Tibetan yoga and mysticism a textual study of the yoga ( (141)

While the critique underscores the originality found in The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo and their consequent worth for the humanist study of the beginnings of Tibetan mysticism, it is als

Edward W SAID (1983:127) once remarked that "the theoretical level of investigation is connected historically in the West to a notion of originality." Ergo, the intellectual significance which in the humanities is attributed to originality and innovation (Greek:

kainotēs) is generally linked to the social value that overall is ascribed to these notions in

the predominantly Eurocentric condition of modernity In this cultural modality, originality and innovation are commonly regarded as the telltale signs of creativity and progress in the arts, industry, and technology Conversely, cultural and epistemic preservation, transmis-sion, and reproduction are less appraised, being either merely of antiquarian concern for cultural heritage or demoted to outright negative connotations of appropriation, plagiarism, and kitsch

The inbuilt Eurocentricity of the academic search for originality, which dictates the historicist investigation undertaken also in the present monograph, has to be kept firmly in

mind, because the book's object of study hails from a very different epistēmē governed by

entirely other values The cultural encounter of this hermeneutical situation demands a very challenging fusion of interpretive horizons between the humanist academic horizon of the reader and the discursive horizon of its object of study that in both place and time lies well outside the Eurocentric vantage point

Regarding place, as has been discussed at length by Elías J PALTI (2006), ideas become

misplaced when the scholarly focus moves away from the traditional dominant places of the humanities and social sciences, namely the cultural-economic core of Europe and North America, and instead becomes engaged with 'non-places' along the culturally-economically dependent periphery Hence, speaking of 'originality' and 'innovation' in connection with Asian Studies in general and Tibetan Studies in particular proves problematic, because the altered context of the Oriental 'Other' constitutes an entirely different hermeneutical situation, which brings unforeseen meanings and values of the terms into play

Regarding time, the present object of study belongs to the Middle Ages, an epoch with a

mindset so entirely different from the interpretive horizon of the modern reader Accord-ingly, as argued by Gabrielle M SPIEGEL (1990), a proper historically informed reading needs to be firmly grounded directly in the social logic of the text Verily, when the notions

of 'originality' and 'innovation' are considered from within the epistēmē of twelfth-century Tibet, it comes to fore that these terms were looked upon with great suspicion as

hetero-doxy of grave soteriological consequence In the classicism of the day, precisely the inverse

epistemic values were considered the virtues of highest genius Exact and unaltered memorization, reproduction, and transmission were not thought of as stagnant and plagiarist, but were deemed essential for preserving the Buddha's teachings in their pure Indian form Oppositely, any attempt to innovate had to be carefully disguised by couching new creative expressions in traditional frameworks of classical terminology, scriptural

quotation, and the authority of an Indian guru lineage

The issues at stake turn up in Chapter Two of the book, when the reception history of

Gampopa's Mahāmudrā system is investigated It is revealed how some later Tibetan

authors criticized Gampopa's brand of mysticism for not being in line with the orthodox

Indian Mahāmudrā tradition While the critique underscores the originality found in The

Manifold Sayings of Dakpo and their consequent worth for the humanist study of the

beginnings of Tibetan mysticism, it is also a reminder to the reader that the texts at hand need to be read with assiduous attention to their own social logic and epistemic values In conjunction, the two chapters of the book's Part I bring together a series of inescapable

considerations needed when entering into a new reading of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo

In Part II, the book embarks on accomplishing its second aim: to shift the ontology of

the text by severing The Manifold Sayings from authorial intentionalism The ontology of

the text denotes the text's mode of being, namely its presence as an object of knowledge Given that the text only acquires meaning as a text within the hermeneutical situation, its ontology is constituted as an inseverable part of this epistemic event To highlight how the object of knowledge's ontology is contingent on its appearance and representation to the intentionality of the knowing subject, GADAMER (1992:115) argued that the mode of being

of a work is linked with its presentation (Darstellung) That is to say, the text's ontology is

substantiated and embodied in the presentation of its lay-out and typography, which are matters of textual production

In an earlier study (KRAGH, 2013c), it has been demonstrated how certain changes in

text design, which were introduced when The Manifold Sayings were printed for the first

time in 1520, created the impression that the entire oeuvre was composed by Gampopa, whereas no such general authorship claim is attested in the older handwritten manuscript recension The altered presentation ontologizes the text within a new superstructure of authorial unity, easily leading to the fallacy of authorial intentionalism

From a methodological perspective, the supposition of singular authorship calls for unwarranted comparison, erroneously suggesting that it is possible to assess the author's

intention in lesser known parts of the collection by adopting a well-known work, like The

Jewel Ornament, as a yardstick This type of thinking inserts the notion of the 'design' or

'intention' of the author into the hermeneutical situation, which – as argued by William K WIMSATT JR and Monroe C BEARDSLEY (1946:468) – "is neither available nor desirable

as a standard." Comparison between individual parts of the corpus is only sensible when it

is recognized that The Manifold Sayings consist of numerous heterogeneous segments

composed by a number of anonymous or little known authors from the broader Dakpo community, of whom some were students of Gampopa and others belonged to later generations Direct evidence of writing by many hands is found throughout the collection and any impression of complete authorial unity is simply a false consciousness spawned by late editorial modifications in the presentation of the corpus

Yet, even when vigilant scholarly attention is paid to the composite constitution of the corpus as a poly-authored work, the authorial icon of Gampopa remains lightly hovering above the hermeneutical situation A relatively unwrought figure of Gampopa features in much – albeit not all – of the corpus, because many written passages are ascribed to Gampopa as representing his spoken word A large number of segments commence with

phrases declaring "the teacher says " or "again the Dharma master Gampopa says…," and

long passages are bracketed within Tibetan quotation markers Moreover, some portions give shape to Gampopa as a concrete character by providing hagiographical accounts of his

religious life, which ties The Manifold Sayings in with the larger Tibetan tradition of

Gampopa narratives found elsewhere in later religious annals, eulogies, and lineage

histories of the Kagyü school From within the Tibetan tradition, it is these literary collages

of Gampopa that define and delimit the reception-historically affected consciousness of the reader

Highlighting this issue, Chapter Three presents a study of the hagiographical tradition portraying Gampopa Special attention is given to the earliest hagiographical records, being the works that exhibit the most divergent and contradictory accounts The intended outcome is awareness of the fact that the representation of Gampopa on the whole is a narrative construct that has been forged over the course of many centuries This discern-ment aims to shift the ontology of the text, perhaps not entirely blotting out the authorial figure of Gampopa as an interpretive element in the reading but at least allowing for an improved hermeneutical situation, wherein the image can be cautiously appraised through

understanding its effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte)

With the critical hermeneutical perspectives uncovered in the book's Parts I-II in place,

the aim of Part III is to establish a new reading strategy for textual corpora (Tibetan: bka'

'bum), applicable to The Manifold Sayings, building the foundation for what forthwith may

be referred to as a neostructuralist methodology for discourse analysis Part III begins with

Chapter Four, wherein the reading of the corpus is prepared by first introducing the religious historical context of the early Dakpo community, thus opening to view a social logic of the medieval text The chapter then surveys all the manuscripts, prints, and editions

of the corpus, drawing attention to the presentation (Darstellung) of each recension, which

is significant for hermeneutically apprehending the ontology of the text through the course

of its reception history Finally, the very substantial Chapter Five embarks on the actual neostructuralist reading of the corpus in its entirety on the basis of the standard edition of

the forty works found in the first printed version of The Manifold Sayings of 1520

The proposed neostructualist method is theoretically underpinned by the semiology of Ferdinand de SAUSSURE In his linguistic examination of meaning-formation, SAUSSURE (1916:166) arrived at a sophisticated view of language as a system of arbitrary signs entailing no intrinsically positive terms, wherein signification exclusively emanates from the structural differences between them Accordingly, the meaning of a given word or utter-ance is regarded as not arising from the word or utterutter-ance itself but only through its thetical relations to allied words and antithetical differences to opposing expressions in the particular linguistic context

To adopt these structuralist principles in a reading strategy for an entire discourse, it becomes necessary to operate with larger analytical units than the individual linguistic signs treated by SAUSSURE One of the most influential attempts at doing so has been the structuralist study of myth advanced by Claude STRAUSS In the method of LÉVI-STRAUSS (1955:431), a myth would be broken down to a sequence of shortest possible sentences, which could be employed as the constituent units of a structuralist analysis

Examining the meaning-producing bundles of relations between the derived sentences, LÉVI-STRAUSS especially focused on pairs of binary opposites, such as the raw and the

cooked, in order to arrive at generic conceptual dichotomies in kinship, social relationships,

and culture that would be applicable for a general theory of structuralist anthropology While the present neostructualist approach shares LÉVI-STRAUSS' objective of applying fundamental semiological principles to a higher level of discourse analysis, the reductionist aspect of his method needs to be avoided, because it involves a degree of generalization that is unsuitable for a close reading of rigorous textual scholarship Consequently, instead

of using individual linguistic signs or simplified sentences as the constituent units of the

analysis, the reading presented here will center on unabridged segments of discourse, which aggregate to form a textual corpus in its entirety, resulting in a true bricolage of

meaning-bearing relations

As with all structuralist analysis, the study of these segments operates along two juxtaposed dimensions of the relations to be examined: the synchronic and the diachronic The synchronic dimension denotes relations that can be posited between the constituent textual segments across the corpus within a given recension of the text These relations can either be in the modality of metaphoric part-part relationships between individual segments

or in the modality of synecdochic part-whole relationships between a given segment and

the corpus as a text in its totality In the case of The Manifold Sayings, the segments that

serve as the constituent units for the analysis are embedded directly in the text In the standard printed edition, the corpus is arranged into forty works, which in turn are divided into 444 separate passages that in nearly every case is explicitly demarcated by means of special opening and closing markers Chapter Five clearly defines the exact starting and ending point of each segment, summarizes their contents, and notes a large number of synchronic relations between the segments These synchronic cross-references of

termi-nology, yoga and meditation instructions, mystical doctrines, literary writing styles, citation

patterns, and many other issues of textual production combine to create an extensive conceptual lattice that may serve as an intertextual ground for all further investigation of meanings in the corpus

The diachronic dimension signifies relations that are historically predicated in terms of the text's redaction history The traditional starting point for diachronic analysis in the humanist traditions of textual scholarship is the earliest possible version of the text, whence

a progressive historical explanation can be formulated That approach, however, entails a deep seated anachronistic fallacy of prefigured historical beginnings, where the existence of

a later phenomenon chosen as the object of study – whether it be a nation state, an institution, a religious tradition, or simply a text – is conceived of as having its birth in an earlier era during which the phenomenon as such was not yet found For example, the early

Dakpo religious community may be viewed as the historical beginning of the Kagyü school

of Tibetan Buddhism, but as a matter of fact the school label Kagyü is virtually absent throughout The Manifold Sayings, suggesting a time when this sectarian brand was not yet part of the community's self-image

In consequence, for the neostructuralist method proposed here, the diachronic analysis shall adhere to the principle that history should be written forwards but read backwards Such a retrogressive approach may be illustrated by the ingenious three-volume history of Indonesia by Denys LOMBARD entitled Le carrefour javanais: essai d'histoire globale (1990) LOMBARD has written each volume forwards in time, but as a whole the volumes cover a retrogressive series of topics, with the first tome presenting modern Indonesia's colonial and post-colonial history, the second tome uncovering the preceding Islamic and Chinese civilizational layers of the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries, and the third tome excavating the underlying stratum of Indian-imported Javanese heritage from the fifth till the fourteenth centuries Using a retrogressive outlook prevents predetermining the writing

of a history by setting its point of departure in the inception of a later phenomenon Instead, the outlook engages in an open-ended investigative search for prior events that need not necessarily be viewed as inaugural In line with this principle, the reading presented in the

present book's Chapter Five is predicated not on the earliest version of The Manifold

Sayings but on the later standard printed edition of the corpus By providing exhaustive

references to parallel texts of each segment in earlier and later editions, the reading lays a firm ground for further retrogressive study of the corpus in its antecedent writing and compilation history

What though quickly becomes evident in the book's implementation of its neostruc-turalist method is that the adoption of entire textual segments as the constituent units for the analysis radically destabilizes meaning The meaning-forming relations that can be found between long segments of discourse are of such immense complexity that any reductionist abstraction into simple binary opposites, as done by LÉVI-STRAUSS, is altogether inapplicable All in all, the horizon of the semantic field, which emanates from a system of virtually endless possible relations between its substantial constituent parts, is boundless Nonetheless, the reading of concrete, stable meanings in the text remains attainable, because a delimited interpretive reflection materializes in the specific hermeneutical situation that is brought about by the fusion of the infinite semantic horizon of the text and the finite interpretive horizon of the reader

Drawing on Martin HEIDEGGER's Sein und Zeit, GADAMER (1992:266-267) reasoned that interpretive reflection operates in a repeated circular mode When the interpreter looks

at "the things themselves" in the text and becomes aware of the subtle interpretive fore-projections originating in him- or herself, new meaning can be penetrated in the text These meanings hold an ontologically positive significance for refiguring the interpreter's fore-projections, thereby enabling another reading capable of finding new meanings in the text

The present study of The Manifold Sayings of Dakpo intertwines three such

hermeneu-tical circles, each of which exerts an ontologically positive effect of its own The first circle

of reenvisioning and reclaiming Gampopa as a mystic and innovator in Part I clears the

semantic field of shallow fore-structures (Vor-strukturen) erected in the courte durée by restrictive closures in the history of research This circle repositions The Manifold Sayings

as an object of knowledge for the study of yoga and mysticism The second circle of severing The Manifold Sayings from authorial intentionalism in Part II decenters the