Plain Words on the Mountain

Some stories about Guru Rinpoche are full of wonders: a birth on a lotus, spirits tamed on mountaintops, footprints pressed into rock. This one is quieter. It is about what he is remembered as saying when people simply asked him how to live.

Guru Rinpoche, "Precious Teacher," is the name Tibetans most often use for Padmasambhava, the master from Oddiyana who, the tradition says, helped the Buddha's teaching take root in Tibet in the eighth century.

A mountain full of caves

High above Samye, Tibet's first monastery, a side valley climbs to a steep slope of granite boulders and small caves. This is Chimphu. Rigpa Wiki notes that practitioners still stay there in long retreat today.

In his short guide to the place, the eighteenth-century master Jigme Lingpa writes that Guru Rinpoche stayed at Chimphu for two and a half years, teaching the disciples gathered around him. He names the caves on its slopes. One belonged to King Trisong Detsen, who had invited the Guru to Tibet. In another, he says, Yeshe Tsogyal practised for twelve years.

Yeshe Tsogyal was a young noblewoman of the Kharchen family who became Guru Rinpoche's closest disciple. In the tradition's memory she was also the one who asked the most questions, and who made sure the answers were not lost.

The questions of the Lady

Two books translated by Erik Pema Kunsang gather this kind of advice in English: Dakini Teachings, from 1989, and its companion, Advice from the Lotus-Born, from 1994. The foreword to the second says the teachings were spoken by Padmasambhava to his close disciples in Tibet, mostly in answer to questions from Lady Tsogyal.

Sometimes it was the king who asked. One chapter is called "Advice to Trisong Deutsen." Others carry plain titles, such as "Oral Advice on Practice," "A Spur Towards Spiritual Practice" and "Pointing the Staff at the Old Man."

According to the translator's prefaces, Tsogyal wrote his answers down in "dakini script," a secret coded writing. A dakini is a female embodiment of awakened wisdom, and Tsogyal herself is often called one. She then hid the writings as terma, treasure teachings, to be found centuries later by revealers called tertöns.

The preface to Dakini Teachings says this advice was revealed by Nyang Ral Nyima Özer in the twelfth century and again by Sangye Lingpa in the fourteenth. In places their versions are almost word for word the same.

The tradition's explanation is a tender one. In earlier lives, it says, both men had been present when Guru Rinpoche spoke. Nyang Ral had been King Trisong Detsen, and Sangye Lingpa had been one of the king's sons.

Almost every chapter, Kunsang notes, says the words were given for people of the future. In a sense, Tsogyal was writing for us.

One gentle note on dates. That same preface places Guru Rinpoche's stay in Tibet in the ninth century, while most accounts on this site speak of the eighth. The sources count the years differently, and nothing in the advice depends on it.

Not just words

The books' publisher, Rangjung Yeshe, sums up the heart of this advice: what we learn about the spiritual life has to become our own, and not stay a theory. On its page for Advice from the Lotus-Born it prints a single line of his: "Don't mistake mere words to be the meaning of the teachings."

The pieces of advice retold below come from other treasure texts of the same plain kind, which can be read freely in English on Lotsawa House. They are retold here in simple words. The books themselves are worth seeking out.

Like the sun in winter

A Garland of Vajra Gems is a short life of Guru Rinpoche that, the tradition says, Yeshe Tsogyal recorded and the nineteenth-century master Jamgön Kongtrul later revealed. Near the end of his years in Tibet, it tells, laymen and laywomen crowded around him, touching his feet to their heads and offering whatever they had.

He told them, in the Garland's telling, that a human life with the freedom and the chance to practise is as rare as the udumbara, a flower said to bloom only once in a very long while. And it does not last. It is like the sun on a winter day, which never stays long in the sky.

What we do now, good or bad, will ripen later, he said. So do good, and keep every thought close to the Dharma, the Buddha's teaching, without drifting. Then he named practices that are learned from a qualified teacher, and this page leaves them in a teacher's care.

It is plain advice, and it fits a short winter afternoon as well as a sleepless night. There is time, but not endless time.

Finer than flour

Lotsawa House keeps two lines attributed to Padmasambhava that Tibetan teachers often quote. His view, he says, is higher than the sky, yet his care for karma is "finer than grains of flour" (trans. Adam Pearcey).

Karma means action, and the way actions bring their results: kindness tends toward happiness, and harm toward suffering. The site's note on the lines says they are about respecting karma even while holding the highest view.

Think of roasted barley flour, tsampa, the everyday food of Tibet, running through the fingers in grains too small to count. One way to hear the lines is this: a great understanding is never a reason to be careless with small things, like a sharp word, a kept promise or a bowl of food shared.

People change the times

Another treasure, A Concise History of Orgyen Padma's Enlightened Deeds, was revealed at Chimphu itself by Orgyen Lingpa in the fourteenth century. Near its close a king of Tibet, whom the Guru addresses as Mutri Tsenpo, weeps and bows. He asks what will become of his family line and of the Tibetan people.

The answer is not comforting at first. In the text, the Guru foretells hard centuries of good and bad kings, armies and broken kingdoms. Then he says something that could have been said yesterday: "The times don't change themselves — it is people who change them" (Samye Translations). It is bad conduct, he says, that brings on dark times.

So his advice for dark times is simple. Turn to him in prayer by day and remember him at night. Keep the good of others in your heart. And be kind to all six kinds of living beings, the gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry spirits and hell-beings of the old Buddhist picture of the world, because every one of them, he says, has been our mother or father.

At the door

Both treasures end with Guru Rinpoche leaving Tibet for the south-west, a parting told on this site in "The Rakshasa Land." But first each of them makes the same homely promise. In the Garland he says that for any man or woman with faith in him, he has never gone away: "I sleep at their threshold" (Samye Translations). The Concise History says almost the same, that he sleeps at the door of all who have faith.

The Garland adds a practical word for those who would never meet him face to face. Honour the images and places that stand for awakened body, speech and mind, he says, and respect the sangha, the community of practitioners. Doing so, he says, is the same as making offerings to him.

It is striking how ordinary all of this is. Remember that life is short. Take care over small actions. Be kind to every creature. Do not wait for the times to mend themselves. Remember your teacher. None of it needs a cave on a mountain.

How to hear it

These are words the tradition places in Guru Rinpoche's mouth, gathered in treasure texts revealed between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Jacob Dalton, writing for the Treasury of Lives, notes how little is known of Padmasambhava as a historical person, and how his legend grew richly from about the twelfth century onward.

Believers hear the Guru himself, speaking through Tsogyal's pen. Either way, the advice stands on its own feet. This page passes it on as the tradition keeps it, with no promise of any particular result.