TD

Glad to see you're keeping an eye on me

) Erik

"Keep an eye on" calls for more mindfulness than I can manage ... so I snoop around now and again. ;-p
A question: there are 2 Shangpa_Kagyu pages, yet the category page remains "unwritten". I don't understand how that is so. __{*}__ --ben 19:25, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm, weird indeed... As to the 2 Shangpa pages, they both ("Shangpa Kagyu" and Shangpa_Kagyu") seem to point to the same entry. TSD

Hmeh ... now I can only find 1. Perhaps the 2nd was a redirect?

But something more substantial; I've found this apparent contradiction ... seems to me it appears somewhere else also: "The Shangpa Kagyu school (shangs pa bka' brgyud) developed independently and is not counted among the Four Greater and Eight Lesser Dagpo Kagyu schools" and then "The Shangpa Kagyu is one of the eight great practice lineages (sgrub brgyud shing rta brgyad) of the Tibetan buddhist tradition". Is that precisely true? Or is there some confound here? --ben 21:28, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Well spotted, and no - there's no contradiction. The eight great practice lineages (sgrub brgyud shing rta brgyad) developed way before the identities of the major schools, as we know them today, evolved. In a way one could say that the "sgrub brgyud shing rta brgyad" represent the early development or grouping together of materials that were brought from India and of what evolved in Tibet itself (namely the gcod tradition). These rather rigid school affiliations evolved with the establishment of ever larger institutions and their gaining more and more political and economic power. That's also more less when all that sectarianism began, which Kongtrul and his contemporaries tried to counter with their "ris med" movement, even though there were many masters who worked along these lines much earlier than Kongtrul and Khyentse etc. If you read histories of the early times, it was rather more the case that there was a lot of free exchange among people and one went to study and practice with whatever great and famous masters were available, regardless of their lineage or school affiliation. As to the Shangpa Kagyu and Dagpo Kagyu, they are often mixed up simply because of the name "Kagyu", not bearing in mind that "Kagyu" means nothing more than "oral transmission", which can of course be applied to any lineage that transmits teachings orally. What muddles the picture further is that the Shangpa never really established any big seats for themselves, they rather "infiltrated" into the other schools and are continued (at least in part) by masters of all extant schools. Best, TSD

---