Conflicting Chronologies: Did Mar pa Lo tsā ba Chos kyi blo gros ever meet Nāropā?

van der Kuijp, Leonard (2025) Conflicting Chronologies: Did Mar pa Lo tsā ba Chos kyi blo gros ever meet Nāropā? ACTA ORIENTALIA ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARUM HUNGARICAE, 78 (1). pp. 115-149. ISSN 0001-6446

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Abstract

This essay seeks to clarify some problems that arose out of the study of a little, most likely forged work that cast serious aspersions on whether Mar pa Lo tsā ba Chos kyi blo gros had in fact met Nāropā in the flesh and thus had studied under him. Given that the authenticity of certain spiritual practices depend on and are sustained by a transmission that is unbroken, the absence of their meeting would of course shake the very foundation of the self-understanding of members of the Bka’ brgyud pa school of Tibetan Buddhism in particular and have profound doctrinal conseqences. The little work is included in the 1736 Sde dge edition of the collected works of Rje btsun Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1147–1216), the third patriarch of the rival Sa skya pa school. Strikingly, it is not registered in any of the earlier catalogs of his writings. So far, the work with its attribution to Rje btsun and a possible forgery, may have first surfaced in an analysis of its contents given by Zhwa dmar IV Chos grags ye shes (1453–1517) who rightly cast aspersions on the assumption that Rje btsun was its author. This essay draws attention to the plethora of different dates the literature has offered for Nāropā and Mar pa and to the many problems one encounters with the dates of early Tibetan scholar-yogis. Most if not all these dates were originally given in the Sino-Tibetan duodenary cycle of the twelve animal-years. Later Tibetan reader-editors recalculated these by using the sixty-year Sino-Tibetan sexagenary cycle, and the result was that mistakes of twelve years or multiples thereof often crept in the re-dating of these individuals. After all, each of the twelve animal-years of a duodenary cycle appears five times in the sexagenary one.

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