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

The biographies of Rechungpa 104
Rechungpa the ‘Wrathful with supplement’ (rDo-rje gtum-po khyungsham-can).
Rechungpa practises this for twenty-one days and then dreams that many
people are going to watch his army fight the spirits of Tibet. He sees chasing
creatures into the sky, and awakes to find himself healed.
Rechungpa waits until the morning before going to see Varacandra, fearful of
interrupting his teacher’s night, because being Nepalese he is short tempered! When
Rechungpa does tell him the good news, Varacandra upbraids him for having a Tibetan
lack of dedication and tells him to carry on practising.
Varacandra’s wife, on discovering that Rechungpa is a practitioner in a lineage
derived from Nāropa, gives him cloth so he can make a gift to ‘Tepupa’ (the Demchog
Nyengyu Biographies version has Tibupa), 46 who she says is a pupil of Nāropa.
Afterwards, Rechungpa, again on the wife’s advice, accompanies Varacandra on two
healing missions. In the first of these, Varacandra cures a queen by releasing a frog from
inside a growth on her head. In the second case, he deflates a woman swollen from
snakebite by making her blow into a chicken’s beak. The chicken swells up, loses its
feathers and dies, and the woman is cured. Varacandra assures Rechungpa that his
powers caused the unfortunate chicken to be reborn in a higher existence.
Varacandra declares Rechungpa cured and sends him back to Tibet. In Nepal he hears
that Milarepa is in Nyanam (sNya-nam) and so seeks him out there, at Tröpuk (Brodphug)
cave.
The story of Rechungpa’s family is brought to a strange conclusion in an addition to
the narrative designed to make Milarepa seem more caring. Milarepa tells Rechungpa
that he had sent for him, wishing to nurse him, only to find that he had gone to India.
Rechungpa’s mother and uncle come for him again, even though the narrative has now
removed Milarepa and Rechungpa to Nyanam, far from his homeland. Milarepa threatens
Rechungpa’s mother and uncle with sorcery and they run away, both out of Rechungpa’s
life and Gyadangpa’s narrative. It is not explained why Milarepa did not do that to save
Rechungpa from all his troubles in the first place.
Rechungpa makes a commitment to stay with Milarepa for twelve years. He receives
the instructions, and by mastering the practice becomes able to wear cotton only.
Therefore he is given the name Rechung Dorje Drak.
Milarepa’s limitations in this version are striking, reminiscent of the fallible version of
Milarepa described by Gampopa. In Gyadangpa, Milarepa does not know the identity or
circumstances of the child he meets. When winter is over and Rechungpa is needed for
ploughing, Milarepa is unable to prevent the mother and uncle from taking Rechungpa
away and he is particularly unhelpful when Rechungpa falls sick. In later narratives there
is a diminution of these deficiencies in Milarepa and an increase in his clairvoyant and
supernatural powers. However, surviving elements from this passage, which are
ineluctably a part of the narrative structure, endure, causing problems in creating
internally consistent narratives.
As mentioned in Chapter 4, Rechungpa’s mother is the principal villain and the uncle
only a background figure in Gyadangpa’s story, but future versions will reverse their
roles.
The story of Rechungpa’s sickness and cure demonstrates the efficacy as well as the
origins of ‘the Wrathful Vajrapāni with supplement’ in combating sickness.
Meditation practice as a method to cure illness by countering the influence of