What is Padmasambhava?
Padmasambhava was an eighth-century Indian tantric master, invited to Tibet by King Trisong Detsen at the suggestion of the Indian abbot Śāntarakṣita. He came from Oḍḍiyāna, the region around the Swat valley. He helped establish Samye, the first Tibetan monastery, conventionally dated to 779 CE, and taught a core circle of students including the queen Yeshe Tsogyal and the translator Vairocana. In Tibetan Buddhist tradition he carries the title Guru Rinpoche, Precious Teacher, and the Nyingma school treats him as the human channel through which Vajrayāna Buddhism, and specifically the Dzogchen curriculum, entered Tibet.
Padmasambhava, Atisha, and the two transmissions
Padmasambhava is the founding figure of the snga 'gyur, the early-translation or Nyingma tradition. He arrived in the eighth century, during the first royal spreading of Buddhism under Trisong Detsen. Atisha (982–1054) arrived three centuries later, during the phyi dar, the later diffusion, and is the founding figure for the schools now called the gsar ma: Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug. The two traditions carry different tantric curricula. The Nyingma inner tantra vehicles, and above all Dzogchen, came through Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra. The gsar ma Anuttarayoga tantras came through later Indian panditas and through Atisha's reform movement. The schools share a common Mahayana foundation but teach different methods and hold different texts as authoritative.
The Nyingma transmission
Padmasambhava is the proximal source of the Nyingma, the ancient ones, the oldest of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The school classifies the Buddhist path into nine yānas: three sūtra vehicles, three outer tantra vehicles, and three inner tantra vehicles. Dzogchen sits at the summit as the ninth. The Nyingma lineage takes two parallel forms. Bka' ma, the long lineage, is the continuous oral and textual transmission from teacher to student. Gter ma, the short lineage or treasure transmission, is the body of teachings the tradition holds to have been hidden by Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal in the eighth century, sealed for later discovery, and recovered by tertöns at the moments the teachings would be most useful. The Bar do thos grol chen mo, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is the most famous gter ma in the Western reception. It is attributed to Padmasambhava and was uncovered by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth century. The tertön phenomenon distinguishes Nyingma from the Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug schools, all of which transmit through long-lineage oral instruction alone.
In the index
The Nyingma side of the index is thin and the Padmasambhava-specific corpus is thinner. The closest English-language entry into the lineage he founded is the literature carried by the closely related Karma Kagyu line. Chögyam Trungpa's *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism* is the index's clearest sustained exposition of the broader Vajrayāna view Padmasambhava is held to have transmitted. The spiritual materialism Trungpa diagnoses is the residue of religious self-image the inner tantra curriculum is engineered to refuse, and the lectures operate inside the ngo sprod (pointing-out) tradition the Nyingma and Kagyu lines hold in common. Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart* carries the same orientation in the form of groundlessness; her course on awakening compassion walks through the lojong curriculum descending from Atiśa inside the same overall Tibetan Mahāyāna view. Her teaching on uncertainty as the practice and her conversation on becoming more alive extend that orientation. Tenzin Palmo's *Cave in the Snow* records a British nun's twelve-year retreat in the Drukpa Kagyu line, an adjacent transmission, and is the index's closest first-person record of the kind of long-form practice Padmasambhava's curriculum points toward. Thich Nhat Hanh on emptiness, signlessness and aimlessness and the Plum Village teaching from Br. Troi Duc Niem are not Tibetan but reach the same non-conceptual horizon from the Vietnamese Thiền lineage that shares the Mahāyāna view the Nyingma inherits.
What he isn't
Padmasambhava is not a figure whose historicity is in serious doubt. The eighth-century kernel is securely attested in early Tibetan sources, and the political circumstances of his arrival under Trisong Detsen are reasonably well documented. He is also not, on the tradition's own terms, principally a historical figure. The Nyingma curriculum treats him as an enlightened activity (phrin las) that continues to operate through the gter ma tradition and through the lineage's contemporary teachers. This is a different claim from the historicist Western reading and from the popular reading that takes his hagiographic feats at face value. The miracles attributed to him, the subduing of local Tibetan deities, the long retreats in the eight Padmasambhava caves of the Himalayas, the prophetic concealment of teachings for later ages, are best read in the register the tradition itself offers: as the visible face of the inner tantra view, in which the conventional distinction between mind and world is one of the appearances the curriculum is designed to dissolve. Reading the hagiography for biographical detail is the misreading the lineage's teachers spend the most time correcting.
