Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Padmasambhava (732 AD) & Chakdara, Pakistan

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"Padmasambhava is said to have been born in a village near the present day town of Chakdara in Lower Dir District, which was then a part of Oddiyana."....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_in_Pakistan

Guru Pema Gyalpo (Skt. Padmaraja; Tib. གུ་རུ་པདྨ་རྒྱལ་པོ་, Wyl. gu ru pad+ma rgyal po; Eng. 'Lotus King') — one of the Eight Manifestations of Guru Rinpoche. In this form, Guru Rinpoche is depicted as a young prince with his left leg folded in his lap and his right leg extended and set on a lotus, ready to act; with his right hand he plays the damaru and with his left hand, he displays a mirror......Guru Rinpoche remained in Oddiyana for thirteen years to teach, as a result of which the king, queen and many others attained realization and the rainbow body. Then he was known as Pema Gyalpo, 'The Lotus King'.

“All roads lead to Balkh,” uttered Gurdjieff, referring to the Sufic origin of all systems. Yesai Narai writes, “Balkh is the town often associated with Padmasambhava, and Rabia and Rumi as well. Although Padmasambhava is usually thought to be Indian, it is possible that he is from the Afghanistan region also associated with his name.”......http://home.earthlink.net/~drmljg/id17.html

Padmasambhava....The site of His Holiness the Karmapa wrote, “If born in the year 732, then he would have been 54 years of age when he made the difficult journey into the Land of Snow” - a moment in history that denotes the first coming of Buddhism to the Himalayan region. Furthermore, “One may conclude that a major reason for so many Indian Buddhist sages coming to Central Tibet from Kashmir, and notably, the famous Padmasambhava from Uddiyana (Bactria), was the simple fact that Tibet then ruled much of this region. Nothing is really reported concerning Padmasambhava’s life in Kashmir. He lived, some say, with wandering yogis and sadhus, in exile from his homeland. Others report that it was during this period that he acquired knowledge and skill in various crafts. In Kashmir he earned the name Sthiramati, ‘the Youthful Genius.’

Kashmir Shaivism was a householder religion based on a strong monistic interpretation of the Bhairava Tantras (and its subcategory the Kaula Tantras), which were tantras written by the Kapalikas.

The Kāpālika tradition was a non-Puranic, tantric form of Shaivism in India, whose members wrote the Bhairava Tantras, including the subdivision called the Kaula Tantras. These groups are generally known as Kāpālikas, the "skull-men," so called because, like the Lākula Pāsupata, they carried a skull-topped staff (khatvanga) and cranium begging bowl. Unlike the respectable Brahmin householder of the Shaiva Siddhanta, the Kāpālika ascetic imitated his ferocious deity, and covered himself in the ashes from the cremation ground, and propitated his gods with the impure substances of blood, meat, alcohol, and sexual fluids from intercourse unconstrained by caste restrictions. The Kāpālikas thus flaunted impurity rules and went against Vedic injunctions. The aim was power through evoking deities, especially goddesses.

The early Buddhist tantric yogins and yoginis adopted the same goddess or dakini attributes of the kapalikas. These attributes consisted of; bone ornaments, an animal skin loincloth, marks of human ash, a skull-cup, damaru, flaying knife, thighbone trumpet, and the skull-topped tantric staff or khatvanga.

"There is also a tradition that Dzogchen,and Padmasambhava, come from a place called Oddiyana in Shamballa. Texts from this same Tun huang site identify Oddiyana as "Shamis en Balkh" in modern day Balkh, Afghanistan where many ruins, Buddhist stupas and monasteries exist. This is the town oft associated with Padmasambhava, and Rabia and Rumi as well. Although Padmasambhava is usually thought to be Indian, it is possible that he is from the Afghanistan region also associated with his name.

Elevated/raised is Persian bala and sham is Persian candle. ...CANDLE (Pers.-Ar. šamʿ). The Arabic word (Ar. also šamaʿ) literally means “beeswax” (Ebn Manẓūr; Dehḵodā), for which Persian uses mūm (Dehḵodā, Moʾīn, s.v.).

Padmasambhava reawakened a particular fusion of Manichaeism and Buddhism in the 8th century in Tibet. This revived synthesis became known as Vajrayana or Thunderbolt. The highest vehicle of Buddhism, also known as the Third Vehicle, is Vajrayana....http://home.earthlink.net/~drmljg/id17.html

"There is also a tradition that Dzogchen, and Padmasambhava, come from a place called Oddiyana in Shamballa. Texts from the archeological site in Dunhuang identify Oddiyana as Shamis en Balkh in modern day Balkh, Afghanistan where many ruins, Buddhist stupas and monasteries exist.....the Tun huang and Central Asian Buddhist texts recovered by Emmerich and discussed by snellgrove."

"Both Bon and Nyingmapa sources affirm, that Dzog chen comes to Tibet from the northwest - from a persiansource (repeated in earlier Nyingmapa sources but affirmed by the great 19 century Nyingmapa scholar and practitioner, Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye) and from Oddiyana in Shambhalla (the Tun huang and Central Asian Buddhist texts recovered by Emmerich and discussed by snellgrove and taught as part of recovered Buddhist history in Dharmasala identify this region as "Shamis en Balkh" - modern day Balkh in Afghanistan where ruins of many Buddhist stupas and monasteries still exist). Tun huang sources also show that a possible Bon is the pudgalavadin version of Buddhism coming into Tibet BEFORE orthodox versions make it in. The Nyingmapas, as also affirmed by Kongtrul and Longchenpo, split off from the Bon when the new translations begin in Tibet. Western scholarship tended to disbelieve this until documentation from original sources and contemporary with the time were found to substantiate it. As the other Tibetan Buddhist lineages have always suspected, Dzog chen is not quite orthodox Buddhism but a heterodox form of it. But whether or not Dzog chen was originally non-Buddhist altogether, heterodox Buddhist Bon or pudgalavadin or whatever). Since nothing in Tibet matches HPB yet nothing in India matches her views either, again, what is the objection to looking in Central Asia except those interested lack the academic or secondhand competence to intelligently look there? Tibetan is an equivocal term. It could mean linguistic, racial, religious, political, or geographical. Tibet had colonies. Some are still under the Dalai lama: Bhutan, Mustang. Neither Buddhism nr Bon exhaust the religious landscape there. HPB says it is northern source and esoteric."....The Blavatsky/Tibet and Stanzas of Dzyan Connection.....by Grigor V. Ananikian

Padmasambhava's birth. It is commonly stated that he was miraculously born from a lotus-flower on Dhanakosha lake in Uddiyana. (Lake Danakosha located on the Afganistan-Pakistan frontier on the river Sindhu (Sita), one of the four great rivers that springs from the four directions of Kailash mountain, flows towards the Western Land of Odiyana..."

"ZANG DOK PAL GYI RI WOR KYE WAR SHOK ...... May I be born at the Glorious Copper-Colored Mountain....May I be born in the realm of the Glorious Copper Colored Mountain......Atop a beautiful mountain of ruby......Is the jewel dome and levels of the celestial palace,

Tirich Mir is the highest mountain of the Hindu Kush range, and the highest mountain in the world outside of the Himalaya-Karakoram range, located in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, and close to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Tirich Mir overlooks Chitral.

HINDU KUSH..."The world mountain, sometimes identified with the Hindu Kus, whose substance was ruby"...(Campbell:1968..pg 203)...The Hindu Kush (Pashto/Persian/Urdu: ھندوکُش), also known as Pāriyātra Parvata (Sanskrit: पारियात्र पर्वत) or Paropamisadae (Greek: Παροπαμισάδαι), is an 800 km (500 mi) long mountain range that stretches between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. The highest point in the Hindu Kush is Tirich Mir (7,708 m or 25,289 ft) in Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan......

"The similarities of Bon to Nyingma, once thought to have been borrowed after Padmasambhava's time, is now seen by the most astute scholars to be signs of their mutual antiquity in the pre-Padmasambhava landscape of central Asia."....

"It has also been asserted by some scholars that Padmasambhava, although he may have been an actual historical figure, certainly did not teach Dzogchen, but only the Tantric system of the sGrub-pa bka' brgyad, the practices of the eight Herukas or wrathful meditation deities. This system forms the Sadhana Section (sgrub-sde) of Mahayoga Tantra. However, eminent Nyingmapa Lama-scholars, such as the late Dudjom Rinpoche, reply that although Padmasambhava may not have taught Dzogchen as an independent vehicle to enlightenment, he did indeed teach it as an Upadesha (man-ngag), or secret oral instruction, to his immediate circle of Tibetan disciples. This private instruction concerned the practice of Dzogchen and the interpretation of the experiences arising from this practice of contemplation. In the context of the system of Mahayoga Tantra, Dzogchen is the name for the culminating phase of the Tantric process of transformation, transcending both the Generation Process (bskyed-rim) and the Perfection Process (rdzogs-rim). In this context, Dzogchen would correspond in some ways to the practice of Mahamudra in the New Tantra system (rgyud gsar-ma) of the other Tibetan schools. An old text, the Man-ngag lta-ba'i phreng-ba, traditionally attributed to Padmasambhava himself, does not treat Dzogchen as an independent vehicle (theg-pa, Skt. yana), but only as part of the system of the Higher Tantras. When taught as an independent vehicle, Dzogchen practice does not require any antecedent process of Tantric transformation of the practitioner into a deity, and so on, before entering into the state of even contemplation (mnyam-bzhag). So it would appear that, according to the Nyingmapa tradition at least, Dzogchen originated as an Upadesha that elucidated a state of contemplation or intrinsic Awareness (rig-pa) that transcedended the Tantric process of transformation alone, both in terms of generation and of perfection. Therefore, it became known as the "great perfection," that is to say, the state of total perfection and completion where nothing is lacking......http://www.angelfire.com/vt/vajranatha/bondzog.html

Padmasambhava Tibetan: པདྨ་འབྱུང་གནས།, Wylie: pad+ma 'byung gnas (EWTS), ZYPY: Bämajungnä); Mongolian ловон Бадмажунай, lovon Badmajunai, Chinese: 蓮花生大士 (pinyin: Liánhuāshēng), meaning "the Lotus-Born," was a sage guru from Oddiyāna who is said to have transmitted Vajrayana Buddhism to Bhutan and Tibet and neighboring countries in the 8th century......

Padmasambhava said......My father is the intrinsic awareness, Samantabhadra (Sanskrit; Tib. ཀུན་ཏུ་བཟང་པོ). My mother is the ultimate sphere of reality, Samantabhadri (Sanskrit; Tib. ཀུན་ཏུ་བཟང་མོ). I belong to the caste of non-duality of the sphere of awareness. My name is the Glorious Lotus-Born. I am from the unborn sphere of all phenomena. I act in the way of the Buddhas of the three times........His Pureland Paradise is Zangdok Palri (the Copper-coloured Mountain).

"It has also been asserted by some scholars that Padmasambhava, although he may have been an actual historical figure, certainly did not teach Dzogchen, but only the Tantric system of the sGrub-pa bka' brgyad, the practices of the eight Herukas or wrathful meditation deities. This system forms the Sadhana Section (sgrub-sde) of Mahayoga Tantra. [35] However, eminent Nyingmapa Lama-scholars, such as the late Dudjom Rinpoche, reply that although Padmasambhava may not have taught Dzogchen as an independent vehicle to enlightenment, he did indeed teach it as an Upadesha (man-ngag), or secret oral instruction, to his immediate circle of Tibetan disciples.".....http://vajranatha.com/articles/traditions/dzogchen.html?start=2

"Padmasambhava is regarded as the second Buddha in Bhutan and Tibet by followers of the Nyingma school, where he is better known as Guru Rinpoche ("Precious Master"). He has also been called Arunagiri Babaji. Like Khezr, Guru Rinpoche appears to each individual human being in a unique way, in the form that fits in with their spiritual world-view. Therefore, in one sense, Guru Rinpoche has as many biographies as there are people on Earth. Some have speculated that not only are these two myths of Khezr and Guru Rinpoche similar, they are in fact, one being."......http://home.earthlink.net/~drmljg/id17.html

"Arunagiri Babaji......For Buddhists, the Lord Padmasambhava represents a second Buddha. For the Hindus he is the deathless Mahavatar (Great Avatar), the eternal youth, or Kumara. For the Christian he is the Christ-consciousness. The Himalayan yogis know him as the foremost of their great Saints, or Mahasiddhas, while amongst the sages he is known as the supreme Magi (mahamuni). For some initiates he is known as Arunagiri babaji, the holy master of the Sacred Red Mountain. In our tradition he is the Paramguru, the supreme Guru of those who follow the way of Tantra.".....http://www.dharmafellowship.org/biographies/historicalsaints/lord-padmasambhava.htm

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Email....okarresearch@gmail.com

John Hopkins.....Northern New Mexico….June 2014

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