The Gelug-Kagyu Tradition
This is a topic, which we find in many different traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. It derives from India. Specifically, we’re looking at the tradition that’s found in the Gelug lineage, and it is known as the Gelug-Kagyu tradition of mahamudra, which is perhaps a bit of a surprising name.
[See: Root Text for Mahamudra]
The word “Kagyu” (bka’-brgyud) means “a lineage of the enlightening words of a Buddha,” and so there are some commentators who say, “Well, the title here doesn’t really mean the Kagyu tradition; it actually means the mahamudra tradition of the enlightening words of the Buddha that are found in the Gelug tradition.” They want to put Kagyu aside here as referring to the actual Kagyu tradition, but His Holiness the Dalai Lama disagrees with this, following other commentators. The text was written by the Fourth Panchen Lama, and the Fourth Panchen Lama wrote his own commentary to it; in this auto-commentary, as we would call it, the Fourth Panchen Lama quotes extensively from Kagyu masters, so it’s quite clear that he’s drawing on the Kagyu tradition.
Moreover, the Fourth Panchen Lama was the tutor of the Fifth Dalai Lama and was undoubtedly the architect behind the whole policy of the Fifth Dalai Lama to bring peace to Tibet after 150 years of civil war and bring harmony among all the different traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. It makes perfect sense from the Panchen Lama’s commentary and from the type of work that he was doing, that he is bringing together the Kagyu and Gelug traditions here.
However, the Panchen Lama makes it very clear that he’s not making this up; he says this very clearly in his beginning lines that these teachings come from a lineage from Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelug tradition, but he’s only writing it down for the first time. Up until then, from the time of Tsongkhapa to his time, which was about 200 years, this tradition was just an oral tradition.
Now, we have to bear in mind that Tsongkhapa studied with teachers from all the different traditions that were available at his time. He had Kagyu teachers, Sakya teachers, Nyingma teachers, and teachers who had the various Kadampa lineages as well. Regarding mahamudra, he had what’s called “the distant lineage” that comes all the way from Buddha through the line of Kagyu lamas, but it wasn’t limited only to Kagyu; we also find mahamudra in the Sakya lineage as well.
Tsongkhapa also has what’s called the “near lineage.” The Panchen Lama refers to the “near lineage,” and this is the lineage that comes from a vision that Tsongkhapa had of Manjushri. Now, what an actual vision is and what happens during a vision, I must say, I really don’t know. In any case, Tsongkhapa had a very profound vision of Manjushri, who gave him many teachings, but particularly, I think what’s most significant is that Manjushri gave him a very clear indication of where to look in the Indian sources to get the most profound understanding of voidness.
Tsongkhapa was a great revolutionary. I think that’s the proper word for him because he completely reinterpreted most of the teachings that were going on in Tibet up until that time. That’s a very interesting phenomenon, if we think about it, because Tsongkhapa, like every great Tibetan lama, puts a great deal of emphasis on entrusting oneself to the spiritual teacher, which is usually called “guru devotion.” One would think that a disciple could not disagree with his or her teacher, particularly concerning the teachings and how to understand the teachings.
However, there is actually quite a long tradition of disciples disagreeing with their teachers’ interpretation and, in a sense, going further than their teachers. The one great example is Atisha with his teacher Dharmakirti, also known as Dharmapala, in Sumatra, who held the Chittamatra view, and Atisha held the Madhyamaka view. Disagreeing with one’s teacher concerning such points doesn’t mean disrespect for the teacher because Atisha, like Tsongkhapa as well, learned a great deal from their teachers, and they acknowledged that very strongly.
The whole tradition of Buddhism, the way that it’s practiced in Tibet, follows the tradition from Nalanda Monastery in India, which uses debate and logic. If one can show logical inconsistencies in somebody else’s thinking, even if it’s our own teacher, then according to what Buddha himself said, one must accept the consequences of logic, and that’s not disrespectful.
From another point of view, different people have different meditational experiences, and there’s no reason why everybody’s meditational experiences should be exactly the same. No matter how close we might be to our spiritual teacher, that doesn’t mean that our own individual spiritual meditational practice is going to be an exact replica of that of our teachers. We are, after all, different mental continuums, and we’ve had different, separate previous lives.
So, what did Tsongkhapa do or add to this mahamudra tradition that he received from his Kagyu lamas? The Panchen Lama makes it very clear in his text. When we talk about mahamudra, we’re speaking about meditation on the nature of the mind. As with any phenomenon, we can speak about the conventional or superficial nature of what mind is, and we can speak about the deepest nature.
The superficial nature of something is what it appears to be. It’s superficial in the sense that it’s the surface appearance and – as both the Sanskrit and Tibetan word implies – it hides something deeper underneath. What it conceals or hides is the deepest nature, and the deepest nature is how something actually exists, in other words, voidness. Voidness is referring to its way of existing devoid of impossible ways. Everybody agrees on that, but what people disagree on is what are the impossible ways that things are devoid of existing as.
What Tsongkhapa does in his interpretation of mahamudra is that he accepts and follows the traditional Kagyu methods for being able to recognize and meditate on the superficial or conventional nature of the mind. However, he introduces his own way of meditating on the deepest nature of the mind, as was indicated to him by Manjushri to follow from the Indian sources of Buddhapalita. Thus, we have a traditional Kagyu method of meditating on the conventional or superficial nature of the mind and the Gelugpa method of meditating on the voidness of the mind. This is why it’s known as the Gelug-Kagyu tradition of mahamudra.
This is not the only example of this type of combined tradition. We also find this within the Kagyu traditions in which we have combined mahamudra/dzogchen type of practices. For instance, a great Kagyu master named Karma Chagme (Kar-ma Chags-med) introduced a system in which one meditates in the mahamudra style up to a certain point and then for the final stages one follows a traditional Nyingma dzogchen approach.
One might start to question this whole method of combining different traditions in light of a statement that His Holiness the Dalai Lama makes very strongly, which is that we shouldn’t mix practices together. However, His Holiness explains that “mixing” actually means to adulterate, and what that means is to put everything all together into one big soup. Here, what these great masters like Tsongkhapa and Karma Chagme are doing is they are not mixing everything together in one stage of practice, but they’re taking different traditional types of practices and having them in sequence with each other. That’s not mixing them together into one soup; that’s like having different courses in a meal; it’s sort of like starting our meal with borscht and then ending with pizza. For some people, maybe that is very appetizing, for other people, maybe not.
In any case, we have this lineage and tradition. One can give various other examples, but I think these are enough examples of combining different practices in stages. Now, let’s turn to our text, and what I thought to do is just give a brief overview of the text without going through it line by line. I myself have received teachings on this four times, once from Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, twice from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and once from Serkong Rinpoche. I will try to explain it to the best of my understanding, which, of course, is not that great.