The concept of history in Tibet — at least since the 7th century, when King Songtsen Gampo ruled — is inextricably tied to Buddhism as a larger framework of Tibetan culture and identity. The very first works of Tibetan historiography — the Annals, the Chronicles, and the Testaments of Ba — are tellings of the Imperial Period, which would, in the later dissemination of Dharma in Tibet, be acknowledged as a historical genre in itself. In that capacity, these works would be broadly called rlo rgyus, which translates to “the year’s thread,” meaning simply “stories.”
Over time, these ‘stories’ evolved into many subgenres, each offering a unique perspective on Tibetan life and culture. There are the chos’ byung, or ‘Dharma Origins,’ which trace the arrival of the Dharma in different places. The khog dbubs, or ‘medical histories,’ which document the evolution of educational ideas related to the five traditional sciences. The rgyal rab, or ‘royal succession’ histories, which narrate the lineage of traditional householders and figures of power. And then there are the rnam thar, or ‘liberation stories,’ which depict the spiritual journeys of those who have attained enlightenment, serving as the closest thing to a hagiography in the Tibetan canon.
These liberation stories do not align with our academic standards of History with a capital H and, for some scholars, amount to no more than folklore. Giuseppe Tucci, the revered Italian Indologist, has said in a particularly acerbic fashion that “human events have nothing to do with these works, and how could they, being a vain flow of appearances in the motionless gleam of that void, never to be grasped, into which the experience of truth dissolves and annuls us?” (Tucci, 1999) In a work of prodigious scholarship, Dan Martin compiled a vast bibliography of Tibetan Histories from the late eighth century to the present, spanning many genres in minute detail. Except for a few works, he deliberately omits the rnam thar without further explanation. It seems self-evident that these works do not qualify as histories in the traditional sense.
Still, these stories are among the most popular and widespread works in Tibetan literature. Perhaps the most famous rnam thar is the story of the Yogi Milarepa, written by Tsangnyom Heruka, literally “Heruka the Madman.” The figure of Milarepa is itself a historical enigma, with much debate revolving around the most basic information about his life. Moreover, according to Tsangnyom Heruka’s account, Milarepa was not an ordinary human being — supernatural elements abound in an enlightenment trajectory permeated with mystical visions and realizations. He moves from killing several people using black magic to feats of unendurable physical effort, such as building enormous stone towers alone using his bare hands. The culmination of his practice grants him magical powers, such as flying and transforming his body into fire and water.
These fabulous accounts of real people’s lives raise significant questions—why would these biographers choose to present these figures like this? Does this result from naive obliviousness and wishful thinking regarding the desire to register someone’s legacy, or does it point to broader meanings within the metaphysical and ontological frameworks from which these stories sprout?
This “mythologization” of history is not strange to Buddhism — and is especially prevalent in Tibetan literature. The founding figure himself is the subject of biographies of enormously disparate styles and tones — some, particularly the most recent, modernized ones, attempt to present the Buddha as nothing more than an ordinary human being who transcended suffering through a set of skeptical, rational premises. In his celebrated version of the biography of the Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh, a leading voice of modern transmissions of Buddhist teachings, avoided including the many miracles often used in the sutras to embellish the Buddha’s life. He says the Buddha has advised his disciples not to waste time and energy acquiring or practicing supernatural powers, making these elements, thus, irrelevant to his account.
On the other side of the spectrum, let us pause a moment on this fragment of Tenzin Chogyel’s — a Bhutanese monk who lived in the 18th century and adherent of the Kagyu lineage, the same of the Yogi Milarepa — version of the Buddha’s biography in which he describes the moment of the Buddha’s birth:
“Mayadevi reached out with her right hand to grasp a branch of the tree. She looked up to the sky and yawned, and the Bodhisattva was born from her right side. She felt no pain. He was not dirty from the impurities of the womb, and he was fully dressed.A host of gods scattered flowers about as he was born. The gods Brahma and Indra received him in a celestial muslin wrap. Two feathered fans and a parasol appeared midair as the serpent kings Nanda and Upananda bathed him from the sky. He had lived in a many-storied palace within his mother’s womb. But Brahma now whisked it away so that it might be worshipped in his own world.” (Tenzin Chogyel, 2015)
When we start pondering the reasoning behind those mythical renditions, it is worth highlighting that Tibetan literature did not serve the same purpose as Western literature—particularly when considering our present understanding of what literature is and where it aims. Tibetan literary texts — preserved and read across generations as works of perceived value — were not the province of casual readers and independent scholars. Readership in Tibetan literary culture was significantly restricted — given that formal education was only available in monasteries and through tutelage by religious tutors, virtually everything written and read in Tibet was embedded within a larger religious framework. Therefore, reading in Tibet was part of a more extensive project — the ultimate goal of any given reader was to become enlightened. In that sense, we can consider that textual traditions in Tibet — despite overlapping with aesthetic, epistemic, and metaphysical themes — had a primarily soteriologic concern.
This soteriologic concern suffuses the very structure of the Tibetan textual tradition. The most famous account of the origin of the Tibetan language is Tonmi Sambotha’s quest to India. History tells that Songtsen Gampo, the first ruler of a triad of Three Dharma Kings, sent a group of ministers to India to develop a script capable of translating the Buddhist teachings into the language Tibetans, back then, only spoke. Tonmi Sambhota was the one who succeeded — he left the creation of the Tibetan script, grammar, and overall writing technique as his legacy. Tibetan written language itself, thus, had a soteriological, therefore moral, motivation designed exclusively to become a vehicle for the transmission of the means of liberation — the Buddhist teachings.
This tale of Tonmi populates Tibet’s most traditional historical literary genre, the Dharma Origins or chos ‘byung, and is a vital element of Tibetan historical identity. The seminal Dharma Origin tomes of both Butön Rinchen Drup (1290–1364) and Sakyapa Sönam Gyaltsen (1312-1375) narrate Tonmi’s journey as foundational for the transmission of the Dharma in Tibet. One thing to note, however, is that within Tibetan Historiography itself, this version of the conception of the Tibetan language has been challenged. The Bon interpretation of the origins of Tibetan script claims it is a ramification of a Zhang Zhung script. That account emphasizes that Zhang Zhung, with its widespread Bon religion, served as the cradle of Tibetan civilization (Bjerken, 2011). These two clashing versions illustrate how much Tibetan history often favors higher purposes that excuse any eventual notion of accuracy or objectivity. In Tibet, telling any story — the rlo rgyuds— is an act that bears significant moral and spiritual implications.
To localize this idea within the tradition of the rnam thar specifically, it is helpful to contextualize the Buddha’s biography and how it relates to a general notion of Buddhist Historiography. Although the Buddha’s biography would be the object of ultimate historical concern regarding Buddhism as a religious tradition, it is mainly, and once again, a theme of primary moral concern for Buddhist traditions worldwide. The life of the Buddha — be it in the modernized or mythological version — is the ultimate role model in an ethical system that relies vastly on modeling an ideal life as the quintessential moral practice. This moral concern is at the center of the mythologized accounts of the Buddha’s life and, most importantly, his biography in an extended sense.
The Buddha’s biography across all Buddhist traditions expands the concept of Buddha across time—beyond the lifetime of Siddharta Gautama. Frank Reynolds points to this by taking Theravada as his example, observing that Buddha’s history includes three interdependent and broadly overlapping components. The first component consists of mythic stories that antecede but are inextricably linked to the birth and life of the “historical” Buddha — the Jataka tales. The second component consists of accounts of events in Gotama’s life, from his descent from Tusita heaven, his birth, to his Enlightenment at Bodhgaya and his death at Kusinârâ. The third consists of stories that recount the fate of his teachings and his relics, often in the context of sacred historiographies composed by a particular segment of the Buddhist community. (in Schober, 2002) Juliane Schober highlights that Reynolds’ outline shows how these historical accounts have been used to establish the continued existence of the Buddha and ultimately serve to legitimize religious and civil institutions and practices throughout Buddhist history. In that sense, we can conclude that Buddhist historiography is a continuation of the biography of the Buddha after his passing. Thus, the Jataka tales work as the Buddha’s biography extended to the past, and the sangha’s historiographies as the Buddha’s biography extended to the future.
Using this framework to approach the textual genre of the rnam thar raises intriguing questions—what are the Tibetan spiritual biographies pointing towards regarding their positionality in a broader scheme of tradition and spiritual legitimacy?
James Burnell Robinson describes the complex nature of rnam thar as historical documents in two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. At the vertical axis, there is mythology. Within that dimension, we come across saintly figures who embody transcendental qualities inside human potential, thus serving as religious role models and figures of inspiration. At the horizontal axis, there is history. In it, we ground the sequence of spiritual events through historicity anchors that bind together spiritual achievements and everyday life. In his words, “This genre derives its value not just from doctrine but also from its affirmation of the sacred in the process of history in which we all live.” (in Lhundup et al., 1996) His account is helpful when considering these two threads as components of a single string. The understanding of continuous string that binds together several beads — spiritual masters, calendar years, kingdoms, and feuds — is at the heart of the tantric tradition and illustrates the religious significance of the rnam thar.
Once again, Milarepa’s biography might be an illustrative instance that helps address that theme. Tsangnyom Heruka, who authored both this biography and that from Milarepa’s teacher, Marpa, emphasized a significant, albeit controversial fact in both works. In his introductory remarks on the Life of Milarepa, Professor Donald S. Lopez Jr. observes that Marpa never met Naropa, from whom he supposedly received the teachings that would later constitute the Kagyu lineage. He says that “by the time he [Marpa] made his first trip to India, Naropa had already died; Marpa studied instead with some of Naropa’s direct disciples. Works by Marpa’s contemporaries make it clear that he never pretended to have studied with Naropa.” (in Tsangnyön Heruka, 2010)
Why does the connection between these two masters—Naropa and Marpa—matter? It seals the authenticity and authority of lineage, an unbroken continuation of teacher and student that extends across the centuries, culminating at the pure source, the Buddha himself. This preoccupation with lineage is central to the comprehension of time within Tibetan Buddhist culture and, therefore, saturates any potential conception of history. The overlap between history and lineage is so evident that, again, the term itself — rlo rgyus, the years’ thread — has a variant of the word lineage contained in it, rgyus, here translated as “thread.”
In the Vajrayana, the tantric method which flourished in Tibet, the importance of lineage is paramount. Among the many contemplative and visualization techniques in the tantra, Guru Yoga is arguably the most important, emphasized in virtually all traditional schools, particularly in the Milarepa’s Kagyu. The essential outline of the practice involves visualizing one’s teacher as an enlightened being transferring their blessings to the practitioner. This visualization happens in a larger framework of a lineage tree in which one dissolves an entire lineage of masters from the Buddha to one’s teacher, who finally dissolves into oneself.
The implications are clear — by visualizing one’s teacher as the fruition of a lineage of blessings, we are taking part in a succession previously performed by our teacher, and then by our teacher’s teacher, and so on until the Buddha. The concept of blessings here takes, thus, an instrumental role. It is a pathway through which the enlightened seed of the Buddha can pass on — only by adhering to a lineage can we actualize enlightenment, which passes from one person to the other like a flame that passes across candles and that cannot be realized otherwise as the genes of a bloodline can only spread by genetic inheritance.
In that context, just as Buddhist Historiographies are branches in the ongoing biography of the Buddha, extending the Buddha’s identity across several generations, the spiritual biographies in Tibet are transmissions of a lineage of blessings, embodying a sequence of enlightened beings culminating in the biography’s subject. The genre’s name itself is telling—rnam thar means “complete liberation,” suggesting that the subjects’ lives carry the very goal of the Buddhist soteriological path in their extension. In that sense, the rnam thar tells a history that does not unfold through physical time but through spiritual lineage. History is told through lineage, the only viable pathway toward complete liberation.
Moreover, like the best biographies of our time, these centuries-old spiritual tales aim to propel us into acting upon the world, acknowledging the often underestimated fact that a significant part of our moral lives resides in modeling ourselves after the ones we admire. Contrary to the orthodox records we expect to find in academic historiographies, which aim at generalist and all-encompassing observations about the past, moral histories, such as the rnam thar, acknowledge and indulge in the remarkably personal nature of why humans tell and preserve their stories.
Reference list
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