Marpa: the tantric origins of the Kagyu tradition

[Apech]

Very interesting talk:

 

 

[Trunk]

Coming back to watch the rest of the video.  This guy, Lama Jampa Theya: *wow*.  Resonates as very well educated historian (+ T.Buddhist educated) who speaks no-nonsense.  Really enjoying this.  Subscribed to his channel on youtube.  Thank you @Apech!

 

https://lamajampa.org/

[Trunk]

Browsing Lama Jampa's youtube playlists, he has a 7-video playlist entitled "The Stages of the Path: from Refuge the the Vajrayana".

 

I'm impressed enough with this guy that I'm writing out this post before seeing the playlist myself ... and ashamed enough of that to at least start watching the first video before I click 'submit reply'.

 

 

p.s.

Watching the first video on refuge.  Lama Jampa strikes me as talking in a really common relatable way & words, no non-sense, not (so far) romantic idealized spirituality, but at the same time it feels~sounds like both his historical and religious training is serious, technical and deep.  He covers a lot of ground quickly, but each point is made relatable and clear in some way, within the limits of brevity.  Wow, just wow.

[Miffymog]

9 hours ago, Trunk said:

Browsing Lama Jampa's youtube playlists, he has a 7-video playlist entitled "The Stages of the Path: from Refuge the the Vajrayana".

 

I'm impressed enough with this guy that I'm writing out this post before seeing the playlist myself ... and ashamed enough of that to at least start watching the first video before I click 'submit reply'.

 

 

p.s.

Watching the first video on refuge.  Lama Jampa strikes me as talking in a really common relatable way & words, no non-sense, not (so far) romantic idealized spirituality, but at the same time it feels~sounds like both his historical and religious training is serious, technical and deep.  He covers a lot of ground quickly, but each point is made relatable and clear in some way, within the limits of brevity.  Wow, just wow.

 

Just watched the 7 of them and I can confirm he gives very clear explanations 

[TheGrayJediKnight]

Here is a video of Lama Glenn, one of my lamas (the one whom gave me my Buddhist Refuge Ceremony name of Jigten Gonpo) I have been studying under.

I personally practice his teachings of the 8 Yogas of Amitayus-Hayagriva. 

Lama Glenn's lineage is Drikung Kagyu.

 

My other Lama is Lama Lena, and she is of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage.

 

May all sentient beings be happy,

Jigten Gonpo

[Miffymog]

5 hours ago, TheGrayJediKnight said:

Here is a video of Lama Glenn, one of my lamas (the one whom gave me my Buddhist Refuge Ceremony name of Jigten Gonpo) I have been studying under.

I personally practice his teachings of the 8 Yogas of Amitayus-Hayagriva. 

Lama Glenn's lineage is Drikung Kagyu.

 

My other Lama is Lama Lena, and she is of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage.

 

May all sentient beings be happy,

Jigten Gonpo

 

I have an inquisitive mind so find these videos fascinating, and I very much like passing the time wondering what I might do once I'm more experienced with Flying Phoenix Chi Kung.

 

In this video Lama Glenn spends a little bit of time discussing karmic resonance, and what draws you to a particular practice.

 

Something keeps bringing me back to Tibetan Buddhism, but having watched this it confirms I'm not quite ready for this particular path, yet.

 

 

[Jamyang Khedrup]

On 6/8/2022 at 7:19 AM, TheGrayJediKnight said:

Here is a video of Lama Glenn, one of my lamas (the one whom gave me my Buddhist Refuge Ceremony name of Jigten Gonpo) I have been studying under.

I personally practice his teachings of the 8 Yogas of Amitayus-Hayagriva. 

Lama Glenn's lineage is Drikung Kagyu.

 

My other Lama is Lama Lena, and she is of the Drukpa Kagyu lineage.

 

May all sentient beings be happy,

Jigten Gonpo

 

The schools Lama Jampa Thaye follows are both Kagyu and Sakya....and the school Lama Glenn follows is Drikung Kagyu. That Drikung is the same school followed by the Mongol king Hulagu Khan, in the Middle East.

 

Hulagu Khan's brother Kublai Khan came to power in China and Hulagu then came under the influence of the Tibetan school which Kublai followed which was Sakya. Conflict erupted between Sakya and Drikung inside Tibet (between the followers of Hulagu and Kublai). Today China's under the Sakya rule, and the followers of Drikung and Hulagu have been absorbed into the empire of the Middle East, where there's a mix of Christians and Muslims that have drowned out the Buddhists of the founder Hulagu''s time. Buddhism's Apocalypse prophecy is in the Kalachakra text that's being propagated worldwide by the Tibetan lamas. And in that prophecy, is the mention of a mythical hidden land called Shambhala (which is situated to the West of Tibet i.e. exactly where Hulagu Khan's Middle Eastern Empire is.).

 

So let's roll this back and sum it up quickly: there's a Buddhist Empire left behind in Tibet by Kublai Khan extending into China, but his brother Hulagu had his own private empire extending from Pakistan/Afghanistan and the Tibetan border areas, all the way to Baghdad/middle of Turkey, Konya etc...and Hulagu's empire was Drikung Kagyu. And bingo! Hulagu's empire of "Hulagid" Ilkhanids aka "The Ilkhanate" fits the description of Shambhala and the Savior of the world known as the King of Shambhala. It's fitting that Hulagu ruled over a puzzle of faiths, including Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hulagu's own Buddhists. He was thus the savior and god-like figure for all those assembled faiths. It's noteworthy that Hulagu's empire outlasted him by far, with an offspring of successors-descendants of his family lineage that lasted for 80 long years. We're thus in presence of the messianic King of Shambhala of the Kalchakra prophecy.

 

What's remarkable is that he's Drikung Kagyu, exactly like Lama Glenn. Drikung was totally taken over by Sakya during their war, but 200 years after Hulagu's death, a Sakya lama (Kunga Zangpo) arose who split from Sakya because he was independent and wanted to return to a stricter path than Sakya's own path. So, he totally revamped Sakya and asserted his school of Ngor as the primary force inside Sakya by far, as he actually dwarfed Sakya by his work. Then a split occurred because part of Sakya left it to found a new school the Gelugpas, and Kunga Zangpo couldn't agree with them because they adopted a way of practicing that excluded Tantrism until the latter part of the practice when the practitioners were already too old to do meditation, which "Ngorchen" Kunga Zangpo couldn't accept. He thus retreated to his monastery at Ngor and decided to carve out a niche region for his school far from the "roar and heat" of Tibetan politics.

 

Pondering his isolation faced with this opposition that was rising against him, he sought to find a path outside of Tibet, (because neighboring tracts beyond the borders offered Buddhist regions, as well). That's when he traveled to and developed Buddhism in an abandoned stretch of land to the West of Ngor called Ngari which happened to be a traditional land of the Drikung Kagyus who had temples surrounding the Kailash sacred mountain and extending also to Ladakh. And this stretch of land was a dependency of Hulagu Khan's Empire (meaning: Hulagu raised taxes there). So when the Kalachakra speaks about Shambhala it's a mythical faraway land hidden from the view. But suddenly it comes into sharp focus at very close quarters, because the Ngari region is inside Tibet itself, but relies upon the empire of Hulagu who's headquarters are in Iranian Azerbaijan. Suddenly this monstrously extensive, megalithic empire rises out of the past and crushes everything on it's path.

 

By Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo's strenuous efforts, the Ngari region became completely Ngorpa, of the Sakya school, but it's noteworthy to see that it was a traditionally  Drikungpa land and one belonging to the Mongol Hulagu. Now nothing happens by chance, and it's good to note that the Kalachakra itself was written by a Sakya lama called Buton Rinchen Drub , just eighty years after Hulagu's death and was certainly a hidden hommage to Hulagu's protective action towards Tibet and Buddhism versus the devastations wreaked by Islam at that time. Therefore, Kunga Zangpo's decision to take over the Hulagu-Drikung part of Tibet called Ngari came once the Kalachakra had become vastly widespread in Tibet and thus Kunga Zangpo was taking an early investment into the Hulagu Empire which the Kalachakra prophecy announces. Kunga Zangpo was thus buying himself part of the dream and prophecy of the end of the world and inserting himself into the past as the rightful heir of the Kalachakra.

 

In such, I think that the successions of reincarnations of Kings of Shambhala, (which was a lineage certainly written by the Sakya lama Buton), are made up of the Sakya school's founder Birwapa, followed by Hulagu (a combined Drikung/Sakya), then Buton Rinchen Drub and finally Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo (among the list of Kings of Shambhala). I see them all as clearly actors in the "Shambhala Saga" and having the status of "Kings of Shambhala". 

 

This was my input to Jigten Gonpo's post above.

 

Very happy to hear from you Jigten...I'm most happy to hear what others want to add to all this.

 

It's good to have proof of things, that's incontrovertible and proof that cannot be denied. I searched for Shambhala on Google and found the land of Bilad-al-Sham, corresponding to The Levant (Israel, Lebanon and Irak/Iran). Then I searched for people called Shambhala. I found two contemporaries of Hulagu which was troubling because I thought they could be allusions to Hulagu. Because indeed, "otherwise why should such people live exactly at the same places (Hulagu's capital was Maragha in Iranian Azerbaijan) and same time as Hulagu?" That's the rhetorical question, which any sleuth like me, researching history, should obviously want to ask themselves.

 

Those two people were respectively called "Shams-e Tabrizi" and "Shams al-Din". They're Muslim luminaries and are rivaling candidates to be the Messiah respectively of the brotherly enemies: Sunnites and Shiites. Seeing the Mongols prospered for eighty years and converted to Islam during forty of those years, it's impossible to not think that Hulagu's heritage was progressively merged into the Muslim heritage.

 

So concretely how did they merge a Buddhist king like Hulagu into Islam via these two "Shams" figures? The answer is perfectly self-evident: 

 

The Drikung Hulagu messianic founder of the Ilkhanate dynasty was the future Messiah of the Islamic Sunnites, but also the Shiites. His successors at the helm of the Ilkhanate couldn't let anyone take the role of Messiah from them. Therefore they jealously attributed the top religious role(s) to themselves by using their founder and grandfather Hulagu as their champion and "chosen one". But secretly, Hulagu was and remained Buddhist in their tradition. And in Tibet, many regions remained Drikungpa. Hulagu could thus be named openly as the Messiah in the Drikung regions and temples of Tibet. But that would not have been plausible at all, for one good reason which was that in Tibet also, Hulagu's role as BUDDHIST Messiah was hidden because Kublai's operatives were on guard there. No Mongol such as Kublai would have been ready to grant to his brother Hulagu the role of Messiah and world Savior. That goes against the Mongol grain of one-upmanship among Genghis Khan's offspring's siblings. But over the years, the Sakya realized that they had inherited this surprising, extraordinary and wonder-filled, miraculous war treasure, which was this messianic king Hulagu and they didn't want to let go of it. Thus, the rewriting of the secretive biography of Hulagu in the Kalachakra, left open the possibility for a future resurrection and returning to rule, of that historical hair-raising figure of Hulagu Khan, the Messiah (of all faiths... even sunni muslims, shiites... and jews...and christians of course. Hulagu's quoted in his writings saying he loved christians, Christians had brought him up. His wife and mother were extremely fervent christians and he had saved the christians in Bahgdad when he razed that in the greatest massacre of the whole History of Humanity. The christians in the East had hailed him as the messianic Savior of Christianity: the Messiah).

 

Forward to Jampa Thaye and Glenn Mullin please, thank you so much!

Edited August 18, 2022 by Jamyang Khedrup

[Jamyang Khedrup]

TheGrayJediKnight  Hi, hello.

[TheGrayJediKnight]

On 8/18/2022 at 2:40 AM, Jamyang Khedrup said:

 

The schools Lama Jampa Thaye follows are both Kagyu and Sakya....and the school Lama Glenn follows is Drikung Kagyu. That Drikung is the same school followed by the Mongol king Hulagu Khan, in the Middle East.

 

Hulagu Khan's brother Kublai Khan came to power in China and Hulagu then came under the influence of the Tibetan school which Kublai followed which was Sakya. Conflict erupted between Sakya and Drikung inside Tibet (between the followers of Hulagu and Kublai). Today China's under the Sakya rule, and the followers of Drikung and Hulagu have been absorbed into the empire of the Middle East, where there's a mix of Christians and Muslims that have drowned out the Buddhists of the founder Hulagu''s time. Buddhism's Apocalypse prophecy is in the Kalachakra text that's being propagated worldwide by the Tibetan lamas. And in that prophecy, is the mention of a mythical hidden land called Shambhala (which is situated to the West of Tibet i.e. exactly where Hulagu Khan's Middle Eastern Empire is.).

 

So let's roll this back and sum it up quickly: there's a Buddhist Empire left behind in Tibet by Kublai Khan extending into China, but his brother Hulagu had his own private empire extending from Pakistan/Afghanistan and the Tibetan border areas, all the way to Baghdad/middle of Turkey, Konya etc...and Hulagu's empire was Drikung Kagyu. And bingo! Hulagu's empire of "Hulagid" Ilkhanids aka "The Ilkhanate" fits the description of Shambhala and the Savior of the world known as the King of Shambhala. It's fitting that Hulagu ruled over a puzzle of faiths, including Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hulagu's own Buddhists. He was thus the savior and god-like figure for all those assembled faiths. It's noteworthy that Hulagu's empire outlasted him by far, with an offspring of successors-descendants of his family lineage that lasted for 80 long years. We're thus in presence of the messianic King of Shambhala of the Kalchakra prophecy.

 

What's remarkable is that he's Drikung Kagyu, exactly like Lama Glenn. Drikung was totally taken over by Sakya during their war, but 200 years after Hulagu's death, a Sakya lama (Kunga Zangpo) arose who split from Sakya because he was independent and wanted to return to a stricter path than Sakya's own path. So, he totally revamped Sakya and asserted his school of Ngor as the primary force inside Sakya by far, as he actually dwarfed Sakya by his work. Then a split occurred because part of Sakya left it to found a new school the Gelugpas, and Kunga Zangpo couldn't agree with them because they adopted a way of practicing that excluded Tantrism until the latter part of the practice when the practitioners were already too old to do meditation, which "Ngorchen" Kunga Zangpo couldn't accept. He thus retreated to his monastery at Ngor and decided to carve out a niche region for his school far from the "roar and heat" of Tibetan politics.

 

Pondering his isolation faced with this opposition that was rising against him, he sought to find a path outside of Tibet, (because neighboring tracts beyond the borders offered Buddhist regions, as well). That's when he traveled to and developed Buddhism in an abandoned stretch of land to the West of Ngor called Ngari which happened to be a traditional land of the Drikung Kagyus who had temples surrounding the Kailash sacred mountain and extending also to Ladakh. And this stretch of land was a dependency of Hulagu Khan's Empire (meaning: Hulagu raised taxes there). So when the Kalachakra speaks about Shambhala it's a mythical faraway land hidden from the view. But suddenly it comes into sharp focus at very close quarters, because the Ngari region is inside Tibet itself, but relies upon the empire of Hulagu who's headquarters are in Iranian Azerbaijan. Suddenly this monstrously extensive, megalithic empire rises out of the past and crushes everything on it's path.

 

By Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo's strenuous efforts, the Ngari region became completely Ngorpa, of the Sakya school, but it's noteworthy to see that it was a traditionally  Drikungpa land and one belonging to the Mongol Hulagu. Now nothing happens by chance, and it's good to note that the Kalachakra itself was written by a Sakya lama called Buton Rinchen Drub , just eighty years after Hulagu's death and was certainly a hidden hommage to Hulagu's protective action towards Tibet and Buddhism versus the devastations wreaked by Islam at that time. Therefore, Kunga Zangpo's decision to take over the Hulagu-Drikung part of Tibet called Ngari came once the Kalachakra had become vastly widespread in Tibet and thus Kunga Zangpo was taking an early investment into the Hulagu Empire which the Kalachakra prophecy announces. Kunga Zangpo was thus buying himself part of the dream and prophecy of the end of the world and inserting himself into the past as the rightful heir of the Kalachakra.

 

In such, I think that the successions of reincarnations of Kings of Shambhala, (which was a lineage certainly written by the Sakya lama Buton), are made up of the Sakya school's founder Birwapa, followed by Hulagu (a combined Drikung/Sakya), then Buton Rinchen Drub and finally Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo (among the list of Kings of Shambhala). I see them all as clearly actors in the "Shambhala Saga" and having the status of "Kings of Shambhala". 

 

This was my input to Jigten Gonpo's post above.

 

Very happy to hear from you Jigten...I'm most happy to hear what others want to add to all this.

 

It's good to have proof of things, that's incontrovertible and proof that cannot be denied. I searched for Shambhala on Google and found the land of Bilad-al-Sham, corresponding to The Levant (Israel, Lebanon and Irak/Iran). Then I searched for people called Shambhala. I found two contemporaries of Hulagu which was troubling because I thought they could be allusions to Hulagu. Because indeed, "otherwise why should such people live exactly at the same places (Hulagu's capital was Maragha in Iranian Azerbaijan) and same time as Hulagu?" That's the rhetorical question, which any sleuth like me, researching history, should obviously want to ask themselves.

 

Those two people were respectively called "Shams-e Tabrizi" and "Shams al-Din". They're Muslim luminaries and are rivaling candidates to be the Messiah respectively of the brotherly enemies: Sunnites and Shiites. Seeing the Mongols prospered for eighty years and converted to Islam during forty of those years, it's impossible to not think that Hulagu's heritage was progressively merged into the Muslim heritage.

 

So concretely how did they merge a Buddhist king like Hulagu into Islam via these two "Shams" figures? The answer is perfectly self-evident: 

 

The Drikung Hulagu messianic founder of the Ilkhanate dynasty was the future Messiah of the Islamic Sunnites, but also the Shiites. His successors at the helm of the Ilkhanate couldn't let anyone take the role of Messiah from them. Therefore they jealously attributed the top religious role(s) to themselves by using their founder and grandfather Hulagu as their champion and "chosen one". But secretly, Hulagu was and remained Buddhist in their tradition. And in Tibet, many regions remained Drikungpa. Hulagu could thus be named openly as the Messiah in the Drikung regions and temples of Tibet. But that would not have been plausible at all, for one good reason which was that in Tibet also, Hulagu's role as BUDDHIST Messiah was hidden because Kublai's operatives were on guard there. No Mongol such as Kublai would have been ready to grant to his brother Hulagu the role of Messiah and world Savior. That goes against the Mongol grain of one-upmanship among Genghis Khan's offspring's siblings. But over the years, the Sakya realized that they had inherited this surprising, extraordinary and wonder-filled, miraculous war treasure, which was this messianic king Hulagu and they didn't want to let go of it. Thus, the rewriting of the secretive biography of Hulagu in the Kalachakra, left open the possibility for a future resurrection and returning to rule, of that historical hair-raising figure of Hulagu Khan, the Messiah (of all faiths... even sunni muslims, shiites... and jews...and christians of course. Hulagu's quoted in his writings saying he loved christians, Christians had brought him up. His wife and mother were extremely fervent christians and he had saved the christians in Bahgdad when he razed that in the greatest massacre of the whole History of Humanity. The christians in the East had hailed him as the messianic Savior of Christianity: the Messiah).

 

Forward to Jampa Thaye and Glenn Mullin please, thank you so much!

Lama Glenn Mullin's email is [email protected]

 

I recommend you share this insight with him. 

 

May all sentient beings be happy,

Ngakpa Jigten Gonpo 

[Apech]