The Biographies of Rechungpa: The Evolution of a Tibetan ...

Rechungpa’s childhood and meeting Milarepa 91
Milarepa asks Rechungpa about his dreams, and the answer is almost the same, though
the detail of women bringing flowers out from a churn (or tree) is omitted. 88 He offers to
take on Rechungpa as his pupil, and the boy accepts the offer.
The Shamarpa’s version is repeated in A River of Blessings as the first of two
alternative versions of the meeting. The second being simply that of The Life and Songs
of Shepay Dorje repeated verbatim.
The third and most elaborate version of the meeting is in the thirteenth-century
Gyadangpa. This proves to be the narrative with greater survival power as it continues in
different versions over the next centuries and absorbs elements from other narratives. It
was repeated verbatim in the Demchok Nyengyu Biographies (bDe-mchog sNyan-brgyud
biographies), written after 1360.
In this version, Rechungpa’s father died when he was little and his mother married his
paternal uncle. Falling under his influence she develops a dislike of Rechungpa.
Rechungpa is, however, very intelligent. He learns to read with a Nyingma lama, and
becomes able to read texts for villagers who pay him with tsampa dough. Nevertheless,
‘his mother took no care of him other than to bind the texts and tie on his belt’. He
brought the food to his mother at a designated place each afternoon. One day, he had to
wait for his payment, and by the time he arrived he found only a message from his
mother, rebuking him, and telling him not to bother ever coming home again. Distraught,
he went up into the mountains where he met Milarepa in a cave and gave him the tsampa.
On hearing his story Milarepa said that they have had similar childhoods. 89
As a narrative cause for the meeting, this is dramatically stronger than that in The Life
and Songs of Shepay Dorje, Donmo Ripa and the Karma Kagyu texts, but is slightly
weaker in terms of internal narrative logic. If the mother herself is able to read and write
why is she so dependent on Rechungpa’s reading abilities? Perhaps the narrator meant to
imply that she had left a verbal message, but with whom? And why should a child,
instead of turning to neighbours or family, go up to an inhospitable cave in the
mountains? While there could be explanations, none are provided. We shall see that later
narrators, while using this basic scenario, had recourse to different solutions to explain
the sequence of events.
The anonymous Biographies of the Kagyu Lineage, Commencing with Vajradhara in
the NGMPP (Nepalese and German Manuscript Preservation Project) collection, has very
interesting variants, most of which are repeated in The Golden Kagyu Garland of Ralung
(circa 1799–1803), but there are differences in their opening lines. The Golden Kagyu
Garland of Ralung changes the uncle’s name to match that found in Götsang Repa’s
sixteenth-century version, and ‘marrying’ (bsdus) has been corrupted to ‘beat’ (brdungs),
but it appears that the redactor of the The Golden Kagyu Garland of Ralung made few
revisions after the first page. The text supplies a much simpler version than Gyadangpa,
so that while thin on some details at least avoids Gyadangpa’s narrative problems. This
may therefore represent an earlier version of the ‘Rechungpa as reader’ narrative.
The version as found in Biographies of the Kagyu Lineage, Commencing with
Vajradhara says that Rechunpa’s father died when he was eight, his mother married his
uncle, named Nyen Khyibar (gNyan Khyi-‘bar). They hated him, but on the suggestion of
neighbours he studied reading with his father’s lama. In his twelfth year, for no explained
reason, he took his food payment to Milarepa, who said to him, ‘Your grandfather was a
pupil of my lharje (guru), Mar-pa,’ and became his teacher. 90