The Biography of Tsongkhapa the Incomparable
Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2012 6:46 am
I recommend that you guys read this, it's amazing. Breathtaking. I'll post some quotes from it.
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Tsongkhapa was not like any ordinary child. He never misbehaved; he instinctively engaged in bodhisattva types of actions; he was extremely intelligent and always wanted to learn everything. And at the age of three, he took the lay vows from the Fourth Karmapa.
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During this time, this teacher gave the boy various empowerments to Five-Deity Chakrasamvara, Hevajra, Yamantaka, and Vajrapani. By the age of seven, he had already memorized—and this is quite fantastic—at the age of seven he had already memorized the complete rituals of all of these, and had done the Chakrasamvara retreat, and was already doing the self-initiation.
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Within one year—he was just seventeen and he’d already become a very skilled doctor. I mean, looking at everything else that he did, he was also a doctor on top of that.
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And so, at that time, there was one great lama who was able to teach eleven different texts at the same time. So the students asked Tsongkhapa to do the same. So Tsongkhapa, instead of doing eleven, he did seventeen major sutra texts. He taught them all from memory. He never actually used a book; he taught them all from memory. And he did one session on each text every day. He started all seventeen on the same day, and he finished them all on the same day three months later. Always knew how much to teach each day so that it would all finish on the same day. And during the discourse, he refuted incorrect interpretations of each of them and established his own view. That’s astounding enough. But also during each day, during the discourse, he also did the self-initiation of Yamantaka with some of his disciples.
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after teaching a little bit after that, Tsongkhapa went into a four-year retreat with eight of his close disciples. During this retreat—he was already in his mid-30s when he was doing this—and during this retreat, they did thirty-five sets of 100,000 prostrations, one to each of the thirty-five confession Buddhas, and eighteen sets of 100,000 mandala offerings.
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But before teaching on tantra, he wrote extensive commentaries on the bodhisattva vows and the Fifty Stanzas on the Guru (Bla-ma lnga-bcu-pa, Skt. Gurupancashila); that was the foundation for tantra practice.
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He attained enlightenment after his death by—instead of bardo, achieving an illusory body after the clear light of death and then went on from that to enlightenment. And this was to emphasize the need for monks to follow strict celibacy, because to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime requires practice with a consort at least once. Only once.
