The Selfless Ego I. Memory and Imagination in Tibetan Hagiographical Writing

The Selfless Ego I. Memory and Imagination in Tibetan Hagiographical Writing

Lucia Galli & Franz Xaver Erhard

This special edition of Life Writing is the first of two issues dedicated to Tibet’s rich auto/biographical tradition, in all its forms and styles. The contributions presented in The Selfless Ego I & II stem from two successful conferences on Tibetan life writing held at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, in September 2012 (Beyond Biographies: New Perspectives on Tibetan Life Writing) and in May 2017 (Global Lives and Local Perspectives: New Approaches to Tibetan Life Writing).1 Both events addressed issues of literary theory and cross-cultural influences, as well as questions of identity construction, power relationships, and gender conceptions as they emerge from the analysis of indigenous forms of biographical writing. As literary theorists know well, any definition of life writing—as a practice, theory, and genre—is tentative at best, as the term eludes clear taxonomic classification, encompassing a wide range of textual products about lives or part of lives. This is even truer in the case of Tibet, where the Western concept of literature—broadly conceived as an ensemble of written materials of various content and/or form—struggles to find a proper equivalent in the indigenous language. The remarks made so far should not lead to the hasty assumption that the absence of a ‘pure’ Tibetan concept of literature would de facto preclude any attempt to formulate an effective taxonomy of literary genres. Although the words used in the Tibetan language to indicate a classification—such as rik (rigs, ‘type’), de (sde, ‘class’) or nampa (rnam pa, ‘form’)—are not systematically used in reference to an abstract notion of a literary category, it is nevertheless evident that some of the issues related to genre theory were not unknown to Tibetan scholars of the past.2 Indian typologies, developed in the context of Buddhist doctrine, were in fact adopted—and adapted—by indigenous scholars in their efforts to translate and organise the dharma; throughout the centuries, other native forms of categorisation emerged, addressing literature as a whole, beyond the confines of Buddhist tenets and scholarship (see Roesler 2015).

By merely glancing at their vast literary corpus, Tibetans appear to have been positively obsessed by life stories. The Buddhist concept of selflessness, far from deterring the production of narratives concerning the individual ego and its experiences, led in Tibet to a flurry of biographies and autobiographies—a massive production largely unmatched in Buddhist Asia. Commonly known as namthar (rnam thar, ‘complete liberation’),3 Tibetan biographical writings mostly narrate the vitae of Buddhist masters, exemplary figures whose life-journey was meant to educate and inspire the devout.4 Generally designed as edifying role models, their deceptive similarity, in topics and purposes, to the life stories of Christian saints led early Western scholars to categorise all Tibetan namthar as indigenous expressions of ‘hagiographic’ writing, containing ‘little if no information of historical value due to their exaggerated panegyric’ (Ary 2015, 103). Convincing arguments against such a gross categorisation have been recently raised by Roesler (2014), who warns against subsuming all namthar under the term ‘hagiography’, underlining the great heterogeneity these works show in terms of style and contents as well as in forms and genres, with features often surpassing those commonly ascribed to life writing. Both narratological (Rheingans 2014) and rhetoric (Ary 2015) readings

have also proven to be valuable methodological tools to understand the role played by namthar in establishing authority and legitimacy, both personally and institutionally.

Though differing vastly in terms of types and styles, most namthar present a common narrative form often interspersed with embedded texts, such as songs, instructions, tantric revelations, prayers, accounts of previous lives, or dialogues. The miscellaneous and multi-layered nature of namthar betrays the fundamental complexity of Tibetan biographical and hagiographical writings. These non-fictional textual products do not mimic social reality, but rather create meaning by extrapolating elements from the cultural archive (e.g. thought patterns, imagination, beliefs) and altering them through the process of narrative presentation (Conermann and Rheingans 2014, 8). The authorial voice becomes therefore fundamental in our understanding of namthar as succinct expressions of the culture that produced them: by adapting extant editorial models to their agendas, Tibetan biographers convey precious information about the historical, social, and cultural milieu they lived in. Even the most intimistic and reflective forms of auto/biography, known in Tibetan as ‘inner’ namthar (nang gi rnam thar) and ‘secret’ namthar (gsang ba’i rnam thar), in their dealings with meditative practices, tantric initiations, dreams, and visions reflect a unique world-making process and participate actively in the social formation and diffusion of meaning, both about the self and the other.

Following such a line of enquiry, the contributions contained in the first issue of The Selfless Ego concern the close connection between ‘biographical’ and ‘autobiographical’ writings in the Buddhist context, examining the way indigenous authors addressed the delicate issue of selfexpression and conformity.5 In discussing questions of identity construction and self-representation, our contributors illuminate the fine balance required of a biographer to seamlessly thread together lineage affiliation and personal affirmation, individual voice and customary norms.

The issue opens with Ulrike Roesler’s critical analysis of Tibetan autobiographical material —a clear and much needed introduction to the indigenous expressions of life writing. Starting with an overview of traditional biographical forms, the author illustrates the intricacies entailed in a definite categorisation of what appears to be a container of different genres, styles, and forms. Following this line of reasoning, Roesler suggests considering Tibetan biographical and autobiographical writing as two distinct ‘spectra’, each an ensemble of textual products narrating the life story of an individual, either in a third-person (biography) or a first-person (autobiography) voice. Having situated Tibetan life writing in its literary context, Roesler deepens her discussion on autobiographical texts broaching the delicate matter of self-expression in a cultural and religious context actively promoting humility, selflessness, and adherence to convention. Relying on extracts from autobiographies spanning from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the author shows the different ways Tibetan biographers dealt with issues of impartiality and truthfulness, apology and self-assertion, clarifying how ‘the length, the style, and the content of the introductory sections of autobiographical works [we]re not random but relate[d] to the work themselves’ and, as such, functional in promoting their authors’ public role and private agendas.

Expanding on Roesler’s overview of Tibetan life-writing idiosyncrasies, David Templeman presents the case of ‘nested’ autobiographies, ‘epithetical and almost confessional writings’ embedded within larger compositions. By taking as example the ‘nested’ autobiography of Tāranātha (1575–1634), Templeman questions the master’s decision to include such a small work, composed in 1612, into his later and much wordier tokjö (rtogs brjod, ‘autobiography’). The author finds a partial answer in the different functions performed by the texts: whereas the larger work was meant to ‘enshrine the viability of the Jonang tradition and […] encourage its ongoing patronage’, the ‘nested’ autobiography was ‘imbued with a clearly spiritual message […] critical of all self-interest and pretence’. The introvert character of the ‘nested’ text, tellingly incapsulated half-way through the main work, betrays a more personal focus: leaving aside praises for patrons and descriptions of monastic and worldly pursuits, Tāranātha broaches deeply cared-for topics, thus offering a unique glimpse of his own figure. In his contribution, Templeman examines Tāranātha’s constant concern with authenticating his position as ‘inheritor’ of authentic teachings translated into a carefully concerted biographical project, the value of which is recalled in the ‘nested’ text itself. By compiling the namthar of his lineage predecessors and Indian teachers, the Jonang master de facto located himself in a specific tradition, enhancing his own prestige against his critics. Tāranātha’s ‘nested’ autobiography, with its intimistic flavour, is aptly compared by Templeman to the ‘heart-songs’ of the sixteenth-century master Nyima Tashi: both texts were in fact viewed by their compilers as a true and authentic record of their existence, thus supporting Roesler’s listing of gur (mgur, ‘songs of experience’) into the ‘spectrum’ of autobiographical writings.

The biographical value of gur in constructing narratives of the self finds further corroboration in the following contribution by Cécile Ducher. In retracing the oral origin of the thirtyodd biographies dedicated to the eleventh-century Kagyu master Marpa (1012–1097), she demonstrates the fundamental role played, as both source and legitimising tool, by the ‘songs of experience’ traditionally ascribed to Marpa—the backbone upon which his numerous hagiographies were built throughout the centuries. Ducher opens her discussion by reconstructing the history of gur, starting from the imperial period (seventh–nineth centuries)— when verses were mainly sung for political or propagandistic reasons—to the so-called ‘second spread of the doctrine’ or chidar (spyi dar, tenth to thirteenth centuries), when gur assumed a marked religious component due to the Tibetans’ exposure to the culture of the Indian sub-continent. Marpa’s songs, similarly to those of his most famous disciple, the yogin Milarepa, showed unique features, as they combined the esoteric and didactic themes typical of Indian tantric songs with indigenous poetic forms and folksongs (Divall 2014). In line with Roesler and Templeman, Ducher clarifies that Marpa’s gur, in their being episodic accounts of the master’s life, were but one of the many aspects of Tibetan life writing, an autobiographical frame of reference upon which an entire biographical tradition was fashioned. By comparing Marpa’s life story to a building, Ducher elegantly deconstructs the textual layers formed by the various biographical writings, a process that allows the author to isolate the earlier namthar—the foundations in her metaphor—and examine the way Marpa’s songs have been used, presented, and re-framed throughout the centuries. Aptly, Ducher concludes her paper reflecting on the ‘plasticity’ of gur in the biographical construction of Marpa: from being the ‘direct voice’ of the master, the songs became through the centuries a feature first supporting and then legitimising a narrative with which the biographer’s lineage identified.

Taking up on the inextricability of autobiographical and biographical writing in the Tibetan Buddhist context, Sangseraima Ujeed presents the case of Dzaya Paṇḍita (1599–1662)’s topyik (thob yig, ‘record of teachings received’). Categorised under the life writing genre, these works, in their most basic form nothing more than ‘bare lists of the disciplines, precepts, directions and consecrations taken, and of the person giving them’ (Vostrikov 1970, 199), may easily total thousands of folios and expound at length upon a diversity of topics, ranging from biographical notes to philosophical precepts to historical accounts. With its 1,234 folios, Dzaya Paṇḍita’s topyik is the second largest example to date—rich in content and complex in structure, the work betrays the compiler’s fascination for life stories whilst acknowledging the role played by biographical writing in the construction of the individual and communal self within a lineage tradition. The 227 namthar of the topyik concurrently support the transmission lineages and expositions propounded in the main text and reinforce the compiler’s status as authoritative figure. By recounting his masters’ lives and accomplishments, in fact, the Geluk scholar claims his own position within an authentic lineage of which each namthar is but a piece. To bolster her reading of Dzaya Paṇḍita’s topyik as a string of individual biographies framing the life story of the entire Geluk tradition, Ujeed presents extracts from the namthar of the 5th Dalai Lama (1617–1682), the regent Desi Sangye Gyatso (1653–1705), and the 6th Dalai Lama (1683–1706). By exposing Dzaya Paṇḍita’s rendition of some of the most controversial events of the time, the author demonstrates the unifying vision of the Mongolian scholar, whose main interest was the creation of a single narrative that, unfolding through individual lives, shaped the ‘namthar’ of his lineage.

Situating her contribution in a similar discourse of identity construction, authorship, and lineage loyalty, although within the Nyingma school, Cathy Cantwell presents the case of three representatives of the Dudjom tradition, linked by a line of reincarnation. In examining the contrasting behaviours, characters, and textual productions of Dudjom Lingpa (1835–

1904) and Dudjom Rinpoche (1904–1987), Cantwell aims to

make sense of the development of stories about a lama in relation to his recognised previous incarnations, looking both at his own self-identity and at the accounts created about him, as well as considering what kind of impact this story or stories may have on his written productions. In a cultural and religious milieu where emanations and rebirths allow for the continuity of an individual’s spiritual gifts through lifetimes, questions of personal identity vis-à-vis lineage continuity come to the fore. Contrary to general assumption that wants reincarnations to follow a common pattern, as if they were clones one of the other, discontinuities along the line appeared, and due to the indigenous understanding of rebirth their emergence met neither scepticism nor suspicion. By emphasising the continuity of the enlightened vision or mind, Dudjom Rinpoche situated both himself and his predecessor within a series of rebirths that includes the seventeenth-century master Düdül Dorje, a pivotal figure in the Dudjom lineage. The thread connecting Düdül Dorje, Dudjom Lingpa, and Dudjom Rinpoche unfolds through the preservation and expansion of a set of tantric transmissions centred on the Vajrakīlaya practice and on the identification of each master as tertön (gter ston, ‘revealers of hidden teachings’) in a specific lineage, namely the Dudjom one. In presenting the case of the Dudjom tradition, Cantwell’s paper shows how biographical writings—in this case, namthar and accounts of tantric revelations—functioned as a tool in constructing authority and framing tantric communities, accommodating the natural evolution of a line of rebirth.

Remaining within the Nyingma tradition and its spiritual communities and tantric practices, Hannah Havnevik discusses normative genre portrayals as conveyed in Tibetan male hagiography, offering as a case-study the namthar of the nineteenth-century master Trülzhik Tongdröl Dorje (1862–1922), a representative of the famed yogin, known as ‘madmen’ (smyon pa) for their nonconformist and provocative demeanour. Havnevik’s reading unearths the female lives buried beneath the hagiographical portrait, giving voice to those women who contributed, in greater or lesser degree, to the spiritual accomplishments of the male protagonists of the narrative, that is to say Trülzhik and his father, the tantric master Pema Wangdrak. Centred on Trülzhik’s early life, the work contains substantial information on his mother Tashi Tsomo, a figure the biographer both glorifies and debases, following indigenous gender conceptions: alternatively divine mother and temptress, dakiṇī and ‘rotten woman’, Tashi Tsomo embodies the ambivalent attitude towards the feminine typical of the androcentric society of Eastern Tibet. Similarly to other famous Nyingma female practitioners such as Sera Khandro (1892–1940) and Tāre Lhamo (1938–2003),6 Tashi Tsomo finds spiritual recognition through her apparent submission to, and subtle circumvention of, the androcentric norms and practices regulating the social environment she lived in. In addressing issues of gender and agency as reflected in the indigenous biographical literature, Havnevik elucidates the process of identity construction of Tibetan female religious specialists, revealing the ‘complex historical women’ hiding behind ‘conflated and idealised female characters’. Meant as a testimony to the saintly life of the yogin, the hagiographical portrayal created by Trülzhik Tongdröl Dorje’s biographer belies the subtle, yet deep, power that women wielded in tantric communities. The namthar, allegedly compiled at the request of the famous female spiritual practitioner Jetsun Lochen, upholds the tantric and esoteric Nyingma teachings as well as Trülzhik Tongdröl Dorje’s legacy as an enlightened being born from the mystical union of a ‘divine mother’ and an accomplished master.

The issue concludes with a contribution that leads us far from the Tibetan plateau and its Vajrayāna framework to explore the forms assumed by life writing in a different Buddhist setting. Sarah Shaw’s paper deals in fact with the emergence of a new tradition of auto/biographical compositions within Southern Buddhism, aimed at embodying and defining the ethos and lineage of the Forest Monastic tradition for an Anglophone audience. Shaw shares with the other contributions a concern for the identity construction of a self which is concurrently mundane and eternal—a transient bead in the eternal rosary of the lineage teachings. As the author informs us, starting from the twentieth century, the impact of modernity ‘effected a sea-change in the thinking of Southeast Asian Buddhists’, leading to the composition of an increasing number of biographies and autobiographies of locally renowned monks. Contrary to Tibet, where ‘the recording of [[[spiritual]]] achievements was not only to be approved, but actively promoted’, in Thailand, as in other Theravāda countries, the disclosure of meditative experiences was traditionally considered a minor offence to be avoided at all costs. The rationale behind the relatively recent emergence and popularity of life stories in both Thai and English language is ascribed by Shaw to the functional, and ultimately beneficial, role they play in diffusing the doctrine. Similarly to Tibetan namthar, these auto/biographical compositions narrate in fact an exemplary life, thus becoming ‘a means of translating Buddhist principle and practice through the medium of one person’s experience of pursuing the monastic way’. The resemblance with Tibetan hagiographies is even more evident in the case of Ajahn Mun, whose teachings and experiences were preserved by disciples through the composition of several life stories, all hinting at the master’s meditative prowess and accomplished nature. In discussing the following generations of the Forest Monastic tradition, Shaw shows the emergence of a new interest in autobiography as means of choice to communicate ‘not just individual histories, but also a kind of composite picture of a way of practice and how to undertake it’. As their Tibetan equivalents, these life stories present a strong edifying and didactic feature, as they show a path to enlightenment viable only to an ego shed of its own self.

All the contributions contained in The Selfless Ego I. Memory and Imagination in Tibetan Hagiographical Writing deal with forms of life writing—be it autobiographical or biographical in nature—set against a Buddhist backdrop and illuminate the role played by hagiographies, mystical songs, records of teachings or autobiographies in fashioning, adapting, and preserving lineage and convention whilst expressing a peculiar and unique authorial voice. The Selfless Ego II. Conjuring Tibetan Lives will cover secular forms of Tibetan life writing, presenting instances of memoirs, lyrics, poems, diaries, and Anglophone autobiographies as well as indigenous reflections on contemporary and mundane affairs.

Notes

1. Both events were organised in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Life Writing(OCLW) and the Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Cluster at Wolfson College, Oxford University.
2. For further reading on Tibetan literary genres and literary taxonomy see, among others,Smith (2001), Almogi (2005), and the volumes edited by Cabezón and Jackson (1996) and Rheingans (2015).
3. Tibetan rendition of the Sanskrit vimoksạ (‘liberation’), meant as release from earthly desires, the term namthar came to designate ‘biography’ in a broader sense.
4. The Buddha’s life story is a classic example of this kind of hagiography. Aśvaghosạ ’s Buddhacarita is an early example of what will develop to be a well-known pattern: although already ‘awakened’, the hero nevertheless goes through the motions of a journey to enlightenment as an example to others (Ary 2015, 39).
5. On the connection between Tibetan biography and autobiography, see Gyatso’s groundbreaking study Apparitions of the Self (1998), Chapter I in particular.
6. For detailed studies of female spiritual practitioners, see Havnevik (1998, 1999), Jacoby (2014), Gayley (2017) respectively. For further reading on women’s status in Tibetan society, see Gyatso and Havnevik (2005).
Acknowledgements
The Selfless Ego I & II would not have been possible without the financial and logistical support of the Academic Committee of Wolfson College (University of Oxford, UK) and the generous grants provided by the Oxford Centre for Life Writing (OCLW-TORCH), Ti se Foundation, Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Cluster, and Lingyin Foundation. We are extremely grateful to all our sponsors. We would like to extend our appreciation to the organisers of the first conference, Prof. Ulrike Roesler and Prof. Charles Ramble, and to the anonymous peer-reviewers who have contributed to this volume through their comments and suggestions.
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Lucia Galli
EPHE – PSL / CRCAO, Paris, France lubigalli@gmail.com
Franz Xaver Erhard
Institute for South and Central Asian Studies, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany f.erhard@uni-leipzig.de