As I am often prone to do when trapped in my room with nowhere to go, I was wearing out my eyesight for a good cause browsing through some recently posted photos of Tibetan Art works at Himalayan Art Resources website. If you are reading Tibeto-logic you no doubt already know that HAR is the best place in the whole universe to see Tibetan art. No museum can compete with it, not even the Newark Museum. I was thrilled to see what did at first seem to me to be a brassy image of our hero Padampa. Have a look at it yourself by tapping on those purple colored words. I mean, it has one hand raised above the head, the other holding what could very well be a bag, and we know that Padampa’s “Interdependence Bag” does at times occur as part of his iconography, even in his left hand as we see here. And Padampa was well known for his practice of yogic gazes out into space, something perhaps indicated by the way the right hand is raised above the head. But when I looked at the back side of the lotus throne, I quickly changed my mind. There we can read a inscription very clearly: grub thob gling la na mo, or Praise to the Siddha Ling. That means Lingrepa Pema Dorjé. On him have a look at the biographical sketch at Treasury of Lives. He may be regarded as the founder of the Drukpa Kagyü order, even if there has been some equivocation on that point. And that means the school affiliation of the image supplied on the website requires emending, too. Lingrepa is normally depicted in his untamable Siddha aspect, and the presence of a bag may just be telling us he was a wandering yogi, one who packed a bit of food for along the way, as yogis had been doing in India and Tibet all along, not just Padampa. I should look into this question, but right off the top of my head I just don’t know of any affinities Lingrepa may have had for Padampa or the Zhijé School. I do know that Lingrepa was often compared to the Indian Mahâsiddha Saraha, the one who made arrows.
§ § §
Read more:
A fine new essay about Lingrepa has appeared. You may be able to locate a free copy of it on the internet, if not right at this moment in the near future. Here are the details: Marco Walther, “The Development of the Biographies of Gling ras pa Padma rdo rje (1128-1188),” Bulletin of Tibetology, vol. 51 nos. 1-2 (2015), pp. 99-113.
