Abstract
Mahāmudrā—an Indo-Tibetan phenomenon of Buddhist spirituality—constitutes in its systematic presentation a path that maps out the mystical quest for direct experience of ultimate reality. Despite the post-15th century bKa’-brgyud attempts at a codified Mahāmudrā genealogy, the early Tibetan sources speak little with regards to how the different Indian Mahāmudrā threads made their way over the Himalayas. To fill this gap, the article investigates, via philological and historical approaches, the lineage accounts in the 12th-century Xixia Mahāmudrā materials against the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist landscape. Three transmission lines are detected. Among them, two lines are attested by later Tibetan historiographical accounts about Mahāmudrā, and thus belong to an Indo-Tibetan continuum of the constructed Buddhist yogic past based upon historical realities—at least as understood by Tibetans of the time. The third one is more of a collage patching together different claims to spiritual legacy and religious authority—be they historically based or introspectively projected. Not only does the Mahāmudrā topography, jointly fueled by these three transmissions, reveal the Xixia recognition and imagination of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist legacies, it also captures the complexities of the multi-faceted picture of Mahāmudrā on its way over the Himalayas during the 11th/12th century.
Highlights
Mahāmudrā (Great Seal) constitutes in its mature and systematic presentation a Buddhist path that maps out the mystical quest for direct experience of ultimate reality
A topic of analysis rhetorically detached from—yet practically indebted to—the tantric matrices, Mahāmudrā came to be received in the Buddhist siddha environment as a gnostic index of ultimacy defined by the luminous nature of the mind
In Roger Jackson’s terms, mahāmudrā “had become a crucial Buddhist term that could describe the nature of reality and of the mind, a ritual or meditative procedure for seeing the nature, and the enlightenment ensuing from that realization.” (Jackson 2005, p. 5597)
Summary
Mahāmudrā (Great Seal) constitutes in its mature and systematic presentation a Buddhist path that maps out the mystical quest for direct experience of ultimate reality. Of the three Mahāmudrā strands already present in sGam-po-pa’s collected works,[1] only the tantric Mahāmudrā lineage was emphasized at the start of the bKa’-brgyud institution. Despite the post-15th century attempts at a codified Mahāmudrā genealogy, the extant early bKa’-brgyud materials remain vague with regards to their specific transmissions—that is, how each Indian thread made its way over the Himalayas and tangled with each other. To fill this gap, the article investigates the Mahāmudrā lineage accounts preserved in the Xixia Buddhist literature pertaining to the Tibetan subject matter,[4] a corpus of Tangut and Chinese texts which constitutes a. The Mahāmudrā lineages contained in the Xixia materials sheds new light on the Tibetan recognition of the Saraha-Maitrıpa branch in that it presents a case as early as the 12th century
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