276 CHAPTER ELEVENBuddhist Tantric practices, and a number of them made the trip to India for
further initiations and texts. One of the most famous practitioners of this time
was Ma-cig (Ma-gcig, The One Mother; 1055-1145), a nun who was forced
to renounce her vows after having intercourse with the man who later be-
came her husband. Mter his death, she began to suffer a variety of ailments re-
sulting from breaking her vows and engaging in indiscriminate Tantric practice
with improperly initiated adepts. Eventually she met up with an adept who
had studied in Nalanda and who was able to diagnose the cause of her trouble.
After arranging for her to undergo an elaborate ceremony of atonement, he
became her new principal partner, and from that point onward she met with
nothing but success. Eventually her fame eclipsed his; Tibetans continue to
worship her as an emanation of Tara to this day.
Without royal patronage to encourage doctrinal orthodoxy and monastic
discipline, Buddhist practice in Tibet mixed freely with shamanic customs. In
the latter part of the tenth century, as various minor Tibetan kingdoms began
to attain a measure of stability, the new kings came to regard this situation
with concern, viewing Tantrism as detrimental to the moral fiber of their so-
cieties. Their concern is what led to the Second Propagation of the Dharma.
11. 2. 2 The Second Propagation
The Second Propagation began in the newly stabilized kingdoms to the south
of Mount Kailasa (Strong EB, sec. 7. 5.1), in the extreme southwest of Tibet,
as the central area around Lhasa was still in disarray. The prime mover in this
Buddhist renaissance was the king ofPurang, Yeshe-od (Ye-shes-'od), who
abdicated his throne in favor of his son and took ordination in order to devote
himself fully to the Buddhist revival. He wrote an ordinance denouncing sex-
ual yoga and animal sacrifice as practiced in Unexcelled Yoga. Sending a group
of followers to Kashmir to collect reliable texts, he set forth the principle that
only those practices that were clearly derived from Indian Buddhist texts
should be accepted as true Dharma. This principle formed the guiding stan-
dard behind the entire Second Propagation.
After Yeshe-od's death, his grandson, O-de ('Od-Ide), invited the great
Indian scholar Atisa (982-1054) from the university at Vikramasila, near Na-
landa, to help spread the Dharma in Tibet. This was perhaps the most influ-
ential single event in the conversion of Tibet to the Buddhist religion. Scholars
have often noted the symbolism of the founding of the monastery at Sam-ye,
with Santarak~ita representing the monastic/university strain of Buddhism,
and Padmasambhava the Tantric strain. Atisa serves as a symbol of the Indian
tradition that became the orthodoxy in Tibet, in that he combined both strains
in one person. On the one hand, he advanced the Prasangika interpretation of
Madhyamika philosophy (see Section 4.2), which was to become the domi-
nant school of Tibetan academic thought. Together with his Tibetan disciple
Dromton ('Brom-ston; 1003-65), he founded the first of the great Tibetan
monastic orders, the Kadam (bK' gdams, Bound to [the Buddha's] Command),
which became renowned for its high standard of scholarship and strict adher-