Tibet, he used his tantric powers to convert the local
spirits into protectors of the Buddhist faith. As reward
for his work, the Tibetan king offered Padmasam-
bhava a second consort, named Ye shes tsho rgyal.
This powerful woman would eventually become a cult
figure in her own right. Together with her, Padma-
sambhava is said to have concealed his most secret
teachings as hidden gter ma,to be revealed by later
generations of Tibetans at the appropriate times. The
future revealers of these gter mawere understood to
be reincarnations of Padmasambhava’s students, so
that the process of revelation was, in part at least, one
of remembering long-forgotten teachings once re-
ceived from the great master.
Later biographies added still more detail, and the
places visited by Padmasambhava continued to mul-
tiply. Over the centuries the legend grew as Padma-
sambhava’s myth was replayed in various border
regions. As new regions were converted to Buddhism,
narratives would often surface describing Padmasam-
bhava’s alleged visits to sites crucial to those regions.
According to such narratives, Padmasambhava visited
these sites to subjugate the local non-Buddhist spir-
its, thus preparing the ground for the future conver-
sion of the regions to Buddhism. Many such sites have
remained sacred and are still PILGRIMAGEdestinations
for Buddhists throughout Tibet, Nepal, India, and
Bhutan. Thus, Padmasambhava’s primary impor-
tance has become twofold: as the inspirational source
for the gter marevelations and as a legendary tamer
of local spirits.
See also:Apocrypha; Tibet
Bibliography
Douglas, Kenneth, and Bays, Gwendolyn. The Life and Libera-
tion of Padmasambhava: The bKa’ thang shel brag ma as
Recorded by Yeshe Tsogyal,2 vols. Berkeley, CA: Dharma,
1978.
Guenther, Herbert V. The Teachings of Padmasambhava.New
York: Brill, 1996.
Gyatso, Janet. “The Logic of Legitimation in the Tibetan Trea-
sure Tradition.” History of Religions 33, no. 2 (1993): 97–134.
Rinpoche, Dudjom. The Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism:
Its Fundamentals and History,2 vols., tr. Gyurme Dorje and
Matthew Kapstein. Boston: Wisdom, 1991.
JACOBP. DALTONPALI, BUDDHIST LITERATURE INThe term Pali,used today in both Buddhist and West-
ern cultures as a designation of a language, is a rela-
tively modern coinage, not traceable before the
seventeenth century. An earlier name given to this lan-
guage in Buddhist literature is Magadh, the language
of the province Magadha in Eastern India that roughly
corresponds to the modern Indian state Bihar. The
only Buddhist school using this language is the THER-
AVADAin Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Theravadins
erroneously consider Pali to be the language spoken by
the Buddha himself.
During the nineteenth century, Western scholarship
discovered that Pali is not an eastern Middle Indic lan-
guage and has little relationship to Magadh, which is
known from other sources. By comparing the lan-
guages used in the inscriptions of AS ́OKA(third cen-
tury B.C.E.), it is possible to demonstrate that Pali,
while preserving some very old Eastern elements, is
clearly based on a western Middle Indic language, one
of the languages that developed out of Vedic Sanskrit,
which was used in India roughly until the time of the
Buddha (ca. fourth century B.C.E.). Although Pali is
clearly younger than the time of the Buddha, it is the
oldest surviving variety of Middle Indic.
The dialect used by the Buddha himself when in-
structing his disciples is unknown and irretrievably
lost. It might have been some early variety of Magadh.
The oldest Buddhist language, which can be traced by
reconstruction, is Buddhist Middle Indic, a lingua
franca that developed much later than the lifetime of
the Buddha. Buddhist Middle Indic is the basis of Pali
and the Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit used by the MA-
HASAMGHIKALokottaravadins.
Even though Pali, as an artificial language, was never
actually a vernacular of any part of India, it was by no
means a “dead” language. Changes in the phonetic
shape of Pali, most likely introduced by Buddhist
grammarians at various times, can be observed, al-
though dating them is problematic. None of these
changes were far-reaching, although they seem to have
continued well into the sixteenth century, if not later.
The oldest literature preserved in Pali is the CANON
of the Theravada Buddhists, the only Buddhist canon
extant in its entirety in an Indian language. Conse-
quently, it is linguistically the oldest form of Buddhist
scriptures known. This, of course, does not mean that
other scriptures in different younger languages orPALI, BUDDHISTLITERATURE IN