The Life and Revelations of Pema Lingpa

by Pema Lingpa, Sarah Harding (Translator)

These fascinating discussions between 11th century court ladies and the great master Padmasambhava, available for the first time in English, weave intriguing issues of gender into Buddhist teachings. The women's doubts and hesitations are masterfully resolved in these impassioned exchanges. The wonderful material in this book is part of a terma (treasure) revealed by Pema Lingpa (1450–1521), the greatest terton (treasure-revealer) of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. The pithy collection is rounded out by Pema Lingpa's astonishing life story..

Genres: Buddhism

176 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 2003

Reviews

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 4 out of 5]

Translator Sarah Harding was the first person from whom I learned what little bit of Tibetan I know, and she was also my instructor for our graduate course on Abhidharma at Naropa, way back in 1994. Her knowledge of the Tibetan language, as well as her lived understanding of Vajrayana Buddhism (she's a lama in the Shangpa Kagyu tradition), ensure that these translation capture the full depth and breadth of the teachings of the Peling Terchö, the terma teachings of Pema Lingpa.

The first text in this collection, Flowers of Faith: A Short Clarification of the Story of the Incarnations of Pema Lingpa, outlines the succession of past lives of tertön ("treasure-revealer") Pema Lingpa. Frankly the text bored me, comprising as it does a fairly monotonous list of people, places, and text names, until I started to recognize some of those sites from my own visit to Bhutan. At those times I would vividly recall the landscapes nearly devoid of human life and of the ugliness of contemporary civilization, and the text would suddenly be far more than a lifeless list. Something I recently read in another book me understand that difference in my experiences. Though the author David Abram is commenting on a book of Aboriginal stories, his insights are equally valid here:

The printed stories seem curious at best, and very poorly plotted at worst; something seems missing, some key that would unlock the abstruse logic of these tales. And that key is nothing other than the living land itself, the expressive physiognomy of the local earth. What is missing is the silent topography, the sensuous hillsides and streambeds that pose the place-specific questions to which these stories all reply. The narratives respond directly to the land, as the land responds directly to the spoken or sung stories; here, cut off from that sensuous reference, transposed onto the flat and featureless terrain of the page, the ancient stories begin to lose their... power. (p.175)

For the people of Bhutan, then, to whom Pema Lingpa is something of a national spiritual hero, whose traces are left all over the Bhutanese landscape, these stories are a guidebook, a mnemonic, to the psychospiritual geographies of the Dragon Kingdom. As with texts, photos are a poor substitute for living immersion and presence, but these can still give a sense of the awesomeness and sacredness of this landscape.

This is Membartsho, the Burning Lake, for example:



The other texts in this collection comprise Refined Gold: The Dialogue of Princess Pemasal and the Guru, The Dialogue of Princess Trompa Gyen and the Guru, The Dialogue of Master Namkhai Nyingpo and Princess Dorje Tso, The Heart of the Matter: The Guru's Red Instructions to Mutik Tsenpo, and A Strand of Jewels: The History and Summary of Lama Jewel Ocean, all of which record many of Guru Rinpoche's teachings which were hidden away as terma until they could be revealed by Pema Lingpa.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

a pretty good translation and a good example of treasure texts (terma).