The Meaning of Lineage by the Venerable Pema Chodron

from a talk given at the Kagyu E-Vam Buddhist Institute - April 1994

Lineage can be regarded as something like a time capsule. It is very precious, extremely rare and extraordinarily useful to all of humankind, has been realised and discovered thousands of years in the past, yet can still be experienced in a very fresh and up-to-date way right now. Lineage is not just something that is limited to Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhism in general, it is the ancient wisdom of this planet which has been passed down through the centuries. It represents someone understanding the truth, not just intellectually, but completely as a full experience.

It is hard to describe exactly what 'understanding the truth' means, except that it has something to do with an experience of timelessness. Trungpa Rinpoche often referred to the word 'nowness.' However it is described, it is something completely refreshing when it is experienced by any individual. A very long time ago, things were understood and realised. Much of this wisdom has not been lost because of the lineage. It has been passed from one person to another throughout the ages. An analogy that is often used is that what is passed down is similar to a recipe for fresh baked bread, that thousands of years ago someone made fresh baked bread that had a beautiful aroma and a delicious taste. A thousand years later, because the recipe was passed down from one person to another, we can use that recipe. The bread does not taste two thousand years old however, it tastes completely fresh because it is happening now, you are eating it now and it is nourishing you now.

There is something that is passed along. It has an outer form, which is to say there are certain teachings that are passed along, certain methods such as meditation techniques that are passed along, a certain way of looking at the world that is passed along. Meditation is like a recipe for fresh baked bread that someone learned long ago, that you can learn right now and have the very same realisation that people have had throughout the history of the lineage.

Things are passed along in different outer forms. They are passed along in terms of ritual, in terms of practices and in terms of teachings. Many of us have a scepticism about ritual, a lack of trust in outer forms, because we have been through a lot of empty form where people are very dogmatic. Sometimes, in the world religions and other really splendid traditions, the outer form becomes all there is. There is something very dry and dogmatic and bigoted about it. As a result, there is a kind of shying away on the part of a lot of us from rituals and forms, and a yearning to have something fresh that does not feel stale and imposed on us, where there are no negative consequences if you look the wrong way, sit too high or too low, or do not bow when you are supposed to.

It would be a great shame to throw out the space capsule because of the fact that it has been abused, to throw out the rituals, the forms and the practices because of our experience of them having been abused or misused. That is really just the outer form, but it carries something very personal and very real nonetheless. Of course it can be corrupted. Throughout time, because of the crazy people that we are, good things get misused; and because people have fear, they will take the forms and make them into dogma, or use them for political gain, or cause schisms in the group as a result of fighting over the outer parts.

However, you can look for a deeper solution than just throwing out the practices or forms. There is a kind of challenge in realising that they are pointing at something. Because there will always be this tendency for things to get rigid, you should not miss the real message of lineage, which is that you yourself can use that recipe and realise that it is up-to-date and fresh. You can find the essence; you can find what is really been pointed at. The real thing that is being pointed out, the real thing that is being passed along in an outer form, is about going beyond the notion of right and wrong or good and bad. It is about stepping more and more into groundlessness and realising the wisdom of insecurity and 'not knowing.'

The fact that we turn this truth into a belief system is actually not in the teachings; it is just something that people do. If you really listen to those teachings and really take them to heart it is you who will find it out. If you do those practices, it is you who will find out, just as the lineage people found out before us and then passed it on so that we could know. This is a general notion of lineage, the notion that wisdom does not get lost even in the darkest ages.

That wisdom has been understood by somebody and when other people hear it, person to person, they also really understand. They do not turn it into a dogma; they do not turn it into a belief that can cause schisms, that can cause war, that can be used for political or materialistic gain. There are always genuine people and those people are just like us. This is the demand on us, to genuinely relate with these precious teachings that have been passed down though the generations.

Once, when I was living in Colorado, a native American man came to the meditation centre where I was staying. His name was Gerald Red Elk and he was Sioux. He said he was 'looking to meet' some Tibetans. He ended up having a very close relationship with Trungpa Rinpoche. He told me that the elders of his Sioux people had seen some signs about the future that they did not understand. The elders had taught these signs to their children, so that they had been passed down through the ages. The Sioux Indians also believed that the Tibetans had the wisdom that went furthest back in time. I doubt that they referred to the Tibetan people as Tibetans, it was probably 'mountain people' or something, but as this vision came into modern times, the Sioux Indians understood it to refer to the people from Tibet. Gerald ended up meeting Trungpa Rinpoche to ask him about these signs. It was a very interesting meeting, which nobody else could understand. As it turns out, the tape recorder actually did not work during this meeting either! The point of this story is about this notion of people holding wisdom that goes so very far back. Sometimes, a particular wisdom gets lost.

For instance, Traleg Rinpoche is part of the Kagyu lineage. If you look at a thanka that shows the main original teachers of the Kagyu lineage, the figure in the centre is Vajradhara. Now, Vajradhara is interesting because when you start to talk about Vajradhara, you are beginning to talk about the wisdom principle, this primordial knowing, this ancient knowing. It is a knowing that is not limited by time or space, a knowing that does not fall into the extremes of yes and no, good and bad, a knowing that actually is like fresh baked bread. It is the same now, in this very moment of time as it was long ago. Vajradhara actually symbolises this wisdom. He is called a 'primordial buddha.'

All lineages have a history and the way the history of a lineage was told was usually as an oral tradition for many centuries. The story of the Kagyu lineage is that an Indian man named Tilopa received this wisdom directly from Vajradhara. Somehow, lineages always starts like that, somebody actually understands the primordial truth in a very unobstructed, fully realised way. It is like it does not come from our ordinary reality; it seems to come from somewhere else. However, in the understanding of this wisdom, Tilopa realised that there is really nowhere else, there is nobody else outside yourself either.

It is said, then, that in the eleventh century, Tilopa demanded the teachings from Vajradhara and received them. After that, it was passed secretly, from one person to another, for a long time. Tilopa passed it on to Naropa in the Kagyu lineage. However, Tilopa passed it on to other people as well and they started other lineages. Lineage is like seeds, the more people who can receive those seeds, the better off humanity is. That is how different lineages start. In terms of Traleg Rinpoche's lineage, which is also Trungpa Rinpoche's lineage and the tradition I was trained in, Tilopa's main student was Naropa, Naropa's main student was Marpa, Marpa's main student was Milarepa, Milarepa's main student was Gampopa and one of Gampopa's main students was the first Karmapa, who was called Dusum Khyenpa.

The interesting thing about all of this is that the students were very different from their teachers. In terms of people becoming bigoted and dogmatic with wisdom that gets passed along, they generally want everything the same. However, the truth is that Tilopa and Naropa were very different. Tilopa was a wild yogi. When Naropa found him he was sitting on the banks of a river, eating the guts of a fish. Naropa, on the other hand, was a somewhat dignified person. He had been searching hard for this Tilopa and was pretty shocked when he finally found him. It took a lot for Naropa to stay there, because this guy smelled bad, probably had lice, and was not what Naropa thought he was looking for.

Naropa had been a very renowned scholar, he was regarded as one of the people who understood the teachings the best and could successfully debate with all the non-Buddhists. However, one day an old, decrepit and very ugly woman appeared to him and asked, 'Naropa, do you understand the words of the Buddhist teachings?' When Naropa said, 'Yes I do,' she started dancing and singing very joyfully and cackling with laughter. Then she asked Naropa, 'Do you understand the meaning of the Buddhist teachings?' However, when this time he replied, 'Yes I do,' the old woman started to scream and wail and throw herself on the ground. When Naropa asked her what was wrong, she replied, 'When you said you understood the words, you were telling the truth and so I was happy, but when you said that you understood the meaning, you were telling a lie.' Then she went her way.

That started Naropa thinking, because he realised it was true. He understood the words, as so many of us do, but he did not understand the real meaning. It is the meaning that gets passed along in the lineage. You need words to do that, and there are practices that help, but it is really the meaning that these words and practices are all about. It took Naropa a long time to 'get' what was going on. Trungpa Rinpoche always said that Naropa was so conceptual, he was so intellectual, that he just could not understand. As a result, when Naropa started practising with Tilopa, he would reinterpret everything that Tilopa told him to fit in with what he already knew. It took twelve years of trials before he finally got the message. The story is that he got the message one day when he was with Tilopa. He had been through a lot, really. The trials of Naropa are enough to make you weep with compassion, because he went through such difficulties trying to understand the meaning. He was a very good student, very devoted, but he was thick, because he was so conceptual. The story is that one day Naropa went up to Tilopa and Tilopa took off his shoe and slapped him in the face with it. At that moment, Naropa realised the truth. However, as the traditional story always says, if you slap someone in the face with your shoe too soon, all he or she gets is a broken nose. Naropa did not exactly gain sudden realisation, even though it appeared that way at the time. It was a very gradual dawning of the real meaning. Tilopa had other students as well, but it was Naropa who passed on what is now called the Kagyu lineage.

Naropa also had quite a few students, but his main student, in terms of the Kagyu lineage, was Marpa. Tilopa and Naropa were Indian, while Marpa was the first of the lineage from Tibet. Marpa was a farmer, who was said to have had a bad temper. He also had a lot of children. Marpa passed on everything he learned from Naropa. He passed on the outer practices, but it was really the meaning or the wisdom that he was passing on. One of the outer practices, one of the wisdom aspects that he passed on, was a special teaching about the transference of consciousness. He passed this to his eldest son and his eldest son died. That is an example of how the wisdom sometimes gets lost, because this practice was lost with his son. Nobody else has actually ever received that teaching since that time. So there is a tremendous responsibility when we understand something, when we realise something, to tell somebody else so that they will tell the next generation, because it can be lost.

Marpa's main student was very different from him. Marpa was a family man, while Milarepa was a wild yogi who sang beautiful songs, a lot of them about giving up family and attachment and all of that. Each student was a very unique character and they really were characters! None of them started out as a saint. It is not like reading the life of the saints, where everybody already seems to be fully realised and you never really get to know about their idiosyncrasies. The lineage-holders in the Kagyu lineage have always been a great inspiration to me, because they made so many mistakes and had such a hard time getting the point. Their stories are very, very human.

They are stories about people who were very brave, people who are just like us, who had a lot of neuroses and a lot of obscurations. However, they never gave up on themselves, they never gave up on their world and they were willing to stick with their teachers, which is something of a synonym for being willing to stick with the experiences of your life and let it tame you. You have to let it process you, let it undo all the old ways you have of editing the world, of making things into dogma, making things into belief systems. There has to be some sense of letting life, the teachers and the whole process awaken you so that you really understand the wisdom, really understand exactly what has been understood before. It is not some kind of homemade thing, not some kind of original creation that still contains our idiosyncrasies. The lineage figures had a lot of idiosyncrasies, but what they realised was timeless, had the feeling of nowness, had no history, was not old or young, was not from the past or the future. It was always now.

That is what Milarepa passed on to his students, the main one of whom, in terms of the Kagyu lineage, was Gampopa. I come from a monastery in Nova Scotia called Gampo Abbey, which is named after Gampopa. Gampopa was the first monk in the Kagyu lineage and he had three main students who were called the Three Men from Kham. One of them was Dusum Khyenpa, who is the first of the Karmapas. Another one of them is said to be the predecessor of Traleg Rinpoche. Once the Karmapa lineage was started with Dusum Khyenpa, it was passed down through the succession of Karmapas to the present day. There were lots of other people in the lineage as well, who passed it on in different lineages and different ways.

The thing about lineage is that, in some sense, it empowers each of us to realise that it is we ourselves who will realise this wisdom that goes back so far in time. No one has a monopoly on it; every person can realise it. That is the essence of the Buddhist teachings. We can realise this wisdom because it is our birthright. It is not something outside; it is something that is actually the nature of our minds.
In the Kagyu teachings, one of the main things that is passed through is called the Mahamudra teachings, which is all about the essence of mind. This is actually what can be realised. It is not like a dogma, or a belief, or even a philosophical system. It is a kind of awakening, which is found in the teachings and in the practices. It is something more timeless than anything that can be expressed in words or pointed out by a form. However, that is how we initially connect with it, through the teachings, our teachers and the practices.

On the other hand, it tends to pull the rug out completely from the notion of charlatanism: somebody proclaiming himself or herself as a self-made person. There are plenty of teachers around who actually use something very good and true to build up their ego and proclaim themselves as a big-deal. Everybody else should do what they say and listen to them, because they have got the goods and you had better listen! We all know that there is a lot of that right now and that there always has been a lot of that. Trungpa Rinpoche called it 'spiritual materialism.' Taking the teachings and the practices and using them to build up your ego. A person who sits and is special, so that the more people appreciate your teaching, the more crowds come, the more books you publish. This is a notion that is actually contrary to the teachings being some kind of undoing of our blindness, undoing of our veils, undoing of the ways that we keep things so small. Instead of stepping further and further into groundlessness, such people build up their sense of ground. Instead of having an image of themselves as losers, like maybe a lot of us do, they have this image of themselves as a big-deal. This is just as poisonous as having an image of yourself as a loser. It is just as much a blindness and maybe even more dangerous as an obscuration.

With the sense of lineage, you begin to understand that you are the only one who will realise it in your own stream of being, but what you are connecting into is something timeless and it is not yours. It is like making yoghurt. You create the causes and conditions, put the right stuff together and the yoghurt makes itself. You cannot really get a big ego out of making yoghurt because it is about how it all works together. So it is with lineage. You cannot exactly get the feeling that it is yours, that you did it. On the other hand, it is only inside your own mind that it will be discovered.
There are many lineages. There are Zen lineages and Theravadin lineages, and the four major lineages of Tibetan Buddhism. There is the Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelugpa lineages. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the main figure in all four Tibetan lineages, although he is particularly attached to the Gelugpa lineage. Each of these lineages has its own lineage tree and its own quality.

You learn from your teacher and your teacher is usually somebody that you love very dearly and trust very much as someone who actually has realised this. According to the tradition, the teacher will pass his or her wisdom to one person, or maybe four or five people. Basically, a teacher tries to develop students who actually have some realisation and can therefore pass it on. What I have started noticing is that more and more responsibility is being put on students just like ourselves to really make a wholehearted sense of longing to really understand. Not just to understand the words, but to understand the meaning and to use one's whole life as a journey of understanding. You realise that your teacher, and your teacher's teachers all the way back, have in some sense actually sacrificed their lives. They have worked so hard so that people in the future can understand, can actually be taught, so that this will not get lost, will not go underground and never be heard again.

Some kind of passion begins to develop sometimes in students, where they wish with all their hearts to get out of the way enough, to undo themselves enough that some kind of real expression of the true Dharma can come through them; that they could be a vehicle for that. They realise that the more 'they' can get out of the way, the more something is going to really communicate. It is nothing mystical or fancy, it is just the sense that something actually comes through. You get out of the way and are no longer talking about 'me,' 'my,' 'mine.' There is some sense of the authenticity of the tradition and the liveliness and up-to-date-ness of the present situation and how these mix together. I asked Traleg Rinpoche the other night, 'Rinpoche, it is always emphasised that the teacher passed his wisdom to the main student, and that main student to their main student or group of main students. Is the lineage also passed along by just ordinary students?' He replied, 'Of course, of course, it is passed along by just ordinary students.'

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