Hidden Treasures and Secret Lives: A Study of Permalingpa (1450-1521) and the Sixth Dalai Lama (1683-1706)

Language: English
Pages: 241 (8 B/W Illustrations)

Preface

This study was researched and written at the Indian Institute of Advanced
Study, Shimla, where I was a fellow from October 1985 to August 1987. I am
indebted to Wolfson College, Oxford, for granting timely leave to accept this
fellowship. I am particularly grateful to the former director of the Institute,
M.N. Sinha, and the present director, Margaret Chatterjee, for the invaluable
help they gave me in numerous ways. Neither my family nor I shall forget
the peace and good company we enjoyed in the former vice regal lodge and
its inimitable surroundings where the Institute is located. My wife, along
with me also held a fellowship at the Institute, and we received 'many acts of
kindness from the fellows and staff. Our sons will increasingly relive the wealth
of non-human life inhabiting this great place properly. We never chanced
upon the ghost of the viceroys but the flying foxes, monkeys, bats and lesser
beasties jazzed up their stay very much.

The book had its origins in a more general plan to review the main
features of Tibetan Buddhist hagiography that would have concentrated not
only on the lives of Pemalingpa and the Sixth Dalai Lama but also on such
disparate figures as Dorjieff, the Buriatlama and agent of Russia (his verse
autobiography having recently come to light) and the nineteenth-century
Nyingmapa master from Amdo, Shapkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol (whose own
autobiography is surely one of the greatest products of the literary tradition in
Tibet). However, in the end they appeared such strange bad-fellows that I
decided finally to concentrate on the two who formed a most natural pair. In
pursuing them I was a