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

PREFACE
This book examines the surviving accounts of the life of Rechungpa (1084–1161). He
was a Tibetan master in the formative years of the Kagyu, one of the principal traditions
of Buddhism in Tibet.
My involvement in Tibetan Buddhism dates back to 1974, and then I lived in or near
Samye Ling Tibetan Centre in Scotland from 1978 to 1991. Kagyu lamas often tell
stories of Rechungpa and his quarrels with his teacher Milarepa, the most famous early
master of the Kagyu lineage. Rechungpa seemed to my contemporaries and me, to be a
curious and contradictory persona, concerning whom little information was available.
I translated for Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche’s course on the life of Rechungpa at
Thrangu Monastery in Bodhnath in 1990, and to my surprise he announced that the
listeners would be able to eventually read the biography in my translation. Although the
translation was intended to accompany this thesis, the readers are sadly still waiting.
Both Akong Rinpoche of the Samye Ling Centre (who is himself regarded as an
emanation of Rechungpa) and Michael Aris at Oxford University encouraged the idea of
choosing Rechungpa as a thesis from amongst the various projects I had in mind. I knew
nothing about the date or provenance of Rechungpa’s biography, which was itself
difficult to obtain a copy of. I had assumed it was a very early work and that the thesis
would be a straightforward project. I had no idea how complex and baffling a labyrinth I
was about to enter.
The thesis assumed a readership that had a familiarity with Tibetan and all Tibetan
words were simply transliterated into roman letters. However, for this book, assuming
that the reader is more familiar with a phonetic version of Tibetan words, the names of
people, lineages and places are given in that form, with transliteration in parenthesis if
their incident is infrequent. However, not only does contemporary Tibetan phonology
differ greatly from its ninth-century spelling, there are considerable variations in
phonology across the Tibetan plateau, so that almost every archaic pronunciation is
preserved in one place or another. Nevertheless, a regular method of phoneticisation has
developed in the now abundant output of books on Tibet, and this is what I have
attempted to follow here. It is by nature somewhat arbitrary, and I apologise for any
irritation it may cause. I have not supplied phonetics for text titles, providing an English
translation instead. I have also given the Tibetan for any text passages in transliteration
only.
For the transliteration of Tibetan, I have chosen to capitalise the root-letter rather than
the first letter; and have hyphenated syllables when they form words but not followed the
system of hyphenating particles to their associated nouns. I am not claiming any
superiority for this approach, but it is the form of transliteration I am at ease with and I
apologise to anyone accustomed to another system.
In this book I shall present the successive parts of Rechungpa’s life through the stages
of their narrative evolution in a succession of texts. The focus is on the life of Rechungpa