The Complete Works of Sangharakshita Vol 18: Milarepa and the Art of Discipleship I

Sangharakshita Milarepa and the Art of Discipleship i

E D I T E D B Y V I DYA D E V I

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Windhorse Publications 169 Mill Road Cambridge CB1 3AN UK info@windhorsepublications.com www.windhorsepublications.com © Sangharakshita, 2018 The right of Sangharakshita to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by Dhammarati Cover images: Back flap and front: Detail of Marpa (1012–1096) and Milarepa (1052–1135), Tibet, 16th century, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art Typesetting and layout by Ruth Rudd Printed by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow All reasonable attempts have been made to contact the copyright holder of the stories quoted from The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, translated by Garma C. C. Chang, copyright © 1999 by Shambhala Publications. The copyright holder is invited to contact us at info@windhorsepublications.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-911407-02-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-911407-01-0 (hardback)

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contents

Foreword

xi

the yogi’s joy 1

1

Milarepa’s World and Philosophy

3

First Story: The Tale of Red Rock Jewel Valley 2

Finding the Sangha

9

Second Story: The Song of a Yogi’s Joy 3

Beyond Fear

39

41

Third Story: The Meeting at Silver Spring 4 5 6 7 8

A Man of the Beyond 57 Free from Ego 74 Pleasing the Guru 107 Listening for the Teachings Laying Down Your Doubts

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7

55

123 156

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the shepherd’s search for mind 1 2

191

No Need of These Things 195 Observe Your Mind 224 rechungpa’s journey to enlightenment Editor’s Introduction

257

259

First Story: Milarepa’s First Meeting with Rechungpa 1 2 3 4

No Time for That Sort of Thing Heavenly Farming 288 Someone Singing 305 Is My Guru Dead? 327

267

Second Story: Rechungpa’s Third Journey to India 1 2 3

349

The Art of Debate 351 Never Give Yourself to Studying Words! 375 Think of the Meanings of This Song 403 Third Story: The Story of the Yak-Horn

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

265

435

I Am Much More Learned Than He 437 Do Not Be Proud and Pompous 466 How Could a Son Ever Disrespect His Father? 481 Father and Son are in Harmony 500 Strong Thoughts, Full of Infidelity 527 I am Starving to Death Right Now 548 An Experience Powerful Like a Sharp Knife 572 Awakened From a Great Dream 586 Rechungpa’s Mind Was Straightened Out 616 Wherever You Go, I Will Go 627

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Notes Index

641 671

A Guide to The Complete Works of Sangharakshita

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707

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foreword

The turquoise flower is killed by frost; This is an example of change (This is an example of change); It is after the manner of transitoriness.

Ponder upon this truth (Ponder upon this truth) And practise the noble teaching.

As we sang these words in harmony and they echoed around the atrium, an immense silence seemed to surround the sound. There was a mingled sense of something ancient and immediate, as far off as stars and as close as breathing. It was as though the whole world had stopped to listen. The choir paused for breath and began the next verse, and the listening audience seemed to play a part in a revelation, as though we were sharing, or creating, a real, if fleeting, insight into the truth.

It was a special moment on a special occasion – Sangharakshita’s ninetieth birthday – in a special place, the atrium of the Sangharakshita Library at Adhisthana. The version of ‘Milarepa’s Eight Wonderful Examples’ we sang was adapted by the composer, Vipulakirti, from a translation by Sir Humphrey Clarke published in 1958 as The Message of Milarepa.1 In the preface to that work, the translator, saying that in his view ‘Milarepa is the St Francis of Tibet’, explains that ‘the style adopted in this translation is deliberately archaic in order to give the f o r e w o r d /

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same impression that the language of the songs themselves does to the Tibetan of today’.2 Perhaps that was what gave the melody its archaic feeling, the sense of words floating across almost a thousand years from the yogi who first sang them among the Tibetan mountains.

Clarke’s slim volume was not the first translation to bring Milarepa to the English-speaking world. In 1928, the American Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz, who settled in Darjeeling just after the First World War, worked with the translator Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup to produce Milarepa’s life story, Tibet’s Great Yogī Milarepa.3 A version of this found its way into a book which the 20-year old Dennis Lingwood, not yet ordained as Sangharakshita, came across in 1945, in a library in Singapore. His account of the chance discovery shows what it meant to him: In Dwight Goddard’s Buddhist Bible, which I borrowed from the Lodge library, I found an abridged version of Tibet’s Great Yogī Milarepa. It would be difficult to find a more powerful incentive to the leading of the spiritual life than this masterpiece of religious autobiography. As I read it my hair stood on end and tears came into my eyes. If I had any doubts about the nature of my vocation they were now dispelled, and from that time onwards I lived only for the day when I would be free to follow to its end the path that, as it seemed, had been in reality mine from the beginning.4

His path took Sangharakshita to the Himalayan region and then eventually back to England, where, in the period 1976–1980, he chose to give a number of seminars on Milarepa’s songs. When recently asked the reason, as well as recalling his first encounter with Milarepa all those years ago, he said simply, ‘Their teaching is direct and relevant, besides having an element of poetry and human interest.’ The seminars were based on the 1962 translation by Garma C. C. Chang given the poetic title The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. (The more literal title would simply be The Collected Songs of Milarepa.) In the foreword, Peter Gruber reported that Mr Chang was Chinese and, in the late 1930s, travelled to Tibet ‘to search for Dharma and Enlightenment’.5 Gruber met Chang in 1947 in Darjeeling, where he and Sangharakshita must surely have crossed paths. As Chang explained, he was given editorial assistance and suggestions by, among others, Gerald Yorke, xii / f o r e w o r d

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whom Sangharakshita knew and who had in his younger days, as Sangharakshita reports in his memoir Moving Against the Stream, ‘been a disciple of the black magician Aleister Crowley, the “Wickedest Man in the World”.’6 At the time Sangharakshita met him, Yorke was working for the London publisher Rider & Co., and helped to bring out the first edition of Sangharakshita’s The Three Jewels. His involvement with the Songs of Milarepa may partly explain why the text, though readable and poetic, is evidently in places quite far adrift from the original Tibetan.

It seems that now is the time for a new wave of interest in the text. This year (2017), an authoritative new translation by Christopher Stagg is to be published by Shambhala Publications, a successor to Chang’s version, which Shambhala have faithfully kept in print for more than fifty years. A commentary on Milarepa’s songs by Chögyam Trungpa, compiled from seminars he gave in the 1970s, has also just been published. Trungpa, while expressing his deep appreciation for Chang’s translation, also had reservations about it, expressing a hope that ‘subsequent translations would have a less religious tone and a more direct and earthy feel, in keeping with the tone of Milarepa’s own speech and poetry’.7 Whatever its limitations, Chang’s translation has given access to an aspect of Milarepa’s life that was previously little known outside the Tibetan-speaking world. The story of Milarepa’s early years – the illtreatment at the hands of his uncle and aunt that led him to learn sorcery as a means of revenge, and his tough, life-or-death apprenticeship in Dharma practice as a disciple of Marpa – is so well known that it was even made into a film in 2006, and I vividly recall a dramatic perform­ ance of the much-loved story in Kathmandu. Less well known is the next phase of Milarepa’s life, when he himself became Dharma teacher to many men and women, as well as demons and demonesses, and even devas in pigeon form. Given that he spent his life meditating in solitude in the mountains as his guru Marpa had instructed, it may seem strange that he managed to acquire so many disciples but, as we will see, people often sought him out, however remote his location, and he himself, out of compassion, never missed any opportunity to communicate the Dharma to anyone he happened to meet.

It is this Milarepa we meet in this two-volume commentary, which is based on eleven study-seminars. In the 1970s and 1980s Sangharakshita gave dozens of seminars on a wide range of texts and themes. In order that these teachings could one day reach a wider audience, a massive f o r e w o r d /

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tape recorder was always present, and members of the small sangha of those days devoted themselves to transcribing the recordings, to be produced in printed form (all now available in digital format on the website freebuddhistaudio.com). The transcripts have great charm, some transcribers’ style including hints at atmosphere (‘laughter’, ‘rattle of teacups’) and occasional uncertainties; I am still grateful to whoever, hazarding a guess at the obscure title of a wonderful Dharma book, transcribed ‘Kindly Bent to Ease Us’ as ‘Kindly Bent Tweezers(?)’. It was rather wonderful for bookish types to discover that even if their talents didn’t run to plastering walls or whatever their local Buddhist centre needed, they could still do something useful. Whether they knew it or not, they were following in the footsteps of Buddhists from the very beginning, one of the main activities of the very earliest sangha being to record the teachings, or rather to commit them to memory, using song, or at least chanting, to help them remember.

Whatever the ostensible subject of study, seminar conversation was sure to turn from time to time to matters that had nothing to do with the text. Occasionally observations were made that are best forgiven and forgotten (sometimes it helps to bear in mind that many of the participants were very young at the time), and sometimes priortiy was given to matters vital to the development of the young Buddhist movement (just over a decade old at the time of the Milarepa seminars).

A number of seminars have been edited and published over the years and now appear in these Complete Works.8 It being impractical to include all the rest, at least we have added as many excerpts of Pāli canon commentary as could be squeezed into volume 15 and the whole collection of Milarepa seminars. The first three stories in volume 18 have been published before, in The Yogi’s Joy, here reproduced in the elegant and succinct version edited by Jinananda and Pabodhana, but the rest are published here for the first time. Sangharakshita has been unable to read through the edited version in the way he used to, but he has given his wholehearted blessing to the project and has been most helpful in answering queries. I am also very grateful to Vessantara, who was present at the very first of these seminars (in the hot summer of 1976), for finding the time to read through a substantial part of the text and suggest some adjustments on the basis of his expert knowledge of the Tibetan tradition. Thanks also, as ever, to Kalyanaprabha for all her help, and to Kalyanasri and Dharmottara for their thoughtful xiv / f o r e w o r d

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comments. The questions and answers of the seminars have been edited here into continuous text for ease of reading, but although the individual voices of the seminar participants have been blended, the questions and observations they ventured played a vital role in drawing forth Sangharakshita’s insights into the text and guiding the flow of the narrative, which is therefore very much a joint effort.

Seminar-based commentary is different from systematic written study. One verse of source text may catalyse pages of discussion while an entire song may slip by almost unnoticed, sometimes for an arbitrary reason like an approaching tea break. Also, the seminar focuses on the needs of those present – in this case young men most of whom were new to Dharma practice. (The Milarepa seminars happen to have been attended by men; Sangharakshita led other seminars attended by women – for example, an insightful series on The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, the classic text by Milarepa’s disciple Gampopa.) While information about the Tantric practices Milarepa mentions is sometimes given, not much is said about how they are performed, this having been at the time beyond the scope of those present and in any case being best learned not from a book but from personal contact with a teacher. The commentary also sometimes analyses in detail (and to useful effect) an inference of the translation which a more accurate rendering might show to be misleading; though Sangharakshita sometimes comments that the translation may be adrift and suggests other possible readings. Endnotes have been added to locate references to the Buddhist canon and other sources, and to suggest links to other passages in the Complete Works.

Also, to help with navigation around these volumes, a brief synopsis and a list of themes is provided at the start of each story.

In the first of the sequence of stories told in these two volumes, ‘The Tale of Red Rock Jewel Valley’, we find Milarepa on his own in the mountains, beset by doubts and demons and desperately missing his teacher and the sangha, but finding his own way to overcome his difficulties. That’s really the last time we see him alone: all the subsequent stories are about his meetings with other people, though he returns to solitary meditation whenever he gets the chance. In the second story he sings joyously of the solitary life, and the third describes what happens when he meets a young nobleman about to cross a river. In the previously unpublished fourth story, ‘The Shepherd’s Search for Mind’, there are two contrasting encounters, f o r e w o r d /

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the first with a married couple who try to convince Milarepa of the joys of conventional life, and the second with a young shepherd who is full of questions about the nature of his own mind and is encouraged to investigate for himself.

The seven stories which fill the rest of volume 18 and the whole of volume 19, under the title ‘Rechungpa’s Journey to Enlightenment’, follow the development of Milarepa’s relationship with his disciple Rechungpa, from their first meeting, when the young man goes to investigate a voice he hears singing in the mountains, to their final parting. An introduction to the sequence, including some reflections on how Rechungpa is presented in The Hundred Thousand Songs, and a brief account of the stories in the original text which feature Rechungpa but are not part of this commentary, appears at the start of the sequence. Needless to say, his progress towards Enlightenment is not without incident, and the ups and downs he experiences, surely recognizable to anyone who has ever seriously tried to live a spiritual life, are told with humour, irony, and pathos, revealing the all too human nature of the disciple and the wisdom and compassion of his patient teacher.

Rechungpa is credited with having written Milarepa’s biography, having one day been inspired to ask his guru to tell his life story.9 The text not only tells Milarepa’s story but gives us an idea of Rechungpa’s interview technique. Having heard all about Milarepa’s grim experiences and seeking a little light relief, he says, ‘The Jetsün’s deeds are in truth amazing and wondrous beyond compare. [Jetsün or Jetsun means something like “revered one”.]

But these episodes of your life inspire only tears and not laughter.

I pray, please describe the episodes of your life that inspire laughter.’ The Jetsün replied, ‘The episodes that inspire laughter are those in which, by virtue of practising with perseverance, I established fortunate humans and non-human disciples on the path of ripening and liberation, thereby benefiting the teachings of the Buddha.’10

Milarepa’s methods of ‘establishing disciples on the path’ are as varied as the dsiciples themselves. One can see what Sir Humphrey Clarke meant when he compared Milarepa to St Francis, but it’s hard to imagine a xvi / f o r e w o r d

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Christian saint engaging in a frank discussion with a party of visitors who ask him please to cover up his nakedness as it embarrasses them,11 or, when asked for a song expressing the key for obtaining Enlightenment in this lifetime, exposing his buttocks, which are covered in callouses from long periods of sitting meditation, and declaring that this is his ultimate precept.

This latter incident is mentioned in a section called ‘Milarepa’s personal style’ in Drinking the Mountain Stream: Songs of Tibet’s Beloved Saint, Milarepa.12 In his foreword to that work, Lama Kunga Rinpoche remarks frankly, ‘If the reader is expecting something like a magical and instantaneous reward from this book, I would say that it is rather difficult – do something else.’ But, he adds, ‘The book, the reader, and the teacher together might produce something of value, something useful.’ This thoughtful statement brings to mind a famous and outrageous episode in which Milarepa burns the books of teachings which Rechungpa has travelled all the way from Tibet to India to acquire. Why? How could he? And what happens next? I will leave you to find out in the story called ‘Rechungpa’s Repentance’. 13 But the question of the value of words, much explored here, is entwined with irony. Here you are, on the brink of this extensive collection of words overheard in conversation about the long-ago songs and stories of an almost legendary figure, mediated through an impressionistic translation and an idiosyncratic editorial process. What do you hope to gain from it? How are you going to recognize whatever you personally need to help you on your own journey towards Enlightenment?

Sometimes it may shine out from the pages like a gift, or a kind of bibliomancy, and sometimes you will need help to see it, because you ‘can’t see for looking’, as the homely English phrase has it. Hence the immeasurable value of collective Dharma study and the specific advice only a friend or mentor can give, the ‘Pith-Instruction’, to use a term frequently encountered in this commentary. Among all the anecdotes and reflections, challenges and reassurances in this text, some things will make a world of difference to you while others will pass you by, maybe because they don’t apply to you, or because you don’t yet see that they do. As Sangharakshita advises, it is crucial to notice what we find genuinely interesting (which may be quite different from what we think we should find interesting) and use that as our way in to genuine understanding.14 f o r e w o r d /

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The basic question is: what can we learn, spiritually speaking, on our own and what do we need help to discover? Many of the themes of this commentary – some of which are allowed to return more than once, because they seem important enough to bear repetition – circle around a crucial subject: the art of discipleship. In his talk ‘Is a Guru Necessary?’ given in 1970, and twenty years later, in his talk ‘My Relation to the Western Buddhist Order’,15 Sangharakshita considered the complexities of the term we have inherited from the spiritual traditions of the East: ‘guru’. The Western term ‘disciple’, whose simple origin is in the Latin verb discere, ‘to learn’, has become just as complex, and has also been the subject of much discussion in our sangha. But the two terms don’t mean anything on their own; they only make sense in relation to each other, and here we see and feel that, in the interactions between Milarepa and his disciples, and in Milarepa’s devotion to his own guru, Marpa.

Not that, even if we accept the terms, the roles of ‘guru’ and ‘disciple’ are fixed. As Sangharakshita makes clear, for a Dharma tradition to continue, it is vital that students do better than their teachers;16 and, as well, individual relationships are part of a wider network of spiritual friendship, the golden net which Sangharakshita urges us to recognize in his poem ‘Four Gifts’.17 Part of the golden net is the network of many people responsible for the funding and production of these Complete Works, which you will find described and appreciated elsewhere in this volume. Here, I can’t resist extending particular thanks to Shantavira, the faithful and indefatigable copyeditor of these volumes. Shantavira has worked on the publication of Sangharakshita’s writings longer than anyone and deserves all our praise. May all blessings be his, especially for his long hours of work on this commentary.

Embedded in its prose are many songs, diamonds among precious coal. I am remembering again the voices singing in the library, seventy years after the author of this book found his eyes full of tears on his first meeting with Milarepa, and many centuries after the songs were first given voice in the clear air of the Tibetan mountains. We don’t know what they sounded like then, or whether the verses we read now in our own language bear any resemblance to the words Milarepa sang, having been passed down to us through so many generations, so many sensibilities. I can’t help hearing in them something of the haunting sorrow and earthy joy of the songs of the medieval troubadours, xviii / f o r e w o r d

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although, thrillingly, they may have been sung in a style similar to the Tibetan folksong of today. What is remarkable is that even when they reach us as bare words on the page they are still alive, perhaps even – if we give them our heartfelt attention – enlightening.

Vidyadevi Herefordshire, August 2017

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