23

Introduction

Prologue

ĀRYADEVA’S Lamp for Integrating the Practices (Caryā-melāpaka-pradīpa, hereafter CMP or the Lamp) is among the most important and influential works in the history of esoteric Buddhist thought. One may infer as much from the fact that it is cited in numerous Indian commentaries of the late first and early second millennia, including the Sekoddeśaṭīkā of Naḍapāda (Nāropā) and the Pañcakrama-ṭippaṇī Yogi-manoharā of Muniśrībhadra. In Tibet, it has been considered of the highest authority by authors from all of the various traditional lineages over many centuries. In Gö Kugpa Lhay­tsay’s eleventh-century Survey of the Esoteric Community ( gSang ’dus stong thun) — the earliest extant Tibetan treatise on the Noble Tradition’s practice of the Esoteric Community (Guhyasamāja) Tantra — it is the first and arguably the most prominent textual authority cited; and it was closely studied and cited by a wide range of Tibetan scholar-monks from this time until at least the seventeenth century. Perhaps most notably, the Lamp served as a definitive template for the early fifteenth-century systematization of esoteric practice by the founder of the Ganden (later Geluk) Tradition, Je Rinpoche Lozang Drakpa (1357–1419; a.k.a. Tsongkhapa), through which it continues to exercise a decisive (if second-hand) influence on much of contemporary Tibetan practice of the esoteric traditions to this very day.

It may be considered remarkable, then, that the Lamp has not generated much comment by modern scholars of Buddhism, who have tended (insofar as they have taken notice of the esoteric traditions at all) to focus their attention on the few Vajrayāna works edited and published in the early twentieth century — a number among which the CMP does not figure. A work that was so edited and published, however, and that accordingly has been noticed and commented on since the very inception of the modern 4study of the Buddhist traditions, is the Pañcakrama, or Five Stages, of Nāgārjuna (hereafter PK). This latter is intimately related to the CMP, for it is the central idea of the PK that the CMP seeks to elaborate and legitimate.

The existence, and to a limited extent the importance, of the PK was noted as early as 1844 in what has come to be considered the foundational document of the modern academic study of Buddhism: Eugène Burnouf’s Introduction à l’Histoire du Buddhisme Indien. Burnouf was not, however, much impressed by Nāgārjuna’s work — indeed, he was rather volubly put off by its antinomian rhetoric — and, aside from a few elementary observations about its use of maṇḍalas and the mantra oṃ śūnyatā-jñāna-svabhāvātmako ’ham, he did not have much to contribute to its study or analysis.⁸ Further research in this area was left to his self-appointed successor, Louis de La Vallée Poussin, who took up work on the PK and one of its commentaries in the 1890s. In 1894, La Vallée Poussin published an initial notice of this work, entitled “Note sur le Pañcakrama,” which was subsequently republished as the introduction to his critical edition in 1896.⁹ Since the publication of that work, the PK has been a touchstone of the published works of esoteric Buddhism, referred to and cited in a variety of contexts.

There has not, however, been equal attention paid to works in the same tradition preserved unpublished in manuscript form or solely in Tibetan translation, as was the CMP until quite recently. The earliest mention of the CMP in modern scholarship seems to have been in Ferdinand Lessing and Alex Wayman’s 1967 translation of the Fundamentals of the Buddhist Tantras (rGyud sde spyi rnam) of Kaydrup Je Gelek Palzang (1385–1438), a major disciple of Tsongkhapa.¹⁰ Further brief reference was subsequently made by Wayman in an article entitled “Early Literary History of the Buddhist Tantras, especially the Guhyasamāja Tantra.”¹¹ Much of this discussion was taken over verbatim into Wayman’s 1977 Yoga of the Guhyasamāja Tantra, which seems to represent what is to date the most extensive discussion of this work and its related traditions in a European language. 5Wayman emphasized the importance of the Lamp, writing that “in this tradition the greatest work on important phases of tantric praxis is Āryadeva’s Caryāmelāpakapradīpa.”¹²

The “tradition” he speaks of is one that Tibetan intellectuals refer to as the Noble Tradition of the Esoteric Community ( gsang ’dus ’phags lugs). Since the work of Wayman and others, this moniker¹³ has been taken up into scholarly usage. While we have no evidence that Indian tradition likewise had a special name for this school of thought and practice, the literature of the tradition itself is sufficiently coherent and self-referential that it may confidently be said to form a consistent school of thought. Thus, though the name may not be of Indian origin, its application in this case seems apposite. Nonetheless, it should always be borne in mind that the “canon” of commentarial literature this name implies does not appear to have been explicitly so-called in the Indian context.

That said, what is “the Noble Tradition of the Esoteric Community?” In brief, the Noble Tradition comprises a group of authors (and their spiritual descendents) who commented in distinctive ways upon the literature and praxis of the Guhyasamāja Tantra, or Esoteric Community Tantra (hereafter GST or Esoteric Community) — one of the most important scriptures of Indian esoteric Buddhism.¹⁴ Perhaps the idea most central to the Noble Tradition (though by no means exclusive to it) is that the goal of Buddhist enlightenment is to be reached through a gradual yogic process, rather than through a “sudden” or immediate experience. There is, of course, more to it than this, which will be explored in greater detail below. In the meantime, as a working definition, we may postulate that the Noble Tradition asserts 6that full and complete realization as an enlightened world teacher (samyaksaṃbuddha) is a) only possible through the practice of yogic techniques revealed in the Esoteric Community Tantra, b) that further essential components of these techniques are only taught in a set of auxiliary “explanatory tantras” (vyākhyā-tantra), and c) that these techniques effect a gradual process of transformation whose main features may be reduced to a schema of discrete stages.

In what follows, I will attempt both to unpack the richness condensed into these three propositions and to provide the background necessary to appreciate and to understand the significance and the thought of the Lamp and the school of which it is an authoritative statement. To date, modern scholarship on these traditions has (it seems to me) made little effort to communicate the fundamental concerns of these Buddhist thinkers — either to other specialists or to a more general public. While there have been some few articles discussing the Noble Tradition, nowhere have its constitution and its main contributions to Buddhist thought and practice been clearly and succinctly outlined. Wayman’s remains the only book-length contribution in this area. As valuable as Wayman’s work may have been in its time and place (and I will leave that for the enterprising reader to determine), Yoga does not succeed in communicating clearly and systematically the thought of the Noble Tradition, although it is devoted precisely to elucidating the same. Unfortunately, as in the case of much scholarship on the esoteric Buddhist traditions, Wayman seems not fully to believe that the tradition even has a coherent, explicable system of thought to elucidate, referring as he does to its doctrines as “arcane lore.”

In attempting to rectify this lacuna, I proceed on the understanding that the teachings of this tradition are not at all “arcane,” except in the limited sense that it may at one time have been restricted to initiated practitioners (and even this proposition is open to serious question).¹⁵ The thought of the tradition is herein communicated through the vehicle of a translation and explanation of the CMP, a work ideally suited to this task insofar as it constitutes an unusually lucid and direct presentation of the yogic system and doctrinal underpinnings of the Esoteric Community as mediated through 7the interpretative lens of Nāgārjuna’s school. This introduction seeks to give an overall sense of the parameters of the tradition — its history, literature, and major figures — as well as to explain its yogic platform in terms accessible to both specialist scholars of Indic religions and the educated public. I begin by addressing the historical context of the tradition and its authors; I then give an overview of the major monuments of the literature of the school; this is followed by an analysis and close reading of the CMP. The introduction concludes with some observations concerning the materials and methods used in editing and translating the work.

History of the Noble Tradition

The Noble Tradition is a school of Buddhist esoteric thought and practice centering on the Esoteric Community Tantra (though making frequent and wide reference to other esoteric scriptures). It is styled “Noble” by Tibetan exegetes in deference to its central thinker, the Noble (i.e., Ārya) Nāgārjuna (Tib. [dpal mgon] ’phags pa klu sgrub), whose PK is the most authoritative statement of the school’s yogic technologies — as contrasted with the other major tradition so identified, which bears the name of its chief thinker, Jñānapāda.¹⁶ In addition to Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva, its most significant authors bear the names Nāgabodhi and Candrakīrti. To anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Mahāyāna Buddhist thought, these names will not be unfamiliar, and their conjunction as members of a common “school” will come as no surprise: for these are none other than the names of the more famous thinkers of the exoteric Mahāyāna Centrist Tradition (madhyamaka, dbu ma). Thus, the attributions of these esoteric works to these authors suggests a link between the exoteric school of the Centrists and the esoteric school of the Noble Tradition.

The exact nature of this link, however, has been a matter of some dispute; and there are, accordingly, divergent views concerning the history of the 8Noble Tradition and its authors, and their relationship (if any) with the famous authors of the Centrist Tradition. Though in what follows I will problematize this formulation, the contrast may most succinctly be stated as follows. The Tibetan tradition has accepted — from its earliest encounter with these texts until the present — that the authorship of the esoteric works may be attributed to those authors bearing the same names who composed the exoteric philosophical works of the Centrist (Madhyamaka) School. That is, they maintain that the famous Nāgārjuna who penned the Fundamental Verses of Centrism¹⁷ was also a tantric yogin who wrote the Five Stages and other important works of Buddhist esoterism.¹⁸ Modern scholars of Buddhism, in contrast, have tended to find this position untenable if not utterly inconceivable. Based on the conviction that esoteric Buddhism constitutes a much later phase in the development of Indian Buddhist literature, they have concluded that the esoteric writings could not possibly have been written by the Centrist authors.

In part, this difference of opinion reflects the fact that these two groups approach this literature with rather different concerns — though there is perhaps more consonance between the two camps than the “ideal types” here presented might imply. For while the Tibetan tradition is, to be sure, rather deeply invested in Nāgārjuna’s role as an authoritative source for the esoteric practices, it is not entirely uninterested in (nor entirely unaffected by) the results of critical, historical scholarship. Modern scholarship, too — if it seeks not merely to “know better” than the tradition itself, but also to understand its internal ideo-historical dynamics — needs be alert to the indigenous construction of the tradition’s own self-imagining if it is properly to evaluate its claims.

A suitably-nuanced scholarly understanding of the history and historiography of this literature, then, requires that each of these ideal positions be somewhat rethought. On the one hand, there are clear problems with 9the “traditional view” as so constructed. Taken in the aggregate, the extant evidence suggests that the authors of the esoteric writings lived rather later than the homonymous authors of the exoteric texts. On the other hand, modern scholarship has in general taken a rather myopic approach to the issue. A tendency simply to rest satisfied in the smug assertion of difference has prevented scholars from probing more deeply into the complex of issues involved. In particular, having overlooked features of the construction of authorship culturally-specific to first-millennium Indian Buddhist communities, they have failed to engage the issue in such a way as would illuminate the important dynamics of religious history and ideology that lie behind the attribution. In what follows, we shall accordingly endeavor to reconsider these positions, taking into account heretofore-overlooked evidence from the Indo-Tibetan historiographical tradition that suggests a more subtle (and more accurate) way of understanding the indigenous views concerning the emergence of these texts and their noteworthy attributions.

Through the Glass of Modern Scholarship, Darkly

Although the Library of Congress catalogs the esoteric writings attributed to Āryadeva under the rubric “Āryadeva, 3rd cent.” — seemingly assenting to the traditional attribution — on the whole, modern scholarship has not considered this credible. It was an early axiom of scholarship on Buddhism that the esoteric traditions were morally degenerate and, precisely to that extent, of correspondingly late date.¹⁹ Though poorly argued and predicated on only the weakest evidentiary footing, a consensus was quickly reached that led inexorably to the conclusion that the works of the Esoteric Community Noble Tradition could not possibly have been composed by the homonymous authors of the Centrist Tradition.

The incredulity of the modern scholarly community early found its most unambiguous voice in the scornful comment of Louis de La Vallée Poussin who, in his Bouddhisme: Opinions sur l’Histoire de la Dogmatique, wrote that:

Much the same has been repeatedly asserted by the most prominent scholars of esoteric Buddhism, such as Benoytosh Bhattacharyya,²¹ S. B. Dasgupta,²² David Seyfort Ruegg,²³ and David Snellgrove.²⁴ That is to say, modern scholars have tended to give one of two explanations for the Tibetan assertion of the identity of the exoteric and esoteric authors: either they were “confused” or they were the victims of a crude (but effective) “literary fraud.” There has been no effort to engage the traditional attribution in more detail or to attempt to understand the logic internal to it. Scholarly consensus in this case has not resulted in any uniformity of opinion concerning their respective floruit,²⁵ nor in any greater insight as to the ideological import of this noteworthy attribution than La Vallée Poussin’s view that it was nothing 11more than a simpleminded attempt to commandeer the authority of the “illustrious doctors of the Great Vehicle.”

Before interrogating the traditional attribution further, it will perhaps be instructive to digress a moment on the evidence available for dating the Noble Tradition literature. For despite the ineptitude with which the modern scholarly view has generally been presented,²⁶ it is in fact possible to argue fairly persuasively that the Āryadeva who authored the CMP was not contemporaneous with the person who authored the Catuḥśataka.²⁷ This is possible based upon the wide range of sources cited in the CMP — sources the nature of which allow us to begin to make some claims about a terminus post quem for its author — and sources that themselves cite the CMP, which allow us to fix a terminus ante quem.²⁸ Given the notorious difficulty of assigning dates to the scriptural corpus of revealed sūtras and tantras, it is the śāstric literature that will concern us here.²⁹ Of śāstras, the CMP cites the following two known works: Kambala’s Ālokamālā (ĀM) and Padmavajra’s Guhyasiddhi (GS).

The citation of ĀM alone would allow us fairly confidently to conclude that the Āryadeva who authored the CMP is not the Āryadeva who authored the Catuḥśataka. Christian Lindtner has argued that the ĀM demonstrates “acquaintance with Bhartṛhari (ca. 450–510) and Dignāga (ca. 480–540, or a few decades earlier).”³⁰ If we accept this, then we must accordingly date the author of the CMP as at least one century posterior 12to that of the Catuḥśataka. However, it is not at all certain how much later the citation of the ĀM allows us to place the CMP. If we follow Lindtner, it would be no later than this same period, that is, the late fifth/early sixth centuries (ca. 450–525).

However, Lindtner’s placing the date of the ĀM so early is based in part on the ascription of the Madhyamakaratnapradīpa to Bhavya/ Bhāvaviveka (ca. 490–570), which ascription (I think it is fair to say) is highly controversial.³¹ Lindtner bases further argument for this early date upon the existence of a commentary on the ĀM by *Asvabhāva, of whom a commentary on the Mahāyānasaṃgraha was translated into Chinese in 648–49. While this may turn out to be sound reasoning, I feel it is premature to rely too heavily on this argument, as so little is known of this author and his range of authentic works. Thus, the evidence of the ĀM citation allows us to rather confidently place the CMP posterior to the fifth century, though further work on the date of Kambala may require us to push this date back somewhat.

The citation of GS suggests that we ought to situate the authorship of the CMP rather later in the second half of the first millennium. Wayman (on rather dubious premises) puts its author, Padmavajra, in the latter half of the eighth century,³² while Ronald Davidson (more reliably) locates him in the second quarter of the ninth century.³³ Given the relative security of these dates (which views are also supported by Yukei Matsunaga),³⁴ it seems 13we must move the CMP yet further back into at least the mid-to-late ninth century.

Having thus established on the basis of the works it cites a tentative terminus post quem for the CMP, we may now turn to evidence that allows us to determine with rather more certainty a terminus ante quem — that is, the evidence provided by sources that themselves cite the CMP. The CMP is cited in several extant works both in Sanskrit and Tibetan. It is, for example, cited in the anonymous Subhāṣitasaṃgraha (SS)³⁵ and the Pañcakramaṭippaṇī Yogimanoharā (PKṬYM) of Muniśrībhadra.³⁶ These two works, however, are of little help in the task at hand — the former because it is of rather uncertain date (and I suspect later than the earliest Tibetan references), the latter because it, too, likely postdates the earliest Tibetan reference to our text.³⁷ Much the same is true of the Caryāgītikośavṛtti (CGKV) of Munidatta, which was likely composed in the thirteenth century.³⁸

We are on firmer ground, however, when we consider the citation of the CMP at the end of the Sekoddeśaṭīkā (SUṬ) of Naḍapāda (Nāropā).³⁹ Adopting the date 1040 for the death of Naḍapāda,⁴⁰ we may presume that the SUṬ was written in the early eleventh century. The terminus ante quem this establishes (early eleventh century) is supported by the earliest Tibetan reference to the CMP. As noted above, the Survey of the Esoteric Community ( gSang ’dus stong thun) of Gö Kugpa Lhaytsay frequently cites the CMP.⁴¹ While the date of Gö is somewhat vague, it seems certain that he flourished in the mid-eleventh century. He does not cite Āryadeva as one of his many 14Indian gurus, so we may presume that there was at least one generation of teachers, and probably two, between Gö and Āryadeva.

Thus, the evidence here cited suggests that the CMP (and, by extension, its author) is the product of the period between ca. 850 CE and 1000 CE. This is, no doubt, rather a large window, capacious enough to encompass the lives of three or more persons. By Indological standards, however, it is relatively precise; and, for now, it will have to do.⁴² It is certainly enough, at the least, for our present purposes, in that it provides relatively reliable grounds on which to maintain that the Noble author of the CMP is not the same person as the Centrist author of the Catuḥśataka.

Traditional History: Treasures and Visions

What, then, is one to make of the traditional attribution? Is it in fact the case that the Tibetan tradition has “hopelessly mixed up” two or more historical figures? Or were they, on the contrary, either the victims or the later propagators of a literary fraud: a nefarious scriptural “bait-and-switch?” I do not believe either hypothesis fits the case. A closer look at the materials available reveals a much more complex picture of the “traditional view” on the authorship of the Noble Tradition literature than has hitherto been recognized by modern scholarship. For while it is certainly the case that Tibetan tradition accepts that (in some sense at least) the author of the Catuḥśataka and the Caryāmelāpakapradīpa are the “same person,” it is by no means entirely clear what precisely is meant by this claim. I contend that this assertion should be taken not as a strictly historical claim about concrete figures (though some may have come to this conclusion), but as an “auctorative” assertion about the validity and prestige of the literature concerned.⁴³

The first of the modern contentions — that Tibetan tradition has merely “confused” two distinct authors — is untenable at best, condescending at worst. There is, on the one hand, abundant evidence of a critical stance with 15regard to authorial attribution among Tibetan religious thinkers. Traditional scholars frequently demonstrate an awareness of the phenomenon of multiple authors bearing the same name, not to mention the inverse phenomenon of a unitary author writing under several names.⁴⁴ Furthermore, it is quite evident that the Tibetans were not the initiators, but the inheritors of a well-established Indian tradition to the effect that the Noble and the Centrist authors were identical. Though it may be argued that we have little or no direct textual evidence that the esoteric authors “Nāgārjuna,” “Āryadeva,” and “Candrakīrti” themselves claimed identity with the exoteric authors,⁴⁵ I think there is a good prima facie case to be made that such is implicit in their writings. These names are not common, so the hypothesis that the correspondence is a mere coincidence is rather a weak one from the start. Their conjunction in a group of authors who form an inter-referential school of thought, however, is so remarkable as to speak overwhelmingly for the position that these texts were deliberately claiming derivation from authors of renown. There are, in addition, several ways in which an affiliation with Centrist doctrines is implicit in the Noble literature: most notably in their technical nomenclature.⁴⁶ Thus, I think it is safe to say that the notion of the identity of the Nobles and the Centrists is an Indian one, presumably intrinsic to the composition of the Noble works themselves, and transmitted as such by Indian teachers of the tradition in Tibet. It was by no means the result of carelessness or confusion on the part of the Tibetans.

The other hypothesis typical of modern scholarship to date — that the Tibetans were the dupes of a literary fraud perpetrated by their Indian masters — is less easy to dismiss but, as I will argue below, nonetheless equally 16problematic. There is no end of evidence to the effect that Tibetans were highly critical of putative Indic authorities and were not wont to accept the attribution of works uncritically⁴⁷ — there being an extensive literature dealing with issues of “literary fraud” and the issue of how to determine genuine religious authority. Thus, even if one insists on describing the attribution of the Noble Tradition works as a “fraud,” the Tibetans — if credulous — were by no means the simpleminded dupes they are implied to be, but went into it with their eyes open. However, there are further, fatal difficulties with this hypothesis, such that the Tibetan votaries of this tradition are perhaps better described as conscious participants in a widespread (and arguably salutary) Buddhist tendency to ratify religious innovation through a distinctive kind of “soft history.”

Tibetan historical literature — presumably the source for modern scholars’ construction of the “traditional Tibetan view” — reveals rather a different understanding of the historical issues surrounding the Noble Literature than has hitherto been recognized. I believe this evidence compels us to construct an alternative understanding of the indigenous historiography. First and foremost, there should be no doubt that traditional historians were well aware of the historiographical difficulties they confronted — not only with regard to the attribution of the literature of the Noble Tradition, but also to the attribution of its source scriptures to the “historical” Buddha (a similar example wherein modern scholars have uncritically maintained that the tradition is guilty of a simpleminded literary fraud). On the contrary, the traditional sources can be read as reflecting a clear, if 17largely implicit, awareness of this problem. That, on the whole, they do not explicitly so address it reflects the fact that, to them, the problem was not a problem. I mean this not in the sense that they did not recognize that the attributions posed significant historical difficulties (which they did), but in the sense that for the tradition this “problem” was in fact the solution to a prior — and presumably more pressing — difficulty: that of the legitimacy of ongoing scriptural revelation.

For while it is uniformly accepted that the exoteric and esoteric authors are in some important sense “identical,” traditional sources nonetheless reflect the “cognitive dissonance” that such a claim creates with respect to historical plausibility. This is perhaps most clearly seen in an analysis of the nature of this authorial “identity” by the early seventeenth-century Tibetan historian Jo-nang Tāranātha (1575–1634) who expresses this dissonance in an unusually explicit manner. His treatment of this issue represents a thoughtful and creative attempt to harmonize a critical approach to historical fact with the theologically exigent concern for the auctorization of the traditional sources of his lineage. While it may legitimately be objected that Tāranātha’s confrontation of this issue demonstrates nothing more than his own distinctively critical stance, other parallel historical narratives concerning the revelation of several earlier Buddhist traditions (both exo- and esoteric) suggest that Tāranātha’s view might plausibly be considered not the novel hypothesis of a creative, critical mind (which his undoubtedly was), but simply the straightforward expression of what I argue is the de facto (if implicit) position of most traditional authorities on the historical question.

In his Great Commentary on the Five Stages (Rim lnga ’grel chen, hereafter RṄGC), Tāranātha stresses the point that the esoteric works of the Noble Tradition are “uncontestably the work of the Father [Nāgārjuna] and Sons.” ⁴⁸ However, this assertion — noteworthy in its direct advocacy of a view most authors treat as part of the axiomatic background of the tradition — comes at the end of a discussion in which he confronts directly the historical problem of attributing the Noble literature to the early period of the Centrist authors. In fact, he no less stringently maintains that these works were not in fact propagated during the lifetime of the Centrist Nāgārjuna. He writes:

On one level, Tāranātha here unambiguously asserts precisely the position maintained by modern scholarship: that the Esoteric Community Noble Tradition literature was not the product of the early first millennium, nor even of so late a period as that of the seventh-century Centrist Candrakīrti. And, it may be worth noting, Tāranātha makes this point some two hundred and fifty years prior to the moment when European scholarship would arrogate to itself the responsibility to propagate these same views in ostensibly overturning the native ignorance that allegedly held the opposite. However, for all their agreement about the chronological question, there remains a significant divergence between Tāranātha’s position and that of most modern scholars: that is, he maintains that these works are nonetheless properly attributable to those authors. How is this possible? How could a thinker of his caliber maintain two such seemingly contradictory propositions?

He does so by recourse to the notion that the active agency of these authors is not restricted to conventional, historical time and place — a presumption, I think it is fair to say, that would have been shared by most of his Mahāyāna co-religionists. He goes on to assert that their works were 19propagated in a later period by one Nāgabodhi, alleged to be an actual disciple of Nāgārjuna who had attained a “rainbow body” (’ja’ lus, i.e., a kind of immortality), who preserved the teachings in some form until the late first millennium.⁵⁰ Tāranātha is less definitive when it comes to the question of the form in which these works were so preserved, and he advances two hypotheses for his learned readers to consider:

That is, Tāranātha does not come down firmly here on the question of whether or not the works as we have them were even composed during the early first millennium. He is willing to entertain the notion that they were, and were then subsequently preserved and propagated by Nāgabodhi; or, alternatively, that they were not, and that Nāgārjuna et al. themselves composed these works at a later point while embodied in a kind of mystical, immortal vidyādhara-form (rig pa ’dzin pa’i lus). Given his commitment to the authenticity of the tradition, however, Tāranātha does come down firmly on one point, concluding (as we have already observed) that “however that may be, [they are] uncontestably the work of the Father and Sons.”⁵²

In his rather more famous History of Buddhism in India (rGya gar chos ’byung, a work widely consulted and regularly cited by modern scholars since the nineteenth century), Tāranātha makes similar claims — claims 20strangely overlooked by modern scholarship.⁵³ While discussing the esoteric saint Mātaṅgīpā, who is traditionally held to be a disciple of Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva and an important link in the transmission of the Noble Tradition, he states quite unambiguously that “though it is said that Mātaṅgī was a disciple of ācārya Nāgārjuna and his disciple [Āryadeva], he could not have lived at that time.”⁵⁴ Yet he does not reject the traditional ascription of authority implicit in this history. How is it possible that Mātaṅgīpā could nonetheless be considered the disciple of these saints? Simply stated, “he could have had their vision later ( phyis zhal mthong ba’o),” that is, he qualifies due to having received their teachings in a miraculous vision.

In his History, then, as in his Great Commentary, Tāranātha makes much the same assertion concerning the provenance of the Noble Tradition’s literature — they are theologically authentic, though historically anachronistic works. Elsewhere in his History, he further adds a rather provocative analogy in which he compares this phenomenon with two others presumably more familiar to his readers, drawn from specifically Tibetan religious experience of which the above cases of Nāgārjuna and Mātaṅgīpā may serve as illustrative examples. What Tāranātha suggests is that the writings of the Nobles were either sequestered revelations along the lines of the Treasure Teachings ( gter ma) famous in the rNying-ma School of Tibetan Buddhism,⁵⁵ or they 21were revealed as mystical visions. Speaking of such literary monuments of the Noble Tradition as the Pañcakrama (PK) and Caryāmelāpakapradīpa (CMP), he writes,

It is hard to overestimate how remarkable this passage is. Again, Tāranātha clearly denies that the works of the Nobles can be properly ascribed to the early first millennium era of the “real” Nāgārjuna, et al. Instead, he here explicitly states his view that they were propagated during the reign of the Pāla Dynasty’s King Devapāla (ca. 810–850) and his son.⁵⁸ His analogy to the Treasures or Visions is meant to communicate that these are books that, while allegedly compos