Julian of Norwich and Other Tibetan Lamas

As we draw close Julian’s descriptions of her visionary experiences, it might be useful to begin to reflect on the mystical experience of a Tibetan Buddhist living in the same period, Tsongkhapa (1357-1419). It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Tsongkhapa in the history of the people of Tibet, the Land of Snows. His life overlapped at least in part those of Christian medieval Saints such as Bridget of Sweden (1303-1373), Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), the anonymous late 14^th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and his years upon this earth were almost completely enclosed in Julian’s own lifespan of about 1343 to sometime after 1416. This medieval Tibetan is renowned as both a profound scholar and philosopher and a deeply committed practitioner. In his scholarly work, he labored to reconcile – and make into a cohesive and organic whole – the Buddhism of his native Tibet with that of its philosophical and spiritual ancestors which had flourished in the monasteries of India centuries earlier. In his religious and spiritual practice, Tsongkhapa was a model of profound meditational discipline and devotion. Meditation, prostrations, retreats, and the recitation of mantras were foundational to Tsongkhapa’s spiritual regimen. A modern biographer, Thupten Jinpa, provides a sense of the spiritual life of this 14^th century “Scholar, Saint, and Teacher-Sage” in his depiction a visit to a monastery in 1376: ₁

During his stay at Kyormolung Monastery … Tsongkhapa joined the monastic community for their prayer sessions. Often, during these sessions, when the congregation would recite the Heart Sutra, Tsongkhapa would enter into deep meditation and remain in single-pointed absorption … At times he would remain so deeply absorbed that he would be left alone in the hall, the rest of congregation having completed the prayer session and left. ₂

Many years later, during a retreat in 1393, Tsongkhapa’s spiritual commitment and practice remained intense, as the following description of his preliminary purifications practices affirms:

Tsongkhapa … performed hundreds of full-body prostrations on a daily basis. At the end of his preliminary practice, the stone floor on which Tsongkhapa performed these prostrations bore visible signs where his hands and his head had touched. Similarly, a flat rock Tsongkhapa used during this retreat for the performance of the mandala offering (symbolically offering the entire universe to the buddhas and bodhisattvas) – wiping the surface of one’s right arm and pouring grains over it repeatedly – had been wiped so much that it came to resemble the surface of a mirror. ₃

In introducing Tsongkhapa’s visionary experience, Thupten Jinpa appears to be acutely aware of the challenges of recounting such experiences to a modern audience: “[T]hese stories will understandably challenge the credulity of contemporary readers.” ₄ Geshe Jinpa continues:

Visionary encounter is a theme common across many religious traditions, with St. Paul’s vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus being a well-known example in the Christian tradition. In the Tibetan tradition, vision is widely recognized as both a mystical phenomenon and a source of important transmission of esoteric instructions … As for the question of what precisely occurred to Tsongkhapa with respect to these visionary accounts and what they might mean, I leave it to readers to make their own judgements. But in order to understand his life as closely as possible, to know how he and his contemporaries understood it, and to appreciate his significance to subsequent generations of Tibetan Buddhists, it is important to take seriously the extent and profound effect of visionary encounters on Tsongkhapa’s development. ₅

Endnotes

1. The Life and Teachings of Tsongkhapa. Edited by Robert A. F. Thurman. Prof. R. Thurman. Dharamsala, Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, 1982, page 1.
2. Thupten Jinpa, Tsongkhapa: A Buddha in the Land of Snows. Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2019, page 44. Regarding “The Heart Sutra,” Thupten Jinpa writes: “For more than two millennia this scripture has played an extremely important role in the religious lives of millions of Buddhists. It has been memorized, chanted, studied, and meditated upon by those aspiring to attain what Mahayana Buddhism describes as the perfection of wisdom. Even today, the chanting of this sutra can be heard in Tibetan monasteries, where it is recited in the characteristically deep overtone voice, in Japanese Zen temples, where the chanting is done in tune with rhythmic beating of a drum, and in Chinese and the Vietnamese temples, where it is sung in melodious tunes.” (Editor’s Preface, Essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama’s Heart of Wisdom Teachings. Translated and edited by Geshe Thupten Jinpa. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2005, page ix.) Among the most famous moments in The Heart Sutra are those that contain the words: “Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is also not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness are empty.” (Retrieved from Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive at: The Heart Sutra | Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive)
3. Thupten Jinpa, Tsongkhapa: A Buddha in the Land of Snows. Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2019, page 120. Another account of Tsongkhapa’s practice during one of his retreats: “The retreat was to last for four years. During the first phase, both master and disciples undertook intensive generation of spiritual energy and purification of the obscurations in order to demonstrate the indispensability of such practices from the outset. Je Rinpoche [Tsongkhapa] personally performed three and a half million full-length prostrations and one million eight hundred thousand mandala offerings. Indeed, his prostrating form wore an impression in the floor of the temple; and at the conclusion of the mandala offerings his forearm was raw and bleeding.” (The Life and Teachings of Tsongkhapa. Edited by Robert A. F. Thurman. Prof. R. Thurman. Dharamsala, Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, 1982, page 16.)
4. The Life and Teachings of Tsongkhapa. Edited by Robert A. F. Thurman. Prof. R. Thurman. Dharamsala, Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, 1982, page 18.
5. The Life and Teachings of Tsongkhapa. Edited by Robert A. F. Thurman. Prof. R. Thurman. Dharamsala, Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, 1982, page 18. I take my title for this reflection from an article written by Barbara Newman, which she begins in the following way: “’In the year that King Uzziah died,’ wrote Isaiah, ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up’ (Isa. 6.1). ‘In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day’ of the exile, Ezekiel declared, ‘the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God’ (Ezek. 1.1). ‘Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me,’ said John the Divine, ‘and I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man’ Apoc. 1.12-13). What did it mean to say ‘I saw’? Although the Bible from the beginning to end is laced with visions, its writers showed little interest in the subjective experience of the visionary. Medieval authors, however, were fascinated by the question. Visionary texts of all kinds, some naïve, others highly sophisticated, coexist with a large and contentious body of theoretical writings on visionary experience. The theorists wrote with diverse purposes: some to interpret the biblical prophets, others to teach contemplative practice, still others to discredit visionaries they held they held to be making fallacious claims. Thus, exegetical, devotional, and juridical writers all took an interest in visions, but their diverse disciplinary perspectives presupposed radically different notions of what a ‘vision’ implied …” (Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture.” Speculum, 80 (1):1-43, 2005, page 1.