The Esoteric Community Tantra with The Illuminating Lamp

Volume I: Chapters 1–12

Great Vajradhara, Chandrakirti, John R. Campbell, Robert Thurman

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781949163179
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

A new presentation of Tantra with its most renownedcommentary by one of the foremost translator/scholar teams of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. This volume is a translation of the first twelve chapters of The Glorious Esoteric Community Great King of Tantras ( Sri Guhyasamaja Maha-tantra-raja ), along with the commentary called The Illuminating Lamp ( Pradipoddyotana-nama-tika ), a commentary in Sanskrit on this tantra by the seventh-century Buddhist intellectual and tantric scholar-adept Chandrakirti. Regarded by Indo-Tibetan tradition as the esoteric scripture wherein the Buddha revealed in greatest detail the actual psycho-physical process of his enlightenment, The Esoteric Community Tantra is a preeminent text of the class of scriptures known to Indian Buddhist scholar-adepts as great yoga tantra, and later to their Tibetan successors as unexcelled yoga tantra. The Illuminating Lamp presents a system of interpretive guidelines according to which the cryptic meanings of all tantras might be extracted in order to engage the ritual and yogic practices taught therein. Applying its interpretive strategies to the text of The Esoteric Community Tantra, The Illuminating Lamp articulates a synthetic, "vajra vehicle"( vajrayana ) discourse that locates tantric practices and ideals squarely within the cosmological and institutional frameworks of exoteric Mahayana Buddhism.

Part One

INTRODUCTIONS

The Vajra Hermeneutics of the Tradition of Ārya Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva

JOHN R.B. CAMPBELL

This volume is a translation of the first twelve chapters of the Great King of Tantras, The Glorious Esoteric Community Tantra (Śrī Guhyasamāja Mahā-Tantra-rāja, hereafter GST), along with the commentary called The Illuminating Lamp (Pradīpoddyotana-nāma-ṭīkā, hereafter PU), a commentary in Sanskrit on the former by the Buddhist intellectual and tantric scholar-practitioner Chandrakīrti in the second half of the first millennium CE. Regarded by Indo-Tibetan tradition as the esoteric scripture wherein the Buddha revealed the very psycho-physical process of his enlightenment, the GST is a preeminent text of the class of scriptures known to late first millennium CE Indian Buddhist writers as great yoga tantra (mahāyoga-tantra), and later to their Tibetan successors as unexcelled yoga tantra (*anuttarayoga-tantra). The PU presents a system of interpretive guidelines according to which the obscure meanings of the GST might be extracted in order to engage its ritual and yogic practices taught therein. Applying its interpretive strategies to the text of the GST, the PU articulates a synthetic, “vajra vehicle” (vajrayāna) discourse that locates tantric practices and ideals squarely within the cosmological and institutional frameworks of Mahayana Buddhism.

From the time Prince Siddhārtha went forth into homelessness and founded the monastic community, the ideal of “giving it all up for nirvana” was not only central to Indian Buddhist institutional structure but also a hallmark of its literary self-expression. From accounts of the Buddha’s former lives of austerity and self-sacrifice in avadāna and jātaka literature to the epic wanderings of the bodhisattvas in Mahayana sutras, the heroic tropes of worldly renunciation and emotional dispassion served to articulate core values of the monastic community in its canonical literature. However, the Buddhist mahāyoga tantras expanded the iconographic and literary representation of an increasingly crowded Buddhist pantheon to include celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas in erotic embrace, demonstrating the “great bliss” (mahāsukha) of their awakening (bodhi), while apparently advocating the transgressing of virtually all the most basic moral precepts of monastic and lay Buddhism as necessary on the accelerated path to complete awakening. In dramatic contrast to the abstinent mendicant and the tough-as-nails bodhisattva, the champions of these new scriptures and practice systems are represented in later hagiographic accounts as freewheeling and generally non-monastic adepts (siddha), the most celebrated among them having dropped out and gone forth (niryāna) from monastic life to seek enlightenment outside its supposedly rigid institutions and dry scholastic curricula.

The unexcelled yoga tantras thus represent a remarkable and startling addition to an ongoing — and apparently ever-expanding — process of Indian Buddhist text production in the second half of the first millennium CE. Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing scholarly interest in the great rise of Buddhist esotericism, long neglected in Buddhist studies. Matthew Kapstein has aptly observed how its radical and “dynamic vision of the Buddhist enlightenment . . . must be regarded as the last great creative movement within Indian Buddhism.”⁸ Indeed, the growing acceptance within segments of late first millennium Buddhist monasticism of practices foregrounding the indispensable role of the tantric master, initiation into a mandala, and the homologizing of sexual bliss with the bliss of awakening are among the most astonishing and poorly understood developments in post-Gupta Indian Buddhism.

A detailed commentary on the GST — itself regarded by the Indo-Tibetan tradition, it bears repeating, as a scripture revealing the psycho-physical process by which the Buddha attained enlightenment — the PU presents a system of interpretive guidelines of “seven ornaments” (saptālaṁkāra), interconnected strategies for extracting multivalent meaning from the “root” (mūla) scripture. In the concise style typical of classical Indian scientific treatise commentary, the PU begins with a highly technical yet lucid presentation of Chandrakīrti’s interpretive system, citing as doctrinal authority a set of revelatory “explanatory tantras” (vyākhyā/ākhyāna-tantra) delivered by the Buddha himself. The commentary goes on to assign to the statements of the GST multiple layers of simultaneous meaning appropriate to tantric practitioners at different levels of ritual and yogic expertise.

The PU seems to presuppose and even codify the acceptance within segments of the Buddhist educated community a complex set of advanced practices and symbolic systems seemingly at odds with normative Buddhist values and monastic codes of conduct. To judge by the pervasiveness of its distinctive terminology among tantric treatises in the Tibetan Tengyur, including six complete or nearly complete sub-commentaries of its own, undoubtedly it was widely known within learned circles in Buddhist India. From the time of its translation into Tibetan in the eleventh century, the PU had come to be regarded by many as a definitive presentation of hermeneutics for the unexcelled yoga tantras and as the foundation for studying and teaching the esoteric practice of “deity yoga” (devatā-yoga), through which a practitioner is said to be able not only to achieve liberation from suffering but also to actualize the “form bodies” (rūpa-kāya) of a fully enlightened buddha in a single lifetime. Its synthesis of Vajrayāna theories and aspirations within an exoteric Mahayana Buddhist path-structure is certainly characteristic of mainstream Buddhist orthopraxy by the time of such famous eleventh-century Indian monastic figures as Atisha Dīpaṅkarashrījñāna (c. 982–1054), Ratnākarashānti (fl. early eleventh century), and Abhayākaragupta (c. 1084–1126/1077–1119). As such, the PU is an exemplary work of Vajrayāna scholasticism and a key source-text for studying the momentous refashioning of North Indian monastic universities into centers of tantric practice and teaching, a trans-regional tantric Mahayana that came to typify much of Indian Buddhism from the second half of the first millennium until its institutional destruction in the early thirteenth century, and all Buddhism within the Tibetan cultural sphere afterward.

The Ārya Nāgārjuna School of the Guhyasamāja Interpretation

The author of the PU identifies himself with what has been called in English translation “the Nāgārjuna system” (Tib. ’phags lugs) of tantric exegesis and practice associated with Nālandā Monastery. The Tibetan shorthand is a coinage of early eleventh-century Tibetan intellectuals such as Gö Khugpa Hlaytsay (’gos khug pa blhas brtsas) and not attested in Indic sources. It reflects this Tibetan tantric tradition’s self-identification with the Centrist (madhyamaka) philosophical school of Ārya Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, whom the Tibetan scholar-practitioners considered the same persons as the tantric scholar-practitioners, authors of the Five Stages (Pañcakrama) and Lamp that Integrates the Practices (Caryāmelāpakapradīpa). This completely opposes the modern dating schemes, which consider that there must be two Ārya Nāgārjunas, two Āryadevas, two Chandrakīrtis, etc. The Tibetans call the two “Ārya” individuals “the noble (ārya) father and son” (’phags pa yab sras), considering the philosophical and tantric personages as very much the same, the Centrist philosophy being the basis of the tantric practice. By his claimed direct affiliation with them, Chandrakīrti aligns himself with this lineage of the famous Centrists/tantrics Ārya Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, and he himself also is understood by all Tibetan scholars to be the same author who wrote the seventh-century Lucid Exposition commentary on Nāgārjuna’s Wisdom: Centrist Root Verses. If the Tibetans are correct, this puts the date of the PU in the seventh century CE, centuries earlier than modern scholars assert. Since we cannot decide this here, we must bracket the dating controversies for the moment. However, we will refer to this particular tantric tradition as simply “the Nāgārjuna system” or “tradition” in order to dispel the implication that there is anything “ignoble” about any other system of interpretation.⁹

The earliest writings on the Nāgārjuna system in Tibet are those of Gö Khugpa Hlaytsay in the eleventh century, presumably around the same time as he revised the Tibetan translation done in the tenth century. The famous Tibetan translator Marpa Chökyi Lodrö (1012–1097) received lineages of GST practice from his teachers in Nepal but apparently not with the explicit nomenclature of the Noble (Nāgārjuna) system, although its content was definitely known to him. The Sakyapa hierarch Sönam Tsemo (1142–1182) wrote on the PU as part of his broader scholarship on “methods for explaining the tantras” (bshad thabs).¹⁰ The master scholar and editor of the Tibetan Tengyur, Butön Rinchendrup (1290–1364) wrote extensively on the Nāgārjuna system as well as the seven-ornament system.¹¹

Strongly influenced by Butön’s writing, Tsong Khapa (1357–1419) would by the end of his life position the literature and doctrines of the Nāgārjuna tradition of the GST alongside those of Dialecticist Centrism (prāsaṅgika-madhyamaka) as the centerpiece of his distinctive interpretation of Buddhist philosophy and practice, forming the doctrinal foundation for the Gelukpa order.¹² Tsong Khapa himself oversaw the production of the first books printed in Tibet at Ganden Monastery, none other than the GST and its PU commentary with his own extensive Annotations (ca. 1414) to the latter. According to the biography of Tsong Khapa by one of his chief disciples, Khedrup Jey, this printing project began late in the dog year (1418) and was completed in the pig year (1419), the year of the master’s passing.¹³ Tsong Khapa’s immediate successors in the early to mid-fifteenth century institutionalized the PU as the curricular foundation for esoteric studies in “tantric colleges” (sngags pa’i gwra tshang) of the monastic “seats” (gdan sa), the monastic universities of the Gelukpa order, with a curriculum modelled on what they understood to be that of the Indian monastic universities.¹⁴

The Seven Ornaments

The system of seven ornaments assigns to the statements of the GST multiple layers of simultaneous meaning appropriate to tantric practitioners at different levels of ritual and yogic expertise, aligning the entire tantric practice with non-tantric, Mahayana Buddhist practice and cosmology. In the concise style typical of classical Indian shastric commentary, the PU outlines hermeneutic categories that enable a tantric specialist to extract the root tantra’s encrypted, or “sealed” (mudrita) meanings, to align those with the esoteric practices detailed in the supplementary explanatory tantras and to apply these to the liturgical performances (sādhana) and psycho-physical yogas of the Nāgārjuna system. The seven ornaments thus describe both the ways in which the GST safeguards its meaning from inappropriate audiences as well as requires the hermeneutic system with which a qualified expert of the Nāgārjuna system can decode the meaning and practices of the GST as they have been purposefully distributed among the explanatory tantras, themselves also supposedly authored by Vajradhara Buddha.

Tsong Khapa wrote extensively on the Nāgārjuna system of interpretation and implementation of the GST. In his Annotations he provides an overview of the function and components of the famous seven-ornament system at the center of the PU and of the Nāgārjuna system exegesis. Tsong Khapa elucidates Chandrakīrti’s statement that the root tantra was deliberately encrypted by means of different types of linguistic expression alongside multiple levels of meaning for each statement of the GST. The rules of interpretation and implementation of the seven ornaments, mainly drawn from the Intuition Vajra Compendium explanatory tantra (JVS), are applicable also to all unexcelled yoga tantras other than the GST and can serve to disclose their inner meanings.

The ornaments themselves as presented in the first chapter of the PU are as follows:

1. Preliminaries (upodghāta): for locating the source context of the root and explanatory tantras.

2. Methods (nyāya): for engaging in both the exoteric and esoteric Buddhist paths of practice, modeled on the process by which the Buddha came to embody enlightenment. This ornament juxtaposes the narrative of Shākyamuni’s exoteric biography with the distinctive narrative of the practitioner’s esoteric enlightenment biography, aligning the dispassionate practice (virāgadharma) of the bodhisattva and the passionate practice (rāgadharma) of the vajrasattva as complementary procedures.

3. Parameters (koṭi) of explanation (upadeśa): refer to different kinds of speech used in the root tantra. These semantic levels are familiar from non-tantric Buddhist hermeneutics and general Indian theories of language, including interpretable meaning (neyārtha) and definitive meaning (nītārtha) statements.

4. Programs (naya) of interpretation (vyākhyā): systematize the gradual decoding of successively more profound levels of meaning encoded in the text (literal, symbolic, implicit, ultimate) corresponding to the needs of students at progressively more advanced stages of study and practice.

5. Teaching Environment: specifies which modes of exposition and levels of interpretation are appropriate to public (satravyākhyāna) versus individual instruction (śiṣyākhyāna). This ornament limits the teaching of the advanced perfection stage practices to confidential, contractual relationships between preceptor and student, ritualized by consecrations.

6. Typology of Five Types of Person (pañca pudgala): to be taught, progressing from barely competent but nonetheless entitled, up to the perfect disciple. The typology lines up with the context of instruction (whether or not someone needs to be restricted to public teachings) and therefore to the semantic level of the explanation and the nature of the practice appropriate to each.

7. The Ornament of the Performance (sā...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor-in-Chief Preface
• Abbreviations and Typographical Conventions
• Part One. Introductions
• Part Two. Annotated English Translation
• Glossaries
• Bibliographies
• Indexes
• Copyright