364 sven bretfeld
this is responsible for his name: Mi-la-ras-pa, “the man from Mi-la
wearing a woollen cloth”. Mi-la-ras-pa is probably the most studied
Tibetan Buddhist gure in Western Tibetology; his life-story and his
famous “vajra-songs” are available in various translations in several
European languages.
Among Mi-la-ras-pa’s many students sGam-po-pa deserves special
mention. He was a fully ordained monk in the bKa’-gdams-pa order,
when he met with the great yogin. After he meditated according to Mi-
la-ras-pa’s instructions for several years, he went to sGam-po (hence his
name), where he settled near a bKa’-gdams-pa monastery. He assembled
a great number of pupils and taught a synthesis of bKa’-gdams-pa
monasticism and the numerous transmissions he was initiated to by
Mi-la-ras-pa. This synthesis gave rise to the bKa’-brgyud-pa order with
its diverse succession lineages founded by his pupils in different parts
of the country. We will hear about some of them later.
4.3. Other SchoolsNext to the schools already discussed, the “later spread” produced quite
a number of smaller school traditions.^48 Among them the Zhva-lu school
(named after the Zhva-lu monastery founded in gTsang as early as 1040)
to which the perhaps most revered scholar of Tibetan Buddhism—the
“all-knowing” Bu-ston Rin-po-che (1290–1364)—belonged. In the wider
sense of the “later spread” concept, the controversial Jo-nang-pa^49 and
the dGe-lugs-pa, which became the dominant power in Tibet from
the 17th century onwards, may be mentioned; but these were founded
considerably later (in the 14th and 15th centuries respectively) and, thus
fall out of the scope of this paper.
Only one example, the gCod-pa, may be discussed brie y here,
mainly as a case study demonstrating the dialectical character of the
interrelations between Tibetan Buddhist school traditions. The gCod
school had considerable in uence on Tibetan tantric practice while its
(^48) Apart from these “small schools” the chos-’byungs refer to a considerable number
of individual Tibetan and Indian missionaries active during the “later spread”. Most
of them apparently did not succeed in institutionalising their respective transmissions
and sooner or later became absorbed by the prevailing schools or vanished completely.
No doubt, there will have been plenty of additional cases that escaped Tibetan “social
memory” completely.
(^49) On this highly interesting school and its controversial philosophical doctrine, that
was used as of cial reason to legitimate its destruction by the 5th Dalai Lama, see Ruegg
1963 and Gruschke 2002 (for further literature see the latter publication).