The Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment

Translation of བྱང་ཆབ་ལམ་གྱ་སྒྲན་མ (བྱང་ཆུབ་ལམ་གྱི་སྒྲོན་མ)

Language: English
Date: 2021 CE
Translator: patrick-dowd
Extent: 16 passages, 1,209 words
Text: complete digital text
Source: lotsawahouse · Patrick Dowd (tr.), The Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, Lotsawa House (version 1.4–20220901) · CC BY-NC 4.0 (Lotsawa House); shown with attribution on a non-commercial site

Text

Few figures in the transmission of the Dharma from India to Tibet hold as central of a role as the great master Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (982–1055?). Often referred to in Tibetan simply by the epithet of “Lord” (Tib. jo bo rje), Atiśa is the individual most associated with the eleventh-century revival of Buddhism in Tibet, which followed the tumultuous era of fragmentation (sil bu’i dus) that began with the 842 collapse of the Tibetan Empire. His impact on the Tibetan Buddhist Dharma continues to reverberate to this day, nearly a full millennium after he first arrived in the Land of Snows, and his teachings have inspired millions of Buddhists in Central Asia and now the world over. A brief introduction to his life and activities may shed light on this foundational text.

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Atiśa was born in 982 as the second son of a royal house in Bengal, eastern India. On the eve of an adolescent marriage, he experienced a powerful vision of Tārā that motivated him to renounce the worldly life, even at this young age, and embark on the Buddhist path. He wandered through the jungles and mountains of India seeking the instruction of Buddhist masters, and he is said to have studied under a great number of mahāsiddhas. There are also accounts that he may have practiced the tantric sexual yogas at this time.[1]

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He received the bodhisattva vows from the master Bodhibhadra at the great Indian monastic university of Nālandā. At twenty-nine, the same age that Siddhartha left the palace, Atiśa had a dream in which he was urged by the Buddha himself to ordain, prompting him to take full monastic vows at a monastery in Bodh Gaya. Upon ordination, he was given the name Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna, “He Whose Deep Awareness Acts as a Lamp.” With his relatively late ordination and scholarly pursuits, Atiśa’s biography is an inverse of Indian mahāsiddhas such as Nāropa, who only disrobed to practice tantra after many years living as a pure monk and scholar. Atiśa’s full monastic ordination after nearly two decades spent as a wandering yogi demonstrates the tremendous esteem with which he held the Vinaya and monastic discipline, values reflected in the Lamp for the Path and his broader missionary activities in Tibet.

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Atiśa’s most important teacher is referred to in Tibetan texts as Serlingpa (“The One from the Golden Island, Suvarṇadvīpa”), the Indonesian teacher also known as Suvarṇadvīpa Dharmakīrti. Atiśa heard tell of this great master of bodhicitta and resolved to undertake the perilous ocean journey to meet him and receive his teachings. He spent many tumultuous months at sea, rife with danger and obstacles, before he finally crossed the Strait of Malacca and arrived at the island of Sumatra where he met the sublime master. Atiśa remained on the island for twelve years, training intensively in bodhicitta and mind training (blo sbyong). He then returned to India as a lineage holder of Serlingpa’s precious teachings and later served as the abbot the great monastic university Vikramaśīla. In Tibet, he declared that of his forty-five teachers, Serlingpa was the most important; his numerous biographies report that the mere mention of Serlingpa’s name caused Atiśa’s eyes to brim with tears.

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The story of Atiśa’s invitation to Tibet is one of the most legendary in the Buddhist history of the country. Toward the end of the tenth century, the king of the Western Tibetan kingdom of Purang-Guge (pu hrangs gu ge), Lha Lama Yeshe Ö, sent twenty-one young Tibetans to Kashmir with the aim of reviving uncorrupted Buddhist teachings in his kingdom. This was prompted by the belief that Buddhism had fallen into a state of intense moral decay with the collapse of the Tibetan empire. Nineteen of the youths perished on the journey, marking the first of many supreme sacrifices required to bring Atiśa’s pure Dharma to Tibet. One of the two young men who survived was the great translator Rinchen Zangpo (958–1055), who informed the king of master Atiśa, whose fame had spread from eastern India all the way to the western mountains of Kashmir.

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The king sent a mission of nine men with a sizable offering of gold to Vikramaśīla to implore Atiśa to come to Tibet and restore the Buddhadharma. Only one of the nine survived the treacherous journey across the Himalayas and into India, but Atiśa declined the invitation and gold, saying it was important he remain in India.

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While amassing even more gold with which to invite the master, King Yeshe Ö was captured by the ardently anti-Buddhist Karluk (Qarluq) people, who said that the king’s freedom could only be bought for his own weight in gold. His nephew Jangchub Ö raised the requisite fortune for the king’s release only to have Yeshe Ö tell him to use the gold to again invite Atiśa, now with the message that the king had sacrificed his very life to bring the master to Tibet.[2] When Atiśa heard the story of the king’s supreme sacrifice, and on being urged directly by the goddess Tārā herself, he accepted the invitation and departed for Tibet, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

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The present text, The Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, is a masterpiece of Buddhist literature. As noted in the first and final verses, Atiśa composed the treatise at the urging of Jangchub Ö, who became king following his uncle’s death. The text fully integrates the three vehicles of the Buddha’s teachings and shows them to be entirely non-contradictory. Doboom Tulku and Glenn Mullin note that “it is largely due to [Atiśa] that today all Tibetan sects of Buddhism are a combination of Hinayana, general Mahayana and Vajrayana doctrines.”[3] The great nineteenth-century master Dza Patrul Rinpoche wrote that although Atiśa had full mastery over the entire range of Buddhist teachings, sūtra and tantra, the foundational practice of taking refuge was of such paramount importance to him that Tibetans nicknamed him the ‘Refuge Paṇḍita.’[4]

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Atiśa’s masterwork is the foundational text for the “stages of the path” (lam rim) genre so prominent in Tibetan Buddhist literature. Gampopa’s Jeweled Ornament of Liberation (dam chos yid bzhin nor bu thar pa rin po che’i rgyan), Tsongkhapa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path (lam rim chen mo), and Longchenpa’s Finding Rest in the Nature of Mind (sems nyid ngal gso), seminal classics of the Kagyü, Gelug, and Nyingma schools respectively, all draw their basic framework from Atiśa’s Lamp for the Path. Given that this is one of the most foundational texts in Tibetan Buddhism, one which shaped the tradition as we know it today, it is a great honour to present this English translation.[5] May it be of benefit!

The Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment

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