We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Greatly Perfected, in Space and Time: Historicities of the Bon Aural Transmission from Zhang zhung.
- Authors
Blezer, Henk
- Abstract
In Tibetan Studies, we customarily refer to Tibetan historical sources. Yet, when we do so, both the referent and the exact definition of the category 'history' often tend to move a bit out of focus-whether that is considered convenient or not…From the great wealth and variety of Tibetan historical literature available, for this paper, we look at an interesting but also somewhat remote Bon representative: complementary materials on lineage, history, and cosmology that developed as a legitimising adjunct to the Aural Transmission of Zhang zhung (Zhang zhung snyan (b)rgyud ZZNG). The ZZNG mainly contains tantric and Great Perfection teachings. There is a curiously insulated and timeless quality to these materials, which of course adumbrates the prominent Great Perfection view and its rhetoric of transcendence. Early ZZNG lineage stories appear almost entirely depleted of verifiable names and dates, while at the same time being replete with stencilled, evocative, trope-like events, names, sacred places, maxims and teaching devices. If one would have much invested in securing historical traces, their conspicuous absence could almost suggest conscious efforts to cover the tracks. Indeed, it is notoriously difficult to put a handle on dates of lineage Lamas of the ZZNG traditions before Yang ston chen po (the late 11th c. AD), who most likely first codified the ZZNG. This raises interesting questions about implicit historicities. Much of the frustration about what may appear to be historical obscurantism might actually relate to a clash of historicities and does not necessarily put the integrity of the underlying ZZNG Bon historicities into question. A 'convention of a-temporality' renders the markedly insulated explications of (partly even 'transcendent') space and time in lineage documents of the ZZNG Bon Great Perfection particularly useful for understanding the clash of historicities that occurs when we try to read such materials as chronologies, and for appreciating the sensibilities from which 'historicising' teaching documents of that ilk are designed. Three crucial links in the ZZNG lineages promise to be particularly revealing: 1) The legendary Gu rib Gyer spungs sNang bzher lod po, who is placed in the 8th c. AD and is said to have recorded the Four Cycles of the Oral Tradition (bKa' (b)rgyud skor bzhi) in writing. 2) The equally legendary dPon chen btsan po, who, by context, is 'dated' to around the 10th c. AD. Later tradition believes him to be the Master where the teachings emerge from a Zhang zhung cultural sphere into the Tibetan world. He is believed to have lived for 1600 years (and thus ought to be still alive as we speak). 3) Yang ston chen po Shes rab rgyal mtshan probably is the only historical figure in this exalted company. His dates start somewhere in the last quarter of the 11th c. AD. The great Yang ngal teacher is a crucial figure for the eventual codification of the ZZNG and its narratives (he and his teacher 'Or sgom kun 'dul apparently were the first to produce notes on the Nyams (b)rgyud or Experiential Transmission). In this study we will take a closer look at some of these Masters of the ZZNG. Since 'the type of historicity' of Yang ston chen po seems the least problematic, we will pay particular attention to the manner of construction the religious persona of the first two figures: to the way their hagiographical narratives gradually emerge from legendary materials, in accordance with convention (and philosophical view).
- Subjects
TIBET (China); CHINA; HISTORICITY; SPACETIME; BUDDHIST cosmology
- Publication
Tibet Journal, 2009, Vol 34/35, Issue 3-4/1-2, p71
- ISSN
0970-5368
- Publication type
Article