Introduction • p. 23 ABOUT THESE LEGENDARY ACCOUNTS
The attitude and hardened opinion among modem Buddhist
studies scholars is that the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist scholars (and perhaps
some members of the Shingon Buddhist tradition of Japan) could not manage to
notice the difference between Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, and Chandrakirti - the
philosopher sages of early and middle first millennium Buddhism - and the
adepts by the same names listed here in the ancestral lineage of the Esoteric
Community Tantra teachings. This disrespectful opinion about the naivete, or
fundamentalism, or whatever else, on the part of the many great intellects to
whom it is applied will simply no longer do. It goes along with the
long-established, and now perhaps subliminal, "Westerners'"
chauvinist idea and racial prejudice that "Eastern" people are to be
lumped together with "primitive" people (not to mention that the
so-called "primitives" don't fit the caricature either). The idea is
that since "Eastern" people have no sense of linear time, no interest
in history, and so live in the eternal now of endless cycles, this explains
their lack of progress in the sciences and their general social backwardness
and economic underdevelopment. Therefore, quite naturally, modem scholars would
think that such "backward" people would be so unrealistic,
unscientific, and unhistorical as to think that the two Nagarjunas, Aryadevas,
and Chandrakirtis could be the same persons. And they think the same about the
many other Indian master authors who also wrote both philosophical and exoteric
works of solid repute as well as works on the esoteric Tantras (actually most
of the great ones did).
The evidence for this truism of contemporary scholars is
exclusively the presumed existence and nonexistence of texts. There is
absolutely no "hard" evidence at all. The only dating used by modem
scholars for these individuals comes from the recorded timing of Chinese or
Tibetan translations of texts attributed to them, built upon by a certain
amount of intertextual referencing. Texts in India were hand-written on palm
leaf pages and never printed until recent times. They would not last too long
and would be re-copied over and over, usually every few generations. Root texts
and commentaries were often intermingled, so intertextual reference is
sometimes an unreliable guide. Spiritual texts in particular were considered
more importantly memorized than written, a tradition that came from Vedic
practices. Additionally, esoteric texts were kept strictly secret, if committed
at all to some handwritten pages. The tradition says that the Tantric
traditions were kept hidden without being written down in the human realm for
over 700 years.
This is the place to put this contentious issue into a new
light (as I will do more in detail below), in the context of this work on the
perfection stage of Unexcelled Yoga Tantra, considered by the Indo-Tibetan
Universal Vehicle Buddhists to be the most advanced possible scientific and
spiritual teaching. Since there is no hard evidence either way as to the
dating, life-spans, and historical activities of these eminent personalities,
it is more respectful and logical to accept the critical scholarship of the
traditional analysts than it is to presume to know better and dogmatically
follow our various modern, "Western," and "scientific"
prejudices.
The basic presumption is that, since there are no such (we
are certainly not) extraordinary, miracle-producing, highly enlightened beings
with far-beyond-though-not-dissimilar-to-Einstein genius, no one ever could
have been such a person, especially not a "pre-modern," Asian,
spiritual person. Indeed the very concept of the enlightenment of buddhahood as
the complete and accurate knowledge of the exact nature of reality is
preposterous to us on its face. However, we must here confront the fact that
the only evidence we have for the rigid opinion that there are no other
extraordinary persons up to the inconceivably extraordinary person of a buddha
is our own failure to be enlightened in that way. We cannot even say we have
the evidence of never having met any such person, since they have the tradition
of most often hiding their enlightenment, perhaps to avoid arrest, intrusive
dissection, and lethal examination such as the E.T. in the film was about to
undergo when he escaped. So we might have met one or two, but were
unfortunately unable to recognize them. I do not say I am so enlightened, or
that I know I have met any who are, but I am open to the fact that I wouldn 't
have recognized one if I saw her or him. So at least I maintain an open mind.
To summarize this argument so far:
1) The presence or absence of texts in the climate of India
cannot provide ironclad dating evidence. All the claims of contemporary
scholars that there must be two of everybody are just speculation grounded in
preconceived ideas.
2) The Tibetan scholars who accept that the two Nagarjunas,
two Aryadevas, etc., are the same persons in different eras and contexts is a
perfectly good hypothesis until something non-speculative arises to disprove it.
A "modernist" presumption of superior perspective is no better than a
racist, nationalist, religious, or culturalist one.
3) The whole program of disproving everything
"traditional" people think and believe, based on the assumed
superiority of our modernist knowledge and culture, is itself obsolete in the
postmodern era. A key part of our critical scholarship's quest of objective
truth has to be to question the rigidity of our conditioned subjectivities and
their biases and blindnesses. Through global warming (over-heating), pollution,
population explosion, etc., we are driving the world into extinction with our
diseased, ignorance-driven, objectivist science and technology-magnified
egocentrist culture. This cannot rationally be considered superiority in knowledge
and culture. It will not do to proclaim like the late Richard Rorty that we are
ethnocentric, and then just honor that fact by refusing to learn anything about
any other culture or look at the world through other eyes and languages and
worldviews.
4) The essence of the noble tradition of the Esoteric
Community and other Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, as opposed to the Jiianapada
tradition and perhaps others, is that the dialecticist centrist worldview goes
along with the Unexcelled Yoga lifestyle. It is inner scientific and
technological and not merely nonrational and mystical.
Tsong Khapa bows with powerful faith not because he is a
fundamentalist -not at all - but because he has met these ancestral adepts
personally, he has talked with them. They are immortal on the magic body (māyādeha)
plane, like George Lucas's jedi masters, who can walk back and forth through
time. So therefore, we need not be over-obsessed with ancillary issues of
historicism. My only purpose in even bringing it up myself- in the face of the
sharp teeth of all my colleagues' and even students' modernist presuppositions
- is only as part of helping the reader break through for a moment their
habitual intellectual and even unconscious entrapment in a horizon of
preconceptions wherein everything explored in this work of Tsong Khapa and
other Tibetan master scholar adepts is some sort of quaint pseudo-magical
thinking, primitive superstitious twaddle, perhaps of some interest
historically that people were ever so crazy.
