Timeless Rapture: Inspired Verse from the Shangpa Masters

DORJÉ DENPA
Although Jamgon Kongtrul does not accord Dorjé Denpa a
separate section in the collection of songs, he deserves a specific
mention. A master whose life Buddha foretold, Dorjé Denpa (whose name
is sometimes cited as Vajrasanapa in probably reconstructed Sanskrit) preserved
the Buddha’s doctrine at the site of Buddha’s enlightenment; thus
we know him as “he of the Vajra Seat,” rather than by his formal Buddhist
name, Punyakara. He was the first main teacher Kyungpo Naljor met on
his travel in India; the disciple records their exchanges in song.
Dorjé Denpa seems totally unknown in the West, but according to
Tibetan oral history (which I have been unsuccessful in finding in print,
in Tibetan or English) he should be recalled for at least one event. He
offered a vajra feast in Bodhgaya and invited in prayer all the accomplished
masters of India. Those who appeared on that occasion, among the thousands
of possible enlightened guests, have been remembered as a group,
although their attendance at that vajra feast on that day is the only event
that linked them—the eighty (or eighty-four) mahasiddhas, the great
accomplished masters of tantric India. 32
According to The Blue Annals, a number of Tibetans traveled to India
and sought instruction at the feet of Dorjé Denpa. The book also credits
Atisha after arriving in Tibet with sending a Tibetan to India to meet Dorjé
Denpa (p. 1021). Certainly, it is clear from Kyungpo Naljor’s account of
their first meeting (in the songs above) that Dorjé Denpa was well
acquainted with the Tibetans and their weaknesses as new Buddhists. One
such story can be found in The Blue Annals, on the subject of Dorjé Denpa’s
transmission to a Tibetan translator (La-tö Marpo) of the meditation of
Bodhisattva Great Compassion, which he had received from Virupa.
When [La-tö Marpo] came to Dorjé Denpa, he presented him half
of the gold and asked him to bestow the method with which he
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