Marpa

Marpa made the journey from Tibet to India three times, in an era when it meant crossing the Himalaya on foot, descending into a climate that killed highland travellers, and returning with manuscripts that had to survive the same trip. He went to collect teachings, and he paid for them. The gold he carried was raised from patrons in Tibet, and the accounts of his life are unusually frank about the transaction: he needed enormous quantities of it, he was ruthless in gathering it, and the Indian masters he sought expected to be paid.

That commercial candour sits oddly beside the piety of most hagiography and is one reason his life reads as though a real person is somewhere inside it. He worked as a translator, in the technical sense the period gave the word: he learned Sanskrit, studied with Naropa and others, and rendered tantric texts into Tibetan with the care of a man who knew that a mistranslation would corrupt a lineage.

He belongs to the second wave of transmission, the period Tibetans call the new translations, which reopened the traffic with India after the collapse of the old empire had interrupted it. What distinguishes his contribution is that he did not merely bring texts. He brought a set of oral instructions attached to them, and the insistence that the two go together, which is the shape Tibetan Buddhism has had ever since.

Marpa was not a monk. He was a landowner with a wife, Dagmema, and children, farming in southern Tibet, and he taught from that position for his whole life. The Kagyu lineage therefore begins outside the monastery, in a household, and its early figures are conspicuously lay: a farmer, then a hermit in a cave. Monastic institutions came later and were built onto a transmission that had not required them.

The episode everyone knows is the treatment of Milarepa, who arrived carrying the guilt of having killed people by sorcery. Marpa refused to teach him and instead set him to build a tower, then to demolish it and return every stone, then to build another, repeatedly, for years, beating him and driving him away when he asked for instruction. Dagmema intervened on his behalf and was deceived in turn. The tradition reads the whole ordeal as a deliberate purification of the karma of murder, undertaken by a teacher who knew what he was doing and could not explain it at the time.

His own family line ended badly. His son Darma Dode, whom he had intended as heir, died after a fall from a horse, and the transmission passed to disciples instead. Tibetan Buddhism's habit of carrying lineage through students rather than sons is not universal, and here it was forced.