Garab Dorje and the Lineage from Oddiyana

The Seven-Line Prayer opens by naming a land: Oddiyana, in the far north-west. It is remembered as the place where Guru Rinpoche was born on a lotus. It is also remembered as the homeland of another child, born, the tradition says, long before him. His name was Garab Dorje, and he is honoured as the first human teacher of the Great Perfection.

The Great Perfection, Dzogchen in Tibetan, is the Nyingma teaching that the mind's true nature is already pure and awake, and that the whole path is to recognize it. That one sentence is as far as this page will go. The practice itself is given by a qualified teacher, in person.

Garab Dorje's life reaches us as sacred history, told and retold by later masters. This page mainly follows The Jewel Rosary History by the fourteenth-century master Longchenpa, recently translated by Adam Pearcey, and says where other tellings differ.

A nun on an island

In Oddiyana, the account says, there lived a king named Uparaja and a queen whose name means Radiant Light. Their daughter, Sudharma, had become a Buddhist nun. She lived simply on an island, giving her days to practice. One summary of another translation says the island lay in Dhanakosha, the same lake where Guru Rinpoche would later be found on his lotus.

One night, the accounts say, she dreamed of a man white as crystal, who placed a precious vase on the crown of her head. Another telling has him set it there three times, with light shining out from it.

Ten months later, Longchenpa writes, she gave birth to a son. A nun with a child had no easy place in the world, and the account says plainly that she was ashamed and hid the baby in a pit of ash.

Then she saw what the tradition remembers: dakinis, gods and nagas coming down from the sky to make offerings to the boy. Dakinis are female beings of wisdom; nagas are spirits of the waters. She asked his forgiveness, took him back and raised him herself. She gave him a name meaning "Bhava the Resurrected", and the dakinis, it is said, called him the Ashen One.

It is a hard beginning, and the tradition does not hide it. Perhaps that is part of its tenderness. The first teacher of the Great Perfection is remembered as a child who was once hidden away, and then taken back into his mother's arms.

The boy who answered the scholars

When he was seven, the account says, many of the Buddha's teachings arose in his heart by themselves. He asked his mother's permission to go to the royal court, where five hundred learned scholars, or panditas, served the king, his grandfather.

There he debated them, and they could not defeat him. The scholars gave him a name, Prajnabhava. The king, delighted, named him Prahevajra, which Pearcey translates "Supremely Joyful Vajra". The Tibetan name means much the same: garab is supreme joy, and dorje is the vajra, the diamond-like emblem of what cannot be broken.

Mountains and charnel grounds

Then he left the court. Longchenpa says he meditated on a mountain called Suryaprakasha, "Light of the Sun", and afterwards went to a charnel ground where Vajrapani, a great protector of the teachings, taught him the Great Perfection.

A charnel ground is a place where the dead were cremated or laid out. In the Buddhist tantras it is a place of practice, because nothing there can be pretended away.

Other tellings describe the vision differently. Rigpa Wiki says it was Vajrasattva, a buddha of purity, who appeared to him and asked him to write the teachings down. Longchenpa too says he set them down in volumes and entrusted them to the dakinis for safekeeping.

At last he settled in a great charnel ground called Shitavana, the Cool Grove, which tradition places not far from Bodhgaya, where the Buddha awoke. Readers of Guru Rinpoche's life may know the name. It is one of the places where he too is said to have practised.

Manjushrimitra

West of Bodhgaya, in a town called Dvikrama, a scholar named Manjushrimitra was born into a brahmin family. He mastered the five sciences, the whole learning of his day. The tradition remembers two ways he came to Garab Dorje.

In Longchenpa's telling, Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, told him that if he wished to awaken in a single lifetime, he should go to the Cool Grove, and he went at once. In another telling, summarized on Wikipedia, he came first as a debater, meaning to refute what he took for a wrong view. He lost, saw his mistake and asked to be taught.

Either way, he stayed. He became Garab Dorje's chief disciple and received the whole of his teaching.

A small golden casket

Then came the parting. Tradition holds that Garab Dorje rose into the sky and dissolved into rainbow light. Manjushrimitra cried out in grief. In Pearcey's translation of Longchenpa, he asks, "who will dispel the darkness of the world?"

The answer, the accounts say, was a tiny golden casket, no bigger than a fingernail, which fell into his hands. Rigpa Wiki tells it more tenderly still: the master's hand appeared again in the light and let it fall.

Inside was Garab Dorje's last testament, known as The Three Statements That Strike the Vital Point, in Tibetan Tsik Sum Né Dek. Patrul Rinpoche's much-loved Special Teaching of the Wise and Glorious King is built on it. Lotsawa House marks the text as restricted, and this page leaves it there. Its meaning is something a teacher introduces in person.

From hand to hand

Manjushrimitra, the accounts say, sorted the teachings of the Great Perfection into three series, called Mind, Space and Pith Instruction. His own great student was Shri Singha. Longchenpa says Shri Singha came from China; Rigpa Wiki says from Khotan, an oasis kingdom on the Silk Road.

When Manjushrimitra in his turn passed into light, he too is said to have left a casket with a final testament for his student. The pattern repeats down the line, like one lamp lighting the next: from Shri Singha to Jnanasutra, and from Jnanasutra to Vimalamitra.

Jnanasutra and Vimalamitra, Longchenpa says, had been scholars together at Bodhgaya until a vision of Vajrasattva sent them in search of Shri Singha. Vimalamitra later carried these teachings to Tibet.

And Guru Rinpoche? Rigpa Wiki, following Nyoshul Khenpo's history of the lineage, says he received the Great Perfection from Shri Singha in a charnel ground and stayed with him for twenty-five years. It adds that he met Garab Dorje himself in a pure vision. Wikipedia instead traces his share of the teaching down the line through Vimalamitra. The tradition is content to hold more than one telling.

Guru Rinpoche's own birth in Oddiyana is told in The Lotus-Born. The Tibetan translator who crossed the Himalaya to study with Shri Singha has his own page, Vairotsana.

What historians say

Historians read all this differently, and it is fair to say so. From the travel records of Chinese pilgrims, most Western scholars identify Oddiyana with the Swat valley in northern Pakistan, though a few still doubt it. Buddhism flourished there for centuries, then declined. By the thirteenth century, a Tibetan pilgrim found it almost gone.

As for Garab Dorje, his dates cannot be fixed, and even his Sanskrit name is a later reconstruction. Modern scholars treat him as a figure of sacred history rather than a documented person; one, quoted on Wikipedia, calls him "historically problematic". The same is true, in varying degrees, of the early masters who followed him.

For the tradition, the heart of the matter lies elsewhere: a living understanding, passed from teacher to student, that reaches back to the land the prayer names in its first line.

Back to the first line

When you recite the Seven-Line Prayer, its first words turn toward Oddiyana. You might remember that Guru Rinpoche was born there, and that the Great Perfection is remembered as coming from there too, from a child once hidden in the ash.