Ruth Gamble - The Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorje: Master of Mahamudra (Lives of the Masters)

We collect felt cases for our texts,

But they dont make reading them more comfortable.

R ANGJUNG D ORJE , 1296, age 13

Khyung Dzong, Tsurpu

M Y RELATIONSHIP with Rangjung Dorjes stories and songs is now more than a decade old. I was first handed a copy of his Collected Works on a CD-ROM the year I started graduate school. At that stage, I was not as interested in his life as I was in his songs. I scanned the names of the texts on the disc, looking for one that included the word gur, the honorific Tibetan word for song, and I was excited to find several collections of them.

I had been fascinated by the songs of this genre since I was a teenager and read the life story of the Mahmudr yogi Milarepa. Milarepa was famous for his songs, and many of them had been woven into his life story. His songs combination of spiritual pursuit and irreverence, the balance they struck between discipline and play, struck an immediate chord with me. They dealt with the hard truths of death and loss and the suffering of life, but they were also funny and (importantly for a teenager growing up in a conservative society) they contained social criticism that was biting. The hard truths Milarepa spoke about life and death were much easier to face because of his humor, andin the story at leasthis satire made tyrannous religious and political patriarchs quake. Among my diverse cultural references, Milarepa hovered like a fast-quipping, awakened superhero. He could fly, his consorts were mountains, and he even had theme songs. After these encounters with Milarepa, I was always on the lookout for more yogi songs.

By the time I was handed the CD, I also knew something about the Karmapas. I had met the Seventeenth Karmapa, Orgyen Trinle, in Tibet when I was a teenager and he a child, and I remet him in India when he was a teenager and I was studying Tibetan. I had found him always curious, kind, and funny, but I was also disturbed by the restrictions he had to endure because of his religious and political position.

After meeting Orgyen Trinle, I had tried to read the sanitized, standardized forms of the Karmapas life stories, but I kept tuning out as I read them. Many have said that it was my karma not to connect with those stories. But it also had something to do with the way they were presented. My experiences and culture had bombarded me with text and taught me not to believe so easily. Later versions of the Karmapas life stories, it seems to me anyway, were written for an already-devoted audience who had limited access to the written word and merely wanted a narrative sketch to accompany their lineage prayers.

When I scanned the table of contents of Rangjung Dorjes Collected Works on the CD, I noted that there were also a few works called namthar, a term that usually refers to spiritual biographies. I was not expecting much from them. I thought they would be formulaic versions of his life, placed at the start of his Collected Works by its collator as a form of introductory homage.

My first surprise was that they were a series of autobiographies. My second surprise was the content of these autobiographies. Rather than the formulaic tales of a life I was expecting, they were often raw and revealing insights into an often difficult but fundamentally resilient life. Reading and translating his stories and songs was like opening a time capsule; it was always fascinating but not always comfortable.

In these works, Rangjung Dorje expressed enough self-doubt for me to relate to him. He was someone, like many of us, who was an outsider that had to work hard to achieve his goals and construct an identity for himself. He was someone who had to negotiate ethical dilemmas in difficult times and someone who had made a pact with peace. He came from a more desperate family than even Milarepa. Milarepas story is a story of lost wealth and prestige. Rangjung Dorje came from nothing and had nothing to lose. His early life was replete with stories about his father getting drunk and bragging about him in a town and about his mother walking hundreds of kilometers to find a place to stay soon after she gave birth to him.

Rangjung Dorjes story also provided fascinating insights into a very different world from mine, the world of a recognized reincarnate, whose sometime-discomfort, sometime-thriving relationship with his reincarnate status reminded me of not just the Seventeenth Karmapa but of many other people in similar situations. And then there were his visions. Rangjung Dorjes story and songs may have resonated with me, but they also transported me to a version of the world that was very foreign to me. His stories and songs mixed the common with the otherworldly.