GIRAFFE

by Stephen Batchelor

This unpublished essay is a brief biography of the Tibetan lama Tsongkhapa (1357-1419). It was originally drafted as a chapter of Buddhism Without Beliefs but rejected as too digressive and experimental.

So sacred was the shrine on Nomad Mountain that even Dalai Lamas were refused permission to worship there. No wonder the Red Guards were so keen to smash it to bits. When the last monks had been evicted or killed, the cultural revolutionaries hacked through the gilded silver casing to find what was concealed at the core. Some were local men and deep down were afraid. It was dark and cold. In the flicker of lamplight they unwound the embalming cloth. They uncovered the body and fled with inhuman cries. The hair and nails were still growing after five hundred and fifty years.

Han Shan-t’ung belonged to the White Lotus Society, a terrorist organisation popularly known as the Incense Army. At this time the Central Empire was in great confusion. It had suffered a hundred years of foreign rule. Han Shan-t’ung declared the time ripe for Buddha Maitreya to be born on Earth. The Mongol rulers captured and executed him in the year of the Wood Sheep. His followers declared his son Lin-erh "Emperor" of a restored Sung Dynasty, that ruled a strip of territory along the northern borders from Manchuria to Tibet.

Two years later, in the first month of the year of the Fire Bird, a woman in the Onion Valley on the northern Tibetan border dreamed of a statue of the compassionate Avalokiteshvara. It was the size of a mountain but penetrated her through the crown of her head. Nine months later, as Venus appeared in the dawn sky, she painlessly gave birth to a boy.

In the following year of the Earth Dog, the head of the Sakya order, which had ruled the Centre under the Mongol Empire for a hundred years, was murdered. A monk, Jangchub Gyeltsen, assumed control of the land and inaugurated the Dynasty of the Man from Sow’s Ferry.

In the year of the Earth Pig, when the Onion Valley boy was three, the Fourth Karmapa, en route to the court of Toghan Temür, the last Mongol Emperor, came to see him. The lama gave him the vows of a layman before proceeding to Beijing. Shortly afterwards, a Dharma teacher returned to the East from the Centre and presented horses, sheep and other gifts to the family, requesting the boy to be placed in his care.

When he was six, in the year of the Water Tiger, the boy was initiated and given a secret name. In the same year Lin-erh was defeated by the Mongols, ending the doomed restoration of the Sung.

When he was seven, in the year of the Water Hare, the boy became a novice monk and was given the name Lozang Drakpa.

When the boy reached eleven, in the year of the Earth Monkey, Hung-wu, a former monk of the Huang-chüeh Temple and officer in the White Lotus Society, led a rebellion that succeeded in overthrowing Mongol rule. Inspired to create an enlightened realm to prepare for the descent of Buddha Maitreya from Tushita, Hung-wu inaugurated the Dynasty of Light and encouraged the ordination of monks.

At the age of sixteen, in the year of the Water Ox, Lozang Drakpa left his home in the Onion Valley and departed for the Centre. He was never to return.

For seventeen years he wandered from monastery to monastery, where he studied, debated, meditated, taught and wrote until, in the year of the Iron Horse, he met Umapa.

A strange man, Umapa. An illiterate cowherd from the East, he was one day physically overwhelmed by syllables reverberating from his heart. When he awoke, he had a vision of Manjushri in the form of a young god with blue skin, wielding a sword. Henceforth he lived in mystic communion with Manjushri. To understand what was happening, he went to hear a renowned young monk called Lozang Drakpa lecture on emptiness: the focus of Manjushri’s wisdom.

The student became the teacher. Lozang Drakpa, the Onion Valley boy, now thirty-three years old, forsook his formal studies of philosophy and went into the mountains with Umapa. Every afternoon over tea he asked Manjushri about emptiness with Umapa serving as his medium.

Two years later, in the year of the Water Monkey, together with eight companions, he began an extended period of meditation. Within the year he received a vision in which Manjushri’s sword pierced his heart, injecting it with rainbow-colored ambrosia.

Six years passed.

One night in the late spring of the year of the Earth Tiger, he dreamt he was seated in Tushita before Nagarjuna and his followers. Buddhapalita, a tall, blue man, came forward and placed a Sanskrit text on his head. When Lozang Drakpa awoke he turned to the passage he had been reading in Buddhapalita’s commentary to Nagarjuna’s verse:

If body and mind were me,
I’d come and go like them.
If I were other than body and mind,
they’d say nothing about me at all.

His confusion was dispelled. He said that his world had been turned upside down. He was forty-two years old. In the same year, Hung-wu, founder and first Emperor of the Dynasty of Light, died.

The next year, that of the Earth Hare, the Emperor’s grandson, the gentle Chien-wen, ascended the throne. Civil war broke out as Prince Yun-lo, the fourth son of the Emperor, sought to depose his nephew and claim the throne for himself.

In the following year, that of the Iron Dragon, Lozang Drakpa convened a great festival to celebrate the restoration of a giant statue of Maitreya, which he and his companions had completed during their retreat. The entire land was drawn to this event to herald the dawning of the age of a future Buddha. This is the first of his four great deeds.

Three years later, in the year of the Water Sheep, he convened a council of monks from all over the land to affirm the value of adherence to the monastic rule. This is the second of his four great deeds.

In the same year, Prince Yun-lo killed his nephew Chien-wen, overthrew his regime, and ascended the throne as third Emperor of the Dynasty of Light.

Next year, that of the Wood Monkey, Tamerlane assembled an army of 200,000 in Ortrar, on the steppes of Central Asia. His plan was to invade the Central Empire through Bishbalik, overthrow the Dynasty of Light and establish an Islamic state. He died before the invasion could be launched.

Three years later, in the first month of the year of the Fire Pig, the Fifth Karmapa was received at the court of Emperor Yun-lo in Nanjing. It is recorded that for twenty-two days he produced apparitions of lions and cranes, flowers falling from the sky, and sweet dew in the Imperial gardens.

The same year, Lozang Drakpa, the Onion Valley boy, reached the age of fifty. By now his name had spread through the Centre and the East all the way to the Central Empire. With his secretary Sonam Lodrö he retired to the Sera Dharma Centre, a hermitage in the hills north of Lhasa, to write a commentary to Nagarjuna’s The Intelligence: Poems from the Centre. As he composed the work, twenty golden letter "A"s hovered above him in space. Commenting on the last two lines of the eighteenth verse of chapter twenty-four, he wrote:

Everything empty of intrinsic being is contingently configured. I configure a cart on the basis of its wheels and other parts. As such it is empty and not generated by an essence. Unborn emptiness has let go of the extremes of being and nothingness. It is both the centre itself and the central path. Emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves.

At the end of the text he describes himself as "a monk from Tsongkha in the East known as Lozang Drakpa, a practitioner of the great centre free from extremes, who has heard a great deal." The twenty letter "A"s fell to ground below the hermitage and embedded themselves in a rock.

***

As the year turned into that of the Earth Rat, an envoy reached the Centre to invite Lozang Drakpa to the court of Emperor Yung-lo. By the time the envoy arrived at Sera, Lozang Drakpa had left for the hermitage at Rakha Rock. He sent down a message declining the invitation on grounds of advancing age and the need for solitary retreat. He subsequently sent a disciple three years older than himself in his place.

In the following year, that of the Earth Ox, he inaugurated a great prayer festival in Lhasa to which people flocked from all over Tibet. This is the third of his four great deeds. It became a yearly event, celebrated in the first days of each new year, until it was forbidden by Chairman Mao of the People’s Republic five hundred and fifty years later.

Four years later, in the year of the Wood Sheep, Lozang Drakpa founded his own monastery on Nomad Mountain. He called it Ganden, the Tibetan name for Tushita, the heaven where Maitreya prepares to descend to Earth. This is the fourth and last of his great deeds.

In the tenth month of the following year, that of the Earth Pig, he complained of pain in his feet. Before dawn on the morning of the twenty-fifth, he entered meditation on emptiness and died as the sun rose. His body assumed the lustre of the youthful Manjushri. He was sixty-two years old.

Earlier the same year a fleet returned to the Central Empire from an expedition to the East Coast of Africa, bringing with it a cargo of tributes, including animals never before seen in China. It is recorded that Emperor Yung-lo greatly enjoyed the sight of his first giraffe.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This brief biography of the Buddhist monk Lozang Drakpa, known as "Tsongkhapa," (1357-1419) is set against an account of the first three emperors of the Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The opening paragraph is based on the oral testimony of Tibetan refugees in India. The Tibetan dating follows the Bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo: smad cha. All other material is constructed and translated from the following sources:

Kenneth Ch’en. Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

L.P. Lhalungpa (ed.) dBuma rigs tshogs drug: The Six Yukt Shastra of Madhyamika written by Acharya Nagajun. Delhi: 1970.

Robert A. F. Thurman (ed.) Life and Teachings of Tsong Khapa. Dharamsala: LTWA, 1982.

------. Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Tsepon W.D. Shakabpa. Tibet: A Political History. New York: Potala, 1984.

David Snellgrove & Hugh Richardson. A Cultural History of Tibet. Boulder: Prajna, 1980.

Tsongkhapa. rTsa she tik chen rigs pa’i rgya mtsho. Sarnath: 1973.

D. Twitchett and F.W. Mote (eds.). The Cambridge History of China. Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644. Part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Return to Table of Contents