The Mahasiddha Luipa
The Fish-Gut Eater
A wild dog with honey rubbed on its nose
Madly devours whatever it sees;
Give the Lama's secret to a worldly fool
And his mind and the lineage burn out.
For a responsive man with knowledge of unborn reality
A mere glimpse of the Lama's vision of pure light-form,
Destroys mental fiction like an elephant berserk
Rampaging through hostile ranks with a sword lashed to its trunk.
Long ago, in the island kingdom of Sri Lanka, a young prince ascended the throne of his fabulously wealthy father, The court astrologers had calculated that the kingdom must be given to the deceased king's second son if it was to remain strong and its people content. In his palace, where the walls were plated with gold and silver and studded with pearls and precious stones, the young king ruled his two brothers and all the people of Sri Lanka. However, possessing nothing but contempt for wealth and power, his only desire was to escape his situation. When he first attempted to escape, his brothers and courtiers caught him and bound him in golden chains, but finally he succeeded in bribing his guards with gold and silver, and at night, disguised in rags, he escaped with a single attendant. He rewarded his faithful accomplice generously before leaving his island kingdom for Ramesvaram, where King Rama reigned, and there he exchanged his golden throne for a simple deer-skin and his couch of silks and satin for a bed of ashes. Thus he became a yogin.
The king- turned-yogin was handsome and charming, and he had no difficulty in begging his daily needs. Wandering the length of India, eventually he arrived in Vajrasana, where the Buddha Sakyamuni had achieved enlightenment, and there he attached himself to hospitable Dakinis, who transmitted to him their feminine insight. From Vajrasana he travelled to Pataliputra, the king's capital on the River Ganges, where he subsisted on the alms he begged and slept in a cremation ground. Begging in the bazaar one market day, he paused at a house of pleasure, and his karma effected this fateful encounter with a courtesan, who was an incarnate, worldly Dakini. Gazing through him at the nature of his mind, the Dakini said, "Your four psychic centers and their energies are quite pure, but there is a pea-sized obscuration of royal pride in your heart." And with that she poured some putrid food into his clay bowl and told him to be on his way. He threw the inedible slop into the gutter, whereupon the Dakinis, who had been watching him go, shouted after him angrily, "How can you attain nirvana if you're still concerned about the purity of your food?"
The yogin was mortified. He realized that his critical and judgmental mind was still subtly active; he still perceived some things as intrinsically more desirable than others. He also understood that this propensity was the chief obstacle in his progress to Buddhahood. With this realization he went down to the River Ganges and began a twelve year sadhana to destroy his discursive thought-patterns and his prejudices and preconceptions. His practice was to eat the entrails of the fish that the fishermen disemboweled, to transform the fish-guts into the nectar of pure awareness by insight into the nature of things as emptiness.
The fisherwomen gave him his name, Luipa, which means Eater of Fish-guts. The practice which gave him his name also brought him power and realization. Luipa became a renowned Guru, and in the legends of Darikapa and Dengipa there is further mention of him.
Sadhana
It is appropriate that the first of the eighty-four legends should repeat the elements of the story of the first Buddha, Sakyamuni, in a tantric guise. Luipa is a king who renounces his throne for the sake of enlightenment. Like Sakyamuni he escaped in the night with a single attendant to become a yogin, and Sakyamuni, too, probably employed a deer-skin (krsnasara) as a mat, a throne, and a shawl. Deer-skins indicate renunciate status; the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara wears one around his torso. But Luipa was born into the kaliyuga when it was no longer possible to practice the fierce discipline and simple practices that Sakyamuni taught. In order to eradicate the subtle defilement that the Dakini indicated and to resolve the dualistic mental constructs that are the root cause of samsara, to attain freedom from samsara in this lifetime a radical short-cut method was required, and in Luipa's case, as with many of the siddhas, a Dakini was at hand to provide it.
Luipa was a master of the mother-tantra, and his Gurus were Dakini Gurus, mundane Dakinis, embodiments of the female principle of awareness.' The Dakinis who indicated his sadhana was a publican and whore-mistress, for liquor shops doubled as brothels. The "royal pride" she discerned in his heart can be rendered more precisely as "racial, caste and social discrimination," and with her putrid food she pointed at a method which can best be described as the path of dung eating. Cultivate what is most foul and abhorrent, and consciousness is thereby stimulated to the point of transcendence; familiarize yourself with what is most disgusting and eventually it tastes no different from bread and butter. The result of this method is attainment of the awareness of sameness SS3 that is at the heart of all pride, all discrimination and prejudice, and transmutes these moral qualities, that are the mental equivalent of fish-guts, into emptiness. To elaborate the Dakini's parting sally: so long as you fail to perceive the inherent reality of emptiness in every sensual stimulus, every state of mind, and every thought, you will remain in dualistic samsara, judging, criticizing and discriminating. To attain the non-duality of nirvana find the awareness of sameness in what is most revolting, and realize the one taste of all which is pure pleasure.
More light is shed on Luipa's practice by considering what fish meant in his society. First, fish is the flesh of a sentient being and therefore anathema to the orthodox brahmin; but left-over fish-guts is fit only for dogs, the lowest life-form on the totem pole. Such a practice, if indeed Luipa performed a literal interpretation, would have made him unclean in the eyes of his former peers, untouchable and unapproachable. Self-abasement and humiliation is the corollary of "dung eating;" destroy every vestige of those associations with former birth, privilege and wealth, and in an existential pit discover what there is in human being that can inspire real pride, divine pride, that is inherent in all sentient beings. Second, fish is a symbol of spirituality and sense control, and Luipa's Samvara sadhana, which is not described here, involves transformation of his universe into that of a god in his paradise, and attainment of control of his energies (prana) and thus of his senses.
Historiography
Our legend is the only source to assert that Luipa was born in Sri Lanka, to which the text's Singhaladvipa must refer. But there were several kingdoms in the sub-continent called Singhaladvipa, one contiguous to Oddiyana which other sources give as Luipa's birth place. In Bu ston's account, Luipa was son of King Lalitacandra of 0ddiyana. When the prince encountered Savaripa, Saraha's disciple, he was immensely impressed by this siddha and begged him for instruction. He received initiation into the Samvara-tantra. The initial part of his sadhana was completed when he joined a circle of twenty-four Dakas and Dakinis in a rite of offering in a cremation ground which climaxed in consumption of the corpse of a sage. With a final blessing from his Guru he left Oddiyana and began a mendicant sadhu existence. That period ended when, feeling the need for sustained one-pointed meditation practice, he sat down to meditate beside a pile of fish-guts by the banks of the River Ganges in Bengal (Bangala), where he remained until he had attained mahamudra-siddhi. His subsequent encounter with the king and minister who became Darikapa and Dengipa portray Luipa as an outrageously honest and fearless exploiter of personal power, and also an adept wielder of the apt phrase bearing tantric truth. Consistent with this facility with words, the Sakya school's account of Luipa's life asserts that he was a scribe (kayastha) at the court of the Maharaja of Bharendra, Dharmapala. Begging alms at Dharmapala's palace Savaripa recognized the scribe Luipa as a suitable recipient of his Samvara lineage; his extraordinary talent was evident in the versified letters he wrote to the king's correspondents, a task requiring acute, one-pointed concentration. Taranatha's account differs significantly from Bu ston's in that Luipa was a scribe to the King of Oddiyana, and was initiated into Vajra Varahi's mandala.
The most significant piece of information in these legends is that Luipa worked at the court of the Maharaja of Bharendra, Dharmapala. The only king who had the right to call himself Maharaja of this kingdom was the great Pala Emperor Dharmapala, who gained it by right of conquest. Since the Sakya legends have been given the greatest historiographical credence of all the siddhas' legends, it is tempting to accept this crucial identification and place Luipa as a younger contemporary of Dharmapala (AD 770-810). If Luipa was initiated in his youth at the end of the eighth century or the beginning of the ninth, his Guru Savaripa's lifetime can be calculated, together with the dates of Darikapa and Dengipa, and also Dombi Heruka (4) who Luipa taught.' Kilapa (73) may also have been his disciple. 9 But if Luipa was born in the eighth century he cannot be identified with Minapa/Macchendranath, an identification that has been attempted due to several coincidences: the stem of both their names means "fish;" they are both associated with Sri Lanka and Bengal; they both conceived yogini-tantra lineages (Luipa - Samvara; Minapa -Yogini-kaula), and they are both known as adi-guru, Whereas Minapa was the originator of nath saiva lineages, from which he gained his adi-guru status, Luipa has no Hindu associations, although his sadhana has a sakta ethos.
Luipa's first place in the eighty-four legends could reflect the belief of the narrator, or the translator, that Luipa was First Guru (adi-guru) of the Mahamudra-siddhas in either time or status. The other claimant to this title is Saraha. Regarding time, Luipa was born after Saraha, but although Luipa's Guru was Saraha's disciple, their lifetimes probably overlapped. Regarding status and personal power, whereas Saraha's reputation lies to a large extent in his literary genius, Luipa's name evokes a sense of the siddha's tremendous integrity and commitment, the samaya that creates the personal power demonstrated in his legends. Both Saraha and Luipa were originators of Samvara-tantra lineages, but it was Luipa who received the title of Guhyapati, Master of Secrets, to add to his status of adi-guru in the lineage that practiced the Samvara-tantra according to the method of Luipa; he received direct transmission from the Dakini Vajra Varahi. If Luipa obtained his original Samvara revelation in Oddiyana, the home of several of the mother-tantras, he would have been one of the siddhas responsible for propagating this tantra in Eastern India. But whatever the tantra's provenance, Luipa became the great exemplar of what Saraha preached, as confirmed in his own few doha songs, and his sadhana became the inspiration and example for some of the greatest names amongst the mahasiddhas: Kambala, Ghantapa, Indrabhuti, Jalandhara, Krsnacarya, Tilopa and Naropa were all initiates into the Samvara-tantra according to the method of Luipa. Marpa Dopa transmitted the tantra to Tibet, where it has remained the principal yidam practice of the Kahgyu school until today.
Although the Tibetan translator rendered "Luipa" as The Fishgut Eater (Nya Ito zhabs), the root of the word is probably Old Bengali lohita, a type of fish, and Luipa is thus synonymous with Minapa and Macchendra/Matsyendra. Luhipa, Lohipa, Luyipa, Loyipa, are variants of the name.
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