The following is an excerpt from Atiśa’s Stages of the Path to Awakening by James B. Apple.
Introduction
Over nine and a half centuries ago, one of the greatest Indian Buddhist masters to ever set foot in Tibet wrote a guidebook for realizing all the stages to awakening at the repeated request of his closest and most faithful disciple. The work would entail guidance on the Buddhist path synthesizing all aspects of Indian Buddhist practice from the very beginning of the path, reflecting on the fortunate opportunity of human rebirth, through to attaining omniscient buddhahood by integrative techniques of nondual meditation. The Indian master’s most devoted and faithful Tibetan disciple kept these teachings secret, and they were only transmitted to select disciples in a closely guarded sequence of transmission. Now, due to recently recovered manuscripts, this significant work of Buddhist path literature has become available. This book offers a study and complete translation of this hidden monument of guidance on the Buddhist path, the Stages of the Path to Awakening by Atiśa Dīpaṃkaraśrījāna (982–1054), and its accompanying commentaries and ritual texts.
The Bengali Buddhist master Atiśa is famous for his journey to Tibet and teaching in the Land of Snows for thirteen years. An Indian Buddhist mahāpaṇḍita from the celebrated monastic university of Vikramaśīla, he is well known among both traditional Tibetan and modern scholars for his Lamp for the Path to Awakening (Bodhipathapradīpa; Byang chub lam gyi sgron ma; hereafter Lamp), composed in western Tibet for his royal Tibetan disciple Lhatsun Jangchup Ö. Lamp, a concise presentation in sixty- eight verses, is generally considered the prototype for all subsequent stages of the path (lamrim) literature in Tibetan scholastic history. Atiśa’s Lamp became, according to the historian Ronald Davidson, “one of the most influential of Indian texts received by Tibetans” and was “the model for mainstream Tibetan monastic Buddhists for the next nine hundred years.” Lamp has been translated into English at least seven times since the 1893 study of Sarat Chandra Das and is used by contemporary Tibetan teachers such as the Dalai Lama for teaching Buddhism to general audiences.
Atiśa’s Stages of the Path to Awakening (Bodhipathakrama; Byang chub lam gyi rim pa; hereafter Stages), although it was just as influential as Lamp was earlier in Tibetan scholastic history, was virtually unknown to later traditional and modern scholars. Atiśa’s Stages is not only the hidden wellspring for the stages of the path tradition in Tibet but also the cornerstone for other well-known Tibetan Buddhist teaching traditions. Prototypical instructions on the awakening mind (bodhicitta), the bodhisattva vows, pointing-out instructions (ngo sprod), and advanced innateist forms of nondual mindfulness (e.g., “coemergent union,” lhan cig skyes sbyor) are found in the Stages and its commentaries.
"The hidden wellspring for the stages of the path tradition."
Atiśa’s Stages is located within a ninety-one-folio unique exemplar manuscript (codex unicus) in handwritten cursive (dbu med) Tibetan script. The treatise is found among the recently published manuscript facsimiles of the Collected Works of the Kadampas (2006–15) recovered from the Potala Palace and Drepung Monastery in Tibet in the early years of the twenty-first century.
Stages consists of Buddhist prescriptive teachings on classical Mahāyāna Buddhist thought and practice indicating stages of cultivation to reach the state of buddhahood. The text outlines Atiśa’s instructions for his close and advanced disciples, who were both lay and monastic. An annotation in the manuscript’s colophon mentions that the text was composed at the request of Atiśa’s Tibetan lay disciple Dromtön Gyalwai Jungné (1004–64). The 181 stanzas of Atiśa’s Stages, although a single coherent text, are structured as a presentation of the stages of the path to awakening based on three types of persons: those of small capacity (chung ba), middling capacity (’bring), and supreme capacity (chen po). The small- and middling- capacity persons are not explained in Lamp, as previous scholarship has noted. However, it is emphatically not the case that later Kadampa teachers were the first ones to “flesh out” the details of the lower stages of the path. Atiśa’s Stages thoroughly discusses the small-capacity individual in lines 13–507 (494 lines), the middling- capacity person in lines 508–846 (338 lines), and the supreme-capacity person for the remainder of the text (704 lines). Atiśa’s Stages therefore provides key details on the sequence of practices outlined for these individuals throughout Indian and Tibetan Buddhist path literature.
Atiśa’s Stages is accompanied by twenty-six minor texts of related rituals and practices. The accompanying texts, eighteen of which are no longer than a folio, include two commentaries to the main work. Others are summaries of the stages of the path and related special instructions. The minor works include verses from Mahāyāna sūtras for recitation, special mantras, and two drawings of protection wheels for clearing obstacles to practice.
Stages and its accompanying texts were a hidden tradition upheld by Atiśa’s close disciples known as the Kadampa. They furnish previously unknown foundations for renaissance-period (gsar ma) Tibetan scholastic exegesis, instructions in meditative practice, and rituals for lay and monastic communities. Although Atiśa’s Stages discusses sequences of practice for three types of individuals like Lamp, it differs in its content from other known works on the stages of the path. For instance, Tsongkhapa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo), a masterpiece composed in 1402 that is patterned after Atiśa’s Lamp, ends with a brief discussion of the practice of esoteric Buddhism, succinctly mentioning the qualities of a spiritual teacher, the principles for receiving consecration, and prescriptions for maintaining the secret vows that have been promised. Atiśa’s Stages, on the other hand, finishes with guidance for cultivating nondual realization based on meditative techniques found in esoteric Indian Buddhist literature. The elaborate meditation instructions found in later sections (stanzas 129–30 and 142–75) of Stages resemble, in terminology and structure, guidance found in later mahāmudrā meditation manuals among the diverse traditions of the Kagyü schools. Stages and its commentarial literature reveal the beginnings of meditative techniques related to not-specifically-tantric mahāmudrā practices that were later dominated by the Kagyü tradition after the time of the erstwhile Kadam monk, and subsequent Kagyü lineage founder, Gampopa Sönam Rinchen (ca. 1079–1153).
"A hidden tradition upheld by Atiśa’s close disciples known as the Kadampa."
Atiśa’s Stages also contains forgotten, or even previously unknown, Indian Buddhist lore, mythology, and doctrinal content. For example, it contains an unusual account of Buddhist cosmology in its description of hungry ghosts (preta) in sections 43–47 and a rare discussion of the immediate environmental effects of karmic actions in sections 59–62. The work also mentions Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya precepts, a distinctive account of dependent arising (section 98), a unique list of the root downfalls of a bodhisattva (section 125), and important prescriptions on the ultimate awakening mind (section 128). Stages is based on Indian Buddhist sūtras and tantras, synthesizing basic Buddhist doctrines with altruistic bodhisattva practices and culminating in advanced meditation techniques similar to what later Tibetan tradition calls “essence mahāmudrā.”
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Nearly a millennium ago, the great Indian Buddhist master Atiśa Dīpaṃkaraśrījñāna (ca. 982–1054) wrote a guidebook for realizing all the stages to awakening at the repeated request of his closest Tibetan disciple. Atiśa is famously the author of the Lamp for the Path to Awakening (Bodhipathapradipa), a short work in verse, but this longer prose work has been virtually unknown, even in Tibet—until now. Atiśa’s Stages of the Path Awakening (Bodhipathakrama), translated here, synthesizes all aspects of Buddhist practice, from the very beginning of the path—reflecting on the fortunate opportunity of human rebirth—up through to attaining omniscient buddhahood by nondual meditation. The Indian master’s faithful disciple Dromtönpa kept these teachings secret, and they were only transmitted to select disciples in a closely guarded transmission, but the lineage died out centuries ago, after Dromtönpa’s Kadam school was eclipsed by history. Now this significant work of Buddhist path literature has become available owing to recently recovered manuscripts of the Kadampas.
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