Later revisions and additions were made during my stay in 2011-2013 as a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, as well as during my visiting Lectureship in Sanskrit, Buddhist, and Asian Studies in 2014-2015 at the University of Sydney, and during an Endeavour Research fellowship in 2015 at the Australian National University (ANU) I wish to express my sincere gratitude to IIAS Director Dr Philippe M.F PEYCAM, IIAS Institute Manager Dr Willem VOGELSANG, the Chair of the Buddhist Studies program at the University of Sydney, Lecturer Dr Mark ALLON, and the Head of ANU's South Asia Program, Senior Lecturer Dr McComas TAYLOR The publication of this book in the prestigious Studia Philologica Buddhica series was made possible by the International Institute for Buddhist Studies (国際仏教学研究所) in Tokyo, Japan The ever forthcoming support of the Institute and the publisher in bringing out this monograph has been extremely positive for the author and for the work I express my warmest gratitude to Institute Director Professor Dr Florin DELEANU, Mr Shin'ichirō HORI (堀伸一郎), and the rest of the IIBS team Last but not least, I am grateful to Mrs Dr Ilse GUENTHER for inviting me into her home in Saskatoon, Canada, in 2006 to consult her and the late Herbert V GUENTHER's personal library and their handwritten and computer-written notes on Bsod nams rin chen's works Canberra, Australia, May 2015 Dr Ulrich Timme KRAGH Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen Theoretical Preamble In the Central Tibetan region of Dakpo stands a mountain known as Mt Dakla Gampo Since the twelfth century, the mountain has been home to a hermitage for meditators The founder of the site and its long lineage of Tibetan mystics was the medieval Buddhist monk Gampopa Sönam Rinchen (1079-1153) Sönam Rinchen took ordination in his early twenties and spent several years learning from some of the leading Buddhist scholar monks and lay yogīs of his day Thereupon, he went into a decade-long solitary meditation retreat, dwelling in rocky caves and self-made meditation huts in uninhabited places At the age of forty two, he took up residence on Mt Dakla Gampo to live in a life-long retreat in the wasteland solitude Soon a small community of fellow yogī meditators began to assemble around him in order to train in Tantric yogas and Mahāmudrā meditation under his skilled guidance and mentoring Having taught many trainees for over thirty years, Sönam Rinchen finally passed away on the mountain The best of his students went on to found the different chapters of the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism that today is known as the Kagyü school, name of which means "the transmission of the instruction lineages" A number of his followers wrote down teachings that they had received orally from Sönam Rinchen and gradually these notes, writings, and texts were compiled into a large written corpus called The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo (Dakpö Kabum) It is from the roots of these medieval texts – originating in the twelfth century – that a massive trunk of meditative instructions, radiating branches of inner yoga techniques, and vitalizing leaves of unique mystical terminology grew into a giant tree in the Himalayan wilderness of Tibetan mysticism Nevertheless, nowadays, the non-Tibetan audience invariably conceives of Gampopa Sönam Rinchen, commonly called 'Gampopa', as being a rather dry monastic figure associated exclusively with a single literary work, namely a large scholastic treatise on Mahāyāna Buddhism in English called The Jewel Ornament of Liberation and in Tibetan referred to in shorthand as the Dakpo Targyen The misperception has over the last halfcentury been reinforced by the repeated Western translations exclusively of this particular text The replicated image is not only skewed but is fraught with factual and representational problems In terms of authorship, it is very unlikely that The Jewel Ornament was ever composed by Sönam Rinchen, given that it markedly differs in style and contents from the rest of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo and bears all the hallmarks of being a much later work More importantly, the notion misrepresents Gampopa and the larger written tradition associated with him as being scholastic rather than experiential in nature When the focus is repositioned to the other 82% of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo, an earlier textual layer comes into view, revealing traces of a large contemplative community of medieval yogī renunciates earnestly devoted to practicing yoga and meditating in the mountain wilderness 20 Theoretical Preamble In view thereof, the intellectual aims of this book are threefold The first aim is to effect a contradistinctive fusion of horizons by reenvisioning and reclaiming Gampopa as a mystic and innovator The second aim is to shift the ontology of the text by severing The Manifold Sayings from authorial intentionalism The third aim is to propose a neostructuralist reading by disassembling the textual corpus into its smallest interpretive units and begin to determine their meaning-producing interrelations These three aims will be addressed respectively by the three parts of the book The historical distance between the reader and the discourse of a text requires a fusion of horizons in the act of reading, constituting what Hans-Georg GADAMER (1992:301-302) has termed "the hermeneutical situation." The reader's standpoint is the horizon of a consciousness that is affected and delimited by history The text's standpoint is the horizon of its discourse Meaning is acquired by the fusion of these horizons: the reader as the discursive agent interacts with the signifiers of the text as the discursive object to construe what comes to be signified by the discourse Signification is thus created anew in each hermeneutical situation Given that the reader's interpretive horizon is a historically affected consciousness, the present book's project of examining The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo is a hermeneutical situation that always remains prefigured by the historically embedded scholarly, religious, and popular notions of 'Gampopa' as the author and ultimate source of these written works For a textual reading, it is fundamentally impossible to exit this interpretive circumstance and to acquire a form of consciousness that is wholly objective and uncolored by preexisting notions Accordingly, the first task at hand when embarking on a new reading of Gampopa Sönam Rinchen and The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo is not to refute or deny the existing state of the art by dispelling the prevailing opinions Rather, it is to transform the situation by introducing contradistinctive notions, which can enlarge the interpretive scope sufficiently to allow for an advanced reading of the text, in turn leading to new signification The needed displacement of notions is to be achieved in the book's Part I, wherein the author Gampopa shall be reenvisioned and reclaimed as a mystic and innovator In the current study, the term 'mysticism' is to be understood in a very specific sense It denotes a contemplative system that in its core is non-ritualistic and not concerned with form As such, this sets it apart from meditation techniques involving elaborate outer rituals and extensive inner visualization techniques Furthermore, it separates it from types of mysticism built on visions, prophecy, ecstasy, spirit possession, and speaking in tongues With this specific signification in mind, the present narrow use of the term fulfills most but not all of the twelve general characteristics of mystical experience posited by Reinhard MARGREITER (1997) In essence, mysticism is here used narrowly as referring to meditative absorption in non-conceptuality The Tibetan word employed in The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo for such absorption is Chakgya Chenpo The phrase, which literally means "the great seal," is the Tibetan replication of the well-known Indian Sanskrit term Mahāmudrā Mahāmudrā, viewed as a unique form of Tibetan mysticism, has been chosen as the focal point for the book's first part in order to confront the reader with a representation of Gampopa that differs from the scholastic image of a Mahāyāna author The portrayal Theoretical Preamble 21 adduced in Chapter One is that of Gampopa as a mystic, namely as a meditation master whose prime occupation was the development of a Tibetan contemplative system The chapter provides an anthology of Mahāmudrā passages in Tibetan and English translation concerned with Gampopa's approach to mysticism in theory and practice as reflected in writings by his closest students These passages from primary sources are intended to augment the hermeneutical situation by introducing parts of The Manifold Sayings other than The Jewel Ornament Though various forms of Indian and Tibetan Mahāmudrā have already received several academic and popular treatments in the past decades, the Mahāmudrā segments of The Manifold Sayings stand out as being of particular historical importance, because they are the earliest substantive Tibetan Mahāmudrā writings On the one hand, these texts postdate the phase of late Indian Buddhism, given that Gampopa detached Mahāmudrā from its traditional Indian Tantric context of ritual, visualization, and sexuality On the other hand, they predate the later Tibetan phenomenon of the Mahāyānization of Mahāmudrā in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries, when Tibetan Buddhist writers apologetically retrofitted Tibetan Mahāmudrā mysticism with the classical Indian contemplative categories of tranquility and insight meditation, named shinä – lhaktong or śamatha – vipaśyanā Hence, a study of the Mahāmudrā passages in The Manifold Sayings is essential for discerning originality and innovation in Tibetan mysticism and for setting a hermeneutical beginning from which the Tibetan mystical terminology can be researched through etymology and philology Moving now to a slightly deeper theoretical level, it is to be observed that 'originality' and 'innovation', in point of fact, are highly precarious notions in classical and medieval Asian Studies The truth of the matter is that the historicist approach, which is the implicit constant in virtually all textual, literary, and philological study in the modern humanities, intrinsically necessitates a search for origins The chief governing principle of the historicist project is the placing of its object of study in historical time, whereby the object's ascribed value becomes secularized Resultantly, the historicist configuration of time is a verbalization of the object's past until the point of its origin, located either in a concrete historical event or in the initial inception in the history of an idea It is this construction of the past that renders the humanities' objects of study relevant to the hermeneutical situation of the present, thereby creating what Franỗois HARTOG (2003) has called "the regimes of historicity." Through the circular mechanism of placing the past in the present, which has been acutely described by Jörn RÜSEN (2013), the humanities fulfill their academic and social purpose of knowledge production (Sinnbildung) of the past within the hermeneutical situation of the formation and education of the modern individual's cultural identity (Bildung) within the nation state The book at hand is no exception to this rule, for it too is a reflection of the commonplace academic search for meaning in the conception of the past as 'origin' and 'history' Without reservation, the very reason for the selection of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo as the book's object of study lies precisely in the philological value of this corpus for understanding the beginnings of Tibetan mysticism ... several academic and popular treatments in the past decades, the Mahāmudrā segments of The Manifold Sayings stand out as being of particular historical importance, because they are the earliest... Chapter One is that of Gampopa as a mystic, namely as a meditation master whose prime occupation was the development of a Tibetan contemplative system The chapter provides an anthology of Mahāmudrā... The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo and bears all the hallmarks of being a much later work More importantly, the notion misrepresents Gampopa and the larger written tradition associated with him as being