Although many texts can be examined in order to understand the history of the rNgog, they are largely derived from two texts, called “rosaries,” and especially from the earlier one (ST1), which is the source of the second (ST2).68 The first lines of ST1 read as follows:69
68 The texts themselves are presented in section I.1.3.1.
69 ST1, 2: bla ma rngog pa yab sras rim par byon pa’i rnam thar rin po che’i rgyan gyi phreng ba bzhugs pa yin no// bka’ brgyud kyi bla ma rnams la phyag ’tshal lo rje btsun dpal ldan rngog pa yi/ mi rgyud chos rgyud rim pa dang/ chos kyi zhus tshul btsaṁs tshul sogs/ lo rgyus zur tsam bri bar bya/ ST2, 26 reads the same with gdung rgyud instead of mi brgyud. In further quotes of ST1, the reader may refer directly to the the Tibetan version in Appendix 1.
Rosary of Precious Ornaments – Hagiographies of the Successive rNgog pa Masters, Fathers and Sons
I pay homage to the bKa’ brgyud masters!
I will write briefly the story
Of the venerable and glorious rNgog pas:
Their successive human and religious lines
And the way they received and composed teachings, among other things.
What is the meaning, here and more broadly, of the words “hagiography” (rnam thar),
“rosary” (phreng ba), “history” (lo rgyus), and “religious history” (chos ’byung)—although the latter is not used in the quote? In order to address this question, I will begin by briefly discussing the terms “biography” and “hagiography” in Western literature, and then compare these with various forms of historiography in a Tibetan framework. This topic was already the subject of considerable attention.70 What follows should therefore be understood as the framing of the documents contained in this work rather than a systematic study of any of these genres.
Biography and hagiography as a source for historical studies
According to François Dosse,71 author of Le pari biographique and specialist of French intellectual history, until the modern period, biography had essentially a function of identification. It was a discourse of virtue, transmitting values—heroic during the Antiquity and religious during the Christian era—to future generations. In the late 18th century, there was a shift in the regime of historicity: the modern man and historian, instead of turning towards the past in order to learn from the experience of others and prepare the future, shifted towards “progress,” a future envisioned as completely different from tradition. With the development of sociology in the early 20th century, social scientists (the sociologist Simiand, followed by the historians of the Annales, and many others) rejected the old idols:
chronology, politics, and biography. Structuralism and post-modernism further relegated the individual in the background, and biography was in general considered a minor genre for amateurs, not one fit for historiography. In the mid-80s, however, there was a renewed interest in “actors;” great paradigms lost their structuring power and biography regained favour, with a shift of interest towards singularity, small people, and day-to-day life.
Hagiography is a specific kind of biography, the biography of a saint, which “intends primarily to engender, propagate, strengthen, etc. the cult of a saint.”72 The reception of
70 For instance, Gyatso 1998 and Quintman 2014. I analyze the question in more depth in Ducher 2017, 23-38, and consider the present essay as an expansion of that.
71 Dosse 2005 (not translated). This is an intellectual history of the biographical genre. Dosse is a specialist of several French intellectuals such as Ricoeur, Certeau, Deleuze, etc. The view summarized here is expressed at the beginning of chapters two “The Heroic Age,” three “The Modal Biography” and four “The Hermeneutic Age,” as well as in the conclusion and in his short article, “Biographies, prosopographie” (Dosse 2010).
72 Delehaye 1906, xiii and 2. Quoted by Lifshitz 1994, 96. See Ducher 2017, 27-32 for a more detailed study of the question of hagiography. Hippolyte Delehaye (1859-1941) was a Belgian Jesuit.
“hagiography” in Tibetology, Buddhology and, more largely, Western historiography follows to some extent the same lines as that of biography, with until three decades ago an even stronger rejection because of its association with religion and its emphasis on being a model of virtue. Until then, in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, the life stories of saints were seen as unsatisfying but unavoidable sources of data mining,73 as indeed there is little else to rely on in order to understand Tibet’s premodern history. After having rejected them, however, scholars adopted a more conciliatory approach, one that does not aim at historical objectivity but tries to understand how each text represents a specific period and milieu. As Guy Philippart notes in his introduction to the Histoire internationale de la littérature hagiographique latine et vernaculaire en Occident des origines à 1550, it is not the personas of the saints, the world in which they lived, or the cults that developed around their memory that are at the center of the study of hagiographic traditions, but the texts, their narratives, their internal dynamics, as well as the hagiographers themselves.74 My study of Mar pa’s biographies illustrates this approach. In Chapter Two of that work, I offer a study of the saint’s hagiographical tradition, which is composed of more than thirty hagiographies and, in particular, I problematize the process of biographical construction, seeing each text as an object of investigation rather than as a mere source of historical information.75
Hagiography has been reimagined because, in large part, the subject matter was no longer approached entirely in terms of historical vericity (e.g. whether the narrative was “true” vs.
“false”). As expressed by Michel de Certeau, it is vain to consider hagiography from the angle of historical truth because it has a practical efficiency and should be taken as social documents that represent a religious community:76
Il est impossible […] de ne considérer [l’hagiographie] qu’en fonction de l’« authenticité » ou de la « valeur historique » : ce serait soumettre un genre littéraire à la loi d’un autre – l’historiographie – et démanteler un type propre de discours pour n’en retenir que ce qu’il n’est pas. […] La combinaison des actes, des lieux et des thèmes indique une structure propre qui se réfère non pas essentiellement à « ce qui s’est passé », comme le fait l’histoire, mais à « ce qui est exemplaire ».
Hence, if we are to follow this lead, biography is not a genre to be discarded because actors can tell us a great deal about society in general. Similarly, hagiography, especially in a religious world such as Tibet, can inform our knowledge of the networks and social forces that shaped its cultural history. It is with this in mind that I approach the texts which discuss the rNgog. I do this with two goals: first, the rNgog history itself is largely unknown, and a
73 A famous remark exemplifying that positivist approach to biography is that of Tucci in Tibetan Painted Scrolls (Tucci 1949, 151): “[…] an historian cannot ignore the rnam t’ar. He must resign himself to read them, and go through hundreds of pages to find a point of reference, an allusion, an important piece of information; he must be resigned […] because with the exception of a few lives, noble masterpieces breathing a fresh, serene and robust poetic spirit, as for instance, Milarepa’s, these Legenda aurea are mostly cast in the same mould […]”
74 Philippart 1994, 9, quoted in Rondolino 2015, 165.
75 Ducher 2017. See also Quintman 2014 who did a similar study for Mi la ras pa’s lifestories that culminated in the masterpiece of Tibetan hagiography, Mi la ras pa’s biography by gTsang smyon.
76 Certeau 2011, 317. See the remarks of Dosse 2005, 150-151, on the subject.
special effort must be made to assemble the various sources dealing with the subject. Second, the rNgog, like Mar pa and his other disciples Mes ston and mTshur ston, were representative of a kind of network widespread in the first half of the second millennium, the family lineage.
They were religious specialists who handed down their religious capital within their families.
By studying their hagiographies and extracting from them the details that point to daily life in Tibet, it might be possible, at a larger scale and with other such case-studies, to understand more finely how this model worked, and how it evolved over time. Chapter I.3 offers such an analysis of rNgog biographies as social documents. Part II examines in more detail the various phases of the rNgog pa lineage by bringing together all data available, and reconstructing some of the important aspects of their lives (ancestors, family lines, monasteries, masters, disciples, etc.).
“Rosary”
Further on, Certeau underlines the fact that the life of a saint is inscribed in the life of a community. He distinguishes two movements in hagiography, which seem to be contrary but that complement one another. On the one hand, an existing community sets a distance with its origins by creating a representation of it. On the other hand, that representation is like a return to the origins that reconstitutes a unity at a time when there is a risk of dispersion because of the spread of the community. Thus, memory (an object whose construction is linked to the disappearing of beginnings) combines with the creation of an image intended to protect the group against its dispersion.77
This understanding of hagiography as a representation uniting a community in a common memory of its past is particularly useful when defining the term “rosary,” which is not a literary genre per se but refer to specific kinds of hagiographical writing in Tibet. The Tibetan word used is phreng ba, which more literally refers to a series, or a succession of things, and is derived from the verb ’brang, “to follow one another.”78 For example, a yig phreng is a line of writing, made up of many letters (yi ge) and a sku phreng is a series of incarnations of the same master through time. The word phreng ba is generally understood as a rosary (a mala), that is to say a series of ornaments (pearls made up of precious stones or gold) strung on a thread. The image, in a hagiographical framework, is that of a series of lifestories of the successive saints of a lineage, and when I use this word in the present study, it should be understood to refer to “a series of hagiographies.” In this series, there is a continuous thread (the blessing of the lineage’s transmission) which links otherwise loose pearls (the saints), thus forming a rosary (a lineage). At one point in history, one of the disciples of the tradition records a series of life-stories of the saints who transmitted a specific teaching from its origin
77 Certeau 2011, 320-321: “La vie de saint s’inscrit dans la vie d’un groupe, Église ou communauté. Elle suppose que le groupe a déjà une existence. […] la « vie de saint » articule deux mouvements apparemment contraires.
Elle assure une distance par rapport aux origines (une communauté déjà constituée se distingue de son passé grâce à l’écart que constitue la représentation de ce passé). Mais par ailleurs un retour aux origines permet de reconstituer une unité au moment où, en se développant, le groupe risque de se disperser. Ainsi, le souvenir (objet dont la construction est liée à la disparition des commencements) se combine à l’« édification » productrice d’une image destinée à protéger le groupe contre sa dispersion.”
78 Bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo, 2: 1987: rjes su ’gro ba dang/ snyeg pa’am/ ’jug pa.
until his own time and that of his co-disciples. When doing that, he creates a distance with their past: indeed, just like hagiographies of a single individual are generally composed after that individual’s death, rosaries of lives only include the life-stories of past masters, generally up to the author’s own master when he is dead. The Rosaries follow that trend, although the names of living family heirs are mentioned in passing. That distance with past members of the lineage unites present members in a common memory, in a common representation of who they are, what they do, and what differentiates them from other communities.
In the history of Tibetan literature, the expression “golden rosary” (gser phreng) is used frequently for collective biographies, and we could perhaps draw a parallel with the Golden Legend, a collection of life-stories of Christian saints written in the 13th c. by Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1229-1298), where the word “legend” does not refer to something that is untrue, but something that is “to be read” during masses or by individuals.79 Just as the Legenda aurea is said to be golden because it is precious like gold, golden rosaries are collections of precious lives. Although the word “golden rosary” is often used, a rosary is not necessarily
“golden;” it can be of various precious materials, gold, but also lapis, ruby, crystal, etc. The most famous “golden rosary” is the transmission of mahāmudrā within the Karma bka’
brgyud lineage. In that case, the term can refer to compilations of biographies of the Karma bka’ brgyud lineage, but also to the concrete succession of saints who transmitted and realized a specific teaching, mahāmudrā, hence, a “golden rosary” is not necessarily written.
Furthermore, the term is not restricted to the bKa’ brgyud lineages, as is generally perceived.
One finds writings with this title in all lineages, for instance rNying ma80 and bKa’ gdams (the sNar thang gser phreng), carrying the idea of a sequence of episodes, or a sequence of life-stories. Thus, the term “rosary,” and more specifically “golden rosary,” although it became more specifically associated with the bKa’ brgyud lineages,81 has a wide range of uses. It nonetheless generally means that there is a series of life-stories, hence that it is a diachronic account.
79 Dosse 2005, 153-156. François Dosse says that “A priori, la légende s’oppose radicalement à l’histoire, mais l’étymologie du terme légende rapproche des deux domaines puisque le légendaire renvoie à « ce qui est à lire ».” See Boureau 1984.
80 A treasure biography of Padmasambhava revealed by Sangs rgyas gling pa in the late 1300s is called the bKa’
thang gser phreng (see Doney 2016). It tells the stories of Padamasambhava and masters such as Vairocana, Nam mkha’i snying po, Vimalamitra and Śāntarakṣita, but these narratives (also found in the Padma bka’ thang) are expanded versions of the Zangs gling ma accounts, and do not form a lineage such that they could be likened to beads of gold on a rosary, like in the other cases. They are more like the sparks drawn in and emanated by the
“lightning rod’ Padmasambhava (see Germano 2002). Thanks to Lewis Doney for the references.
81 Smith 2001, 39: “Probably intended to explain a bla brgyud gsol ’debs, the reverential petition to the successive gurus in a transmission lineage of an esoteric teaching, such collections of hagiographic writing often enshrine some of the most cherished instructions (man ngag) of a tradition. These gser ’phreng, like biographies of individual lamas, can also serve as some of our most reliable sources of historical data. It is probable that the gser ’phreng originated among the ’Brug pa and Stag lung traditions within which bla mchod (gurupuja) and rnam thar reached their highest degree of elaboration as liturgical and contemplative practices.” As demonstrated by the circumstantiated phrasing of Gene Smith, the genre of rosary deserves a more thorough study.
“Diachronic” has a parallel in the word “synchronic.” These are linguistic terms developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20th c. A diachronic study considers the history of something (generally a language), the way it developed in time, vertically. A synchronic approach, on the contrary, considers its present complexity, horizontally, without consideration for its history. In general, biographies and hagiographies consider the life of one individual synchronically, by taking into account the events of his life as unfolding in space, in relation to his contemporary masters and disciples, and they have a stronger emphasis on edification. One could argue that rosaries, for their part, study a lineage through time, and focus more strongly on the history of the lineage. An individual is seen as a link in a chain of saints who received and transmitted a given teaching. He is valued not for himself but as an element of a whole which unfolds in time. In this sense, the rNgog Rosaries thus deal with the history of a series of individuals who followed each other in time and are considered restrospectively, thus have a more diachronic perspective.
Rosaries in general are religious works, that is to say that they describe the successive lives of religious masters and disciples. The Rosaries for their part relate both the human and the religious lines of rNgog pa masters (mi rgyud chos rgyud), hence are in some way akin to the genre of gdung rabs, “genealogy,” that relate more specically the life-stories of individuals of the same family. Because of the close connection between religion and family in Central Tibet at the period we are interested in (11th-15th c), the two often coincide, which is the case in the Rosaries that relate both the religious ancestry of the rNgog (Mar pa, his family and his religious masters) and their own family ancestry. This is in no way limited to the rNgog, as many other families were also religious lineages,82 but as will be argued later, it may be significant that the rNgog accounts are called rosaries and not genealogies. With regards to the way hagiography uses the glorious ancestry of an individual, Jonathan Samuels states:83
Authors through the ages seldom neglected the opportunity to advertise a subject’s eminent ancestry. Whether or not the information provided is of a genealogical nature (describing specific lineages or lines of succession), the overwhelming sense is that the discussion of ancestry is there to support the notion that the protagonist’s path to greatness was predetermined. Significant forebears were not necessarily religious figures. Descent from those of high status and “worldly” achievement (political or even military) were treated by many as guarantors of eventual spiritual preeminence.
With regards to the distinction between diachronic and synchronic, one can wonder whether there is a significant difference between “rosary” (that is to say “successive hagiography”) and “hagiography,” understood as the biography of a single saint. To answer this question, one must first take into account that there are several types of “rosaries.” Some rosaries can be made up of several distinct hagiographies. In that case, the style of the two is not so different although there can be a difference in length. In the case of Mar pa’s life-stories for instance,84
82 See for instance the Sa skya gdung rabs that relates the history of the Sa skya lineage and the ’Khon family.
83 Samuels 2016, 300-301.
84 Ducher 2017, 24-26. See Ibid., 24, n. 25 for references about these genres of historical writing, especially van der Kuijp 1996, 42–47.
many hagiographies become parts of longer collections compiled by one or several authors and that are eventually called “rosaries” although they may not have been called so in the beginning. Some hagiographies are authored as free-standing texts and are circulated on their own, or together with others thus creating a giant rosary (a case in point is that of Mar pa’s biography by gTsang smyon, which together with the other biographies of the early bKa’
brgyud saints authored by gTsang smyon’s school formed a large rosary which became a classic of religious reading).85 In the case of free-standing texts, the biographies are generally longer and more detailed. Biographies that are from the beginning conceived as part of a rosary, on the other hand, are more archetypal. In Mar pa’s case, a good example is the collection compiled by rGyal thang pa bDe chen rdo rje (13th c.), which runs until the ’Brug
brgyud saints authored by gTsang smyon’s school formed a large rosary which became a classic of religious reading).85 In the case of free-standing texts, the biographies are generally longer and more detailed. Biographies that are from the beginning conceived as part of a rosary, on the other hand, are more archetypal. In Mar pa’s case, a good example is the collection compiled by rGyal thang pa bDe chen rdo rje (13th c.), which runs until the ’Brug