sahaja wrote:Anybody ever built a tulpa? Either as a part of or extension of dream yoga or for any other reason for that matter.
I can't really answer the question the way you are asking,
but I was just thinking that you could go over to Malcolm Smiths board and ask him to verify what I believe he may have said many years ago, if my memory serves me right, that there are "Tulpas" and "Tulkus" named in Pema Lingpa's lineage, "Tulpa" within that context meant an emanation in the lineage verses an incarnated Lama: "Trulku".
I remember the same subject came up on esangha many years ago, and I had some fun with the lovely Chicago lady "Red_Dust" concerning the idea of Tulpas... the topic was actually fun (if you can believe that)...she was a wonderful woman and had a voracious sense of humor.
If I get my old "independent computer memory" box fixed, I "saved" many esangha posts that I found enjoyable including that topic on Tulpas.
Anyway, the Tulpas in the Lingpa lineage were not "ghosts" or "phantoms" or anything negative... neither were they thought of as just some kind of created projection etc or made from a thought form or from maybe something like ectoplasm...from what I understood they were emanations who were Lamas & teachers within the lineage, so the sense was that they were part of the lineage masters (Lamas etc), generally when we say Mandarava had hundreds of emanations, we could say she had 100's of "tulpas", and this wouldn't have had any "bad" connotation the way (as I understand it) the word was originally used in Tibetan.
The quote someone gave previously in the thread, actually was used in The Golden Letters book, The Three Statements of Garab Dorje, the quote is mentioned in a note from the book:
Vajranatha (1996: p. 350) in a note to his English translation of the life story of Garab Dorje defines a Nirmita thus:
"A Nirmita (sprul-pa) is an emanation or a manifestation. A Buddha or other realized being is able to project many such Nirmitas simultaneously in an infinite variety of forms."
The Quote Citation above was from: Reynolds, John Myrdhin (1996). The Golden Letters: The Three Statements of Garab Dorje, the first teacher of Dzogchen, together with a commentary by Dza Patrul Rinpoche entitled "The Special Teaching of the Wise and Glorious King". With Foreward by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche. New York, USA: Snow Lion Publications. ISBN 1-55939-050-6. p.350
This maybe is like the idea of tulpa as a flower, maybe a "tulip" he he...but seriously, we're taught that a Nirmanakya can manifest as a medicinal plants for example, not only as human beings.
Tulpa (sprul-pa) was a borrowed word for spiritualists and in borrowing the word ADN applied it to her "monk" friend who she claimed was a projection, and also it took on a negative connotation, however in a real sense the word originally applied to some of the emanations in Tibet, as in (sprul-pa) in a lineage, that is what I was recalling some practitioners discussed on the old esangha thread, (sprul-pa) however had the distinction of being applied to an emanation, whereas the (sprul-pa) description was
not applied to the direct incarnations of masters which were usually referred to as Tul-ku (Sprul-sku).
Once again, a talk with Malcolm about it, might be the ticket, as he can actually read with ease and know where to look rather quickly within the TBRC files on (sprul-pa) and mention of them, also he'd probably want to look them up if someone asked him about it, but it could take a few hours, like I said, he's got his own forum. I'm too lazy to go looking through those pechas for tulpa info in the TBRC, although I'm a member of TBRC... I guess I'm just not very curious about the subject... lol, my bad.
Wishing you well.