The Gathering of Intentions: A History of a Tibetan Tantra

By Jacob P. Dalton

This unique study reads a single Tibetan Buddhist ritual system through the movements of Tibetan history, revealing the social and material dimensions of a seemingly timeless tradition. By subjecting tantric practice to historical analysis, the book offers new insight into the origins of Tibetan Buddhism, the formation of its canon, the emergence of new lineages and ritual traditions, and efforts to revitalize the religion by returning to its mythic origins.

The ritual system explored in this volume is based on the Gathering of Intentions Sutra, the fundamental root tantra” of the Anuyoga class of teachings belonging to the Nyingma (Ancient”) school of Tibetan Buddhism. Proceeding chronologically from the ninth century to the present, each chapter features a Tibetan author negotiating a perceived gap between the original root textthe Gathering of Intentionsand the lived religious or political concerns of his day. This ongoing tension underscores the entanglement between Tibetan culture and its elaborate esoteric ritual systems, which have persisted for centuries, evolving in response to historical conditions. Rather than overlooking practice in favor of abstract philosophical concerns, this volume prioritizes Tibetan Buddhism’s ritual systems for a richer portrait of the tradition’s identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541176

Book preview

THE GATHERING OF INTENTIONS

This image appears thanks to the courtesy of the Himalayan Art Resources (www.himalayanart.org). The nineteenth-century painting depicts the buddha Vajrapāṇi’s original preaching of the Buddhist tantras, and the Gathering of Intentions in particular, atop Mount Malaya on the island of Laṅka. Surrounding Vajrapāṇi are the five excellent ones (dam pa lnga) who are receiving his teaching. Led by Rāvaṇa (Blo gros thabs ldan), king of the rākṣasa demons, each of the five represents a different class of beings: gods, nāgas, yakṣas, rākṣasas, and humans, with the latter represented by Licchavi Vimalakīrti. Rāvaṇa sits at Vajrapāṇi’s proper right, while the god Brahmā is at his left. Beneath and to the proper left of Vajrapāṇi sits a sixth figure: that of King Dza. As explained in chapter 1, King Dza is not counted among the five excellent ones receiving the teaching atop Malaya. At the end of Vajrapāṇi’s sermon, however, Rāvaṇa, who inscribes the buddha’s words in melted beryl on golden pages, places the resulting tantra within a casket and hides it the sky. Through the blessings of this symbolic transmission of the conquerors, at the same moment, King Dza receives the same casket as it descends out of the sky onto the roof of his palace, as depicted directly above the king, thus inaugurating the hearing transmission of persons and thence all the lineages of tantric Buddhism. The comprehensiveness of Vajrapāṇi’s teaching is represented by six volumes, embodying the six classes of tantras from Kriyā to Atiyoga, seen descending from the sky at the top of the painting. The lower three classes, of Kriyā, Ubhayā, and Yoga, each descend on a light ray to a specific Indian locale: Vāraṇasī, the Blazing Mountain (Me ri ’bar ba), and the Craving Wood (Sred tshal), respectively, while the destinations of the higher three are left unnamed. In the painting’s lower half sit five Tibetan teachers, all important figures in the history of the Nyingma School. From left to right, they are: Nyak Lotsawa Yeshé Zhönu, Zurché Śākya Jungné, Longchenpa, Terdak Lingpa, and Nupchen Sangyé Yeshé.

THE GATHERING OF INTENTIONS

A History of a Tibetan Tantra

Jacob P. Dalton

Columbia University Press   New York

Columbia University Press

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. Origins: Myth and History

2. The Gathering of Intentions in Early Tibetan Tantra

3. The Spoken Teachings

4. The Rise of the Sutra Initiation

5. Dorjé Drak and the Formation of a New Lineage

6. The Mindröling Tradition

7. Returns to the Origin

Appendix: The Four Root Tantras of Anuyoga

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

My research on this project began in the spring of 1997. While staying at Namdröling monastery in south India, I began to work my way through the Gathering of Intentions, with the help of Nupchen Sangyé Yeshé’s late ninth-century commentary, the Armor Against Darkness . By the time I returned to the United States, I was confused but also captivated by the vast and mysterious unexplored territory I had glimpsed. Over the next year and a half, I assembled a small library of everything written on the Gathering of Intentions that I could find. Finally, in October 1998, I was ready to return to India and my research proper. On the advice of Gene Smith, I decided to begin with Pema Trinlé’s collection of biographies of the lamas belonging to the Gathering of Intentions lineage.

In the winter of 1998–99, while still reading through this collection under the supervision of Khenpo Chöwang at the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Gangtok, Sikkim, I learned that the current head of the Nyingma School, Penor Rinpoche, was in town, at the behest of the Sikkimese royal family. This was fortunate, as I was having an extraordinarily hard time locating anyone experienced in the Gathering of Intentions with whom I could study, and I had heard that Penor Rinpoche was the last living holder of the complete lineage, having received its initiations, the reading transmission, and the explanations. (I later learned that Thubzang Rinpoche of Pelyul monastery in eastern Tibet also held the lineage.)

On his final morning before leaving Gangtok, Penor Rinpoche granted me an audience in his hotel room, with many members of the local government present. I prostrated three times and in my halting Tibetan explained my predicament. I was quickly reprimanded that I should not have been reading the text in the first place without having received the initiation. When I asked if Penor Rinpoche would grant me that initiation, he told me that he would be in the United States the following summer and I should meet him there.

It just so happened that I was back for a brief visit that summer. One day, while staying with friends in upstate New York, I learned that Penor Rinpoche had just opened a new center only a few hours away and was visiting there at that very time. On a hot afternoon, up a small, dusty road, I found Penor Rinpoche sitting alone in an upstairs room in an isolated farmhouse that was otherwise silent and strewn with slumbering monks. After prostrating three times, I reminded Penor Rinpoche of our meeting in Gangtok and that he had instructed me to come find him here, in the United States. Again I requested the initiation. This time he responded, somewhat more kindly, that the following October he would be at his monastery in south India, and that I should come see him there. I thanked him and drove away.

Returning to India, I made sure to arrive at Namdröling monastery, located in the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe, a few hours from Mysore, at the proper time. The Dalai Lama had just left, having helped Penor Rinpoche with the consecration of his grand new temple, and Penor Rinpoche was preparing to leave for Singapore. I gained entrance to his room, and after prostrating three times, reminded him of our first meeting in Gangtok and how he had told me to come see him in the United States the following summer. Then I reminded him of our second meeting in the isolated farmhouse and how he had told me to come see him here, in Bylakuppe, in October. Again I asked him for the initiation. This time he responded with exasperation, telling me to go and wait in the monastery’s guesthouse until summoned.

I waited for four days. One morning I awoke to find the monastery bustling with preparations for an initiation ceremony that was to begin later that day. I went in to see Rinpoche and asked if this had anything to do with the request I had made. It did indeed. He impressed upon me the seriousness of the event, that he had postponed his trip to Singapore just for this, and that I should not take this initiation in order to become famous. Certainly, he said, I should not publish any photos of the elaborate sand mandala that had been constructed for the event and hidden behind silk brocade curtains. Sufficiently cowed, I crept out of the room.

Around three thousand people attended the ceremony. For three full days, Penor Rinpoche granted the hundreds of initiations for all nine vehicles of the Nyingma School’s teachings. At the end, as the blessings were being distributed while Penor Rinpoche sat upon his throne in meditation, a hard rain fell. Finally, as Rinpoche raised himself up to leave, the rains stopped as suddenly as they had begun, leaving the monastery grounds cleansed and cool.

Over the months that followed, in Bodhgaya and Kathmandu, I read through the various writings by Katok Dampa Déshek, paying particular attention to his influential Outline of the Vehicles and his Summary , a detailed outline of the entire Gathering of Intentions that itself fills about 146 folio sides. Meanwhile, I still had not found anyone who knew the Gathering of Intentions apart from Penor Rinpoche, who obviously could not afford the time to read with the likes of me. Finally, Khenpo Pema Sherab, the abbot of Penor Rinpoche’s Namdröling monastery, agreed to help me, even though he himself had never read the text. For four months in the spring of 2000, we sat together for two or three hours every day in his room at Shuksep nunnery in Dharamsala, picking our way through the more important parts of the tantra. I used my translation of Dampa Déshek’s Summary to determine which sections to read. To supplement his own vast knowledge, Khenpo used both of the extant word-by-word commentaries (tshig ’grel )—Nupchen Sangyé Yeshé’s late ninth-century commentary, the Armor Against Darkness , and Khenpo Nüden’s massive early twentieth-century subcommentary.

It was from Khenpo Pema Sherab that I first learned of a Spoken Teachings festival held annually at Namdröling. I was thrilled to hear that the Gathering of Intentions plays a central role in the ten days of ceremonies, so much so that the event is called the festival of the Gathered Great Assembly, this being the name of the Gathering of Intentions’ main mandala. Immediately upon finishing my work with Khenpo in early June, I returned to south India to observe the performance of this festival. As the activities reached their climax, I experienced my first significant breakthrough regarding how to conceptualize this tradition that I had now been studying for nearly two years. As I watched, the entire Nyingma pantheon was symbolically returned to its collective origin in the Gathered Great Assembly mandala. I perceived this as a defining moment for the Nyingma School. The grandeur of the event led me to expand my view of what I had been studying. For the first time, I began to sense the extent of the Gathering of Intentions’ influence upon the history and the identity of the Nyingma School.

For the rest of that summer I continued reading on my own, working through Lochen Dharmaśrī’s late seventeenth-century General Exposition , a history of the Sutra Initiation (Mdo dbang) tradition. This is certainly the richest source for information about the Gathering of Intentions ’ shifting influences. It answered some crucial questions and bore out many of my evolving theories. In particular, Dharma ś r ī ’s discussions of what he and his brother, Terdak Lingpa, had accomplished at Mindröling monastery with their late seventeenth-century reformulation of the Gathering of Intentions ’ ritual system confirmed the new insights I had gained during the festival in June. The General Exposition led me in turn to Dharma ś r ī ’s initiation ritual manual, the shortest of all such manuals, which I had already seen in action during the initiation I had received from Penor Rinpoche. As I plodded through this work’s ritual forms, I compared it to the much longer manual by Pema Trinlé, the author of the lineage biographies I had read earlier.

In October 2000, I returned to the United States and established myself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I had access to the incomparable library and generous advice of Gene Smith at his new Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC). During my time away, two different editions of a new and greatly expanded Spoken Teachings collection had been published. One edition had just arrived at TBRC, while the other was held by David Germano at the University of Virginia. Both editions included additional long manuals for the performance of the Gathering of Intentions initiation, texts that had been lost in the Chinese invasion. The quantity of new materials was a mixed blessing. Suddenly I had a lot more work to do, but it was a timely opportunity to fill a huge gap in my knowledge—all three manuals dated from between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, a period about which I still knew next to nothing. In late November, thanks to the hospitality of David Germano, I traveled to Virginia to examine a couple of relatively short works that were included in that edition of the Spoken Teachings but missing in the TBRC edition. (All of the texts have since been gathered together in a further, authoritative 133-volume edition that was published in 2009.) I spent the rest of the winter studying the newly discovered ritual manuals at TBRC. Finally, in March 2001, I began writing, though with an extended detour into the background materials necessary to place Pema Trinlé’s seventeenth-century writings in their proper political context.

In May, I traveled to eastern Tibet to observe the Spoken Teachings festival as it was performed at Pelyul monastery, just south of Degé on the Yangtze river. While there, I met the exceptionally learned Tupzang Rinpoche; finally, at the end of my researches, I had found someone well acquainted with the Gathering of Intentions system. As I explored the monastery grounds, I saw that he had ordered murals from the Gathering of Intentions’ central myths to be painted on the walls of the main temples. In a series of meetings, I confirmed with him some of my interpretations of the Gathering of Intentions and its legacies, while he recounted its history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the spring of 2002, as I was at last completing what would become the first draft of the present book, I was contacted by Khenpo Pema Sherap. He asked if I could send him scans of the initiation manuals that had so recently appeared in the new Greatly Expanded Spoken Teachings collection. Of course, I obliged and some months later heard that Penor Rinpoché had granted a large number of his students the Sutra Initiation in accordance with the Katok tradition for the first time since leaving Tibet. Thanks to the digital revolution, the Sutra Initiation tradition now has a chance of survival. Had these technological advances come ten years earlier, however, I might never have had many of the adventures or the invigorating meetings and conversations with such wonderful people that I did.

Those who most directly helped me with the research and writing that went into this book include Kyapjé Drüpwang Pema Norbu Rinpoche and Khenpo Pema Sherap of Namdröling monastery in south India, Khenpo Chöwang of Gangtok, Sikkim, and Tulku Tupzang Rinpoche of Pelyul monastery in eastern Tibet, as well as Donald Lopez and Gene Smith. To all of these generous teachers, I owe my profound gratitude. This project was also made possible thanks to a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education that funded much of my original research, and to a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies as well as a UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities from the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, both of which gave me the time to finish this project during the academic year 2011–12. I also want to thank José Cabezon, Bryan Cuevas, and Christian Wedemeyer for their valuable feedback. Finally, I thank all of my other teachers, colleagues, friends, and family who made the production of this volume not only possible but a great pleasure.

INTRODUCTION

The Spoken Teachings provide the structure and the treasures the ornaments.

(bka’ ma khob ’bubs gter ma zur rgyan)

—a well-known Nyingmapa saying

As anyone encountering Tibetan Buddhism for the first time will soon discover, the panoply of tantric ritual systems can be overwhelming. Tibetan culture has been shaped by some of the most elaborate and esoteric ritual systems in the world. Already in early medieval India, the tantras had introduced into Buddhism a plethora of ritual practices, but only in Tibet were so many of them preserved, transmitted through countless lineages, and interwoven to produce still further systems. Given the complexity of the situation, where should the interested student begin? What are the historical relationships among these many varied tantric systems? Between the Guhyasamāja and the *Guhyagarbha?¹ Between the Cakrasaṃvara and the Hevajra? Between the revelations of Jikmé Lingpa’s Seminal Heart of the Great Expanse and those of Chogyur Lingpa’s New Treasure of Choling ? And, for that matter, what is the relationship between tantric treasure revelations and the canonical tantras in the first place? How do ritual practices correlate to the canonical tantras upon which they are supposedly based? Which parts of all this are originally Indian and which Tibetan? Why are there so many methods, each enshrined in its own manual or sādhana , for performing a single rite? What are the histories behind the various esoteric classes of tantric practice? Where did all of this come from? None of these fundamental questions has yet been answered.

In part, Western scholars’ own historical prejudices have not helped the situation. As is now well documented, the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment inspired many Western scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to downplay Tibetan Buddhism’s ritual side in favor of its higher, more philosophical elements, or even to dismiss tantric ritual outright as priestly hocus-pocus.² Still today, a surprising number of scholars working on early Indian or Chinese Buddhism continue to see Tibet, and especially its bewildering rites, in a somewhat dismissive light. Such prejudices, of course, are often reflections of our own ignorance more than of Tibetan Buddhism and its rituals themselves.

Nor do Tibetans always help. Many lamas are extraordinarily generous with their time and knowledge, but others can be rather proprietary when it comes to the particulars of their rituals. This may be understandable, as foreign scholars often ignore the tradition’s own values, ask the wrong kinds of questions, or are eager to historicize certain unassailable truths. In addition, there is the secrecy in which tantric ritual has been shrouded throughout its history, an esotericism that is still maintained for a variety of reasons. Mystery and the element of surprise can be spiritually powerful, and in a tradition that is suspicious of conceptuality and its detrimental effects on meditation, care must be taken not to dampen the practitioner’s experiences. Considerable too are the economic effects of secrecy. Proprietary expertise in a given ritual system can be a marker of a Tibetan Buddhist teacher’s authority and is therefore not readily given away. Over the centuries, some Tibetans have struggled hard to maintain control over certain tantric lineages.

But beyond all of this, teachings on a given ritual system, even when offered openly, can themselves obscure as much as reveal that system’s history; these teachings are construed as eternal, after all, their forms written into the very fabric of the universe. Despite the long-standing Buddhist insistence on the impermanence of all things, the Buddhist tantras are widely held to be temporal manifestations of enormous ur-tantras that are held eternally in the heavens. To subject tantric ritual to a critical historical gaze is sometimes to work at odds with such deeply held beliefs.

For all of these reasons, the study of Tibetan tantra is a daunting task, yet it is also an important one. For centuries, tantric ritual has ensured the endurance of Tibetan culture. When Genghis Khan and his descendents swept across central Asia, they are purported to have supported Tibet’s lamas in exchange for regular performances of powerful tantric rites. Even today, Tibetan lamas and their esoteric rituals continue to attract wealthy patrons from around the world, from New York and Hollywood to Taiwan and Beijing. Indeed, it may not be going too far to say that tantric Buddhism has provided the primary language through which Tibetans have articulated their culture. It has shaped the language of Tibet’s art, its politics, and its very identity. Without some sense of this ritual world, the modern student of Tibet cannot grasp the full import of fundamental events. When the Dalai Lama and the Paṇchen Lama meet, it is not just a carefully scripted meeting of two dignitaries; it is a ritualized encounter between Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, and Amitabha, the father of the Lotus buddha family; it is the eighth-century king Trisong Detsen prostrating to the tantric master Padmasambhava; it is Dromtön requesting initiation from Jowo Atiśa in the eleventh century. If we are ever to understand this rich and layered culture, we must come to terms with its ritual universe and intricate ritual histories.

This book takes a small step in that direction by tracing the vicissitudes of a single ritual system—that of the Gathering of Intentions Sutra (Dgongs pa ’dus pa’i mdo )—from its ninth-century origins to the present day. The Gathering of Intentions (as it will be called here) is often referred to as the fundamental root tantra of the Anuyoga class of teachings belonging to the Nyingma (Ancient) school of Tibetan Buddhism.³ Its odyssey offers unique insights into the history of Tibet, and the Nyingma School in particular.

The study is divided into seven chapters, each of which focuses on another reworking of the Gathering of Intentions’ ritual tradition. They proceed chronologically and thereby depict a tantric system in constant negotiation with the events of Tibetan history. Each chapter presents an encounter, perhaps even a confrontation, between the original root text—the Gathering of Intentions itself—and the latest political or religious concerns. Each Tibetan author wrote his new commentary or ritual manual to negotiate a perceived gap between the original tantra and the lived tradition. The shifting relationships between past and present, between the enduring structures of Tibetan religion and the changing conditions of history, therefore constitute the central theme of this study. Which parts of a given tradition remain fixed and which parts are available for adaptation? As a tantra enters a new phase in its history, does it remain the same text? Or has it in some way died out, become obsolete? Such questions are raised in each chapter, as the Gathering of Intentions is reborn again and again, taking new forms generation after generation, amid the dominant paradigms of Tibetan history.

THE PLACE OF THIS STUDY WITHIN THE FIELD OF TIBETAN STUDIES

The Nyingma School is often regarded as a disparate grouping of wild-eyed antinomian visionaries, lone hermits meditating in caves, or at most, lay village lamas working as local priests in small communities. Such images are juxtaposed to those of the other three New (Gsar ma) schools—the Kagyu, Sakya, and Geluk—which, according to stereotype, comprise strictly disciplined Buddhist monks ensconced in great hierarchical institutions where lofty scholarship and large-scale state rituals are the primary focus. Such stereotypes have exercised a significant effect on Western scholarship. As long ago as 1895, in his seminal work on Tibetan religions, L. Austine Waddell described a variety of what he saw as monster outgrowths within Tibetan Lamaism, with the Geluk School at one end, being the purest and most powerful of all,⁴ and the Nyingma School at the other, exhibiting a greater laxity in living than any other sect of Lāmas.⁵ Sixty years later, in another major survey of Tibetan Buddhism, this dim view of the Nyingma School persisted. Helmut Hoffman described the school, which traces its roots back to the arrival in Tibet of the Indian master Padmasambhava, as a Padmaist religion that deviated so far from Buddhism into tantric excess that it required repeated purges by the followers of the reformist New Schools.⁶ More recently, however, as Tibetan Studies has come into its own as a legitimate field, the popularity of the Nyingma School has improved dramatically. In 1993, Geoffrey Samuel turned the earlier prejudices on their head by removing the negative judgments that accompanied them. Noting the damage already done by such views throughout popular texts on the history of religion,⁷ Samuel placed the Nyingmapa yogin in his or her mountain hermitage on an equal footing with "the Gelukpa scholar with his geshé diploma.⁸ Despite his rehabilitation of the Nyingmapa, however, Samuel maintained the common characterization of the school as shamanic, as opposed to the clerical Geluk School. The most ‘shamanic,’ he writes, and least centralized and hierarchical of these [Tibetan Buddhist] orders are the Nyingmapa.⁹ To be a Nyingmapa means, according to Samuel, to be tantric, nonmonastic, to act primarily through analogy and metaphor," and not to be engaged in scholarship, textual analysis, and centralized monasticism.¹⁰

Like all stereotypes, such characterizations are not without their truths. They have persisted in part because they mirror our own familiar dichotomies of the mystic versus the scholar, the ecstatic versus the rational, the profligate versus the celibate, but they are not entirely Western constructions. Tibetans themselves have long espoused similar views, portraying the Nyingmapa as mindlessly absorbed in meditation and the Gelukpa as obsessed with scholarship. Indeed, the Nyingmapa and the Gelukpa often see themselves in similar terms. The problem is that the stereotype also conceals much. Many of the Nyingma School’s most significant characteristics are occluded by its standard portrayals. The present study is a history of the Nyingma School as seen through a single ritual system, and the picture that emerges stands in stark opposition to the one so often presented. The Gathering of Intentions is without doubt a thoroughly tantric work, yet counter to the suppositions of some, every time it is reworked in some new commentary or ritual manual, the purpose is precisely to bring greater centralization and hierarchization to the Nyingma School. The writings on the Gathering of Intentions are rigorous works of scholarship and textual analysis, even as they delve deeply into the mysterious realms of tantric myth and ritual. The school revealed in these pages is intimately involved in highly complex and carefully constructed hierarchies, its practitioners often housed in large monastic institutions.

Admittedly, this is partly a reflection of the institutional nature of the Gathering of Intentions in particular.¹¹ This text is fundamental to the so-called Spoken Teachings (bka’ ma), a class of tantras that are traditionally juxtaposed to the Treasure Teachings (gter ma), the revelatory writings that began to emerge in the eleventh century and went on to take the Nyingma School by storm; today the vast majority of rituals performed by the Nyingmapa have their roots in treasure revelation. Notwithstanding the popularity of the Treasure Teachings, the Spoken Teachings have long formed the canonical backbone of the Nyingma School. Today’s practitioners can choose from any number of treasure-based ritual systems, which share in common the ritual structures in the Spoken Teachings. The Spoken Teachings are thus foundational, and as a central text, the Gathering of Intentions represents an especially institutional aspect of the Nyingma School. Nonetheless, the current popularity and the fascinating origins of the Treasure Teachings have brought them considerable scholarly attention, while the Spoken Teachings have only recently begun to receive the notice they deserve.¹²

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

Almost all Tibetan canonical works—sutras and tantras—are supposed to have been translated from Sanskritic originals. The Gathering of Intentions represents a rare exception, for it purports to have been translated into Tibetan from Burushaski (Tib. Bru sha skad), a linguistically exotic language spoken today in just one remote valley in Kashmir. Given internal evidence, there may be some limited truth to the Gathering of Intentions’ claim, but the bulk of its pages were more likely composed directly in Tibetan. This probably occurred around the middle of the ninth century, at the beginning of Tibet’s age of fragmentation (sil bu’i dus), a period of social disintegration that saw the gradual collapse of the Pugyel empire that had ruled Tibet and much of Central Asia from the seventh through the ninth centuries.¹³

The Gathering of Intentions’ original purpose was to provide Tibetans with a comprehensive system for organizing all of the Buddhist teachings—and especially the tantric teachings—that had so far arrived in Tibet. It wove together many of the day’s most popular myths, doxographical schemes, rituals, and doctrines into a single, elaborate structure. In constructing their comprehensive system, its authors deployed a range of strategies, perhaps most importantly a scheme of nine vehicles (i.e., methods for traversing the Buddhist path to enlightenment) that gathered all the Buddhist teachings into a single organizational hierarchy. The Gathering of Intentions’ initiation ceremony, whereby the disciple was ritually inducted into the mandala and taught its secret rites, could grant initiation into some or all of the nine levels of the teachings. The mandala palace had nine stories, one for each vehicle, with spaces for all the deities relevant to that vehicle to dwell.¹⁴ The Gathering of Intentions’ Gathered Great Assembly Mandala thus provided room for all nine vehicles of its doxographic scheme. Its authors included the exoteric teachings of the sutras, but their attentions were clearly focused on the esoteric tantras, and particularly the three highest vehicles, Mahāyoga, Anuyoga, and Atiyoga. They developed new tantric equivalents for some of the best known exoteric doctrines of the Buddhist sutras—ten tantric levels (bhūmi) through which the practitioner must ascend,