[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So welcome everyone to the first talk in the fourth series of our Padmasambhava in Tibet seminar.
We have an excellent programme of four talks, this Trinity term. You can find details on our website.
Just Google Padmasambhava or Dhyana in Tibet seminar and you'll find it.
All our talks are published as video podcasts.
They can be freely there, freely available from our own web pages at the Wolfson College Tibetan and Himalayan Studies cluster.
They are also available from the Central University of Oxford podcast page, from Apple Podcasts and from other sites too.
Uh, please try not to interrupt during the recording. The discussion periods of the talks will not be podcasting and are open to the entire audience,
so please feel absolutely free to express yourselves and ask questions then.
Today we are delighted to welcome Professor Curtis Schaefer, who is joining us from the University of Virginia,
where he is the Francis Myers Ball Professor in the Department of Religious Studies.
Curtis is a student of Buddhist literature in Tibet and the Himalayas, and one of the best known figures in Tibetan studies in the United States.
He is the translator of The Life of the Buddha 2014 and Buddhist Meditation Classic Teachings from Tibet, 2024, both from Penguin Classics.
He's also the author of Himalayan Hermitage Hermit Himalayan Hermits, 2004.
Dreaming the Great Brahmin Tibetan Traditions of a Buddhist Poet Saint, 2005.
The culture of the Book in Tibet, 2009, and several other books.
Curtis specialises in the narrative and poetic literatures of Buddhism in Tibet,
India and the Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan, and more broadly in the literary and religious cultures of Buddhism.
He regularly conducts research in Bhutan, Nepal, India, China, and Tibet.
He has also served as president of BRC, the Buddhist Digital Resource Centre.
So, Curtis, many thanks for taking the time to speak to our seminar. And over to you.
Thank you. Rob, it's a real pleasure to be here. It's an honour and I want to thank my host and thank all of you for being here today.
Uh, I have a presentation. It's essentially about one text today, but I've tried to extend it out to create some context for that text.
And the text will simply refer to as the 11 Acts of Padmasambhava or the 11 Acts.
And this is some a text that we've known about for about a hundred years, and it was considered lost and was not available to us until 2012, but I.
I at least I certainly didn't notice it in 2012.
And it wasn't until several years later that I, um, that I came across a different manuscript version of it and realised, oh,
this is very interesting and probably worth inserting into the broader conversation about, um, narratives dedicated to Padmasambhava.
Um, this is the second thing I've done about this text.
The first one is listed here. Uh, it came out in 2023, so there's material there that I won't talk about today.
So if you're interested in that, you can go find that.
I will say this is a very text dense presentation.
So I'm so happy and grateful that Rob and Cathy and company have been putting these up as freely available,
uh, um, video presentation so you can go and grab all the BRC numbers if you like.
So what am I going to do today? Let's see here, um, an outline of the talk.
First I'm going to talk about the the texts, the Bhutan manuscript,
the manuscript and a modern edition that we have of probably one of those two manuscripts.
Uh, I will give you an overview of the 11 acts.
I'll give you an example of an act. We'll read, um, probably part of chapter six of the 11 acts.
We'll talk a little bit about basic narrative structures,
and then I'll have some comments really more than a side, because I haven't theorised it sufficiently.
The many names of Padmasambhava, which are important for this text.
I'll talk about contexts. Um, this is probably where we'll spend the most time today looking at our author, Guru Chong's,
uh, two other two of his other major collections, the so-called Autobiography and Instructions.
And then his Monte Carlo Shenmue, where we find lots of interesting relationships between our central text and other writings by Guru Guru Chong.
We'll do some comparisons. We'll look at the Katanga, the act names in particular, and this is probably already familiar to you.
But from to many of you, from Lewis Donnie's writings, especially his article in the Brill's Encyclopaedia of Buddhism on Padmasambhava,
um, I'll make glancing reference to the Katong, but honestly, not as much as I should have.
Um, and then we'll look a little bit in some detail at Sungai Lepas surrogate trauma,
and looked at the way at least one writer integrated episodes from Guru Chong's 11 acts into the his own work.
And then we'll look at some next steps,
possible next steps for thinking about how we might want to integrate this work into our broader collective research about group narratives.
Looking fat. Forward and backward in time.
Looking outward to other narrative traditions, and then maybe looking regionally to the extent that, um, um, records allow us to do as well.
So let's talk about the text a little bit. Um, the reason I got into this is because in 2015, I was at the National Library in Bhutan,
where they had a set of hard drives containing scans that Carmen.
And then it was Arcadia, primarily in Arcadia project.
And now we all know it as Endangered Archives program. Um, they had a complete set, um, ostensibly complete set of the work that they had done,
and they were kind enough to make the catalogue available and some of those resources available.
So the scan that I that got me into this whole thing.
Is currently located in the National Library of Bhutan, or at least it was in 2015.
I'm honestly not 100% sure where those digital files are now.
Um, although we have many works on the EAP site, um, uh, from Kaman work and his team's work.
This one does not appear to be part of the current online offerings.
Um, you can correct me if if I'm wrong about that. I've not been able to find it.
Uh, so that's one. And we'll look at that in a second. And again, we'll look at one image of it.
And it's 74 folios long. It's located.
It was located at the time of scanning in uh portrait monastery.
The, the manuscript itself the south of Paro in Bhutan.
The next one we have is a Khan manuscript. I'm not exactly sure when this one became available to us.
Probably in the late teens. Um, and, um.
Uh, it's a shorter, more densely written work.
We'll see it in a second. This is available on BBC.
It was, um, part of, um, US Aids, uh, of funding that was so instrumental in Bach's work in China throughout the tens and teens.
It's part of a personal collection, and there's not a whole lot of, uh,
data about the nature of this collection on the PRC site, so I don't actually know that much about it.
And as we'll see, if we look at the image of it in a second, there's annotations,
um, periodically inserted throughout that text as well, especially at the beginning.
And then finally we have a modern edition, um, in 2012, this work, probably in addition of the manuscript,
was published by Ludovico Um in his Katong children make good jump.
Georgie makes a beautiful collection of Tang like material.
It was, I believe, the last of seven volumes that he published between 2007 and 2012 on various more or less well known narratives of scripture.
Um, the Bedok numbers are there for all of those, so you can go find those if you like, and you can go back to the slide and go grab all of them.
So it's a great collection and a good, um, if we can talk about if we could talk about it this way,
a sort of one stop shopping for a lot of material, uh, narrative material.
So in short, right now, as far as I know, we have two manuscripts and one recent edition of the 11 acts.
Here's the Baton manuscript. It's the kind of plain manuscript.
So if you if you've looked at handwritten, Uyen Bhutanese manuscripts much?
You'll this will look familiar to you. Um.
It's a simple manuscript. Um, the writing is very clean.
The spelling is terrible, though. And in fact, what I've had to do to, um, to work through the terrible spelling is go over to logic.
Guangzhou's edition of of of the manuscripts that he had at his disposal to get the spelling right.
Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not. Um, this text.
Um, this manuscript witness never met an accounting it didn't like.
If you could stick an Chung in someplace where there shouldn't be an Chung, this one does it.
So it's a it's, um, orthographically, it's, um.
It's challenging, let's say. Okay, here's the manuscript. Um, you can see those red interlinear notes.
Those are really thick at the beginning and they kind of Peter out towards the end.
It has a much longer title. Um, my initial sense.
I've not done a full edition of the two texts, although I think it's in the long run,
probably merited, because I think what we're looking at is to fairly distinct, um, textual histories.
Um, and I think we might get some we might be able to, um, uh, reverse engineer, um,
the long history of this work, if we look at what I'm, what I think of now as the.
Com tradition and the Bhutan tradition, but that's work I really haven't done yet.
So. And then finally, here's the modern edition.
If you look down on the lower third of that, you'll see the smaller Tibetan font where Gazzo has um, um represented the interlinear notes.
Again, I assume, of the the Kham manuscript that we're looking at, but it could certainly be another one too.
That's related anyway. Llodra Gateaux is much closer, let's say, to the manuscript than the Bhutanese manuscript.
Okay, let's go to an overview of some of the themes and context of the work.
Um, uh, in the Baton manuscript, I believe also in the common manuscripts.
The work represents itself as the work of the founders, so to speak.
And it says towards the end of the work, Queen May took to her this great chronicle, or again directly from Oregon, and wrote it down.
The Tibetan Chronicle Chogyal heard directly from him and wrote it down.
When he was 3500 years old, he went to Tibet, and he stayed at Sameer for between 23 and 25 years.
And then there's a lineage. This is an excerpt at the beginning of a much longer lineage that takes the work basically up to,
I think, more or less when the manuscript was described in Bhutan,
I think, um, I made an initial stab at that list of names in the article I referred to at the beginning of this talk,
and Kathy already started to help me out. Um, coming up, trying to identify some of those other names.
So this is work that requires more effort.
But if we look at this lineage, um, we see that it has, in its own estimation,
a cosmic origin from Samantabhadra, uh, down through Guru Rinpoche himself to Tokyo Tristen Davison.
And then finally to make a quick jump, um, from Tristen Jason to Choki Wangchuk himself.
So clearly one of the ways in which, um, uh, Kuang authorises this work is to say I was there.
I was there back in the day, the 11 acts themselves.
We'll look at them through various in various ways over the course of the.
Presentation. But let's get started. Here's an opening.
Uh, here's some opening verses from the the 11 acts itself, the text, the 11 acts.
It's the same in the Bhutan and the manuscript, with some.
Minor orthographic differences.
Son in whom are gathered all of the good acts and qualities of the three bodies of all the victors throughout space and time.
Organ. Padmasambhava, you are the peerless lord of the three times in this world.
Indisputably renowned from the Buddha's word as an emanation. It is difficult to present your story in full.
Still, if I relate a brief story of his enlightenment, as I have heard, the 11 acts of the victors are these one.
The intention to civilise the beings two. Entry into the lotus womb three.
Spontaneous birth four. Playing as a prince five.
Ordination six. Mental and physical training seven.
Taming demon hordes seven. Enlightenment as a Buddha.
Nine or excuse me eight. Enlightenment is a Buddha nine.
Turning the Wheel of Dharma ten. Ascetic practices 11.
Hiding treasures to enhance the Buddhist teachings. And then immediately following that verse is a classic, um, evocation of the cult of the book.
Whoever sees or hears or writes or shows to others, or against brief life story explained here will be born in the land of bliss.
Whoever devotes themselves to this and its and practices, its intent will doubtless be a Buddha with an excelled enlightenment.
And if this looks familiar to you, um, you may have read it some in some other text, but you may also have read it in Louis Dan's article.
We'll get back to that, okay, because we'll use this as a point of comparison to at least one later text.
But let's think about just briefly and we can talk about this more.
I hope we can talk about this more. How we might start to see these 11 acts as enacting a larger set of, let's say, theological and narrative themes.
So here's one way that I thought about it. And clearly I'm thinking about Buddha narratives in 12 acts here.
So perhaps we can put, um, acts one and two,
the intention of civilised beings and the entry into the lotus essence womb into a category we might call pre incarnation under pre renunciation.
We might say, um, we should include spontaneous birth in Dona Scotia and then playing as a prince, um, five,
six and seven we might conceive of as a single larger set on renunciation and training,
ordination, mental and physical training, taming demons up to gods and up to the enlightenment.
And then finally a teaching period, using all the paths to turn the wheel of Dharma everywhere,
undertaking ascetic practices of all sorts and hiding treasures of the Buddhist teachings.
These are all from the chapter titles. And these are. These are more or less the chapter titles.
So if we go to the slide before I have this quick version from the opening verses of the 11 acts, which does not name places,
and it's a little bit more tightly expressed, but if we go here, we start to see how the chapter titles themselves, um, describe their contents.
Um, so one of the most fascinating parts of this for me, and the part I would like to think more about,
um, for myself and with all of you is its relationship to the 12 acts of the Buddha.
I mean, one way to look at this very quickly is that we have a Lalita Vistara version of the life of the Buddha,
which ends with the Buddhist teachings. It does not contain his death.
Right?
It was up to Tibetans to tack on whatever they felt was the appropriate death narrative after the teaching, because the law officer didn't have it.
And so here we also grew up in this narrative set of 11 does not die, right?
He teaches in the last act. Okay. 11 acts.
Um, there are loosely two versions of the 11 acts, or two sets of 11 acts, one from India and one from Tibet.
Um, we're dealing with the Indian one Guru Cho one's dealing with the Indian one.
And, uh, Oregon Lingpa tells us that there was a set of 11, um, that were all about guru guru.
And he's working on that as well. Um, so but they really they're kind of different.
They're kind of different beasts. Um, uh, in the beginning of the Katanga, Says, um, yes, there's a set of 11 acts in India, but go.
Lookouts were for those.
But here are 11 acts in Tibet, and he gives them to you in a very nice, concise order in the opening moments of the laundry Khotang.
Um, but he doesn't actualise them in a very specific way throughout the Katanga, at least not to my initial read.
So we find these acts, um, starting out to be pretty tightly woven into the narratives of the Katanga, but then they get looser as they go on.
Um, so my thought here is that this notion of 11 is a it's a productive rubric.
Um, and we'll see. There are other, um, numbers of sets of acts that Dru Chong in particular also worked with.
Um, and we have this in at least two cycles, right?
An Indian cycle and a Tibetan cycle. I can't say that I found the 11 acts in Tibet anywhere in corpus.
It doesn't mean it's not there. It just means I haven't come across yet. Okay. Let me give you just a little example of of a chapter now.
Um, this is, uh, undertaking various ascetic practices in the snows and in mountain retreat.
Um, it does have a place listed in the chapter. I'll say snowy lands, mountain retreat.
Um, but he's only on a single place here. I think he's only on a single place here.
So let me read a little bit. I won't read the whole thing, but I'll stop on each slide so you can go back and read it, uh, if you like.
Later, then the great monk or again, shaky singer. So note that I've highlighted the name here.
There's a lot of names in this chapter. Um, and this is a hallmark of this work,
like other groups narrative material is that when he does something really amazing at a particular place for a particular audience,
he gets a new name. So showcasing a thought, even if one is all knowing and exalted, if one does not make it a part of one's experience,
then one returns empty handed from an island of jewels while taking the teachings into his experience.
Resolve obstacles such as being distracted by food or fashion, and to launch the ship of the body, which liberates one upon the sea of samsara.
He undertook ascetic practices and alchemy.
This chapter ends up to be in great part about his alchemical skill, the development of his alchemical skill.
He emanated on the peak of Dakota and stayed in a place made of stacked rows of light.
He undertook all types of ascetic practices and alchemy, in which his body was firm and controlled in a state of detachment.
He practised every water based aesthetic and alchemical practice which clarify wisdom.
He practised every kind of fire based aesthetic and alchemical practice which.
Produce heat and make clothing unnecessary. He also practised every kind of wind.
Let's see. What am I going to do? Sorry. Uh, wind and aesthetic and chemical practice, which produce strength and fast walking over the land.
He practised every kind of sky based ascetic and alchemical practice in which taking the sky as food increases one's lifespan,
lifespan and understanding. At this time, he was called by the named Dana Roper, maybe playing in bliss.
He practised every kind of aesthetic and alchemical practice involving the Five Nectars,
where they pacify negative spirits with a self blazing blessing. He was known by the name Tommy Haruka, who goes for alms in the cemetery, you know.
Likewise, he practised all green. As an alchemy. I'm going to summarise a little bit here.
There he was known as Zico cow man.
Um, he practised poisoned based alchemy. He was named birria number two.
Yeah. Um, he had a variety of alchemical practices that gave him the name Mitra Dama.
Yeah. Um, and again, with Pima Gwangju, he undertook the alchemical and ascetic practices of water skill,
alchemy or detox or slash ion alchemy and Eye-Opening alchemy.
And he became known as Renkin Ningbo. You can see a variation on a theme here.
Uh, there's some narrative structure that emerges in chapter six.
Um, he undertakes a certain practice. Uh, he achieves a certain result through using the various materials of that practice.
And for that, he gets a new name later in the chapter.
He, um. Um. He receives notice of the of the gods above.
So at this time, medicine Lord Buddha, Vader, a light appeared.
The Buddha granted a full container of nectar to Padmasambhava, who drank half for long and expansive life.
The Buddha concealed half a container full in an auspicious collection stupa made of crystal,
and when the Buddha offered it to Padmasambhava, he was known by the name payment se mudra.
So not only does Rinpoche do the work himself, he also receives blessings from, in this case, the Medicine Buddha,
and then he receives praise towards the end of the chapter by Brahma and other gods who are called Rishis in this case,
and they offer praise to him and he receives a new name because of that as well.
So that's a whole chapter right there. So you can go back and review that.
There's chapter two, I believe is, um, I have a translation of that in the article that I mentioned at the beginning of the talk.
So right now, as far as I know, there's two chapters that are available to you in English, uh, if you want to go look at those.
Okay. So let's, um, let's step out a little bit, um, uh, and start to get some other topics on the table.
Um, there are ten names in chapter six, and they were all great in, you know, um,
my most recent count suggests that there's about 100 names, uh, in this work as a whole.
I don't know how that compares to the, um, um, to the tongue, probably some of, you know, um, but there's also a lot of names there too.
So this is, you know, great. Um, um, piece by piece work to do.
I think we might benefit in some measure, uh, from doing a more careful comparison of names in the development of names from the song forward.
Um just for to to.
To glance at that process. Um, we can use Lewis Donnie's work.
There's a great column in 2000, Donny 2014, page 95, column A, which I love.
I love it that it's there. Um, and he lists 12 names in the song.
So, um, one of the things we might suggest is that there was an explosion of names between the, um, in general and Guru Chohan.
The reason why and the how of it are all things that are still questions for me.
Um, but does emerge, though, if we focus on names, is that there are a lot of groups of names, um, in throughout Guru Chong's work.
And we'll start to move into, uh, Guru Chong's other works.
Uh, here in in the next section of the talk, we have.
For instance, in his autobiography and instructions, we have a praise in nine names to Guru and pray.
We have a praise in 21 names. Autobiography. Second volume of the autobiography.
We have a praise in 32 names. So these are all works that are in the same collection of praises and teachings and narratives authored by Guru Chong.
So we can see that there's a proliferation names. It's not just limited to 12 or 11 or 100, but there are multiple groupings and it may be useful.
It may be interesting, um,
to be a little bit more systematic about how those might relate to each other and to the earliest strata of names that we can find.
Okay. Let's move to context. Um, for by context, I mean literary context.
And I want to look at two collections. I want to look at Guru Cho Wong's so-called autobiography instructions.
This is where the famous Trojan camel is in. But there's much more to this work.
Um, and by my count, we can find three instances of the 11 acts, um, in this two volume collection.
That's one of Groucho collections that we'll look at.
And the second one is just Monty com boom HMO, The Big Book of Money.
Um, together. I think these make a really nice set with the the Groucho Wong's work, the 11 acts and moving forward.
Um, my intention is to read them as a as a kind of a triad.
I think they go together quite well. Um, and I hope to give you some examples of why I think that, um, in the following.
Okay. Let's look. I'm going to give you a 2 or 3 examples from the autobiography and instructions.
Um, this was the title autobiography and Instructions was the name that was given
to this collection in 1979 when it was published in the PL 40 collection.
Um, and that's a fine brief summary of it, I suppose.
But there's so much in here and a systematic approach to the structure and contents of this really repay a lot for the study.
Um, not just of, um, of revelation, not just of, um, of money practice, but of Guru Rinpoche himself, too, because he really suffuses the work.
Um, so first we're going to look at a praise poem to the 11 acts of the, uh, of guru.
And, and this is one of 15 to our praise poems to Guru Vijay.
And these 15 collectively make up um chapter eight um uh out of 19, in a longer collection within the autobiography instructions.
Um, uh, and this is really the kind of beauty and challenge of this collection,
the autobiography and instructions is the way that small works are nested into larger chapters,
which are in turn nested into larger works, which form, I think,
a structured whole that we should really reflect on, um, more than we've done in current scholarly literature.
Okay. I'm going to give you three verses out of the 11 and, um, um, and we can move on from there.
Okay. The first one. So each verse has a name.
Um, it's got an act. Does it have a and most of them have a place, I think, where the act happens.
So here's number one to load and say, yeah. Um, and what's the point of this verse?
He's making the intention to civilise, um, living beings. And if you recall back from the beginning of the talk.
The first act in the 11 acts, in the narrative work, the 11 acts, was in fact this very act, the intention to civilise living beings.
Amitabha. Amitabha. Compassion. Rousing from the open space of the Samantabhadra body of reality to civilised people.
He kindly thought to emanate as a son of the victor in the land of Oregon to Loden.
Chukchi. Chukchi who wondrously aimed to civilise living beings. I pray and offer praise to Padma Vajra existing for the good of living beings.
This is a little variation on the act. Number two, actually on the peak of a lotus stalk on the island of Kusha.
Not born through a mother and father, he sits on a lotus amid flower,
the vajra and Hari to Padma Vajra, who wondrously lived for the benefit of beings.
I pray and offer praise. And then finally, number three, a Jew name Self rising birth on the 15th day of the spring.
Month of the spring of of the monkey year, a flower bloomed in the dawning sun.
And a glorious Buddha, a glorious Buddha. Padma was born to a genie who wondrously conceived the self arising birth.
I pray and offer of praise. So there's eight more six line verses to continue this full set.
Um, and these largely align with the seven acts.
So here's our most, um, maybe compelling evidence for, um, the the narrative work,
the 11 acts being related in a very specific way to a poem, in the autobiographical autobiography and instructions.
Let's look at another one. Um, we're going to move a little bit farther afield from the 11 acts.
Two kind of acts in general, but I think that this is probably, um,
a useful thing to do in terms of trying to imagine the the broader range of creativity
or perhaps resources and narrative structures that grew Chuong was working with.
So in this recollection, um, uh, prayer um, he he's remembering things that, uh, are recalling things that happened in his life.
And this represents, I would say, a variation on the set of 11 acts.
And we have eight acts here. So in these eight we have coming to his earth, coming to this earth as an emanation body.
Um, his distinctive liberation story working for the benefit of being.
You'll see it's variation on a theme here. Teachings of this secret compassion treasure.
Meeting him in dreams in accordance with treasure and Scripture. Meeting him in contemplative visions in accordance with treasure and Scripture.
Civilising demons while staying in Tibet. So, unlike the 11 Acts narrative work in this recollection prayer we move into Tibet.
And then finally a prayer to recollect him all the time and in every situation.
This is a medium size. Um uh um uh, um, recollection prayer.
So here's just a section of it, just to give you a little taste of what this prayer looks like.
Dwelling is an emanation body in India at the northwest corner of Oregon and the Lake of Akasha, in the centre of a lotus stalk.
An emanation body of limitless appearances whose essence is great compassion.
He is famed as Lotus. Born for eight years, he acted like a young, like a child.
His complexion was brilliant, like a lotus. He fulfilled all needs and desires like a wishing gem.
Born into a miraculous emanation body, he was enthroned as the son of a king.
Relatively familiar material to to to many of us.
And this set of eight chapters could be marked on, I think, with a high degree of specificity to the 11 acts,
even though we're looking at a set of eight, um, scenes rather than 11 scenes.
He maintained both political and religious affairs and fulfilled 11 acts.
So in this prayer, um, in this eight chapter prayer, he does mention specifically the 11 acts to like and here this is really important here, right?
He maintained both political and religious affairs and fulfilled 11 acts.
And here I think he's really showing something like Lord Siddhartha, we should recollect him now as a peerless master.
So I think he doesn't actually say, I got the 11 acts from the 12 acts of the Buddha or somebody before me did.
But, um, in quick succession he's saying, look, this, these, these.
This is a cogent way to think about, uh, Guru Jay's narrative in 11 acts.
And we should think of him like we do the Buddha, and we should engage in recollection recollection practices as we do.
But I think there's a close relationship, at least implied here in Guru Wong's text between guru 11 acts and Shakyamuni 12 acts.
Again, this is another thing that we might, um, dig into, um, uh, more to see what kind of relationships we might come up with.
Um, between the life of the Buddha, um, conceived of as a 12 act narrative,
the life of guru and the various sets of acts in the autobiography and instructions.
Okay. Final one for the autobiography. Autobiography and instructions. Um, dreams.
This is a related set of eight names and places that occurs in the autobiography instructions.
This is in the Chung uh Nam Lama, a dream account.
Um, these are dream meetings with Guru and Pichai in various manifestations, and they're organised in a three fold seam outer, inner in secret.
Each of those has its own narrative movement, and it's in the inner,
the inner set that we find the, um, the, the acts that look the most like the 11 acts.
So inner guru defines as in accordance with treasure, prophecy, the story or nam Tara uses of Oregon, Padmasambhava and the places he stayed,
along with symbolic dharma right locations and names in the inner category, which briefly outline the dream sequences.
Um are included for each moment in the dream narrative,
and then a longer explanation of the actual dream and the whole inner dream account is organised into, um, uh, ten chapters.
And so in this narrative structure that we find in the dream accounts,
it looks a lot like the narrative structure that we find in the 11 acts narrative.
Padmasambhava, go someplace, he does something wonderful.
He acquires some new superpower. Um, he's given a new identity.
The difference is in the dream account here. Graham Chong goes there, and he actually interacts with Padmasambhava in the midst of an act.
And, um. And then Padmasambhava uses that same word, um, to introduce the signs and their meeting the dun tree.
Um, um, um, excuse me.
Pardon of a given teaching to him. So, again, this is another place where we might want to do more systematic, um,
work on the relationships between the narrative scenes in which Guru Chong inserts himself through,
um, a dream account and his biographical work on Google.
Now let's look at some names and places.
Um, and, uh, my goal here is to just give you a sense that, um, there are, uh, names that we can collate, um, with in the dream account.
Um, and, but that there are limits to that, very serious limits to that, because the places are going to be largely different,
because if you start to look at this chart, these are the names and places, um, in of each of the eight chapters in the dream account, I believe.
That's right. Ten chapters. Excuse me. Um, and we'll find most of these names in the main column.
We will find those in the, um, 11 acts narrative work.
But the places in the dream account are mostly about, um, mostly in Tibet, not exclusively, but mostly in Tibet.
So Sameer, Sameer, Ramesh, um, um, um, etc., etc. but we get down to six, we find again two.
True. Um, so we find some, um, South Asian imaginaire, uh, mixed in with Tibetan places as well.
So again, um, one of the most interesting things of about trying to relate the 11 acts narrative with
the material in the autobiography and the instructions was not 1 to 1 correspondences,
but variations on a theme. Um, all of which I think will repay, will repay rereading and reassessment as we go along.
Um, yeah. So one of the things I want to throw out there is maybe we consider that Wang authorises innovation through dreams and dream accounts.
It's a big question that I'm not trying to answer at all here.
Um, where the material in the 11 acts narrative comes from?
Um, and we could talk about that more.
Cathy's already given me wonderful thoughts about that and encourage both me and us collectively to look backwards.
Now that we know what the 11 acts are, and we have access to a really slim narrative of the 11 acts in a way that we didn't before,
we can go backwards and start to look at that.
Um, if I'm looking, um, um, simultaneously in the corpus of Guru Guru Chong, I'm seeing a lot of variation,
and it leads me to think that he's engaging in a lot of creativity right here.
Is it new? Maybe not. Are they new? Um, organisations of pre-existing material?
Maybe. Yeah. Okay, let's go to the, um, Monty Campbell memo.
Um, the other main work that I wanted to, um, uh, draw your attention to.
And this is much, uh, this is a much simpler story. Um, and basically, the money come from.
Chimo contains the same praise poem as Groucho Wong's other collection, The Autobiography of Instructions Money Combo.
Chimo is a set of 152 chapters, and give or take.
Each of those chapters aligns a certain practice could be a prayer, could be a ritual,
could be a narrative sequence with the practice of money recitation.
So everything in the money combo is about money recitation,
and it basically is a place where you could have a snapshot of dozens of different practices around in, um, 13th century Tibet.
And you can relate all of them to this one single powerful practice of mani recitation.
So and we find that the the 11 acts of Padmasambhava are integrated into this.
So it's a very different context than we find it in the autobiography and instructions here.
It basically says you do this prayer to the 11 acts of guru and you're doing morning prayer.
So again, another iteration, another variation. But this one is more or less about the distinctive narrative elements than
the distinctive practices that the 11 acts might be related to in his corpus.
All right, let's on a little bit. I'm probably going to talk about ten more minutes, and then we'll open it up for questions and comments.
Um, let's go to the place where many of you may well know the 11 acts from, and that's Oregon Lingua Katanga.
Um, if we look at this chart here, we can see three things. One is my translation of the 11 acts chapter titles into English.
On the left side, in the middle we have Guru Cho Wong's uh, um, the chapter titles.
And then on the right side, we have the verse summary of the, uh, from the lumber, from the Katanga.
And to make a long story short, we will see that they are identical and great notes in an overview of this passage,
and some relationships to the other passages you can find in Louis Dan's 2019 article,
which is really a great starting point for all of this material.
Um, uh, one thing that might be different is that, or at least, um, more elaborate in one versus the other,
is the chapter titles in Chuong often will list a place where the act happens, but in the Katanga, um, where those are removed.
Right? Probably for verses of for reasons of verse concision.
But you do lose some, some some some context. Right?
You lose this imaginative, um, World.
That group she acts within in Indian context.
Okay. So, um, the you know, the short story there is that, um, there was a direct relationship between Guru Chung's work and,
uh, organ linguist work, and we could see that now quite clearly.
Could there have been an intermediary? Of course there could have. But at least we can say they're related now.
Yeah. Um. Uh, or lenguas.
Um, uh, Khotang, um, has many of these, um, uh, Indian acts, but they're divided in a very different way.
And I initially thought I was going to do, um, a presentation about how the tongue,
uh, relates to the 11 acts, but it proved to be too much for me right now.
So maybe, maybe later. We'll see. Um, but Oregon Lingpa did a lot of creative work that, um,
appears to know quite well of Gertrude Wang's 11 acts, but is not beholden to them for its structures.
For example, the acts about the alchemical practice in act six that we looked at earlier in Guru Chong's 11 Acts.
They appear to be only partially represented in the cartoon, and they're not formally called out in the same way.
Um, they're just sort of they're, they're they're embedded within a chapter, which is, um, um,
is expressing itself to be about something else besides the development of alchemical practices.
So, um, I think he knew about the material.
He used it, but the ways in which he edited it into his own vision of guru and his life are yet to be determined by me at least.
Okay, let's move to one more example. And that's Sungei Lenguas, uh, Katong.
Um, another one of the big works of, uh, narrative literature.
And what I have here is a part of chapter six, which we read.
Um, and, uh, and then I have some, uh, chapter 22, 2222 out of 27.
We're in the middle of chapter two. Um, and, uh, like, uh, um, or the book used or at least had available to him in some version of the,
uh, narrative scenes, uh, that are also in the 11 acts.
But I think the relationship is a little bit stronger here.
So it looks to me like Sungei Lingpa had, um, Guru Cheung's text and was using it very specifically, um,
Um, to write or at least um, um, as the basis for elaboration of his own, uh, of his own narrative.
Um, it's much longer work. It's probably four times as long.
So we're just in a little section of chapter two out of 117 in the Katong Trang right now.
But if you look at on the chart on the right, we have, um, um, uh, ludo gateaux, um, edition of, uh, 11 acts.
Excuse me, on the left. And then on the right, we have Sanjay Lingas text again from Ludo Gateaux edition of that.
And the material that is in, um, um, grey in the single column.
That's material that it appears to come straight out of Guru Atul Wong's text.
So the material in white in the Sanjay Linga column on the right column is material that ostensibly sunk Lingga, or one of his sources added.
You can see, and we don't have to read it at all. To get a sense between the grey and the white.
What Sungei Lingua was doing, he's writing a version of the text on the left side, probably the 11 acts or some intermediary or some source.
That is largely exactly the same, but we can see a really, really close relationship.
Sometimes he makes the grammar a little bit better. Sometimes he adds a a doctrinal word or a here, but for the most part, it's pretty.
It's pretty similar. Yeah. It moves along. Yeah. So Sungei linguists text would appear to integrate most of Wong's text.
I've done this. I've spot checked this with other chapters too.
Um, and I'm reasonably confident that we're going to find most of Guru Chong's 11 acts embedded within Sungei Linguist text.
There's another text I'm not going to talk about here. Um, um, attributed to, uh, Zhang Dok Tokyo, um, which does the same thing too.
And that text is, in fact, why we know about the 11 acts in the first place.
Because I've had access to that text 100 years ago and saw that one of his sources was the, um, Guru Cho Wang's 11 acts.
So anyway, um, where does Sungai Lenguas? Where does the rest of Sungai Lenguas material come from?
We don't know or I don't know. Yeah, but I'm. I'm now I'm a little bit more confident we can find out.
Right. Um, we can reverse engineer googling this text. Um, uh, as well.
And the 11 acts gives us a really good source to do that, if we're interested.
Okay, that was a lot of text. And, um, I hope some of it was interesting.
Let me give you three takeaways from this. And then we'll look at some maybe next steps, things I'm thinking about as I move this project along.
And I think about things to do with any of you who are interested as well.
So just really simply, we now have access to three witnesses of Guru Chong's biography of Padmasambhava in India the 11 acts,
two manuscripts, and in addition probably of one of those manuscripts.
Yeah. Um, 11 acts is both a single and narrative work that we now have access to,
but it's also an it's interrelated with specific references to a set of 11 narrative scenes into varied sets of acts,
names and settings in at least two of Guru Chong's other works.
The collection we typically call in global scholarship, the Autobiography and Instructions, and then also in the Money Combo memo.
Um, and some, but not all, later narrative writers made explicit use of this text of the 11 acts in particular.
So those are the three things I really want you to take away from there.
So let's if we think about next steps for study, I think, um, the, the excitement of um,
of identifying a new work within a corpus that many of us have done so much research on is a great occasion to think,
oh, what are we going to do with this corpus as a whole? So there's things I've been thinking about.
The first one is its relationship with the Lima, which is probably its most proximate neighbour.
Looking backward in time.
My initial read is there remains a gap, or a great deal of creative work occurred between General and Guru Chong because they look quite different.
The Lima and the zipper, the 11 acts?
Yeah. If we look forward, we might systematically compare narratives or hymns and names.
Up until at least the 11th century, when people were talking about the 11 acts and using them.
I haven't even talked about Ratna Lingas, 11 acts, which are actually different than Guru Chong's 11 acts.
Um, and then finally, we might think about the groups of narratives, uh,
sections such as the fourfold grouping I suggested at the beginning to foster comparison.
We might think of if we take this group for a group of four, for instance pre incarnation, pre renunciation, training and teaching.
How does this help us thinking more broadly about the narrative structures of the 11 acts in a smaller set of themes?
Um, how does this compare to the other works that we know were being developed at the time, or that come up later?
Yeah, if we look outward along the same lines. Um, there's so much we can do with the narrative corpus.
Um, we might look at relationships with other existing and emerging narratives, such as the Buddha narrative, um, which is, you know,
they received in such a, um, uh, in such an elaborate version in the form of the Lalita Sutra and in the Vinaya material as well.
Um, but we might also look to Milarepa right where it's sung in, Haruka says,
I'm making you a 12 act version of Milarepa or Tom Shinra or the fifth Dalai Lama, also using a 12 act song.
Sargasso used a 12 act set to develop the one of his life stories of the fifth Dalai Lama.
So narrative patterns, imagery, passages, existential and philosophical concerns.
If we take a step back and we look not just at the guru input corpus,
but that corpus in relationship to other emerging and developing a corpus of narrative literature, it could be really interesting and exciting.
And again, the, the, the inclusion of, of, of, of,
of a new work into our current work is great invitation to do this kind of broader comparative work.
Um, if we look regionally, it's really what I've done the least work on.
But I think there's probably a lot here.
Um, we can note that the three works of guru, which are discussed here all extant and one exclusively in handwritten manuscripts from Bhutan.
So the 11 acts upon the samovar appears to come from poor drip gumbo, from putrid monastery near Paro.
But we have to remember there's a calm manuscript in the mix as well.
The guru unpacks autobiography, and instructions came from Kishu Lacan, also right next to Paro and the Monty Campbell demo version B, at least.
Um, there's three versions that we have extant right now, as far as I know, also comes from Bhutan.
Different plays zone up in the northeast. So, um, we could probably, um, um, look,
use our manuscript evidence and our hunt for more manuscript evidence to localise these narrative traditions as well.
And I will stop there. And thank you very much and some time for questions and comments.
Yeah.