Source Text
Foreword by Dugu Chogyal Rimpoche The Naljorpa Drukpa Kunley was an awakened Buddha, a Master of Mahamudra and Dzokchen. I am very happy that English readers now have the opportunity to read this full account of a Tibetan mahasiddha’s life. The stories in this biography are not fiction or fable – the events described really happened.
how he renounced the eight worldly preoccupations (praise and blame, loss and gain, pleasure and pain and notoriety and fame); how he gained an understanding of karma; how he met his teacher and took refuge in the Lama; how he practiced his moral precepts, study, and meditation, to gain both relative and absolute compassion; how through the maintenance of his samaya vows and his accomplishment of the two stages of Tantric practice, he brought his body, speech, and mind to full enlightenment.
He works without any discrimination, inhibition or selfish motivation, to give meaning to other people’s lives.
An uncensored account of the Lama’s activity is likely to raise all sorts of doubts and fears in the minds of devotees. Also, it is secret, a mystery, because a Buddha’s existence resolves the paradoxes and dualities of being. The way Drukpa Kunley acts makes us understand how the Three Precepts of the Three Vehicles (Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana) can be combined without any contradiction.
Saraha, after a long tenure at Nalanda University, took an arrow-smith’s daughter (a Dakini) as his consort, and said: Only now am I truly a pure Bhikshu. Drukpa Kunley’s life shows us a liberated mind that is free from the preconceptions, preferences, bias, and mental activity that binds us in tension and fear, and shows us a way of life that frees us from emotional attachments and family ties. He gives us a vision of mad indiscipline and free wandering, and having accomplished the goal of his Dharma in one lifetime, he demonstrates a deceptively simple example and inspiration. His behaviour shows us the result of the practice of Milarepa’s precept: Concerning the way to pursue your inner search, reject all that increases mind-poisons and clinging to self even though it appears good; and, on the contrary, practice all that counteracts the five mind-poisons, and helps other beings, even though it appears to he bad: this is essentially in accord with the Dharma.
Translator’s Introduction
Although we expect an adverse reaction from members of Buddhist schools adhering closely to the Buddha Sakyamuni’s teaching in the ‘First Turning of the Wheel’, we hope that the interest in the tantras this translation excites, the misconceptions that it removes, and the insight and inspiration that it infuses, will vindicate us.
This tradition produced the mystic poet Saraha (Drukpa Kunley was a reincarnation of Saraha), who sang his apocalyptic songs denigrating pious show, academic scholasticism, empty ritual, and self-righteous morality.
The aim of both Saraha and Drukpa Kunley was to free the human spirit’s divinity from slavery to religious institutions, and moral and ritual conventions, that had originally been designed to support spiritual endeavour. Both these yogins, as exemplars of the uncompromising, ascetic path, believed that total renunciation and detachment, including detachment from religion and its institutions, were necessary conditions for perfect happiness.
However, Drukpa Kunley’s attacks on the establishment are never vicious. He himself was a product of monastic training (though he grew out of the spiritual nursery at an early age), and he must have realized that the monastery provided a unique haven for those with inferior capabilities and those with different propensities in need of a social environment for their spiritual evolution.
AI Summary
The Divine Madman by Keith Dowman presents key insights from the Tibetan Buddhism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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