Skull Fragments: on the Root Tantra of the Vidyādharas

Prologue: A Whole Contained in a Fragment

Among the many texts of the Heart-Essence of the Vast Expanse, few are so short and none is so foundational as the Root Tantra. It belongs to the teachings on history that bring certainty. Rigdzin Jigme Lingpa received it, as he received the whole cycle, from the ḍākinī of the all-pervading expanse, in symbols that he could decode. What he set down is not a sādhana to be chanted. It is not a commentary to be studied line by line. It something rarer: a Root Tantra in miniature, in which the entire architecture of Secret Mantra, from the ground of buddha-nature to the final seal of the treasure, is folded into a few dozen verses.

As with all texts of the Luminous Great Perfection, the title itself is a teaching. A skull fragment is a piece of the skull-cup, the vessel that in the charnel grounds holds the amṛta of the herukas. It is small, broken off, and yet it is of the same bone, the same substance, as the whole. So it is with this text. It does not present itself as one of the vast tantras of the eight sādhana classes that it describes. It is a fragment of them, a shard of the vessel, and yet whoever truly receives it holds something of the essence of what the whole vessel was made to contain.

The text unfolds in a clear and deliberate order. It opens with homage to the glorious Heruka. It then defines tantra itself through the classical triad of ground, path and fruition, and within the path sets out the three classes of tantra and the eleven topics that every tantra must contain. It turns to the means of understanding: the distinction between tantra, scripture and pith instruction, the threefold way of explaining, the six limits and the four modes. It then reveals that the whole of the teaching, teacher and retinue, Dharma and practitioner, arises within one’s own perception. From there it tells the sacred history of the eight great sādhana cycles in the Cool Grove, their entrustment to the Eight Vidyādharas and to the Lotus-Born Padmasambhava, and their compilation by Vajradharma. It closes with a prophecy addressed to the one who would reveal it, a blessing on all connected with him, and the threefold seal.

I. The Tantra of the Ground: The Continuum That Was Never Made

The homage is offered to the glorious Heruka. In the language of the Ancient Translations, the Heruka is the one who drinks the blood of saṃsāra: awareness that has consumed the root of confusion and stands in the charnel ground of the ordinary mind. To bow to him at the outset is already to declare where the text begins and where it ends: in the all-consuming, unshakable wakefulness of awareness itself.

The first word of substance is a definition. Tantra means continuum. The Tibetan rgyud, like the Sanskrit tantra, names the arrangement of threads that runs unbroken through the weave, the continuity that persists through every change. The Guhyagarbha, king of the tantras of the Ancient Translations, teaches that tantra is threefold: the Tantra of the Ground, the Tantra of the Path, and the Tantra of the Fruition. Rigzin Jigme Lingpa follows this ancient frame exactly, and the opening verses describe the first.

This Ground is not something produced. It does not arise from causes, and it is free of conditions. Here the text speaks with the precision of the Great Perfection. Everything in saṃsāra and in the conventional path of accumulation is produced: it depends on causes, it changes with conditions, and therefore it can be lost. The ground of the tantra is the one thing that is not produced, and therefore the one thing that cannot be lost.

The text names it the essence of the Sugatas, those who have gone forth into Bliss: awareness itself. Their essence is the Sugatagarbha, the Buddha-nature present in every being. To identify it at once with awareness, rigpa, is the signature of the Heart-Essence. The Buddha-nature is not a hidden seed waiting to grow. It is the very knowing that is present now, before any thought has shaped it.

Five qualities are then given: It is beyond elaboration, for no concept of existence or non-existence, of one or many, can touch it. It is utterly pure, because no stain has ever entered its nature. The obscurations are adventitious, like clouds that never alter the sky. It is the nature itself, not a state attained but what has always been the case. It is unfabricated, because no effort of meditation constructs it. And it is unaltered, because no correction improves it. The five culminate in a single phrase of great beauty: thus gone. The Buddhas are called the Thus-Gone Ones, Tathāgatas, because they have gone into Suchness. Here the ground itself is called thus gone: suchness was never elsewhere, and so the going is already complete.

This is the continuum that runs through all three tantras. In the ground it is called the essence, on the path it is called the method, and in the fruition it is called the result, but it is one and the same thread, never broken, never begun.

II. The Tantra of the Path: Means Without Number

If the Ground is never produced, why is there a path at all? Because, though the essence has never been lost, it has not been recognised. The Tantra of the Path is everything that brings about that recognition. The text says plainly that the methods are limitless in number, and then, with the economy of a Root Tantra, gives the essentials.

The Three Classes of Tantra

The first division is threefold. The Father Tantras give priority to skilful means: the generation of the deity, the movement of the winds, the vast activity that manifests as form. The Mother Tantras give priority to insight: the recognition of emptiness, the bliss that dissolves the grasping mind, the wisdom that sees through appearance. The Non-Dual Tantras of Union hold method and insight in equal measure, neither leading, neither following.

This is not a library classification. Method and insight are the two wings of every practice, and every practitioner leans toward one or the other. The Ancient Translations hold that the Guhyagarbha belongs to the third class, and the Omniscient Longchen Rabjam, in his great commentary Dispelling the Darkness of the Ten Directions, shows how in Mahāyoga the inseparability of method and insight is already the inseparability of the two truths. The Heart-Essence, coming from the summit of the Ancient Translations, belongs to this non-dual vision: its sādhanas are generation and completion held as one.

The Eleven Topics

Every authentic tantra, the Ancient Translations teach, must contain a set of essential topics. The Omniscient Longchen Rabjam and Rigzin Jigme Lingpa himself, in the Treasury of Precious Qualities, enumerate them; here the root tantra gives eleven, and each one is a doorway into the whole path.

The first is the view: freedom from the extremes of permanence and nihilism. Everything appears, so it is not nothing; nothing has true existence, so it is not something. The View of Secret Mantra is the indivisibility of appearance and emptiness, and from this all the rest unfolds.

The second is conduct, which must accord with place and time. This brief line carries great wisdom. Secret Mantra does not prescribe one rigid form of behaviour for every circumstance. The yogin’s conduct is the free expression of the view, shaped with skill to what the moment and the place require, neither reckless nor timid.

The third is the maṇḍala, described as perfecting the clarity of mudrā. Mudrā here means the form of the deity, the seal of appearance as divine. The maṇḍala is not a diagram but the whole of perception recognised as the palace and the deities, and its perfection is the clarity with which that recognition is held.

The fourth is the perfecting of the four enlightened activities: pacifying, enriching, magnetising and wrathfully taming. These are the ways in which awakened compassion acts in the world, and their perfection is the sign that the practice has become effective beyond oneself.

The fifth is empowerment, called the entrance door. No one enters the maṇḍala except through it. Empowerment ripens the practitioner’s continuum, planting in body, speech and mind the potential that the path will bring to fruition.

The sixth is samaya, called the life-force. Once the door has been entered, the sacred commitment keeps the connection alive. A practice without samaya is like a body without breath: its form may remain, but its life has departed.

The seventh is secret mantra, called the essence of the deity. Mantra is the deity in the form of sound. It protects the mind, as its very name declares, and through its recitation the deity is made present.

The eighth is mudrā, which carries the power of truth. The gestures of the hands, the forms of the body and the seals of meaning give the practice its force of actuality. What is enacted with mudrā is sealed.

The ninth is approach, defined as keeping the deities close to one’s heart. This is the stage of familiarisation, in which the practitioner draws near to the deity through meditation and recitation until the deity is never far from mind.

The tenth is accomplishment, the group practice. Here the practice of a whole assembly, the drubchen, gathers the power of many in one maṇḍala, and the deity’s qualities are actualised.

The eleventh is offering, which increases the accumulation of merit. Whether outer, inner, secret or of suchness, offering opens the hand and the heart and gathers the conditions for realisation.

The text then adds that the learned regard these eleven as the summarising points. That is precisely their function. When one meets any tantra, of any class, these are the questions that unlock it: what view it teaches, what conduct, what maṇḍala, what activity, what empowerment, what samaya, what mantra, what mudrā, how one approaches, how one accomplishes, and what one offers.

III. The Keys of Understanding: Tantra, Scripture and Pith Instruction

Having set out what the path contains, the Root Tantra turns to how its teachings are to be understood. This is no small matter. The tantras are written in the twilight language, deliberately veiled, and without the keys a practitioner may take the outer shell for the kernel, or the kernel for something to be discarded.

Three Kinds of Teaching

Three kinds of teaching are first distinguished. Tantras are the words of the Teacher himself, spoken from the state of realisation. Scriptures, the lung or āgama, are summaries made by those who requested the teaching, gathering what was spoken into a form that can be held. And pith instructions, man ngag or upadeśa, are the master’s direct key, which clarifies whatever is complicated, confused or concealed in the other two.

The Ancient Translations know these three as the three great classes of their own scripture: the tantras of Mahāyoga, the scriptures of Anuyoga, the pith instructions of Atiyoga. Whether or not the Root Tantra intends this correspondence, it is illuminating to hold it in mind. The pith instructions are the highest because they are the closest: they directly point out realisation.

The Threefold Way of Explaining

The pith instructions themselves explain in three ways: by essence, by literal meaning, and by enumeration and the rest. Each answers a different need. Explanation by essence ensures there is no confusion about what a teaching is actually pointing to. Explanation by literal meaning ensures there is no doubt about what the words say. Explanation by enumeration ensures that the lists and categories, the eight of this and the five of that, are understood and can be put into practice. And together they resolve any disorder, so that teachings received in fragments fall into their proper place.

The Six Limits

Next come the six limits, the six boundaries within which every statement of a tantra must be read. The first pair is provisional and definitive meaning. The text gives the classic example: the generation phase is of provisional meaning, the completion phase of definitive meaning. This does not diminish the generation phase. It means that the deity’s form leads beyond itself toward the recognition in which it is perfected, like a path that leads to its destination.

The second pair is the indirect and the not indirect. An indirect teaching says one thing while intending another, often its very opposite; a not-indirect teaching means exactly what it says. The tantras speak of killing, of union, of consuming flesh and drinking blood. Read without this key, they can lead to ruin. Read with it, the killing is the liberation of ego-clinging, the union is the inseparability of method and insight. The text adds a further pair in the same spirit, the hidden and the not hidden, for the tantras conceal as well as reveal.

The third pair is the literal and the not literal. Some statements of the tantras are true exactly as the words stand; others use the words as signs whose sense lies elsewhere. Candrakīrti, in his Illuminating Lamp on the Guhyasamāja, made these six limits a foundation of tantric exegesis, and the Root Tantra receives them in that great line.

The Four Modes

Finally, the Root Tantra names four modes of explanation, through which one savours the meaning of the profound king of tantras: the verbal, the general, the hidden and the ultimate. The verbal mode explains the words themselves, their grammar and their sense. The general mode shows how the teaching applies in common to the whole of the path, to practitioners of every capacity. The hidden mode reveals the practices that are concealed within the words, especially those of the completion phase, the channels, winds and essences, and the path of bliss. And the ultimate mode points directly to luminosity and to the union of the primordialy purity of emptiness and spontaneous luminous presence that is the final meaning of every tantra.

The verb the text chooses is worth noticing: one savours the meaning. These keys are ways of tasting the tantra, layer by layer, until its whole flavour is known.

IV. The Tantra of the Fruition: What Was Always There, Now Seen

The third tantra is called the Dharma of the essence. The fruition is not a new attainment added to the Ground. It is the essence itself, no longer concealed. What was named in the opening verses as the essence of the Sugatas returns at the end as the fruit, exactly as it was, only now without veils.

The text describes how this comes about. All obscurations, the many objects to be purified, are eliminated in actuality through two forces: the power of the truth of the path, and the two accumulations of merit and wisdom. The path has the power of truth because it is not foreign to the Ground. I is the Ground’s own continuum acting upon itself. The accumulations supply the conditions in which that recognition can stabilise and become all-pervading.

When the obscurations are gone, one realises enlightened body, speech and mind, whose nature is indestructible wisdom. These are the three vajras. Body is the unchanging presence of form, speech the unceasing resonance of sound and meaning, mind the unwavering clarity of awareness. They are called indestructible because nothing that arises can harm them, and nothing that passes can diminish them.

And one reaches the essence of awakening itself, the byang chub snying po, the heart of enlightenment. Here the text uses its final and most important qualification: this essence is beyond words and cannot be exemplified. Everything that has gone before, the definitions, the classes, the eleven topics, the six limits and the four modes, has been a finger pointing. The fruition is what the finger points to, and no finger can touch it.

Thus the three tantras close their circle. The Ground was unproduced. The Path brings recognition of what was unproduced. The Fruit is that same unproduced nature, seen without obstruction and beyond description.

V. Everything Within One’s Own Perception

At this point the Root Tantra makes the turn that distinguishes it as a teaching of the Great Perfection. Before telling the sacred history of the eight sādhana cycles, it states the principle by which that history must be heard: everything occurs within one’s own perception.

The main teacher, the assembled retinue, the Dharma to be accomplished and those who accomplish it are no different from oneself. These four echo the classical perfections of a tantra’s setting: the perfect teacher, the perfect retinue, the perfect teaching, and with them the perfect place and time. In the Guhyagarbha, the teacher and retinue are already declared to be of one nature, the retinue being the teacher’s own display. The Root Tantra carries this to its fullest conclusion. The history about to be told is not an account of events elsewhere, long ago, among other beings. It is the self-display of one’s own awareness.

The text then names how this display appears in four ways.

As wisdom, it is the radiance of the ninefold expanse. One may hear in it the nine vehicles, each a facet of a single expanse, or the expanse of awareness radiating in its ninefold display. Either way, the point is the same: wisdom is not a possession but the natural radiance of space itself.

As the yidam deities, it is the Eight Great Maṇḍalas of the Sādhana Class, the Kagyé, the eight Herukas whose transmission the text will describe. They are the deities of body, speech, mind, qualities and activity, and the three worldly classes of mamo, worldly offering and wrathful mantra. To know them as one’s own perception is to know that their maṇḍalas are not entered from outside; they are recognised from within.

As bodhisattvas, it is the Eight Close Sons, the great bodhisattvas who surround the Buddha: Mañjuśrī, Avalokiteśvara, Vajrapāṇi, Kṣitigarbha, Ākāśagarbha, Sarvanivaraṇaviṣkambhin, Maitreya and Samantabhadra. In the tantras of the Ancient Translations they are also the eight consciousnesses in their pure nature. What appears as the bodhisattva assembly is the purity of one’s own faculties of knowing.

As vidyādharas, it appears in the manner the text now describes at length.

VI. The Cool Grove and the Eight Caskets

The scene now opens in Oḍḍiyāna, the naturally arisen land of the Ḍākinīs, and in the Great Cool Grove, the charnel ground strewn with corpses. Śītavana, the Cool Grove, is the most celebrated of the eight great charnel grounds, and the charnel ground is the native place of the vidyādharas. Where the ordinary mind sees only death and decay, the yogin sees the dissolution of every fixed identity, and in that dissolution, the open ground of awareness. It is fitting that the transmission of the herukas should take place among the dead.

The vidyādharas gathered there, and when the time came to tame beings, the Heruka, abiding in the Unsurpassed Realm of Akaniṣṭha, placed the tantras of the whole assembly of the Bliss-Gone Ones, written in letters of perfect eloquence, within the Śaṅkarakūṭa caitya, the stūpa called Heap of Bliss-Making. The Great Karmendrāṇī, the mighty Ḍākinī of enlightened activity, drew them forth and entrusted them, each in its own casket, to the eight vidyādharas.

The teachings thus descend from the Unsurpassed Realm into a stūpa in the human world. They are held there until the time is ripe. The ḍākinī, the guardian of the secret, opens it and places each cycle in the hands of the one destined to hold it. This is the pattern by which the treasures of the Ancient Translations are concealed and revealed.

The Eight Holders

To Vimalamitra, born in Zahor, the Ḍākinī gave the casket of the Supreme Heruka, Amṛtakuṇḍalin, the heruka of enlightened qualities, whose amṛta transforms every substance into wisdom.

To Mañjuśrīmitra, born in Malaya as the son of a brahmin, she gave the casket of supreme body, Mañjuśrī in his wrathful form, the conqueror of the Lord of Death.

To Nāgārjuna, born in Vidarbha in a brahmin family, she gave the casket of supreme speech, the lotus heruka Hayagrīva, whose neigh scatters all obstruction.

To Hūṃkara, born on the forested isle of Siṃhala, she gave the casket of supreme mind, Yangdak, the heruka of perfect purity.

To Prabhahasti, born in Oḍḍiyāna, the land of the turbaned ones, she gave the casket of enlightened activity, Vajrakīla, the dagger that pins down every obstacle.

To Dhanasaṃskṛta, born in Tokhara, she gave the casket here named the Fully Perfected Heruka. The more widely told account entrusts the cycle of the mamos to this master. The root tantra’s own naming is to be received as it stands.

To Rombuguhyacandra, born in the Land of the Ḍākinīs, she gave the casket of the worship of the tamer of haughty spirits, the cycle of worldly offering and praise.

To Śāntigarbha, born in a grove upon an island, she gave the casket of the maledictory fierce mantra, the wrathful power that cuts through the forces opposed to the Dharma.

The Single Taste

Then comes the line that turns the whole history inside out. None of these were ordinary, independent beings. It seemed as if there were deities, and as if transmission took place; but in reality the practice and the practitioners were of a single taste, appearing only within the perception of those to be trained.

ye dharmā hetu-prabhavā hetuṃ teṣāṃ tathāgato hy avadat |
teṣāṃ ca yo nirodha evaṃ-vādī mahāśramaṇaḥ svāhā | |

“Phenomena which have arisen from causes –
 the Tathāgata explained their cause, and he explained their cessation.
Thus spoke the Great Śramaṇa, svāhā.”