Gampopa

The Kadampa physician of Dakpo

The figure the Tibetan tradition stabilises under the name Gampopa — the man from Gampo, after the Daklha Gampo retreat-mountain in the Dakpo region of southern Tibet at which he eventually founded his seat — was born Sönam Rinchen in 1079 in the Nyel valley. Trained from boyhood in the Buddhist medical curriculum of the period, he became a practising physician; the epithet Dakpo Lhajé — the physician of Dakpo — is the form in which the early Tibetan literature most often names him. The hagiography fixes the turning point at the death of his wife and two children, presumed in the standard reading to have occurred during the plague that swept the region in the late eleventh century: at twenty-six, having attended the deaths professionally and then privately, he took monastic ordination in the Kadampa tradition that the Bengali master Atiśa had established in central Tibet half a century earlier. The Kadampa training he undertook for the next sixteen years was not the tantric Mahāmudrā§ curriculum the line he founded would later become associated with. It was the systematic bstan rim — the graded path of lam rim — and the blo sbyong — the lojong§ mind-training — that the Kadampa school had built around Atiśa's Bodhipathapradīpa. The tonal restraint, the monastic precision and the ethical-cognitive emphasis of the Kadampa formation are the substrate on which everything Gampopa later did is built; without it, the institutional shape the Kagyu§ tradition eventually took would not have been available.

Daklha Gampo: the synthesis

The decisive turn came in 1109. Gampopa heard a wandering yogi describe Milarepa§ — by this point an old man living in the Himalayan caves, having received the Mahāmudrā and the Nāro chos drug directly from Marpa§ — and travelled north to Lapchi to find him. Milarepa accepted him as a student, gave him the Six Yogas of Naropa§ curriculum (gtum mo, sgyu lus, rmi lam, 'od gsal, bar do, 'pho ba), and the Mahāmudrā pointing-out, then instructed him to return south. The hagiography records Milarepa's parting prediction: that he would have many students, among whom one — the moonlike one — would receive the most. The decade or so Gampopa then spent at Daklha Gampo from 1121 onwards is the operative period of the Tibetan curriculum. The synthesis the seat enacted is the substantive innovation of his life: the tantric content of Marpa-Milarepa's Mahāmudrā curriculum was rendered teachable to a settled monastic community by being folded into the bstan rim shape the Kadampa training had given him. The Dwags po thar rgyan — the Jewel Ornament of Liberation — that he composed at Daklha Gampo opens with chapters on the precious human birth, impermanence, karma, and the suffering of cyclic existence (the canonical bstan rim topics in their canonical sequence) before introducing bodhicitta§ and the bodhisattva training; only late in the text does the Mahāmudrā recognition the synthesis was built around come into its own. The architectural choice is the choice that made the Mahāmudrā curriculum institutionally transmissible. Outside this framing — without the prior bstan rim and blo sbyong preparation — the tantric pointing-out had remained, in Marpa§'s and Milarepa§'s hands, a transmission for the very few students prepared to undertake the trial-cycle the mahāsiddha§ form of life imposes.

From Daklha Gampo to the four major and eight minor sub-schools

The institutional consequence is the Kagyu§ school as it now exists. Of Gampopa's students, four founded the four major sub-schools — Düsum Khyenpa (1110–1193) the Karma Kagyu (the line of the Karmapas, into which Chögyam Trungpa§ and his student Pema Chödrön§ were eventually trained); Phagmo Drupa Dorje Gyalpo the Phagdru Kagyu (from which the eight minor sub-schools — the Drikung, Drukpa, Taklung, Yamzang, Trophu, Shugseb, Yelpa and Martsang — descend); Baram Darma Wangchuk the Baram Kagyu; and Shang Tsalpa Tsöndrü Drakpa the Tshalpa Kagyu. The Karma Kagyu is the line through which most of the English-language Kagyu material in the index has come down, but the Drukpa Kagyu — the school of the twelve-year retreat at Tayul Gompa that Tenzin Palmo's *Cave in the Snow*↗ records — is one of the eight minor schools downstream of Gampopa's student Phagmo Drupa. Almost every Kagyu lineage now extant is a Daklha Gampo school at one or two removes.

Where the lineage surfaces in the index

The English-language index does not yet hold a row recorded under Gampopa's own name — Herbert Guenther's mid-century English rendering of the Jewel Ornament and Khenpo Konchog Gyaltsen's later one circulate in the academic literature but are not yet indexed here. The lineage is in the index through the Karma Kagyu side it founded. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism*↗ is the canonical English-language Kagyu text and the explicit institutional inheritance of the curriculum Gampopa systematised; the spiritual materialism Trungpa diagnoses is the residual self-image the bstan rim preparation Gampopa built into the front of the Jewel Ornament was designed to dismantle from the start. Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart*↗, her course on awakening compassion↗, her teaching on uncertainty as the practice↗ and her conversation on becoming more alive↗ carry the Kadampa blo sbyong curriculum that Gampopa folded into the line — the tonglen§ and lojong§ practices Pema teaches are the substantive inheritance of the same Atiśa-Kadampa stream Gampopa trained in for the sixteen years before he met Milarepa. Tenzin Palmo's *Cave in the Snow*↗ records the British nun's twelve-year retreat at the Drukpa Kagyu hermitage four generations downstream of Gampopa's student Phagmo Drupa, and is the index's closest first-person record of the kind of long-form practice the Jewel Ornament's late chapters point at as the curriculum's terminus.

What he isn't

Gampopa is not the founder of a tantric tradition de novo. The substantive curriculum he carried — Mahāmudrā and the Nāro chos drug — is the Indian curriculum Tilopa§ and Naropa§ stabilised, transmitted in unbroken line through Marpa to Milarepa to him; what he is the figure of is the institutional-form shift, the synthesis that allowed the curriculum to be carried by a settled monastic community rather than only by a small number of cave-yogis. He is also not the figure on whom the Kagyu school's Mahāmudrā literature depends most heavily — the dohās of Tilopa§, the Six Yogas commentaries of Naropa, and the mgur of Milarepa§ are the stronger primary-source weight upstream of him. And the Jewel Ornament of Liberation is, on the tradition's own self-presentation, the Kadampa side of his synthesis rather than the Mahāmudrā side; the most pointing-out-dense literature in the Kagyu§ inheritance was composed by his students and their students rather than by him. What Gampopa is — and what every Kagyu sub-school takes him to be — is the figure to whom the institutional Tibetan inheritance of an Indian mahāsiddha§ curriculum is owed.