ideal. Yet many narrators ask whether Khunu Lama’s hiddenness complicated his role as a Buddhist teacher and raise the question of whether, or how much, he transmitted the Buddhist initiations and teachings he himself received. Such questions suggest a tension between two ideals: the ideal of renunciatory self-concealment and the ideal of unbroken, intimate, teacher-student lineage transmission. Part of parsing Khunu Lama’s legacy, or lack of legacy, in Tibet and the Himalayan region involves exploring this tension. In this chapter, I turn to the theme of devotion, and show how the conceptual and affective repertoires of devotional practice work in tandem with the imaginary of renunciation. Devotional practices offer methods for affectively overcoming separations between students and teachers, including the separations that can result from renunciation itself. At the same time, devotional practices draw energy and inspiration precisely from the affective poignancy of such separations. This affective poignancy is expressed in a vocabulary of longing, described as devotion’s affective crux. Such longing presumes—indeed, requires—various forms of separation, in order to create the distance on which longing thrives. Thus the separations produced by renunciation (and by various forms of impermanence and circumstance) emerge as simultaneously painful, challenging to lineage connection, and also as essential for the indispensable practice of guru devotion. The first section of this chapter explores some of the ways that Khunu Lama’s renunciation is remembered as inflecting both student devotion toward him and his receipt of that devotion, through examining examples drawn from three different contexts: a public group teaching near the end of his life; his return to teach in his home region of Kinnaur in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and his relationship with the Drikung Khandroma. Accounts of the public Dzogchen teaching that Khunu Lama gave at Tso Pema in 1976, one of the few times when he taught to a large assembly, offer a rare glimpse of Khunu Lama in the role of guru in a formal ritual sense, interacting with a group of disciples. Students who attended this 1976 teaching recall Khunu Lama’s teaching style and relationship to devotional ritual at that time as shaped by his renunciation. In addition, during the 1976 Tso Pema teaching Khunu Lama’s students prevailed on him to compose a supplication prayer (gsol ‘debs) to himself, to be recited by the students. This is the sole self-authored supplication prayer to Khunu Lama that has thus far come to light. The dynamics of devotion and renunciation in this supplication prayer provide an instructive comparison to an earlier episode in Khunu Lama’s teaching career in the 1940s, when he returned to his homeland of Kinnaur

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and remained there giving Buddhist teachings for nearly a decade. This is a period in which he is remembered as being highly responsive to both the needs and the devotion of his disciples, even while narrators also describe him as a renunciant without ordinary attachments to the family and friends of his childhood home. By contrast, stories about Khunu Lama’s relationship with the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, who became Khunu Lama’s attendant and close disciple for the last seven years of his life, reflect themes of devotion and separation in the context of a one-to-one teacherstudent relationship. Foremost among Khunu Lama’s students though the Drikung Khandroma seems to have been in many ways, stories about their relationship nevertheless highlight Khunu Lama’s recurring attempts to send her away or to withdraw from her. Specifically, it seems that the presence of an attendant didn’t suit Khunu Lama’s chatralwa mode of renunciation, and his relationship with her, like his relationship a decade earlier with Baling Lama, was shaped by the parameters of his renunciation. These dynamics of absence and separation within Khunu Lama’s relationship with the Drikung Khandroma suggest an interplay of teacherly absence and devotional connection. With all of these examples in mind, I return in the final section of this chapter to the idea that separation itself has a pivotal role to play in the affective imaginary of guru devotion, through the experience of longing. From this perspective, Khunu Lama’s own absences and hiddenness can in turn be viewed as an essential dimension of his teaching and transmission activity, creating opportunities for his disciples’ longing devotion that continue to function even after his death.

Teaching at Tso Pema In 1976, the last year of his life, Khunu Lama was invited to give Dzogchen teachings in the small north Indian town of Rewalsar, or Tso Pema (“Lotus Lake”), in present-day Himachal Pradesh, where the Drikung Khandroma, the young Ontul Rinpoche, and their companions had lived after fleeing Tibet in 1959.1 Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma came to live in Tso Pema for much of 1976, and many of Khunu Lama’s students spent significant time with them there. The 1976 teaching in Tso Pema turned out to be one of the largest Buddhist teachings Khunu Lama gave during his lifetime, and certainly the largest Dzogchen teaching that he gave. In the words of Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, who attended, “[Khunu Lama] gave really extensive teachings there. . . . There were a great number of students.”2 Many of his long-standing students seem to have traveled to Tso Pema for the occasion, in addition to those who had already gathered near him at the sacred lake.

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At these teachings, the assembled students asked Khunu Lama to compose a solteb (Skt. adhyeṣaṇa; Tib. gsol ‘debs). A solteb is a supplication prayer to a particular teacher, often recited as part of communal rituals and incorporated into individual practices of guru devotion. Solteb are among the most common kinds of Tibetan Buddhist prayers directed at teachers. They generally recount, in verse form, the qualities and accomplishments of the person to whom they are addressed, often through exalted language and intensely worded expressions of emotion and soteriological aspiration. Solteb can also convey biographical information about their subjects, as well as giving their subjects’ names (and often incorporating their names into the verses).3 It is a mark of veneration that Khunu Lama’s students asked him to compose a solteb, and also notable that this did not happen until the year before his death, although it is difficult to know if anyone asked him to write one before that time. As Janet Gyatso has noted, Tibetan life-writing genres like namtar entangle self-effacement, authorial ego, and student input in ways differing from Euro-American conventions of biography and autobiography. Buddhist teachings on selflessness often combine with Tibetan and Himalayan etiquettes of modesty and humility to discourage the appearance of selfaggrandizement in autobiographical writing or oral storytelling. Even so, Tibetan authors sometimes write in bold declarative style about their own accomplishments, particularly in the context of claiming legitimacy for their religious revelations or, by extension, for their lineages.4 Devotional genres like solteb are composed at the intersection of these dynamics. While solteb are sometimes written by the students or colleagues of a given teacher, they are sometimes written by the very person to whom they will later be recited. Indeed, student requests to a particular teacher to compose a solteb arguably constitute a form of devotional practice in and of themselves, a tacit communication that the students are focusing their devotion on this teacher. It can require multiple requests for a teacher to compose a solteb, because of widespread conventions and practices of modesty (something by no means unique to Khunu Lama), so that students can sometimes be in the position of supplicating the teacher to compose a supplication. Since disciples will use them for devotional practice, solteb are written in a second-person voice, from the disciple’s perspective. Thus, even teachers who ordinarily eschew public claims about their own Buddhist mastery may write a solteb identifying themselves explicitly as enlightened beings, or praising themselves as bestowers of blessings. For the students who will be reciting the prayer in the future, these are appropriate devotional atti-

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tudes, even if the person writing the solteb might not normally claim such attributes. To take one example, the nineteenth-century yogic virtuoso Togden Shakya Shri composed a solteb for his students to use in their Dzogchen practice. (Readers will recall that Khunu Lama entered the lineage of Togden Shakya Shri as a teenager in Kinnaur, when Shakya Shri’s disciple Sonam Gyaltsen became one of his important early teachers.) The colophon to Shakya Shri’s solteb explains that Shakya Shri wrote it in response to the “repeated” ( yang yang) requests of a disciple. This note frames the solteb’s composition as a compassionate act, rather than a self-aggrandizing one, and contextualizes the devotional language of the prayer. An excerpt conveys the devotional tone: Embodiment of all sources of refuge, Guru of unrepayable kindness, Gracious root guru, care for me! O guru, care for me! With the view of the Great Perfection beyond the mind, Simultaneously merging with space and awareness, You are beyond meditation and free from deliberate activity: Gracious root guru, Yogi of the sky-like Great Perfection, Shakya Shri, care for me! I pray to you from the depths of my heart! Look on me with your eyes of wisdom!5

Khunu Lama’s solteb reads somewhat differently. Its words are comparatively simple. The first two stanzas of the prayer walk the reader briskly, even telegraphically, through highlights of Khunu Lama’s studies of Buddhism and other fields. These first two verses only give glancing mention to Khunu Lama’s own resulting accomplishments. While the repeated fourthline refrain in each verse uses the verb “supplicate” or “pray” (gsol ba ‘debs), there is little other devotional language. For example, there are no direct requests for blessing, no equations of Khunu Lama with an enlightened being, and no sections of the prayer that integrate directly into other kinds of ritual or guru yoga practice. Devotedly taking them as the crown ornaments of your body, speech and mind, you relied upon many authentic masters, who fully entrusted [you] with the glorious essence of the Buddha’s stainless teachings, At your feet, O Tenzin Gyaltsen, I pray (gsol ba ‘debs).

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[You embody] the glory of the fields of knowledge, including grammar and logic, The holy texts which clearly teach the three trainings [of the Buddhist path] And the scriptural collections of the Vidyādhāras. At your feet, O Tenzin Gyaltsen, I pray.6

The third verse lists six major systems of esoteric Buddhist practice in which Khunu Lama says he engaged (the wording implies that this may only be a partial list): Through continuous practice, your sublime wisdom-vessel overflowed With the vital essence of the amazing Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, Madhyamaka, Lamdre, Zhijey, and Kālacakra. At your feet, O Tenzin Gyaltsen, I pray.7

Despite the brevity with which Khunu Lama enumerates it, this list of Buddhist meditational systems is remarkable. These are virtually all the main Tibetan Buddhist esoteric traditions, each one itself a complex system of meditation instructions, yogic techniques, philosophical analyses, textual collections and commentaries, and in some cases (e.g., the Kālacakra tantric system), medical and astrological literatures. To list all of them in this way—and notably without categorizing them in sectarian terms—is both a strikingly ecumenical act and arguably a powerful, though understated, claim about the breadth of Khunu Lama’s learning and Buddhist activity. Yet Khunu Lama does not elaborate on this list or describe in detail the results of his practices. The line, “Through continuous practice, your sublime wisdom-vessel overflowed / With the vital essence” ( gdams pa’i bcud / rtag sbyor gus pa’i blo gros yol gor ‘khyil) is as close as he comes to making any direct statement about his own Buddhist accomplishments. The relatively spare language and telegraphic tone of these lines are in marked contrast to the kind of grandly devotional phrasing that we find in a solteb such as the one by Shakya Shri (and are notably less effusive than the devotional tone of the namtar-solteb published a decade after Khunu Lama’s death by his biographer and student, K. Angrup, stanzas from which form the frontispiece of this book).8 One way to understand this brevity and understatement of Khunu Lama’s solteb is that it expresses a kind of renunciant approach to the solteb genre. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok was one of the students present at the Tso Pema Dzogchen teachings when Khunu Lama composed this solteb,

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and his descriptions reinforce such an interpretation. He described how Khunu Lama had been persuaded to compose the solteb, somewhat against his will: “Many people requested him to compose a solteb, and he was very reluctant. And finally, he wrote one.” This solteb prayer then became part of the daily ritual framework for the Tso Pema teachings, a standard practice at such events. Yet Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok noted that even so, Khunu Lama reminded the assembly of students at Tso Pema that he did not like this kind of attention. “Every day, at the beginning of the teaching, we used to say that solteb. And on the first day I think he gave the lung [oral transmission] of the solteb, and he gave a brief explanation of how he was forced to write it! ” Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok recalled Khunu Lama commenting, after transmitting the solteb to the assembled students, that “there’s no exaggeration at all in those lines, but just exactly what he did. . . . It’s a very plain simple telling of what he did.” Khunu Lama’s remembered words here reframe the devotional-prayer genre as a “plain, simple telling of what he did,” quite a contrast in tone from the devotional register of most solteb. Notably though, Khunu Lama’s solteb’s “renunciant” qualities are not necessarily a barrier to student appreciation or use of the prayer in devotional practice. In Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s estimation, this “plain” solteb is “really of course very humble, but at the same time beautiful.  .  .  . So meaningful.  .  .  . a real, small beautiful thing.” Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok added, “I used to know it by heart. If I can start I can go on to the end.” Similarly, when I visited Ani Damcho Zangmo, the disciple and attendant of the Drikung Khandroma and Khunu Lama, she gave me a one-page Tibetan woodblock print version of the solteb. She recommended that I recite it, commenting that after years of reciting it daily herself she knew it by heart.9 It was in the context of transmitting his solteb at the Tso Pema teachings that Khunu Lama made some of the comments about his own renunciatory attitude that we encountered in chapter 3. For example, Tso Pema was where Khunu Lama told the assembled community not to compare him to other lamas. As Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok described it, “Even at the teaching time, [Khunu Lama] was saying that, ‘I have nobody, I am nobody, I want nothing. . . . So don’t compare me with any other lama.’ Because all of the great lamas, . . . they have so many great qualities at the same time, or the great karma to be able to do many things. Like the Dalai Lama of course. But for himself, he is just one, by himself.” Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok related this renunciatory attitude to Khunu Lama’s practice of refusing or re-gifting monetary offerings during the Tso Pema teachings, explaining that each day, the assembled group would make money offerings to Khunu Lama, but Khunu Lama would not accept these donations

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for himself. Instead, each day, Khunu Lama would redistribute the money as a donation back to the assembly of students. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok linked Khunu Lama’s refusal of these money offerings to his broader disregard for many of the ritual conventions that are normally part of this kind of Dzogchen teaching, a point that Chris Fynn, who also attended the 1976 Tso Pema teachings, made as well. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok described Khunu Lama as having “already risen above those” ritual conventions; in his view, Khunu Lama’s way of teaching Dzogchen was distinctive. As he put it, “He was a great Dzogchen master and Dzogchen teacher. But his way of teaching Dzogchen . . . might have differed from others.” In particular, Wherever there’s usually a need for many ceremonies, there’s not much ceremony in him. And especially, for example, there is a point in the teaching when you are introducing the real nature of the subtle mind. At that point, it was traditional in Tibet to have a lot of ceremonial mandala offerings using precious materials, to show the preciousness of the teaching. In particular, there’s a tradition of making an offering of real gold at that point. So the people at that time [in Tso Pema] tried to do some of those ceremonial offerings, but then Khunu Rinpoche disliked that, . . . saying that there’s no such need, and that focusing the mind on the teaching was more important than performing the ceremony.

According to Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok, this resistance to the ceremonial gold mandala offerings was not simply an aspect of Khunu Lama’s material renunciation. Rather, it was also an expression of his desire for those attending the teaching to, in Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s words, “get the meaning,” rather than simply go through the ritual. “It’s clear how [Khunu Lama] was emphasizing that it is so important to know [the real meaning] and make sure that one got the real understanding. Otherwise, if it’s just traditional, . . . then what real difference is made in the minds of those disciples will be hard to say.”10 In this description, it may seem at first glance that we see Khunu Lama making a dramatic break with the past when he dismisses ceremony to focus on students’ “real understanding,” beyond what is “just traditional.” Yet this description also echoes long-standing, even “traditional,” Tibetan Buddhist tropes. Tibetan literature contains many portrayals of Buddhist teachers who display and transmit enlightened understanding by radically rejecting ritual convention. Such unconventionality often functions as a mark of authenticity, as is often the case in narratives of lineage figures from the past, such as Milarepa and the early Kadampa masters. Influen-

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tial nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dzogchen teachers in the lineages that Khunu Lama himself transmitted at Tso Pema are likewise very much remembered in this way. Stories about them show them rejecting convention, sometimes in startling fashion, in order to transmit the “essence” of the tradition. For example, popular accounts of the late nineteenth-century Dzogchen teacher and unpredictable yogic master Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje (1800– 1866) describe how he introduced the true nature of mind to the revered eastern Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author Dza Patrul Rinpoche, (the famed teacher of Khenpo Zhenga’s teacher, among many others.) Do Khyentse is described as physically dragging Patrul out of his tent one day, beating him, and throwing him on the ground. Afterward, narrators recount, Patrul had an experience of “clear and total realization like a rising sun.” As a result, Patrul venerated Do Khyentse as one of his root gurus, taking the epithet that Do Khyentse had shouted at him, “Old Dog,” as his esoteric Buddhist name.11 Khunu Lama’s focus on “real understanding,” rather than what is “just traditional,” (in Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s description), can be read in part within this narrative context. At Tso Pema, Khunu Lama did nothing as dramatic as Do Khyentse dragging Patrul out of his tent. Nevertheless, Khunu Lama’s bracketing of ceremony in favor of “real understanding” takes on meaning for his students within this broader tradition, where authentic transmission transcends convention and ritual. At the same time, Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s description implicitly connects Khunu Lama’s unconventionality to the circumstances of the exile situation. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok contrasts Khunu Lama’s renunciant disregard for ritual at Tso Pema with what was “traditional in Tibet.” Tibet appears here as the locus of the teaching tradition, the source for the transmissions Khunu Lama gave. Although Tso Pema is itself a Tibetan Buddhist sacred landscape, one linked to Dzogchen’s origins through its connection to Padmasambhava, it is located in India. For Tibetan refugee attendees at Khunu Lama’s teachings, Tso Pema was at least in one sense, far from home. Khunu Lama’s Tso Pema audience was, moreover, a different kind of audience in many ways, meeting under different circumstances, than gatherings of Tibetan Dzogchen practitioners in Tibet would have been a generation earlier. Attendees were a mix of Tibetan refugees and people from Himalayan regions culturally linked to Tibet but outside it, as well as several Western students. These Tso Pema teachings thus involved multiple elements of tradition and unfamiliarity, convention and the nonconventional. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s recollection of Khunu Lama’s teaching style as distinctive yet meaningful for those attending hint that Khunu Lama’s disregard for the usual ceremonies reflected or transposed

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the unwelcome novelties of the exile situation into an experience of efficacious transmission. Returning to the question of teacher-student separations imposed by Khunu Lama’s renunciation, we can note that, taken together, stories about the Tso Pema teachings and the composition of the solteb suggest that Khunu Lama did not completely slip away from the role of guru in relation to students, although they do show him apparently reworking a number of guru conventions. Stories about him giving away the money offerings, discouraging the mandala offerings, and expressing reluctance about composing a solteb centered on himself suggest an ambivalence about certain aspects of the guru role. Such an ambivalence might additionally help to explain the kinds of teachings Khunu Lama apparently did not give, according to student recollections. In particular, it seems he did not give tantric empowerments (Skt. abhiṣeka; Tib. dbang). Chris Fynn commented in reference to Khunu Lama and tantric empowerments that “he had them all, but he never gave them.” Some of this reluctance to give empowerments seems connected to Khunu Lama’s resistance to the ritual attention directed at the guru in the attendant ceremonies.12 In this context it is worth noting that tantric empowerments are often very popular events and can involve multi-day gatherings, sometimes with hundreds of people. Some students speculated that the fact that Khunu Lama seems not to have given such empowerments may be an additional reason why he is less well-known. For many narrators, such recollections, like Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s interpretation of the solteb, are connected to broader ways of remembering Khunu Lama as a figure embodying simplicity—a simplicity understood as indicating authenticity. The Nyingma scholar Tulku Thondup, for instance, directly linked Khunu Lama’s renunciant self-presentation and his teaching style in these terms: “Some scholars use words to make things harder to understand, but [Khunu Lama] made very profound meanings clear and simple. When you look at him, he was the image of a simple person, and when he taught, it was [in] simple plain words. This helps to give you some understanding of authenticity. Some teachers try to create some impressive image—that wasn’t him at all. He created an atmosphere of authenticity.”13 In a related vein, Chris Fynn hypothesized that another reason why Khunu Lama was less well known as a teacher and appeared to reach relatively few students had to do with the kind of students he chose. Specifically, Fynn recalled that Khunu Lama “liked to teach people who went into retreat.” That is to say, Khunu Lama chose students who would themselves be likely to leave to pursue Buddhist practice. “That was the thing with

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most of his students; . . . people didn’t stick around for that long, because after they got teachings for a while, he would tell them to go off and go into retreat. So, they would just sort of disappear.”14 In this description of the “disappearing students” of a disappearing teacher, Khunu Lama seems almost to be transmitting the ideal of hidden chatralwa practice itself. Khunu Lama’s activities as a teacher, like other aspects of his “beggar’s life,” here prompt students toward their own separations and departures. In addition, the modesty and renunciation of fame that students associate with Khunu Lama’s hidden quality seem to lead him here to prefer students who themselves not only demonstrate their own seriousness of purpose by going into retreat, but also make clear their own modesty or hiddenness. When we turn in a moment to Khunu Lama’s main female disciple, the Drikung Khandroma, this dynamic of both teacher and student being hidden renunciants becomes even more visible.

Return to Khunu Yet there was at least one instance when a group of disciples persuaded Khunu Lama to stay and teach at great length in one region; likewise, there is one region in particular where Khunu Lama seems to have had many students and where he remains very well known. This is his home region of Kinnaur. After his secret home departure in 1914 and his years of traveling, Khunu Lama returned to Kinnaur, probably during the 1940s. At the request of relatives and neighbors, he remained there for some eight years, teaching extensively. During this period of his life, he influenced a significant cohort of Kinnauri students, women in particular, who remain dedicated to his memory many decades later. It is mainly people from Kinnaur, and from adjacent Indian Himalayan regions like Lahaul, Ladakh, and Spiti, who remember this period of Khunu Lama’s life and teaching career. For example, Angrup, who is himself from Lahaul, covers these events in detail in the namtar. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche’s namtar account, which closely follows Angrup’s chronology, mentions Khunu Lama’s teaching in Kinnaur as well, although Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche describes Khunu Lama as spending only “a few years” in Kinnaur, rather than the eight years that Angrup mentions. By contrast, as the historian Tashi Tsering Josayma has pointed out, it is rare to find mention of these years in stories about Khunu Lama written or narrated by people from geographic Tibet.15 The Dalai Lama is one of the few exceptions. Although he raised the question of whether Khunu Lama left any legacy among Tibetans, he followed these remarks by noting that Khunu Lama did have considerable influence among Himalayan people as

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a result of his extensive teaching in Himalayan regions, something which narrators with ties to the region strongly echo.16 In his namtar presentation, Angrup introduces Khunu Lama’s return to Kinnaur in a very particular way. Before describing Khunu Lama’s return, Angrup first highlights the poignancy of Khunu Lama’s departure and absence in a manner reminiscent of his presentation of Khunu Lama’s initial decision to leave home as a youth. In doing so, he once again invokes the example of the Kadampa masters: As for this Lama Rinpoche [Khunu Lama], who practiced exactly like the Kadampa spiritual teachers of the past, he had turned his back on and abandoned his homeland in order to practice the Dharma very purely. He did so because of having felt that, if he did not separate from his father and mother and his close relations even while they were still alive, he would not be able to act properly, in terms of knowing how to discern and avoid worldly bustle and distraction. He thus took up the Dharma as his portion. He went to Tibet, first to U-Tsang [central Tibet], and then gradually set out for the Kham area.

Yet Angrup hints at the poignancy of Khunu Lama’s long sojourn away from home, when in the next sentence he goes on to note that during the nearly twenty-three years that elapsed before Khunu Lama’s subsequent return to Kinnaur, both his parents, ”who were so very kind”; his maternal uncle and first Buddhist teacher, Rasvir Das; and his sister had all passed away.17 Angrup next acknowledges Khunu Lama’s own feelings of family connection as the initial reason for his return to Kinnaur: Nevertheless, although they [his parents, uncle and sister] were no longer living, due to the power of familiarity from the predispositions of many previous lifetimes, he [Khunu Rinpoche] wished to see the house and final resting place of his parents, whose kindness outshone all others. Motivated by the intention to bring condolences to his kin and relations, he briefly turned his steps toward his homeland of Kinnaur. He met his relatives and friends face to face, and because of that, brief happiness and pleasure arose. However, households of lay people concerned with worldly life become obstacles to learning, reflection and meditation; and [thus] he did not extend his stay at his cherished home.18

By juxtaposing the pleasures of returning home with a renewed statement of the importance of leaving household life behind, Angrup emphasizes the rhetorical ideal of renunciation he introduced earlier in the namtar, when

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he described Khunu Lama’s first departure as a young man. Angrup says that at this point Khunu Lama was ready to leave Kinnaur to travel to Varanasi, where his Sanskrit studies and secluded retreat at Tekra Math awaited him. But his brothers and other relatives and neighbors prevailed on him to stay, by appealing to him in his role as Buddhist lama and placing themselves in the role of his disciples: After having traveled through his homeland, he developed the aspiration to go quickly to Varanasi, but he was surrounded by his friends and relatives, full of attachment. His kind (drin che ba) monastic and lay friends and acquaintances with great devotion all begged him in person over and over again by all means to give teachings that would benefit their minds.19

At this point, in Angrup’s telling, the tension between Khunu Lama’s renunciatory desire to depart, and his relatives’ and neighbors’ desire for him to stay is resolved by Khunu Lama’s “kindness.” Khunu Lama is kind (bka’ drin), but in a different way from his “kind” relatives, even though the same word is used. He cares for his relatives as their teacher, in the way they request, deferring his plans to go to Varanasi. But he does so, according to Angrup, without the attachment that motivates his kin when they ask him to stay: [Because] this lord [Khunu Lama] was diligent in the practice of a Bodhisattva who is an uncultivated friend of sentient beings, a spiritual child of the Buddhas, there was no opportunity for attachment and craving as a result of special [feelings] for his homeland, siblings and relations and so forth. However, for the sake of fulfilling the wishes of disciples in his homeland, both ordained and lay people, male and female, . . . he kindly nurtured them. He gave the complete teachings and transmissions for all the stages of the path of the three different levels of practitioner to many ordained and lay people, . . . Especially [he taught] the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, written by the noble Śāntideva, in accordance with the dispositions and inclinations of his disciples. Gradually, his Dharma-related work spread far and wide. Accordingly, it eventually turned out to be necessary for him to stay for about eight years in Khunu itself, the land of his birth.20

In light of how long Khunu Lama eventually stayed in Kinnaur, one might recall Angrup’s initial invocation of renunciation at the start of this section. Angrup reminds readers of the importance of leaving home at precisely the moment when Khunu Lama is negotiating intersections of the

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chatralwa ideal with the reality of ongoing communal and familial connection. Angrup tacitly acknowledges that from one perspective, Khunu Lama’s years of teaching in Kinnaur appear to involve a tension with the home-leaving aspects of his renunciation. Yet, from the point of view of Kinnauri disciples, as Angrup also notes, Khunu Lama’s time in Kinnaur is not a divergence from a practice of renunciation, but rather a major and vital expression of his bodhisattva role as teacher and guru. For Kinnauri disciples, the “kindness” of Khunu Lama in staying so long in Kinnaur is highly concrete, and Kinnauri people remember his teaching there as a central act of his religious biography. Kinnauri oral sources, as well as subsequent passages in Angrup’s namtar, explain that Khunu Lama was motivated to bring Buddhist education to the Himalayan region as a whole, and to Kinnaur specifically, in part because Buddhist resources there were comparatively so limited.21 Kinnauri accounts especially emphasize this dimension of Khunu Lama’s “kindness:” he was not simply kind due to filial obligation or extensive requests, but in response to what narrators recall as an acutely felt need. Kinnauri narrators note that Khunu Lama’s activities continue to resonate into the present. For example, Khunu Lama ordained many Kinnauris as monastics, particularly women. Many of these monastics went on to teach others in Kinnaur, and several teaching lineages connected to Khunu Lama, in particular of religious women, flourish there now.22 Khunu Lama also supported a project to bring a full edition of the Tibetan canon (Tib. bka’ ‘gyur and bstan ‘gyur) from Tibet to the village of Ribba in Kinnaur, a significant event memorialized in song traditions of Kinnauri nuns.23 He composed a number of short works on Buddhist topics specifically for use in Kinnaur, including works on basic Buddhist concepts, on preliminary practices for the Mahāmudrā meditational system, and on fundamentals of Tibetan grammar and writing. Several of these compositions remain in circulation, both as part of Kinnauri oral song traditions and in the form of brief Tibetan/Hindi bilingual pamphlets.24 Thus, we find Khunu Lama accepting the demands placed on him by the devotion of at least one set of disciples. These were the disciples of his home region, where Buddhist resources were otherwise limited, especially for women, and where the ties of family and communal obligation and affection were particularly strong. As we will see in chapter 6, Kinnauri disciples continued to see themselves as strongly connected to Khunu Lama even after he died. In the present day, many Kinnauri sponsors and monastics remain connected with Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima.25 At the same time, as we have seen, both Tibetan and Himalayan oral and textual accounts of Khunu Lama’s activities as student and teacher

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repeatedly return to the rhetoric of renunciation. Many accounts highlight themes of hiddenness, departure, and separation, even within the larger context of describing Khunu Lama’s active presence as a Buddhist teacher and his disciples’ devotion to him. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche, for instance, evokes Khunu Lama’s renunciatory self-concealment and separation in the midst of a paragraph describing Khunu Lama’s special care for his humblest students. Drawing on Tibetan literary motifs of renunciation, Lamchen Gyalpo describes how Khunu Lama “hid all of his qualities like a butter lamp inside a vase,” and “[l]ike a child of the mountains without enemies or friends, like a solitary and companion-less wild animal wearing the clothing of mist, . . . strove in unfixed isolation.”26 In phrases such as these, audiences see activities of teacherly generosity entwine with the rhetoric and practice of renunciation.

“She has no connection with me” “The Drikung Khandro was always his attendant”—so Khenpo Sonam Topgyal put it, describing what it was like to visit Khunu Lama in Bodh Gaya in the 1970s.27 Many people who met Khunu Lama during this period recall the Drikung Khandroma as a tall, thin woman with long, uncut hair. (Nuns in the Drikung tradition often take a retreat vow to leave their hair uncut, a vow that the Drikung Khandroma seems to have observed throughout her life.)28 Students remember that she lived not in a room of her own but in the space under the stairway at the Bodh Gaya Tibetan temple, where Khunu Lama had his small room.29 The Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin figures in many accounts of Khunu Lama’s final ten years in India and Nepal, as the person who begged or shopped for his food, prepared it, washed his clothes and generally cared for him. She also was the person who assisted him in his distinctive practice of being locked into his room from the outside. It was the Drikung Khandroma who was in charge of the key, she who locked him in, and she who returned many hours later to open the door. As Pema Wangyal Rinpoche recalled, “She is really, really very, very devoted; devoted to Khunu Rinpoche. She is the one who has the key from outside.” Although she had been a Dzogchen practitioner since childhood and, according to Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen, received important teachings from Khunu Lama on Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā, the Drikung Khandroma reportedly first became interested in Khunu Lama because of her interest in bodhicitta. Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen described how the Drikung Khandroma’s guru during her youth in Tibet had directed her to seek out a teacher to guide her in bodhicitta and how, many years later, this

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instruction led her to Khunu Lama.30 More directly, inspiration to meet him seems to have come while she was living at Tso Pema in the 1960s, when she read a copy of Khunu Lama’s Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta. The poems convinced her that he was the teacher of bodhicitta she needed to meet. Her own attendant of many decades, the Tibetan nun Ani Damcho Zangmo, explained that Khunu Lama ultimately became the Drikung Khandroma’s most important guru of the final decade of her life.31 Manshardt describes how at first, the Drikung Khandroma contacted students of hers who knew Khunu Lama, who was then still living in Varanasi at Tekra Math. At her request, Khunu Lama sent her a four-line verse responding to her questions on bodhicitta. But this verse only confirmed her sense that she needed to meet him directly. When she heard he had gone to Bodh Gaya, she traveled there to find him.32 According to an interview Manshardt conducted with one of her nun disciples, when the Drikung Khandroma “first met Khunu Lama, he is supposed to have said immediately, without having seen her ever before: “You are Drikung Khandro, right?”33 After giving her the teachings she requested in Bodh Gaya, Khunu Lama told her to leave, saying that he did not need an attendant. But the Drikung Khandroma insisted on remaining with him, virtually without interruption, for the next seven years, until his death. She acted as his attendant and often traveled with him; she followed him to Nepal in 1973 and returned with him to India in 1976. Several students speculated that her neglect of her health during these years contributed to her own death from tuberculosis in 1979. She was at Khunu Lama’s side when he died in Lahaul in 1977 and, as chapter 6 describes, played an important role in events after his death. Yet people who encountered Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma during the years they lived together describe Khunu Lama’s resistance to having any attendant at all, and thus his resistance to her presence. For example, Sakya scholars whom David Jackson has interviewed recall this dynamic playing out during Khunu Lama’s visit to Lumbini in 1975: “At his arrival [in Lumbini], Khunu Lama said, ‘Please lend me lodgings for a few days. If I don’t like it here, I’ll leave. And one more thing: Don’t listen to her [the Drikung Khandroma]. She is very troublesome and has no connection with me. She just follows me around and makes trouble for others.”34 One of the most detailed narrators of the Drikung Khandroma’s relationship with Khunu Lama and of events of her life in general is Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche. He describes the Drikung Khandroma’s interactions with Khunu Lama as being specifically marked by Khunu Lama’s renunciation, in ways that help to illuminate stories like the one above, in which Khunu Lama calls her “troublesome” or says “she has no connection with

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me.” Reflecting on the Drikung Khandroma’s relationship with Khunu Lama, Ontul Rinpoche explained to Manshardt that Khunu Lama had refused student attempts to serve as his attendant until the very end of his life: “Even before, many of his students had offered to be his attendant, but in his modesty he had refused all of them. Only when he was old, weak, and sick did he consent that others would support and take care of him. . . . Before Drikung Khandro came to him, Khunu Rinpoche was like a chatralwa, a sadhu who didn’t need anything. He was alone on his travels, and nobody was allowed to serve him. Khunu Rinpoche did not need anybody.”35 Manshardt describes Ontul Rinpoche as suggesting here that it was Khunu Lama’s chatralwa renunciation that conflicted with having an attendant. When he appeared to reject or criticize the Drikung Khandroma’s help, this was an expression of his “modesty,” and his reluctance to be treated as special. Khunu Lama’s rejection of the Drikung Khandroma’s help is also, in Ontul Rinpoche’s account, an expression of his commitment to renouncing any attachments to his own comfort. Thus, only at the very end of his life, when he was quite frail and ill, was anyone able to prevail on him to accept help. Even then, although he accepted the Drikung Khandroma’s assistance, he strictly demarcated what he would allow her to do for him. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche recalled these dynamics in similar terms, reflecting on the fact that “she [the Drikung Khandroma] is the one who spent a lot of time with Khunu Rinpoche,” but nevertheless, “he would hate, even her, to spend time with him, and only when she knocks on the door, he would open and she would bring the food, and even then right away he would ask her to leave.”36 Khunu Lama’s chatralwa practice here appears as the cause of absence or separation even within his closely proximate relationship with the Drikung Khandroma, even though she is not only his student but also prepares his meals and lives alongside him for years on end. They are together but also, in a certain sense, apart. At the same time, Pema Wangyal Rinpoche highlighted the Drikung Khandroma’s ongoing commitment to Khunu Lama despite his practices of withdrawal, commenting that “she is very devoted.” Throughout such accounts, one question is whether the Drikung Khandroma’s female gender played any role in shaping her interactions with Khunu Lama. Notably, Khunu Lama’s Ladakhi disciple Baling Lama also described himself as serving as Khunu Lama’s attendant years earlier, in the 1960s, suggesting that Khunu Lama did not always refuse, or succeed in refusing, the desire of disciples to take on an attendant role. Although Baling Lama recounted many limitations imposed by Khunu Lama’s renunciant austerity, such as minimal (or occasionally even uncooked) food and

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highly unpredictable and spartan housing, Baling Lama does not describe Khunu Lama as trying to send him away or as refusing his service, although it is certainly possible that Khunu Lama did so.37 This prompts the query of whether there was anything distinctive about Khunu Lama’s relationship with the Drikung Khandroma and, if so, whether this had anything to do with her being a woman. Khunu Lama had a number of female students at several periods of his life, and sources recall him as intentionally choosing to teach women because he knew their opportunities for Buddhist study were otherwise often limited. Yet it is difficult to draw broader conclusions from the available sources about his attitudes to students in terms of gender. It is possible that he rebuffed the Drikung Khandroma’s attempts to serve as his attendant with particular force because something about having a female attendant complicated his chaltralwa identity in ways that having a male attendant did not. On the other hand, it is also possible that there are simply more stories about his relationship with the Drikung Khandroma, because they met near the end of his life, when he was better known and when there are therefore more stories about his interactions with people in general. From another perspective, the larger imaginary of Buddhist teacherstudent relationships offers a slightly different interpretive frame for understanding the dynamic between Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma. Echoing aspects of the Milarepa-Marpa paradigm, Khunu Lama’s renunciant withdrawal from the Drikung Khandroma even while she sought to care for him might be read as a kind of pedagogical performance.38 From that perspective, one might interpret their interactions as offering a dynamic enactment of both his renunciation and her devotion, an enactment that they were each in some sense actively party to, at least in the recollection of their students.39 In a kind of recapitulation of the “student hardship” narrative we have seen in other contexts, stories about Khunu Lama’s relationship with the Drikung Khandroma emphasize not only his withdrawals but also the difficulties she faced in order to remain near him, including Bodh Gaya’s intense heat and her own increasingly serious health problems, not least the tuberculosis that she apparently contracted in Bodh Gaya. Yet these difficulties in turn highlight her own prowess as a renunciant. One contemporary biography in English of the Drikung Khandroma quotes Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen as saying, “I met her when I went to Northern India to receive teachings from Khunu Rinpoche. She was very devoted to Khunu Lama. She never left his side, even when she was very sick with TB. She never complained, even though she suffered terribly. I never met a practitioner like her.”40

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In such stories, the Drikung Khandroma herself appears to embody Khunu Lama’s own renunciatory ideal, even as his resistance to her presence sometimes seems to contribute to her hardships. Manshardt notes that her students described her as following a lifestyle of renunciation even before she met Khunu Lama: “Like the great Khunu Lama, whom she was to meet later on, Drikung Khandroma was entirely modest in her needs. Only clean clothes and good tea were important to her. Besides that, she barely required food and comfort whatsoever.” People Manshardt spoke with recalled the Drikung Khandroma as rejecting offering scarves and material gifts, saying “I don’t sell Dharma!” and “I need nothing.” 41 In such stories, and in accounts of her interactions with Khunu Lama, part of what emerges is the centrality of renunciation for both of them. Their mutual virtuosity as chatralwa is a key element of the devotional memory that their mutual students preserve about each of them as individuals, and about their relationship. Indeed, the Drikung Khandroma’s seven years with Khunu Lama, which appear in anecdotes as so full of difficulty and perhaps even rejection, become more legible if her own identity as a renunciant and teacher takes center stage. At the time she sought out Khunu Lama, the Drikung Khandroma was a woman with her own religious community and students. She also had at least one other important teacher in India before she met Khunu Lama, in the person of Mewa Khenpo Tubten. Her students recall her during her years at Tso Pema as an authoritative, even intimidating, teacher, who scolded the young monks and nuns, and spoke her mind sharply even to scholars like Khenpo Tubten and to important reincarnations.42 While she often protested that she knew little except what she had heard from her teachers, students recall her as teaching Dzogchen and other Buddhist topics at a high level; Manshardt, moreover, points out that as a young woman in Tibet, she had herself studied in a nuns’ shedra at Terdrom, and was thus far more educated than she often admitted. This personal history forms a backdrop to her decision to devote herself to Khunu Lama’s care, despite his apparent resistance. From this perspective, the Drikung Khandroma’s relationship with Khunu Lama, marked by hardship as it was, nevertheless reflects her own forceful agency. She identified the most important teacher for herself, and arranged to remain in close proximity to him despite his initial refusal of her. In a specifically Buddhist sense, moreover, her determination was effective. As Khunu Lama himself had done as a student, she received the teachings she had set out to get, in part because of her persistence. When Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen enumerated teachings she had received from Khunu Lama, he listed bodhicitta, Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, Madhyamaka,

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and more; in his words, “lots of Dharma.”43 She appears in a number of recollections of the Tso Pema teaching as one of the main students. Nevertheless, the same stories that reflect her agency and persistence do also imply an affective quality connected to separation, both present and future. In many stories of her relationship to Khunu Lama, the Drikung Khandroma actively seeks to remain with him not only in the face of his temporary absences (when he is locked in his room, or occasionally traveling, for instance), but also in a longer-term way. She tries to remain with him by extending his life through her care. This dimension of her efforts is suggested in particular by her efforts to get him to accept better food and thus improve his health. Manshardt describes how Khunu Lama’s renunciation had included not eating well for years, and how this weakened him physically. “Later in his life he often fell sick and Drikung Khandroma pleadingly asked him to eat more to renew his strength.”44 Manshardt’s sources say that Khunu Lama did eventually listen to the Drikung Khandroma and eat more. In a temporary physical way, her presence seems to have strengthened him. Yet his underlying physical frailty and her own are recurring motifs in stories their students tell, and references to their frequent illness and health problems foreshadow the fact that Khunu Lama would pass away seven years after their first meeting, while the Drikung Khandroma would die only two years later. As the story of the Buddha Śākyamuni’s dialogue with Ānanda about his own impending death suggests, trying to persuade one’s Buddhist teacher to remain alive (and with their students) is a long-standing theme in Buddhist devotional literature. Indeed, there is an entire Tibetan poetic genre called zhabten (zhabs brtan, lit. “firm feet”), which consists of supplications specifically asking one’s teacher to remain in the world.45 In the Drikung Khandroma’s efforts to keep Khunu Lama healthy despite his chatralwa disengagement from food and comfort, we might detect a kind of unstated zhabten of the physical body. Such an embodied zhabten would employ the disciples’ care for the teacher’s own physical body to convey an implicit request to the teacher to remain living—as we see the Drikung Khandroma doing with Khunu Lama. Such a zhabten of the body, like student requests to a teacher to compose a solteb, communicates students’ devotion to the teacher and hints at the sorrow the students know they would feel, or will feel, when the teacher’s life comes to an end. Zhabten prayers and, I would argue, the Drikung Khandroma’s embodied zhabten of feeding Khunu Lama, like her ongoing attempts to remain with him despite difficulties, hints at an affective state of longing for the teacher that permeates Tibetan and Himalayan writings on guru devotion. As earlier chapters in this book have noted, teacher-student lineages

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form human networks with the potential to bridge both generational time and geographic distance. The ideal guru-disciple connection chronicled by Tibetan authors is one often imagined through metaphors of pouring, filling, dissolving, and blending liquids. This vocabulary draws on people’s lived knowledge of what a perfectly filled container looks like, or how liquids mixed together become indivisible. Yet, as we know, teacher-student relationships in practice frequently involve separations. As the lives of Khunu Lama and his circle make clear, travel, personal retreat, and renunciatory self-concealment can all draw teachers and students apart, as can political turmoil, exile, or death. Buddhist accounts of human relationships, which emphasize impermanence as a fundamental feature of life, are of course cognizant of such realities. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Tibetan and Himalayan authors often record in detail the grief of students separated from their teachers—a grief that has sometimes been noted with surprise by observers from outside the Buddhist context, who imagine that Buddhist accounts of impermanence bring an end to emotion or to affective experience. As Khunu Lama’s students’ longing for him makes clear, this image of emotionless Buddhists is a kind of caricature. On the contrary, in literary genres of supplication and guru-yoga practice, Tibetan and Himalayan authors describe guru-devotional connections in strongly affective terms, while framing this affect within explicitly soteriological frameworks connected to the Buddhist path. Such portrayals of guru devotion emphasize an affective state of mogu (mos gus), which might be translated as “faith and devotion,” or as “devoted faith.” I suggest that a central component of this “devoted faith” involves an affective state best rendered by the English term longing, which, in this Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist devotional context, both requires and also overcomes separation. In a context where devotion is animated by longing, renunciation in the absence-inflected mode that Khunu Lama is remembered as practicing arguably has a crucial role to play.

Calling the Guru from Afar: Supplication, Memory, and Longing There are a number of indications in Tibetan guru devotional literature that the apparent conflict between Khunu Lama‘s renunciatory choices and his availability to disciples is actually not the problem it appears to be. Most importantly, many Tibetan authors explain that guru devotion practice should harness affective states ordinarily connected with sadness and loss (as well as ultimately with union and joy); the practitioner is exhorted

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to use these affective states to intensify their devotion. Tibetan authors place renunciation at the center of this affective process of sadness, so that renunciation is not a problem for guru devotion, but on the contrary, is essential to it. From this perspective, stories of disciples who long painfully for their gurus or struggle to find them should not be read as critiques of the absent gurus, but rather as depicting a kind of affective training in the emotional contours of longing. To see how this might be so, let us explore a handful of textual examples that link guru devotion, longing, and renunciation in affective terms. One of the best-known modes of supplication to the guru in Tibetan is a poetic form called “Calling the Guru from Afar” (bla ma rgyang ‘bod). This genre explicitly links affective and narrative dimensions of guru devotion to feelings of longing and renunciation. Prayers in this genre can be directed toward one’s living teacher(s), or toward teachers who have passed away, in which case they take on an extra poignancy. Such prayers can also be directed toward lineage ancestors of the past, such as Padmasambhava, whose temporal remoteness can intensify the affect of longing. “Calling the Guru” prayers have deep roots in Tibetan and Himalayan literature and remain important in devotional ritual for individuals and communities across the Himalayan region today. A particularly well-known example of the “Calling the Guru from Afar” genre is a solteb by the influential nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan polymath Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thayé, who appeared in chapter 3 as the paradigm of someone who collected and transmitted a notably large number of lineages.46 His “Calling the Guru from Afar: A Supplication to Pierce Your Heart with Devotion” (Bla ma rgyang ‘bod kyi gsol ‘debs mos gus snying gi gzer ‘debs zhes bya bzhugs so) is the prayer that contemporary Tibetan Buddhists may first think of when they think of this genre. In his Calling the Guru prayer, Kongtrul explicitly links renunciation with the proper attitude for guru devotion: “The key point for invoking the guru’s blessing is devotion, inspired by disenchantment and renunciation, not as mere platitude but from the core of your heart, from the very marrow of your bones.”47 Here, Kongtrul directly links the affective experiences of sadness or disillusionment with samsara (using the Tibetan phrase skyo sha, translated here as “disenchantment”) and renunciation (nges ‘byung) to the correct form of devotion. This renunciation- and sadness-inspired devotion in turn is necessary in order to activate and receive the guru’s blessing. Kongtrul uses somatic language to make his point, saying that this affective experience of renunciatory disenchantment and the guru devotion it inspires should come “from the core of your heart, from the very marrow of your bones [snying gi dkyil/rus pa’i gting].” The practitioner’s body itself

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participates in the affects of renunciation and likewise is the source of the devotion that Kongtrul says is crucial for receiving the guru’s blessing. Many Tibetan authors describe devotion as manifesting in involuntary tears or hair standing on end. Not only conveyed through language, it is described as an experience ideally expressed in and through the body itself. The authenticity and value of this somatic devotion is directly connected to its spontaneity, to the involuntary quality of the devoted body and its ardent response to the guru. Of course, Tibetan and Himalayan sermon literature and philosophical explanations of the Buddhist path insist on the necessity of prayers, supplications, and rituals for maintaining guru-disciple relationships, in particular for maintaining tantric vows and commitments (dam tshig). Yet narratives and rituals alike reaffirm that the authenticity of an individual’s guru devotion is always marked by the involuntary affective responses of the practitioner’s devoted body.48 We can see the embodied, affective dimensions of such supplications in prayers composed by the eighteenth-century Dzogchen visionary Jigme Lingpa (1729–1798), progenitor of the Longchen Nyingtik (klong chen snying thig) Dzogchen system with which Khunu Lama was closely connected and from which he taught at Tso Pema. For example, Jigme Lingpa wrote a famous solteb prayer to Padmasambhava. In the colophon to this prayer, he urges practitioners to remember and to supplicate the guru “with such devotion that tears cascade from your eyes.”49 As the mention of tears suggests, the devotion Jigme Lingpa urges here is not abstract or emotionless. On the contrary, he renders it in deeply emotional and bodily terms, evoking feelings of sadness and longing, while elsewhere in the verse emphasizing gratitude and love. Thus, one way in which Khunu Lama’s renunciation can be seen as encouraging his connection to his students, rather than harming it, is precisely in the absences and separations from them which his renunciation produces. At moments when his renunciation withdraws or conceals him from students, they have the opportunity to long for him with the kind of affective intensity that the solteb above describe. In one sense at least, the connection between guru devotion and renunciation is quite straightforward. Both appear at the starting point of Buddhist practice in old and important Tibetan-language mappings of the Buddhist path. For example, in the influential oeuvre of the fourteenth/ fifteenth-century visionary and polymath Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa (1357–1419), who is retrospectively identified as the source of the Gelukpa tradition of the Dalai Lamas, both guru devotion and renunciation appear among the first “roots” of Buddhist practice. Tsongkhapa composed many texts in the lamrim (lam rim) or “Stages of the Path” genre of Buddhist instruction (a genre that is closely associated with Atīśa, the eleventh-

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century Bengali pandit whose students formed the Kadamapa tradition, to which Tsongkhapa’s disciples saw themselves as heir). Among Tsongkhapa’s many lamrim texts of varying lengths, there are several shorter summaries of the path in poetic form that Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists, especially in the Gelukpa tradition, know by heart and recite daily. In these shorter texts, he makes the primacy of both renunciation and guru devotion explicit. For example, the famous opening verse of Tsongkhapa’s short lamrim called “The Foundation of All Good Qualities” (Yon tan gzhir gyur ma), leads with the topic of guru devotion: “The foundation of all good qualities is the kind and perfect, pure Guru. / Correct devotion to him is the root of the path.”50 In a teaching and verse-by-verse commentary on this same text that Khunu Lama himself gave in 1975 to a group of Western monks and nuns studying with Lama Zopa Rinpoche in Boudhanath, Nepal, Khunu Lama says simply of this line, “This verse, obviously, is about guru practice. All the good qualities of liberation, the boundless state [Tib: thar pa], and enlightenment, the ultimate goal, depend upon the guru.”51 In Khunu Lama’s presentation, the necessity to begin with guru devotion is “obvious”; it is a truism that barely requires explanation. Indeed, in standard Tibetan presentations of the Buddhist path, all practice of Buddhism begins with encountering a teacher, who functions like the Buddha for the individual student; all understanding and engagement with Buddhism depends on having someone explain it and offer guidance. More esoterically, according to the Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā traditions that Khunu Lama himself is said to have emphasized, the student requires a teacher to “introduce the nature of mind.” In this classic Tibetan presentation of the role of the teacher, the teacher-student dynamic is marked by a crucial, even productive, asymmetry, expressed in the notion that the student cannot repay the teacher’s “kindness.” Because the teacher makes possible the student’s progress toward what Khunu Lama here calls the “ultimate goal,” the student’s attitude toward the teacher is always an asymmetrical gratitude, expressible through devotion and potentially through transmitting the lineage to one’s own students, but never adding up to full repayment. Yet, in another frequently taught and recited brief verse lamrim by Tsongkhapa called “The Three Principal Aspects of the Path” (Lam gyi gtso bo’i rnam gsum), Tsongkhapa names renunciation as itself the “first principal aspect.” After an opening line of homage (“I bow down to my perfect gurus”), the third verse lays out the first “root:” “Without the complete intention definitely to be free from circling [in samsara] / There is no way to pacify attachment.” The verse concludes, “Therefore, at the very beginning seek renunciation.”52 Here, Tsongkhapa suggests that without renuncia-

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tion, understood as a combination of disenchantment with samsara and the desire to seek liberation from it, no other aspect of the path makes sense. And yet, of course, this “Three Principal Aspects of the Path” lamrim itself also arguably places guru devotion at the forefront—with its opening verse of homage. As many Tibetan commentators have explained, such lines of homage are a shorthand for expressing (and reminding students) that without the guru the Buddhist path cannot even begin. Thus, by reading the opening lines of “The Three Principal Aspects of the Path” as a combination of guru devotion and renunciation, or by reading these two lamrim texts of Tsongkhapa’s together, a picture emerges of renunciation and devotion mutually implying and requiring one another, although guru devotion in an ultimate sense takes precedence. In this reading, a renunciatory attitude makes the student seek out a teacher; at the same time, the first thing the teacher will explain is the need for renunciation. Put another way, renunciation is both a feature of guru devotion and a spur to practice it. And, as Kongtrul’s and Jigme Lingpa’s verses suggest, renunciation and guru devotion share an affective, embodied repertoire of tears and longing. We might think here, moreover, of the affect of sadness that Angrup evokes when he describes Khunu Lama’s first departure from home as a young man. In the mature practice of guru devotion that Tsongkhapa, Jigme Lingpa, Kongtrul and many others describe, that sadness at leaving home is set within in a larger landscape of longing that renunciation intensifies, even as it also, in Buddhist soteriological terms, offers a response. For, finally, devotional longing is presented by Tibetan and Himalayan authors as ultimately being the means by which separation is overcome. Guru yoga liturgies, after all, culminate in affirmations that student and teacher have become indivisible. To more fully appreciate these affective dynamics linking renunciant practice, separation, and devotion, and the claim of indivisibility, consider once more the repertoire of images through which Tibetan and Himalayan authors invoke the intense closeness between gurus and disciples that constitutes the ideal. As we saw in chapter 1, teachers transmit to their chosen disciples and lineage heirs “like filling a vase completely / to the brim” (bum pa gang byo’i tshul), and “like water dissolving in water” (chu la chu thim pa lta bu).53 Such images convey the ideal of a perfect transmission in which teacher and student have become, in a Buddhist soteriological sense, indivisible, “like water mixed with water.” This imaginary of indivisibility is in turn closely connected to the affective, ritual, and literary repertoires of devotion, in which disciples dream about their gurus, weep for them when they are absent, faint when they hear their names. It is this embodied affect of devotion and related vocabularies of indivisibility that Khunu Lama’s

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Figure 6. Photo arrangement on the teacher’s seat at Jangchub Rabten Ling nunnery, Himachal Pradesh, showing a large photo of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen (left), in which a picture of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama garlanded by white offering scarves is visible (upper right). A smaller composite image (lower right) of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen and Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima (one of two identified incarnations of Khunu Lama) has been tucked into the frame. Photo by the author, 2013.

renunciatory absences might seem to challenge; yet, at the same time, it is this indivisibility in which devotional longing is said to culminate. Reflecting on this liquid imagery of guru-disciple connection and lineage transmission, a further observation is that recurring phrases such as “like water dissolving into water” do significant work precisely in their multivalence—a multivalence that draws on the physical properties of liquid evoked in these devotional imaginaries. Because of authors’ and audiences’ embodied experience with liquids—how liquids dissolve, pour, and fill, and also how they spill, leak, or dry up—the imaginary of liquid implied by the vase and water formulae allow for the affectively powerful narration of idealized guru-disciple connections and transmissions. Yet these formulae also communicate a shadow narrative of loss and interruption, of students who are like leaky pots and gurus whose lineages run dry when students fail to continue them, or when harsh circumstances drive them apart. This shadow narrative is in a sense what each successful transmission staves off, while the poignancy of that shadow narrative makes each completed transmission that much more remarkable. Devotion and renunciation, separation and indivisible closeness—these apparent polari-

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ties of absence and presence exist in dynamic tension, which constantly threatens to destabilize the fragile, always impermanent continuity of lineage transmission. I suggest that the liquid imagery of vases pouring and water dissolving encompasses breaks in guru/disciple closeness, while also offering efficacious images of guru-disciple connection. In addition to evoking an idealized image of guru/disciple unity, these formulae of pouring and dissolving, and the broader literary repertoires in which they partake, reckon with the challenging reality that sometimes gurus and disciples are separated. In so doing, these imaginaries of waters blending and liquids pouring and filling help to maintain, and also to manage, the recurring experiences of both loss and indivisibility that Tibetan authors place at the heart of the guru-disciple relation.

[ Ch a pt er 6 ]

Death and Other Disruptions: Dying Like a Dog in the Wilderness

Then [Dodrubchen] said, “A yogi should die like a stray dog,” and lying on a street of Tartsedo [Dartsedo], pointing his head downhill, he died. Tulku Thondup 1996:214 Having conquered the realm of conceptual appearances, you are a Yogi! Conforming your practices to spiritual paths, you are a great Siddha! Possessing a mind of genuine altruism, you are a Rinpoche [Precious One]! At your feet, O Tenpai Gyaltsen, I pray. Angrup 2005:101

Introduction: Narrating the Teacher’s Passing Away Having explored some of the contours of guru devotion and the role of renunciation in dynamics of separation and longing, this chapter turns to consider what is, at least from some perspectives, the paradigmatic moment of separation: the crisis of the teacher’s death. What happens to the students when a Buddhist teacher dies? Perhaps, in fact, death is the underlying disruption that narratives of lineage continuity work to overcome. In this chapter, I explore how the dynamics of renunciation, separation, and devotion play out in the events surrounding Khunu Lama’s death, and in particular in the ways his disciples recount these events.1 Although I have focused on the ways that stories about Khunu Lama’s 162

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absences highlight his renunciation, modesty, and self-concealment, the problem of the guru’s renunciatory absence is also linked to broader Buddhist claims about the transitoriness of all lives, bodies, and arrangements. Certainly, chatralwa-style renunciants like Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma may seek solitude, hide their own accomplishments, and be hard to find. But in addition, they may neglect their own health, and this can shorten their lives. Students and teachers can misunderstand one another, or quarrel; painful conflicts and differences can divide them. Gurus older than their students may predecease them. And political turmoil, imprisonment, exile, or economic crisis can separate people from relatives and teachers, not only through physical violence or displacement, but also through the disruption or unmaking of familiar modes of community and connection. The dynamics of separation, in other words, are everywhere, and, notably, given the twentieth-century context of Khunu Lama’s life, they transcend any simple demarcation of tradition or modernity. Narratives of Buddhist teachers and the lineage relationships they are part of continually reckon with this fact. The previous chapter suggested that there may be a double valence in the metaphors of “water dissolving into water” and “filling a perfect vase to the brim” through which so many Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist authors have imagined lineage transmission. These liquid metaphors communicate an ideal of guru-disciple indivisibility, in which each new generation perfectly enters into the soteriological achievement of the previous generation. Yet these metaphors can also imply a shadow narrative of liquid’s other qualities of spilling, evaporating, and leaking. This shadow imaginary of liquid hints at the fragility of person-to-person chains of transmission and relationship, always at the mercy of human error and human mortality. Audiences can glimpse the high stakes of these dynamics in moments when students attempt to extend their teachers’ lives. For instance, when the Drikung Khandroma pleads with Khunu Lama to accept better food, or when her own students lament her neglect of her health and her decline from tuberculosis, the audience encounters the poignant affects of student longing, keyed in a register of devotion that is also rooted in an acknowledgement of the teachers’ practice of renunciation. Tibetan genres of devotional supplication, such as zhabten, that ask teachers to remain in life for a long time crystallize these concerns and affective experiences in literary form, and concerns about extending a teacher’s life also permeate conventions of teacher-student interactions in other contexts, from gift-giving to farewells. As we have seen in earlier chapters, renunciation as Khunu Lama practiced it can play a crucial role in these dynamics. Stories about him depict his chatralwa renunciation as sometimes threatening to destabilize

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his role in transmitting lineages he held by separating or concealing him from his students, and perhaps also by shortening his life. Concerns about whether Khunu Lama transmitted all the lineages he held take on particular intensity in the post-1959 context, where the fragility of guru-disciple connections is a recurring concern. Tibetan and Himalayan religious thinkers link the maintenance of lineage transmission in this context with cultural survival. At the same time, imaginaries of renunciation also offer conceptual and affective tools for constructively engaging with the loss and impermanence that Buddhist authors, in the Himalayan region and elsewhere, frame as basic correlates of human life and as urgent contemporary concerns. When Angrup introduces Khunu Lama’s home departure by quoting the Kadampa Four Aims, he implicitly reminds readers that renunciation is simultaneously a source of painful separation and an acknowledgment of the inevitability of separations. Renunciation is a tool to address sadness, even while sometimes being a source of sadness; it is both engine and acknowledgment of loss. Yet simultaneously, as articulated in influential Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist ritual, meditational, and literary contexts, renunciation and separation together also energize the devotional practices that are understood to ultimately overcome separation, and on which successful lineage transmission depends. These considerations offer a conceptual framework for approaching stories about Khunu Lama’s death. Multiple, slightly variant accounts circulate in print and oral narrative. Some of Khunu Lama’s disciples, including Angrup and two of the Kinnauri nuns who were present at the time, recount the events of Khunu Lama’s death and its aftermath as marked not only by sadness, separation, and faith, but also by a kind of disappointment or regret about certain events. At the same time, they also, in different ways, recall the events of Khunu Lama’s death and funeral as a time when they witnessed the continued power of Khunu Lama’s meditative accomplishment and expressed their own devotion and assertive agency.2 Uniting all the narratives is their record of student inspiration due to extraordinary manifestations of ongoing connection with Khunu Lama. Let us set the stage for analyzing these student narratives by briefly examining stories about the death of a different figure, the Second Dodrubchen Jigme Phuntsok Jungne (1824–1863), a yogic virtuoso from eastern Tibet. He was multiply connected to Khunu Lama through their shared Dzogchen lineages, which linked both of them to Khenpo Zhenga and to the venerated nineteenth-century Dzogchen master Patrul Rinpoche, who was Dodrubchen’s contemporary and colleague. Accounts of Dodrubchen’s death include some potentially startling details, and through those

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details, convey some of the affective dynamics of the moment of a teacher’s passing away, evoking both devotion and the shadow narrative of a lineage transmission marked by loss. The first story about Dodrubchen’s death that I explore here draws on an influential image of yogic renunciation at the very moment of death, encapsulated in the metaphor of a dog dying and abandoning its body in a wilderness, ditch, or other unheralded location. Consider this metaphor for a moment. In chapter 2, we saw how Geshe Sonam Rinchen explained the fourth line of the Kadampa Four Aims, “Aim at leaving your death to a dry ravine,” as describing an ideal attitude of renunciation. In his interpretation, this refers to a mental state of courageous acceptance, such that, “even if for the sake of your practice you have to die alone like a dog far away from everyone in a desolate place, you will not be afraid or distressed.”3 Here, Geshe Sonam Rinchen implicitly links the figure of the ideal renunciant— the “beggar” described by the Kadampa Four Aims—and the image of the dog, such that the ideal renunciant’s death, hidden or far from other people, is analogous to a dog dying alone “in a desolate place.” Patrul Rinpoche is well known for having used the terms dog and beggar as names for himself as humilific markers of his own renunciation.4 Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, Patrul actually adopted the insulting epithet “Old Dog” (khyi rgan) as his esoteric name, reportedly after the unconventional yogi Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje called him that while dragging him around his tent, in the encounter that Patrul later credited as crucial for his Buddhist realization. A well-known poem of Patrul’s describing the development of his own renunciatory attitude vividly illustrates the imagery of “dying like a dog.” Patrul says, “When I seek solitude now, I feel that I am on secure ground, like an old dog lying dead under a crevice. Have I finally hidden my corpse?”5 It is not surprising that the following story of Dodrubchen’s death draws on imagery that we also encounter in Patrul’s poems. Not only is this imagery part of a broader Tibetan imaginary of renunciation; in addition, the particular people involved in this story are themselves closely connected to Patrul and his lineages of Dzogchen meditation and Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, lineages which also link them to Khunu Lama. Besides Dodrubchen himself, the other key figure in the story of his death is in fact Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje, the same Do Khyentse whose dramatic encounter with Patrul led Patrul to embrace the epithet “Old Dog.” Dodrubchen and Do Khyentse are, like Patrul, major figures in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual and religious efflorescence in eastern Tibet that shaped the milieu in which Khunu Lama sought out Khenpo Zhenga and other eastern Tibetan masters. Indeed, a number of popular

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stories feature Dodrubchen, Patrul, and Do Khyentse performing (sometimes startling) religious activities together.6 Subsequently, the reincarnations of all three men were identified among the sons of the Dzogchen visionary Dudjom Lingpa (1835–1904). Thus these stories and their imagery of death and renunciation are multiply interconnected. The first version of the story I recount was compiled, translated, and published from Tibetan textual and oral sources by the Dzogchen historian and exegete Tulku Thondup, who himself studied with Khunu Lama.7 In his English retelling, Tulku Thondup chronicles Dodrubchen’s life and activities; he describes Dodrubchen as a gifted teacher, Buddhist visionary, and yogic adept. Then, turning to the end of Dodrubchen’s life, he recounts how, in 1863, a smallpox epidemic devastated the Tibetan border town of Dartsedo (Ch. Kangding), where Dodrubchen had come to live. According to Tulku Thondup, Dodrubchen responded to the epidemic by yogically sacrificing his own life to save the town: “Dodrupchen was extremely saddened by the suffering that people were going through in the town. In order to stop the suffering, he took the epidemic on himself. As soon as he got sick, the epidemic stopped.”8 Here, the audience witnesses Dodrubchen’s compassion for the suffering of others and sees Dodrubchen’s lack of attachment to his own life, revealing his inner attitude of renunciation. The narrator suggests that Dodrubchen’s meditational accomplishments have given him the yogic ability to substitute his own illness for the illness of the community, and that he chooses to do so. In the next turn of the story, Tulku Thondup describes how Dodrubchen then died. In his recounting, the audience hears Dodrubchen invoke a renunciatory attitude toward death as the yogic ideal: “Then [Dodrubchen] said, ‘A yogi should die like a stray dog,’ and lying on a street of Tartsedo [Dartsedo], pointing his head downhill, he died.” The image is stark. Dodrubchen, whom the audience has just learned is one of the great Buddhist masters of his generation, has died alone in the street like a dog. Both the fact of his death and the manner of his dying are shocking. But this is not the end of the story. Next Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje arrives. Tulku Thondup continues: “Soon Do Khyentse arrived with his son, Rikpe Raltri. Do Khyentse shouted at Dodrubchen’s body, ‘Why are you dying like a stray dog?’ and he kicked the body. Dodrubchen’s body sat up in the meditation posture as if he were alive and remained in absorption [tukdam (thugs dam), “post-death meditative absorption,” which I discuss in more detail below] for a week.”9 There are many ways to understand this account. On one level, this is a story of grief. A leading religious figure has died in an epidemic, and his teacher is distraught. Even within this narrative, in which Dodrubchen’s

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death is framed as an act of voluntary self-sacrifice, his loss so young (he is thirty-nine, while his teacher is sixty-three) appears here as a dreadful blow to his community. Normally, it is students who must confront the deaths of teachers, but here that dynamic is reversed. In Do Khyentse’s shocking act of kicking Dodrubchen’s body, a reader might detect a suggestion of disbelief, grief, even anger at the idea that this student who was so remarkable and so dear to him could have gone and died. At the same time, this is also a story about renunciation, yogic power, and the correct way for a renunciant practitioner to die. While in one sense a devotional story, this is at the same time a scandalous story. The story is, in fact, structured as if it were funny, even though it is a story about grief. The audience sees Dodrubchen’s heroic act of taking on the smallpox. Next, they see him taking the renunciatory ideal to heart, and dying like a stray dog in the street, like Patrul’s “old dog lying dead under a crevice.” One might wonder, isn’t Dodrubchen doing just what the Kadampa Four Aims instructs, and “leaving his body to a cave”? But then Do Khyentse arrives, and says, “Why are you dying like a stray dog?” and actually kicks Dodrubchen. And the punchline is that Dodrubchen dutifully does stop dying like a dog. He sits up and dies like a lama, in tukdam post-death meditative equipoise. Not only that: Dodrubchen remains in this state for a week, demonstrating his enlightened qualities through his mastery of the postmortem state. One could read Do Khyentse’s actions in this version of events as a kind of critique of Dodrubchen’s hyper-literal performance of renunciatory death. But in that case, it is not clear what is being criticized. Is Do Khyentse rebuking his student for being too literal, because to die like a dog is too humble, and he ought to die like the lama he is? Or perhaps the rebuke is aimed at a kind of exaggeration in Dodrubchen’s renunciation, an over-performance of the ideal. Dodrubchen has not only sacrificed his life for others, but has now gone to the dramatic extreme of dying in the street. Part of the impact of the story is the way it seems to function on all these levels, with the apparently disrespectful act of corpse-kicking startling the audience by seeming to call the conventions of veneration into question, even as this same gesture also forces the deceased yogi to sit up and display the post-death Buddhist ideal. And of course, without Do Khyentse to complete the narrative of what is (in this account) Dodrubchen’s renunciant death, there might be no story at all. A death leaving no story, no recollection, might achieve a kind of renunciatory perfection, but from the point of view of students, it would be a failure, perhaps a more serious loss even than the death itself. These questions are complicated by slight differences in the versions of

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this story appearing in other published accounts. For example, in his massive history of the Dzogchen lineage, the exegete Nyoshul Khenpo Jamyang Dorje (1931–1999) similarly describes Dodrubchen as taking smallpox on himself to protect the community during an epidemic and dying as a result. However, Nyoshul Khenpo describes Dodrubchen as dying “in bed,” rather than in the street, and Nyoshul Khenpo does not mention the phrase “dying like a dog” in his presentation of these events. Moreover, Nyoshul Khenpo presents Do Khyentse’s actions toward Dodrubchen’s body as explicitly the actions of a Buddhist teacher giving final deathbed religious instructions: “Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje came to give [Dodrubchen] his final instructions. ‘Puntsok Jungne, are you dead?’ he asked, and kicked the body three times, whereupon Jigme Puntsok Jungne [Dodrubchen] sat up suddenly in vajra posture and remained that way for a week without moving. During that time, countless marvelous signs, such as rainbow lights, moved all of his students to awe and faith.”10 The 2004 history of the Dzogchen lineage by the Tibet-based Seventh Dzogchen Rinpoche Tenzin Lungtok Nyima (b. 1974) similarly says that Do Khyentse arrived specifically in order to give Dodrubchen the “introduction to tukdam post-death meditation” (thugs dam ngo sprod gnang ched phebs gnas). It describes how Do Khyentse said, “‘Puntsok Jungne, you are dead!’ and then kicked him three times,” after which “astonishing displays of rainbow light” produced “amazed faith (ngo mtshar dad pa) in the disciples.11 These two accounts do not describe Dodrubchen as attempting to “die like a dog.” In addition, although Nyoshul Khenpo and the Seventh Dzogchen Rinpoche’s accounts do show Do Khyentse kicking Dodrubchen’s body (and both show this happening three times rather than once), they both state explicitly that this apparently disrespectful gesture is indeed a deathbed religious instruction. In these versions of the story, some of the more unsettling or painful emotional possibilities that we encountered in Tulku Thondup’s telling do not appear, or are more fully integrated into a narrative framework in which everything that happens is what “should” happen. Both the scandal of Dodrubchen’s renunciant, yogic death and the scandal of Do Khyentse’s response are tamed by the broader devotional frame of the story. This urges audiences toward a devotional reading of the events, a perspective directly enacted within the narratives in the postdeath rainbow displays and the awe and faith of Dodrubchen’s disciples. With this in mind, it is notable that Dodrubchen’s sitting up in postdeath equipoise is not the end of the story in Tulku Thondup’s account, either. Tulku Thondup’s version specifies that Do Khyentse had his little son with him, Rikpe Raltri, who was only three years old at the time: “When

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three year old Rikpe Raltri saw Dodrubchen’s body sitting up, he experienced a great shock, and that shock awakened the realization of the ultimate nature in him. Since then, Rikpe Raltri always said, ‘My supreme lama is Dodrubchen Jigme Phuntosk Jungne.’”12 Here, the emphasis is not on a communally witnessed display of postdeath “marvelous signs” and the resulting faith of disciples taken as a group. Instead, Tulku Thondup’s narrative focuses on the sight of Dodrubchen’s responsive body precipitating an inner transformation in Do Khyentse’s young son. This pivotal Buddhist event is expressed here both as the seed of that child’s personal Buddhist awakening and also of his future capacity as a Buddhist teacher himself. Tulku Thondup’s and his sources’ version of the story thus offers an account not only of virtuosic death, but also of an (unconventional) ideal of Buddhist transmission, a transmission that Tulku Thondup highlights as the basis of Rikpe Raltri’s subsequent religious accomplishment and devotion to Dodrubchen. In all three presentations of this story then, the audience sees Dodrubchen, facilitated by, or perhaps in tandem with, Do Khyentse, remaining in relationship with his disciples even after death. Yet the narratives address this ongoing relationship and what it communicates in different ways. Two of the stories offer a public account of faith and continuity after death through reference to displays of post-mortem yogic achievement visible on a group scale that act to energize a whole community of lineage practitioners. By contrast, Tulku Thondup’s narrative renders a more intimate devotional encounter, in which Rikpe Raltri’s guru devotion stems from a personal experience of transmission.

The Death of the Guru: Turning Back the Helicopter With these narrative possibilities in view, we turn to the last months of Khunu Lama’s life and, in particular, to the events of February, 1977. On the twentieth of that month, Khunu Lama gave the last teachings of his life at Shashur Monastery in Lahaul, and then passed away. With him or nearby were a handful of close disciples and personal attendants, including the Drikung Khandroma, the Kinnauri nuns Tenzin Dolma, Bogti, and Tenzin Zangmo,13 and Angrup, the former literature student and Shimla college professor who would become Khunu Lama’s main biographer. Also present or nearby were Lahauli monks and community members who had been attending his teachings. Many of Khunu Lama’s other close students were elsewhere, teaching in their own communities, traveling, or on retreat. As

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we have seen, he had not normally encouraged an entourage or gathered a permanent community around himself, and this remained his pattern into the last months of his life. Nevertheless, once Khunu Lama passed away, it quickly became clear that many different people and communities felt connected to him through ties of kinship, home region, guru-disciple relationship, and devotion. Kinnauri relatives and patrons, Lahauli disciples, his small, close-knit circle of nun disciple-attendants, as well as his Tibetan, Himalayan, and Western students: these overlapping but sometimes distinct groups were all affected by his death, though not always in the same ways. Many of these people remained invested in his legacy after his death, though they described this legacy differently. These differences apparently shaped conflicts over Khunu Lama’s death and funeral at the time, and subsequently have marked the stories people tell about what happened. Accounts of the final months of Khunu Lama’s life give a sense of his being much in demand, with teaching invitations coming from Buddhist communities across the Himalayan region, including from Ladakh, Bhutan, Lahaul, and Kinnaur. However, Khunu Lama apparently declined most of these invitations, only teaching in a few places near Manali, where he had strong teacher-student connections.14 In the second half of 1976, after concluding his Dzogchen teachings in Tso Pema, Khunu Lama began to make his way north into the Himalayan foothills. The Drikung Khandroma was ill that spring. She remained in Tso Pema for some weeks after Khunu Lama left and then traveled with the Kinnauri nun Tenzin Dolma and the British student Chris Fynn to join Khunu Lama near Manali. The Kinnauri nuns Bogti and Tenzin Zangmo made their own way to Manali, and the little group spent the early summer of 1976 in the Manali area. The Drikung Khandroma’s other guru, Mewa Khenpo Tubten, who had himself become one of Khunu Lama’s close disciples, invited Khunu Lama to give teachings to the students at the retreat center he had established at Pangan outside Manali, where several of Khunu Lama’s Kinnauri nun students studied, and where at least one returned to live after Khunu Lama’s death.15 Khunu Lama did accept this invitation and spent some time teaching at Pangan. At one point over the summer, Khunu Lama, the Drikung Khandroma, Chris Fynn, and several of Khunu Lama’s nun disciples visited the hot springs in Manikaran, and Khunu Lama stayed for a while near Manikaran with the family of one of his brothers who lived there, revealing something of his continuing connections to his own Kinnauri family.16 Renewing his long-standing connection to the lineage of Togden Shakya Shri, Khunu Lama also gave teachings during that summer on Mahāmudrā and the Six Yogas of Naropa to the community of Shakya Shri’s grandson

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Apho Rinpoche, at Apho Rinpoche’s retreat center near Manali. Apho Rinpoche himself had passed away two years earlier, in 1974, but his wife, Sangyum Orgyen Chodon, had suggested that the community invite Khunu Lama. Apho Rinpoche’s son, Sey Rinpoche Namgyal Gelek, explained that once his mother had learned that Khunu Lama was staying nearby, she was eager to invite him. As Sey Rinpoche put it, “Who doesn’t know Khunu Rinpoche? You know, very humble, very learned, and I believe, very realized.”17 Among the many teaching invitations at this time, there were repeated requests from people in Lahaul, a region made up of three high valleys in the Indian Himalaya, not far as the crow flies from Khunu Lama’s birthplace in Kinnaur or from Manali (although a tiring journey for those traveling by bus or on foot). Lahaul was Angrup’s home region, and he too seems to have encouraged Khunu Lama to visit. Eventually, Khunu Lama accepted this invitation—in fact, the Kinnauri nun disciple Tenzin Dolma recalled that, although he turned down so many other invitations, “he loved to go there.”18 Nevertheless, one of the other Kinnauri nun disciples, Bogti, recalled that even when Khunu Lama finally agreed to go to Lahaul, he resisted being hurried along. She remembers him saying to the last Lahauli delegation sent to invite him, “On the day when I have time, that very day I will go. Don’t come again to fetch me.”19 All testiness aside, later in the summer (Tenzin Dolma says it was in the sixth month of the Tibetan calendar) Khunu Lama traveled up into the Himalayas, accompanied by the Drikung Khandroma, the Kinnauri nuns Tenzin Dolma, Bogti, and Tenzin Zangmo, and Chris Fynn. Their party traveled across the pass from Manali to the village of Keylong, the administrative seat of the Garzha region of Lahaul, which is also the part of Lahaul where Angrup is from. From Keylong, Khunu Lama traveled to his first teaching stop in Lahaul, at Kardang Gonpa (Kardang Monastery), located on the mountain on the opposite side of the Bhaga River from Keylong.20 Kardang Gonpa was founded in 1912 by two disciples of Togden Shakya Shri, and maintained a living connection to Shakya Shri’s family and lineage. In fact, in the early 1950s, when Shakya Shri’s grandson Apho Rinpoche and his family fled Chinese forces in eastern Tibet, they had first made their way to Kardang. In 1952, Apho Rinpoche had renovated Kardang Gonpa, renewing his connection to it, before relocating from Lahaul to the Manali area where Khunu Lama had spent time over the summer. Thus, like his summer teaching at Apho Rinpoche’s Manali center, Khunu Lama’s Kardang Gonpa visit was another instance of his ongoing connection with people and communities from the extended lineage of Shakya Shri.21

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Angrup specifies in the namtar that Khunu Lama gave “extensive” teachings at Kardang. According to Angrup, these teachings included Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament of Liberation,22 which is the main text on the “stages of the path” associated with the Kagyu traditions; Nagarjuna’s Precious Garland [Ratnāvalī]; and teachings on Mahāmudrā.23 Angrup records the detail that Khunu Lama taught from the Dohākoṣa (the inspired poetic songs of the Indian Mahasiddhas, who are understood in Tibet as the Indian forerunners of the Tibetan tantric traditions), and that Khunu Lama taught his own composition, the Jewel Lamp.24 During the fall, Khunu Lama’s Lahauli hosts seem to have vied with one another for his time and teachings. After his Kardang Gonpa sojourn, a monk from the monastery of Gemur Samten Choling arrived, making what the nun Bogti recalled as “forceful” requests: “the Gemur monk came again and again; . . . Gemur Gonpa’s monk again and again was doing ‘force’ [forcing Khunu Lama]”—that is, pressuring him to visit. In response, Khunu Lama traveled to Gemur, and taught at the monastery there for many weeks, also accepting an invitation to teach for some ten days in the residence of the king and queen of Gemur.25 When he finished teaching the king and queen, people at Gemur Gonpa again requested his presence. As Bogti put it, “People requested, ‘Teach more Dharma!’”26 However, according to Angrup, Khunu Lama’s health began to suffer from the cold in the high-altitude Upper Garzha region where Gemur is located. A well-to-do patron in Keylong therefore invited Khunu Lama to come back down to the valley and stay in one of the two residences this patron owned. But in the Keylong village, Angrup says, “all around [since] there were many village households, there was the smell of charcoal smoke; and also there were many visitors who requested audiences. So [Khunu Lama] grew weary. At one point [he said] he wanted to go live at a quiet hermitage.”27 At this juncture, monks from Shashur Gonpa in Garzha invited Khunu Lama to spend the winter with them. Shashur Gonpa is located on the steep mountain slope above Keylong village, facing Kardang Gonpa across the Bhaga River; as it happens, Shashur is the place where Angrup himself would choose to pass many of his final years. In the namtar, Angrup pauses briefly in his account of events to describe the beauty of the juniper trees that give Shashur its name, “root-drinkers, spread[ing] turquoise leaves in the expanse of the sky.”28 According to the Kinnauri nun Bogti, when the Shashur monks invited Khunu Lama, they emphasized not only the peace and quiet they could offer, but also the famous coldness of the Lahauli winters, when snow closes mountain passes and roads for eight to nine months, and the valleys are effectively cut off except by helicopter. The Shashur delegation promised

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to provide warm winter housing and all necessary cold-weather supplies if Khunu Lama would come to them.29 Khunu Lama accepted, first sending the three Kinnauri nun disciples on ahead to make arrangements. Once settled at Shashur, he again resumed giving teachings. It was during these winter teachings at Shashur that Khunu Lama passed away, in late February. Here is how Angrup describes the events in the namtar: On the twentieth day of the second Western month, just as usual during the [teaching] session after noon, he [Khunu Lama] was giving an excellent teaching in a very joyful manner, on Chapter 17, the Perfection of Wisdom Chapter of the Jewel Ornament of Liberation, the heart essence of Dakpo Lhaje [Gampopa] . . . At the age of eighty-three years old, his great deeds that were overflowing like a summer lake at that time came to a halt; very suddenly, in a flash, his body took on slight signs of illness. He vomited a little bit of blood. Immediately afterwards, he displayed the dissolution of his mind into the sphere of ultimate reality.30

Consider how Angrup sets this scene of Khunu Lama’s death. (Dissolving the mind “into the sphere of ultimate reality” here is a euphemism for death, framed as Buddhist enlightenment). Angrup mentions first of all that Khunu Lama passed away while teaching on the Kagyu master Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament of Liberation, and specifically that Khunu Lama was teaching the chapter on the Perfection of Wisdom, concerning the Buddhist philosophical concept of emptiness. This chapter is understood as the conceptual pinnacle of Gampopa’s work. For Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist lineages, the Perfection of Wisdom is generally framed as the liberating culmination of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophical insight. Thus, Angrup highlights the fact that Khunu Lama’s death occurred at the most soteriologically significant moment in the work he was teaching. More generally, Angrup’s tone here invokes a Buddhist devotional register, describing Khunu Lama’s death as a “display,” (i.e., a skillful teaching [Skt. upāya; Tib. thabs]) for the benefit of disciples. He portrays Khunu Lama in this scene in a way that suggests Khunu Lama is not physically distressed: the signs of illness are “slight,” and his overall demeanor as he is teaching is “joyful.” Angrup frames Khunu Lama’s demise in this passage as a culmination of his Buddhist life and as an intentional act of teaching, modeled on the example of Śākyamuni’s parinirvāṇa: “He displayed the dissolution of his mind into the sphere of ultimate reality.” The language of intentionality and “display” in accounts of a teacher’s death is part of a widespread Buddhist and Tibetan literary convention for narrating events

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surrounding the deaths of teachers and virtuoso practitioners. We have already seen some of these dynamics at work in the stories of Dodrubchen’s death, and glimpsed them earlier in accounts of the parinirvāṇa of the Buddha Śākyamuni. One of the important affordances of this literary repertoire is the claim it makes about a deceased person’s Buddhist accomplishment, their “success” on the Buddhist path. A person who can control the processes of death, such that death itself becomes a teaching on impermanence, is someone in whom disciples can have confidence. Perhaps just as importantly, such indications of the teacher’s accomplishment have implications for the value and authenticity of the teacher’s lineage, which the bereaved disciples now inherit. Tibetan and Himalayan authors, like Buddhist writers more generally, make clear that the moment of the teacher’s death is a vulnerable time for the community of disciples left behind, both in emotional terms and with regard to the stability and continuity of the lineage. Despite the existence of Buddhist rhetoric exhorting other responses to death, such as equanimity, textual and oral sources attest that the death of the guru is a time of sadness, even emotional crisis, for the disciples. Thus, narratives of the deaths of gurus generally work—we might say, are supposed to work—to assuage the disciples’ loss and mitigate the community’s vulnerability by reconfirming (and often publicizing) the guru’s spiritual attainments. This is one element of the accounts of Dodrubchen’s post-death sitting-up and tukdam meditation in the stories considered above. Such narratives often implicitly or explicitly offer the promise of future connection with the guru, by encouraging devotion to the guru as an enlightened being who can respond to the needs of devotees even beyond death, and/or by affirming the soteriological effectiveness of disciples’ own spiritual activities, based on the authenticity of the guru’s teachings and lineage transmissions. The latter, in particular, promises that disciples can actualize the guru’s Buddhist accomplishments for themselves and in this ultimate sense remain inseparable from the guru. In this context, Buddhist claims about enlightenment as something that practitioners of the Buddhist path can expect to achieve, (as well as claims about other kinds of results from Buddhist practice, ranging from good rebirth to health and prosperity) do not depend solely on the personal charisma of an individual Buddhist teacher, although that charisma is essential. Rather, the teacher’s own personal charisma in some sense depends on claims about the efficacy of the Buddhist path itself, and in particular on the teacher’s manifestation of that efficacy in communally legible form. The post-death tukdam (thugs dam) meditative equipoise that plays such an important role in the stories of Dodrubchen’s death offers perhaps the

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most important kind of communally legible manifestation of the efficacy of the Buddhist path. Tibetan exegetes frame tukdam as a corollary of specific meditative practices and as indicating that the deceased person continues to meditate at a subtle level. During the period of tukdam, the meditator is understood to be completing or, alternatively, abiding in, the culminating stages of the Buddhist path, making tukdam a marker of exceptional Buddhist accomplishment. Accounts of tukdam describe the body of the deceased as remaining upright in meditation posture for a long period, often several days, without decay or physical collapse. The end of the post-death meditation period typically is indicated when a small amount of blood or of red and white fluid flows from the nose.31 Bodies of individuals in tukdam are ideally not touched or moved until tukdam is understood to be complete, so as not to interrupt the process. Tibetan sources also describe other communally significant indications of meditative accomplishment as occurring at the end of the tukdam period. These include diminution of the size and weight of the corpse, and even dissolution of the corpse into a “rainbow body” ( ja lu), leaving behind only clothing and sometimes hair and fingernails. Unusual weather, such as rainbows and snow, can also be a feature of such postmortem events, and so can the production of relics during cremation, or the failure of certain body parts to burn.32 In the stories about Dodrubchen’s death, the displays of rainbow light that inspire his disciples are part of this vocabulary of post-death indications of meditative accomplishment. More recently, communities of disciples and family members of Buddhist practitioners have posted video footage chronicling the tukdam of their teachers or relatives on social media platforms, ranging from YouTube to the messaging app WeChat. This video sharing raises new questions about the relationship between end-of-life moments, the legacy of virtuoso individuals, and the role of new media technologies in communal practices of memory.33 As these considerations suggest, demonstrations of spiritual accomplishment and the inspiration of disciples by the events of a teacher’s death and funeral continue to be central Buddhist narrative concerns. Returning to Angrup’s account with these factors in mind, we can note that he continues the theme of Khunu Lama’s death as an intentional display: As for that, it says in the Gyu Lama [Rgyud bla ma]: “The Noble one completely gives up the suffering of sickness, old age and death.” Just as the quotation says, great holy beings who are holders of the teachings achieve independent control over birth and death. They act only for the benefit of those who are to be taught; their intention is nothing

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other than that, of this there is no doubt. Having remained in one life for a long time, they transform themselves for the benefit of others. From the blessings of their physical body it is possible for them to remain for many  hundreds of years. Nevertheless, they intend that lesser beings who  are bound by the tight chains of believing in permanence should arouse the mental state of really wanting to be liberated from cyclic existence.34

In a kind of foreshadowing, a few pages earlier in the namtar Angrup has in fact already presented Khunu Lama’s trip to Lahaul as itself an intentional, compassionate act, one in which Khunu Lama accepts his own imminent death for the sake of benefiting the people of Lahaul. Speaking of Khunu Lama’s decision at the end of the summer of 1976 to accept the Lahauli invitation, Angrup says, “Lord Lama Rinpoche [Khunu Lama] had the supreme aspiration to compassionately care for the disciples of Garzha [i.e, Lahaul] during the later part of his life.” This was, Angrup says, because of the guru-disciple karmic links that connected Khunu Lama to the people of Garzha in Lahaul: “The disciples who were there specifically included fortunate ones who were lay and ordained, male and female; and their mutual connection [with Khunu Lama], based on their prayers and their karma due to having been guru and disciples through many previous lifetimes, was unbroken and fully manifested.”35 Here, Angrup describes the people of Garzha in Lahaul as Khunu Lama’s karmically destined disciples, implying that both their invitation and his decision to accept it— even though this would set the stage for his death—are karmically destined as well. Garzha is, as we know, Angrup’s own home region. Notably, this passage frames Khunu Lama’s final trip and passing away in Angrup’s home place as a gift—an honor and source of blessing. By implication, this passage gives the events that follow the ring of inevitability. Just as in the story of Dodrubchen sacrificing himself to save the people of Dartsedo from smallpox, here too, the unwelcome and disruptive event of the teacher’s death is situated within the compassionate repertoire of the bodhisattva. Angrup’s presentation of Khunu Lama’s passing away as part of his bodhisattva activity suggests in fact that this is a narrative moment when the rhetoric of renunciation ceases to be in tension with the rhetoric of teacherly generosity. No longer concealed, hard to find, or “escaping,” Khunu Lama apparently teaches everyone and everywhere in Lahaul that he is asked. Angrup recounts, “All kinds of instruction as suitable, he gave extensively, nurturing us with his kindness.”36 Indeed, here renunciation directly enables teacherly generosity: Khunu Lama’s “nurturing kindness” as a teacher in Lahaul, is, according to Angrup, an expression of Khunu

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Lama’s own lack of interest in prolonging his own life and his willingness to pass away as a final teaching on impermanence. Ironically, however, Khunu Lama’s renunciant generosity, like Dodrubchen’s willingness to contract smallpox, will ultimately withdraw him from his disciples once again. Death, as we have seen, constitutes the supreme example of separation, even as practices of devotion and guru-disciple connection can be mobilized to mitigate it. It is in this context that the next events that Angrup narrates take on their full resonance. And here, in stories of what happens following Khunu Lama’s death, a note of disruption and conflict comes into the story as both Angrup and others tell it. First, consider Angrup’s account of what happens after Khunu Lama’s passing, which is not a conventional account of tukdam: When the life’s mission of this great Lama Rinpoche—a real incarnate bodhisattva in person, who was also an heir of the Buddhas—of service to the followers of this region was complete (i.e., when he died), the painful message that hurt like a thorn in their ears was sent via wireless telegraph from Keylong post office to the monasteries; the religious patrons, especially the Kinnauri state officials in Shimla, the capital of Himachal state; and the family members in the upper, middle, and lower part of the region. Subsequently, [the people in Keylong] received a message deliberated upon by the Kinnauri officials who were living there [i.e., in Shimla and Kinnaur], together with the close and distant relatives of Lama Rinpoche, stating: “We are definitely coming tomorrow with a helicopter [to take] the precious remains. Therefore, until then, do not cremate the body, etc., or do any harm to it whatsoever—this is vitally important,” they wrote. Since the great Protector [Khunu Lama] himself was born in Khunu and was a Kinnauri, the people of Garzha had no religious or legal rights, either to the casket of the honored remains, or to the daily utensils and implements that this yogin, who engaged in an unfabricated practice of renunciation, used for merely sustaining his life. They had to act in accordance with the message. The very next day, led by incense-bearers, we had to carry [him] in stages, accompanied by all honors, from the monastery of Tashi Shukling [Shashur Gonpa] down to a middle point where an aircraft could land [at a lower place on the mountain]. Unmoved, the holy Lord Lama remained in the natural state of deep samadhi, yet immediately, he ended his tukdam post-death meditation. Because of this, this plan [to move him to the helicopter] was no good, yet there was no way out of it, so what was the use?”37

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Angrup’s narrative here suddenly veers away from reassuring convention. Disciples compete for the privilege of conducting his funeral and hosting his bodily relics, a conflict in which Angrup suggests local political influence plays a role. Because of the winter weather, a helicopter is the only way to carry the body out of the valley. Getting to the helicopter entails moving Khunu Lama’s body down the mountain, first to the bus station in Keylong, and then to the Indian military base where there was a helicopter landing pad. But Khunu Lama is sitting in tukdam, a state which Angrup and the other disciples present in his narrative understand as a culminating enactment of Khunu Lama’s Buddhist realization, one that also cements his posthumous identity and lineage. Circumstances and local power dynamics compel the people present in Lahaul to interrupt this tukdam by proposing to move the body. Yet this cutting short of Khunu Lama’s tukdam seems to risk disrupting the community’s ability to witness, memorialize, and be encouraged by clear signs of their teacher’s meditative accomplishment (although Angrup’s ambiguous wording here makes it possible to conclude that Khunu Lama himself drew his tukdam to an end to ease the conflict for his disciples, which would be a remarkable form of post-death display in itself, and one very much in keeping with post-death narratives of other important Buddhist exemplars, such as Milarepa).38 Likewise, the plan to remove Khunu Lama’s remains threatens to jeopardize the access of the disciples in Lahaul to his bodily relics, normally another important source of ongoing connection to a deceased teacher’s blessings.39 Angrup’s narrative tone in this passage conveys a lingering distress, even more than twenty-five years after these events: “This plan [to move him to the helicopter] was no good, yet there was no way out of it, so what was the use?” Yet Angrup’s story does not end here. The namtar continues: In order to prevent the transport of the precious body to Khunu on the helicopter, it would require storm clouds [to appear] in the expanse of the sky. . . . But how could this difficult thing happen in such a way, in accordance with the wishes and hopes of the people of Garzha? However, while powerless, we could make the most powerful prayers, and did so. As for some faithful disciples who were enthusiastic-minded, needless to say, they not only prayed to the Three Jewels but also offered incense and libations to gods, nāgas. and demi-gods. Likewise, finally we entrusted our hopes to the yidam deities and powerful oath-bound Dharma protectors. All of a sudden, from the surface of the sky in the western direction, an assembled rosary of young rain clouds gathered, new, like petals of

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white wool. Having expanded in parallel twos and threes like woolen rope, banks of clouds piled up darkness throughout the entire realm of the sky. Because of this happening thus, perfectly just so, the people shed tears involuntarily, from joy, sadness, and faith. In that situation, since [they] had no good alternative to going into that agitated net [of bad weather], terrifying to the mind, we therefore quickly got the message from Shimla, the state capital, saying “The aircraft can’t come because of the extremely bad weather conditions.” We brought [Khunu Lama’s] honored remains once again back to the monastery.40

Here, Angrup describes how the helicopter is turned back by a storm, and how the disciples, who have prayed for just such a helicopter-blocking storm, are moved to involuntary tears “from joy, sadness, and faith.” Angrup does not spell out what has brought this welcome storm, but he hints that the people present understand the storm as arising both in response to their prayers, and from Khunu Lama’s blessing. Without naming the source of the storm directly, Angrup chronicles the disciples’ tears of faith. Notably, however, in this passage, although a storm arises out of a clear sky, and the helicopter is turned back, these events do not prevent the ending of Khunu Lama’s tukdam. The miraculous post-death elements in this story are displaced from what would seem to be their ideal position in the narrative; in that sense, the central problem of the narrative is not fully resolved. Although partially offset by the prayed-for storm, a rupture in the story lingers. Most strikingly, Angrup records this disruption, allowing readers to see the degree to which his account does not fit an ideal narrative for the deaths of gurus. Angrup makes a number of choices in the namtar that are part of his considered approach to crafting a biography of a religious and intellectual figure for an audience that he anticipated would include both scholars and devotees (a complex task, as he hints in the introduction and concluding sections of the namtar).41 In his account of Khunu Lama’s life, he integrates classical stylistic and devotional conventions from the broader namtar genre and from the repertoires of Tibetan and Sanskrit classical poetry with more contemporary passages of reportage, interview material, and personal anecdote in ways that reflect his own positionality as a late twentieth-century Himalayan writer and literary scholar, and someone who was a direct student of his subject. Angrup is writing here about someone with whom he had a formative intellectual and personal relationship, who passed away in his own home monastery, surrounded by people he knew. He ultimately devoted much of his own later life to writing about

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Khunu Lama, composing three versions of the namtar, two in prose and one in verse. The final 2005 edition reflects years of revisions based on his ongoing research. In his approach to his subject matter and in many of his stylistic and structural choices, his work combines concern for historical documentation with strong personal investment in his subject in a way that eludes easy labels of “devotional,” “objective,” “modern,” or “traditional.” Thus, for instance, although Angrup chronicles the faith of people present when the storm blocks the helicopter, he does so descriptively, chronicling the faith he observes without directly claiming it for himself (although he writes in a much more explicitly devotional tone in the introduction and conclusion of the namtar, as well as in the poetic namtar-solteb that is printed together with the 2005 prose namtar).42 Against a larger intellectual backdrop in which Tibetan and Himalayan genres of history and biography have been dismissed by outsiders as overly devotional, or even as inclined to fraud or exaggeration in their depiction of “miraculous” events, Angrup here presents an episode that departs from namtar conventions in its straightforward presentation of the shortened or interrupted tukdam, even as he also records remarkable circumstances that many present at the time found inspiring. He allows the potential feelings of ambivalence, disappointment, or regret, together with the devotion, of participants in these events to be clearly visible to the reader. Certainly, a number of influential Tibetan and Himalayan narratives of gurus’ deaths do describe conflicts among disciples over relics and over succession—even unseemly conflicts. Accounts of Milarepa’s death, to take perhaps the most famous example, describe groups of disciples fighting, in some versions many times, over the relics of Milarepa’s cremated body. Yet while the Milarepa namtar literature, especially the influential Tsangnyon Heruka namtar, includes descriptions of these conflicts, in these accounts the conflict is dramatically and satisfyingly resolved by Milarepa himself through miraculous means that seem intended to further demonstrate Milarepa’s identity as an enlightened figure. In the Milarepa literature, in other words, the conflict over the teacher’s body relics is resolved in a way that reinscribes communal faith and the coherence of the teacher’s lineage.43 It is less clear whether the same can be said here. Although a remarkable and longed-for event (the turning back of the helicopter) occurs, Angrup depicts it as in a sense occurring too late, in that Khunu Lama ends his tukdam. (On the other hand, Angrup describes subsequent events of the funeral as unfolding perfectly, as we will see; moreover, he ultimately reaffirms Khunu Lama’s identity as an enlightened bodhisattva in the introduction to the 2005 namtar). Still, when Angrup narrates the story of the helicopter in this way, we might ask what is going on.

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For a different perspective on this question, we turn to other accounts, in particular the narratives of Tenzin Dolma and Bogti, two of Khunu Lama’s Kinnauri nun disciples. They were both present when he died and were intimately involved in the events that followed. Linda LaMacchia recorded oral histories of Khunu Lama’s death and funeral with each of them, in 1995 and 1996 respectively, as part of her pioneering study of Kinnauri jomos (female Buddhist renunciants) and their oral literature and song traditions. In their oral histories, Tenzin Dolma and Bogti recount the same general sequence of events surrounding Khunu Lama’s death that Angrup describes in the namtar, but with different emphasis. Tenzin Dolma and Bogti both describe the moment of Khunu Lama’s passing in much more graphic detail than the namtar, perhaps in part because of their own eye-witness and literally hands-on participation. As Khunu Lama’s personal attendants, they performed the intimate and physical tasks of preparing his food and bath water on his last day, bathing his body after his death, and preparing his relics after cremation. Both Bogti’s and Tenzin Dolma’s stories convey an embodied witness of Khunu Lama’s death and their own intense grief in ways that are deeply personal to them. At the same time, the physical and emotional details of their accounts point to broader somatic and affective dimensions in student encounters with the deaths of teachers. LaMacchia has moreover suggested that their accounts also point to distinctively gendered aspects of their experiences. Following LaMacchia, we might read the concrete, often tactile detail of their stories as reflecting the gendered physicality of their identities as nuns, for whom hands-on caretaking work and somatic expressions of grief such as tears are often linked to female embodiment.44 Bogti’s narrative is the most detailed of all accounts of Khunu Lama’s death. Although both Tenzin Dolma and Bogti note, like Angrup in the namtar, that Khunu Lama died after reaching the Perfection of Wisdom chapter in Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament, Bogti gives additional details that highlight a perception of Khunu Lama’s own agency over the time of his passing. Bogti describes how on the day that he died, contrary to his normal teaching schedule, Khunu Lama insisted on teaching straight through the morning teaching period and normal lunchtime without a break, until he had reached the Perfection of Wisdom chapter: “That day, though, he didn’t even agree to eat lunch, because until he reached Sherab [shes rab; wisdom; the wisdom section of the Jewel Ornament] he didn’t agree to rest at all.” She recalls what may be Khunu Lama’s last words, in which he confirms what he completed in the teaching that day, further conveying the sense of his agency, as well as of the logistics of lunch and bathing for which the nuns were responsible: “Rinpoche asked

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me, ‘Today where did I get to in the teaching?’ I answered that today he got to [the Perfection of Wisdom Chapter], that in the house the fire was lit, and I was going for water [for his bath].”45 Bogti goes on to describe Khunu Lama’s physical symptoms of illness and death in much more explicit terms than either the namtar or Tenzin Dolma. She says that when she was about to leave the room with the tub for bath water, “Negi Rinpoche [Khunu Lama] had a fit of loud coughing.” Angrup in the namtar describes Khunu Lama as having “vomited a little bit of blood,” but Bogti describes this differently. First, she recalls that he coughed up considerable blood into a bowl she held for him. Concerned, she asked him if he had medicine she could give him. When he didn’t answer, she asked if the patron who sponsored the teachings might have medicine. When Khunu Lama nodded in reply, she briefly left the room: Then I went upstairs to call Tenzin Dolma and Tenzin Zangmo [and tell them] that here Negi ji [Khunu Lama] was coughing a lot. ‘Go to Ngawang, the sponsor, to get medicine and bring it back here.’ When I had sent Tenzin Dolma to Patron Ngawang’s, I was in such a hurry I didn’t even go all the way up, but loudly began to call. . . . I went tearing back to Negi and as soon as she had heard, Khandroma [the Drikung Khandroma] arrived right there with me. [From the time] when I went to call Tenzin Dolma, not even five or ten minutes had passed.46

When Bogti, now accompanied by the Drikung Khandroma, returned to Khunu Lama’s room, she recalls that Khunu Lama had vomited up a great deal of blood, the sight of which brought her to tears: “From the door I saw and was so afraid and at the same time astounded. So suddenly and unexpectedly, what was happening? When I came in front [of him], seeing Negi Rinpoche’s condition, tears fell and I sat down.” Bogti describes the Drikung Khandroma as standing by the door, “clasping her hands” and praying aloud; she says that the two of them cried and prayed together, but Khunu Lama did not say anything.47 At this point, according to Bogti, Tenzin Dolma and some of the monks came into the room. While Bogti says that she herself and the Drikung Khandroma, despite their tears, intended to sit in the room and pray, she recalls that Tenzin Dolma, overwhelmed by grief, began to cry so forcefully that the monks and sponsors present made her leave the room. Bogti says that the sponsors and monks also made the Drikung Khandroma and Bogti leave the room, together with Tenzin Dolma, out of fear that the three women would cry loudly and disrupt the deathbed with their noise. Bogti recalls being shut out of the room at this pivotal moment, and how she and the Drikung Khandroma

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impressed upon Tenzin Dolma the urgency of not crying anymore. She continues, “When we were outside talking like this, then when we went back in, Negi Rinpoche at that time his sir sadar [consciousness, sic] had gone. Then, whatever things we could have done for him before, at this time nothing could be done. This vomit of flowing blood was indeed his leaving this samsara.” This passage seems to mean that when they returned it was too late to offer any further medical assistance.48 Bogti does not elaborate on what it was like to be shut out of the room while Khunu Lama was dying, and she does not criticize the male students who made them leave, but there is a hint of emotion when she says, “whatever things we could have done for him before, at this time nothing could be done.” She does not criticize Tenzin Dolma’s grief. Both she and Tenzin Dolma are direct about the intensity of their own reactions, in contrast to the more measured tone of Angrup’s namtar account. The two nuns describe their grief at losing Khunu Lama in vivid physical and emotional terms. In Tenzin Dolma’s words, “When Khunu Rinpoche passed away I cried a lot. That is why I can’t see properly now, because I lost a lot of tears. I was almost going mad at that time.”49 An additional important difference between Angrup’s namtar account and those of Bogti and Tenzin Dolma concerns how specific they both are about the substantial length of Khunu Lama’s tukdam. Both Bogti and Tenzin Dolma describe Khunu Lama as remaining in tukdam for a long time before the body was moved for the helicopter. In Bogti’s words, “As for us, day and night we stayed with candles lit. Then Negi Rinpoche stayed right there for seven days in Shashur Gonpa. Whatever was to be done, the monks did it. Day and night, they stayed there. They did funeral rites. Negi Rinpoche stayed for seven days sitting in tukdam.”50 Yet, in Bogti’s recollection, this seven-day period could have lasted even longer but was ended by the plan to move the body to the helicopter, a plan that Bogti says she and the other Kinnauri nuns tried to resist: “When they came to us, we said to the sepoy [the local Indian military official], ‘We cannot lay a hand on such a great Rinpoche, because he is seated in meditation posture, in this state. We too are Kinnauris. We too want to take him to Kinnaur. But seated in tukdam, how can we lay a hand on him?”51 Although she recalled the time period differently, Tenzin Dolma likewise described a substantial period of tukdam, although she too says that it would have continued even longer if it had not been interrupted: “Even after dying, Khunu Lama stayed in meditation posture, tukdam. It’s a kind of prayer after death. Even if they [high lamas] pass away, they stay in prayer. He was sitting up for three days. . . . Actually, he was going to stay about five days. But then people . . . thought of taking his body in a helicopter.”52

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The two nuns witnessed the dramatic events surrounding the helicopter from different locations. Bogti remained in the monastery at Shashur with the Drikung Khandroma, while Tenzin Dolma accompanied the procession carrying Khunu Lama down from Shashur to the bus station in Keylong. However, they were each aware of the other’s roles, and mention each other in their narratives (although LaMacchia recorded their accounts separately, a year apart.) Bogti, for her part, recounts that the Shashur monks asked the Kinnauri nuns for help in preventing the plan to meet the helicopter. This is a striking detail, given conventional Himalayan Buddhist gender hierarchies that often place monks above nuns.53 In Bogti’s recollection, “Then at that time when the officer went to the monks, the monks said, ‘Rinpoche is in meditation posture [tukdam]. In this condition how can we bring Rinpoche?’ When the monks forbade [moving him], then the sepoy said, ‘This is the D.C.’s [district commissioner’s] order. You people have to bring him.’ Then one monk came to us bringing the sepoy [and said:] ‘He is not paying attention to us. You tell him.’”54 Although Bogti explains that the nuns, like the monks, ultimately failed to persuade the local officials, her recollection of being asked to intervene confirms in her narrative the importance of the role she and the other nuns played. Subsequently, in describing what happened after Khunu Lama’s remains were taken down the mountain, Bogti emphasizes the efficacy of her own and the Drikung Khandroma’s prayer activity. She describes how she and the Drikung Khandroma focused on supplicating Khunu Lama directly, praying both for his swift reincarnation and for his post-death intervention to block the helicopter: Then when they were taking Negi Rinpoche from here, we didn’t have any discussion at all. We couldn’t do anything at all. . . . If we kept talking to each other, we couldn’t do anything at all. I spoke in this way to Negi Rinpoche [Khunu Lama], I was requesting a blessing from bhagwan [Hindi, “lord,” i.e., Khunu Lama]. . . . “We can’t do anything. Negi Rinpoche, whatever shakti [power] you have, show it! If you want to go in this way, if you don’t want to go, then also, by some shakti, use your thul [Tib. sprul, emanation, display of yogic accomplishment] and do something!”

After making this request, Bogti says she and the Drikung Khandroma began doing prostrations, “lit butter lamps,” and began making offerings at Khunu Lama’s seat, where he had been giving the teachings when he died.55 Meanwhile, the group of monks formed a procession carrying Khunu Lama’s body on a palanquin down the mountainside toward the bus

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station. Bogti describes the scene much as Angrup does, noting that the monks played musical instruments and adding that villagers from all the surrounding areas of Garzha had been invited to gather in the bus station for a last darshan (Hindi, “viewing,” “devotional encounter”) with Khunu Lama. Tenzin Dolma and Tenzin Zangmo accompanied the procession to the bus station. To continue with an eye-witness account of what happened next, we turn to Tenzin Dolma. She remembers herself as actively trying to prevent the plan to transport Khunu Lama to the helicopter. She also remembers herself as playing a decisive role in seizing the opportunity to bring his remains back to Shashur when the storm blocked the helicopter’s arrival. Her account is especially detailed about the social and financial pressures involved. In her words, “Actually, he was going to stay [in tukdam] about five days. But then people . . . thought of taking his body in a helicopter. . . . At that time, I was there, and I said, ‘We don’t want to destroy the sitting meditation.’ But they didn’t listen, and around five o’clock they sent an airplane to Shashur monastery.” At this point Tenzin Dolma recalls herself as “quarreling” with the people who made the helicopter plan: “I said, ‘I’m happy to take his body to Kinnaur as I am from Kinnaur. At least wait until he finished the meditation, and only then are you allowed to take the body.’ And they said they paid 60 thousand rupees for the helicopter and I would have to pay 60 thousand rupees to them [if they couldn’t take the body that day]. At that time, I didn’t have money at all, but I said, ‘I’ll pay this very day.’ I thought of begging the money from the people of Lahaul.”56 Here Tenzin Dolma makes clear that the crisis over moving Khunu Lama’s body and sending the helicopter also has an economic aspect, something Bogti notes as well.57 The helicopter is expensive, perhaps a marker of the power and resources of the officials who will use it. Its price creates a constraint for everyone. Even for the officials who have hired it, the sixty thousand rupees is not a negligible sum, and this price creates its own logic, the logic of (according to Tenzin Dolma) following through with a flawed plan, since otherwise a large sum of money would be wasted. The price of the helicopter moreover highlights the vulnerability of Khunu Lama’s nun disciples as renunciants: they have no money and little hope of raising any except by begging. Not only are they women, which makes them less powerful in religious and social terms, but they are renunciant women, separated from whatever social and economic power their families might have by virtue of their renunciation and their decision to leave their home valley to study Buddhism and travel with Khunu Lama.58 And yet, Tenzin Dolma suggests in her account, precisely in their role as Buddhist renunciants, the nuns also have special responsibilities. These responsibili-

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ties place them in the middle of events. We see this in particular when the Lahauli community scolds Tenzin Dolma for not doing more to prevent Khunu Lama’s body from being moved: In Tenzin Dolma’s words, “the people of Lahaul scolded me that I had allowed them to destroy Khunu Lama’s sitting meditation. They said it’s the duty of nuns to quarrel with the people . . . who wanted to take his body.”59 This sense of having a special responsibility to protect Khunu Lama’s tukdam and to ensure that ritually correct and communally beneficial things are done continues as Tenzin Dolma describes her ongoing role even after the helicopter turns back. Tenzin Dolma recounts how the group attending Khunu Lama’s body near the bus station waits for hours for the helicopter, which does not arrive, and she waits with them. Some of the leaders present want to take Khunu Lama’s body to the Indian army base, where there was a heliport, but Tenzin Dolma says she cries and resists this. It is only when the sky becomes dark from the arrival of the storm that the standoff is resolved. In Tenzin Dolma’s narrative, although the storm provides the opportunity to finally take Khunu Lama’s body back to Shashur, it is her own decisive actions that complete this resolution: “And suddenly what happened was, there was a big cloud and everywhere it became very dark. I thought the airplane would not come, and I said, ‘Now I’m going to take Rinpoche’s body back to the place where he passed away.’ I planned this myself. Whatever happened, I myself was going to take responsibility for it. Then we took him to Shashur Monastery again.”60 As we have seen, the disruption of death stems in part from how it highlights the impermanence of all physical bodies. In the narratives of masterful Buddhist death we have already encountered, we have seen figures like the Buddha, Dodrubchen, and Khunu Lama address this disruption in a variety of ways, such as when they are shown choosing the time and place of their deaths, or when they demonstrate various forms of mastery over the post-death state. Indeed, when narrators describe such figures’ deaths as intentional displays for teaching students about impermanence, these stories communicate both impermanence, and the ability of Buddhist masters to choose their own relationship to that impermanence. This is a striking enactment of their meditative power and thus of the authority and authenticity of their lineage. Accounts of chatralwa renunciation like the ideal described in the Kadampa Ten Jewels and Four Aims, or in Tulku Thondup’s description of Dodrubchen’s death scene, by contrast, at the same time seem to draw on the disruptive quality of physical death to make a different, though closely related, point: not only are physical bodies impermanent, but true renunciation ultimately includes relinquishing even the markers of a saintly

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death itself. The stories of Khunu Lama’s passing away that we have just explored resonate on all of these levels at once, showing both his mastery of the death and post-death processes, and the interruption or concealment of that display of mastery. Stories of Khunu Lama’s death, in all their ambiguity, are acts of memory carrying this renunciatory ambivalence to future audiences. The accounts of Bogti and Tenzin Dolma arguably reflect a further set of priorities as well. Their narratives model for their audience an embodied, subtly gendered ethics of Buddhist care for others, one they enact specifically as nuns. We have already seen an aspect of this ethic of care emerge in the physical detail with which Bogti recounts her activities as Khunu Lama’s attendant, responsible for bathing, medicine, and lunch, as well as in her description of the moments of Khunu Lama’s death process, including his coughing and blood, and the somatic outpouring of the nuns’ own grief in tears. The nuns’ role further emerges when other community members turn to them for help in protecting Khunu Lama’s tukdam by resisting the plan to move him to the helicopter. Finally, in their descriptions of their important roles in the cremation and funeral rituals, we see the nuns’ practice of care mobilized for the proper ritual preparation of the relics of their revered teacher. This turns us now to Khunu Lama’s cremation. Bogti, Tenzin Dolma, and Angrup all describe the cremation in their accounts, and depict it as unfolding in a moving and satisfying way, yet each gives quite different emphases and details. Angrup highlights the ceremonial exactitude of the funeral and the stupa construction, both as befitting a great Buddhist teacher and also as demonstrating the ritual knowledge and devoted care of the Lahauli community. Angrup even names one particular local participant individually. In Angrup’s words, “Right from the time when the kind protector, who was a bodhisattva-emanation, graced us with his presence at Tashi Shukling Monastery, to up to the performing of the funeral service, rituals, prayers, supplications and the erection of the memorial stupa, the necessary activities of bathing and consecration, and seeking forgiveness through reading the complete collection of Kanjur, it was the young monk disciple Ngawang Tenzin, who took the sole responsibility of overseeing and coordinating between event organizers through all these stages.”61 The funeral and cremation as Angrup describes them were elaborately and carefully done: “We performed uninterrupted offering rituals for the funeral service every day for seven days. On the twenty-seventh day of the western second month, we removed the robes from the honored body and washed the body with good smelling perfume and scented water, and applied ointment.” After this, “having put on the crown, and five-colored silk

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scarves of the Five Buddha Families, [Khunu Lama’s body] took on the accoutrements of a divine Perfect Enjoyment Body. Then it was carried from the assembly by people holding incense and led by trumpets.”62 Angrup specifies that the cremation box was filled with “juniper kindling” and that “on all four sides of the cremation box, we set out extensive clouds of the five types of offerings, and resplendent rosaries of brilliant butter lamps.” The funeral fire offering was done “according to the mandala of the glorious Buddha Akṣobhya,” and the people present “made offerings and supplication prayers in order to completely accomplish all the profound intentions of our compassionate protector.”63 Angrup describes the building of the stupa after the cremation, with the completed stupa looking “like a heap of divine ambrosia.” In his depiction, the final consecration of the stupa and installation of Khunu Lama’s relics was a bitter-sweet but deeply meaningful event: “At that time, with highest respect, sincere intention inspired by faith, with tears in the eyes, making prostrations and offerings, we offered prayer flags on the stupa. And a vast, wonderful, auspicious celebration was organized.”64 Notably, Angrup’s account focuses on the funeral rituals and stupa construction, rather than on any explicit mention of further post-death remarkable events after the storm that stopped the helicopter. Yet it is striking that he describes the cremation as occurring after seven full days of funeral rituals, which implies that Khunu Lama’s body remained undecayed for a week. This would be a remarkable post-death sign of Buddhist accomplishment in itself. Angrup mentions these seven days of ritual, but does not highlight the implications.65 In contrast to Angrup, Tenzin Dolma and Bogti describe slightly different aspects of Khunu Lama’s funeral and cremation. Both nuns primarily focus on the challenge of dividing his bodily relics between the disciples in Kinnaur and those in Lahaul. (Indeed, the earlier conflict over transporting Khunu Lama’s body suggests that the disposition of relics may have been a matter of concern.) While Angrup notes the placement of relics in the stupa, he does not address the details of their division. Nevertheless, although both Tenzin Dolma and Bogti describe how the relics were divided in some detail, they describe the process differently. Tenzin Dolma describes a process of voting, while Bogti describes the spontaneous division of one of Khunu Lama’s bones into two, in what appears to be a further post-death yogic intervention. Tenzin Dolma offers the briefest of all the accounts of the cremation, saying merely that “crowds of Lahaul people came. We took his body back to Shashur monastery, and from there we took the body up the hill to burn it. . . . And I lit the fire first” (something the others do not mention). When

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turning to the relics, however, she offers considerably more detail, noting that parts of Khunu Lama’s body did not burn and that both communities hoped for the same relics: “After burning the body, we collected the small bones and locked them into a box. But his head and heart were still left. They didn’t burn. People wanted to divide them. . . . The people of Kinnaur wanted to take the heart to Kinnaur, and the people of Lahaul wanted the heart too.” Here, as in the conflict surrounding the helicopter, Tenzin Dolma again identifies herself as a Kinnauri, even as she insists on an impartial procedure, one that she implies is what Khunu Lama would want: “Then I said, ‘I’m from Kinnaur too, and I know if the heart comes to Kinnaur I’ll be happy. But I have to please my teacher [Khunu Rinpoche], and so we have to put it to the vote. Vote means we took two pieces of paper and wrote the name [Kinnaur or Lahaul]. The people of Kinnaur didn’t get the heart. They kept the heart in Lahaul, and then they took the head to Kinnaur. And then we sent the small bones and ash to every monastery in Keylong . . . and we made a stupa. We made a silver stupa.”66 Bogti’s account by contrast is much more detailed. She describes some of the same elaborate ritual procedures as Angrup does, including a recitation of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. Like Tenzin Dolma, however, she is most concerned with the production and division of the relics. Bogti explains that members of the community in Lahaul were aware that they must divide the relics, so that some could be sent to Kinnaur. In her recollection, Khunu Lama’s body remained in the brick cremation box for seven days, during which time the monks recited prayers. When the cremation box was opened, “only the outer flesh had gone, the bones were still there. Only his two hands and his two feet were gone. The rest was there.” Bogti remembers that at that point, she herself set in motion the building of the stupa: “Then I said to the monks, ‘Within fifty days the stupa . . . must be made. To build it, kudung [sku bdung, body relics] is very necessary. I will prepare them and give them to you.”67 Like Tenzin Dolma, Bogti recalls that it was difficult to know how to divide the large relics between the communities in Lahaul and in Kinnaur. But in contrast to the voting procedure Tenzin Dolma describes, Bogti recounts a dramatic resolution: “We opened [the cremation box]. . . . But it seemed strange to break the sabut [bones (sic)]. Then Lama Sonam [one of the Shashur lamas] said, ‘Such a great lama, how can we break this with our hands?’ . . . At the time we were thinking in this way, by themselves of their own accord, Rinpoche’s dancha [bones that did not burn (sic)] split into two pieces. Then at that time Sonam said, ‘Ane [nuns], it broke in two itself. Now we don’t have to worry.’”68

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Here Bogti describes a final remarkable event that resolves the problem of dividing the relics. She does not spell out that the bone broke in half through Khunu Lama’s compassionate post-death intervention, but the implication is clear. Much as in the climactic funeral scene in Tsangnyon Heruka’s Life of Milarepa, where a conflict over relics is resolved through Milarepa’s extraordinary post-death activity, Bogti implies that Khunu Lama’s post-death mastery resolves a potential conflict among the disciples. In this example, and throughout her account, Bogti highlights her own, and perhaps her community’s, faith in Khunu Lama’s Buddhist identity as an enlightened being with powerful agency even after his death. Tenzin Dolma’s narrative, on the other hand, particularly affirms her own interpersonal strength and agency in protecting and honoring Khunu Lama, and her ability to act independently despite her grief. She also affirms her role as an equitable adjudicator of important devotional claims from multiple disciple communities. She links her own fairness in the voting process with what she understands as Khunu Lama’s wishes and with her own ethical commitments to him as her teacher. Despite their differences, both nuns’ narratives jointly assert the resilience and resourcefulness of Khunu Lama’s disciples. Indeed, we might say that both nuns’ accounts model the kinds of strengths the continuity of Khunu Lama’s memory and teachings will require in his absence. In her analysis of their accounts, LaMacchia highlights how both nuns not only “affirm the authenticity of the lama’s attainment and the lineage,” as namtar narratives are ideally supposed to do, but also how their stories “confirm the authenticity of the nuns’ lineage.” The two women note their own achievements, as close and trusted students of their teacher, who display “courage, good judgment, quick wit, and articulateness, and demonstrate how effective their prayers are.”69 Tenzin Dolma and Bogti’s recollections of Khunu Lama, both in life as their guru and in the events of his death, thus function on multiple levels as resources for their own religious power as female Kinnauri Buddhists, and as female renunciants in particular.70

Loss and Memory The time of the guru’s death is a time of vulnerability for both reincarnation and transmission lineages. At the level of reincarnation lineages, for any sequence of reincarnate lamas, a vulnerability exists, inasmuch as each time the guru departs, the disciples must wait for him or her to return and then locate the rebirth. The many prayers and supplications for the quick return of deceased gurus testify to the concern this provokes. Even after a reincar-

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nation is identified, the community must wait for the new incarnation to be trained and to reach maturity before the new individual can truly begin to take over the previous teacher’s activities, adding to the potential strain on the lineage. An important contemporary subset of this problem arises in the case of major figures who have traditionally played powerful political and social roles in the Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist world, such as the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, and the Karmapas. For these figures, the issue of transition to their reincarnations has in the present day taken on great political weight, most starkly in the case of the Eleventh Panchen Lama.71 However, at least as complex is the problem posed for transmission lineages by the guru’s death. For the transmission lineage, what is at stake when the guru dies is the continuity of the “authentic” transmission of the lama’s teachings, following the paradigm of the problem posed by the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa with which this book began. At this level, the question is whether the lineage of teachings held by the lama who has died has been successfully passed along to disciples who remain. Some, perhaps many, disciples will in turn become lineage holders and transmitters themselves, highlighting the need to demonstrate to the community the efficacy of the guru’s teaching, since that efficacy authorizes the next generation of lineage teachers. One could see these concerns as being, to various degrees, about rights and title to the guru’s legacy, to whatever charisma had been associated with the guru, as well as to the inheritance of the guru’s property and status. One can also understand these concerns as being about the future of the community of disciples, in particular the continuity of the community through time. But it is the soteriological level that Buddhist narrators emphasize as most important. At this level, disciples are not concerned only with whether the lineage will continue in its outward forms. Rather, they are interested in manifestations of the guru’s enlightened state, because indications of the guru’s attainment at death demonstrate to disciples the soteriological efficacy of the transmissions they have already received. Narratives of a teacher’s death can offer reassurance and assuage grief to the degree that they assure that the guru is authentically realized, the lineage is valid, and the students can access the teacher’s attainment through their participation in that lineage. In this light, stories of Khunu Lama’s tukdam transpose the danger of the volatile time after a teacher’s death into stories about these events. Accounts of a potentially interrupted tukdam in a sense offer a metonymy for the pain and danger of a lineage interrupted by the death of a teacher. Yet in different ways, Angrup’s namtar and Bogti’s and Tenzin Dolma’s narratives move beyond this distress to highlight sources of strength, reassurance, and

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continuity in what occurred. In Angrup’s namtar, the arrival of the storm that blocks the helicopter, which by implication occurs in response to disciples’ prayers, is one part of moving past the dismay of the interrupted tukdam. Angrup’s description of the perfectly executed funeral and cremation further aids this process of repair and affirms the ritual competence of Khunu Lama’s disciples. It also confirms the legitimacy and value of the places in both Lahaul and Kinnaur where Khunu Lama’s bodily relics are now enshrined and affirms the devotion of both communities of disciples. As LaMacchia has suggested, Bogti’s and Tenzin Dolma’s narratives also highlight the affirmation provided by the turning back of the helicopter, and by the funeral and cremation, and especially, in Bogti’s account, by the apparently miraculous breaking apart of the large bone, providing each community with a bone relic to keep. Even beyond this, the nuns’ description of Khunu Lama’s lengthy tukdam before the interruption of the helicopter, and their recollections of their own forceful prayers and assertive leadership all manifest the continued flourishing of Khunu Lama’s lineage and disciples. Indeed, both Angrup’s namtar and the nuns’ recorded narratives communicate a noticeable independence on the part of the disciples. Angrup’s departure from certain namtar conventions for recounting the deaths of gurus suggests one kind of stylistic independence; the nuns’ description of their own rapid and assertive responses to Khunu Lama’s death offer another. All three of their descriptions of the well-performed cremation and fair division of relics likewise demonstrate their capacity and that of other disciples to step into leadership roles. Moreover, the very act of recounting these events in itself enacts a form of power and agency, situating them in the powerful roles of biographers and historians. One might even speculate that the separation imposed between guru and disciple when a guru dies may enable precisely this kind of independence, leadership, and agency. The loss involved in a guru’s death creates a potentially dangerous gap in lineage continuity, but at the same time it creates an aperture in which a new generation’s creativity is forced to take shape. Nevertheless, we might also see Khunu Lama’s death, like Dodrubchen’s, as a kind of “renunciant death,” in which what happens at one level seems to refuse the conventions of the “inspiring death” that one might anticipate. Stories of renunciant deaths like that of Khunu Lama or Dodrubchen retain a power to startle and move audiences, portraying moments of loss that remain in some sense unresolved, despite the consolations that each set of narratives goes on to offer. Indeed, wouldn’t a more conventional “saintly death” be out of keeping for the Khunu Lama we have encountered in earlier stories? It is difficult to imagine the man whom students remember as

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discouraging composition of namtar about himself and resisting entreaties to write his own supplication prayer willingly participating in a death narrative that might increase his fame or visibility. And yet, to frame Khunu Lama’s death as a renunciant death in this way would still be to inscribe a story of his own extraordinary agency over the dying process. This too would offer a powerful, if unusual, prompt toward faith. The tensions between faith and loss in these stories of renunciant death evoke the jarring intensity of a guru-disciple separation that the narratives do not smooth over. At the same time, that very separation inspires the disciples to assume new roles and forms of agency. The intensity of loss that comes through in narratives of Khunu Lama’s death resonates with the imaginaries of renunciation through which his students describe his activities in life. Their longing for him, energized by separation in both life and death, fuels their devotion. These narratives of separation and devotion in turn support the continuity of the lineage.

Epilogue

Lineage networks honeycomb the spatial maps of terrestrial geography with binding interpersonal ties. These can traverse great cultural and linguistic differences and bridge state and national boundaries. The same networks also bind individuals across generations, and link events in the past with experiences in the present and with future possibilities. Buddhist lineage systems in this sense offer a model of inter-Asian connections both spatial and temporal. Individual participants in Tibetan and Himalayan lineages are strikingly autonomous, active co-creators of human chains of relationship that disrupt simple mappings of center and periphery, tradition and modernity, unitary flows of knowledge and power. The paired, though apparently opposite, themes of indivisibility and separation fundamentally structure Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist transmission lineages, in areas ranging from rhetoric to ritual, relationships, and literary representations. Evocations of separation and loss work together with the rhetoric of indivisibility in an interplay of sameness and difference, continuity and change, intimacy and longing. This book has explored narratives of separation and connection that highlight these affective dynamics. Disruptions, in particular the disruption of death, are literally built into lineages. In Buddhist terms, this is because human lives, bodies, and relationships are impermanent: people die, and circumstances constantly change. Other moments of guru-disciple separation, including those due to physical distance or conflict, or to social or political circumstances, also potentially destabilize the flow of lineage continuity. Yet these instances of separation and disruption simultaneously carve out spaces within the intimate proximity of the teacher-student sequence in which students can assert their own capacities; manifest the

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power of their faith or the value of their connection to their teacher; and ultimately step into new roles as lineage holders in their own right. Not only that—for Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhists (as for participants in a number of other religious traditions), separations of students from gurus create opportunities for devotional longing that play a crucial affective role in lineage vitality, reenergizing the devotional practices on which lineage continuity and its attendant practices of memory and recollection are understood to depend. In all these ways, lineage continuity involves a paradoxical tension, in which disruptive instances of separation are nevertheless highly productive for lineage creativity, adaptability, and resilience. I have argued here that the paradoxical quality of separations between teachers and students appears with particular vividness as imagined and enacted through the Buddhist ideal of renunciation. Renunciation undergirds the Buddhist project that Buddhist lineages transmit. Yet at the same time, many of its practices threaten to destabilize lineage continuity. The chatralwa renunciant ideal, as Khunu Lama is remembered as practicing it, withdrew him from students in many ways. His embrace of a life of hidden wandering, his avoidance of fame and public presence, his apparently intentional poverty and disregard for his own health all repeatedly hid him from students and would-be students or caused him to leave students behind. For those who remember and tell stories about him now, in particular for narrators who transmit accounts of his death, attempts to describe his activity are in multiple ways marked by forms of incompleteness or ambivalence. In a sense, these are narratives that preserve precisely the disruption of narrative. This then is a book about gaps—separations and absences; losses and departures; things unknown, hidden, or occluded. Yet at the same time, this is also a book about the survival of enduring connections, about a repertoire of responses to separation that includes devotion, longing, recollection, and storytelling itself. Even Khunu Lama’s withdrawals and departures produce anecdotes. These observations have guided me to focus in this book on the ways people remember Khunu Lama and on the narrative and affective modes within which stories about him circulate. From a theoretical vantage point, a focus on “gaps” is at the core of my engagement with the repertoires, imaginaries, and authorizing referents of the chatralwa renunciant ideal and with the dynamics of absence, longing, and devotion that energize and embed this ideal within the relational webs of lineage. Yet on the other hand, any account of the chatrawala ideal and its attendant separations must be juxtaposed here with a second Buddhist ideal that also runs through accounts of Khunu Lama’s life. This is the Mahāyāna ideal of compassion, epitomized by skillful, engaged teaching

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relationships. In Khunu Lama’s case, stories of his teaching relationships highlight his focus on people accorded marginal status with limited access to Buddhist teachers, such as women, rural people, and non-Buddhists. Stories of his teaching also depict him as nearly omnivorous in his intellectual and religious ecumenicism, both as a teacher and as a student. People who remember him present him as both renunciant and teacher, enacting ideals both of withdrawing from fame and of engaging in relationship. In part because of the time period in which he lived, Khunu Lama emerges as a bridge figure, a member of a pivotal generation whose studies and teaching activities span the pre- and post-1959 periods in Tibetan and Himalayan intellectual and religious life. When reflecting on accounts of his life that emphasize his departures, withdrawals, and self-concealments, we might even ask whether narrators mobilize the example of Khunu Lama’s absences as a kind of metonymy for the gaps and losses of the twentieth century itself. Narratives of lost opportunities for connection with him, like narratives of missed opportunities between other gurus and students, remind audiences of foundational Buddhist accounts of painful impermanence. Yet such narratives also point simultaneously to specific losses and traumas of twentieth-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist communities, most starkly in geographic Tibet and in the Tibetan diaspora, as well as more broadly in a range of political, ecological and social contexts across the Himalayan region. At the same time, Khunu Lama is often situated by narrators as a lineage connector, a figure who played a role in Tibetan Buddhist survival and flourishing in the aftermath of recent social and individual trauma. Indeed, despite the challenges in studying with him, a list of his students and contacts in the last decades of his life reads as a kind of Who’s Who of twentiethcentury Tibetan Buddhism, marking an ongoing vitality and continuity. Narratives of his life also suggest a reorienting of the lineage geographies of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism, with geographic Tibet becoming less accessible and the adjacent Himalayan regions taking on a newly central role, in tandem with diasporic Tibetan institutions in other places, such as South India. In both these contexts, Khunu Lama serves not only as a member of a bridge generation of scholars and teachers in a context of historical disruption, but also as a bridge figure in a different sense, a cultural and geographic bridge who, in his own person and connections, is remembered as drawing Himalayan and Tibetan communities of Buddhists closer together and linking both to older Buddhist communities in India.1 In view of all these considerations, it is perhaps not surprising that Khunu Lama and the chatralwa ideal he is recalled as embodying remain vivid in various ways. Photographs, voice recordings, selections from his writings,

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Figure 7. Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen in Bodh Gaya, India, c. 1974. Photo courtesy of Anasuya Weil, 1974.

and excerpts from various accounts of his life circulate on the internet; on institutional websites, blogs, crowd-sourced encyclopedias, and social media; and in languages ranging from English and Tibetan to Chinese, Italian, French, and German.2 Contemporary practitioners also continue to mobilize the chatralwa ideal itself, in very much the same terms that Khunu Lama is recalled as embracing it. Perhaps the most prominent recent exemplar is Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s youngest brother, the Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (b. 1975), who in 2011 left his students in secret for a four-year wandering retreat in India and the Himalayan region.

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During his retreat, he lived on alms and leftovers, immersing himself in a homeless state in a way strongly reminiscent of Khunu Lama. Upon his return, he has begun to write and speak about his experiences in a way that further introduces a chatralwa style of practice to new audiences.3 Taken together, these various examples reflect the ongoing vitality of individual lineages that Khunu Lama received and transmitted. More broadly, these examples suggest the vitality of the Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation, devotion, and lineage connection in which he and his biographers participate, and which narrators of stories about his life are engaged in transmitting to future generations.

Glossary

A bu lha sgang. See Pema Tekchok Loden Akṣobhya (mi bskyod pa) Amdo (a mdo) Amgon Rinpoche (a mgon rin po che) Ānanda (kun dga’ bo) Angrup (dngos grub) Ani Damcho Zangmo (a ni dam chos bzang mo) Apho Rinpoche Yeshe Rangdrol (a pho rin po che ye shes rang grol) Apho Rinpoche. See Apho Rinpoche Yeshe Rangdrol Atīśa (Atīśa, alt. Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna, a ti sha dpal mar me mdzad ye shes) Bakula Rinpoche, Ngawang Lobsang Tubsten Choknor (ba ku la rin po che nag dbang blo bzang thub bstan mchog nor). See Nineteenth Kushok Bakula Ngawang Lobsang Thubten Choknor Rinpoche Baling Lama Kushok Thupstan Tsewang (sku shog thub bstan tshe dbang ba? gling) Bhutan (‘brug yul) Bod Rinpoche (bod rin po che). See Khangsarwa Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche Bopa Tulku Dongak Tenpe Nyima (bod pa sprul sku mdo sngags bstan pa’i nyi ma) Bogti (bog ti) Bon (bon) Chamdo (chab mdo) Chatralwa (bya bral ba) Choden Zangmo Rinpoche. See Drikung Khandroma Choden Zangmo Rinpoche Chogyal Ngagi Wangpo (chos rgyal ngag gi dbang po) Chogye Trichen Rinpoche (bco brgyad khri chen rin po che) Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche (chos kyi nyi ma rin po che)

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Dakmema (bdag med ma) Dakpo Lhaje (dwags po lha rje). See Gampopa Sonam Rinchen Dakpo Lhaje Sonam Rinchen (dwags po lha rje bsod nams rin chen). See Gampopa Sonam Rinchen Dalai Lama (tA la’i bla ma) Damcho Zangmo (dam chos bzang mo) Daṇḍin (dbyug pa can) Darjeeling (rdo rje gling) Dartsedo (dar rtse mdo, Ch. Kangding) Dasang Damdul Tsarong (tsha rong zla bzang dgra ‘dul) Dergé (sde dge) Dezhung Kunga Tenpai Nyima (sde gzhung kun dga’ bstan pa’i nyi ma) Dezhung Rinpoche (sde gzhung rin po che). See Dezhung Kunga Tenpai Nyima Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (dil mgo mkhyen brtse rin po che) Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje (mdo mkhyen brtse ye shes rdo rje) Do Khyentse. See Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje Dodrubchen Jigme Phuntsok Jungne (rdo grub chen ‘jigs med phun tshogs ‘byung gnas) Dodrubchen Rinpoche (rdo grub chen rin po che). See Dodrubchen Jigme Phuntsok Jungne Dondrup Gyaltsen (don grub rgyal mtshan) Drepung (‘bras spungs) Drichu (‘bri chu) Drikung (‘bri gung) Drikung Khandroma (‘bri gung mkha’ ‘gro ma) Drikung Khandroma Choden Zangmo Rinpoche (‘bri gung mkha’ ‘gro ma chos ldan bzang mo rin po che) Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin (‘bri gung mkha’ ‘gro ma shes rab thar phyin) Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen (alt. Gyaltsen; ‘bri gung mkhan chen dkon mchog rgyal mtshan) Drikung Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche (‘bri gung lam chen rgyal po rin po che) Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche (‘bri gung lho dbon sprul rin po che) Drikung Ontul Rinpoche. See Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche Drikung Til (‘bri gung mthil) Dromtonpa Gyalwé Jungné (‘brom ston pa rgyal ba’i ‘byung gnas) Drukpa Kagyu (‘brug pa bka’ brgyud) Drubwang Togden Shakya Shri (grub dbang rtogs ldan shAkya shrI) Doboom Tulku (rdo bum sprul sku) Dudjom Lingpa (bdud ‘joms gling pa) Dza Patrul Rinpoche (rdza dpal sprul rin po che) Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) Dzogchen Monastery (rdzogs chen dgon)

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Dzogchen Rinpoche. See Seventh Dzogchen Rinpoche Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (rdzong gsar mkhyen brtse rin po che) Dzongsar Monastery (rdzong gsar dgon) Fifteenth Karmapa Kakyab Dorje (karma pa 15 mkha’ khyab rdo rje) Fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso (tA la’i bla ma 14 bstan ‘dzin rgya mtsho) Gampopa Sonam Rinchen (sgam po pa bsod nams rin chen) Ganden (dga’ ‘ldan) Ganden Phelgye Ling Monastery (dga’ ldan ‘phel rgyas gling dgon) Ganden Podrang (dga’ ldan pho brang) Ganden Tripa (dga’ ldan khri pa) Gangtok (sgang tog) Garzha (gar zhwa, dkar zha) Geluk (dge lugs) Gemur Samten Choling (dge mur [alt. dge smon] bsam gtan chos gling) Gen Lobsang Jamspal (rgan blo bzang ‘jam dpal) Gendun Chopel (dge ‘dun chos ‘phel) Geshe Sonam Rinchen (dge bshes bsod nams rin chen) Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe (dge bshes ye shes thabs mkhas) Golok (‘go log) Guru Rinpoche (gu ru rin po che). See Padmasambhava Gyagar Lama (rgya gar bla ma). See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Gyalyum Kunzang Dechen Tsomo Namgyel (rgyal yum kun bzang bde chen mtsho mo rnam rgyal) Gyawo (rgya bo) Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Tayé (‘jam mgon kong sprul blo gros mtha’ yas) Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (‘jam dbyangs mkhyen brtse’i dbang po) Jangchub Nyima (byang chub nyi ma). See Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima Je Lama Rinpoche (rje bla ma rin po che), Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Jigme Lingpa (‘jigs med gling pa) K. Angrup (dngos grub) Kachen Sangye Pelzang (dka’ chen sangs rgyas dpal bzang) Kadamapa (bka’ gdams pa) Kagyu (bka’ brgyud) Kālacakra (dus ‘khor) Kalanpur (ka lan pur) Kalep Drungyig Pema Dorje (dkar lebs drun yig padma rdo rje) Kalimpong (ka sbug) Kamshe Monastic College (khams bye slob gling) Kardang Gonpa (mkar mdangs dgon, dkar sdang dgon pa) Karma Gelek Yuthok (karma dge legs g.yu thog) Karma Lekshe Tsomo (karma legs bshad mtsho mo) Karmapa (karma pa) Karmapa Kakyab Dorje. See Fifteenth Karmapa Kakyab Dorje

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Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje. See Sixteenth Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso. See Third Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso. Kelsang Namgyal (bskal bzang rnam rgyal) Keylong (alt. Kyelang; kye lang, skye snang) Kham (khams) Khandro Tsering Chodron (mkha’ ‘gro tshe ring chos sgron) Khangsarwa Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche (khang gsar ba o rgyan kun bzang bstan ‘dzin rin po che) Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek (mkhan rin po che blo bzang bde legs) Khenchen Chatral Rahor Chodrak (mkhan chen bya bral ra hor chos grags). See Rahor Palden Chokyi Drakpa Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen (alt. Gyaltsen; mkhan chen dkon mchog rgyal mtshan), Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen Khenpo Lhagyal (Mkhan po lha rgyal) Khenpo Palden Sherab (mkhan po dpal ldan shes rab) Khenpo Sonam Topgyal (mkhan po bsod nams stobs rgyal) Khenpo Thubten (mkhan po thub bstan) Khenpo Zhenga (mkhan po gzhan dga’). See Zhenpen Chokyi Nangwa Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche (mkhas btsun bzang po rin po che) Khon (‘khon) Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima (khu nu bla ma byang chub nyi ma) Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen (khu nu bla ma bstan ‘dzin rgyal mtshan) Khunu Lama. See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Kinnaur (kin+no ri) Kokonor (mtsho sngon) Konchok Gyaltshen (dkon mchog rgyal mtshan). See Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen (alt. Gyaltsen) Kongtrul (kong sprul). See Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Tayé Ladakh (la dwags) Lahaul (lA hu la) Lamrim (lam rim) Lama Jabb (bla ma skyabs) Lama Kunga (bla ma kun dga’) Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche (bla ma thub bstan bzod pa rin po che) Lama Zopa Rinpoche (bla ma bzod pa rin po che), Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche (lam chen rgyal po rin po che) Lamdre (lam ‘bras) Lhasa (lha sa) Lho Ontul Rinpoche (lho ‘on sprul rin po che). See Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche Lhuntse Dzong (lhun rtse rdzong) Ling Rinpoche (gling rin po che)

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Longchen Rabjampa (klong chen rab ‘byams pa dri med ‘od zer). See Longchen Rabjampa Drimé Ozer Longchen Rabjampa Drimé Ozer (klong chen rab ‘byams pa dri med ‘od zer) Madhyamaka (dbu ma) Mahāmudrā (phyag rgya chen mo) Marpa (mar pa). See Marpa Chokyi Lodro Marpa Chokyi Lodro (mar pa chos kyi blo gros) Mewa Khenpo Tubten Ozer (rme ba mkhan po thub bstan ‘od zer) Milarepa (mi la ras pa) Namgyal Monastery (rnam rgyal grwa tshang) Namgyal Taklha (rnam rgyal stag lha) Nangchen (nang chen) Naropa (na ro pa) Nechung (gnas chung) Negi Rinpoche (ne gi rin po che). See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Neni Rinpoche (ne ni rin po che). See Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin Nepal (bal yul) Ngakpa (ngags pa) Ngari Choling (mnga’ ris chos gling dgon) Ngawang (ngag dbang) Ngawang Rabgyas (ngag dbang rab rgyas) Ngodrup Garshawa (dngos grub gar sha ba), alt. K. Angrup Ngor Ponlop Ngawang Lekdrup (ngor dpon slob ngag dbang legs grub) Nineteenth Kushok Bakula Ngawang Lobsang Thubten Choknor Rinpoche (sku shogs ba ku la 19 ngag dbang blo bzang thub bstan mchog nor) Ninth Panchen Lama Tubten Chokyi Nyima (paN chen 09, thub bstan chos kyi nyi ma) Norbulingka (nor bu gling kha) Norkyi (nor skyid) Nyingma (rnying ma) Nyoshul Khenpo Jamyang Dorje (smyo shul mkhan po ‘jam dbyangs rdo rje Ontul Rinpoche (‘on sprul rin po che). See Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche Orgyen Tenzin Norbu (o rgyan bstan ‘dzin nor bu) Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche (o rgyan bstan ‘dzin rin po che). See Khangsar Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche Padmasambhava (pad+ma ‘byung gnas) Panchen Lama (paN chen bla ma) Patrul Rinpoche. See Dza Patrul Rinpoche Pema Lingpa (pad+ma gling pa) Pema Tekchok Loden (pad+ma theg mchog blo ldan), alt. Khenpo Lhagyal Potala (po Ta la) Rahor Chodrak (ra hor chos grags). See Rahor Palden Chokyi Drakpa Rahor Monastery (ra hor dgon) Rahor Palden Chokyi Drakpa (ra hor dpal ldan chos kyi grags pa)

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Rakra Rinpoche (rak ra rin po che) Rewalsar (mtsho pad ma) Rikpe Raltri (Rigpai Reltri) (rig pa’i ral gri) Rimè (ris med) Sakya (sa skya) Sakya Paṇḍita (sa skya paṇḍita). See Sakya Paṇḍita Kunga Gyaltsen Sakya Paṇḍita Kunga Gyaltsen (sa skya paṇḍita kun dga’ rgyal mtshan) Sakya Trizin (sa skya khri ‘dzin) Śākyamuni (shAkya thub pa) Samten Chhosphel (bsam gtan chos ‘phel) Samye (bsam yas) Sangngak Tenzin (gsang sngags bstan ‘dzin) Sangyum Orgyen Chodon (gsang yum o rgyan chos sgron) Śāntideva (zhi ba lha) Second Dodrubchen Jigme Phuntsok Jungne (rdo grub chen 02 ‘jigs med phun tshogs ‘byung gnas) Sem Tinley Ongmu Tashi (sras mo ‘phrin las dbang mo bkra shis) Sera (se ra) Seventh Dzogchen Rinpoche Tenzin Lungtok Nyima (rdzogs chen 07 bstan ‘dzin lung rtogs nyi ma) Sey Rinpoche Namgyel Gelek (sras rin po che rnam rgyal dge legs) Sey Rinpoche. See Sey Rinpoche Namgyel Gelek Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol (zhabs dkar tshogs drug rang grol) Shakya Shri. See Drubwang Togden Shakya Shri Shashur Gonpa (sha shur dgon pa) Shechen Ontrul Gyurme Tutob Namgyal (zhe chen dbon sprul ‘gyur med mthu stobs rnam rgyal) Shedra (bshad grwa) Sherab Tharchin (shes rab thar phyin). See Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin Shigatse (gzhis ka rtse) Sikkim (‘bras ljongs) Sixteenth Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (karma pa 16 rang byung rig pa’i rdo rje) Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (tA la’i bla ma 06 tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho) Sixth Ling Rinpoche Thubten Lungtok Tenzin Trinlé (gling 06 thub bstan lung rtogs bstan ‘dzin phrin las) Sonam Gyaltsen (bsod nams rgyal mtshan) Śrī Siṃha (shri siMha) Taktse Palace (stag rtse pho brang) Tartsedo. See Dartsedo Tashi Dhondup (bkra shis don grub) Tashi Rabgias (bkra shis rab rgyas)

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Tashi Shukling (bkra shis shugs gling dgon). See Shashur Gonpa Tashi Tsering (bkra shis tshe ring), alt. Tashi Tsering Josayma Tashi Tsering Josayma (bkra shis tshe ring jo sras ma) Tashilhunpo (bkra shis lhun po) Tentong Shapey Gyurme Gyatso (bkras mthong zhabs pad ‘gyur med rgya mtsho) Tenzin Chodron (bstan ‘dzin chos sgron) Tenzin Dolma (bstan ‘dzin sgrol ma) Tenzin Jamyang (bstan ‘dzin ‘jam dbyangs) Tenzin Zangmo (bstan ‘dzin bzang mo) Terdrom Nunnery (gter sgrom dgon) Third Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso (kaH thog si tu 03 chos kyi rgya mtsho) Third Trijang Rinpoche Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso (khri byang 03 blo bzang ye shes bstan ‘dzin rgya mtsho) Thirteenth Dalai Lama Tubten Gyatso (tA la’i bla ma 13 thub bstan rgya mtsho) Thirteenth Dalai Lama. See The Thirteenth Dalai Lama Tubten Gyatso Thubten Jinpa (thub bstan sbyin pa) Thubten Zopa Rinpoche (thub bstan bzod pa rin po che) Tilopa (ti lo pa) Togden Shakya Shri. See Drubwang Togden Shakya Shri Tsangnyon Heruka (gtsang smyon he ru ka) Tsarpa (tshar pa) Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche (mtshan zhabs gser skong rin po che) Tsering Dolma (tshe ring sgrol ma) Tso Pema (mtsho pad+ma). See Rewalsar tsodra (rtsod grwa) Tsongkhapa (tsong kha pa). See Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa Tsongkhapa Lobsang Drakpa (tsong kha pa blo bzang grags pa) Tulku (sprul sku) Tulku Pema Wangyal (sprul sku pad+ma dbang rgyal) Tulku Thondup (sprul sku don grub) Tenzin Priyadarshi (bstan ‘dzin prI ya dar+shi) Vidyādhara (rig ‘dzin) Yongdzin Lhaksam Gyaltsen (yongs ‘dzin lhag bsam rgyal tshan) Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (yongs dge mi ‘gyur rin po che) Zhenpen Chokyi Nangwa (gzhan phan chos kyi snang ba) Zhijey (zhi byed)

Notes

Chronology 1. There are numerous unknowns in mapping a chronology of Khunu Lama’s travels. This chronology offers one plausible sequence, based on the following considerations and with some caveats: Angrup (2005) states that Khunu Rinpoche left central Tibet for Kham at age twenty-seven. If he were born in 1895, this would make the year 1922. Manshardt (2004) gives the date of Khunu Rinpoche’s departure for eastern Tibet as 1925. Khunu Lama met Khenpo Zhenga in Kham just before the end of the Khenpo’s life in 1927. Lamchen Gyalpo (n.d., 2011) gives 1922 as the date of Khunu Lama’s meeting with Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso, and implies the two met in Kham. Sparham (1999), following Angrup’s 1989 namtar and other textual and oral sources, says that Khunu Lama went to Kham twice: once immediately following his time in Lhasa and Tashilhunpo, and a second time in the 1930s. In between these trips, Sparham says Khunu Lama returned to India to study Sanskrit in Varanasi for five years, during which time he met Gendun Chophel. (Sparham 1999:3.) Angrup’s 2005 namtar and oral recollections suggest that Khunu Lama remained in Tibet from 1917 to 1938 (possibly traveling between central and eastern areas several times) and then made one trip from Tibet to India, after he had returned from Kham to central Tibet. Lamchen Gyalpo (n.d.; 2011) gives 1938 as the date of Khunu Lama’s departure from central Tibet to Kolkata. See note 3 below. 2. Angrup gives 1934 in the 2005 namtar as the year when Khunu Lama returned to Lhasa. Khunu Lama himself calculates in his recorded interview with Lama Kunga that he spent twelve years in Kham and one year in Chamdo, for a total of thirteen years away from the Lhasa area. The namtar says fourteen. Since the Tibetan New Year falls irregularly in the Western calendar, this may have produced ambiguity about the Western calendar date. 3. Paul Hackett has found a reference suggesting that Khunu Lama and the Tibetan polymath Gendun Chophel collaborated on a project to translate Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra into English in Darjeeling, together with the Sikkimese Theravādin monk S. K. Jinorasa c. 1939–40. (Hackett 2012:317. My thanks to Heather Stoddard for this reference. Also see Bhutia 2016.) Khunu Lama’s initial acquaintance with Gendun Chophel is tricky to date. Lopez notes that Gendun Chophel spent six months studying

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Sanskrit in Varanasi, probably in the late 1930s, and was in Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kolkata several times in this period (Lopez 2018:30–-31). Gendun Chophel seems to have made his famous trip to Sri Lanka in 1940–41. By 1945, Gendun Chophel was back in the Kalimpong-Darjeeling area, from where later that same year he returned to Tibet. Khunu Lama and Gendun Chophel could have first met in Kalimpong, Varanasi, or Kolkata, in 1938 or 1939; sources place both of them in each of these locations at points during this period. It is also difficult to pin down exact dates for Khunu Lama’s return to Kinnaur and teaching there. Manshardt says that Khunu Lama left Tibet in 1942 and visited Kinnaur soon afterward; Dodin also suggests that Khunu Lama left Tibet and returned to India in the “first half of the 1940s,” based in part on the funeral notice in the Maha Bodhi society journal. (Dodin 1997:87, 97, n. 20. Dodin’s source is the obituary notice published in The Maha Bodhi of June–July 1977, 230.) Manshardt, Sparham, and Dodin place Khunu Lama in Kinnaur in 1948, where he learned of Gandhi’s death. (Manshardt 2004:25–26; Dodin 1997:88; Sparham 1999:3.) One way to make sense out of these conflicting dates is that, consistent with his well-documented pattern in other periods of his life, Khunu Lama may have traveled back and forth between several of the places where he is said to have stayed during these years. If Khunu Lama did leave Tibet in 1938, and if he spent about a year in Kolkata, then one plausible chronology would place him mainly in Varanasi from 1939 to 1944, with interludes in Darjeeling and Kalimpong (the period during which he could have known Gendun Chophel). Then his eight-year stay in Kinnaur could have occurred from 1944–1952, and he would have heard about Gandhi’s assassination while in Kinnaur in 1948. This would suggest that Khunu Lama resumed living in Varanasi (between other trips) from about 1952. He seems to have been based there until the late 1960s, when he began staying for long periods in Bodh Gaya.

Introduction 1. Shaw 2006:115 and Swearer 1995:209 make similar observations. 2. Collins 2016:1; 1998. On the concept of an “imaginary” more generally, see Collins 1998; Le Doeuff 2002; Kleinberg 1992 (cited in DiValerio 2015:261); DiValerio 2015; Campany 2009. 3. Ramanujan 1991:46, cited in Collins 2016:5. 4. Collins 2016:6. 5. Collins 2016:6. 6. For the concept of “religion as a chain of memory,” see Hervieu-Léger 2000; this phrase is her title. See also Gyatso 1992. 7. For instance, see Yampolsky 1978; Buswell 2017; Faure 1991; Gyatso 1998; Germano 1998; McRae 2003; Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2014; Diemberger 2014; Quintman 2014; Pitkin 2004; 2011; Greene 2021. 8. Gyatso 1998:238–39. See also Robinson, Johnson, and Bhikku 2004. 9. For esoteric Buddhist relationships in Southeast Asian settings, see, for instance, Crosby 2020. 10. In cases where an ordination lineage has been lost or is unavailable, Buddhist exegetes raise questions about whether or how it is possible to reconstitute it. Contemporary debates about the full ordination of Buddhist nuns in part depend this question and on whether, for instance, nuns ordained in one lineage can confer ordina-

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tion on Buddhist women rooted in a different lineage. Of course, it is also possible for such considerations to be mobilized as a proxy for other kinds of ambivalences about women’s ordination. 11. Lopez 2001:168. 12. On these dynamics, see Yampolsky 1978; McRae 2003; Faure 1991, 1993; see also Sharf 2001. On the early history of Chan/Tibetan Buddhist connections and influence, see van Schaik 2015. 13. Some Tibetan Buddhists have nevertheless worked to revive lost lineages, either through visionary means, or by attempts to track down surviving lineage holders. The nineteenth-century polymath Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thayé (1813–1899) was particularly active in this regard; I touch on his work in chapters 3 and 5. See Gardner 2006 and 2019. 14. Gyatso 1998 describes the role of autobiographical and biographical narratives in enhancing lineage prestige in competitive sectarian contexts. 15. Gyatso 1992:469. 16. Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen, oral communication, 2013; Tenzin Norbu Nangsal, oral communication, 2020. A famous example is the nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan renunciant Shabkar’s devotional relationships with masters he had not met in person. Namtar is only one of many Tibetan biographical genres; some genres have different structures and priorities. (Gene Smith, presentation, November 2008, Auto/ Biography Seminar, Columbia University.) 17. Hervieu-Léger 2000. On Tibetan Buddhist life stories and memory see Gyatso 1992 and 1998; Willis 1985; Jackson 2003; Jacoby 2014. See also Angrup 2005:xv–xxiv, which by implication addresses this point from a devotional perspective. 18. On authorizing referents in Tibetan Buddhist life stories, especially in the context of women’s religious lives, see Gyatso and Havnevik 2005:22; Bessenger 2016:148– 63, 169, 172, 177, 206–9, 267; Diemberger 2007:294–95; see also themes raised in Jacoby 2014. 19. Khunu (khu nu) is the Tibetan word for Kinnaur, the Himalayan region where Khunu Lama was from. He is sometimes known as Negi Lama, Negi (ne gi) being his family name. Many students refer to him with the honorific “Rinpoche” (rin po che, “Precious One”), which often, although not always, connotes either reincarnate status, or devotional relationship or both. As the following chapters discuss, he was called a number of other nicknames as well, depending on where he was. I have chosen to refer to him throughout this book primarily as Khunu Lama, opting for the name under which he was most widely known across the various stages of his life. 20. This beggar-hermit ideal type is closely connected to another important Tibetan Buddhist ideal figure, the “mad yogin” or “crazy lama,” lama nyonpa (bla ma smyon pa); see DiValerio 2015; Quintman 2014; Larsson 2012. 21. Clarke 2014; Wilson 2013; Schopen 1997. 22. Milarepa (1040–1123) is arguably the paradigmatic renunciatory figure in Tibet and the Himalayan region, and (as I describe) serves as a key authorizing referent for Khunu Lama. See Turek 2013; Smith 2001; Schaeffer 2004; Tsangnyon 2010; Quintman 2014; Larsson 2012. 23. Gyatso 1998. 24. See Ardussi and Epstein 1978; Gyatso 1998; Mills 2003; Cuevas and Schaeffer 2006; Diemberger 2007; Yamamoto 2012; Pitkin 2017; Debreczeny 2019; relatedly, Berger 2003.

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25. Śāntideva 1997:154, verse 55. This work of the eighth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva is the main literary and meditational inspiration on the topic of bodhicitta for Khunu Lama and for the Tibetan tradition in general. Early Mahāyāna communities of “bodhisattvas” seem to have had a more exclusive and ascetic orientation, and to have been less focused on community engagement than either later Tibetan and North and East Asian literature or Western popular Buddhism would suggest. Indeed, early Mahāyāna communities’ ascetic and hermitic bent is fascinatingly both like and unlike that of Khunu Lama and his Kadampa and Kagyu role models’ approach to renunciant life. See Boucher 2008; Harrison 2018, 1995, 1987; Nattier 2003; see also Yü 2001; Beyer 1978. For Theravādin perspectives, see Collins 2016. 26. I refer to Khunu Lama’s verses on bodhicitta here under the English title Jewel Lamp: In Praise of Bodhicitta. These verses are available in a variety of Tibetan editions, as well as in Hindi and European languages. The first Tibetan printed edition appeared in 1966 (Khu nu bla ma bstan ‘dzin rgyal mtshan [1966] 2018; see Sparham 1999:7). Sparham, following Angrup, gives a list of the early Tibetan editions, some of which are undated and may have been private printings for use during teachings (Sparham 1999:147, n. 3). Notable European-language editions include Gareth Sparham’s English translation (Khunu Rinpoche 1999), and Jürgen Manshardt’s German translation (Manshardt 2004), both of which include biographies of Khunu Lama. More recently, a younger generation of Tibetan and Himalayan intellectuals have taken an interest in Khunu Lama’s work and in his life story more generally. The diaspora-based writer from Amdo, Tenzin Jamyang (b. 1972) published a lengthy verse-by-verse commentary in 2003 (Bstan ‘dzin ‘jam dbyangs 2003); more recently, someone has created a page on the WeChat messaging service dedicated to Khunu Lama, visited by Tibetans based both within and outside geographic Tibet (Tenzin Gelek, personal communication, 2018). 27. Among many others, Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek (interview, 2006). Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek (b. 1939), now retired, was the seventy-fourth abbot of Sera Jey Monastery in Bylakuppe, India. See also Angrup 2005:xv–xxiv. 28. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005; this comment may be read as a lightly veiled criticism of those lamas who do engage in such activity. 29. His Tibetan biographers use the term “Hindu” to encompass a diverse range of non-Buddhist Indic practitioners and thought systems that apparently interested him, including Jain, Śaivite, yoga, and possibly Baul traditions. 30. For more on the term ris med, see Gardner 2019, 2006; Gayley and Schapiro 2017; Smith 2001; and the discussions that follow. 31. Indeed, Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi cites an account of Khunu Lama describing himself as a Kagyu practitioner toward the end of his life, when he felt that the term rimè had taken on its own kind of sectarian meaning (Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi, oral communication, 2020). 32. Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi, oral communication, 2020. 33. Chakrabarty 2002:36–37. 34. Wyschogrod 1998. 35. In making engagement with narrative and its affective dimensions central to my theory and methodology in this book, I am further inspired by the work of other scholars who have advanced this approach, including Gyatso 1998, 2015; Berger 2003; Rheingans 2010; Ohnuma 2006, 2012; Feng 2013; Jacoby 2014; Simpson 2014 (on decolonization, refusal, and stories told/left untold); Conermann and Rheingans 2014; Kachru 2019; Tzohar 2019, 2021; Lively 2019; McGranahan 2020; and Huang, Lin, Mc-

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Coy, and Wang 2021 (on narrative as historical method). See also Convery and O’Brien 2014 on place, representation, and narrative. 36. Shakya 2000:29; “underdevelopment” is his translation of rjes lus. “Backwardness” is another common rendering in English. See also my discussion in Pitkin 2016. 37. Shneiderman 2018, 2015; Cabezon 2008; Kolås and Thowsen 2005; Yang 2008, 2011; Duara 1995. A description of a similar pattern in the central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India appears in Govindrajan 2018. 38. Pitkin 2021, citing Jabb 2015. 39. Pitkin 2021, citing Lopez 1998. 40. Mignolo 2012. I discuss these themes in Pitkin 2016 and 2021. See also Lokyitsang 2018. 41. I also implicitly engage here with claims about modernity, “homelessness,” and religion made by Peter Berger in, for example, Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1973; Berger, Davie, and Fokas 2008; and Berger 2005. 42. Byams pa phrin las 2000, and Bstan ‘dzin kun bzang lung rtog bstan pa’i nyima 2004. 43. For instance, the 2004 namtar of the important twentieth-century Drikung Kagyu master Amgon Rinpoche, by ‘Bri gung dkon mchog rgya mtsho, ‘Bri gung grub dbang a mgon rin po che’i rnam thar. 44. Manshardt 2004. I thank Daniella Nittenberg for assistance reading materials in German. 45. Sparham 1999. 46. Dodin 1997. 47. Angrup and S. Lall 1987. 48. Jackson 2003.

Chapter One 1. The Gyawo hermitage (rgya bo gnas phung / rgya bo phu) was Khenpo Zhenga’s primary residence during the final five years of his life, probably from 1922 to 1927 (Bayer 2019:151). It is located in Kham (khams), one of the two eastern regions of pre-1959 Tibet. The parts of Kham in which Khenpo Zhenga spent most of his life are located in present day Dergé County, Garzé Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province. This account of Khunu Lama’s meeting with Khenpo Zhenga is summarized from the accounts given in Nyoshul Khenpo 2005; rGyal dbang chos kyi nyi ma, rDzogs chen dgon gyi lo rgyus; and in interviews I conducted with Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche in 2004 and 2005, Tashi Tsering Josayma in 2004, an eastern Tibetan scholar in 2005, and an eastern Tibetan Buddhism expert in 2007. One scholar mentioned that the Gyawo upland area is so high that it is cut off by snow much of the year. This suggests that Khunu Lama arrived in summer. For biographical information on Khenpo Zhenga, see Bayer 2019; Jackson 2003:26–30; Smith 2001; Pearcey 2015; Chhosphel 2012. I base my dating here on the following considerations: Khenpo Zhenga passed away in 1927. Lamchen Gyalpo gives 1922 as the date of Khunu Lama’s travel to Kham. (Lamchen Gyalpo 2011: 10). Angrup gives Khunu Lama’s age as twenty-seven when he left central Tibet for Kham, which would make the year of his departure 1925 (if Angrup is giving Khunu Lama’s age in Western calculation; see Angrup 2005:19). Khunu Lama also studied with Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso, who passed away in 1925 (Pearcey 2019), giving a further external point by which to date these events.

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2. Angrup 2005:23. 3. Angrup 2005:23. There seems to be an implication here that Khunu Lama continued to travel long after the age at which most Buddhist scholars of the time would have settled into a permanent institutional or pedagogical role in a monastery or aristocratic establishment. As we will see, Khunu Lama was repeatedly offered such teaching positions but never stayed very long in any of them. 4. Jackson 2003:52; Khenpo Sonam Topgyal Rinpoche interview, 2006; Ringu Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005; Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010; Khenpo Appey interview, 2004; Tashi Rabgias interview, 2004; Kasur Sonam Tobgay interview, 2005. I explore the valence of the term atsara below. 5. Bayer 2019:163. 6. Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:506. 7. Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:506. Bayer translates the name of this seminal text collection—Zhenga’s most influential work—as the Gloss Commentaries on the Thirteen Great Texts (gzhung chen bcu gsum gyi mchan ‘grel); see Bayer 2019:183. I abbreviate the title here as the Thirteen Great Texts. This corpus of texts provides mchan ‘grel (“gloss commentaries,” Bayer 2019:83) on some nineteen major Indian Buddhist texts, on topics including Vinaya, Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, the Five Dharmas of Maitreya, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra (and in one later edition, his Śikṣāsamuccaya-kārikā), and the Guhyagarbha tantra (Bayer 2019:183–209). As Bayer discusses, this list of texts is related to several similar earlier lists circulating at the period; different editions, moreover, include different numbers and groupings of texts. 8. Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) for example, the polymath, scholar, and visionary, retrospectively considered the source of the Gelukpa lineage of the Dalai lamas, reportedly had sixty gurus from across the spectrum of Tibetan Buddhist lineages, and in this he was by no means an isolated example. 9. See Samuels 2016 for a critical discussion of Western academic literature on clans and related genealogical categories of family descent; important studies of Himalayan bone and blood lineages include Oppitz 1973; Aziz 1974; Levine 1981; HolmesTagchungdarpa 2014. See also Gyatso 2015. 10. See Davidson 2002; Wedemeyer 2012; Gray 2013 on key developments in Indian tantric Buddhism. Gray and Davidson, among others, have suggested that medieval Indian tantric Buddhists were competing for the patronage of Indic kings at a time of political decentralization, and in that competitive context they moved to frame their communal relationships in the vocabulary of lineage. Gray suggests that medieval Indian tantric Buddhists modeled their community relationships on the broad South Asian system of an extended “joint” family led by a single patriarchal figure (Gray 2013). 11. See for instance Meeks 2013; Reinders 1997. 12. Gyatso notes how lineages of medical knowledge in Tibet form a kind of “patrimony” that medical experts pass on to their student-heirs (Gyatso 2011:317); see Kapstein 2000; Kellner 2016. On the forms of knowledge in Tibet, see Gold 2008; Townsend 2017, 2021. 13. Gray 2013; Davidson 2002; Thurman 1984. 14. Notably, in the tantric sense, bodhicitta is associated not only with the compassionate wisdom that pursues enlightenment for the sake of others but also with the generative biological fluids that carry genetic material. 15. Austin 1955/1962. See also Townsend 2017.

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16. Clarke 2014; Wilson 2013; Ohnuma 2012; McDaniel 2011; Schopen 1997, among many others. I discuss renunciation and departure from family life in greater detail in the next chapter. Townsend (2021) reframes Buddhist renunciation’s relationship to materiality and social and political life. 17. See, for instance, Davidson 2002, 2005; McDaniel 2011; Orzech 2008. 18. See for instance Jaffe 2001; Meeks 2013; Wilson 2013; Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2014; Jacoby 2014; Jacoby and Terrone 2009; Gayley 2016; and especially Clarke 2014. 19. Clarke 2014; Schopen 1997. See Almond 1988 and especially Lopez 1998 for discussion of these European claims. 20. Jacoby 2014; Jacoby and Terrone 2009; Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2013, 2014; Sihlé 2013. 21. For instance, across the Buddhist world and according to multiple Vinaya systems, only fully ordained monks can ordain new monks. According to both the Theravādin and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayas, fully ordained nuns and monks together are required to ordain new nuns, although Diemberger describes the moves made by fifteenth-century Buddhist figures to allow monks alone to fully ordain women in Tibet, as a way of reviving the women’s ordination lineage (Diemberger 2007:132–34). Diemberger also notes de Silva’s work on the Cullavagga Vinaya, in which the Buddha authorizes monks to ordain women if no fully ordained nuns are present (Diemberger 2007:132, citing De Silva 2004:125). 22. See analysis in Jacoby 2014; Jacoby and Terrone 2009; Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2013, 2014; Sihlé 2013. 23. Jacoby and Terrone 2009. 24. Angrup 2005:11. On Shakya Shri and his lineages, see Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2013, 2014; Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso 2009 (2011). 25. See Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2013, 2014 on this important point. 26. Tashi Tsering personal communication, 2004. 27. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2014. 28. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2014. 29. Lamchen Gyalpo 2011; Lamchen Gyalpo interview, 2005. A treasure revealer or terton (gter ston) is a visionary practitioner who reveals inspired scriptures and objects connected with enlightened figures of the past. 30. Lamchen Gyalpo describes the importance and size of Khunu Lama’s family establishment as “a vast wooden structure, where, in earlier times, since there were many relatives who did not all get along, it was divided up and apportioned, and that time the family built a lama’s residence called Tashi Choling—‘The Dharma Sanctuary of Auspiciousness’” (Lamchen Gyalpo 2011:8.). 31. Angrup 2005; Angrup, interview, 2004. Note that Kinnauris who practice Tibetan Buddhism do not necessarily use Tibetan names. 32. See Mills 2003; Dreyfus 2003; Ortner 1978. 33. The pattern of uncles, especially maternal uncles, taking care of their nephews is represented in many Himalayan literary contexts. In the Gesar epic and the stories of Milarepa for instance, mothers’ brothers are benevolent supporters of the young heroes, while fathers’ brothers are murderous rivals, perhaps reflecting the ambivalences of competition for inheritance. Boys entering a monastery are looked after by, and will often live with, an uncle or another older male relative at that monastery. Family bonds thus connect many teachers and students, in addition to the close ties of the teacherdisciple relationship itself. See Dreyfus 2003; Mills 2003; Stein 1972; Ortner 1978.

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34. Angrup 2005:11. 35. Angrup 2005:11 36. Angrup 2005:16. This line is the title of Angrup’s chapter 4. In chapter 2, I return to the question of in what way Khunu Lama’s parents may have resisted his departure and to the implications of Angrup’s description. 37. Multiple incarnations are not at all uncommon. Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima was profiled in “Peace on the Planet: A New Generation of Tibetan Lamas,” Mandala Magazine, September/October 2000. Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi is author of Running Toward Mystery (2020) and director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. The question of whether Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen was himself perceived as an incarnate lama (tulku) during his lifetime is complex to answer. Many who knew him, including Angrup, suggest that some people viewed him as an incarnation of Śāntideva; I have not been able to confirm other identifications. 38. Kellner 2016. 39. The invasion was tragic on the Tibetan side: more than nine hundred Tibetans were cut down by Younghusband’s troops, outdated Tibetan equipment being no match for British firepower. Yet the British government distanced itself from Younghusband and his expedition. Parliament condemned his actions, and the events of 1904 did not lead to ongoing hostilities between Tibetans and the British. Less than five years later, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama sought protection from Chinese troops in British India. Younghusband himself recorded a spiritual experience on a Tibetan mountainside after the battle of Gyantse (Younghusband 1910), and went on to become a new-age mystic, writing about spirituality, including extraterrestrial phenomena, and founding the World Congress of Faiths. He was buried with a statue of the Buddha given him by the Ganden Tripa, the highest Gelukpa religious hierarch at the time and the Dalai Lama’s regent, whom he had met in Tibet. These events entered the repertoire of Western Orientalist fantasy-histories of Tibet, forming the backdrop for Kipling’s colonial-era novel Kim and feeding British, Chinese, Japanese, American, and European modes of imagining Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, leaving traces in the discipline of Tibetan studies as well as in popular perception. See Norbu 2001; Shakya 1999; Lopez 1998; Richards 1993; Dodin and Räther 2001; McKay 2012. 40. Tuttle 2007:44–47. This was a notable Qing-era Chinese attempt to create and administer a Tibetan area explicitly as an internal colony, using the rhetoric of Tibetan “backwardness” to justify large-scale social and legal interventions as well as population transfer. See Tsomu 2012; Harrell 1995. See also Ho 2008; Epstein 2002; Goldstein 1989; Richardson 1984; Sperling 1976; Shakabpa 1967. 41. Ho 2008 describes Qing officer Zhong Ying’s role as leader of the 1910 Lhasa invasion. See also Goldstein 1989:44–45; Richardson 1984; Epstein 2002; Tsomu 2012; Tuttle 2007; Kapstein 2006. 42. Canti 2017:24; Smith 2001:235. Sources also describe Khunu Lama as traveling to Amdo (northeastern Tibet) during this period, though details about these travels have proved elusive. Many political and intellectual dynamics described in this chapter are part of broader eastern Tibetan developments involving both Kham and Amdo. This chapter centers Kham because of Khunu Lama’s extended presence there. 43. Most importantly, Smith 2001:24–25, 235. 44. Gardner 2006. For further discussion of ecumenicism and the term ris med,

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see also Ronis 2017, 2013a, 2013b; 2011, 2006; Gayley and Schapiro 2017; Gyatso 1998; Ringu Tulku 2006. In the context of Dzogchen, see Deroche 2018. 45. As I note in chapter 3, it is less clear whether Khunu Lama was already committed to an ecumenical perspective before his studies in Kham. I believe so, partly because of his own Nyingma/Drukpa family lineages, and also because of the way he seems to have sought out a non-sectarian array of institutions and teachers from the very beginning of his travels in Tibet. 46. Schapiro 2012; Bayer 2019. 47. Dzogchen has been important to practitioners from an array of Tibetan and Himalayan lineages, including the Drikung Kagyu tradition, although it has also sometimes been the subject of sectarian criticism. See, among others, Thondup 1996; Nyoshul Khenpo 2005; Dudjom 2002; Dkon mchog rgya mtsho 2004. 48. Smith 2001; Germano 1998; Gayley and Schapiro 2017. 49. A particularly important source for Khunu Lama’s Bodhicaryāvatāra transmission was another leading figure in Patrul’s extended lineage, the meditator and scholar Khenchen Pema Tekchok Loden, also known as Abu Lhagang or Khenpo Lhagyal, who was the twentieth abbot of Dzogchen Monastery’s Śrī Siṃha College and Khenpo Zhenga’s disciple. In addition to the Bodhicaryāvatāra, Abu Lhagang also gave Khunu Lama important transmissions of many core Dzogchen teachings, and Khunu Lama listed him as one of his Nyingma root gurus. (Bstan ‘dzin lung rtogs nyi ma 2004: 480– 84, 451; Thub bstan brtson ‘grus 2011, 2:225–28; Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:11; Angrup interview, 2004.) 50. Smith 2001; Jackson 2003; Gardner 2006; Chhosphel 2012; Pearcey 2015. I am grateful to Gene Smith and Tashi Tsering for discussing these and the following points (personal communications, 2003, 2004). 51. Dzogchen and Dzongsar Monasteries are located in Kham in present day Dergé County, Garzé Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan province. Dzogchen Monastery (rdzogs chen dgon) was founded in 1684 and is one of the six major monasteries of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Its buildings were demolished by Communist forces in the 1950s and have been gradually rebuilt since 1985. A Dzogchen Monastery has also been built in India. The current Dzogchen Monastery in Kham has been expanded with new facilities. Dzongsar Monastery (rdzong gsar dgon) was founded as a Sakya monastery in the Dergé area, in 1253, after a previous history of temples in Nyingma, Kadampa, and Bon traditions at the site. Dzongsar is a main site of the famous Khyentse (mkhyen brtse) incarnation lines associated with the flourishing of ecumenical teaching and scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Smith 2001; Gardner 2006, 2019). The Dzongsar monastery buildings were demolished during the Maoist period in 1958. Rebuilding began in 1983. Dzongsar is home to a painting school, an institute of Tibetan medicine, and a Tibetan painting workshop. 52. Chhosphel 2012; Bayer 2019. 53. On the history and curriculum of bshad grwa commentarial schools, see Dreyfus 2005, 2003; Pearcey 2015; Jackson 2003; Smith 2001; Bayer 2019. 54. Smith 2001. Interestingly, Pearcey has noted that in fact, scholars at present-day non-Gelukpa commentarial schools (bshad grwa) use Zhenga’s commentaries selectively, often using them to reinforce their own traditions’ viewpoints (Pearcey 2015). See Dreyfus 2005; Duckworth 2014.

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55. Pearcey 2015, citing Duckworth 2008:196, n. 49. 56. Pearcey 2015. 57. Smith, in particular, has highlighted this point, in Smith 2001 and personal communications. 58. Angrup 2005:17; Angrup 1989:52; Rakra Rinpoche interview, 2006; Khenpo Sonam Topgyal interview, 2006; Densapa n.d. 59. Khenpo Sonam Topgyal interview, 2006. 60. While in Tibet, Orgyen Tenzin studied at the Kagyu monastery of Tsurpu (Tshor phu) during the time of the Fifteenth Karmapa, Khakyab Dorje (Karma pa Mkha’ khyab rdo rje, 1870/71–1921/22), and was noted for having been the student of the meditator and scholar Togden Karma Monlam (rTogs ldan Kar ma smon lam od zer lhag bsam rgyal tshan, n.d.). The nickname “Tibet Rinpoche” highlights the ambiguity surrounding the cultural location of individuals who moved across Himalayan regional borders, paralleling the ways Khunu Lama’s cultural identity was perceived. 61. Many decades later, Khunu Lama’s Sanskrit student, the Sakya scholar Dezhung Rinpoche (1906–1987), itemized two lineages for the Sanskrit lexical tradition taught by Orgyen Tenzin as a result of his own travels in Kham, each transmitted via leading intellectuals of the period. The first transmission comes from Shechen Ontrul Gyurme Tutob Namgyal (1787–1854) via Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Thayé to Yongdzin Lhaksam Gyaltsen (n.d.; described as tutor to the Fifteenth Karmapa Kakyab Dorje), and from him to Orgyen Tenzin. The second comes via Shechen Ontrul Gyurme Tutob Namgyal to Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1820–1892), then to Ngor Ponlop Ngawang Lekdrup (1811–?1861), and from him to Orgyen Tenzin. It seems likely that these are the lineages for the grammatical and poetic teachings that Orgyen Tenzin shared with Khunu Lama. Khunu Lama would meet and study with masters from these same lineages. See Jackson 2003:597, n. 233; Pitkin 2004. 62. Orgyen Tenzin also taught Khunu Lama other Sanskrit grammatical and poetic works (Angrup 2005:17). 63. Tashilhunpo Monastery, where the future Khunu Lama now arrived, is one of the four most famous Geluk monasteries in Tibet. The seat of the Panchen Lamas, the powerful incarnation lineage that is ritually and politically second only to the Dalai Lamas among Gelukpas, Tashilhunpo historically attracted men from across the Indian Himalayan region, as well as from Tibet proper. Monks from Ladakh, Kinnaur, Lahaul, and other areas of the Indian Himalaya were grouped into regional housing units, where there were special “scholarships” of grain available to support them. Khunu Lama’s biographer Angrup was a Tashilhunpo monk in his youth, in the early 1950s. Recalling the financial support he himself received and the number of Himalayan students present, Angrup surmised that Tashilhunpo was similarly welcoming to Khunu Lama. 64. Khenpo Sonam Topgyal stated that Khunu Lama’s Tashilhunpo philosophy teacher was a well-known holder of the geshe degree from Tsang (west-central Tibet) (interview, 2006). Angrup says in the namtar that Khunu Lama received novice monk vows at Tashilhunpo (perhaps for the second time, as a formality for living in the monastery) from a famous scholar who was tutor (yongs ‘dzin) to the Panchen Lama. This information comes from a 1979 interview Angrup conducted with Khunu Lama’s cousin, the Kinnauri geshe Rigdzin Tenpa (see Angrup 2005:21). Angrup theorizes that the Tashilhunpo scholar who gave Khunu Lama novice vows was Guge Yongdzin Lobsang Tenzin, but this may be a conflation.

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65. Angrup 2005:18. Angrup says that the Panchen Lama’s school for the literary arts (Kun gzigs slob grwa) eventually relocated to a site near Tashilhunpo Monastery, the Kyi Kyi Na Ga park in Shigatse, the capital city of Tsang province, where the school “became the site of instruction in matters connected to the literary arts for the noble families who were part of the government of Tsang.” The few sources that mention this school sometimes refer to it as the Kyi Kyi Na Ga school (Kyi kyi na ga slob grwa). Angrup notes that under the Tenth Panchen Lama (1936–1989), a new but similar literary school was founded, which Angrup himself briefly attended (Angrup 2005:19). 66. Goldstein 1989; Rakra Rinpoche interview, 2006. 67. Jackson 2003. 68. Angrup interview, 2004; Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche interview, 2004; Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:10–11; Bstan ‘dzin ‘jam dbyangs 2003. Khunu Lama studied and taught medicine and related systems of astrology at several points in both Lhasa and Kham, including at the Lhasa Mentsikhang (Medical and Astrological Institute). 69. See Angrup 2005:24. The Dag yig ngag sgron root text was composed in 1538 by the Tibetan translator and literary scholar Pelkhang Lotsawa (Dpal khang lo tsa’ ba Ngag dbang chos kyi rgya mtsho, b. fifteenth/sixteenth century.) See Mgon po dbang rgyal, 2000:324; Buddhist Digital Resource Center record W12500. LaMacchia 2008 notes that Khunu Lama’s commentary is used in Kinnaur for teaching the Tibetan language. A paperback edition of the root text with Khunu Lama’s commentary was reissued in 1989, by the Mi rigs dpe skrun khang. This 1989 edition, available in Tibetan regions within the PRC and in India, presents the root text, Khunu Lama’s commentary, and the commentary of the contemporary scholar Kun bzang rnam rgyal under the title Ngag sgron rtsa ‘grel dang de’i yang ‘grel. Angrup (2005) states that Dergé was the location where Khunu Lama composed his commentary. Dodin reports that Khunu Lama later revised the commentary in Kinnaur, after which, “the manuscript was sent to Lhasa, where it was printed on woodblocks at the Mentsikhang” (Dodin 1997:88). 70. Manshardt 2004:23. 71. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche describes how during his time in Tibet, Khunu Lama met the influential Khampa Buddhist master and scholar Katok Situ Chokyi Gyaltso, an important meeting that Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche also discusses. According to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Katok Situ said, “Where are you from? Your face and accent are very interesting.” Khunu Lama replied that he was from Khunu [Kinnaur], which was an Indian border region (Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010). According to several sources, Katok Situ Chokyi Gyaltso then started to call Khunu Lama “Gyagar Lama” (“Indian Lama”), the nickname by which many people in Kham came to know him (Khenpo Sonam Topgyal Rinpoche interview, 2006; Ringu Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005; Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010; Khenpo Appey Rinpoche interview, 2004; Tashi Rabgias interview, 2004; Kasur Sonam Tobgay interview, 2005. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:10.) Important Tibetan Buddhist figures who studied Sanskrit with Khunu Lama during his time in Kham also include Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910–1990). 72. Chhosphel 2012. 73. Quintman 2014; Tsangnyon 2010. 74. Guenther 1963; Dowman 1985. 75. Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:492. Tibetan monasteries before 1959 generally did not guarantee meals or material support for monks, although they might offer communal meals when a sponsor made a donation for a ritual; individual teachers might also support their own students. In pre-1959 Tibet, monks and nuns were generally funded

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by their families or sometimes by personal patrons; they might also receive salaries or periodic cash and food disbursements in exchange for performing rituals. But monks and nuns without regular family funding were often very poor; women and women’s institutions often had particularly limited resources, as is still often true today (Makley 2007). Stories of hunger and hardship, especially early in student life, are a frequent theme of Tibetan religious biographies. Present-day monasteries in India now often provide some basic food support to monastics, generally supported by donations; present-day monastic institutions in geographic Tibet vary in the support they provide. 76. Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:492–99; Bayer 2019:37. Also see Dilgo Khyentse 2008:31–38; Jackson 2003:25–53; Chhosphel 2012. 77. Geshe Gelek Chodak, personal communication, 2016. This is by no means a uniquely Buddhist perspective. Indic traditions in the broad family of Hinduism share almost identical concerns about testing students and teachers to ensure their seriousness and ability to make a commitment. Thanks to Michael Guiou for raising this point. Similarly, Tibetan commentators also discuss the karmic and associated health risks for religious practitioners of accepting tainted offerings, such as money, that may be the ill-gotten gains of a criminal. Indeed, the potentially harmful karmic entanglements of accepting large offerings is something to which Khunu Lama himself seems to have given considerable thought. More recently, Buddhists, like other religious communities, have begun to confront the issue of religious teachers abusing students sexually and in other ways. Buddhists from a range of lineages and cultural locations are examining the institutional arrangements and power relations that can fuel abuse. This process has highlighted difficult questions about teacher-student relationships. Narrative staples like the “student hardship” theme and related guru devotional attitudes, combined with the affective intensity of guru-disciple relationships that I describe here, can seem to urge students toward acceptance of any and all behavior from the teacher, raising troubling questions about the scope for student autonomy, refusal, and self-protection. At the same time, some interlocutors have pointed to other strands within guru devotional practice, in particular the recommendation that student and teacher mutually observe and evaluate each other before committing to a relationship, as potentially offering tools for preventing abuse. I suggest that one possible affordance of Buddhist imaginaries of renunciation may be as a tool for critiquing self-serving behavior on the part of religious authorities. Nevertheless, the vulnerability of students to teachers in contexts of affective intensity and institutional hierarchy remains. See Gleig and Langenberg 2021; Langenberg 2021. 78. Thanks to Elayne Oliphant for raising this point. 79. Dilgo Khyentse 2008:330. 80. Khenpo Dechen Dorje interview, 2004; Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005; Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005. 81. Pitkin 2019; see examples in Stearns 2000:51 and Dalai Lama XIV 1989:5.

Chapter Two 1. The Kadampa lineage derives from the teachings of the Bengali master Atīśa (Skt. Atīśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna; Tib. jo bo rje dpal ldan a ti sha, 982–1054). Atīśa was a primary influence on the second diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet from the eleventh century onward. This verse is usually referred to as the “Kadampa Four Aims” or “Four Entrustments” (bka’ gdams pa gtad pa bzhi). It is part of a Kadampa meditation in-

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struction called the “Ten Jewels” (phugs nor bcu; more literally, the “Ten Jewels of the Inner Goal”). The Rangjung Yeshe translation group offers a translation that captures the spirit of this verse and the way it is commonly explained in Tibetan sermons on practicing the “Ten Jewels” of the Kadampas: “Aim your mind at the Dharma. Aim your Dharma practice at simple living. Aim at simple living for your entire life. Aim your death at solitude.” See http://rywiki.tsadra.org/index.php/gtad_pa_bzhi. I have chosen to translate the verse more literally here to convey the stark pithiness of the Tibetan lines, the emotional and aesthetic flavor of which are so relevant to the themes of this chapter. I discuss the verse in more detail below. 2. This interview was conducted in English. 3. The semantic field of the English word renunciation corresponds to several overlapping Tibetan terms, including the Tibetan term nges ‘byung (Skt. nihsarana), which is the technical Buddhist term most precisely rendered as “renunciation” in English; the Tibetan verb spangs, which can mean “to renounce” or, more literally, “to abandon,” and which is often used in Buddhist contexts; as well as the related Tibetan phrase khyim nas khyim med par phyin pa (to go forth from home into homelessness). This last phrase, like the concept of “homelessness” in general, is often (but not always) associated with monastic ordination, for which the most common Tibetan verb is rab tu byung ba (used especially for monastic ordination; the Sanskrit term pravrajyā, which is often given as its equivalent, however, is not itself literally a term for monastic ordination, which is a separate step, requiring a specific upasampadā). Shayne Clarke argues persuasively that the phrase khyim nas khyim med par phyin pa (to go forth from home into homelessness), like the famous Pāli formula to which it corresponds, “agārasmā anagāriyam pabbajati,” is added precisely because the terms pravrajyā / rab tu byung ba are vague about the nature of the departure and what precisely is being left behind, in particular to what extent familial ties continue (Clarke 2014). I explore these terms and their implications in what follows. 4. On longing and related forms of devotional affect, see Jacoby 2014, ch. 5, in particular the discussion of Patrul Rinpoche’s comments on longing in guru devotional practice (257). 5. On Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist ideals of saintly virtuosity and related questions surrounding “who becomes a ‘saint,’” see DiValerio 2015; Gayley 2017; Jacoby 2014; Bessenger 2016; Quintman 2014; Schaeffer 2004. 6. The Tshig Mdzod Chen Mo glosses bya bral ba as: “‘jig rten gyi las don spangs pa’i rnal ‘byor pa,” “a yogin who has abandoned [all] worldly activities and goals.” I discuss a number of these themes in Pitkin 2017. 7. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche specified that Khunu Lama should be understood as a “hidden yogin” (Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010). DiValerio translates sbas pa’i rnal ‘byor pa as “covert yogin” (DiValerio 2015:54). As DiValerio notes, the term can have a range of connotations, some positive and some critical. 8. Chris Fynn interview, 2006. 9. See Shakspo 2017; Ba ku la thub bstan mchog nor 2001. 10. Tashi Rabgias interview, 2004, Leh, Ladakh (in English). I include this story in Pitkin 2017:2. 11. Interestingly, in this vignette we see Khunu Lama being asked to teach Sanskrit rather than Buddhist religious topics. This turns out to be a pattern that becomes part of Khunu Lama’s “hiddenness,” as I discuss in chapter 3; it may also be a factor in his decision to leave in this story.

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12. Śāntideva 1999, 10:55. 13. There are striking parallels in this dynamic with parenting and the developmental necessity for the child to separate from the exclusive intimacy of parent and child, at least to some degree (perhaps by weaning, or by going to school). Sonthar Gyal’s 2017 film “River” (Gtsang bo) brilliantly explores the poignant parallels between a small child weaning from her mother and an adult child accepting the religious renunciation (and ultimately the deaths and separations) of his parents. Robert Paul’s analysis of the story of Milarepa approaches some of these themes, although from a distinctively Freudian perspective (Paul 1982). 14. I turn explicitly to the guru-devotional dimension in chapter 5. The comparative question of how and in what ways other Buddhist traditions engage these dynamics is important, though I cannot do full justice to it here. 15. Tsangnyon 2010. 16. The classic plots of Tibetan opera (a che lha mo) form another set of important sites where the conceptual links among the dynamics of renunciation, hardship, death, separation, longing, and teacher-student intimacy are made. On Tibetan opera, see Henrion-Dourcy 2001; on the theme of performance in the context of Khunu Lama’s biography, see Pitkin 2017. Of course, it is also possible to read Marpa as an irascible, unpredictable, or abusive individual, and some interpreters have done so. 17. Tsangnyon 2010:109–15. 18. While there are clear resonances here with Indian Buddhist narrative literature, and Tibetan authors often go to considerable lengths to remind audiences that the lives of particular Tibetan saints resemble the life of the Buddha Śākyamuni or other Indic exemplars, many unknowns remain surrounding the interaction of non-Buddhist Tibetan narrative elements with Indic narrative tropes such as these. 19. Pitkin 2017. 20. “Chos phyir pha yul sbangs” (Angrup 2005:16). Angrup repeats versions of this phrase repeatedly in this chapter and throughout the namtar. 21. The Life of Milarepa, arguably the paradigmatic renunciatory drama in Tibet (Turek 2013:23; Smith 2001:61), shows Milarepa moving through successive layers of renunciation and home-leaving. Tibetan religious life narratives such as the Life of Milarepa tend, as we have seen, to be implicitly or explicitly modeled on the life story of the Buddha Śākyamuni(Schaeffer 2004; Quintman 2010), in which the paradigmatic renunciatory moment comes when the future Buddha departs from home to pursue spiritual practice. Nevertheless, as Collins has noted, not all Buddhist communities identify Śākyamuni’s life as the most important narrative of renunciation. As Collins discusses, while the Buddha’s life story is taken as paradigmatic by Western translators and by those he calls “Buddhist modernists,” as well as by Tibetans and many Buddhists in North and East Asia, for South Asian and Southeast Asian Buddhists, the paradigmatic story of both Buddhist life and of renunciation is the jātaka narrative of Prince Vessantara, whose perfection of generosity leads him to give away his wife and children. See Collins 2016; 1998. 22. Tsangnyon 2010:118–19. 23. Tsangnyon 2010; Quintman 2014; Schaeffer 2004. 24. The literature in which this pattern appears is too large to cite in full; Schaeffer 2004 explores a particularly intense instance of this discourse of sadness. The turn away from one’s natal family is a key narrative moment in other kinds of literature, in contexts far outside Tibet; the motif can also be mapped onto the developmental

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sequence of a young person’s marriage and departure from the parental home (see, for instance, Diemberger 2007; Hallisey 2015; Yü 2001). Buddhist texts from many cultural settings play with renunciation/marriage parallels (and potential conflicts, especially in life stories of women). Such narratives often present monastic ordination as a replacement for marriage. Nevertheless, as the previous chapter notes, many Tibetan Buddhist lineages are also family lineages. For young people whose first teachers are parents, grandparents, or other relatives, or who are trained to take up an inherited religious role, this paradigm of early renunciation in the form of departure can look somewhat different. 25. Angrup 2005:9. Bogin (2013) has highlighted the widespread narrative trope of youthful precocity and the spiritual “prodigy” in Tibetan life-story genres, especially rnam thar. 26. Angrup 2005:9. 27. Angrup 2005:10. 28. Angrup and Lall 1987. 29. Angrup 2005:10; Angrup’s namtar often breaks Khunu Lama’s activities down into increments of three years, or just over two years, which may suggest that these numbers are sometimes an approximation. 30. Angrup 2005:11. Angrup and Lall (1987) say that the young Tenzin Gyaltsen also took novice ordination from Sonam Gyaltsen at this time, though in the 2005 namtar Angrup says Tenzin Gyaltsen briefly “entered religious life as a monk” at the Kinnauri monastery of Ngari Choling, which suggests he took novice ordination there. The future Khunu Lama also seems to have taken some form of novice ordination at Tashilhunpo Monastery in Tibet (Angrup 2005; Angrup and Lall 1987). I discuss the question of Khunu Lama’s ordination status in Pitkin 2009. 31. Angrup 2005:16. One of Khunu Lama’s former students remembers Khunu Lama describing his plans differently. Khenpo Sonam Topgyal recalls Khunu Lama telling him that he had initially hoped to travel to Burma to study Buddhism (Khenpo Sonam Topgyal interview, 2006;). This rather unusual suggestion for a Himalayan teenager in 1914 may hint that Khunu Lama had some early awareness of emerging twentieth-century intra-Buddhist contacts connecting Himalayan Buddhists to Buddhist communities in Southeast Asia. It is even possible that the future Khunu Lama was aware of innovative Burmese Buddhist reformers and teachers like Ledi Sayadaw, whom Erik Braun and David McMahan have linked to the development of Buddhist “modernism” (Braun 2013; McMahan and Braun 2017). Later in his life, Khunu Lama certainly came into contact with the influential international Buddhist modernist organization the Maha Bodhi Society through the Sikkimese monk S. K. Jinorasa, as well as during his residence in Bodh Gaya, and perhaps through other connections. (Hackett 2012: 317; my thanks to Heather Stoddard for this reference; Bhutia 2016; Lopez 2018:30–31). 32. Angrup and Lall 1987: 15. 33. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011: 9. I quote the Tsiknopoulos translation here and below except where indicated. 34. Angrup 2005:16. 35. The literature on this topic is substantial; see, for instance, Ortner 1978; Mills 2003; Childs 2004; Gutschow 2005; Makley 2005; Kapstein 2006; Pirie 2007. 36. Angrup 2005: chap. 2; Lamchen Gyalpo 2011: 6. 37. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005; Chris Fynn interview, 2006.

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38. For English translation of the first part of Shabkar’s autobiography, with introduction, see Ricard 1994. Jacoby alludes to the emotional tenor of Shabkar’s autobiography ( Jacoby 2014:369, n. 21). 39. Ricard 1994:32. 40. Ricard 1994:40. 41. Ricard 1994:40. 42. Ricard 1994:xxii, 32, 43. There is an interesting parallel with the householder status of Milarepa’s guru Marpa, creating an alternation of householder and renunciant models of practice. 43. Ricard 1994: 41. 44. Ricard 1994: 201–5. 45. Of course, there is important Buddhist literature on renunciation that focuses specifically on the pains and challenges of renouncing sexual pleasure and marital love. Perhaps most famous in this vein is the story of Handsome Nanda, the tale of the Buddha’s half-brother, who is whisked away from his bride on the eve of their wedding to become a monk, as famously rendered by the first-century Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa (Covill 2007; Kachru 2012 and 2019; McClintock 2011; Tzohar 2019, 2021). 46. Collins offers important and relevant comments on the degree to which a different narrative of Buddhist renunciation, the story of Prince Vessantara, may be considered a tragedy (Collins 2016; also 1998. On the “desire” for enlightenment, see Surin 1998). 47. Geshe Gelek Choedak, personal communication, 2018. 48. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, “Introduction,” to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Brilliant Moon: The Autobiography of Dilgo Khyentse, trans. Ani Jinba Palmo (Shambhala, 2009), xi. 49. At the same time, of course, definitive genres of Tibetan Buddhist philosophical explanation also articulate the Mahāyāna and tantric view of samsaric events and sufferings as ultimately “illusion-like” (gyu ma lda bu). Even in the tragic sequence in the Life of Marpa the Translator, in which Marpa’s beloved only son dies, Marpa, who was Milarepa’s guru, negotiates between the intensity of his loss and his own tantric Buddhist understanding, saying of his son in part, “Among dreams this would have been a super dream; among illusions, a super illusion” (Nalanda Translation Committee, 1995:174). 50. Ulrike Roesler (2015) has explored aspects of Tibetan literary intertextuality, in particular what she calls “textual reuse” of canonical Buddhist works by early Kadampa authors; Terrone (2016) has examined intertextuality in the writings of a contemporary eastern Tibetan Buddhist visionary. 51. Angrup 2005:15. 52. Angrup 2005:16. 53. Perhaps most notable among the differences between Khunu Lama’s life story and the accounts of Milarepa’s life is Khunu Lama’s apparently unmarred, happy childhood, spent in prosperous and loving circumstances, in contrast with Milarepa’s suffering after his father’s untimely death and the cruelty and hardship that his paternal relatives inflicted on Milarepa and his mother and sister. 54. On the topic of authorizing referents in Tibetan Buddhist lifestories, see Gyatso and Havnevik 2005: 22; Bessenger 2016:148–63, 169, 172, 177, 206–9, 267; Diemberger 2007:294–95; see also themes raised in Jacoby 2014.

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55. The Mussoorie teacher training was held over the course of six months in 1965. (Lamchen Gyalpo 2011:11; Jackson 2019:110-112. In a 2006 interview with Ann Helm and Lama Pema Dragpa, Khenchen Palden Sherab referred to Khunu Lama as the “head teacher” of the Mussoorie teacher-training program, though not all participants described Khunu Lama’s role in exactly those terms (https://www.padmasambhava .org/ven-khenchen-palden-sherabs-lineages-primary-teachers/). I discuss the Mussoorie teacher training in more detail in chapter 3. 56. Doboom Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005. Gyumed Khenpo Tuthob Rinpoche, whom I interviewed in 2005, told the same story. Rakra Rinpoche (interviewed in 2006) told a similar story but omitted the reference to Dromtonpa. See Jackson 2019:111. 57. Angrup 2005:16. “blo phugs chos la gtad / chos phugs sprang la gtad/ sprang phugs shi la gtad/ shi phugs grog po skam po la gtad [sic].” Readers will note that in one of the two excerpts from Angrup’s verse namtar-supplication prayer that serve as frontispiece for this book, Angrup restates the Kadampa Four Aims, and honors Khunu Lama as someone who embodied them. 58. The fifteenth-century proponent of Kadampa mind-training (blo sbyong) techniques Chenga Lodro Gyaltsen (1402–1471) lists the Kadamapa Four Aims as part of the Kadampa repertoire of techniques for turning away from the eight worldly concerns and developing renunciation. (Spyan snga blo gros rgyal mtshan 199?:16a– b). See also Rinchen 1999; Zopa Rinpoche 2012; Jinpa 2013. Relatedly, the Dalai Lama mentions his own reflections on the Kadampa Four Aims in the context of developing bodhicitta (Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron 2017:232–33). 59. Rinchen 1999:52. 60. Rinchen 1999:53. 61. Rinchen 1999:54. 62. Zopa Rinpoche 2012. Lama Zopa Rinpoche and his late teacher, Lama Thubten Yeshe, founded the international Buddhist organization Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition (FPMT), which has branches in many countries. Lama Zopa’s students include Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhists in India and elsewhere, as well as Western and Asian converts. Lama Zopa, like Khunu Lama, comes from a Himalayan border region, the Mount Everest region of Nepal. Although Lama Zopa’s primary public presence is as a Gelukpa teacher, he is recognized as the reincarnation of a Nyingma master (Wangmo 2005). As I discuss in the next chapter, Lama Zopa’s community in Nepal hosted Khunu Lama for a series of teachings in 1976, shortly before Khunu Lama’s death, and he personally received teachings from Khunu Lama (Lama Zopa Rinpoche, interview, 2005). The FPMT has published translations of two of Khunu Lama’s lectures from that visit, in a volume called Teachings from Tibet (Ribush 2005). 63. Zopa Rinpoche 2012:174. 64. Rinchen 1999:54–55. 65. The first three instructions of the Kadampa Ten Innermost Jewels further amplify the renunciatory perspective of the Four Aims and use the same image of the “dog” that we find in Geshe Sonam Rinchen’s commentary. They urge, “Discard the company of humans. Join the company of dogs. Attain the company of the gods.” On the Kadampa Ten Innermost Jewels and Four Aims, see the Bka’ gdams glegs bam, selections of which are translated in English by Thubten Jinpa as The Book of Kadam: The Core Texts ( Jinpa 2008:586, 598). These pithy distillations sum up points Atīśa makes

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to Dromtonpa in chapter 16 of the Jewel Garland of Dialogues, part of the Bka’ gdams glegs bam. See Jinpa 2008:290. 66. The link between solitary wilderness meditation and a direct confrontation with possible death is not simply abstract. It is a recurring theme in personal accounts by meditators or ascribed to meditators, ranging from Milarepa to individuals in the present day. The British nun Ven. Tenzin Palmo, for instance has described her own near death in a snowstorm during her thirteen-year Himalayan cave retreat. Palmo 2002. Compare the Tibetan and Himalayan imaginary of wilderness and renunciation I discuss here with the Indic equivalent, described in Kachru 2012; Tzohar 2019, 2021. 67. The Sanskrit term kusāli (ku sā li) appears in some of the same contexts as the Tibetan word sprang po and is used by figures in lineages connected to Khunu Lama, including Patrul Rinpoche and Jamgon Kongtrul. The term kusāli often appears in more explicitly tantric contexts, as well as in the context of the generosity of offering the body through chod (gcod) practice. See, for example, chapter 5 of Patrul’s famous Words of My Perfect Teacher (Patrul Rinpoche 1994:297–307.) 68. Notably, Khunu Lama was not a beggar in the conventional sense of asking for alms or donations. On the contrary, a hallmark of stories about him are accounts of his rejecting donations of food or money when people tried to offer them. Buddhist communities across Asia historically have varied widely with regard to alms-gathering by monastics. Practices range from daily alms rounds to institutional donations and offerings that are primarily symbolic. 69. For instance, Baling Lama Kushok Thupstan Tsewang (1935–?), the Ladakhi monk who served as Khunu Lama’s attendant in the early 1960s, recalled Khunu Lama being harassed when meditating outside, and turned away from places where he tried to stay; Lama Zopa Rinpoche specifically recalled Khunu Lama being denied a room in the Tibetan monastery in Bodh Gaya and made to stay in the courtyard (until the Dalai Lama arrived and honored him). Baling Lama, interview, 2004; Halford 2015:30; Lama Zopa Rinpoche 2010. 70. Baling Lama, interview, 2004; Halford 2015; Lama Zopa Rinpoche 2010; Sem Tinley Ongmu interview, 2004; Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 71. Sem Tinley Ongmu interview, 2004; Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 72. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005 (in English). 73. Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe interview, 2004.

Chapter Three 1. Rakra Rinpoche interview, 2006. 2. Khenpo Sonam Topgyal interview, 2006. The Dalai Lama continues to mention Khunu Lama by name at large public teachings, including major Kālacakra initiations (e.g., Amaravati 2005, Dharamsala 2004). See also Dalai Lama XIV 1994:1; Sparham 1999. 3. Namgyal Taklha interview, 2004; personal communication 2021. Mrs. Taklha’s grandfather, General Dasang Damdul Tsarong, was one of Khunu Lama’s patrons in central Tibet and Kham before 1937; her father and mother, Tsarong Dudul Namgyal and Ragashar Yangchen Drolkar, also knew him, as did her grandmother and great aunt. Sem Tinley Ongmu described similar events (interview, 2004). David Jackson

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(2019:112) reports a similar story, as do Lama Zopa Rinpoche (2010) and Halford (2015). 4. On antinomian behavior as part of tantric practice and its interpretations, see, for instance, Stearns 2007; DiValerio 2015. 5. Dalai Lama interview, 2005. At the same time, the Dalai Lama has frequently talked about Khunu Lama’s importance in his own study of bodhicitta as well as related topics, and his comments here should be read within that context. 6. Tibetan writers discuss three main kinds of namtar: the “outer,” or public account of someone’s life and Buddhist liberation; the “inner” account, which, as the name suggests, incorporates accounts of the protagonist’s inward meditational practices and experience; and the “secret” account, which is not intended for public consumption and might incorporate details of an individual’s private tantric practices, visions, dreams, and Buddhist realizations. There can also be an even more esoteric “very secret” account (Cabezón and Jackson 1996). According to this influential Tibetan theoretical framework, a given religious figure’s identity operates within layers of disclosure and concealment, and multiple public, private, and secret narratives likewise disclose differing aspects and understandings of such a person’s activity. Some prominent figures, such as the Fifth Dalai Lama, have multiple namtar in all three subgenres. Angrup’s prose and verse accounts of Khunu Lama’s life rest firmly in the “outer” namtar category, as do most (though perhaps not all) of the oral accounts I have encountered. See Willis 1985; Gyatso 1998; Diemberger 2007, all three of which discuss parallels and differences between namtar and European and American genres of biography and memoir. All three also address the history of non-Tibetan scholarship that dismisses namtar as “mired” in miracle narratives or hagiography, and as therefore somehow not “really” historical or biographical in Euro-American terms. I address some of these issues in Pitkin 2016 and 2017. 7. This preference for poor and humble people, with its elements of social critique as well as personal modesty, is a recurring convention of namtar literature, as I discuss. 8. See discussion of these issues in Townsend 2016; Gold 2008; Hartmann 2019. 9. See Quintman 2014 for the notion of a biographical corpus in the case of Milarepa. 10. Angrup 2005:16. 11. Angrup 2005:16. 12. Angrup 2005:16. 13. Angrup 2005:17. There is no record of his brother’s response, but later in life at least one of Khunu Lama’s brothers acted as his patron and sent him money each month. 14. Lamchen Gyalpo 2011:9. 15. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 16. Angrup 2005:19. See chap. 1, n. 1 on my dating of this episode. 17. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 18. Angrup 2005:35–36. 19. Angrup 2005:36; Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi, personal communication, 2021. 20. Angrup 2005:36. 21. Tekra Math is located near the Godaliya market in the Lukshwa area of Varanasi. According to residents of its religious community, it was founded in the early eighteenth century. See also Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi and Zara Houshmand 2020:189. When

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I visited in 2005, only one elderly resident of the math remembered Khunu Lama, as a “great mahātmā,” [Hindi, lit. “great being”; “holy person”], who always wore thick eyeglasses, a beard, and red robes that were too short for him (interview in collaboration with Dr. Jampa Samten, 2005). Khunu Lama’s room was no longer extant in its previous form during my visit, because the upper floors had been renovated. 22. Pitkin 2017:8, citing K. Angrup interview, 2004; Angrup spoke in English. I also discuss these details in a slightly different context in Pitkin 2011. 23. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005; Dodin 1997:88, quoting the Kinnauri scholar Sangngak Tenzin. 24. Tashi Rabgias interview, 2004. 25. Kasur Sonam Tobgay interview, 2005. Kasur Sonam Tobgay recalled Khunu Lama having pots for water in his room when he visited. This suggests that Khunu Lama did not always drink directly from the pump in the street, reinforcing how multilayered and inevitably partial all such remembered accounts must be. 26. Halford 2015:30. 27. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche recalled an uncle as Khunu Lama’s supporter; Angrup states that it was one of Khunu Lama’s brothers, a successful trader, who supported him in this way for much of his life in India. Multiple relatives may have supported him (Angrup interview, 2004). 28. Halford 2015:30. The barber charged half a rupee, and Khunu Lama paid him 50 rupees for each visit. 29. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. Note the importance of Śāntideva’s work Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (Skt. Bodhicaryāvatāra; Tib. byang chub sems dpa’i spyod pa la ‘jug pa) in this account. 30. Ngawang Rabgyas interview, 2004. 31. Online at http://www.berzinarchives.com/bioghaphies/portrait_serkong _rinpoche.html. 32. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. Baling Lama similarly describes Khunu Lama as regularly giving away food and money offerings he received. 33. Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek interview, 2006. As I discuss in the Epilogue, this remains an active mode of renunciatory practice. A notable recent example is Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s four-year wandering Indian retreat from 2011 to 2015 (Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche 2019.) 34. Sem Tinley Ongmu interview, 2004; Chris Fynn interview, 2006; Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:17–18. 35. Ngawang Rabgyas interview, 2004. 36. Khandro Tsering Chodron (1929–2011), the consort of Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro (1893–1959), lived in Sikkim during the last decades of her life. 37. Sem Tinley Ongmu interview, 2004. Sem Tinley Ongmu told this story in the context of highlighting both the intensity and also the occasional humor of Khunu Lama’s chatralwa practice, and as an example of Khunu Lama’s apparent clairvoyance. 38. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005. At the time of our interview, Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok was secretary to the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) for Education. As of 2021 he is kalon (minister) for Religion and Culture, CTA. 39. Chris Fynn interview, 2006. In addition to being a student of Khunu Lama, Fynn was also a student of the Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin and lived with her and Khunu Lama in 1976. He accompanied them on Khunu Lama’s final trip from Tso Pema to Manikaran, Manali, and then Lahaul.

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40. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005. 41. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005. 42. See chapter 2. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok’s description of Khunu Lama is reminiscent of comments attributed to Milarepa by Tsangnyon Heruka, in which Milarepa says that he doesn’t follow his guru Marpa’s married-lama lifestyle because he himself can’t handle it—he lives as a hermit yogin because that’s all he can do. 43. Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo, email communication, 2008, describing events of November 1974. 44. Jackson 2019:185. 45. Jackson 2019. 46. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, interview, 2010. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s younger brother, the Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (b. 1976), who himself engaged in a four-year chatralwa-style wandering retreat, reminiscent of Khunu Lama, recounts the same episode, although he does not refer to Khunu Lama by name. (Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche 2019:112.) Relatedly, Baling Lama relatedly describes Khunu Lama as living in a kind of constant retreat, not lying down to sleep and only interrupting his practices when requested to teach (Halford 2015:30). Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi describes him in similar terms (Priyadarshi and Houshmand 2020:188–89). 47. Chris Fynn interview, 2006. 48. Namgyal Taklha interview, 2004. 49. Ani Pemo interview, 2005. 50. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010. 51. Namgyal Taklha interview, 2004. Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi also describes Khunu Lama’s practice of being locked inside his room “with a huge padlock,” specifically as a way to avoid visitors; an assistant would slide the key under the door to him, and later “he would slide the key back out again and knock quietly to be let out.” (Priyadarshi and Houshmand 2020:186). 52. Jackson 2019:185. 53. Chris Fynn interview, 2006; also Ven. Tenzin Palmo interview, 2015. 54. Sey Rinpoche interview, 2013. 55. Doboom Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005. Many other people emphasized the importance of Khunu Lama’s decision to live in a Hindu religious space, including sGu ngo rTa ra Rinpoche (interview, 2004) and Kasur Sonam Tobgay (interview, 2005). 56. Ironically, Khunu Lama’s Indian neighbors at the Varanasi Tekra Math ashram by contrast apparently perceived him not as Indian but as a Tibetan or Himalayan person; people at the ashram when I visited in 2005 remembered him as the “Bhot baba,” the “Himalayan master.” Bhot, or Bhotia/Bhotiya, is an Indian and Himalayan ethnonym for groups speaking Tibetan languages; the word comes from bod, the Tibetan word for “central Tibet,” and sometimes for Tibet generally (interview in collaboration with Dr. Jampa Samten, 2005; on the term bod, see Shakya 1993). As seen in chapter 1, such stories demonstrate the shifting nature of cultural and regional differences and their perception, depending on location and context. 57. Ringu Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005; Khenpo Sonam Topgyal interview, 2006. 58. Jackson 2003; Gyumed Khenpo Tuthob Rinpoche interview, 2005. As Gyumed Khenpo Tuthob Rinpoche pointed out, the word atsara is a Tibetanized pronunciation of the Sanskrit word acharya. Acharya is a scholarly title, hardly a negative epithet, but in the Tibetan context, for instance in Tibetan opera, the character of the atsara

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becomes a kind of clown, a caricatured, foreign-looking mendicant (Leonard van der Kuipje, personal communication). We might note that, despite this implied critique from his teacher, Dezhung Rinpoche did in fact go on to study Sanskrit with Khunu Lama, and they formed a close relationship ( Jackson 2003). Relatedly, Kalep Drungyig Pema Dorje (b. 1858), a grammarian from Kalep Monastery in Tsang, criticized Khunu Lama as a rong pa or “valley person,” with the connotation of “not-fully-Tibetan”/“narrow minded individual,” in a grammatical treatise attacking Khunu Lama’s scholarship. See dKar lebs Sum rtags ‘Grel pa (Kalep Drungyig’s Commentary on Tibetan Grammar). A reprint was published in 1971 by Getse Trulku Kunga Lodoy in New Delhi, under the title dkar-lebs drun-yig padma-rdo-rje on Tibetan Grammar, and in Lhasa in 1989 by the Bod ljongs mi dmangs dpe skrun khang under the title dkar lebs sum rtags dka’ ‘grel. In the 1989 edition, the section on Khunu Lama, entitled “Gtsang ljongs pa rnam kham brag mchog sprul rin po che’i bka’ lan gandharvha’i gling bu dang lhan cig dbus gtsang khams gsum gyi mkhas pa khunu ba bstan rgyan can gyi rtsod yig las ‘phros pa’i sgrub byed gsal por ston pa ‘jigs med zho ‘thung rus pa,” covers pp. 95–116. 59. Tulku Thondup Rinpoche interview, 2006 (in English). 60. Sem Tinley Ongmu (interview, 2004) noted both his ability to travel in the Indian style and his relationships with sadhus as remarkable to her. Ngawang Rabgyas interview, 2004. Many other students also described and emphasized Khunu Lama’s travels with sadhus. 61. Sem Tinley Ongmu interview, 2004. 62. Manshardt 2004: 26. Students who described his doing yoga or assuming physical postures that seemed yogic include Sem Tinley Ongmu (interview, 2004); Chris Fynn (interview, 2006); Khenpo Sonam Tobgyal (interview, 2006); Ani Pemo (interview, 2007); Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek (interview, 2006); and Rakra Rinpoche (interview, 2006). See also David Jackson 2019. 63. Lama Zopa Rinpoche (2010) described Khunu Lama as dressing in sadhu clothing to match the sadhus he was living with in Varanasi. Tulku Thondup recalled Khunu Lama wearing a long red wool chuba “like a Ladakhi chuba” when they met, probably in Darjeeling in the late 1960s. Tulku Thondup interview, 2006. 64. Druktrul Rinpoche, recalling a description of Khunu Lama in 1965 given by the Dalai Lama to Chogye Rinpoche, as reported in an interview done by David Jackson in Bodhnath, Nepal, 2006 ( Jackson 2019:112 and personal communication). 65. Chogye Trichen Rinpoche interview, 2005; David Jackson, personal communication, 2008; Jackson 2019. Mrs. Namgyal Taklha interview, 2004. 66. Namgyal Taklha interview, 2004. 67. Manshardt 2004:25. 68. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010. 69. Doboom Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005. 70. David Jackson 2019, and personal communication, 2007. 71. See related discussions in Krug 2018; Turek 2013. 72. There is also, of course, the fact that Khunu Lama was from the Himalayan border region of Kinnaur. In some circumstances, the Indo-Tibetan qualities that stood out to his interlocutors can be seen as simply dimensions of his identity as a member of an ethnic group less familiar to his students in Tibet and India. For fellow Kinnauris and people from adjacent Himalayan regions, Khunu Lama’s self-presentation was much less ambiguous.

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73. Townsend 2021; see also Gold 2008; Kapstein 2003; van der Kuijp 1996; R. Jackson 1996. According to the Indic taxonomy of the fields of knowledge popularized in Tibet by Sakya Paṇḍita (1182–1251), there are five major fields of knowledge (arts and crafts, logic, grammar, medicine, and Buddhism), and five minor (synonyms, mathematics, astrology, drama, poetry, composition). Sources describe Khunu Lama as trained in the literature-related fields, as well as in medicine, astrology, and mathematics, in addition to Buddhism. 74. Of course, neither of these languages was his first. His first language, Kinnauri, was largely unfamiliar to both Indians and Tibetans he encountered, another way in which his identity as a Himalayan border person seems to have made him “illegible” to both Indians and Tibetans. His Kinnauri disciples would later describe the importance for their community of the handful of short poetic and didactic works on Buddhism he composed in Kinnauri and Tibetan. 75. Gen Lobsang Jamspal interview, 2009; Gen Jamspal, a prominent Ladakhi scholar, was also present at this event, and recalled that he tried to assist Khunu Lama by taking notes on the discussion. See also the printed event program. Khunu Lama may have served as a Hindi-Tibetan translator in other contexts as well; Chris Fynn (interview, 2006) recalled that Khunu Lama told him that at one point during his years in Tibet he had met the European explorer Alexandra David-Neel and translated for her from Tibetan to Hindi. Interestingly, Rakra Rinpoche states that the famous and sometimes unconventional polymath Gendun Chophel commented that when he first met Khunu Lama as his Sanskrit classmate (probably in the early 1940s), Khunu Lama did not know Hindi well. (Bkras thong rak ra Rin po che 1980: 50; Angrup 2005: 20– 21.) Khunu Lama may have mastered Hindi in the intervening years of living in India, or Gendun Chophel’s comment might hint at some (apparently good-natured) rivalry between the two men. 76. See Townsend 2021 for related discussion of roles played by literary study and rig gnas more generally at Mindroling Monastery at the time of the Fifth Dalai Lama. 77. Doboom Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok also described this (interview, 2005). 78. Manshardt 2004:26. 79. Gen Jamspal interview, 2009; Ribush 2005; Angrup 2005; Chris Fynn interview, 2006. 80. Angrup 2005:35. 81. Chris Fynn interview, 2006 and personal communication 2021. “Putting his feet on their heads” is a standard Sanskrit and Tibetan literary trope both for religious devotion and for acknowledging an opponent’s victory in philosophical/religious debate. 82. This work was popularized among Tibetans by Sakya Paṇḍita in the midthirteenth century and has remained the most influential work on poetics in Tibetan contexts. See van der Kuijp 1996; R. Jackson 1996; Kapstein 2003; Gold 2008; Lin 2008; Townsend 2016, 2021. Contemporary Tibetan writers continue to wrestle with the influence of this text. Nancy Lin quotes a critical letter by the groundbreaking twentieth-century author Dondrup Gyal, in which he says, “Our scholars have a weakness, which is to rely as much as possible on India for our cultural and historical origins. . . . In my view, if Daṇḍin can write a Kāvyādarśa, why can’t we write a Tibetan Mirror of Poetics?” (published in Sbrang char (Light Rain) 1984; quoted in Lin 2008:86. 83. Tashi Rabgias interview, 2004. Dalai Lama XIV, Tenzin Gyatso, and Thubten

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Chodron 2017:236 also mentions the detail of Khunu Lama correcting Tibetan translations from Sanskrit. 84. The Dalai Lama described similar experiences with Khunu Lama, in which Khunu Lama would point out errors earlier Tibetan translators from Sanskrit to Tibetan had made in rendering Śāntideva’s Guide (Dalai Lama XIV, Tenzin Gyatso and Thubten Chodron 2017:236). 85. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005; Ngawang Rabgyas interview, 2004; Ven. Tenzin Priyadarshi, personal communication, 2020. Others who mentioned Khunu Lama’s ris med approach, especially at the Mussoorie “lama school,” include Kasur Sonam Tobgay (interview, 2005); and sGu ngo rTa ra Rinpoche (interview, 2004). 86. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. Lama Zopa Rinpoche (2010) also makes this point. 87. Ontul Rinpoche interview, 2004; Manshardt interview with Ontul Rinpoche, 1995, cited in Manshardt 2007:14, n. 49. Baling Lama made similar comments (Baling Lama, interview, 2004; Halford 2015:30). 88. Khenpo Sonam Topgyal interview, 2006. 89. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, “Ask a Lama: Celebrating All the Traditions,” interview, Mandala Magazine (Oct/Nov 2006). https://fpmt.org/mandala/archives/ mandala-issues-for-2006/october/ask-a-lama-celebrating-all-the-traditions/. Perhaps not coincidentally, such descriptions of Khunu Lama echo canonical presentations of the Buddha Śākyamuni, who is described as teaching so that each member of any audience heard each sermon in his or her own language. 90. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 91. Angrup 2005:18. 92. Chris Fynn recalled this as well. Chris Fynn interview, 2006. Tantalizingly, like Khunu Lama’s emphasis on the figure of Śākyamuni, this statement seems to resonate in its Indian-origins-inflected ecumenicism with what David McMahan has called Buddhist Modernism. However, Khunu Lama’s ecumenicism is arguably motivated by different concerns than the modernist priorities McMahan identifies (see McMahan 2008). Lopez uses the term “modern Buddhism” (Lopez 2002). See also Masuzawa 2005. 93. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 94. Tulku Thondup interview, 2006. 95. Doboom Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005; Gyume Khenpo Thuthop interview, 2005; sGu ngo rTa ra Rinpoche interview, 2004; Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005; Khenpo Palden Sherab interview, 2005; Ringu Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005. 96. Rakra Rinpoche interview, 2006. 97. Rakra Rinpoche interview, 2006. 98. Ringu Tulku Rinpoche interview, 2005. Jackson 2019:110–11. 99. Rakra Rinpoche interview, 2006. The implication here is that the speaker realizes he has misjudged Khunu Lama and is overawed to see how close he is to the Dalai Lama. 100. Dreyfus refers to this as “the repression of writing in Gelukpa scholasticism,” which he sees as an indicator of a specific genre of Gelukpa intellectual conservatism (Dreyfus 2003:111). This de-emphasis on writing is now changing. Both diaspora monasteries in India and, to some extent, monastic institutions in geographic Tibet are making major curricular shifts, incorporating topics ranging from science and foreign

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languages to an extensive secondary school curriculum. Townsend (2021) discusses the earlier history of these dynamics. 101. Dreyfus 2003:111. On bshad grwa commentarial schools, see chapter 1, n. 53. Dreyfus describes widespread local historical variation in literacy rates across regions: many nomadic areas of Kham and Amdo in eastern Tibet have at times had much higher literacy rates than rural populations in central Tibet, and literacy has varied greatly, even among individual villages. Dreyfus points out that traditional teaching methods in Tibet, as elsewhere in Buddhist Asia, have often separated reading from writing, so that a child might learn to read very well without developing corresponding levels of writing skill (Dreyfus 2003:83). 102. See chapter 1, n. 53. 103. Townsend 2016, 2021. 104. Jinpa and Elsner 2000:2, 15. 105. Townsend (2016 and 2021) describes the key historical context of these dynamics. 106. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010. 107. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010. 108. Śāntideva 1999:11–13. 109. Angrup 2005:xxiv. 110. Tulku Thondup interview, 2006. 111. Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek, interview, 2006. 112. Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek, interview, 2006. 113. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok, interview, 2005. 114. Khunu Lama received transmissions of the root text of the Guide from multiple teachers. He seems to have received a key transmission of the Guide during his sojourn at Dzogchen Monastery in Kham, from the meditator and scholar Khenchen Pema Tekchok Loden, also known as Abu Lhagang or Khenpo Lhagyal, who was the twentieth abbot of Dzogchen Monastery’s Śrī Siṃha College and Khenpo Zhenga’s disciple. Abu Lhagang also gave Khunu Lama important transmissions of many core Dzogchen teachings, and Khunu Lama listed him as one of his Nyingma root gurus. (Bstan ‘dzin lung rtogs nyi ma 2004: 480–; Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:11; Angrup interview, 2004.) 115. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche, for instance, gives a specific example (2011:11).

Chapter Four 1. Tashi Tsering Josayma, oral communication, 2005. 2. The Sixth Dalai Lama (1683–1706), to be sure, was an exceptional and often outrageous figure, who flung aside many protocols of his office (although he does not seem to have publicly venerated anyone quite like Khunu Lama in style). Subsequent Dalai Lamas were less flamboyant, perhaps partly in response to the political crisis of the Sixth’s reign. Tibetan stories paralleling Rakra Rinpoche’s Sarnath narrative, in which one genuine or “real” practitioner recognizes another, despite that person’s unlikely or off-putting appearance, are a recurring theme in the literature of mad yogins (bla ma smyon pa), siddhas, and other kinds of renunciant virtuosi and tantric adepts. What is unusual here are the public actions of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the fact that he had the opportunity to form a close relationship with someone like Khunu Lama at all.

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3. Angrup 2005:34–35. 4. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:4–5. 5. Because of this book’s focus on Khunu Lama and his activities, this chapter concentrates on developments in India. But during this period, Tibetans who remained in geographic Tibet were likewise undergoing intense social disruption and facing existential concerns about continuity. Accounts of this period from Tibet highlight the scope of trauma and its ongoing social and intellectual impacts in ways that resonate with this chapter’s concerns. Among a host of works, see Naktsang Nulo’s Joys and Sorrows of the Naktsang Boy (Nags tsang zhi lu’i skyid sdug, 2007, published in English as My Tibetan Childhood: When Ice Shattered Stone, 2014); and Pema Bhum’s Stone Pillar Memoirs (Dran tho rdo ring ma), 2006; Six Stars with a Crooked Neck, 2001, and, relatedly, Heartbeat of a New Generation, 1999. See also Germano 1998; Jabb 2015; Gayley 2017; Willock 2021. 6. Sparham 1999:6–7. 7. Shakya 1999:43. 8. Kapstein 2006:281. 9. Interviews, 2001–2013. PLA troops entered different Tibetan regions at different times, reaching communities in some eastern Tibetan regions of Amdo as early as the Long March, while for the Ganden Podrang government in Lhasa, the decisive year was 1950. See Weiner 2020; Shakya 1999; McGranahan 2010. 10. Tuttle 2007:225. New ways of thinking about “world religions” in the aftermath of the Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893 made this role for Buddhism possible. Once Buddhism began to be viewed as a world religion, Chinese and Tibetan Buddhisms could be understood as two branches of the same world-wide tradition. This new way of thinking about Buddhism allowed certain Buddhists in China to reimagine Buddhism as a pan-Asian, (or global) system, linking societies that included China, Japan, and the nations of Southeast Asia. On the effects of the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, see Ziolkowski 1993; Masuzawa 2005. On Buddhism in the discourse on world religions and the notion of “local” forms of Buddhism, see Lopez 2013a, 1998, 1995; Masuzawa 2005. 11. Tuttle 2007:9. 12. Tuttle 2007; Jagou 2004; Birnbaum 2003; Willock 2021. 13. Tuttle 2007:1. 14. Shakya 1999:66–69; Tuttle 2005:1–2. 15. Shakya 1999:138–39; McGranahan 2018, 2010; Weiner 2020. 16. Shakya 1999:139; McGranahan 2018, 2010. 17. Kapstein, 2006:286; Shakya 1999:108; Weiner 2020. 18. Shakya 1999:192; Kapstein 2006; van Schaik 2011. 19. Shakya 1999:200–201. 20. Shakya 1999:204. 21. Shakya 1999:207. 22. Shakya 1999:206. 23. Shakya 1999:207. 24. Manshardt 2007; on the Tibetan resistance, see McGranahan 2010, 2005. 25. Terdrom Nunnery is an important Drikung Kagyu community of religious women located at a hot spring and cave complex associated with Yeshe Tsogyal, the Tibetan consort and scribe of Padmasambhava. Narratives about Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin describe her as an incarnation of Yeshe Tsogyal, part of a widespread

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pattern of identifying female Himalayan religious masters as emanations of Tsogyal ( Jacoby 2014; Bessenger 2016; Schaeffer 2004; Gayley 2017; Diemberger 2007). Yeshe Tsogyal herself is described in hagiographies as the first Tibetan person to reach Buddhahood. She and Padmasambhava are the central figures in the Treasure (gter ma) tradition of Tibetan Buddhist revelation, particularly associated with the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions as well as Bon. The Longchen Nyingtik cycle of Treasure teachings is among the best-known Treasure cycles in the present day, and is one which Khunu Lama and the Drikung Khandroma both practiced and taught to others. 26. Manshardt 2007; Kunzang Dechen Chodron, Brief Biographies of the Drikung Khandros, Chodrung Zangmo Rinpoche and Sherab Thubten, online at http:// saraswatibhawan.org/brief-biographies-of-the-drikung-khandros-chodrung-zangmo -rinpoche-and-sherab-thubten-rinpoche/. 27. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche (2011:13) says that Khunu Lama was forty years old when he met Amgon Rinpoche. 28. Manshardt 2007:16–17; Kunzang Dechen Chodron, Brief Biographies (see n. 26 above). 29. Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:504–5. However, Nyoshul Khenpo and other sources put the date of his death at 1901, which would mean that Sherab Tharchin could not have met him directly. If that date is correct, he may have taught her teacher Choden Zangmo Rinpoche, who may have passed his teachings on to Sherab Tharchin. This name could also refer to a younger master from Rahor monastery, possibly Rahor Khenpo Tubten (Ra hor mkhan po thub bstan, twentieth century), a contemporary of the same Mewa Khenpo Tubten with whom Sherab Tharchin later became close. 30. Manshardt states that there can be two Drikung Khandromas at the same time, and that Choden Zangmo appointed Sherab Tharchin to the role while she was still alive (Manshardt 2007:19). On Choden Zangmo’s life, see Dkon mchog rgya mtsho 2003:133–34; Dkon mchog rgya mtsho 2004:654–55; Sonam Dorje. “Drikung Khandro Choden Zangmo,” online at https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Drigung -Khandro-Choden-Zangmo/9171. See also Kunzang Dechen Chodron, Brief Biographies (see n. 26 above). 31. Manshardt 2007; interviews conducted at Terdrom Nunnery, 2004, 2006. 32. Manshardt 2007:20. 33. Manshardt 2007:21. 34. Manshardt 2007:25–26. 35. Ontul Rinpoche interview, 2004. Road-building was one of the limited employment options available to Tibetan refugees in the early 1960s, but the hardships of the work and living conditions resulted in many falling ill. 36. On Mewa Khenpo Tubten, see Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:480–81; Lung rtog bstan pa’i nyima bstan ‘dzin kun bzang 2004; BDRC profile https://library.bdrc.io/show/ bdr:P3JM13. Mewa Khenpo Tubten was a student of the Dzogchen scholar Bopa Tulku Dongak Tenpe Nyima (1895/1900–1959), who also taught scholars from Rahor, and whom Khunu Lama himself had met while living in Kham (Lamchen Gyalpo 2011:11). 37. Ontul Rinpoche interview, 2004. Manshardt 2007:27. 38. Chris Fynn interview, 2006. Manshardt 2007. 39. Dalai Lama 1991; Jackson 2019. 40. Dalai Lama 1991.

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41. These remarks also apply to lamas in the Tibetan Bon tradition. Bon is an indigenous Tibetan religious tradition whose roots predate Buddhism in Tibet, but in the contemporary period it is closely connected with Buddhism. In the diaspora context, Tibetan leaders including the Dalai Lama sometimes describe Bon as a fifth school of Tibetan Buddhism. Important Tibetan literary genres that emphasize documenting lineage transmission include sen yig (gsan yig, “record of teachings received”), as well as ser treng (gser phreng, ”golden rosary”) and more institutional genres like cho jung (chos ‘byung, “institutional history”). As Tashi Tsering Josayma, Jan Willis, and Janet Gyatso (among others) have noted, and notably redressed through their own work, this Tibetan focus on teachings received and lineage connections made has sometimes been held up for criticism, even ridicule, by non-Tibetan observers. Such critics have accused Tibetan authors of being formulaic and devoid of creativity, or have labeled Tibetan sources historically “useless,” because their focus on documenting transmissions is different from Western biographical and historiographical conventions. Willis 1985 and Gyatso 1998 document and critique this approach; see also Martin 1997; Schaeffer 2004; Tashi Tsering Josayma 1998, 2006. 42. Mills 2003. 43. Mills 2003; see also Rambelli 2007 on Buddhist economies of circulation and exchange; Pinkney 2013 on ritual and devotional exchange more broadly in South Asia. 44. Sparham 1999: 7. 45. Dalai Lama XIV 2017:ix. 46. Dalai Lama interview, 2005. The Dalai Lama also mentions Ling Rinpoche’s study with Khunu Lama in his biography of Ling Rinpoche (Dalai Lama XIV 2017). 47. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche interview, 2010. 48. Sparham 1999:7. 49. Tashi Rabgias interview, 2004. Dodin 1997:89 and Manshardt 2004:27 also mention this episode. 50. On the refugee education crisis and the Dalai Lama’s response, see Jackson 2019:96–97. 51. Jackson 2020:89–90. 52. Jackson 2020:90–91. 53. Jackson 2020:110–12; Brentano 2018:37. 54. Dalai Lama interview, 2005. Jackson 2019:110; Brentano 2018:37, who mentions that Khunu Lama was named head teacher of the 1965 teacher-training program. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche gives the number of participating scholars as fifty (Lamchen Gyalpo 2011:11). 55. Lamchen Gyalpo 2011:11. 56. Dodin 1997. 57. Dalai Lama interview, 2005. See also the summary in Mdzad rnam rgya chen snying rje’i rol mtsho: 243–44. 58. Dalai Lama XIV Tenzin Gyatso and Thubten Chodron 2017:236. 59. Dalai Lama interview, 2005. Dalai Lama XIV Tenzin Gyatso and Thubten Chodron 2017 :236 also mentions this detail. 60. Sparham 1999:18. 61. Sparham 1999:21. 62. Dalai Lama interview, 2005. 63. Dalai Lama interview, 2005. The text in question was the Byang chub lam gyi rim

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pa’i khrid yig gser zhun ma, often referred to in English as “Essence of Refined Gold.” See Dalai Lama XIV 2019. 64. Manshardt 2007. 65. Sparham 1999:41. I quote from Sparham’s translation here and in what follows. 66. Sparham 1999:41. 67. Sparham 1999:43. 68. Sparham 1999:53, verse 81. 69. Sparham 1999:99. 70. Sparham 1999: 135, verse 329. 71. See for instance A Tshogs bstan ‘dzin ‘jam dbyangs 2003.

Chapter Five 1. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche describes the Drikung Khandroma as the main disciple receiving these teachings, although Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok recalls that it was the Nyingma Monastery in Tso Pema, of which his father subsequently became abbot, that requested and organized the teachings overall (Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:17; Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005.) 2. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 3. See Cabezón 1996:344–57. 4. Gyatso 1998. See Jabb 2015 on related song and toast traditions, which long predate Buddhism in Tibet and the Himalayan region. 5. Adam Pearcey translation (Shakya Shri 2018). 6. The Tibetan stanza omits an explicit verb. I have added a possible verb in brackets, but readers might note the suggestion of reticence or humility implied by the absent verb. sgra dang tshad ma la sogs rig pa’i gnas/ bslab gsum gsal bar ston pa dam pa’i gzhung/ rig pa ‘dzin pa’i sde snod thos pa’i dpal/ bstan ‘dzin rgyal mtshan zhabs la gsol ba ‘debs/

7. See also the translation by Erick Tsiknopoulos (Khunu Lama 2019). Of course, the solteb genre is enormous and contains poems with a range of devotional tones, but Khunu Lama’s solteb is at the understated end of this range. 8. Angrup 2005 includes this verse namtar-solteb, which was originally published in 1989 (Angrup 2005, 1989). 9. Ani Damcho Zangmo interview, 2004. 10. Ven. Karma Gelek Yuthok interview, 2005. 11. Thondup 1996:202; Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:224–25; 643, n. 7. The kind of unconventional action described in this anecdote is related to a specific form of esoteric practice and in that sense is not identical, for example, with the Chan/Zen repertoire of shocking or unconventional teaching techniques, although they are often narratively similar. See DiValerio 2015; Stearns 2007; Thondup 1996. 12. Chris Fynn also connected the fact that Khunu Lama didn’t give tantric empowerments to his more general disregard for ritual and thus to his disengagement from tantric practices more broadly: “He didn’t encourage that kind of practice. I mean, he actually said it was unnecessary.” Chris Fynn interview, 2006. Baling Lama

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likewise described this attitude to ritual, as well as to religious items like statues (Halford 2015). 13. Tulku Thondup interview, 2006. 14. Chris Fynn interview, 2006. 15. Tashi Tsering Josayma, personal communication, 2004. 16. For example, Gyetrul Jigme Rinpoche (b. 1968, the son of Namkha Drimed Rabjam Rinpoche, head of the Ripa lineage), framed Khunu Lama’s contemporary impor tance in the context of his origins in the Himalayan region, describing Khunu Lama as a bridge figure who links Tibetan and Himalayan communities, at a time when the Himalayan region itself is growing in prominence in the Buddhist world (Gyetrul Jigme Rinpoche interview, 2012). 17. Angrup 2005:26. This sister (who may be a cousin considered as a sister) is not mentioned in the opening account of his childhood; I have not been able to find additional information about her or their precise relationship. 18. Angrup 2005:26. 19. Angrup 2005:26–27. 20. Angrup 2005:27. The phrase “sems can rnams kyi ma ‘dris pa’i mdza’ bshes” means an “uncultivated friend of living beings,” in the sense that a bodhisattva’s kindness and friendship toward living beings results from the bodhisattva’s selfless compassion, rather than from something that those they help have done to “earn” it. The bodhisattva is in this way an “unknown friend,” or “anonymous benefactor.” 21. This practice of teaching to an area “underserved” by Buddhist institutions echoes patterns from the life of Patrul Rinpoche, something pointed out to me by Gene Smith (personal communication, 2004). At the same time, such teaching can also play a role in the “Tibetanization” or “Buddhicization” of regions that are in fact religiously and culturally diverse. See Shneiderman 2006; Huber 2011. 22. LaMacchia 2008; Ven. Gurucharan Singh Negi interview, 2005; Dr. Ven. Wangchuk Dorje Negi interview, 2005; Ven. Ramesh Chandra Negi interview, 2005; Gian Negi interview, 2013. 23. LaMacchia 2001:130. 24. LaMacchia 2001; Ven. Gurucharan Singh Negi interview, 2005; Dr. Ven. Wangchuk Dorje Negi interview, 2005; Ven. Ramesh Chandra Negi interview, 2005; Gian Negi interview, 2013. Three of Khunu Lama’s brief compositions from this period in Kinnaur have been republished in bilingual Tibetan/Hindi pamphlet editions by Ven. Ramesh Chandra Negi, who did the translation into Hindi together with Ven. Gurucharan Singh Negi. These republished pamphlets are Mthun bshi sin tu mdor bsdus and dbyang can dstod pa don gnis sne ma by Negi Rinpoche Tanzin Gyaltsan (sic, English words used on the cover pages); Vajrayaniya Adya Sadhana Ka Sanksipta Paricaya: A Brief Introduction to the Preliminary Meditation in the Vajrayana; and Song and Prayer By Negi Rinpoche Tenzin Gyaltsan [sic]. 25. For example, the nunnery of Jangchup Rabten Ling in the Himalayan foothills near Shimla in present-day Himachal Pradesh is home to a community of Kinnauri nuns whose ritual practices and temple images venerate Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen, and whose head is the Khunu Lama incarnation Jangchub Nyima. The land for the nunnery, which had previously served as winter pasture, was given by a Kinnauri disciple of Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen. Gian Negi interview, 2013. See Figure 6. 26. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche 2011:4.

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27. Khenpo Sonam Topgyal interview, 2006. 28. Ani Damcho Zangmo interview, 2004. 29. Manshardt 2007:34. 30. Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen interview, 2004. 31. Ani Damcho Zangmo interview, 2004. 32. Manshardt 2007 and unpublished manuscripts kindly shared with me in personal communications. These works are based on Manshardt’s interviews with surviving students, including nun disciples of the Drikung Khandroma and Khunu Lama; with Lho Ontul Rinpoche, now abbot of the Drikung monastery of Wogmin Thubten Shedrup Ling in Tso Pema; and with Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen. I interviewed many of the same people in 2004. 33. Manshardt 2007:33, n. i, citing Manshardt’s interview with Ani Tenzin Dolma; Ani Tenzin Dolma stated this was a direct quote of what the Drikung Khandro had described to her. 34. David Jackson, interviews with Lama Choedak and Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, n.d.; Manshardt 2007:70, n. 18. 35. Manshardt 2007:34, n. i, quoting Ontul Rinpoche interview with Jürgen Manshardt, 1995. My interview with Ontul Rinpoche (2004) covers the same events and themes. However, the Ladakhi monastic Baling Lama did serve as Khunu Lama’s attendant in an earlier period; as with so much else about Khunu Lama, different people observed different aspects of his life in different ways. 36. Pema Wangyal Rinpoche interview, 2005. 37. Halford 2010. 38. On pedagogical performance, see Schapiro 2017; Pitkin 2017. 39. See also discussion in Pitkin 2017; Schapiro 2012. 40. This contemporary biography, based on oral accounts, has been written and made public online by a member of the Drikung Kagyu community. “Brief Biography of the Drikung Khandro, Sherab Thubten Rinpoche” (sic) by Kunzang Dechen Chodron, online at http://www.dharma-media.org/ratnashripj/wogmin/khandro_neni .html. 41. Manshardt n.d. (a):11; 2007:29. 42. Manshardt 2007:27. 43. Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen interview, 2004. 44. Manshardt 2007:34. 45. Cabezón 1996. 46. Gardner 2019. 47. byin rlabs bskul ba’i gnad skyo shas nges ‘byung gi bskul ba’i mos gus kha tsam tshig tsam ma yin par snying gi dkyil/rus pa’i gting nas ba sked. Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Tayé 2020; ‘Jam mgon kong sprul blo gros mtha’ yas 2014. 48. See Jacoby 2014, chapter 5, for discussion of related themes, particularly in the context of affects of love, love-in-separation, and longing in both the guru-devotional, affectionate, and erotic ranges of the terms. 49. Zhes mig nas mchi ma thon pa’i mos gus kyis gsol ba gdab par bya’o. Jigme Lingpa, colophon to “A Prayer of Devotion to Make the Tears Fall,” ( Jigme Lingpa 2013. “Devotion” and “faith” are two common English translations for the Tibetan term mos gus; I use “devotion” here for mos gus, and I use “faith” to translate dad pa. On Jigme Lingpa’s life and visionary work, see Gyatso 1998.

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50. Tsongkhapa 1999. 51. Published in Ribush 2005, trans. Lama Zopa Rinpoche: 202. 52. Tsongkhapa 1999. 53. Pitkin 2019; Stearns 2000:51.

Chapter Six 1. Tibetan formal language for addressing religious teachers and high-status individuals in general includes special terms for death and dying. The deaths of religious figures in particular are often framed through the language of enlightenment, or the vocabulary of “skillful display” (since advanced religious practitioners should have control over their death and “manifest” it as a teaching device for others). As the writer and filmmaker Pema Tseden has explored in the short story “Orgyan’s Tooth” (Tseden 2018), the use of ordinary words for the death of religious figures can register as rude; shifts in the vocabulary used to describe a death can reveal layers of psychological or social meaning. I address some of these conventions in this chapter. I begin this section using a formal English euphemism for death, “passing away,” and then incorporate the blunt term “death,” in part to highlight elements of the stories that follow. 2. Linda LaMacchia recorded interviews with these two nuns, Bogti and Tenzin Dolma, in 1996 and 1995 respectively, and published the full interviews in LaMacchia 2008. Tenzin Dolma told her story in Tibetan; a Bhutanese nun translated into English. Bogti told her story in Kinnauri; her niece translated into Hindi, and LaMacchia translated it into English. LaMacchia transcribed and edited the English translations of both interviews for grammar and to form a single narrative, omitting the interviewer questions. Except where noted, I cite the 2008 publication of these interviews; I also refer to LaMacchia’s 2012 article on these narratives. I have edited the transliterations when quoting here for consistency. 3. Rinchen 1999:54–55. 4. See for instance Ricard 2017; see also Schapiro 2012. Gyatso 1998 describes how the eighteenth-century Dzogchen visionary Jigme Lingpa explores the tension implied by such terms of potential pride in one’s own renunciation. 5. “Da lta dben pa brten tsa na / khyi rgan gad ‘og ‘chi ba bzhin / sdod sa bzang ba’i nyams zhig shar / ro skung byed pa de ltar lags,” in The Collected Works of dpal sprul ‘jigs med chos kyi dbang po. (Chengdu: Si khron mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2003), 8:281; For the English translation, see Jinpa and Elsner 2000, 178. Ricard’s translation also highlights these themes: “Now, on retreat in the wilderness / Like an old dog who’s just found the right ditch to die in, / I feel settled and content. / That is playing the part of a corpse.” Ricard 2017:19. See also Schmidt and Schmidt 2005; Kretschmar 2003. 6. On the nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan religious and intellectual developments in which all three figures were important participants, see Duckworth 2011, 2014, 2019; Smith 2001. Thondup 1996:212, for instance, recounts the story of Do Khyentse killing a sheep (a shocking act in keeping with his non-monastic yogic persona) and inviting Patrul (famously a vegetarian) and the Second Dodrubchen to eat it with him. Also see Ricard 2017. 7. Thondup 1996:211–14. Tulku Thondup bases his account of the life and death of the Second Dodrubchen on rdo grub chen rin po che sku ‘phreng rim byon gyi rnam par thar pa ‘dod ‘jo nor bu’i phreng ba, by Sonam Nyima (MS); and ‘jigs med ‘phrin las

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od zer gyi rtogs bjod dpag bsam ljon pa’i me tog, 6a–10b, as well as oral accounts. See Thondup 2002:374, n. 254. Although this particular account is drawn from narrative histories surrounding the Longchen Nyingtik Dzogchen lineage, its themes resonate across a spectrum of Tibetan religious literature. 8. Thondup 1996:214. 9. Thondup 1996: 214. 10. Nyoshul Khenpo 2005:323, Richard Barron trans. 11. Bstan ‘dzin lung rtogs nyi ma 2004:573. 12. Thondup 1996:214. 13. In the oral history that LaMacchia recorded, Bogti says that this nun, who joined Khunu Lama’s circle somewhat later and whom Bogti took as her travel companion, was named Tenzin Zangmo; Tenzin Dolma refers to this nun as Tenzin Lhamo (LaMacchia 2008:293–98). Angrup gives her name as Tenzin Zangmo (2005:46). Angrup names the nun from Asrang in Kinnaur who was present as part of Khunu Lama’s retinue as Tenzin Chodron; this is Bogti’s religious name (Angrup 2005:46; LaMacchia 2012:5). As LaMacchia points out, it is notable that Angrup actually lists the Kinnauri nun disciples present at Khunu Lama’s death by name. This makes Angrup’s namtar one of the few texts LaMacchia has identified that records names of Kinnauri nuns (LaMacchia 2008:50). 14. For example, the Kinnauri nun disciple Bogti recalled that although Khunu Lama initially agreed to go to Bhutan that summer, he ultimately “canceled” that trip (LaMacchia 2008:297). 15. Mewa Khenpo Tubten’s retreat center is now a large community, Pangan Gonpa/Ritro Samten Choekorling (spang sgang ri khrod bsam gtan chos ‘khor ling). Ani Damcho Zangmo lived at the Pangan center when LaMacchia interviewed her in 1995 and when I met her in 2004. Pangan is also anglicized as Panggan or Pangaon. 16. LaMacchia 2008:294, 298. 17. Sey Rinpoche Namgyal Gelek interview, 2013. Apho Yeshe Rangdrol (A pho ye shes rang grol, 1922–1974) founded a small religious community outside Manali but died before construction was complete. His wife Sangyum Orgyen Chodon (Gsang yum o rgyan chos sgron, 1931–1985) subsequently oversaw further temple construction; his son Sey Rinpoche (Sras rin po che bde legs rnam rgyal, b. 1963) completed construction in 1994. There are now temples and practice communities connected to Apho Rinpoche’s lineage at multiple locations in the region, including in Pangi, KulluManali, Lahaul, and Ladakh. Sey Rinpoche’s sister Khandro Thrinlay Chodon (Mkha’ ‘gro ‘phrin las chos sgron) also teaches and leads retreat communities in the region, with a focus on female practitioners. 18. LaMacchia 2008:294. 19. LaMacchia 2008:299. 20. Stutchbury (1991; 1994) discusses the category of “dgon pa” in the Lahauli context, with specific reference to Kardang. I use the terms gonpa and monastery in what follows. Monastery conveys many of the main institutional and ritual reference points in English. 21. Chris Fynn interview, 2006; Stutchbury 1991, 1994; Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2013, 2014. 22. The Jewel Ornament of Liberation (Dam chos yid bzhin gyi nor bu thar pa rin po che’i rgyan) by Gampopa is one of the most influential texts for the Kagyu traditions.

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Gampopa, also known as Dakpo Lhaje Sonam Rinchen (Gam po pa Dwags po lha rje bsod nams rin chen, 1079–1153) is remembered as the main disciple and lineage heir of Milarepa. The Jewel Ornament is his magnum opus and best-known work. 23. Angrup mentions that Khunu Lama taught Mahāmudrā at Kardang from the Phyag chen zin bris (“Notes on Mahāmudrā”) by Pema Karpo (pad+ma dkar po, 1527–1592). 24. Angrup 2005:44. Khunu Lama likely taught the Dohākoṣa of Saraha, although there are multiple Mahāsiddha texts with the same name. 25. LaMacchia 2008:299. Angrup says that Gemur Samten Choling was the “old Drukpa Kagyu monastery” of “Upper Garzha” (2005:44). 26. LaMacchia 2008:299. 27. Angrup 2005:45. 28. Angrup 2005:45. 29. When Bogti recalled these events with LaMacchia, she remembered that the people from Shashur even carried all the nuns’ luggage, making the move very easy; see LaMacchia 2008:299. 30. Angrup 2005:47. 31. These latter signs are not necessarily manifest in the case of very elderly masters. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point. 32. See Martin 1997; see also Willis 1985; Thondup 1996; Lung rtog bstan pa’i nyima bstan ‘dzin kun bzang. 2004; Nyoshul Khenpo 2005. For a general treatment of the theme of Buddhist relics, see Germano and Trainor 2004; Strong 2004. 33. See Coleman 2017. 34. Angrup 2005:47. 35. Angrup 2005:42. 36. Angrup 2005:44. 37. Angrup 2005:49. Tenzin Norbu Nangsal suggested that Angrup’s wording here implies that Khunu Lama himself ended his tukdam at this point, rather than having it interrupted by the disciples’ moving him. In his reading, this implies both that Khunu Lama had great mastery over the post-death meditative state, and also that he displayed compassion in protecting the Garzha disciples from the emotional burden of interrupting their teacher’s tukdam. (Tenzin Norbu Nangsal, oral communication, July 2020). 38. See note 37. 39. Strong 2004; Schaeffer 2007; Cuevas and Stone 2007; Germano and Trainor 2004. 40. Angrup 2005:50. Unrecorded by Angrup or the Kinnauri nun witnesses I turn to next are the feelings and concerns of the Kinnauri disciples who had hoped to swiftly bring Khunu Lama’s remains back to his home valley. Sources available to me do not offer direct access to the experiences of people in Kinnaur on receiving the news of Khunu Lama’s death. This leaves a gap in the narrative that follows. Conversations with Kinnauri disciples and community members from a variety of locations shape what I say below about the dynamics of mourning, devotion, and lineage continuity, in which the multiple communities of Khunu Lama’s disciples participate. 41. Angrup 2005:xv–xvi and 54–55. Humilific statements of authorial unworthiness and praise of one’s subject are common in colophons to namtar and related literature, but in his conclusion to the 2005 edition (pp. 54–55), Angrup not only describes himself as unworthy and Khunu Lama as a bodhisattva, he also details his own research

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and fact-checking in a way that suggests he envisions multiple kinds of audiences who will evaluate his work according to a range of devotional and scholarly criteria. 42. Angrup 2005:xv–xvi, in which he discusses Khunu Lama as a bodhisattva. 43. Schaeffer 2007 and 2004; Quintman 2014. 44. See for instance LaMacchia 2012, 2016; Makley 2005, 2007; Gyatso and Havnevik 2005; Gutschow 2005; Diemberger 2005; Jacoby 2014. 45. LaMacchia 2008:300. 46. LaMacchia 2008:300. 47. LaMacchia 2008:301. Ven. Tenzin Palmo also recalled hearing about the large quantity of blood, from someone present at the time. Ven. Tenzin Palmo interview, 2015. 48. LaMacchia 2008:301. Both Bogti and Tenzin Dolma describe Khunu Lama as remaining in an extensive period of tukdam after this, so I take Bogti to be referring here to the futility of medical aid, rather than making any statement about Khunu Lama’s consciousness from a tukdam perspective. 49. LaMacchia 2008:293. 50. LaMacchia 2008:302. Seven days would constitute an impressively lengthy tukdam period but one not at all unheard of in similar accounts; seven days is also a meaningful number: post-death rituals are grouped in seven-day intervals. Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche gives far less detail about Khunu Lama’s passing away or about the events involving the helicopter, and only briefly describes the cremation and the enshrining of the relics, but writes in a tone of devoted faith. Notably, he compares Khunu Lama’s seated posture just after death to the post-mortem posture of Jigme Lingpa, the venerated revealer of the Longchen Nyingtik treasure cycle of Dzogchen teachings. (Lamchen Gyalpo 2011:19; Gyatso 1998.) 51. LaMacchia 2008:302. 52. LaMacchia 2008:293. 53. See Makley 2005, 2007; Gutschow 2005; Jacoby 2014. 54. LaMacchia 2008:302. 55. LaMacchia 2008:303. Angrup may be referring to them when he says “some enthusiastic-minded disciples” had been praying. 56. LaMacchia 2008:295. 57. Bogti recalled the amount needed to pay for the helicopter as 10,000 rupees (LaMacchia 2008:302). 58. Jacoby 2014 highlights similar vulnerabilities affecting the early twentiethcentury religious visionary Sera Khandro when she leaves home to follow her lama. 59. LaMacchia 2008:295. 60. LaMacchia 2008:296. 61. Angrup 2005:52. 62. That is, when the body was adorned with the tantric ritual crown and colored scarves for the funeral ritual, it represented the saṃbhogakāya (Tib. longs sku), or Enjoyment Body, one of the three bodies of a Buddha. 63. Angrup 2005:51. 64. Angrup 2005:53–54. Angrup describes the building of the stupa as a collaborative effort, in which monks, nuns, sponsors, and villagers from the different monasteries and communities where Khunu Lama had taught each built different sections of the stupa. 65. Thanks to Tenzin Norbu Nangsal for this point. Oral communication, July 2020.

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66. LaMacchia 2008:296–97. 67. LaMacchia 2008:306. Baling Lama also states that half of Khunu Lama’s body did not burn during cremation (Halford 2015). 68. LaMacchia 2008:307. 69. LaMacchia 2012:11. 70. LaMacchia 2008, 2012, 2016. 71. Hilton 1999.

Epilogue 1. I thank Gyetrul Jigme Rinpoche for highlighting this point; personal communication, 2012. 2. On the mediation of religious memory, community and devotion, see, for instance, Hoover 2006; Rozehnal 2019. 3. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov 2019.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. absence: and continuity, 111, 190; and departure, 74, 92, 146; and devotion, 3, 137, 155, 195; and hiddenness, 137; imaginaries of, 3; and lineage, 195; and lineage continuity, 111; and lineages, 195; and longing, 3, 54–55, 155–56, 195; and loss, 10, 196; and memory, 190; as metonymy for gaps and losses of the twentieth century itself, 196; and presence, 9, 13, 50, 160–61; renunciatory, xv, 11, 13, 47, 54–55, 92, 111, 112, 155, 157, 159–60, 162–63; and searching, 54–55; and self-concealment, 112, 162–63, 196; and separation, 3, 47, 55, 137, 151, 157, 195; teacherly, 137; temporary, 154 Abu Lhagang. See Pema Tekchok Loden, Khenchen Akṣobhya, Buddha (mi bskyod pa), 188, 199 Ambedkar, B. R., xxvi, 14 Amdo, xxiv, 61, 116–17, 199, 210n26, 231n101, 232n9 Amgon Rinpoche. See Drubwang Amgon Rinpoche Ānanda (kun dga’ bo), 1–3, 8, 24, 111, 154, 199 Angrup, K. (Tib. Ngodrup Gashawa), v, xii–xiii, xxvi, 16, 19–26, 34–36, 41,

159, 199, 201, 203, 207nn1–2, 211n1, 214nn36–37, 216–17nn63–65, 217n69, 220n20, 226n27, 240n23, 240n25, 240n37, 241n55, 241n64; on Khunu Lama’s beggar’s life, 75, 79–84, 89, 94, 97–99, 102, 109; on Khunu Lama’s cremation, 187; on Khunu Lama’s death, 162, 164, 169–92; on Khunu Lama’s home-leaving, 48–51, 55–60, 62–64, 67–68, 71–74, 81; on Khunu Lama’s posthumous identity and lineage, 178; on lineage continuity, 113–15; memorial article by, 21, 57–58; namtar, 20–23, 25–26, 34–35, 55–60, 62–64, 67–68, 79–84, 89, 94, 97–99, 102, 109, 113–14, 123, 134, 145–48, 183, 191–92, 221nn29–30, 225n6, 239n13, 240n41; namtar-solteb, 140, 180, 235n8; namtar-supplication prayer, 20, 223n57; verse as memorial, 68 Ani Damcho Zangmo. See Damcho Zangmo, Ani Ani Tenzin Dolma. See Tenzin Dolma, Ani anonymity, 51, 97 antinomian behavior, as part of tantric practice, 225n4

268

Apho Rinpoche Yeshe Rangdrol (Apho Rinpoche), 94, 170–71, 199, 239n17 Arunachal Pradesh, 118 asceticism, 25, 50, 68, 85–87, 93, 96, 99, 210n25 Ashoka Hotel, 91 Ashoka pillar, 91–92 Assam, 118 astrology, xxv, 41, 140, 217n68, 229n73 Aśvaghoṣa, 222n45 Atīśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna, 64–66, 131, 157–58, 199, 218n1, 223n65 authenticity, 4–7, 46, 77–78, 142–44, 157, 174, 186, 190–91 autobiography, 14, 22, 222n38, 222n48; and biography, 8, 138, 209n14; and home-leaving, 59–62 backwardness (rjes lus), 17, 211n36, 214n40 Bakula Rinpoche, xxvi, 51–52, 92, 127, 199, 203 Baling Lama Kushok Thupstan Tsewang, xxvii, 84–85, 137, 151–52, 199, 224n69, 226n32, 227n46, 230n87, 235n12, 237n35, 242n67 Bangladesh, 9 Baul traditions, 210n29 Bayer, Achim, 211n1, 212n7 beggar-hermit. See chatralwa (bya bral ba, renunciant) beggar modern, 15–19 beggar/monk, 15, 17, 18, 224n68 beggars (bhikshuk, sprang po), 15–19, 145, 165; and Dharma practice, v, 23, 48, 55–68, 75–111; and home-leaving, 70– 73; and poverty, 71, 73 Beijing, xxiii, xxvi, 37, 115–16 Benares. See Varanasi Berger, Patricia Ann, 210–11n35 Berger, Peter, 211n41 Berzin, Alexander, 85 Bhutan, 32, 42, 86, 118, 170, 199, 239n14 Bihar, 85–86 biography, xiii, 14–15, 20–22, 35–36, 45, 50, 54, 85, 115, 124, 148, 152, 179; and autobiography, 8, 138, 209n14; and history, 180; and memoir, 225n6;

‹ index renunciatory, 79–80, 94. See also namtar (biographical genre) bod (central Tibet/Tibet), 227n56 Bod Rinpoche (Tibet Rinpoche). See Khangsarwa Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche Bodh Gaya, xxvii, 57, 75, 76–77, 85–86, 91, 96, 102, 109, 122, 126, 131, 149–50, 152, 197, 208n3, 221n31, 224n69 Bodhicaryāvatāra (Śāntideva). See Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (Śāntideva) bodhicitta, xvi, xxvi, 22, 210nn25–26, 212n14; and compassion, 12–13, 52–53, 114, 134; and Dalai Lama, 223n58, 225n5; and devotion, 135–36, 149–50, 153–54; embodiment of, 110; and enlightenment, 28–29, 81; and home-leaving, 64–66; joy and bliss of, 134; key text on, 110; and lineage, 18, 35, 114–15, 119–20; literary compositions on, 13; and Mahāyāna, 12, 15, 28–29, 81, 115; and meditation, 66, 210n25; and mind-training, 64–65, 131–32; practice, 109, 130–34; and renunciation, 64–65, 110, 131–32; and self-concealment, 80–81; teachings, 149–50, 153–54; virtue of, 52–53 bodhisattva, 240n41; and beggar’s life, 77; compassion of, 52–55, 109, 114, 236n20; compassionate, 52–55, 109, 236n20; and enlightenment, 28–29; ideal of, 8–9, 12–13, 21, 28–29, 35, 52– 53, 66, 80, 110, 135–36; and lineage, 130–31; and mind training/meditation, 64–65; practice, 71; and renunciation, 21, 64–66, 86; role as teacher and guru, 148; and self-concealment, 75, 109 Bogin, Ben, xvi, 221n25 Bogti, xxviii, 16, 20, 169–72, 181–92, 199, 238n2, 239nn13–14, 240n29, 241n48, 241n57 Bombay (Mumbai), 96 Bon, 199; family lineages, 31; temple, 215n51; tradition (Tibetan), 38, 215n51, 233n25, 234n41 Book of Kadam, The (Thubten Jinpa), 223n65

index

Bopa Tulku Dongak Tenpe Nyima, 199, 233n36 Brahmins, Indian, 99–100 Braun, Erik, 221n31 Brentano, Robyn, 234n54 bshad grwa commentarial schools. See commentarial schools Buddha Śākyamuni. See Śākyamuni Buddha Buddhism: as antidote to sectarianism, 103; and Bon, 234n41; in China, 116, 232n10; and civilizational-literary repertoire, 3; and clan/community, 30; critics of, 29; and decentering of self, 17; and enlightenment, 12, 29, 85–86, 93; and entrustment, 69; esoteric relationships in Southeast Asian settings, 208n9; facets of as inspiration, xvi; as field of knowledge, 229n73; as foreign religion, 7; Himalayan, 3, 8–14, 17, 19, 23–24, 27, 31–36, 42, 48, 53, 55, 62–65, 71–72, 75–76, 80, 93, 110, 155, 158, 163–64, 173, 184, 191, 194–96, 219n5, 221n31; history of, 6–7; Indian, 28–29, 38–39, 42, 80, 100, 103, 121, 212n7, 212n10, 220n18; Indic, 39, 134, 218n77; and knowledge, 2, 30, 52, 106–7, 114; liberated practitioners of, 65; and liberation, 47; and lineages, 7, 9, 13, 27–29, 33, 39, 41, 87, 98–99, 106, 114, 173, 194–95, 212n8, 221n24; local forms of, 232n10; mastery, 97–103, 107; modern, 116, 220n21, 221n31, 230n92; and monastic community, 6; monastic purity of, 30; and moral subjectivity, 17; not a solo project, 5; philosophy, xxiv, 11, 41, 49, 67, 106, 110, 128, 173, 222n49; power relations and abuse, confronting, 218n77; renaissance of nineteenth century, 37–38; and renunciation, 11, 18, 23, 29–30, 55–56, 61–62, 65, 115, 213n16, 218n77, 222n46; and ritual, 3, 5, 116; as shared religion, 116; and social life, 30; song and toast traditions, 235n4; in Southeast Asia (Burma), 5, 221n31; and Stages of the Path genre, 157; superiority of, 99– 100; survival and continuity of, 23–24,

› 269 114, 116, 123–24, 196; Tibetan, xxiii, 3–19, 22–47, 48, 53, 55, 62–72, 75–76, 80, 90, 93, 110–11, 116, 121–28, 155, 158, 163–64, 173, 191, 194–96, 211n1, 213n31, 214n39, 215n51, 218n1, 219n5, 232n10, 234n41; Tibetan renaissance in, 37–38; transcontinental spread of across Asia, 7; and transmission, ideal of, 169; as world religion, 116, 232n10 Buddhist narrative genre, xvi, 3, 7, 24, 49, 111, 175, 191, 220n18 Burma (Myanmar), Buddhism in, 221n31 “Calling the Guru from Afar” (bla ma rgyang ‘bod), 156 Canti, John, 37 Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath (CIHTS), 20, 74, 128–29 chain of memory, and lineages, 8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 15–18, 73 Chamdo, xxiv, 41, 115, 199, 207n2 Chan/Zen, 5–7, 235n11 Chatral Rahor Chodrak, Khenchen. See Rahor Palden Chokyi Drakpa chatralwa (bya bral ba, renunciant), 199, 226n37, 227n46; and ascetic lifestyle, 85–89; and beggar’s life/Dharma practice, 11, 15–19, 73, 75–111, 92, 107, 145; and death, 163–64, 186; and devotion, 135–37, 145–48, 151–54; and hiddenness, 110, 145; and home-leaving, 50–51, 63–64, 68, 71–73; and humility, 89; ideal, 11, 23–24, 45, 63, 71–72, 145, 147–48, 195–98, 209n20; and lineage, 38, 119, 124; practice, 151–52, 154; and travels, 151; and virtuosity, 153 Chenga Lodro Gyaltsen, 223n58 Chhosphel, Samten, 42, 204 China, xxiii, xxvi, 14, 19, 37, 115–16; Buddhism in, 5–7, 116, 232n10; cultural and intellectual landscape in, 9–10, 17; and imperial dominance, 36; and India, 121; political sensitivities in, xix; post-imperial, 116. See also People’s Republic of China Choden Zangmo Rinpoche. See Drikung Khandroma Choden Zangmo Rinpoche

270

‹ index

Chogyal Ngagi Wangpo, 61, 199 Chogye Trichen Rinpoche, xiii, xxvii, 21– 22, 89–93, 96–97, 128, 199, 228n64 Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, ii, 57, 91–93, 96–97, 101, 103, 107–11, 126, 197, 199, 203, 217n71, 219n7, 227n46 Chopel, Gendun, xiii–xiv, xvi, xxv, 14, 100, 105, 201, 207n3, 207n1, 229n75 chronology, xiii–xiv, xxiii–xxviii, 21–24, 207–8nn1–3 CIHTS. See Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath (CIHTS) Clarke, Shayne, 219n3 Collins, Steven, 3–4, 208n2, 220n21, 222n46 commentarial literature, 70–71, 82 commentarial schools, 39, 106, 119, 153, 204, 215nn53–54, 231n101 Commentary on Tibetan Grammar (Kalep), xxiv, 228n58 commitments: ethical, 190; and lineage transmissions, 6; religious, 77; and renunciation, 49; ritual, 45; and vows, 6, 53, 157 community: and clan, 30; and connection, 163; and devotion, 242n2; and intimacy, 23; and lineage transmissions, 123; religious, 34, 44, 60, 83–84, 98, 153, 218n77, 225n21, 239n17; and renunciation, 12, 49; and ritual, 30, 124; and students, 153 compassion: and bodhicitta, 12–13, 52–53, 114, 134; of bodhisattva, 52–55, 109, 114, 236n20; in classroom, xvi; and engagement, 12; and generosity, 13; and Mahāyāna, 195–96; and renunciation, 66, 96; and separation, 52–55; for suffering, 66; and teaching relationships, 195–96 connection: and Buddhism, 27, 30; and community, 163; and continuity, 15; and disruption, 78; and inseparability, 47; and lineage transmissions, 43–44; and longing, 24; and memory, 10, 19; and narrative(s), 19; and relationships, 125; and separation, 9–10, 14–15, 24, 27, 47, 194; and travels, xv continuity: and absence, 111, 190; of

Buddhism, 124; and change, 194; and connection, 15; and dislocation, 23– 24, 112–34; and disruption, 232n5; and faith, 169; and faith, after death, 169; and impermanence, 161; and indivisible closeness, 10; Khunu Lama’s, 15, 18; and lineage connections, 24; and lineage transmissions, 161; and memory, 4; and separation, 15; and survival, 18, 123–24; and teacherstudent lineages, 24; and vitality, 196. See also lineage continuity covert yogin, 219n7. See also hidden yogin “crazy lama,” 209n20 Dag yig ngag sgron (Pelkhang Lotsawa), 41, 217n69 Dakmema (bdag med ma), 54, 200 Dakpo Lhaje Sonam Rinchen. See Gampopa Sonam Rinchen Dalai Lama, 66–67, 191, 200, 224n69, 228n64, 234n41, 234n50; and bodhicitta, 223n58, 225n5; Ganden Podrang government of, xxiv, 37; Geluk/ Gelukpa tradition of, 37, 141, 157; Gelukpa lineage of, 212n8, 216n63 Dalai Lama, Third (III), Sonam Gyatso, 131 Dalai Lama, Fifth (V), Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, 225n6, 229n76 Dalai Lama, Sixth (VI), Tsangyang Gyatso, 125, 204, 231n2 Dalai Lama, Eleventh (XI), Khedrup Gyatso, 125 Dalai Lama, Thirteenth (XIII), Tubten Gyatso, xxiii, 36–37, 124, 125, 205, 214n39 Dalai Lama, Fourteenth (XIV, current), Tenzin Gyatso, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, 8–9, 14, 23–24, 36, 51, 66–67, 74, 75–80, 85, 89, 96–99, 104–34, 145– 46, 160, 201, 224n2, 229n83, 230n84, 230n99, 231n2, 234n46, 247; leaves Tibet for India, 23, 115–24 Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, MIT, xxviii, 214n37 Damcho Zangmo, Ani, xxvi, xxvii, 120– 22, 131, 141, 150, 199, 200, 239n15

index

Daṇḍin, 100, 200, 229n82 Darjeeling, 86, 92, 101, 200, 207n3, 228n63 Dartsedo (Ch. Kangding), 162, 166, 176, 200, 204 Dasang Damdul Tsarong (general), 41, 200, 224n3 David-Neel, Alexandra, 229n75 Davidson, Ronald, 212n10 death: awareness of, 55; and birth, 175; and devotion, 193; and disposition of body, 70; and disruption, 24, 162–93, 194; and enlightenment, 238n1; and faith, 164, 168–69, 179–80, 188, 190, 193, 241n50; and grief, 181; and illness, 182; and impermanence, 55–56, 174, 177, 186; and lineage continuity, 193; and loss, 3, 190–93; and manifest, 238n1; and memory, 190–93; and old age, 175; as paradigmatic moment of separation, 162; of religious figures, 238n1; and renunciation, 55, 71–72, 166; and separation, 24, 55, 162, 193; and suffering, 29; Tibetan language/ terms for, 238n1; and wilderness, 71, 224n66, 238n5. See also mortality; rebirths; reincarnations decolonization, 17, 210n35 departure: and absence, 74, 92, 146; and loss, 195; and marriage, from parental home, 221n24; and renunciation, 11, 92, 213n16, 221n24; and sadness, 220n24; and separation, 60, 145, 149; and travels, 13, 135; and withdrawal, 195 Dergé (region of Kham), xxiv, 37, 41, 73, 82–83, 99, 119, 200, 215n51, 217n69, 224n70 Dergé County (present day), 211n1, 215n51 Dev Narayan Tripath, Pandit, xxv devotion: and absence, 3, 137, 155, 195; and community, 242n2; and death, 193; and faith, 155, 237n49, 241n50; and indivisibility, 24, 47, 159–60; and lineage, 193, 195; and lineage connections, 198; and longing, 3, 24, 62, 136– 37, 155, 160, 193, 195, 219n4, 237n48; and memory, 24; and religion, 17, 169, 242n2; and renunciation, 9, 18, 24, 27,

› 271 47, 62, 77–78, 90–91, 135–61, 152, 162; and ritual, 234n43; and sadness, 62, 156; and separation, 3, 10, 137, 155, 193; and social courage, 77; somatic, 24, 156–57. See also guru devotion Dezhung Kunga Tenpai Nyima (Dezhung Rinpoche), xiii, xxv, 21, 95, 200, 216n61, 224n70, 228n58 Dharamsala, 87–88, 121, 128–29 Dharma practice, 34, 219n1; and beggar’s life, v, 23, 48, 55–68, 75–111; and guru devotion, 153–54; and home-leaving, 22–23, 70; teachings, 114. See also renunciation Diemberger, Hildegard, 213n21 Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, 62, 200, 217n71, 222n48 disciples: devoted, 19; Kinnauri, xxviii, 20, 78, 129, 148, 188, 229n74, 236n25; Lahauli, 170, 178; and lineage, 159, 192, 240n22; and lineage heirs, 159; and lineages, 159, 192, 240n22; nuns as, 237n32. See also guru-disciple relationship; teacher-disciple relationship disenchantment: and renunciation, 135, 156; and samsara, 158–59 disillusionment, and sadness, 56, 156 dislocation: and continuity, 23–24, 112– 34; lineage memory, 97 disorientation, and unfamiliarity, 113 displacement: and crisis, 123; and mobility, 18; and travels, 18; and violence, 163 disruption: and conflict, 177; and connection, 78; and continuity, 232n5; and crisis, 112–13; and death, 24, 162–93, 194; and narrative(s), 195; and separation, 53, 194 DiValerio, David, 209n20, 219n5, 219n7 Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje, 143, 165–69, 200, 238n6 Doboom Tulku Rinpoche, 66–67, 97, 99, 104, 200 Dodin, Thierry, xiii, 21, 129, 208n3, 217n69 Dodrubchen Jigme Phuntsok Jungne (Dodrubchen Rinpoche), 143, 162, 164–69, 174–77, 186, 192, 200, 204, 238nn6–7

272

‹

dogmatism, 65 Dondrup Gyal, 229n82 Dondrup Gyaltsen, 81, 200 Drepung Monastery, 102, 105, 200 Dreyfus, Georges, 215n53, 230n100, 231n101 Drichu River, xxvi, 115–16, 201 Drikung, 200 Drikung Kagyu, xxv, 20, 118, 211n43, 215n47, 232n25, 237n40 Drikung Khandroma, 200; title in Terdrom nuns’ community, 120 Drikung Khandroma Choden Zangmo Rinpoche, 120, 199, 200, 233nn29–30 Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin, xiii, xxv, xxvi, xxvii–xxviii, 13, 21–23, 57, 85–86, 89–94, 115, 118–23, 131, 136– 37, 141, 145, 149–55, 163, 169–71, 182– 84, 200, 203, 204, 226n39, 232n25, 233nn29–30, 235n1, 237nn32–33, 237n40; death of, xxviii Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen, 149–50, 152–54, 200, 202, 237n32 Drikung Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche. See Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche, xxvi, xxvii, 101–2, 118–23, 137, 150–51, 200, 202, 203, 237n32, 237n35 Drikung Til Monastery (Lhasa), xxv, 119, 200 Drikung Valley, xxv, 118–19 Dromtonpa Gyalwé Jungné, 66–67, 105, 200, 223n56, 224n65 Drubwang Amgon Rinpoche, xxv, 119, 199; namtar, 211n43 Drubwang Togden Shakya Shri. See Shakya Shri, Drubwang Togden Drukpa family lineages, 215n45 Drukpa Kagyu (school of Tibetan Buddhism), xxiii, 34, 57, 85, 102, 200, 240n25 Druktrul Rinpoche, 228n64 Dudjom Lingpa, 166, 200 Dunne, John, xiv, 22 Dza Patrul Rinpoche, 38, 87, 143, 164–67, 200, 203, 215n49, 224n67, 236n21, 238n6 Dzogchen, 200, 215n47; and Buddhism,

index

38; as Great Perfection, 38, 107; lineages, 46, 164–65, 168, 239n7; meditation, 40, 46, 119–20, 165; origins, 143; practice, 46, 107, 121, 139–40, 143, 149; teachings, xxviii, 88, 93, 103, 107, 111, 123, 136–37, 140–43, 149, 153–54, 157, 170, 215n49, 231n114, 233n36, 241n50; tradition, 121, 158. See also Mahāmudrā (Great Seal) Dzogchen Monastery (Kham), xxiv, 21, 38, 119, 200, 215n49, 215n51, 231n114 Dzogchen Rinpoche, 168, 201, 204 Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, 62, 201, 222n48 Dzongsar Monastery (Kham), 38, 201, 215n51 ecumenicism, 14, 27, 37–39, 41–43, 80, 101, 103, 134, 196, 214n44, 215n45, 230n92. See also non-sectarianism engagement: and Buddhism, 11–12, 34, 158; and compassion, 12; and family connections, 34–35; and renunciation, 12–13, 53 enlightenment: and bodhicitta, 28–29, 81; and bodhisattva, 28–29; and Buddhism, 12, 29, 85–86, 93; and death, 238n1; and home-leaving, 56 entrustment, 69 faith: and awe, 168; and beggar’s life/ Dharma practice, 109; communal, 180; and continuity, 169; and death, 164, 168–69, 179–80, 188, 190, 193, 241n50; and devotion, 155, 237n49, 241n50; and loss, 193; of students, 194–95; in teachers, 26 family lineage, 22–23, 53, 63, 94, 171, 202, 213n33, 215n45, 221n24; and lineage transmission, 27–36, 31–36, 102; and lineage transmissions, 27–28, 31–36, 102 Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna Tradition (FPMT), 89–90, 130, 223n62 Four Aims. See Kadampa(s), Four Aims FPMT. See Foundation for the Preser-

index

vation of the Mahāyāna Tradition (FPMT) Fynn, Chris, 75, 88, 92–94, 99–100, 103, 142, 144–45, 170–71, 226n39, 229n75, 229n81, 230n92, 235n12 Gampopa Sonam Rinchen, xxviii, 66, 93– 94, 172–73, 181, 200, 201, 239n22 Ganden Phelgye Ling Monastery, 102, 105, 125–26, 201 Ganden Podrang, xxiv, 37, 115, 120, 201, 232n9 Ganden Tripa, 125, 201, 214n39 Gandhi, Mahatma, xxv, 96, 208n3 Gangagire, Reverend, 83–84, 99 Ganges River, 85, 90, 94, 97, 99 Gangtok (Sikkim), xxvii, 73, 86, 201 Garzha (Lahaul), 171–72, 176–78, 185, 201, 240n37; Upper, 172, 240n25 Geluk/Gelukpa, 201; Buddhist schools, 27, 125; lineage, 65, 102, 125, 212n8, 216n63; meditation, 91; monasteries, xxiv, 41, 82, 102, 104, 216n63; monastic universities, 40–41, 105–6; philosophy, 101; present day schools, 215n54; scholars, xxiv, 74, 215n54; scholasticism, 230n100; teachings, 102, 223n62; temple, 85; tradition, 37, 91, 128, 157–58; tradition of Dalai Lamas, 37, 157 Gemur Samten Choling, 172, 201, 240n25 Gen Lobsang Jamspal, xvi, 19, 201, 229n75 Gendun Chopel, xiii–xiv, xvi, xxv, 14, 100, 105, 201, 207n1, 207n3, 229n75 genealogy, 28, 212n9 Gesar epic, 213n33 Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe, 74, 201 Getse Trulku Kunga Lodoy, 228n58 Gloss Commentaries on the Thirteen Great Texts (Zhenga), 26, 38–43, 46, 95, 110, 129–31, 212n7 Golok, 119, 201 grammar, xxiv, xxv, 23, 28, 41, 98–99, 104, 106–7, 126, 140, 148, 228n58, 229n73, 238n2 Gray, David, 212n10 Great Prayer Festival (Monlam Chenmo), 117

› 273 grief: and fear, 61; and loss, 10; and separation, 10 Guge Yongdzin Lobsang Tenzin, 216n64 Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (Śāntideva), xiv, xxv, 38, 53, 69, 85, 108–10, 130–32, 147, 165, 207n3, 212n7, 215n49, 226n29, 230n84, 231n114 Guiou, Michael, 218n77 guru devotion, 24, 45–47, 53–54, 62, 135– 61, 162, 169, 192, 195, 218n77, 220n14, 237n48; and impermanence, 155; and lineage connections, 136; and lineage continuity, 24. See also guru-disciple relationship Guru Rinpoche (“the Precious Guru”), 121, 201. See also Padmasambhava Gurucharan Singh Negi, Ven., 236n24 guru-disciple relationship, 2, 5, 9, 24, 27, 29, 36, 44–47, 53, 155, 157, 160–61, 163–64, 170, 176–77, 193, 194, 218n77; and lineage transmissions, 160; and ritual, 157. See also disciples; guru devotion; teacher-disciple relationship Gyagar Lama. See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Gyalyum Kunzang Dechen Tsomo Namgyal, 86, 201 Gyatso, Janet, xiv, 4, 8, 138, 209n14, 209nn17–18, 210–11n35, 212n12, 222n54, 234n41, 237n49, 238n4 Gyawo hermitage, xxiv, 25, 201, 211n1 Gyetrul Jigme Rinpoche, 236n16, 242n1 Gyumed Khenpo Tuthob Rinpoche, 223n56, 224n69, 227n58 Hackett, Paul, 207n3, 221n31 hagiographies, 225n6, 233n25 Handsome Nanda, 222n45 hardship: and poverty, 53, 60, 75–111; and renunciation, 133–34; and solitude, 72; of students, 152–53 Heidegger, Martin, 15 Helm, Ann, 223n55 hermit yogin, 227n42 hermits. See chatralwa (bya bral ba, renunciant) Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, on chain of memory, 8, 208n6

274

‹

hidden yogin, 51, 96–97, 103–10, 135–37, 219n7 hiddenness: and absence, 137; and gaps, 195; and meditation, 92; and modesty, 145; and renunciation, 78–80, 104, 108–11, 135–37, 145, 149, 219n11; and self-concealment, 79–80 Himachal Pradesh, xxviii, 34, 93, 121, 137, 160, 177, 236n25 Himalaya (journal), xv Himalayan region(s), xix, 4–5, 10, 14, 19, 22, 26, 30–34, 73, 78, 98, 109, 136, 143–48, 156, 164, 170, 196–97, 209n19, 209n22, 216n60, 216n63, 228n72, 235n4, 236n16 Hinduism, Indic traditions, 218n77 historiography, 6, 10, 64, 123, 234n41 history: and biography, 180; of bshad grwa commentarial schools, 215n53; and memory, 4; and narrative(s), 15; and signifiers, 4; and storytelling, 4 Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Amy, xiv, 32, 213n25 home-leaving: and beggar’s life, 55–67, 73; and enlightenment, 56; and escape, 51–52; narrative intensification of crisis of, 62; and renunciation, 15–16, 18, 22–23, 29, 35, 48–74, 75, 79, 81, 95, 147–48, 159, 185, 220n21; and separation, 52–55. See also separation homelessness, 15–17, 73, 198, 211n41, 219n3; Mosaic, 16 Houshmand, Zara, xxviii How to Practice Dharma: Teachings on the Eight Worldly Dharmas (Zopa Rinpoche), 70 Huang, Ellen, 210–11n35 humility: and chatralwa, 89; and modesty, 138; and renunciation, 72–73 identity: and lineage, 178; and renunciation, 35, 64, 78; and ritual, 32 imaginaries, xvi–xvii, 3–8, 10, 17–18, 24, 48–74, 75, 160–61, 164, 193, 195, 198, 208n2, 218n77 impermanence, 30, 194; and continuity, 161; and death, 55–56, 174, 177, 186; and guru devotion, 155; and loss, 164;

index

painful, 196; and separation, 136; and suffering, 55–56 incarnation lineage, 22, 27, 32, 35–36, 53, 120, 125, 190, 215n51, 216n63. See also reincarnations, lineages incarnations, xxviii, 14, 35, 160, 214n37, 236n25. See also rebirths; reincarnations India, 4, 14, 19; Buddhist study and practice in, 67; and China, 121; connections to, 23, 80, 94, 96; cultural and intellectual landscape in, 9–10; developments in, 232n5; final years in, 112, 149; independence, xxv; lineage relationships in, 78; maps, xxi– xxii; Republic of, xxvi, 120; Tibetan institution-building in, 123; Tibetan refugees in, 118, 120–21; travels/returns to, xxv, xxvi, 13, 22, 23, 26–27, 41, 44, 66, 75–76, 82–83, 85, 93–96, 99, 107, 112, 114–24, 126, 131, 149–50, 152, 207n1, 208n3 indivisibility: and devotion, 24, 47, 159– 60; guru-disciple, 163; and lineage transmissions, 53; and loss, 161, 194; metaphors of, 47; and renunciation, 159; and separation, 194; of teacherstudent relationship, 24, 47, 53 indivisible closeness/connection: and continuity, 10; and devotion, 47; ideal of, 3; and separation, 160–61; of teacher-student relationship, 47 intellectual: conservatism, 230n100; fearlessness, 65; movements, 36–43 International Mahayana Institute (Boudhanath, Nepal), xxvii intertextuality, literary, 48–49, 62, 222n50 intimacy: and community, 23; of family, 23; and lineage, 5, 10, 29; and lineages, 5, 10, 29; and longing, 53, 194; and relationality, 2–3, 29, 131; and separation, 50, 53–54, 61 invisibility, and renunciation, 77, 110 Jabb, Lama, xiv, 17, 202, 235n4 Jackson, David, xiii, 21–22, 90–92, 95, 150, 224n3, 224n70, 228n64, 234n50

index

Jacoby, Sarah, 209n18, 210–11n35, 219n4, 222n38, 222n54, 237n48, 241n58 Jain/Jainism, 99, 210n29 Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Tayé, 110–11, 135, 156, 201, 202, 209n13, 216n61, 224n67 Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro, 226n36 Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, 201, 216n61 Jangchub Nyima, Khunu Lama, xxviii, 35, 148, 160, 201, 202, 214n37, 236n25 Jangchub Rabten Ling nunnery (Himachal Pradesh), 160, 236n25 Japan: Buddhism in, 5–6, 30, 232n10; and imperial dominance, 36 Jayanti celebrations, 126–27 Je Lama Rinpoche. See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Jewel Lamp (Khunu Lama), xxvi, xxvii, 12, 23–24, 41, 81, 109–10, 114–15, 121–22, 129–31, 134, 150, 172, 210n26 Jewel Ornament of Liberation (Dam chos yid bzhin gyi nor bu thar pa rin po che'i rgyan) (Gampopa), xxviii, 93–94, 172– 73, 181, 239n22 Jigme Lingpa, 157, 159, 201, 237n49, 238n4, 241n50 Jigme Phuntsok Jungne. See Dodrubchen Jigme Phuntsok Jungne (Dodrubchen Rinpoche) Jinorasa, S. K., xiv, 207n3, 221n31 Jinpa, Thubten, 106, 126, 205, 223n65 Kachen Sangye Pelzang, xxiv, 201 Kachru, Sonam, xiv, 210–11n35, 224n66 Kadampa(s), 201; and authenticity, 142; and bodhisattva ideal, 66; Four Aims, v, 64–74, 89, 111, 164–65, 167, 186, 218n1, 223nn57–58, 223n65; Four Entrustments, 218–19n1; geshes, 65–66; lamas, 48; lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, 64, 66, 218n1; meditation, 219n1; mind training, 131–32, 223n58; and poverty, 87; practice, 146; role model, 210n25; teachings, 105; temple, 215n51; Ten Jewels, 71, 186, 219n1, 223n65; tradition, 215n51 Kagyu, 201; Buddhist school, 27, 39, 65, 106; lineage, 102; meditation, 57,

› 275 91, 93–94; monastery, xxiv, 216n60; monastic college, 39; philosophy, 101, 106; practice, 210n31; role model, 210n25; teachings, 101–2, 173; tradition, 39, 91, 94, 102, 128, 172, 215n47, 233n25, 239n22 Kālacakra, 76, 85, 140, 201, 224n2 Kalanpur, 34, 201 Kalep Drungyig Pema Dorje, xxiv, 201, 228n58 Kalep Monastery (Tsang), xxiv, 228n58 Kalep’s Commentary on Tibetan Grammar (Kalep), xxiv, 228n58 Kalimpong, xxvii, 86, 92, 201, 208n3 Kamshe monastic college, 38, 201 Kanjur, 187 Kardang Monastery (Lahaul), 171–72, 201, 239n20, 240n23 Karma Gelek Yuthok, Ven., 75, 87–89, 93, 109, 140–44, 201, 210n28, 226n38, 227n42, 229n77, 235n1 Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Ven., xiv, 90, 201, 227n43 Karmapa Kakyab Dorje, 191, 201, 216nn60–61 Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, 91–92, 202, 204 Karmapas, 191 Kasur Sonam Tobgay, 84, 226n25, 227n55, 230n85 Kathmandu, xxvii, 86, 89–90 Katok Monastery (Kham), xxv Katok Situ Chokyi Gyatso Rinpoche, xxiv, 95, 202, 205, 207n1, 211n1, 217n71 kāvyā poetics, 40, 134 Kāvyādarśa (Daṇḍin), 100, 229n82 Kellner, Birgit, 35, 211n41 Kelsang Namgyal, Lama, 118–22, 202 Keylong, xxviii, 94, 171–72, 177–78, 184, 189, 202 Kham, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 21, 25, 27, 32, 36–38, 40–41, 43–44, 73, 87, 95, 99, 116–18, 130, 131, 146, 202, 207nn1–2, 211n1, 215n45, 215n51, 216n61, 217n68, 217n71, 231n101, 231n114, 233n36 Khandro Thrinlay Chodon, 239n17 Khandro Tsering Chodron, 87, 202, 226n36

276

‹

Khangsarwa Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche, xxiv, 40, 82, 199, 202, 203, 216nn60–62 Khen Rinpoche Lobsang Delek. See Lobsang Delek, Khen Rinpoche Khenchen Chatral Rahor Chodrak. See Rahor Palden Chokyi Drakpa Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen. See Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen Khenpo Tubten. See Mewa Khenpo Tubten Ozer Khenpo Zhenga. See Zhenga, Khenpo Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche, xiii, 16, 19–21, 97–98, 202, 211n1 Khon (Buddhist family lineage), 31, 202 Khunu. See Kinnaur (Khunu Lama’s birthplace and home region, Himachal Pradesh) Khunu Lama Jangchub Nyima. See Jangchub Nyima, Khunu Lama Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen, ii, xi, xv, 133, 160, 197, 201–3, 207n1, 236n25; biographical sources, xii–xiv, 19–22; birth of (1895), xxiii; as boundarycrossing, 13; and Buddhism, 97–103, 105, 107–8, 114, 123, 140, 196; chronology, xxiii–xxviii, 22–23, 207–8nn1–3; clairvoyance, 226n37; cross-cultural competence, 98–99; and cultural survival and renewal, 23–24, 114, 123; Dalai Lama, meets, 125–34; death of (1977), xxviii, 9, 24, 55, 94, 150, 162–93; death of, aftermath, xxviii, 9, 148, 150, 164, 169–90, 241n50; death of, cremation, xxviii, 181, 187–88, 192, 242n67; death of, disruption and conflict following, 170, 177–78; death of, Enjoyment Body, 241n62; death of, funeral, xxviii, 24, 164, 170, 175, 181, 187–88, 192; death of, mastery, 187, 240n37; death of, narratives, 162–90, 192–93; death of, relics, xxviii; death of, renunciant, 192–93; death of, stupa, xiii, xxviii, 187–89, 241n64; death of, tukdam (meditative state), xxviii, 175, 177–80, 183–87, 191–92, 240n37, 241n48, 241n50; diaries, 22; as elusive, 13; ethnic Indianness, 43; family, 33–34, 57–59, 81, 84, 146–

index

47, 225n13, 226n27, 236n17; family lineages, 33–36, 102, 215n45; as figure of connection, 23–24, 78, 134, 135, 196; as Great One, 82; as Himalayan border person, 23, 42, 223n62, 228n72, 229n74, 236n16; as Himalayan master, 227n56; as Hindi-Tibetan translator, 229n75; and Hindu, xxvii, 13, 210n29; incarnations, xxviii, 13, 35–36, 109, 160, 214n37, 236n25; as Indian beggar (atsara), 26, 54, 73, 83, 95, 224n70, 227n58; as Indian Lama (Gyagar Lama), xxiv, 26, 43–44, 95, 201, 217n71, 227n56; as Indian lama who could speak Tibetan, 94–97, 128; as Indic outsider, 95–96; kindness of, 147–48; legacy, xiii, 35–36, 78, 80, 110–11, 136, 145–46, 170, 175, 191; as lineage connector, 8–15, 134, 135, 196– 97; lineages, 22, 25–47, 78, 102–3, 111, 178; as literature teacher, 41; material hardship and poverty, 81–94; monastic status, xxiv, 13, 67; name/title, 209n19; ordination status, 221n30; peripatetic life of, 14; posthumous identity and lineage, 178; as professor, honorary, 83; protection chords, 87; rebirths, 35–36; as renunciant wanderer, 8–15; as renunciant wanderer linking past and future, 8–15; and renunciation, 10–11, 14, 16–17, 22–23, 35, 48, 50–51, 54–55, 59–60, 64, 79, 90, 103, 132–34, 135, 148–49, 193, 196; renunciatory biography, 79–80, 94; as rimè figure, 103; role models, 210n25; saintliness of, 96; self-presentations, 13, 43, 77, 94–97, 102–3, 105, 144, 228n72; as simple yogi, 109; studies, 99; teaching at Tso Pema, 137–45; teachings, 13–14, 41, 44, 51, 93–94, 101–7, 112, 114–15, 129, 134, 137–45, 152, 173, 195–96, 217n68, 219n11, 223n62; themes in life of, 1–24, 89–90; travels (map, 1914–1977), xxi; travels (map, eastern Tibetan), xxii; travels (map, western Himalayan), xxii; as unconventional, 13, 50–51, 77–78, 142–43; as valley person, 43–44, 228n58

index

Khunu Rinpoche Tenzin Gyaltsen. See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Kinnaur (Khunu Lama’s birthplace and home region, Himachal Pradesh), xxiii, 13, 19, 23–26, 43, 56–59, 73–74, 93–95, 139, 170–71, 185, 188–89, 192, 202, 209n19, 217n71, 228n72; disciples, xxviii, 20, 78, 129, 148, 188, 229n74, 236n25; Khunu Lama leaves, xxiv, 26, 35, 57, 63, 81, 146–47; Khunu Lama travels/returns to, xxv, 32–35, 74, 136–37, 145–49, 208n3; as religiously diverse, 59 Kinnauri jomos (nuns/female Buddhist renunciants), xiii, 181, 190 Kinnauri language, 78, 229n74 Kinnauri nuns, xxviii, 16, 20, 93–94, 122, 164, 169–73, 181, 183–85, 188, 190, 236n25, 237n32, 239nn13–14; song traditions of, xiii, 148 knowledge: Buddhist, 2, 30, 52, 106–7, 114; and Buddhist lineage continuity, 114; fields of, major and minor, 229n73; and literary study, 106–7; and power, xv, 194; ritual, 187. See also riknè (rig gnas) Kokonor (Amdo), 61, 202 Konchok Gyaltshen, Khenchen. See Drikung Khenchen Konchok Gyaltshen Kongtrul. See Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Tayé Kullu-Manali, xxviii, 33, 81, 239n17 Kun bzang rnam rgyal, 217n69 Kunga, Lama, 19, 202, 207n2 Kushok Bakula Ngawang Lobsang Thubten Choknor Rinpoche. See Bakula Rinpoche Kushok Thupstan Tsewang Balingpa. See Baling Lama Kushok Thupstan Tsewang Kyelang. See Keylong Ladakh, 9, 19, 32–33, 51, 78, 84, 92, 100, 126, 145, 151, 170, 202, 216n63, 219n10, 224n69, 228n63, 229n75, 237n35, 239n17 Lahaul, xiii, xxviii, 20, 33, 94, 145, 169–72, 176–78, 185–89, 192, 202, 216n63,

› 277 226n39, 239n17; Khunu Lama dies in, 150; monastery/monks, 169, 239n20; tradition, 240n20 Lall, S., 21, 57–58, 221n30 lama (bla ma), 124 LaMacchia, Linda, xiii, 16, 20, 181, 184, 190, 192, 217n69, 238n2, 239nn13–15, 240n29 Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche, xiii, 16, 19–21, 33–34, 58–59, 97–98, 112, 129, 149, 200, 202, 207n1, 211n1, 213n30, 217n71, 231n115, 233n27, 234n54, 235n1, 241n50; on holders of key Buddhist lineages, 41; on lineage continuity, 114–15; namtar, 79, 145 Lamdre, 140, 202 lamrim (lam rim, “Stages of the Path”), 131, 157–59, 202 leaving home. See home-leaving Leh. See Ladakh Levinas, Emmanuel, xvi–xvii, 15–17 Lhagyal, Khenpo. See Pema Tekchok Loden, Khenchen Lhasa, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, 25, 36–37, 41, 73, 82, 107, 114–18, 125, 202, 207nn1–2, 217nn68–69, 228n58, 232n9; Geluk monastic universities, 105; invasion, 214n41 Lhasa Mentsikhang (Medical and Astrological Institute), xxv, 21, 217nn68–69 Lho Ontul Rinpoche. See Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche Lhuntse Dzong, 118, 202 Life of Marpa the Translator, 222n49 Life of Milarepa (Tsangnyon), 53–56, 59– 62, 69, 190, 220n21 Life of Shabkar, 62 life-story narratives, xxi, 21, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 67, 72, 74, 78–81, 87, 96–97, 102, 210n26, 220n21, 222nn53–54; as authorizing referents, 8, 10, 23–24, 27, 38, 48, 50, 64, 195, 209n18, 209n22; and chain of memory, 8, 208n6; and lineage, 8, 10; and lineages, 8; and memory, 8, 18, 208n6, 209n17; and recollection, 15; and theory-making, 15; of women’s religious lives, 222n54; youthful precocity and spiritual

278

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life-story narratives (continued) prodigy trope, 221n25. See also namtar (biographical genre); narrative(s); oral histories/narratives; storytelling Lin, Nancy, xiv, 210–11n35, 229n82 lineage connections: and bodhicitta, 18; and continuity, 24; and devotion, 198; and guru devotion, 136; and teacherstudent relationship, 8, 10, 25–27, 99; and teachings, 26–27, 134, 234n41; and transmissions, 26–27, 35, 43–44, 111, 160; and travels, 26–27, 35 lineage continuity, 10, 15, 23–24, 161, 162, 174, 192–93, 194–95; and absence, 111; Buddhist, 114; and chatralwa, 81; and connections, 24; and death, 193; and guru devotion, 24; and memory/ recollection, 195; and teacher-student relationship, 114–15 lineage family. See family lineage lineage networks, 7, 26, 32, 42, 194 lineage relationships, 22, 27, 43, 78, 124, 163; Buddhist, 9, 29; and intimacy, 29; and personal connections, 135 lineage transmissions: and commitments, 6; and community, 123; and connections, 26–27, 35, 43–44, 111, 160; and continuity, 161; documenting, 234n41; and family lineage, 27–33, 31–36, 102; and guru-disciple connection, 160; and guru’s death, 190–93; and guru’s teachings, 174; and indivisibility, 53; and intimacy, 5; and teacher-student relationship, 3–10, 22, 25–27, 30, 32, 43–47, 53, 111, 112–13, 124, 129; in Tibetan Buddhism, 22, 25–47, 124; and travels, 110–11 lineages: and absence, 195; Buddhist, 7; and chain of memory, 8; and cultural locations, 218n77; and disciples, 159, 192, 240n22; and gaps, 195; and gurus, 27; and identity, 178; and intimacy, 5, 10, 29; and life-story narratives, 8; of medical knowledge in Tibet, 212n12; ordination, 208n10, 213n21; and patrimony, 212n12; and power, 28; reincarnations, 31–33, 190–91; and relationships, xi; ritual of, 4, 6–7, 24,

124, 143; spiritual, 43; and teachings, 27, 112, 124, 134, 174, 234n41; women’s, 208n10, 213n21. See also family lineage; incarnation lineage; teacherstudent lineages Ling Rinpoche, xxv, xxvi, 125–27, 202, 204, 234n46 Lippa, 57 Lobsang Delek, Khen Rinpoche, 75, 86, 109, 202, 210n27 Longchen Nyingtik, 157, 233n25, 239n7, 241n50 Longchenpa (Longchen Rabjampa Drimé Ozer), 37, 203 longing: and absence, 3, 54–55, 155–56, 195; and connection, 24; and devotion, 3, 24, 62, 136–37, 155, 160, 193, 195, 219n4, 237n48; imaginaries of, 3, 24; for indivisible intimacy, 53; and intimacy, 53, 194; and lineage, 24, 195; and memory, 24, 155–61; and renunciation, 50, 155–61; and sadness, 61–62, 157, 159; and searching, 14, 54; and separation, 3, 53, 136, 155, 162, 193; and tears, 159 Lopez, Donald, Jr., xiv, xvi, 207n3, 213n19, 230n92, 232n10 loss: and absence, 10, 196; affective dimension of, 111; and change, 18; and death, 3, 190–93; and departure, 195; and disappointment, 24; and faith, 193; and gain, 68; and gaps, 196; and grief, 10; and impermanence, 164; and indivisibility, 161, 194; and interruption, 160; and memory, 190–93; and renunciation, 193; and sadness, 56, 155; and separation, 10–11, 193, 194; and vulnerability, 174 Lotus Lake. See Tso Pema (Rewalsar) Lukshwa, 225n21 Lumbini, xxvii, 90–93, 150 mad yogins (bla ma smyon pa), 44–45, 77, 209n20, 231n2 Madhyamaka, 104, 140, 153–54, 203, 212n7 Maha Bodhi, The (journal), 208n3 Maha Bodhi Society, 208n3, 221n31

index

Mahābhārata, 3 Mahāmudrā (Great Seal), 203; as Great Seal, 91; meditation, 91, 93–94, 148; practice, 107, 140; teachings, 111, 148– 49, 153–54, 170, 172, 240n23; tradition, 158 Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta, 2 Mahāsiddha, 34, 172, 240n24 Mahāyāna: and bodhicitta, 12, 15, 28–29, 81, 110, 115; and bodhisattva, 8–9, 12; communities, 210n25; and compassion, 195–96; ideal of bodhisattva, 8–9, 12, 28–29; and meditation, 108, 110; philosophy, 74, 110, 173, 222n49; practice, 79, 106–7; principles/ themes, 131, 134; tantric view of samsaric events and sufferings, 222n49; teachings, 57, 106–8, 195–96; tradition, 89–90, 130, 223n62 Manali, xxviii, 33, 81, 93–94, 99–100, 122, 170–71, 226n39, 239n17 Mandala Magazine, xxviii, 214n37, 230n89 Manikaran, 170, 226n39 Manshardt, Jürgen, xiii, 21–22, 41–42, 51, 81, 96, 99, 118–20, 150–51, 153–54, 207n1, 208n3, 210n26, 233n30, 237n32 maps, of Khunu Lama’s travels, xxi–xxii Marpa Chokyi Lodro, 44–45, 53–54, 61, 66, 152, 203, 220n16, 222n42, 222n49, 227n42 Marxism, 17 materiality, and renunciation, 81–94, 213n16. See also poverty mathematics, 229n73 Mayadevi temple, 91, 93 McCoy, Michelle, 210–11n35 McGranahan, Carole, xiv, 210n35, 232n24 McMahan, David, 221n31, 230n92 Medical and Astrological Institute. See Lhasa Mentsikhang (Medical and Astrological Institute) meditation, 5; and bodhicitta, 66, 210n25; Dzogchen, 40, 46, 119–20, 165; Geluk/ Gelukpa, 91; and hiddenness, 92; Kadampa, 219n1; Kagyu, 57, 91, 94; and lineages, 14, 165; Mahāmudrā, 91, 93– 94, 148; Mahāyāna, 108, 110; and mind training, 64–65; as non-sectarian, 14;

› 279 Nyingma, 57; and philosophy, 13, 110; and reflection, 146; and renunciation, 12, 72, 90–91, 93; and ritual, 6, 125; Sakya, 91; solitary wilderness, and death, 224n66; and solitude, 72, 108; and wilderness, 224n66 memoir, 123, 225n6 memory, 242n2; and absence, 190; chain of, 8, 208n6; and connection, 10, 19; and continuity, 4; and death, 190–93; and devotion, 24; and history, 4; and innovation, 40; and life-story narratives, 8, 18, 208n6, 209n17; lineage, 97; and lineage, 8; and lineage continuity, 195; and longing, 24, 155–61; and loss, 190–93; and narrative(s), 16, 18–19, 22, 24, 87; and recollection, 15, 195; religion as chain of, 208n6; and storytelling, 4, 10, 15, 18–19 Men-Tsee-Khang (Tibetan Medical and Astro-science Institute). See Lhasa Mentsikhang (Medical and Astrological Institute) Mewa Khenpo Tubten Ozer, xxviii, 122– 23, 153, 170, 202, 203, 233n29, 233n36, 239n15 Milarepa (Tibetan saint), 11–12, 32, 44– 45, 53–56, 59–66, 69, 71–72, 74, 81, 87, 142, 152, 178, 180, 190, 203, 213n33, 220n13, 220n21, 222n42, 222n49, 222n53, 224n66, 240n22; biographical corpus, 225n9; as hermit yogin, 227n42; as key authorizing referent for Khunu Lama, 209n22; as paradigmatic renunciatory figure, 209n22 Mills, Martin, 124, 221n35 mind training, 5–6, 64–65, 131–32, 223n58 Mindroling Monastery, 229n76 Mirror of Poetics, 40, 100, 229n82 modernity, xv, xvi; Buddhist, 220n21, 221n31, 230n92; in China, 17; colonial, 17–18; contemporary, 18; nationalist, 17; and rationality, 17–18; and religion, 15, 211n41; secular, 17–18; and tradition, 18, 163, 194 modesty: and embarrassment, 82; and hiddenness, 145; and humility, 138; and renunciation, 145

280

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monastery (gonpa), term, usage, 239n20 monasticism, 6, 66, 217n75; and almsgathering/donations, 224n68; and curricular shifts, 230n100; and renunciation, 11, 30–31; and ritual, 49, 239n20. See also monks (bhikshu); vows Mongolia, xxiii, 43 monks (bhikshu), 5, 15, 17–19, 30, 57, 153, 158, 213n21, 216n63, 217n75; Lahauli, 169, 239n20. See also beggar/monk; monasticism Monlam Chenmo (Great Prayer Festival), 117 mortality: and renunciation, 55; samsaric, 55–56; and separation, 55; and transmission, 163. See also death Moses, 16–17 Mumbai (Bombay), 96 Mussoorie, xxvi, 118, 121, 125–27; teacher training (lama school), xxvii, 23–24, 66–67, 104–5, 107, 127–31, 223n55, 230n85, 234n54 Myanmar. See Burma (Myanmar) Namgyal, Kelsang, Lama, 118–22, 202 Namgyal Monastery, 85, 203 Namgyal Taklha. See Taklha, Namgyal Lhamo Namkha Drimed Rabjam Rinpoche, 236n16 namtar (biographical genre), 8, 21, 45, 53, 59, 79, 87, 97, 124, 138, 140, 180, 190, 192–93, 209n16, 225nn6–7, 235n8. See also biography; life-story narratives; oral histories/narratives Nangchen, 118, 203 Naropa, 44–45, 170–71, 203 narrative(s): and affective modes, 62, 195, 210–11n35; Buddhist literature, xvi, 220n18; and connection, 19; and disruption, 195; and history, 15; and memory, 16, 18–19, 22, 24, 87; method and theory, 210n35; miracle, 225n6; and recollection, 16; and rhetoric, 65; and ritual, 6–7, 157; and theorymaking, 15. See also Buddhist narra-

tive genre; life-story narratives; oral histories/narratives Nechung Oracle (state oracle of Tibet), 117, 203 Negi Rinpoche. See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Nehru, Jawaharlal (prime minister), 120–21 Neni Rinpoche. See Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin Nepal, 14, 19, 32, 203, 223n62; civil war and governmental change in, 9; cultural and intellectual landscape in, 9–10; final years in, 149; Tibetan refugees in, 118; travels to, xxvii, 86, 89–93, 149–50 ngakpas (married yogic practitioners), 31, 203 Ngari Choling, 203; monastery (Ropa), xxiii, 34, 57, 221n30; scholastic college, 34 Ngawang, 182, 203 Ngawang Rabyas, xxvii, 86–88, 203 Ngawang Tenzin, 187 Ngodrup Garshawa/Gashawa. See Angrup, K. (Tib. Ngodrup Gashawa) Ngor Ponlop Ngawang Lekdrup, 203, 216n61 non-sectarianism, 14, 22, 23, 25, 27, 37– 40, 80, 98–103, 110, 128, 130–31, 134, 135, 215n45. See also ecumenicism; sectarianism; secularism Norbulingka Palace, 117, 203 Norkyi, 34, 203 nuns, Kinnauri. See Kinnauri nuns Nyarong, 122 Nyima Dolma, xv Nyingma/Nyingmapa, xxiv, 34, 37– 40, 73, 76, 84, 95, 122, 144, 203, 215n49, 223n62, 231n114; Buddhist school, 27, 39, 106; lineages, 27, 38, 102, 215n45; meditation, 57; monastery, xxviii, 38, 235n1; philosophy, 101, 106; teachings, 27, 101–2; temple, 215n51; tradition, 38–39, 128, 215n51, 233n25

index

Nyoshul Khenpo Jamyang Dorje, 168, 203, 211n1, 233n29 Nyungti/Kullu, 81 Odysseus, 16 ontology, 16 Ontul Rinpoche. See Drikung Lho Ontul Rinpoche opera, Tibetan, 220n16, 227n58 oral histories/narratives, 8, 18, 20, 22, 27, 36, 50, 54, 79, 90, 98, 109, 119, 122, 138, 148–49, 164, 181, 239n13. See also lifestory narratives; storytelling “Orgyan’s Tooth” (Tseden), 238n1 Orgyen Tenzin Norbu, 38–39, 45, 203 Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche. See Khangsarwa Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche Padmasambhava (“the Lotus Born”), 121, 143, 156–57, 201, 203, 232n25. See also Guru Rinpoche (“the Precious Guru”) Pakistan, 9 Palden Sherab, Khenchen/Khenpo Rinpoche, 101, 202, 223n55 Palmo, Tenzin, Ven., 224n66, 241n47 Panchen Lamas, xxiv, xxvi, 40–41, 106, 126–27, 191, 203, 216nn63–64, 217n65 Pangan (Pangaon) Gonpa/Ritro Samten Choekorling, 122–23, 170, 239n15 parinirvāṇa, 1–2, 173–74, 191 Path with the Fruit Commentary Given for His Son (Sachen), 92 patrimony, 212n12 Patrul Rinpoche. See Dza Patrul Rinpoche Paul, Robert, 220n13 Pearcey, Adam, 215n54 pedagogy, xvii, 152, 212n3, 237n38 Pelkhang Lotsawa, 217n69 Pema Dragpa, Lama, 223n55 Pema Karpo, 240n23 Pema Lingpa, 33–34, 203 Pema Tekchok Loden, Khenchen, 199, 203, 215n49, 231n114 Pema Wangyal Rinpoche, 48, 73–74, 82– 86, 101–3, 107, 111, 137, 149, 151, 226n27

› 281 People’s Republic of China, xxv, 9, 17, 19. See also China Phuntsok Tashi Takla, 130 Pinkney, Andrea, 234n43 poetics, xvii, 13, 23, 28, 41, 43, 52, 98–100, 104, 106–7, 126, 179, 229n73, 229n82 Pokhara, xxvii Potala, 203 Potala Palace, 118, 203 poverty: and beggars, 71, 73; and Dharma practice, 75–111; and hardship, 53, 60, 75–111; intentional, 69, 195; personal, 73; and renunciation, 13, 75–111, 195; of students, 53. See also materiality power: and abuse, 218n77; and agency, 192; and charisma, 12; and gurudisciple connections, 29; and knowledge, xv, 194; and lineage, 28; meditative, 186; of renunciants, 12 pragmatism, 81–82, 98 Praise of the Twenty-One Noble Taras, 57 presence: and absence, 9, 13, 50, 160–61 Priyadarshi, Tenzin, Ven., xxviii, 35, 205, 210n31, 214n37, 227n46, 227n51 Quintman, Andrew, xiv, 208n7, 209n20, 209n22, 217n73, 219n5, 220n21, 220n23, 225n9, 241n43 Rahor Khenpo Tubten, 233n29 Rahor Monastery, 119, 122, 203, 233n29, 233n36 Rahor Palden Chokyi Drakpa, 119, 202, 203 Rakra Rinpoche, 41, 76, 104–5, 113, 204, 223n56, 229n75, 231n2 Ramanujan, A. K., 3, 50 Rāmāyaṇa, 3 Rambelli, Fabio, 234n43 Ramesh Chandra Negi, Ven., 236n24 Rasvir Das, Lama, xxiii, 34, 57, 146 Rayesan, 81 rebirths, 35–36, 45, 55, 61–62, 174, 190. See also incarnations; reincarnations recollection: and lineage continuity, 195; and memory, 15, 195; and narrative(s), 16; and storytelling, 195

282

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reincarnations, 9, 13, 51, 65, 109, 118, 153, 166, 184, 209n19, 223n62; lineages, 31–33, 190–91. See also incarnations; rebirths relationality, and intimacy, 2–3, 29, 131 religion: as chain of memory, 208n6; and devotion, 17, 169, 242n2; and exploitation, 17; foreign, 7; and modernity, 15, 211n41; and oppression, 17; and rationality, 18; shared, 116; world, 116, 232n10. See also community, religious renunciation, xv; and Buddhism, 11, 29, 55–56, 61–62, 65, 213n16, 218n77, 222n46; as Buddhist ideal, 11; Buddhist imaginaries of, 50, 62, 73–74, 75, 164, 193, 198, 218n77; fraudulent, 50; and freedom, 49; heartrending drama of, 62; heroic, 13; ideal of, 11–12, 16, 23, 65, 72–73, 115, 146–47, 153, 167, 195; poignancy of, 55; and political life, 213n16; potential pride in one’s own, 238n4; and relationship(s), 49; rhetorics of, 6, 11–12, 29–30, 65, 149; self-abnegating, 12; semantic field of English word, 219n3; of sexual pleasure and marital love, 222n45; and social life, 213n16; term, usage, 219n3; and turning away from worldly concerns, 223n58. See also Dharma practice “renunciatory biography,” 79–80, 94 Rewalsar. See Tso Pema (Rewalsar) rhetoric: and narrative(s), 65; of renunciation, 6, 11–12, 29–30, 65, 149 Ribba (Kinnaur), 148 Ricard, Matthieu, 222n38, 238n5 rig gnas. See riknè (rig gnas) riknè (rig gnas), 97–98, 229n76. See also knowledge Rikpe Raltri (Rigpai Reltri), 166, 168–69, 204 rimè (ris med), 14, 25, 27, 37, 103, 204, 214n44, 230n85 Ringu Tulku Rinpoche, 104 ris med. See rimè (ris med) ritual: and Buddhism, 3, 5, 116; communities, 30, 124; and devotional exchange, 234n43; and guru-disciple

index

relationship, 157; and identity, 32; and institutional life, 31; of lineages, 4, 6–7, 24, 124, 143; and meditation, 6, 125; and monasticism, 49, 239n20; and narrative(s), 6–7, 157; and tantric practice, 11, 33, 235n12; and teaching, 33; and tradition, 6; and vows, 5 “River” (Gtsang bo) (Sonthar Gyal film), 220n13 rjes lus (underdevelopment/backwardness), 17, 211n36, 214n40 Rnam thar gsol ‘debs dad pa’i ‘jug ngogs (Angrup), v Roesler, Ulrike, 222n50 Ropa, xxiii, 34 Rumtek Monastery, xxiv Running Toward Mystery (Tenzin Priyadarshi), xxviii, 214n37 Sachen, 92 sadhus, 94–97, 107, 151, 228n60, 228n63 sadness: and departure, 220n24; and devotion, 62, 156; and disillusionment, 56; and longing, 61–62, 157, 159; and loss, 56, 155; and renunciation, 55, 61–62, 155–56; and suffering, 56 saintly virtuosity, 50, 219n5 Śaivite, 83, 210n29 Sakya, 204; Buddhist school, 27, 39, 106; lineage, 102; meditation, 91; monastery, 215n51; monastic college, 38–39; philosophy, 101, 106; scholars, 150; teachings, 102; tradition, 31, 38–39, 91, 128 Sakya Paṇḍita Kunga Gyaltsen, 204, 229n73, 229n82 Sakya Trizins, 31, 204 Śākyamuni Buddha, 1–5, 8, 29, 44, 49, 56, 81, 85–86, 93, 103, 114, 126, 154, 204, 220n18, 220n21, 230n89, 230n92; parinirvāṇa, 1–2, 173–74, 191 samsara, 55–56, 60–62, 156, 158–59, 183 Samten, Jampa, 226n21, 227n56 Samuels, Jonathan, 212n9 Samye, 204; monastery, 6 Sangngak Tenzin, 21, 204, 226n23 Sangyum Orgyen Chodon, 171, 204, 239n17

index

Sanskrit, xix, 13, 28, 43, 65, 83, 95–96, 207n1, 208n3, 217n71, 219n11, 228n58, 229n81, 230nn83–84; and Buddhism, 42, 98–100, 105–8; and cross-cultural competence, 98; intellectual and religious culture, xvi; and meditation, 40; studies/teachings, xxv, 19, 23, 40–42, 51, 80, 98–101, 105–8, 147, 179, 216nn61–62; writings, 134 Śāntideva, xiv, xxv, 12–13, 38, 53, 69–70, 74, 79–81, 85, 115, 130–32, 134–36, 147, 165, 204, 207n3, 210n25, 212n7, 226n29, 230n84; as hidden yogi/ yogin, 108–10, 135–36; Khunu Lama, comparisons, 108–11; reincarnations of, 13, 109, 214n37; as simple yogi, 109 Sarnath, xiv, 76–78, 105, 113, 128–29, 231n2 Sayadaw, Ledi, 221n31 Schaeffer, Kurtis, xiv, 220n21, 220n24 Scholar’s Lamp of Language, The (Pelkhang Lotsawa), 41, 217n69 sectarianism, 13, 15, 25, 42, 99, 102– 3, 135, 209n14, 215n47. See also non-sectarianism secularism, xv, 10, 17–18. See also ecumenicism; non-sectarianism self-centeredness, 16, 144 self-cherishing, 69–70 self-concealment: and absence, 112, 162–63, 196; and bodhicitta, 80–81; of bodhisattva, 75, 109; and hidden yogin, 108; and hiddenness, 79–80; and interruptions, 23; and lineage continuity, 23; potential problems posed by, 23; and renunciation, 11, 35, 50–51, 74, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 93–94, 96–97, 107–8, 112, 136, 149, 155, 162–63; and separation, 78, 112, 149; and solitude, 108; and wandering/travels, 74; and withdrawal from social entanglements, 96–97 self-cultivation, 132 self-effacement, 138 self-grasping, 16, 83 selflessness, 138 self-protection, 218n77 self-righteousness, 65 self-sacrifice, 166–67

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283

Sem Tinley Ongmu Tashi, 204, 224n3, 226n37, 228n60, 228n62 Senior Tutor, xxv, xxvi, 106, 125–26 separation: and absence, 3, 47, 55, 137, 151, 157, 195; and compassion, 52–55; and connection, 9–10, 14–15, 24, 27, 47, 194; and continuity, 15; and death, 24, 55, 162, 193; and departure, 60, 145, 149; and devotion, 3, 10, 137, 155, 193; and disruption, 53, 194; and grief, 10; and guru-disciple relationship, 24; and home-leaving, 52–55; and impermanence, 136; and indivisibility, 194; and indivisible closeness, 160–61; inevitability of, 164; inseparability and connection, 47; and intimacy, 50, 53, 54, 61; and lineage continuity, 15; and lineage interruption, 112–13; and longing, 3, 53, 136, 155, 162, 193; and loss, 10–11, 193, 194; and mortality, 55; as painful, 164; and renunciation, 10– 11, 15, 24, 50, 55, 62, 135–36, 144, 149, 164; and self-concealment, 78, 112, 149; and teacher-student relationship, 1–3, 24, 112–13; and travels, 74. See also home-leaving Sera Khandro, 241n58 Sera Monastery, 102, 105, 204, 210n27 Sey Rinpoche Namgyal Gelek, 94, 171, 204, 239n17 sGu ngo rTa ra Rinpoche, 227n55 Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol, 59–63, 72, 74, 81, 87, 204, 209n16, 222n38 Shakya, Tsering, xiv, 211n36, 214n39, 227n56, 232n7, 232n9, 232nn14–23 Shakya Shri, Drubwang Togden, xxiii, 32–34, 43, 57, 94, 139–40, 170–71, 200, 204, 205, 213n24 Shashur Monastery (Lahaul), xiii, xxviii, 94, 169, 172–73, 177, 183–89, 204, 205, 240n29 Shechen Ontrul Gyurme Tutob Namgyal, 204, 216n61 shedra commentarial institutions. See commentarial schools Sherab Tharchin. See Drikung Khandroma Sherab Tharchin Shigatse, 73, 204, 217n65

284

siddhas, 44, 45, 162, 231n2 signifiers, 3–4, 50 Sikkim, xxiv, xxvii, 9, 19, 26, 32, 40, 73, 76, 82, 86–88, 204, 226n36; monastic learning institution, 42; Tibetan refugees in, 118 Simpson, Audra, 210n35 Smith, Gene, xi–xii, 37–39, 209n16, 215n50, 236n21 social capital, 10 social engagement. See engagement solitude: and hardship, 72; and meditation, 72, 108; and self-concealment, 108 solteb (devotional genre), 138–41, 144, 154, 156–57, 180, 235nn7–8 Sonam Gyaltsen, Lama, xxiii, 34, 57, 72, 94, 139, 204, 221n30 Sonam Rinchen, Geshe, 69–71, 165, 201, 223n65 Sonam Topgyal, Khenpo, 76, 101, 149, 202, 216n64, 217n71, 221n31 Songs and Lives of the Jomo (Nuns) of Kinnaur, Northwest India (LaMacchia), 20 Sonthar Gyal, 220n13 soteriology, 3, 6, 46–47, 49, 55, 62, 107, 138, 155, 159, 163, 173, 191 sovereignty, epistemic forms of, 18 Sparham, Gareth, xiii, xvii, 21, 130, 132, 207n1, 208n3, 210n26 Spiti, 145 Śrī Siṃha monastic college, 38, 204, 215n49, 231n114 Srinagar ( Jammu-Kashmir, India), xxvi, 51–54, 92, 100, 127 Stearns, Cyrus, 225n4 storytelling: and history, 4; and memory, 4, 10, 15, 18–19; and recollection, 195. See also life-story narratives; oral histories/narratives students. See teacher-student lineages; teacher-student relationship Stutchbury, Elisabeth, 239n20 subaltern, 15, 17 “Subaltern Histories and PostEnlightenment Rationalism” (Chakrabarty), 15

‹ index suffering: compassion for, 66; and impermanence, 55–56; and sadness, 56 Sunlight Blessings That Cure the Longing of Remembrance (Lamchen Gyalpo Rinpoche), 20–21 supplication prayer (gsol ‘debs), 20, 22, 136–38, 156, 188, 192–93, 223n57 survival: and continuity, 18, 123–24; and lineage, 124; and renewal, 123 Taklha, Namgyal Lhamo, 77, 92–93, 96, 203, 224n3 Taktse Palace, 86, 204 tantric practice, 5, 28, 31, 53, 54, 66, 140, 144, 157, 212n10, 222n49, 225n4, 225n6, 231n2, 235n12; and ritual, 11, 33, 235n12 Tara(s), 57, 86–87 Tartsedo. See Dartsedo Tashi Dhondup, 204 Tashi Rabgias, xxvi, 51–52, 54, 84, 92, 100–101, 126–27, 204 Tashi Shukling. See Shashur Monastery (Lahaul) Tashi Tsering Josayma, xi, 32, 113, 145, 205, 234n41 Tashilhunpo Monastery (Tsang), xxiv, 32, 102, 216nn63–64, 217n65, 221n30 Tashilhunpo monastic university, xxiv, 40–41, 105, 205, 207n1 teacher-disciple relationship, 2–3, 7, 46–47, 112, 213n33. See also disciples; guru-disciple relationship teacher-student lineages, xi, 1–10, 22, 24, 25–27, 43–47, 136, 154–55, 180 teacher-student relationship, xvi, 2–10, 94–95, 122, 144, 152, 155, 158–59, 163, 170, 194–95, 218n77, 220n16; indivisibility of, 24, 47, 53; and lineage connections, 8, 10, 25–27, 99; and lineage continuity, 114–15; and lineage transmissions, 3–10, 22, 25–27, 30, 32, 43–47, 53, 111, 112–13, 124, 129; and separations, 1–3, 24, 112–13; and vulnerabilities, 2–3 Tekra Math (Hindu ashram, Varanasi), xxvi, 13, 83–84, 95–99, 107, 115, 127, 129, 147, 150, 225n21, 227n56

index

Tentong Shapey Gyurme Gyatso, 41, 205 Tenzin Chodron, 205, 239n13 Tenzin Dolma, Ani, xxviii, 16, 20, 169–71, 181–92, 205, 237n33, 238n2, 239n13, 241n48 Tenzin Gyaltsen. See Khunu Lama Tenzin Gyaltsen Tenzin Jamyang, 205, 210n26 Tenzin Lhamo, 239n13 Tenzin Lungtok Nyima, Rinpoche, 168, 204 Tenzin Norbu Nangsal, xiv, 209n16, 240n37, 241n65 Tenzin Palmo, Ven., 224n66, 241n47 Tenzin Priyadarshi, Ven., xxviii, 35, 205, 210n31, 214n37, 227n46, 227n51 Tenzin Zangmo, xxviii, 169–71, 182, 185, 205, 239n13 Terdrom Nunnery, 118–20, 153, 205, 232n25 Terrone, Antonio, xiv, 222n50 Thirteen Great Texts. See Gloss Commentaries on the Thirteen Great Texts (Zhenga) Thondup. See Tulku Thondup Rinpoche Thubten, Khenpo. See Mewa Khenpo Thubten Ozer Thubten Jinpa. See Jinpa, Thubten Thubten Yeshe, Lama, 223n62 Thubten Zopa Rinpoche. See Zopa Rinpoche, Thubten, Lama Thurman, Robert (Bob), xvi Tibet, 4, 14; Buddhist study and practice in, 38, 67; Chinese Communist forces in, as critical time for, 112–15, 134; cultural survival and renewal, 123; as diaspora community, 123, 128; guru-disciple relationship in, 44; independence, xxiii, 37; institutionbuilding in India, 123; intellectual and religious life, 42, 196; leaves, 33, 83, 115–24, 207n1, 208n3; lineage relationships in, 78; maps, xxi–xxii; monastic learning institution, 42; patrimony, and lineages of medical knowledge in, 212n12; “Peaceful Liberation” of, 9; travels/returns to, 13, 22, 26–27, 36–

›

285

37, 40–42, 44, 59, 82–83, 146, 207n1, 208n3 Tibet House (New Delhi), 66 “Tibet Rinpoche,” 216n60 Tibetan Medical and Astro-science Institute (Men-Tsee-Khang). See Lhasa Mentsikhang (Medical and Astrological Institute) Tibetan Review, memorial article, 21 Tilopa, 45, 205 Togden Karma Monlam, 216n60 Togden Shakya Shri. See Shakya Shri, Drubwang Togden Townsend, Dominique, 213n16, 225n8, 229n76, 231n100, 231n105 travels, xii; alone, 151; and connections, xv; and departures, 13, 135; and displacement, 18; and lineage connections, 26–27, 35; and lineage transmissions, 110–11; maps, xxi–xxii; renunciatory, 13; and separation, 74 Trijang Rinpoche Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, 205 Tsang (west-central Tibet), xxiv, 146, 216n64, 217n65, 228n58 Tsangnyon Heruka, 54–56, 69, 180, 190, 205, 227n42 Tsangyang Gyatso. See Dalai Lama, Sixth (VI) Tsarpa Sakya lineage, xxvii, 205 Tseden, Pema, 238n1 Tsenzhab Serkong Rinpoche, 85, 205 Tsering Dolma Takla, 130, 205 Tsiknopoulos, Erick, 20–21, 235n7 Tso Pema (Rewalsar), xxvii–xxviii, 93– 94, 121–22, 131, 136–45, 150, 153–54, 157, 170, 204, 205, 226n39, 235n1, 237n32 tsodra (rtsod grwa, debating institution), 105, 205 Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa, 37, 157–59, 205, 212n8 Tsurpu, 216n60 Tubb, Gary, xvi Tubten, Khenpo. See Mewa Khenpo Tubten Ozer Tubten Lungtok Tenzin Trinlé. See Ling Rinpoche

286

‹ index

Tulku Pema Wangyal, 205 Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, 95–96, 103, 109, 144, 162, 166, 168–69, 186, 205, 228n63, 238n6, 238n7 Tuttle, Gray, xv, xvi, 116 Tzohar, Roy, xiv, 210–11n35

Willis, Jan, 234n41 Willock, Nicole, xiv, 232n12 Wogmin Thubten Shedrup Ling, 237n32 World Buddhist Culture Trust, 66 world religions, 116, 232n10 Wyschogrod, Edith, 16, 18

unfamiliarity: and disorientation, 113; and tradition, 143 Upper Garzha, 172, 240n25

Yeshe Tsogyal, 119, 232n25 yogic practice/yoga, 5, 13, 31, 47, 65, 98– 99, 139, 155, 210n29; hatha, 96 Yongdzin Lhaksam Gyaltsen, 205, 216n61 Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, 197–98, 205, 226n33, 227n46 Younghusband, Francis (colonel), xxiii, 36, 214n39

Vajrayāna practice, 30, 236n24 van der Kuijp, Leonard, 227n58 van Schaik, Sam, 209n12 Varanasi, xiv, xxv, xxvi, 13, 73–74, 76, 83–86, 94–100, 115, 127–29, 147, 150, 207n1, 208n3, 225n21, 228n63 Varanasi Sanskrit University, xxvii, 83, 98 Vast as the Heavens, Deep as the Sea (Sparham, trans.), xiii, xvii, 254 Vessantara, 3 Vessantara, Prince, 4, 220n21, 222n46 Vidyādhara, 140, 205 Vinayas, 213n21 virtuosity: as chatralwa, 153; saintly, 50, 219n5 vows: and commitments, 6, 53, 157; religious, 31; and ritual, 5; tantric, 157. See also monasticism Wang, Michelle H., 210–11n35 Waxing Moon (journal), xv wilderness: and death, 71, 224n66, 238n5; and meditation, 224n66; and renunciation, 71–74, 224n66

zhabten (zhabs brtan, lit. “firm feet”), 154, 163 Zhao Erfeng, xxiii, 36–37 Zhenga, Khenpo, xxiv, xxv, 25–27, 32, 37–46, 53, 72, 80, 95, 99–100, 106, 110, 119, 129–30, 143, 164–66, 202, 205, 207n1, 211n1, 212n7, 215n49, 215n54, 231n114 Zhenpen Chokyi Nangwa. See Zhenga, Khenpo Zhijey, 140, 205 Zhou Enlai, 118 Zopa Rinpoche, Thubten, Lama, xxvii, 69–71, 89–90, 130, 158, 202, 205, 223n62, 225n3, 224n69, 228n63, 230n86